“We are needed here specially to keep a sword hanging over the Cossack neck. Through whom has Doroshenko support? Through the Tartars! Let me take the Tartars in hand, Doroshenko must beat with his forehead to the hetman.”
Here Azya stretched out his palm and opened his fingers like the talons of an eagle; then he grasped after the hilt of his sabre. “This is the way we will show the Cossacks law! They will become serfs, and we will hold the Ukraine. Do you hear, Pan Bogush? You think that I am a small man; but I am not so small as it seems to Novoveski, the commandant of this place, and you, Pan Bogush. Behold, I have been thinking over this day and night, till I have grown thin, till my face is sunken. Look at it, your grace; it has grown black. But what I have thought out, I have thought out well; and therefore I tell you that in me there are resources and power. You see yourself that these are great things. Go to the hetman, but go quickly. Lay the question before him; let him give me a letter touching this matter, and I shall not care about the estates. The hetman has a great soul; the hetman will know that this is power and resource. Tell the hetman that I am Tugai Bey’s son; that I alone can do this. Lay it before him, let him consent to it; but in God’s name, let it be done in time, while there is snow on the steppe, before spring, for in spring there will be war! Go at once and return at once, so that I may know quickly what I am to do.”
Pan Bogush did not observe even that Azya spoke in a tone of command, as if he were a hetman giving instructions to his officer. “To-morrow I will rest,” said he; “and after to-morrow I will set out. God grant me to find the hetman in Yavorov! Decision is quick with him, and soon you will have an answer.”
“What does your grace think,—will the hetman consent?”
“Perhaps he will command you to come to him; do not go to Rashkoff, then, at present,—you can go more quickly to Yavorov from this place. Whether he will agree, I know not; but he will take the matter under prompt consideration, for you present powerful reasons. By the living God, I did not expect this of you; but I see now that you are an uncommon man, and that the Lord God predestined you to greatness. Well, Azya, Azya! Lieutenant in a Tartar squadron, nothing more, and such things are in his head that fear seizes a man! Now I shall not wonder even if I see a heron-feather in your cap, and a bunchuk above you. I believe now what you tell me,—that these thoughts have been burning you in the nighttime. I will go at once, the day after to-morrow; but I will rest a little. Now I will leave you, for it is late, and my head is as noisy as a saw-mill. Be with God, Azya! My temples are aching as if I had been drunk. Be with God, Azya, son of Tugai Bey!”
Here Pan Bogush pressed the thin hand of the Tartar, and turned toward the door; but on the threshold he stopped again, and said, “How is this? New troops for the Commonwealth; a sword ready above the neck of the Cossack; Doroshenko conquered; dissension in the Crimea; the Turkish power weakened; an end to the raids against Russia,—for God’s sake!”
When he had said this, Pan Bogush went out. Azya looked after him a while, and whispered, “But for me a bunchuk, a baton, and, with consent or without, she. Otherwise woe to you!”
Then he finished the gorailka, and threw himself on to the bed, covered with skins. The fire had gone down in the chimney; but through the window came in the clear rays of the moon, which had risen high in the cold wintry sky. Azya lay for some time quietly, but evidently was unable to sleep. At last he rose, approached the window, and looked at the moon, sailing like a ship through the infinite solitudes of heaven. The young Tartar looked at it long; at last he placed his fists on his breast, pointed both thumbs upward, and from the mouth of him who barely an hour before had confessed Christ, came, in a half-chant, a half-drawl, in a melancholy key,—
“La Allah illa Allah! Mahomet Rossul Allah!”