Pirates, Cossacks and Cossacks who are Pirates

I’ve written about Harold Lamb’s Cossack stories before—many of which had never been reprinted until a four-book anthology was published a few years ago. So I’ve never had a chance to read a bunch of these before. I’m enjoying every single one of them.

Take the novella “Mark of Astrakhan.”(from the Nov. 20, 1925 issue of Adventure) It’s told in the first person by a 17^th Century Cossack named Barbakosta, who lives in a remote hut on the steppes. One winter day, a he runs across a guy in soaking wet clothes, whom he brings to his hut for warmth and food.

The guy’s name is Mark and he’s from Virginia of all places. He ended up in Russia after a career as a buccaneer eventually got him captured by the Spanish and sold to the Turks. He escaped from a Turkish galley after the vessel sunk.

Both men speak Turkish, so they are able to communicate and strike up a friendship, especially after Mark defends Barbakosta’s hut from Tatar bandits.

The two eventually travel to the city of Astrakhan, where Mark takes a job as artilleryman in the Russian military. There’s a need for trained soldiers, since it’s rumored that the Cossack pirate Stenka Razin may be attacking the city.

But the local governor of the city soon learns that you can’t depend on soldiers you haven’t paid for a year while you hold elaborate and expensive parties in your mansion.

The two protagonists are captured by the pirates when the city inevitably falls. They might have gotten away if they had still been on their own. But by now, there is a girl involved—the niece of a Roundhead soldier who fled England after Cromwell’s regime fell and also ended up serving in the Russian military. The need to save himself, Barbakosta and the girl leads Mark to challenge the pirate leader to a drinking bout, followed by a shooting match.

So far, all this has made for a great story. But Barbakosta’s unpretentious first person narration gives the tale a snap and a sense of personality that makes you wish you had an excuse to read it aloud to someone. Plot twists come along at a furious pace and the tale builds up to an exhilarating climax when the two friends (and the girl) end up working for Stenka Razin to defend Astrakhan against a large Persian fleet. 

Much of the novella is built around the pirate leader—a man capable of acts of horrible brutality, but who can still appreciate loyalty and bravery; a man who can inspire devotion in his followers and lead from the front when the come into battle, but can still sometimes act on whims that place those followers in grave danger. For much of the story, he’s the nominal bad guy and we get several brutal examples of just how murderous he can sometimes be. But one of the several pleasurable aspects of the novella is how the plot twists slowly morphs our point-of-view until we get to the point where we’re really rooting for this guy.

But the novella is primarily Mark’s story. Lamb’s yarns would often involve an outsider thrust into a strange culture, using his wits and his fighting skills to think or battle his way out of dangerous situations. “Mark of Astrakhan” is a fine example of this.

The Very Definition of Epic

It’s the early 17^th Century. The Turks are certain to march north into Russia when the weather allows it. Guarding the border along the Dnieper River are the Cossacks. But they lack arms and supplies and their leader—Rurik—is a prisoner of the Turks.

So the young chief Demid and his big partner Ayub plan to raid down into Ottoman territory, stealing enough gold to pay Rurik’s ransom.

Well, there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers serving under the Ottoman flag, all of whom would gladly cut the throat of any Cossack they catch. How many men will Demid need to carry out a successful raid that will take him deep into the heart of enemy territory?

Demid figures thirty men will be enough.

This is the premise of Harold Lamb’s novella “The Witch of Aleppo,” published in the January 30, 1924 issue of Adventure magazine. I’ve written about Lamb’s superb Cossack stories before. They are true edge-of-your-seat adventures, written with a real sense of time and place, filled with great characters and plots with many twists and turns as well as exciting action.

This is the October issue of Adventure. I was unable to locate an image of the January issue

.

Though “Witch” does not star Khlit, the aged Cossack who is my favorite Lamb character, it’s perhaps my favorite of his stories. It has a truly epic feel to it—the small band of Cossacks must ride huge distances, capture a galley and row across a hostile sea, then ride again for many more leagues before they reach the city of Aleppo (located in what would today be Syria), in which--rumor has it--a great treasure is stored.

