A former cavalry guard of the Life Guards from St. Petersburg survives as a Cossack centurion, and hurries to the location of the Russian troops near the Russian-Turkish border, driving his favorite horse.

A column of Russian troops sets out on a campaign. Khvoshchinsky stops at a roadside cross: here the Russian land ends, ahead is the Turetchina. But half a century ago, in 1829, these stones and rocks were ours. Just like the Bayazet fortress itself, the goal of the current campaign.

Bayazet is surrounded by an invisible wall of hostility and treachery. At night the sentry disappears. In the morning, a bag containing the severed heads of soldiers is found on the road near the fortress. The murderer, spewing curses, is strung up in the fortress to the beat of drums...

Karabanov goes on a desperate spree, drinking and rowdying in the city dukhan. Exhausted, he falls asleep to the seductive dance of an oriental beauty. Only animal instinct and instant reaction allow him to avoid death from the dagger of the treacherous Turk. Having come to his senses, he frantically beats all the arriving enemies - another, a third...

The police who escaped from the battlefield return to the fortress, and then the Cossack hundred that escaped from encirclement. Now even Patsevich cannot ignore the fact that the headquarters generals did not want to notice for so long: not far from Bayazet, in the vicinity of Van, up to three thousand well-armed Turks have accumulated. To share his difficult share with her husband, Olga Khvoshchinskaya comes to the fortress. Not wanting to sit idly by, Olga begins working as a nurse in the infirmary. And fate seems to protect her from meeting Andrei: immediately upon returning from the battlefield, Karabanov is sent to Igdir to receive monetary allowances for the garrison.