
"ebru in the grove" ZJC (2010)
Mariam started.
“I see that you have heard of my name or at least my poetry,” continued the stranger, but without vanity. “Yes, I am a poet from Constantinople, one of many. I was seized by Ivedik while on the way to Van. Everywhere I have traveled in our empire I have found our people being rounded up like animals, our men executed in mass graves, our women raped and marched out into the desert to die. The wastes of Der Zor are scattered with our bones. He knew who I was and he sought to silence all I had seen.”
Awat, who had been sitting near by, nodded her head.
“Rumor in Van was that the Sultan ordered all Armenian priests and writers and teachers in Constantinople executed.”
“Ah. Yes, in this case rumors did not lie.”
“What about the Holy Father, the Catholicos?” Mariam asked.
Yarjanian shook his head.
“I do not know. I was already caught when I heard news through Ivedik's spies that all my friends in the capital city were dead.”
Mariam shuddered and walked a little space out of the grove to steady his nerves. She had never deceived himself about the dangers that her people were facing, but it seemed that they would have to fight every kind of atrocity. When she returned she found Awat and Ebru spreading a blanket on the ground onto which they helped lay the wounded man and soon he fell asleep. After a while the three followed suit and soon the little grove was silent save the rattled breathing of those who had survived.
Morning came pouring a brilliant light over the desolate mountainside. Beads of water from the rain the night before sparkled a little while and then dried up. Mariam, Awat and Ebru were up though some of the rescued men still slept.
Mariam, at the suggestion of Ebru, mounted Old Tigran and rode up the embankment to a point that offered a view of the surrounding mountains. When she returned with her report she said no matter how she searched the horizon she saw only a lonesome rocky slopes or two trees shivering in the wind.
“Then we'll just take our time. There is no point pushing our new friends past the point of exhaustion,” said Ebru. “They are already there.”
As she made her way through the knots of sitting men Mariam saw Mr. Yarjanian was awake and able to pull himself up and limp about a bit. Now that Mariam saw her in the full daylight she understood more clearly why he had appeared so familiar to her the night before. Those brows and eyes belonged to a photo that graced the cover of a book of his verse sold in every Armenian enclave in the empire. They had a celebrity with them.
As she passed by the older man looked at her and said, “Is it hard to live among such dangers on a daily basis? Why do you not go to Moscow or Paris where life is safe?”
“Paris?” Mariam echoed, as if the word were totally alien to her mind. “Why would I go abroad when my people are here? I belong here with my friends. Those two,” and she nodded at Ebru and Awat who were sitting some distance away talking in low voices, “have saved my life more than once and are likely to do so again.”
Yarjanian smiled.
The two women dressed in similar travel robes of a simple Muslim woman but each was striking in her own way. Awat, with her broad face and snub nose and eyes that were almond-shaped and close-set had an almost feline appearance and Ebru, small and thin, reminded Mariam of the curved knife butchers used to gut animals.
“They are uncommon, no doubt,” said Yarjanian. “Please, if you can, tell me: are they Muslim?”
“Yes, both.”
“Then, and here I must admit my own ignorance, why are they fighting for us?”
“Because it is the right thing to do.”
Yarjanian nodded but said no more.
“It's time to start,” said Ebru as she stood and faced the small camp.
Yarjanian again mounted one of the horses and the group set off, heading south. The boy, Diradour he had been called, appeared fresh and strong after a good night rest. He and Mariam walked side by side for a while.
“How long have you three been friends?” Diradour asked Mariam, looking at Awat and Ebru. Mariam smiled at the precociousness of the child.
“I first met Awat when we were both prisoners together in the dungeon of Dalan Gez, near the city of Kars. I'd never have escaped without her. I've known Ebru ever since she was this tall,” and she indicated a height near the boy's shoulders, “back when I was her nurse maid.”
Diradour looked incredulous. He looked at Mariam's scarred hands and the long rifle on her back.
“You? A nurse maid to that woman?”
“Yes, and whole lot more.”
They were compelled to stop at noon for rather a long rest, as walking was tiresome. Mariam went back up onto the ridges to look for pursuers, but announced that she saw none, and, after an hour, they started again.
“It would seem that if Ivedik has already organized pursuit he won't waste the element of surprise by being caught following us,” Ebru said several hours later. “If I were him I'd wait until night and attack while we sleep.”
“It's likely that you're right about tonight,” agreed Awat, “but we won't be asleep. And besides the boy and Mr. Yarjanian here everyone has a rifle. We'll make it costly for anything that Ivedik might try to bring against us.”
