Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon

  “We sent our demand for his surrender not two hours ago, boy!” Amram said. Six lancers of the 15th Arsiyah, the best-attired, finest-armored troops in the Brotherhood, had been admitted under flag of truce into the city, bearing testimonials of the humble obeisance of the Little Elephant, Filaq, eternally loyal servant of the kagan in whose name all truces were held to be sanctified, and lenient terms of surrender to Buljan, who would be permitted to keep not only his household goods, camels and tents but-over the objections of Filaq-the eyes and tongue in his head.

  “And in any case, your ‘good men’ have no grievance with Buljan,” Zelikman said, fighting the urge to make a trial of his skill at strangulation, by scarf or bare fingers, right there. “Their quarrel is with the Rus. And the sooner and the easier you make yourself bek, and act to revoke the safe passage that Buljan granted to the Northmen, the sooner your men will be free to seek the redress they do want, and the more of them will live to get it. You are the one who has a grievance with Buljan, you arrogant little bastard.”

  “Not even in power yet and already thinking like a despot,” Amram observed with a rueful smile, studying his shatranj board. “Confusing your will with the will of the men you lord it over.” Without looking up from the board he grabbed at the youth's left ankle and gave it a yank, sending Filaq tumbling onto the carpet. “I swear, you are starting to worry me.”

  “And you are starting to worry me,” Filaq said, scrambling to his feet, his cheeks and throat radiant with blood. “You seem to have forgotten the purpose of that impressive ax you carry about so picturesquely. I thought you were a soldier. But I see that you are just a craven barber like your friend.”

  “I am a soldier,” Amram said, looking up, no longer smiling.

  “Are you? Then fight like one. We should have attacked as soon as we arrived.”

  “The men were tired. It was dark. The city is well defended and prepared.”

  “Is that how they do it in the armies of Byzantium? Offer excuses in advance of the defeat, to save time later?”

  Zelikman was obliged to acknowledge that Filaq had a true gift for commanding soldiers, because Zelikman knew what the stripling had intuited, namely that Amram was vulnerable to a well-timed display of taunting. The African had served too long as a pit mas-tiff in the dogfights of empire not to respond to an artful application of the handler's goad, even when it was wielded by a beardless youth who could have no clear notion of the hard and harrowing work that soldiering entailed. Filaq stood there with his lip curled, his pretty eyes glinting with scorn, his soft, narrow fingers playing on the hilt of his untried sword, looking as certain of victory as only a green recruit would dare.

  “Let your spies within the walls do their work,” Amram said. “After you have news-”

  On hands and knees an Arsiyah trooper crawled in through the door flap, in a clatter of armor. He pressed his forehead to the blood-blue figured carpet and waited for Filaq to give him leave to speak.

  “Has he responded?” Filaq said.

  “It is-we were told that Buljan would be sending out an emissary, lord, an old friend of yours. But in the end they have sent only an elephant.”

  “An elephant?” Filaq whispered.

  “A very old one. Thin and old and slow.”

  Filaq stood unmoving, shaking his head.

  “It has a bald patch on its forehead,” he said softly

  “Yes, lord. Spotted and hairless.”

  Filaq crawled past the guard, shoving him aside, and poked his head out of the door flap, looking toward the great gates of Atil. Whatever he saw when he looked out made him forget himself He leapt up and ran, laughing, snuffling, tripping over his own feet.

  Amram and Zelikman went after him and arrived before the gates just in time to see Filaq encircle with his slender arms, in their baggy sleeves of borrowed quilt armor, the gnarled proboscis of a broken-down elephant. It loomed, skeletal and listing, its skin tuberous, lumpy, pocked with whitish scars and peeling away in strips of papery excelsior that snowed and blew in little drifts around its feet: a wagonload of ragged and mildew-blown blankets hastily arranged over the staved-in ruin of a barn. A steady rattle issued from the mysterious machinery of its interior like wind in the branches of a locust tree, over a deeper rumbling an unmistakable continuo of pleasure as the stripling rubbed at the piebald patch between its phlegmatic little eyes, gummed with a milky effluence of tears.

