T WAS Avak the shepherd who first beheld the miracle—Avak and his dog. In that year, the year of Our Lord 1222, the winter was a hard time and snow fell heavily in the higher ranges so that the khodas, or trails, were almost blocked. For this reason Avak kept his fat-tail sheep and goats penned up. Avak had built around his pens a fence of oak limbs, high and sturdy enough to keep out the wolves that sometimes ventured into the street of the village. So he was at liberty to spend most of his days watching for enemies.
His hut was on the outskirts of the village of Nakha in the foothills of the Khaukesh, beneath the ranges that stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian. Through these ranges ran the highway that led from Asia to the threshold of Europe—though Avak knew or cared little about that matter. To him, the highway was a source of trouble. And he relished fighting.
Avak, being the head of his family, had more than one feud on his hands. In the last harvest-time a Cherkessian horse-trader who had stopped overnight at Nakha had sworn to come back and cut out his heart and other organs. Avak had not stolen the trader's bald-faced Kabarda mare. The shepherd was not clever enough to steal; but he was much too proud to refuse a quarrel when it came his way.
And the four Ermeni—Avak's mild brown eyes glinted when he thought of them. Four ragged and hungry Ermeni who had wandered up the road, one at a time. The first had asked why Avak kept such a starved dog, at the same time pointing out a small sheep that had strayed from the flock. Avak had said that it was a sheep and not a dog. But when two other men had stopped and told him that it was indeed a dog, and an evil looking beast, he had been doubtful. And he had believed the fourth, who swore that the beast had been bewitched by a pagan sorcerer. This fourth Ermeni had carried off the sheep, unharmed.
Avak had bought holy water to sprinkle his flock, and—when he learned that the four wanderers had eaten the sheep in the village—he remembered the saying of his people that two Greeks are a match for a devil, and one Ermeni is a match for two devils.
So he kept an eye out for the four wanderers—himself a Georgian and a sword bearer, and a descendent of the Orphelians who had carried sword and fire over all the Khaukesh in by-gone generations. The evidence of his nobility was the blade itself, a heavy yataghan in a leather sheath hanging from his shoulder by a strap ornamented with all the silver coins Avak had been able to get together.
And, as his father had done before him, Avak watched the mountain road for enemies—his personal adversaries and the foes of the blessed young queen of the Georgians.
The Road of the Warriors, it was called, this narrow track that wound up from the wide steppes into the east. And on this Road of the Warriors Avak had seen all that came out of the east—the laden camels of Bokharians plodding in the dust of midsummer, the donkey trains of purple-clad Jews, the creaking carts of turbaned Hindus. By night he had caught fleeting glimpses of raiding Turkoman horsemen.
But this road that came out of the unknown East had been deserted since the first snow. Until the day of the miracle.
Then Avak, going out to his aerie, had beheld with keen eyes a change in the aspect of the plain beneath. The gray surface of the steppe was covered with round black objects like tiny domes. And between these objects moved specks that were men. Here and there were dark blurs that changed shape as he watched, and he knew instinctively that these must be horse herds, or perhaps cattle.
After a while he reasoned that the black domes must be tents, of a kind he had never beheld. He did not know how to count over a hundred and so he told the priest in Nakha that there were many hundreds of foemen camped on the plain under the mountains of Georgia, and the priest had agreed that this was so.
“Eh, Avak, it is true that last night I saw in the sky a fiery cross. Now it is clear that this was an omen. There will be war in the Khaukesh.”
“In that case,” agreed the shepherd, “crows will eat the flesh of the foemen. Aye, the wolf packs will not go unfed.”
He had heard his father tell how the hosts of Islam had tried to force the mountain rampart in the day of the prophet Muhammad, and how in the end they had failed. He himself had seen armies of the Persian atabegs come up one valley or another, only to draw back licking their wounds.