Michael Chabon - Gentlemen of the Road

At the mention of his father or the memory of that library with its precious maps, Filaq's soft voice turned raspy with emotion. Amram wondered if a boy holding a book of maps of the world felt as if he possessed the world and if Filaq now felt, remembering, that he had lost it. Filaq watched the brooding scarecrow alone at the edges of the dark, and an unwonted softness entered his strange green eyes. He was a hard boy, orphaned and imperious, but in the days since his momentary failure of nerve Filaq had shown clear signs to Amram of incipient fitness to command. He woke on his own in the dark of morning and retired having ensured that curfew was in force and universally observed. He held himself apart from the men as he had from Zelikman and Amram, sleeping in his own tent, performing his ablutions and elimination in private, riding usually at the head of the train with none beside him and none before, but he fell in regularly among the ranks, during the course of a day, all the way back to the weakest and most useless of the stragglers, to join them for a song or find shoes for the unshod. That afternoon he had made over his entire double share of the bribe to be divided among the feeblest and most miserable of the men. He rode well and looked fine on horseback, and he saw to it that those tending the animals were competent and humane. His authority was something bestowed by him on the Brotherhood and not the other way around, and Amram realized that he must himself have fallen to some degree under the spell of the boy's gift for being served by others, because in the light of his pessimism about the expedition there was no other explanation for his presence at Filaq's right hand, unless it was that in some inexplicable but deep-rooted way this pale-skinned, redheaded, foulmouthed young man reminded him of his dark-brown, sloe-eyed daughter, Dinah.

“What is it like, in Francia?” Filaq said, without taking his eyes off Zelikman.

“Cold and gray and green and rank with fog,” Amram said. He had never seen Regensburg, but one winter long ago he had traveled up the Rhine in the retinue of the ambassador of Constantinople to the emperor of the West, and at times he felt that the chill of that journey was still in his bones. “The forests are vast and haunted by wolves and bears and men who take the shapes of wolves and bears. The cities of the Christians are mean and mildewed and devoid of splendor. They do not love Jews. Zelikman's family, learned men all, suffered persecution from mobs and princes alike.”

“He is a learned man himself,” Filaq said, “for a common thief.”

“A gentleman of the road,” Hanukkah said sternly, then winked at Amram and raised a dented tin dipper of wine. “Are we anything else?”

“Indeed we are not,” Amram said, raising his own battered cup.

Filaq stood and nodded to Amram. He signaled a guard and, with a tentative hand on the man's shoulder but no hesitation in his voice, gave the order that the watch should be doubled in case soldiers from the Sam-bunin garrison or an assassin sent by the babaghuq attempted treachery in the night. Then he walked through the twilight to his solitary tent, picking his way carefully through the horse dung, swinging his gawky camel hips as he went.

“A curious lad,” Amram said.

On the way to the tent, the youth was obliged to pass Zelikman. He stopped and stood watching Zelik-man watch the light die somewhere over Francia and the West, without speaking. Zelikman seemed unaware of Filaq's presence or of the presence of anyone or anything in the world but the glowing coal of his pipe. From the tall grass beyond his partner, Amram heard a dry rasp like a rough sleeve against leather, and he was already running toward Filaq when he saw an indeterminate shiver in the air, tumbling with the slowness of dice on a mat rolling toward jackpot or ruin. Zelikman sprang up and doffed his hat like a man coming in from a long day in the sun and tossed it as if aiming for a pair of antlers on a wall. Then, as the hat, which had already known such misfortune, gave its life to deflect the flight of yet another knife, Zelikman flung himself after it, onto Filaq, who had heard and seen nothing at all. The youth looked very surprised as Zelikman came down on top of him and slammed him belly first against the ground, Filaq's chin striking with a crack. Knife and hat fell to earth like a falcon tangled with the limp bundle of its prey

“Get off me!” Filaq said. He rolled out from under Zelikman, who looked surprised as if by the turn his bhang dream had taken. Amram kept running toward the bushes, heard thumping behind him and a moment later was overtaken by Hillel, with Filaq mounted bareback and holding Lancet like a pigsticker, charging hard into the shadows on the grass. The horse broke and feinted with deft leaps to the left and right like a ratting dog, and Filaq drove the wicked sword home. There was a cry of pain, and Filaq swung down from the horse. A handful of Arsiyah had followed their Little Elephant into the meadow, on foot and horseback, and now they fanned out looking for stray assassins. Amram ran into Filaq just as he emerged from the high grass, looking shaken, leading Hillel by the halter. He walked past Amram without a look, chest rising and falling, green eyes catching the light of the fires of the Brotherhood, and strode over to Zelikman, who had dusted himself off and was busy cutting his hat to ribbons with the assassin's knife.

“I will never again view your affection for this horse as unnatural,” Filaq said, passing the lead to Zelikman. “But there is nothing to be said in favor of this blade, which is not even fit for a woman.”

Filaq raised Lancet and bridged the gulf between them with its slender span, a compass needle indicating the cardinal point at the center of Zelikman's chest. They stood facing each other, separated by less distance than that which had separated Francia from Khazaria on the maps in that childhood library There was something between them, some heat of dislike or strangled affection that Amram felt but could not understand, and he wondered if this had something to do, as well, with Zelikman's growing unease. As far as Amram knew, his partner had never lain with a woman or a man, and if he had in hard times, on cold nights, shared a companionable bed with Amram, it was a mark of how much the state of their relations resembled those between his partner and Hillel. Amram had lost much and fared widely alone, but Zelikman was simply born lonely

Filaq wiped the blade on the flap of his tunic and then handed it back, haft first. “Thank you for saving my life,” he said.

“I don't save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.”

When the troopers returned empty-handed from hunting in the grass, Filaq ordered that word be sent to Sambunin.

“Tell them their cowardly act has failed,” he said, “and that if they do not supply this noble Brotherhood with five hundred armed and able-bodied men by tomorrow morning, we will seek to test on their city the techniques we have learned from the Rus.”

The tale of the failed assassination attempt was taken up within moments by the Brotherhood, and by the next day embellished word of it had spread all across the marshes. By the time the Brotherhood arrived at the gates of the city of Atil, it numbered nearly ten thousand men, including the five hundred grudged by Sambunin and four more rebel detachments of Ar-siyah troops, fresh from the campaign in the Crimea, where it had been reported, with helpful inaccuracy, that a miraculous infant, accompanied by a ghost and a black giant, had raised an army and set out to conquer Khazaria and the world in the name of Allah.