As the afternoon wore on, they began to search for some spot to camp, something that would provide them with a bit of protection them in the dark. Before dark they found a dry stream bed cut in the rocks seven or eight feet high and a mile or so up it they came to a small grove of shrub and thorn that grew on its banks and there they made their camp.
That night half the group of men remained on guard while the other half tried to sleep. As Mariam passed him by she saw that he had placed his back to a tree and spread his injured legs upon the ground in front of him. He had been riding Old Tigran and the horse had seemed to take to him, but after the stop Mariam herself had looked after her mount.
She allowed the horse to graze a while and then she tethered him in the thickest of the shrub just behind the sleeping men. Mariam wished the horse to be as safe as possible in case there was any fighting, but everything was still in the open. Before going she stroked Tigran's nose and whispered in his ear.
“Good Tigran! Brave fellow!” she said. “We are going to have bloody times, you and I, along with everyone else, but I think we are going to ride through them safely.”
The horse whinnied softly and nuzzled Mariam's arm. Then Mariam left her, intending to take a position by the bank of the dry stream bed. On the way she passed Yarjanian, who regarded her attentively.
“I judge from what Ebru said that you are expecting an attack?” asked the poet.
“If anyone can second guess Ivedik it is Ebru,” replied Mariam.
“Of course, then,” said Yarjanian, “we can use the high sides of the bank to our advantage. The Ottomans can come up it and yet we will be protected by height and dark.”
“Most of the boys Ivedik has brought with him,” Mariam said, “are from the lowlands, farm boys who never been in rocky mountains like this before. Awat and Ebru and I were raised here and we're all fighting for something the Ottomans aren't: survival. Even our poets, like you, Mr. Yarjanian.”
The man smiled.
“I'm afraid I won't count for much in battle,” he said, “and least of all maimed as I am now. But if the worst comes to the worst I can sit here with my back to this tree and shoot. If you will kindly give me a rifle and ammunition I shall be ready for anything.”
“I think that can be arranged,” Mariam smiled in the dark. “But it is your time to sleep.”
“I don't think I can sleep,” the man said. “And as I cannot I might as well be of use to you.”
Mariam nodded and presently brought him a rifle, powder and bullets, and Yarjanian, leaning against the tree, rifle across his knees, watched all that was going on with bright eyes.
Guards were placed at the edge of the grove and Ebru and Mariam sat on opposite side of the high bank overlooking gulf cut in the rock.
Mariam found a large boulder, blown down on the mountain by some ancient tremor and as there was a comfortable seat on one side she remained there a long time. The bed itself was about ten feet wide and in the dark she was looking toward the east, about two hundred yards or more down the rocky ground to a point where it curved.
Everything was still as the wind that had been blowing all day had gone off to moan elsewhere some hours ago. It was a fair night with a fat moon and cold stars looking down. The air was full of movement and Mariam began to walk up and down again in order to keep awake. She noticed Yarjanian still sitting with eyes wide open and the rifle across his lap.
As Mariam came near in her walk the poet turned his bright eyes upon her.
“I hear,” he said, “that you have seen Jevdet Bey.”
“More than once. Several times when I was a prisoner in the castle the Turks call Dalan Gez, and again when I was recaptured.”
“What do you think of him?”
Mariam thought for a second.
“To call him a wicked man is to underestimate him. Ottoman promotion is measured in Armenian blood, as they say, but as provincial governor Jevdet Bey gained the nickname 'the horseshoe master' by nailing white-hot horseshoes onto the feet of his victims. What can you say about such a man that doesn't sound like a cliche?”
Yarjanian turned his look away and interlaced his fingers thoughtfully.
“I do not know,” he said finally. “Is this a new breed of man who revels in barbarous action? Or is this an old breed, a race traced down from Cain who live among us but we insist does not exist? My friends and I would argue late into the night on the nature of evil and we agreed how could such a thing be defined since it is always possible, no matter what atrocity a person can dream up as example, to go further by being even more atrocious to the point such terms as evil lose their meaning?”
Mariam shurgged.
“But that doesn't take into consideration what is happening around us now,” Mairam said. “The Ottomans have always been a combination of greatness and vanity and corruption. That is the building blocks of the Young Turks' government.”
“And the irony,” the poet nodded, “is that all my friends who could not come to an agreement on what evil was are dead, executed, even while they argued.”
Yarjanian lifted the rifle, put its stock to his shoulder and drew a bead in the dark.
“I do not think I shall make that mistake. Evil is evil because I say it is and I think I could hit a man at forty or fifty yards in this good moonlight and believe I was still doing good in this world,” he said.
He replaced the rifle across his knees and sighed.
Mariam nodded and moved away. She sat on her rock and kept her eyes on the deep shadows that had been cut by the stream. The rocks were dark and still in the night but it seemed to her that they were darker than they had been before. Mariam could feel her scalp tingle.
