Gentlemen of the Road (12 page)

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

A
t 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 peering 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.”

“No doubt it was foolish, even demented, to unite behind the banner of an untried female, my lord. But one can hardly have expected the Muhammadans to enjoy the treatment they received at the hands of the Rus.”

“Nor did I so intend,” Buljan said. “This empire is only as strong as its neighbors are weak. My predecessor coddled our Muhammadans, granting them so many privileges that they grew too strong, encouraging the caliph’s northern hopes. And he all but ceded the Crimea to the Rus. He was mistaken in nearly all his policies, while the only mistake I made was failing to clean house properly. That has now been remedied. The common rebels I will permit to return to their homes and vineyards—or what remains of them. The mutinous Arsiyah will be dealt with appropriately.”

“How sad,” the Radanite said. “That really is, if I may say, my lord, a remarkable hat.”

Buljan stared at the Radanite, wondering what it was, aside from the madness of power, that had persuaded him that his destiny lay not on the open steppe but amid the meshes of the shatranj board that was city life.

“It pains my uncle greatly that he is unable to treat with you in person, my lord,” the Radanite said. “But it was felt that I should come in his stead as soon as possible.” He glanced at the board again, and hesitated. “One hears rumors of a giant African.”

“An enormous fellow,” Buljan said, understanding now. “A prodigy Powerful. Well favored. Intelligent too.” He felt relief as the nature and mission of his interlocutor became clear to him. “It is a long time since we have had any slave-dealing Radanites in Atil. We heard your people had forsworn the trade in men.”

“News can be slow to diffuse among my people,” the Radanite said apologetically, crinkling the corners of his eyes in a show of slyness.

“How fortunate for you.”

“May I—would it be possible, I wonder, to see this prodigy for oneself?”

Before Buljan could reply, a guard entered and bowed, his face expressionless, having no understanding of, or interest in, the words he was about to pronounce.

“The prisoner moves his vizier to the seventeenth square, my lord, and respectfully offers you the opportunity to concede the game.”

With a distinct thud, Buljan, blind, dissolved in an impenetrable night of rage, dropped the baby onto the rug. The little girl screamed, and the mother screamed, and the twins gazed at their father as if he had just burst into flame.

“His life is not for sale,” Buljan said. He picked up the baby and handed it to his wife without a glance. “But it will cost you nothing to see it spilled into the dust.”

Under the windows of the donjon, to the very spot in the courtyard on which previous beks had put up their harvest booths, a detachment of six well-armed guards escorted the African. He was stripped to the waist, with his hands lashed behind his striped and bleeding back, his eyes fixed steadily before him.

A dozen carpenters carried in sawed planks and stout posts, and with hammers, pegs and thongs quickly assembled a wide table onto whose top two large blocks of wood were fixed on either side of center. Four grooms led in the horses, harnessed as for plowing, and then the African was asked, with fitting tenderness, to lie on his back between the blocks, which were intended to hold his torso in place as the horses disjointed him and carried his limbs to the corners of the yard, but the blocks proved to have been set too close to admit the span of his great back.

“What an appallingly inefficient way to kill a man,” the Radanite said, standing beside Buljan on a terrace overlooking the yard.

“What’s that?” Buljan said.

“His offense was great, I will allow,” the Radanite said. “But surely not so great as the bek would show himself to be in having the mercy to permit me, with every assurance that the African will be sold to an exacting and implacable master, to purchase him.”

One of the carpenters had fetched a crowbar and set about prying loose the blocks.

“And what do you imagine, Radanite, his offense to have been?”

“Rebellion. Insurrection.”

“But he is not a Khazar subject.” And Buljan smiled, knowing it was foolish but enjoying nonetheless the sensation of puzzling one of that enigmatic tribe. “How could he then rebel? No, those are not the grounds of his punishment.”

The Radanite watched as the African was introduced successfully between the blocks, on either side of his rib cage, and as a horse was tightly cinched, by the reins of its harness, to each of his ankles and wrists. The African’s face remained impassive; he seemed already to have crossed into the world of his ancestors. But something about the procedure appeared to trouble the Radanite, and his attention seemed to be focused on a particular horse, a bandy-legged, shaggy freak of a tarpan with a prominent nose.

“He beat you at shatranj,” the Radanite said with gratifying wonder in his voice.

“Nonsense,” the bek said. “I never lose at shatranj.”

He turned to one of his guards and extended a gloved hand. The guard brought forward the African’s ax, and the bek hefted it.

“What would you give me for this?” he said. “I am sure it would fetch a good price for you farther down the road. After I have used it to disembowel its former owner, I will make a present of it.” He turned it over and ran his fingers along the runes. “I wonder what they say.”

“I can tell you that,” the Radanite said, and translating freely into surprisingly good Khazari he shoved Buljan with his shoulder and snatched the ax. He leapt onto the balustrade of the terrace and as Buljan regained his feet cried out a word that sounded like a name, cried out from the depths of his soul: “Hillel!”

The shaggy horse reared and beat a tattoo on the skull of the carpenter who was tying him to the African’s right leg, tore loose and charged across the yard. Just before the Radanite leapt he turned to Buljan and frowned as if trying to make up his mind. A moment earlier it would have been hard for Buljan to conceive of an astonishment greater than that which he already felt, but it was nothing compared with his surprise when the Radanite grabbed his embroidered silk hat. Then he leapt into space.