Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

It was just as she remembered it, as in her dream, as in any dream: a circular brick tower on a miniature islet of brick, in a glossy black moat, within a ring of laurels, at the center of a vast courtyard of cyclopean flagstones, at the very midpoint of the city of Atil and the Palace of the kagan. Imposing and forlorn, a grave marker, a dolmen, the eyrie of some august raptor. At the top four timbered loggias each carved with the totem animal of the direction it faced (raven, dove, bee, heron); at the base a narrow doorway. Here four more Colchians stood guard and here Zelikman found that he had run out of narcotic elixir, so that to gain entrance the partners, showing the same maddening restraint they seemed to feel was incumbent upon them as her “guardians” now that she had been exposed as a female, albeit one who would in a transport of impatience chew off a man's ear, were obliged to employ the haft of the ax, the flat of a sword and an admittedly impressive display of simple pounding with fists and boot heels.

A commotion was therefore unavoidable, and by the time they had wound, like the ant of Daedalus threading the conch, up the involute stairway to the highest chamber in the city of Atil, the kagan was on his feet and waiting for them, wearing a hard little smile, as if the whole adventure from the meeting with the partners at the caravanserai until now, as if all that slaughter and struggle had been arranged beforehand or at least foreseen by this tall, fat man with the cropped hair and the beard close-trimmed over pitted jowls and the eyes so mournful, tender, pitiable and pitying that she could not meet them.

“The little mouse,” he said.

Grief swelled her chest and throat as if the iron bands of the river had finally snapped. The kagan opened his hands and turned them palm upward as though testing for rain. Waiting for her. And though no one had touched him or even looked him in the eye in thirty years she went to him, and after a moment of uncertainty he transgressed all laws and took her stiffly in his arms, and in a whisper he called her by the name that apart from her brother he alone now knew out of all the men and women on the face of the earth.

It was a while, a longer time than they could afford, before she could arrest the sobs that shook her, draw her sword and lay the point of it against one of the luxuriant folds of his throat.

“Buljan dies or you do,” she informed him.

“Show some ambition, little mouse,” the kagan said, looking not at the blade but into her eyes. “Why settle for one or the other?”

“Girl,” Amram said. “Lower your sword.”

She dipped the tip of the blade to the kagan's belly and then returned it to the scabbard slung across her shoulders. Zelikman had his back to all of them, stalking a long shelf of folios and scrolls with his fingers flickering at his sides as if he longed to touch them. Apparently he had no particular interest in meeting or even noticing one of the three princes acknowledged as a peer by the Emperor of Byzantium, along with the Emperor of the Franks and the Caliph of Baghdad.

“We're marked,” she said. “Hunted.”

“I know,” the kagan said.

“I've lost everything.”

“I know it, little mouse.”

He pointed to the only seat in the room, a low couch covered in dappled ponyskin. She shook her head.

“These two … “

“Have nothing to lose?” He spoke in the holy tongue. “Amram, isn't it? An Abyssinian. I am pleased. I have never seen an African in the flesh before.” Amram touched his forehead. “I perceive that you served in the army of my brother emperor. I have heard a good deal about that ax you carry Tell me, have you ever used it to shave the throat of one of the princes of the earth?”

Amram shook his gray head. “Only a petty one,” he said. “A minor khan or two.”

The kagan looked delighted by this information. He turned to Zelikman and spoke a careful sentence in an outlandish tongue. Zelikman replied in the same language, lightly, then spun around, the yellow curtain of his hair flying. He stood for a moment blinking at the kagan. Then he swept the pretty embroidered hat from his head and bowed low

The kagan conversed with him a little in the language of Zelikman's unimaginable homeland, a dense jargon that seemed to her to be pronounced with the front and the back of the tongue at the same time, and with the lips simultaneously pursed and opened wide. Then he went to the shelf and took down a large vellum book and handed it to Zelikman.

“The De Urines of Alexander Trallianus!” Zelikman said. “But it was lost.”

“Imperfectly”

Zelikman took the book with reverence and set it on a lectern and started to turn its pages, and she supposed that they had lost him now for a long time.

“So you know a lot,” Amram said. “Do you know what this girl wants, and how she can get it?”

“That depends. Do you want to be the bek, little mouse?”

She shook her head. “I knew it would not work,” she said. “So in my heart I never desired it. Not for myself For my brother, yes. For Alp. And I still want to drive Buljan from the tripod, and hold it for Alp until he can be ransomed or liberated. And then we will see to the Rus. And if a woman may not be bek there is no law, so far as I know, to prevent her from becoming a tarkhan. I have already proved that I can lead soldiers into a fight.”

“Your brother,” the kagan said. “Alp. That's another thing, alas, that I know something about.”

“He is not dead,” she said. “No. No, he isn't.”

“The Rus encountered a plague when they reached Derbent,” the kagan said. “Or perhaps the plague was booty they acquired along the way south. They may even, I do not know, have brought it with them out of the North. Some illnesses lie hidden in the body like burrs in a fold of a cloak, for days and weeks and even months, before they flower.”

Filaq remembered how her brother looked on the summer day she last saw him, tall and gangly, speaking tenderly to the falcon on his arm, as he rode to hunt at their family's horde amid the plane trees and the cicadas and the wild surge of grapevines in the hills. She looked away so that they would not see her tears, and noticed, on its carved and gilded stand, the giant illuminated Ibn Khordadbeh that had so enchanted her as a child, with its maps and preposterous anatomies and flat-foot descriptions of miracles and wonders, page after page of cities to visit and peoples to live among and selves to invent, out there, beyond the margins of her life, along the roads and in the kingdoms.

“I will help you,” the kagan said. “Because I was fond of your father, at least to a point, and even more because I have always been fond of you. There is nothing now that I can do to help your brother, least of all seat him on the tripod. But I can order Buljan to abdicate. I am a prisoner of my title. But so, though he has yet to be forced to acknowledge it, is he.”

“The man wiped out the family of this girl,” Amram said. “He executed five hundred of the kaganate's finest troops, mowed them down in cold blood. I suppose I don't need to tell you that.”

“True enough,” the kagan said.

“It strikes me that conceivably he might therefore behave in whatever way suits his purposes best,” the African said. “Regardless of what you tell him to do.”

“The bek may not disobey the kagan.”

“That is true,” she told Amram. “We have had revolution and coup and civil war now and then in our history But that is one thing we have never had.”

“He ignored your own flag of truce,” Zelikman said.