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.
The elephant withdrew its burled trunk from Filaq’s embrace and turned its slow head on the scraping millstones of its vertebrae, left, right, as if indicating the men around it, producing a clucking sound with its lips or throat. It made a backward lurch toward the troopers. One of the horses shied, and its rider raised his lance and drove it deep into the flank of the elephant.
Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence. It sounded a few flat whuffling notes that seemed to raise a stirring echo from far away, and then it pitched forward, its massive skull dragging it down. The architecture of the head struck the ground with a formidable tolling, but the rest of it hit with the light snap of brushwood. Its fall kicked up a roil of dust and delicate falling flakes of scurf
“Damn me,” Amram said, unslinging Defiler of All Mothers from his back. The impostors threw down the streaming banners to be trampled in the mud, unfurled the candelabrum flag of Khazaria and drew their swords. Amram reared up and began to uncoil the bite of his Viking ax, but before he had the chance to swing it, one of the impostors dragged Filaq off the body of the dead beast and, reaching for the collar of the stripling’s tunic, ripped the front away, revealing a white belly with a soft prominence, a curve of hip and two yards of linen swaddling cloth wrapped tightly around a slender chest. Filaq struggled, growled,
“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.
The elephant withdrew its burled trunk from Filaq’s embrace and turned its slow head on the scraping millstones of its vertebrae, left, right, as if indicating the men around it, producing a clucking sound with its lips or throat. It made a backward lurch toward the troopers. One of the horses shied, and its rider raised his lance and drove it deep into the flank of the elephant.
Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence. It sounded a few flat whuffling notes that seemed to raise a stirring echo from far away, and then it pitched forward, its massive skull dragging it down. The architecture of the head struck the ground with a formidable tolling, but the rest of it hit with the light snap of brushwood. Its fall kicked up a roil of dust and delicate falling flakes of scurf
“Damn me,” Amram said, unslinging Defiler of All Mothers from his back. The impostors threw down the streaming banners to be trampled in the mud, unfurled the candelabrum flag of Khazaria and drew their swords. Amram reared up and began to uncoil the bite of his Viking ax, but before he had the chance to swing it, one of the impostors dragged Filaq off the body of the dead beast and, reaching for the collar of the stripling’s tunic, ripped the front away, revealing a white belly with a soft prominence, a curve of hip and two yards of linen swaddling cloth wrapped tightly around a slender chest. Filaq struggled, growled,
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