Then there’s just the small matter of getting into the walled and heavily guarded city, then getting out again with the treasure.

Demid and Ayub—a true odd couple to start with—are wonderful characters in of themselves. Demid is a young and quick-thinking warrior who has already earned an authority over others despite his youth. Ayub is a big veteran who is deadly in a fight, wielding a huge broadsword, but is also superstitious and sometimes prone to act without thinking.

They had already appeared in several earlier stories. This time around, they are joined by Michael—an itinerant Irish swordsman isn’t as foppish as he first seems—and Lila, an Armenian woman rescued from the Muslims who may or may not be trusted to help. Lila is the title character, a beautiful young lady who Ayub soon decides is a witch who has cast a spell on Demid—since why else would he insist on bringing a woman along? But Demid has a plan for getting into Aleppo and he needs the girl to carry it out.

There are a number of great action set-pieces here, most notably a fight to capture a galley; a frantic escape from the beached galley sometime later; and a desperate battle in a secret treasure room at Aleppo. Demid thinks and plans his way out of seemingly hopeless situations on several occasions. Stuff happens that makes you think Lila can be trusted. Then stuff happens that changes your mind. Then even more stuff happens that might possibly change your mind again.

I don’t want summarize too much of the story, because I don’t want to spoil any of the great plot twists that keep coming up. Suffice to say that Demid’s raid into Aleppo lasts about seven months, with he and his men in constant danger pretty much all the time.  Despite the relative short length of the tale, Lamb is able to give a real sense of distances to be crossed and dangers to be confronted—creating an adventure that the Cossacks will be telling each other about over their campfires for years to come. 

From the Bonhomme Richard to Russia

A little while back, I posted THIS about pulp stories that had Cossack heroes.The post is primarily about Khilt the Cossack, an extraordinarily cool hero from a series of adventure stories by Harold Lamb, published back int the 1910s & 1920s.


Lamb, though, apparently loved Cossacks. In 1924, he used one named Ivak in a story titled "Forward." Set in the late 19th Century, it's about Ivak escorting an American naval officer from Petersburg in his journey to take command of the Russian fleet. But certain members of Catherine the Great's court--acting out of political ambition and jealousy--are determined to make sure the American never reaches his duty station.

The American? Well, if you haven't guessed it from the title of this post, then you oughta be embarrassed. It is, of course, John Paul Jones. It was Jones, remember, who was captain of the Bonhomme Richard when it took on the British warship Serapis in in 1779. It was Jones who replied "Sir, I have not yet begun to fight" when asked if he would surrender his badly damaged ship. Jones fought on and captured the Serapis, moving his surviving crew aboard just before the Bonhomme Richard sank from under him.

Jones is just as cool in Lamb's story. With the clever and skilled Ivak at his side, he overcomes enemies and hacks past danger. The only Russian word he learns is "Forward!" But that's pretty much all Ivak needs to hear anyways.

Also in 1924, Lamb published "The Sword of Honor," in which Jones has taken command of the Russian fleet and goes up against the ships of the Ottoman Empire. The point-of-view character this time is Pierre, a French sailor who had been aboard the Bonhomme Richard and was eager to serve alongside Jones once again. Pierre has more than his share of adventure just getting to Jones, but then is with the Admiral as Jones deals with back-stabbing and cowardly political enemies and takes on the Turks at the same time. There's a massive fleet-vs-fleet engagement and a mission to capture a Turkish ship from under the guns of a fortress.

Both stories are action-packed adventures that manage squeeze in a total of three heroes (Ivak, Pierre and Jones) who have been thoroughly dipped in awesome sauce.

These stories have been reprinted in Swords from the Sea, an anthology of sea-going adventures by Lamb. All the stories are fun, but the two featuring John Paul Jones are particularly enjoyable. John Paul Jones is even cooler than keel boats and giant ants.*







*see my last two Thursday posts to make sense of that last sentence.

The Best Team-up that Never Happened.

