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Authors: Michael Chabon
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business the youth was about to propose began to blow among the enervated and downcast soldiers like a wind through dry rushes.
“We can be at the gates of Atil in two weeks,” Filaq said. “Along the way we will surely pass through other towns, cities of the Prophet that have known defilement by the Rus. When they see your example, your loyalty to the family of my father, that great respecter of the property and the faiths of all his peoples, they will flock to our banner. By the time we reach the capital there will be thousands sworn to the cause of restoring the true heir: Alp, my good, my wise and pious brother, that strong fighter, that wolf of our ancestors, that keeper of the law common to Jews and Muslims, whom Buljan sold to the Northmen. Thousands! Ten thousand!”
“Hundreds, at least,” the old veteran said. “Possibly even dozens.”
The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion. If the Rus had treated the towns along the coast between here and Atil as harshly as they had this poor ruin, a rebellion could hope for little to feed them along the way, let alone to swell their ranks. He had just begun to describe the torments that, he understood, awaited those convicted of mutiny when, taxed apparently by lack of food and drink and the exhaustion of the past week, his eyes rolled in their sockets, and his head tipped backward, and he slid boneless to the ground, where, fortunately for him, his skull was spared fracture by the timely action of Zelikman, who caught him and eased him to the ground, concealing the pad of wadded chamois in his fist so adroitly that Hanukkah was certain no one saw it but him.
“God has silenced this man and his cowardly counsel,” Amram said in Arabic, the mother tongue of the Arsiyah. “Perhaps you would do well to heed this indication of His will.”
There was general acclaim at this suggestion, shouts and whoops and wild ululation of the steppes, but it all ceased abruptly when Filaq pumped his fist and cried: “Alp! Alp!”
There followed a silence broken only by the wind hissing in burned rafters, the derision of a crow, somewhere the smack of the sea against stone. Then to Hanukkah’s mild surprise a voice rose up and, with laconic precision, likened this rumored brother Alp to a secretion on the nether parts of a she-tur.
“What is your Alp to us but a galley slave?” he said.
“If he was half the man you are, boy, he would have harangued and speechified those Northmen to death weeks ago,” another said.
There was laughter at this, and the soldiers felt their spirits a little restored, and little by little the square of the burned city, with its roofless mosque and its clouds of flies and its smell of death, began to resound with cries of “Filaq! Filaq!” that died away only when their object, having turned a shade of red deeper than the flush of sunset over the western gate of the town, ran down the steps of the mosque and fled into a side street.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON A NICENESS OF
MORAL DISCERNMENT
UNCOMMON AMONG
GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD
T hey rode north through cities of carrion and widows, husk-and-stump cities where the Northmen’s fires still burned. Everywhere they went—at first—male survivors of the raids fell in with the Brotherhood of the Elephant, as Filaq had dubbed them, in token of his own nickname and in bitter tribute to his dead father’s fallen banner and to the creatures in whose passing lay the seeds of that fall. Some men came on horseback, bearing proper weapons, but most showed up on foot, shoeless, hungry, armed with a pruning hook or a fishing spear
“We can be at the gates of Atil in two weeks,” Filaq said. “Along the way we will surely pass through other towns, cities of the Prophet that have known defilement by the Rus. When they see your example, your loyalty to the family of my father, that great respecter of the property and the faiths of all his peoples, they will flock to our banner. By the time we reach the capital there will be thousands sworn to the cause of restoring the true heir: Alp, my good, my wise and pious brother, that strong fighter, that wolf of our ancestors, that keeper of the law common to Jews and Muslims, whom Buljan sold to the Northmen. Thousands! Ten thousand!”
“Hundreds, at least,” the old veteran said. “Possibly even dozens.”
The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion. If the Rus had treated the towns along the coast between here and Atil as harshly as they had this poor ruin, a rebellion could hope for little to feed them along the way, let alone to swell their ranks. He had just begun to describe the torments that, he understood, awaited those convicted of mutiny when, taxed apparently by lack of food and drink and the exhaustion of the past week, his eyes rolled in their sockets, and his head tipped backward, and he slid boneless to the ground, where, fortunately for him, his skull was spared fracture by the timely action of Zelikman, who caught him and eased him to the ground, concealing the pad of wadded chamois in his fist so adroitly that Hanukkah was certain no one saw it but him.
“God has silenced this man and his cowardly counsel,” Amram said in Arabic, the mother tongue of the Arsiyah. “Perhaps you would do well to heed this indication of His will.”
There was general acclaim at this suggestion, shouts and whoops and wild ululation of the steppes, but it all ceased abruptly when Filaq pumped his fist and cried: “Alp! Alp!”
There followed a silence broken only by the wind hissing in burned rafters, the derision of a crow, somewhere the smack of the sea against stone. Then to Hanukkah’s mild surprise a voice rose up and, with laconic precision, likened this rumored brother Alp to a secretion on the nether parts of a she-tur.
“What is your Alp to us but a galley slave?” he said.
“If he was half the man you are, boy, he would have harangued and speechified those Northmen to death weeks ago,” another said.
There was laughter at this, and the soldiers felt their spirits a little restored, and little by little the square of the burned city, with its roofless mosque and its clouds of flies and its smell of death, began to resound with cries of “Filaq! Filaq!” that died away only when their object, having turned a shade of red deeper than the flush of sunset over the western gate of the town, ran down the steps of the mosque and fled into a side street.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON A NICENESS OF
MORAL DISCERNMENT
UNCOMMON AMONG
GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD
T hey rode north through cities of carrion and widows, husk-and-stump cities where the Northmen’s fires still burned. Everywhere they went—at first—male survivors of the raids fell in with the Brotherhood of the Elephant, as Filaq had dubbed them, in token of his own nickname and in bitter tribute to his dead father’s fallen banner and to the creatures in whose passing lay the seeds of that fall. Some men came on horseback, bearing proper weapons, but most showed up on foot, shoeless, hungry, armed with a pruning hook or a fishing spear
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