She looked attentively and saw figures moving in the dry river bed, keeping close against the sides. She waited only a moment longer to assure herself that the dark moving line was not some trick of the moonlight. She could not see faces or uniforms but she had no doubt that these were Ivedik's Raiders. Taking up her rifle, she found the foremost shape in her sights and fired.
“Down by the river! Ivedik is here!”
A salvo of bullets came from the shadows but with nothing to aim at fell far to one side or the other. In an instant Ebru, Awat, Diradour and two of the guards were by Mariam's side.
“So they thought they could sneak around the grove in the dark and come down upon us with our backs turned,” Ebru murmured in the dark. “We'll pick them off as they run, they've trapped themselves down there.”
The rifles flashed and the dark line in the rocky creek bed now broke into a desperate rush of bodies. Three fell in the first burst of gunfire, but the rest ran, tripping and stumbling through the sand and rocks, until they turned the curve.
Even as the small company began to reload they could hear rifle shots and someone screaming in pain in the dark. Ebru, calling to the others, rushed to the other side of the grove, where they were confronted by a second attack, led by Ivedik in person. Here men on horseback charged directly at the Armenians, but they were met by a fire which knocked more than two from their saddles.
Much of the charge was a blur to Mariam, a smudge of fire and smoke, of beating hoofs and of cries of pain. Glancing around her she saw Yarjanian sitting with his back against a tree calmly firing a rifle at the Turks. The poet had time for only two shots, but when he reloaded the second time he placed the rifle across his knees as before and smiled.
As the Ottoman troops turned in their charge Mariam saw a figure waving a sword and fired, but missed. The next moment the horseman was lost in the shadows. A second charge up the river bed was beaten back like the first and several Raiders were left to bleed and moan in the dark along side the bodies of their earlier companions. Two Turks got into the thickets and tried to stampede the horses but the quickness of Awat and several of the men who had been sleeping defeated their aim. One of the Turks fell there but the other escaped in the darkness.
When the charge was driven back and the horses were quieted Ebru and Awat threshed scrub and grove, in case some Ottoman sharpshooter should lie hidden among the rocks.
Nobody slept any more that night. Mariam, Diradour and Ebru kept a sharp watch upon the bed of the creek, the moon and stars fortunately aiding them. But the Turks did not venture again by that perilous path, although toward an hour or so before morning they opened a scattering fire in the gloom from below at the base of the mountain, many of their bullets whistling at random among the rocks and scrub. Some of the Armenians, crawling to the edge of the grove, replied, but they seemed to have little effect, as the Turks lay hidden behind a ridge. The attackers soon grew tired and after a while silence settled again.
Three of the Armenians had suffered slight wounds, but Awat bound them up skillfully.
Mariam say that several of the men on their own initiative, had been rolling all the fallen rocks that they could move to the edge of the clearing to form a more natural defense. The going was rough and in their exhausted state they were only able to turn over half a dozen, but at least they are trying to do something, she thought with a smile.
Yarjanian, the rifle across his knees, was sitting with his eyes closed, but he opened them as they approached. He appeared unhurt and his eyes were uncommonly large and bright eyes and they expressed delight.
“I am glad to see none of us is too badly hurt,” he said. “It has been a strange night for all of us. I never before thought that I should be firing at any one with intent to kill them. But history is never ours to make.”
He closed his eyes again.
“I am going to sleep a little, if I can,” he said.
But Mariam and Ebru could not sleep. They went to to the edge of the creek bed and together watched for the dawn. They saw the bright sun rise over a distant mountain ridge and the dew sparkle for a little while on the clumps of grass and rock. The day was warm but apparently it had come with peace.
They saw nothing on the mountainside. The day had started just as it had the morning before. But the three friends discerned six dark objects lying on the sand down the bed of the creek, and they knew that they were the men who had fallen during the night. With the two shot from their saddles in Ivedik's charge, the two that Yarjanian shot and the one caught trying to stampede the horses there were eleven less Turks in the world to bother them as they made their escape. Perhaps more, depending on the wounded and what little medical facilities Ivedik had to offer.
At the suggestion of Ebru they lighted a fire and were able to warm the last of the food and coffee they had among the group, thus putting heart into all the defenders. Then Ebru chose Mariam for a little scouting work on horseback. Mariam found Old Tigran seeking blades of grass within the limits allowed by her lariat. But when the horse saw his master he stretched out his head and neighed. Mariam was grateful not a single bullet had found her friend during the night.
“Good old fellow,” she said, stroking the velvet nose. “There's no water up here and hardly any grass. Let's go see if we can find any, shall we?”
[cont.]