In their rush to escape the darkness, and screaming almost as loudly as the terrible warrior priestess in the chariot, Hagen and Donkels collided with each other before running straight into a wall, and managed to knock themselves out.
The fourth SS man fled in completely the wrong direction, tripped on the skeleton of a dead horse and then fainted with horror when, having found the flashlight on the floor, he managed to crawl on top of the mummified corpse in the center of the burial chamber.
Fortunately, the eyesight of Przewalski’s horses is excellent—even in the dark—and Temüjin and Börte quickly found the path that led out of the burial chamber; seconds later, they were speeding out of the ancient doorway. Kalinka was more used to driving the coal cart than a chariot—it was the speed of the thing that took her breath away, and this lack of charioteering experience was the main reason why the girl allowed her left wheel to clip one of the vertical beams supporting the heavy stone lintel, which brought the whole edifice down in a loud crash of snow and dust and rock, sealing the entrance forever.
Taras barked his approval, and Kalinka brought the chariot to a halt next to the motorcycles near the top of the slope to look for more Germans. But there were none, so instead, she turned to survey the damage her chariot wheel had done to the ancient monument.
“I think it’s going to take them a while to get out of there,” said Kalinka, who had little appreciation of the enormous weight of the stone lintel.
Temüjin and Börte reared up on their hind legs and neighed triumphantly. They had a keener appreciation of the true fate that had met the four Germans.
“Whoa, steady,” said Kalinka.
Still holding the spear, she climbed down off the chariot platform and stabbed all six tires on the two motorcycles and their sidecars, just in case the Germans managed to escape sooner than she imagined. Then she threw the keys away for good measure, after which she conducted a swift search of the two sidecars to look for anything useful she could steal.
Kalinka hooted with delight as she found several packets of sausage, groundsheets, some lighters, some pumpernickel bread and cheese, some cigarettes and matches, ammunition, a pair of clean socks, woolen mittens, a bottle of schnapps, a bottle of beer, several canteens of water, a bag of apples, a thermos flask of lukewarm coffee, some chocolate, a book by someone called Goethe, a scarf, a snood and an SS officer’s cap.
“You wouldn’t think you could get so much stuff in the sidecars of two motorcycles,” she said. “There are more supplies here than in a salesman’s suitcase.”
There was even a compass.
She gave the apples and the beer to the horses and half of the sausage to Taras. Taras also took the hat, and for a while, he used it as a chew, which he thought was a poor substitute for biting one of the Germans. Kalinka put on the scarf, the snood and the socks, and crammed everything except the ammunition into a soldier’s forage bag.
She got rid of the armor and the helmet, and with handfuls of snow, she washed the silver paint off herself and the animals, after which she was very glad of the mittens. Then she took a quick compass reading and pointed out the route.
“I think we’d better leave right now,” she said, stepping back onto the chariot platform. “There may be more Germans around here. So the quicker we’re away from this place, the better.”
Kalinka took hold of the reins, snapped her team forward again, and soon the chariot was racing across the hard-packed snow.
THE CHARIOT WAS VERY old, and after the collision with the entrance, it quickly developed a bias to the left that periodically required Kalinka to pull the reins hard to the right in order to keep them running in a straight line; then the left wheel started to stray up and down the axle with a loud squeak that soon drove them mad. They kept the chariot rolling for most of the following morning and part of the afternoon, but as soon as they reached a country road, the chariot collapsed on the faster, harder surface. No one was injured, but a cursory inspection revealed that it would never drive again.
While she unharnessed the horses, Kalinka uttered a few silent words to the warrior priestess for lending her the chariot. It wasn’t a prayer but more of a thank-you, as well as an apology for spoiling her grave, although Kalinka knew deep in her bones that, in the circumstances, the little priestess would hardly have minded.
“I don’t know what we’d have done without you,” she said quietly. “And I sort of feel that it was you who gave me the idea while I was asleep. Either way, I’ll never forget you. Not if I live to be a hundred.”
After that, Kalinka was obliged to ride again, for which Temüjin, at least, was grateful, as he didn’t much care for the chariot harness. Running in a straight line and without accelerating ahead of Börte was as much discipline as he could endure for one day.