  Filaq spoke to it, calling it his beauty and his little mother and his queen. At a slight distance from the stripling and the elephant, as if granting a measure of privacy to this reunion, the lancers of the 15th Arsiyah sat their horses, with four foot soldiers behind them bearing the flag of truce and the impromptu green ban-don of the Brotherhood of the Elephant, the soldiers’ faces expressionless and shaded by the brims of their round helmets.

  The elephant withdrew its burled trunk from Filaq's embrace and turned its slow head on the scraping millstones of its vertebrae, left, right, as if indicating the men around it, producing a clucking sound with its lips or throat. It made a backward lurch toward the troopers. One of the horses shied, and its rider raised his lance and drove it deep into the flank of the elephant.

  Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence. It sounded a few flat whuffling notes that seemed to raise a stirring echo from far away, and then it pitched forward, its massive skull dragging it down. The architecture of the head struck the ground with a formidable tolling, but the rest of it hit with the light snap of brushwood. Its fall kicked up a roil of dust and delicate falling flakes of scurf

  “Damn me,” Amram said, unslinging Defiler of All Mothers from his back. The impostors threw down the streaming banners to be trampled in the mud, unfurled the candelabrum flag of Khazaria and drew their swords. Amram reared up and began to uncoil the bite of his Viking ax, but before he had the chance to swing it, one of the impostors dragged Filaq off the body of the dead beast and, reaching for the collar of the stripling's tunic, ripped the front away, revealing a white belly with a soft prominence, a curve of hip and two yards of linen swaddling cloth wrapped tightly around a slender chest. Filaq struggled, growled, cursed and finally screamed as the soldier tore off the linen drawers, revealing a gonfalon of russet hair with nothing to inspire it but the breeze. With a flourish of his dagger-one of those bold gestures so dear to emancipators-the soldier slit the swaddling cloth, and it sprang from Filaq's body, baring the startled gaze of a pair of breasts shaped by the hand of nature to fit the cup of a lover's palm.

  On that plain of mud and grass and staring faces, along the battlements and bartizans of the walls of Atil barbed with pikemen and archers, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Khazar, from the Urals to the Caucasus, there was no sound but the wind in the grass, the clop of a sidestepping horse, the broken breathing of the Little Elephant, Filaq, with whom they had marched and slept and shivered, the son, the prince they had raised up on their shoulders to rule them as their bek, the revenger of the rape of their sisters and the burning of their houses and the pillage of their goods. All Zelik-man's disdain, all his resentment toward the foul-mouthed spoiled stripling who had plagued him since the rescue at the caravansary vanished with the double shock of the elephant's slaughter and the revelation. In their place he felt only pity for a white thing flecked with mud, a motherless girl, drooping in the grip of the soldier like a captured flag.

  Before Amram could recover, the mounted impostors had him at the point of their lances. He studied the angles and distances, the lean faces under the helmets, the wonder of the girl, the glinting steel tips of the lances. He threw down his ax. They bound his arms behind him, and with the girl they drove him toward the gates of the city Zelikman reached for Lancet, but as if he had heard the snick of the blade Amram whipped his head around, seeking among the baffled faces of the Brotherhood for his old friend's, and in his own impassive mien there was neither a warning against hasty action nor the fatalism
of defeat but a hint of amusement more useful and wise: Can you top this? And Zelikman recollected his own intelligence, forgot his outrage, resisted the urge to act in panic and left his blade where, for now, it belonged.

  Like apes on a rock at sunset, like crows in the trees, like the bells in the watchtowers of a city under attack, the men of the Brotherhood fell to talking all at once, as those nearest the gates and those at the extremes of the encampment sought to reconcile the stark prodigies of observation with the grandiose inventions of rumor.

  “Master?” Hanukkah said, approaching Zelikman warily, one hand extended like a man searching out a stairhead in the dark. He wore a mail shirt and one boot and no pants, with his arm in a sling and a bruise on his cheek, a hangover folded about him like a cloak, tottering, squinting, a loop of his woolen bedroll caught in a link of his mail so that the blanket dragged along behind him in the mud. “Is that you?”

