"I knew that you would think better of it," said Carlovitch, sitting down in his tent, and writing a memorandum; "thenceforward from this day, you are a captain in the Tenginski Hussars, and your brothers shall be the lieutenants of your troop. Allow me to present you with a horse which was taken at Mikhailov. You shall fight against the Tartars, not your own people; but to-morrow I have a piece of service to propose to you. Come here after morning parade or at noon, and I shall tell you all about it—meantime adieu."
With a heart full of bitterness I left him, and careless of the Cossacks, who still watched me, I took up a handful of gravel and flung it towards his painted tent, spying, as Mohammed did at Bedr,—
"A curse upon thee, Muscovite—and a curse be on every hair of the cur that begot thee! May thy face be confounded for ever!"
Whichever way I turned, his cold smile seemed before me; but when I reached the tent in which my brothers were confined, great was my pleasure to find my favourite charger Zupi led up to the door by a hussar, and I kissed and embraced my old friend, for we Mussulmen deem the horse as the noblest of animals next to man; and the Koran says, that the beasts which traverse earth and air are creatures like ourselves—they are all written in the Book, and shall appear at the last day; so when I die, I hope to take my faithful Zupi with me to paradise, even as Ezra took his ass, after she had ceased to bray for a hundred years.
Like myself, at the first proposition of taking service under the abhorred emperor, my brothers were full of fierce scorn; but when I had calmly placed my views before them, showing that we had no alternative but military service, with its chances of escape on one hand, and perpetual slavery, with its stripes on the other, they condescended to accept the lieutenantcies of my troop; and the next day—oh, may it be accursed!—saw us attired in the green uniform of the Tenginski Hussars, and on parade with Menschikoff's division of the Caucasian army.
In camp around us were bivouacked thousands of the Russian infantry in their long great-coats and flat round caps; the Cossacks of the Don with their fleet, rough, and active horses, and all armed with long lances; the horse regiments of Tchernemorski glittering with jewels and embroidery, and the Imperial Guard in their magnificent uniform. Around us rang the clank of the armourer's anvil, the springing of ramrods and fixing of flints; the limbering of artillery and powder-waggons; the galloping of aides-de-camp; the hewing down of palisades, and the plaiting up of fascines, all of which told us of preparations making for the subjugation of our country, and we were amid it all, attired in the Russian uniform!
At noon I sought the tent of Carlovitch.
"My colonel," said I, veiling my boiling hatred under a calm exterior, as with a solemn salaam I raised a hand to the front of my fur hussar cap; "you had a duty to propose to me?"
"Yes, my stubborn Tcherkesse; I am glad to find that you have so easily learned the task of obedience, as without it an army sinks into a rabble. Well, the duty is this. There is an old fellow at Soudjack Kaleh, who for some time past has traded with the Tartars in various ways, and latterly with Turks in salted fish and pretty women, both of which commodities he exports largely to Stamboul, to the ancient city of Trebizonde, and to Sinope."
My heart began to leap at these words.