Michael Chabon - Gentlemen of the Road

Zelikman said nothing for a long while, and the old Radanite assumed that he had not heard or had nothing to add to his sage and bitter remark.

“That's not the case, alas,” Zelikman said finally, “if one is a surgeon.”

The next morning, the Italian sat up and asked for broth and soon afterward was heard to whistle the opening measures of his constant tuneless tune. But when they went to find Zelikman ben Solomon of Re-gensburg, to thank him for saving the life of their companion, of whom, despite his whistling, they were all rather fond, neither he nor his horse could be found. A subsequent inspection of the wagons revealed the absence of a good harness and an excellent Iberian saddle.

“I can on ly s ave men one at a time,” Zelikman said.

He sat cross-legged on a carpe t that smel led like rutting sheep, in the cramped gloom of a circular dog tent constructed, as far as he could tell, from equal quantities of rancid felt, dung smoke and the acrid shadow cast by a naphtha lamp. He was working to get Amram to take him and his proposal seriously, a task impeded by the fact that he was still wearing the robes and head wrap with which the Radanites had generously if unwittingly supplied him, his patchy golden beard tied in trivial plaits and blackened with lamp soot.

“I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know,” Zelikman continued. “I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief, but on this one small principle of economy, damn you, and damn that troublemaking little stripling, and damn every one of those men out there, living men, in full possession, for the most part, of all their limbs and humors, I have to hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill them one man at a time.”

“I didn't get a word of that,” Filaq said. Having declined to sit with the reunited partners, he leaned against the roof pole nearest the low door flap, hugging himself in the way of a youth trying to keep his temper, glowering at Zelikman from under his ruddy eyebrows. “But if what this barber proposes is that, having mustered these men and promised them redress of their grievance and a fine fight, we now sneak into the city like cutpurses and strangle Buljan in his sleep with a silk girdle … “

“A scarf will do as well,” Zelikman said.

“… and send those good men home with a handclasp and our thanks for their trouble, then I suggest he wriggle on back to whatever reeking Western sump exuded him and leave us to settle this matter in the Khazar way Openly. By fire and steel. And soon, Amram, today, now, before the main body of the army can return from the Crimea and surround us.”

“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.