Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

“True, and yet I think he will go,” the kagan said. “Palace life does not hold the appeal for Buljan that he imagined it would. But first, you see, I must be persuaded to order him to go.”

“And what is it going to take to make that happen?” Zelikman said.

“It's really quite simple,” the kagan said. “I just want you to kill me.”

A silence ensued, during which the partners conferred wordlessly, stroking their chins while she watched, fidgeting and stalking the circular room, wanting to look at the book she had loved but afraid that if she did she would never be able to live with the paltry self that fortune had chosen for her.

“We can do that,” Amram said to the kagan.

“We can?” Zelikman said, looking less startled than interested by his partner's claim.

“Of course. I already beat Buljan once at shatranj with the sacrifice. I hate to waste such a fine chance of doing it to him again.”

After a hasty mutual debriefing, the guards, groggy and sheepish and lacking a full complement of ears, roused an old Wendish manservant and sent him into the tower to find out the worst. The Wend, sightless and mute, knew the proper smells and bodily utterances of his man and the circular echoes of the apartment so well that on reaching it he could hear the books that had been moved from their right places, and his sapient nostrils at once discerned the intrusive brackish smell of river water and a faint ribbon of some rank attar in the air. He covered his face with his hands and sank to the floor by the couch that was covered in the hide of a spotted tarpan, and silently wept. He had been born a bondsman into a family of slaves, and his life was bondage, and in that regard he counted himself no worse than the general run of humanity, not excluding his master, who was the slave of an exacting God and in this nowhere near so fortunately owned as the Wend.

After a little while the Wend got up and wiped his face on his sleeve, and made a study of the angles, likelihoods and protocols of the business at hand. He dragged a Tabriz carpet from the floor and, with a muttered apology, threw it over the mass whose smell of bitter asphodel and silent bulk freighted the couch. He tucked one end of the carpet under this side of the body, careful not to allow even the tips of his fingernails to brush against the flesh, lest he be pursued through the fogbound eternity of his Wendish ancestors by the misplaced and revenging shade of his master, heaved the great bulk to the floor and rolled the dead emperor up in the Tabriz rug, leaving a long flap at the head and feet to facilitate lifting.

While the soldiers worked the body down the spiral stair, the Wend made the long, slow ascent to the turret, carrying a leather pouch tucked under his arm. When he reached the top and stood in the wind he took out a triangular white flag marked with a red rune, unfolded it and hoisted it from the standard, beneath the candelabrum flag of the empire; and thus, against a bright gray sky, with the first fat flakes of snow drifting all around, was the news published to the world that Zachariah, the kagan of the Khazars, had been the victim of a foul assassination.

This faithful Wend was the one who, woken earlier in the night by an urgent pealing of his master's bell, had conveyed from the tower apartment to the quarters of the messenger corps three sealed copies of a written fiat, to be delivered at once to the bek, to the kender and to the grand rabbi of Atil. The couriers sent to the central barracks where the kender was quartered and to the home of the grand rabbi discharged their commissions and returned to their billet in the Palace, but the messenger charged with bringing Buljan the demand for his immediate abdication had a more difficult job, and by the time he tracked Buljan down, on the low reddish hill called Qizl at the southern extreme of Atil, it was nearly the third hour after dawn, and by then Buljan had other concerns.

At first light, around the time that the body of the kagan-a body that had already begun to manifest decidedly uncorpselike signs of movement-was being carried by an ill-assorted trio into a springhouse near a little-used gate of the Palace through which corpses and those who tended to them traditionally passed, the watch posted atop Qizl caught sight of a scattering of black seeds against the flickering gray of the southern horizon. At first the seeds drifted nearly motionless as milkweed pouf but as they blew nearer they cut long, slow grooves in the water. They grew wings and sprouted brazen necks that seemed to reach devouring toward Atil, like eels contending from a tidepool for a castoff morsel on a rock. The ships’ sails bellied and swung about on the spars as they drove against the north wind, cutting a zigzag course. By the third hour, when the breathless messenger at last found the bek and transmitted the sealed order, two dozen long ships were rounding the headland on whose summit Buljan stood in the falling snow, waiting to see if-as every other soul on Qizl, along the river, watching from the walls of the city hoped-the Northmen meant to sail on. News of the death of the kagan had sped across the city after the hoisting of the rune flag, accompanied in an imperial style by a retinue of rumors that the Rus, the Muslims or the bek himself were responsible.

Buljan was trying to decide just what it was that he hoped for as he tore open the seal on the final command of Zachariah. He conned the document without displaying interest or distress. He turned to the javshi-gar who stood by his side, a captain of archers in a scale-mail coat.

“Signal the ships,” he told the javshigar, motioning to a scribe for a tablet and stylus. “I want to parley with Ragnar, if he is still in command of them.” With the stylus and with an urgency that betrayed his calm expression he pressed a series of runes into the wax of the tablet. “If not, then whoever keeps those yellow dogs leashed.” He handed the tablet back to the scribe and told him, “Take this to the bekun.” Then he mounted his horse and sent it at a canter down the hill toward the Caspian wharfs.

As the remnant of that giant fleet-launched at midsummer from the viks of the North to fatten, with Buljan's full consent and encouragement, on the Muhammadan cities of southern Khazaria-returned to the mouth of the river they called Volga, the Northmen richer and covered in glory but their ranks thinned by plague and battle and an appalling toll of alcoholism, the army of Khazaria was completing its long homeward tramp to Atil. Having reduced three Crimean cities and brought their populations back under the candelabrum flag, the Khazar army found itself obliged to abandon its campaign in the rebellious Crimea, summoned home by an urgent appeal from Buljan a Muhammadan uprising, northern cities swooning like maidens at the feet of a boy general and his army of peasants. Though scouts had since brought back reports of the rebellion's collapse, the total absence of any trace of disturbance surprised the tarkhan of the Crimean force now as he urged his horse down from the hills along the road that ran east toward the city. All around Atil lay only a great silent waste, dotted with silver marsh and green scrub and devoid of men or horses. He could see plumes of smoke rising up from the Khazaran side that must be remnant of the rioting that his scouts had reported, but they were few and thin. Unless the rioters themselves had gained control of and pacified Atil, there would be little employment for his troops here, and their frantic homeward march across a hundred leagues of forest and desert and steppe a fruitless journey, futile at either end. The falling snow, twisting in lazy helices to settle in streaks and patches on the plain, seemed both to embody and to enhance the pointlessness of the haste and fury with which he had driven his troops over the last week. Politics, cowardice and the corrupt broils of leadership had spoiled the campaign, and the tarkhan with the romantic pessimism of old veterans felt the missed opportunity, in his bones, as one that would never again present itself to the Khazars. There was no hope for an empire that lost the will to prosecute the grand and awful business of adventure.