  And he reached out, his pudgy cheeks slack, his bright little eyes drained by surprise of any visible emotion, to tug at one of the braids of Zelikman's beard. But the day was not yet replete with wonders, because before Zelikman could reply there were shouts from the rear and then the blatting tantara of an inhuman horn. A fissure opened in the mass of soldiers, and like a dike giving way before the ransacking arm of a flood they fell back or ran to get out of the path of Cune-gunde, the elephant, who came shambling toward the gates of Atil, her hide scrubbed, oiled and glistening in the sun, caparisoned in purple silk and cloth of gold, the tips of her tusks capped with gilded leather sheaths. On her back in a large rush basket jostled the nephew of Joseph Hirkanos with three or four of his uncles, clutching the sides of the basket. The effect of the fine silk robes they wore, like that of the bright ribbon braiding their beards and moustaches, was spoiled to a degree by the expressions of terror on their faces as she ran wild.

  Cunegunde stopped beside the body of the dead elephant, and stared at it with an unreadable expression. She snuffled, and rumbled, and investigated its sounds and the pocks and scars of its hide. She redistributed her weight impatiently among the pillars of her frame, and some fundamental injustice or harsh fact about the world seemed to confront her afresh, with no gain in meaning or message. The dead animal was a distant cousin to her at best, Zelikman supposed, no nearer kin than Amram was to him.

  Zelikman clapped Hanukkah on the shoulder and then ran toward the elephant. The Radanites riding in the howdah, not yet fully recovered from their jaunt, appeared taken aback by the sudden appearance, amid the legs of their merchandise, of one of their own guild. Even Joseph cried out in alarm as Zelikman grabbed hold of one of the gilt-embroidered purple strips that fluttered from the withers of the elephant and used it as a rope to pull himself up to the shoulders of the beast, whom his disguise neither alarmed nor, apparently, deceived. Twenty years earlier, at the St. John's Fair at Mainz, a Jewish boy sneaked into the stall where the elephant was kept for the night and fed her a ripe pear, and patted her flank, and spoke a kind word in the holy tongue, which he believed at the time to have been the original language of elephants and men, and now when that boy, grown to a man, lost his footing on the elephant's flank and began to slide down the silken panel to the ground, Cunegunde reached back and, with the tip of her trunk against the seat of his breeches, held him steady until he could regain his purchase.

  “The offer to join us was a simple one, really,” Joseph Hirkanos said when Zelikman tumbled into the basket, looking him up and down from the tips of his curled slippers to his blackened hedgehog of a plaited beard to the clumsy windings of his head wrap. “But I divine that you find a way to complicate everything.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON THE UNFORESEEN AND ANNOYING RESEMBLANCE OF A BEK'S LIFE TO AN ILL-PLAYED GAME OF SHATRANJ

  At the Feast of Booths it was the custom of the beks of Khazaria to pitch their leaf tents in the yard of the prison fortress called Qomr, a mound of yellowish brick rising up from the left bank of the turbid river, in whose donjon by long tradition the warlord was obliged to lay his head. But on his return to Atil from the summer hordes, the usurper Buljan ordered that his sukkah be erected on the donjon's roof, with its strategic views of the kagan's palace, the seafront, the Muslim quarter and the steppe, and above all with its relative nearness to the stars, among which his sky-worshiping and uncircumcised ancestors still hunted with infallible gyrfalcons for celestial game.

  When Sukkot ended, he declined to dismantle the booth and, after a one-sided consultation with the grand rabbi, took his wife and three daughters to dwell there with him. Whispers began that a guilty conscience was preventing the new bek from taking up residence in the royal apartments, and even that the ghost of his murdered predecessor in phantom rags had been seen in the donjon's upper windows. But the truth was that Buljan found comfort in the sukkah, in this open-air proof of the affinity between his own fathers and those of the people (by the account of their own book once a wandering horde of tent dwellers and cattle raiders) whose faith they had adopted. The new bek's great-grandfather had passed every night of his life under the sky, on the back of a pony or in the felt walls of a ger, and Buljan retained the ancestral contempt for cities and city dwellers. He could not contemplate the move indoors without experiencing a panic in his skin. “The fate of the Khazars appears to have become curiously knit up with the fate of its elephants,” he said to the strange Radanite agent, who sat on the carpet, crosslegged, under the interlaced rushes of the roof Buljan himself perched on the tripod of his office, formed from gilded elks’ antlers, with his bekun beside him nursing his infant and his twins playing in the corner with colored beads and some squirrels’ tails. The girls, not yet fluent in the holy tongue, looked up at the word elephants. “We must therefore be grateful to you for having helped us begin to restore our herd. I am personally very pleased.”

