The Winter Thief

85

Thirty professional soldiers, thirty-seven comrades, and fifteen local men manned the battlements against a seemingly endless mass of mounted tribesmen forming and re-forming outside the walls. Kamil examined them through his field glasses. The Kurds rode tough, spindly-legged horses that seemed too small to carry the weight of the men astride them but were agile and fiery. Above the men’s long mustaches, they wore turbans of tasseled cloth and fur hats. Bandoliers of ammunition crossed their chests, and their sashes bristled with daggers.

Suddenly the Kurds drew up and shouted among themselves, pointing at the regimental standard of Kamil’s imperial troops atop the wall. Then they wheeled about and galloped some distance away to a clearing by the forest. Kamil adjusted his field glasses. The horses clustered around two mounted men arguing. One of them, a Kurd, gesticulated angrily. The other was hidden by the mass of riders. After a few minutes, to Kamil’s bafflement, the Kurds turned and resumed their attack. Kamil kept his field glasses trained on the place where he had seen the argument occur, but by the time his line of vision cleared, the second man was no longer there. Before he could scour the countryside more closely, a bullet smacked into the stone beside him and he ducked for cover. They were under attack.

Kamil ordered the men and women on the monastery wall to fire only when the enemy was so close they could see their mustaches and not simply to spray the ground with bullets. Kamil sensed that the troops were playing with them. They would storm in like a wave on the shore, fire at the battlements, then retreat. He could hear them laughing and joking among themselves in their own language. Kamil could see the effect of their own efforts as a man here and there fell from his horse, but it was as ineffectual as shooting at a swarm of gnats.

A bullet grazed Apollo’s shoulder, but he insisted on remaining at his post. Victor had set up a medical station in a corner of the courtyard near the well, but at the moment he too was on the walkway that circled the top of the wall, crouched behind a piece of masonry with his rifle pointed at the men circling on their horses just out of range.

Kamil pointed. “They’re lighting torches.”

“The walls are stone and the roof is tile, so we should be all right,” Apollo told him, “although some of the windows are sealed with clay and straw.”

Kamil shouted to the men to aim at anyone carrying a torch before the rider came into throwing range. The torches that made it over the wall were immediately doused with water.

Victor ran back and forth, his left arm, which had been wounded while hunting, held stiffly by his side, sweat streaming from his face, as one after another of the defenders fell. Apollo was hit again in the shoulder. After the wound was bound up, he returned to his post, his face crumpling with pain at each retort of his rifle.

Vera went to check on Gabriel. He was barely conscious. She took the cloth from the woman caring for him and wiped the sweat from his forehead. She trickled water between his cracked lips. “Gabriel,” she whispered, “I’m here, but I have work to do.” She kissed his mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.” With tears in her eyes, she lowered his head back onto the quilt and took up her gun.

“I taught some of the women to use these,” she complained to Siranoush Ana, thinking about all the idle weapons in the storage room, “but Apollo says they’re not needed.” Several hundred women and children were crowded into the central hall. “Maybe he’s right. There are so many children.”

“Why should we wait?” The old woman stamped her foot. “We have eyes and we have hands. What do breasts have to do with it? Others can watch the children.” She summoned her daughters.

They assembled about forty able-bodied women. Vera demonstrated the basics of using a rifle and pistol, then grouped the inexperienced women around those she had trained in the villages. Men passing through the hall stopped in startled contemplation of a troop of armed women, but no one spoke against it.

Siranoush Ana held out her hand for a rifle. “My eyes are as sharp as a hawk’s.”

Kamil tried to stay near Elif during the battle but lost sight of her in the pandemonium. The tribesmen had set up a ladder against the outer wall. One of the comrades was killed as he pushed it away, but it was immediately set back in place. A face with a large mustache under a red-checked turban appeared over the wall. That’s when Kamil saw Elif again, as she swung her curved sword and neatly severed the Kurd’s head.

Stunned, Kamil stared at her. She saw him and flushed, then ran at him with her sword. He steeled himself, then felt a movement behind him and swung around just as Elif’s sword sliced into the arm of a man attacking him. Elif’s eyes met Kamil’s, and he shuddered at what he thought he had seen there. Bloodlust? Yet was hers any different from the faces of the men around him? He watched Omar gleefully kill one man after another, as if he were on holiday.

Other invaders were dashing down the stairs from the battlements now, their dun-colored cloaks billowing about them, rifles and daggers in hand. Their faces too had a look of satisfaction. Kamil wondered how they had scaled the wall, but the monastery was so old that they might well have clambered up some of the rubble surrounding it. He looked for someone who was commanding the invaders but saw only a maelstrom of jagged motion, glinting steel, and the startling crimson of fresh blood. Despite the frenetic activity, the air seemed caught up in silence, the shouts and screams of anguish background notes to a timeless hush.