It’s not often that you find in Western literature a Cossack warrior as a hero. But in a series of superb adventure stories by pulp writer Harold Lamb (recently reprinted in four volumes, we do get to follow along with a Cossack as he gets caught up in one wild adventure after another.


Set in the last 16th Century, Lamb’s stories introduce us to Khlit, an aging warrior whose wits are as sharp (and often as deadly) as his sword. "His ability to think clearly into the future," we're told in one story, "had kept Khlit alive until his hair was gray, when few Cossacks lived to middle age."


Khlit gets around. In the first few stories, he’s hanging out with his fellow Cossacks. But despite constantly proving himself to be smarter than everyone else (and still a master swordsman), they think he’s getting too old to fight. So he wanders off on his own. At this point, his adventures really kick into high gear. He gets involved in finding the hidden tomb of Genghis Khan. He sneaks into a city of Assassins and finishes them off from the inside out. He gets accused of assassinating the emperor of China (who has really only been kidnapped by traitors). He gets hunted as prey by the Tartars. He has myriad single combats and fights in huge battles involving tens of thousands of soldiers. He fights and thinks his way out of prisons and certain death on a regular basis.


Lamb gave his stories consistently fun finales. There's be a twist--or we'd get to see the culmination of Khlit's plan in dealing with his current situation--then there would often be another bigger twist on top of that, highlighting just how clever the Cossask is.


These stories were printed in Adventure magazine between 1917 and 1926. Adventure was a unique pulp, taking pride in printing high quality stories that combined excitement with historical accuracy. Lamb’s stories were standouts even among works by Rafael Sabatini and Talbot Mundy. Khlit is one super-cool guy and Lamb’s prose is animated and lively.


Reading these stories (most of which have never been reprinted before) reminded me of the one other Cossack pulp hero that I’m aware of. Here we have to turn to a writer who admired and was highly influenced by Lamb’s stories—Robert E. Howard.


“The Shadow of the Vulture” is a novella published in the January 1934 issue of Magic Carpet Magazine. Here we first meet Red Sonya, a red-haired warrior woman who is helping to defend the city of Vienna against the Turks during the siege of 1529.

She also spends a lot of time defending Gottfried von Kalmbach, a knight who has a price on his head. Some years earlier, Gottfried had personally wounded the emperor Suleyman on the battlefield. Now Suleyman has sent his most ruthless soldier, Mikhal Oglu, to bring him Gottfried’s head. So the knight has not only survive a series of regular battles, but also watch his back for treachery.


Sonya is at first contemptuous of Gottfried, but she gradually warms up to him and they become companions on the battlefield (how far their companionship might eventually go is never made clear). And if you need someone to watch over you on the battlefield, you can’t do better than Sonya, whose “blade is a blur of white fire, and men went like ripe grain before the reaper.” She saves Gottfried—who is no slouch himself in a fight—at least three times; once after he’s kidnapped by double agents inside Vienna’s damaged walls. There is an absolutely wonderful shock at the story's climax.


The novella is yet another exciting example of Howard’s own storytelling skills. It’s sad that he never got around to writing any more stories about Gottfried and Sonya. In the 1970s Conan comic book published by Marvel, Red Sonya (now Red Sonja) was moved back to the Hyborian Age to team up with Conan. She’s been in sword-and-sorcery land ever since, both in comics and in a series of paperback novels published at some point in the 1970s. There was also what is reputed to be a very bad movie (I haven’t seen it) made in the 1980s.

So the original 16th Century Red Sonya is limited to her one appearance. It really is sad.


But while reading the Khlit stories, I got to thinking. It’s not impossible that Sonya—a few decades after the siege of Vienna—could have met a young Khlit. Maybe she returns to her homeland after adventuring around Europe and the Middle East for a couple of decades with Gottfried. Khlit might have been a youthful warrior, just getting started in the business of warfare. Maybe Sonya is the person who taught him his swordsmanship. Maybe they even had an adventure or two together.


It’s a nice thought. But, sadly, we'll never know for sure.