  “Then we have fulfilled our sole ambition,” the Radanite replied, having apologized for the insufficiency of his Khazari. “An animal, by the way, of excellent character.”

  Buljan reached toward the shatranj board at his right hand, picked up one of the alfils of dark green stone, then set the jade elephant down again. He expected at any moment to receive, via armed guard, the response of the prisoner in the south bastion to his most recent move. The bek's position looked strong but in his belly he felt the clutch of a fist and knew that he was in trouble from some quarter of the board. He had the kind of bravery-the most effective kind-that derives from playing only when one is assured of victory He anticipated arrival of the armed guard with unwonted dread.

  “Character?” he said, signaling to the Sorb slave who waited, shivering, outside the booth. The day was bright and the sky as blue as the beard of his greatgrandfather's God, but the wind was cold and had a smell of rusty iron. “In this town that will be an anomaly”

  Head bowed, silenced forever at the root of the tongue by the bek's own dagger, the Sorb entered the booth bearing a steaming copper pot and poured into the bek's cup more of the infusion of dried camellia leaves, imported from Khitai at great expense, on which Buljan depended to keep up his spirits in the city. “Find me one more honest creature living in Atil and I will have myself a pair.”

  The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date. He was a bony-faced fellow with light eyes, younger than the usual old rug dealer, the jet of his mustache and skimpy beard plaits contrasting starkly with his fair skin.

  “People saw the deaths of the previous elephants as an ill omen for their custodian,” Buljan continued, lowering the brim of his hat over his eyes. The hat was a fine piece of workmanship, also from Khitai, yak felt covered in panels of ultramarine silk embroidered in black and silver, but, crippled by headaches that made him sensitive to light, Buljan prized it chiefly for its wide brim. “One that proved accurate, which in my experience does not often happen with omens.”

  The Radanite was peer
ing at the board, and though he quickly returned his gaze to Buljan, the latter did not fail to remark the scintilla of understanding in the merchant's eyes. Whatever fate awaited Buljan on the shatranj board, this Radanite saw it.

  “We of course had heard nothing about the recent changes in your government,” he said. “When we arrived and learned of the precarious situation, particularly here in the Qomr, our anxiety on your behalf was considerable.”

  “I should imagine so,” Buljan said, taking the infant from the bekun so that she might cover her breast. “And I look forward to perusing your stock.”

  As if this were a signal, the Radanite started to rise, more willing than most of his kind to show that he was eager to conclude business. Buljan glanced at his wife, who raised an eyebrow at this atypical display of haste.

  “I can spare you very little time,” Buljan said, rocking the baby with an audible slosh of the milk in its belly, resisting an urge to question the Radanite about his predicament on the shatranj board. Since wresting control of the bek's tripod, a measure he took only after concluding that a coup was not just necessary and advantageous to himself and his clan but also likely to succeed, he had experienced only doubt, rumor and rebellion. His solace, apart from sleeping in the tent of leaves, had been a strict policy of playing shatranj with opponents he knew he could defeat. “But surely not so little as that.”

  “Please,” the bekun said, holding out a silver plate on whose border running horses were chased in gold. She was a Rus, with copper hair and golden eyelashes. “Another sweet?”

  The Radanite lowered himself back to the carpet and took another little pellet of the paste of honey, roses and almond oil.

  “The premises are rather full, I imagine,” the Radanite said, glancing back at the inlaid board.

  “To the rafters,” the bek said. “Thanks to the recent foolishness.”