Kamil took aim at a man running along the top of the wall toward Omar, an ax in his left hand, a knife in his right. His shot missed, but it alerted Omar, who spun around and ducked the ax. Grabbing his rifle by the barrel, he swung it at the man’s head. In a corner of the courtyard, Victor was kneeling over a wounded man, bandaging his arm, while Alicia held a cup to the man’s mouth. A Kurd appeared behind Victor, knife in hand. Kamil raised his rifle, aimed, and shot him. Victor jumped up and grabbed his rifle, placing himself in the path of three other men approaching, their eyes on Alicia.

To Kamil’s surprise, just then the monastery door opened and a troop of armed women emerged, grim-faced, others hesitant. A few glanced back, panicked, at the sound of the key locking them out to protect those still inside. Then they opened fire on the Kurds. Those who were too close or too inexperienced used the rifles as clubs. They were cut down by the amused tribesmen, but not before inflicting damage of their own. The stairs and courtyard were slippery with blood and blocked by bodies of men and women, some still alive but too weak to move out of the way.

The diminutive Siranoush Ana and her daughter leaned their rifles against a piece of masonry, firing their weapons over and over, as the younger daughter reloaded for them. When the eldest daugher was cut down, the old woman turned her gun on the attacker. He took hold of the barrel to wrench the gun out of her hands, but found her hold firmer than he expected. In that instant, she pulled the trigger and his blood spattered over her. Her other daughter ripped the scarf from her head and laid it over her fallen sister’s face, then wiped her mother’s gun clean and reloaded it.

Omar was rolling some of the enemy’s bodies over the side of the wall to clear a space for fighting. Kamil saw him jerk back and fall. He raced up the stairs. An axe protruded from Omar’s upper thigh.

The police chief grinned at him and joked, “Those dogs can’t aim.”

Kamil used his knife to cut Omar’s trousers away, then tore a long piece of linen from his own shirt, which he tightened around the top of Omar’s leg.

“Ready?” he asked.

“What are you waiting for?”

When Kamil pulled the ax out of Omar’s leg, the wound started to bleed heavily. Omar tried to get up, but his face turned white and he passed out, crashing to the ground. Kamil shouted down into the courtyard but couldn’t get Victor’s attention.

He pushed his shoulder under Omar’s chest and grabbed his leg. The police chief was short but stout. Kamil staggered to his feet, with Omar balanced precariously over his shoulder. He made his way down the stairs, trying not to slip on the blood, some of which flowed from Omar’s leg.

Amid the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the courtyard, Vera moved among the women, helping them load their weapons, comforting the wounded, and trying to pull them to the side so they weren’t trampled. Guns had given way to knives and bludgeons. One woman ran at a tribesman with a stick from the latrine. She managed to shove it into his eye before he shot her down. Vera stopped to help a girl of no more than thirteen in a torn shalvar, whose face was swollen from bruises. Her gun had jammed, and she was pulling blindly at the trigger. Vera took it from her hands and laid it aside. She recognized the rage and pleading in the girl’s eyes and handed over her own gun, showing her how to make sure it didn’t jam again.

Vera turned to see Apollo and Kamil open the gate leading into the courtyard. She ran over, shouting a warning, wondering whether they had gone mad. Why were they letting the enemy in?

As Levon and his son, Taniel, galloped through the gate at the head of a small army of villagers, Vera bent over, dizzy with relief. The riders who were wounded clutched at their mounts so they wouldn’t fall. Those who were able jumped from their horses into the fight, wielding axes and swords, unable to use their firearms at such close range. Before long, the remaining Kurdish tribesmen fled through the gate. When the firing stopped, Vera dared to hope they had driven off the Kurds.

Levon’s men searched among those lying on the ground for members of their families. Levon embraced his wife and daughter, and Taniel reverently kissed his mother’s hand. The gate closed onto cries and imprecations to God from the lips of men who had found their loved ones.

As soon as the monastery door was unlocked, Vera ran inside to see Gabriel. His eyelids fluttered. She leaned over and pressed her lips to his. His breath smelled of hyacinths. “Gabriel,” she whispered. His lips moved, and she pressed her ear to his mouth. “I love you.” Had she heard him say that? Or had it been her voice? His breath rattled. She could no longer see his chest move. “No. Don’t go.” She wrapped her arms around him and, pressing her face to his, rocked back and forth.

After a while, she realized that Apollo was kneeling beside her. He pushed her away gently and checked the pulse at Gabriel’s neck. He laid his hand over the dead man’s eyes and murmured a prayer. Vera had no prayer in her heart, just a scream that she could not release.