May There Be a Road (Ss) (2001) Read Online Free PDF Page B

helped it up and came on.
    How many were there? A hundred or more. But they were not dressed or provisioned for the high mountains.
    Tohkta could tell this because, though all were mounted, they had few packhorses, and these seemed to carry only weapons and ammunition.
    At three hundred yards Tohkta and his hidden men opened fire. Instantly there was confusion. A milling of horses and men. For a moment only sporadic fire was returned, then Chu Shih rode into the midst of them on a tall gray horse and suddenly there was order. Soldiers dropped to the ground and sought cover, the bullets striking the rocks around Tohkta and his men were no longer random; it now seemed that the fire was seeking out each of them as separate targets.
    "Be ready!" Tohkta called out as under the covering fire a group of soldiers swarmed forward.
    "Now, run!"
    Tohkta turned and ran himself. Before him, Basru. In spun and fired one last shot before entering the pass. The others followed as rifle fire cracked and whined off the rocks around them. Tohkta had known that they couldn't stand off a concerted attack, but he also knew that in the thin air of the mountains he and his men could outrun any lowland soldier.
    Chu Shih's men paused in their rush to fire at the fleeing Tocharis, but their breath came too hard at fourteen thousand feet and their shots went wild.
    At a signal from their leader, soldiers on horseback charged into the pass to pursue the retreating tribesmen, but this was exactly what Tohkta had been planning for.
    Tola Beg and a strong young boy had made their way up the steep walls of the pass and together they had found a precariously balanced boulder that the yak hunter had spotted years before. With their shoulders braced against the cliff behind them and their feet on the huge rock they waited. They waited until they heard the sound of firing stop and the sound of horsemen entering the pass. Then they pushed.
    Nothing happened.
    They eased up and Tola Beg looked at the boy and they pushed together then released and pushed again.
    Suddenly the boulder was rocking and Tola Beg pushed hard, pushed with all the strength he had in his old body and with all the strength he had in his mind. Something gave inside of him, something in his back, but he pushed on through the blossoming pain and then the boulder was rolling. It dropped from sight, and Tola Beg could feel its impact further down the mountain, then he heard the roar of other rocks falling with it and the screams of men and horses.
    Tohkta, Ibrahim, and Basru. In turned and threw themselves back into the maelstrom of dust and flying rock that now choked the pass. They had seen little of it, for they had been running for their lives not only from the soldiers but from the landslide that nearly took them as well. It had only been the fast thinking of Ibrahim that had saved them, for as soon as they cleared the pass he had forced the running tribesmen into a corner of the hillside protected from the crashing torrent of rock.
    Now they pushed their way back through the slide, and while Ibrahim mercilessly stripped the dead and wounded soldiers of guns and ammunition, Tohkta and Basru. In poured fire into the oncoming Chinese.
    Their lines wavered and fell back, the impact of this double ambush overcoming even Chu Shih's leadership. As soon as the soldiers had taken cover Tohkta and his followers fled back through the pass to where the others had brought up the horses.
    Under a sky dense with cloud they started down the rocky slope. The men were excited by their victory, but Tohkta saw the look on the face of Tola Beg and knew that he was in pain. In the trees far below the pass they waited to see what the Han Chinese soldiers would do.
    Chu Shih was taking no chances. After some time had passed there was activity around the mouth of the pass: a scouting party who had, no doubt, worked their way carefully through the rockfall alert for additional trouble. Then they watched as a squad