Embers in the Steppe

Finished Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe Wednesday and feel only slightly more Polish—a little tired, a little defeated, a little melancholy—as if one had actually campaigned against the Turks but seen little action: it’s a long, fairly flat read of the epic sort. One book jacket reviewer claims that “If you are going to read only one literary work in your life about Poland, read Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy.” Perhaps, but if you are that reader, I recommend you read it when you are a boy. Parts of this third volume would make a reasonably salable video game, that is to say, a ripping good bloodbath, but the book as a whole and the love story dominating it are less satisfactory.


One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.

But it was too late for realizations and regrets. Lusnia stooped down, grasped Azia by the hips so that he’d be able to move them back and forth, in much the way that a seamstress moved the eye of a needle she is about to thread, and barked an order at the men who held the waiting horses.

“Move out! Slowly and together!”

The horses started forward. The ropes tightened and pulled on Azia’s legs. His body slid along the ground for barely a moment before it struck the crudely sharpened point of the young, felled tree. [It gets rather graphic here, page 602-3 for the less squeamish among you.]

“Slowly!” the sergeant growled.

[The stake is raised and imbedded in the ground.]

Azia looked down upon all this from his dreadful height. He was fully conscious. This form of execution, which came to the Commonwealth from Valachia a long time before, was all the more dreadful because an impaled victim sometimes lived as long as three days.

[Then it gets worse before Sienkiewicz finally ignites him.]

Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.