cursed and finally screamed as the soldier tore off the linen drawers, revealing a gonfalon of russet hair with nothing to inspire it but the breeze. With a flourish of his dagger—one of those bold gestures so dear to emancipators—the soldier slit the swaddling cloth, and it sprang from Filaq’s body, baring the startled gaze of a pair of breasts shaped by the hand of nature to fit the cup of a lover’s palm.
On that plain of mud and grass and staring faces, along the battlements and bartizans of the walls of Atil barbed with pikemen and archers, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Khazar, from the Urals to the Caucasus, there was no sound but the wind in the grass, the clop of a sidestepping horse, the broken breathing of the Little Elephant, Filaq, with whom they had marched and slept and shivered, the son, the prince they had raised up on their shoulders to rule them as their bek, the revenger of the rape of their sisters and the burning of their houses and the pillage of their goods. All Zelikman’s disdain, all his resentment toward the foul-mouthed spoiled stripling who had plagued him since the rescue at the caravansary vanished with the double shock of the elephant’s slaughter and the revelation. In their place he felt only pity for a white thing flecked with mud, a motherless girl, drooping in the grip of the soldier like a captured flag.
Before Amram could recover, the mounted impostors had him at the point of their lances. He studied the angles and distances, the lean faces under the helmets, the wonder of the girl, the glinting steel tips of the lances. He threw down his ax. They bound his arms behind him, and with the girl they drove him toward the gates of the city Zelikman reached for Lancet, but as if he had heard the snick of the blade Amram whipped his head around, seeking among the baffled faces of the Brotherhood for his old friend’s, and in his own impassive mien there was neither a warning against hasty action nor the fatalism of defeat but a hint of amusement more useful and wise: Can you top this? And Zelikman recollected his own intelligence, forgot his outrage, resisted the urge to act in panic and left his blade where, for now, it belonged.
Like apes on a rock at sunset, like crows in the trees, like the bells in the watchtowers of a city under attack, the men of the Brotherhood fell to talking all at once, as those nearest the gates and those at the extremes of the encampment sought to reconcile the stark prodigies of observation with the grandiose inventions of rumor.
“Master?” Hanukkah said, approaching Zelikman warily, one hand extended like a man searching out a stairhead in the dark. He wore a mail shirt and one boot and no pants, with his arm in a sling and a bruise on his cheek, a hangover folded about him like a cloak, tottering, squinting, a loop of his woolen bedroll caught in a link of his mail so that the blanket dragged along behind him in the mud. “Is that you?”
And he reached out, his pudgy cheeks slack, his bright little eyes drained by surprise of any visible emotion, to tug at one of the braids of Zelikman’s beard. But the day was not yet replete with wonders, because before Zelikman could reply there were shouts from the rear and then the blatting tantara of an inhuman horn. A fissure opened in the mass of soldiers, and like a dike giving way before the ransacking arm of a flood they fell back or ran to get out of the path of Cunegunde, the elephant, who came shambling toward the gates of Atil, her hide scrubbed, oiled and glistening in the sun, caparisoned in purple silk and cloth of gold, the tips of her tusks capped with gilded leather sheaths. On her back in a large rush basket jostled the nephew of Joseph Hirkanos with three or four of his uncles, clutching the sides of the basket. The effect of the fine silk robes they wore, like that of the bright ribbon braiding their beards and moustaches, was spoiled to a degree by the expressions of terror on
On that plain of mud and grass and staring faces, along the battlements and bartizans of the walls of Atil barbed with pikemen and archers, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Khazar, from the Urals to the Caucasus, there was no sound but the wind in the grass, the clop of a sidestepping horse, the broken breathing of the Little Elephant, Filaq, with whom they had marched and slept and shivered, the son, the prince they had raised up on their shoulders to rule them as their bek, the revenger of the rape of their sisters and the burning of their houses and the pillage of their goods. All Zelikman’s disdain, all his resentment toward the foul-mouthed spoiled stripling who had plagued him since the rescue at the caravansary vanished with the double shock of the elephant’s slaughter and the revelation. In their place he felt only pity for a white thing flecked with mud, a motherless girl, drooping in the grip of the soldier like a captured flag.
Before Amram could recover, the mounted impostors had him at the point of their lances. He studied the angles and distances, the lean faces under the helmets, the wonder of the girl, the glinting steel tips of the lances. He threw down his ax. They bound his arms behind him, and with the girl they drove him toward the gates of the city Zelikman reached for Lancet, but as if he had heard the snick of the blade Amram whipped his head around, seeking among the baffled faces of the Brotherhood for his old friend’s, and in his own impassive mien there was neither a warning against hasty action nor the fatalism of defeat but a hint of amusement more useful and wise: Can you top this? And Zelikman recollected his own intelligence, forgot his outrage, resisted the urge to act in panic and left his blade where, for now, it belonged.
Like apes on a rock at sunset, like crows in the trees, like the bells in the watchtowers of a city under attack, the men of the Brotherhood fell to talking all at once, as those nearest the gates and those at the extremes of the encampment sought to reconcile the stark prodigies of observation with the grandiose inventions of rumor.
“Master?” Hanukkah said, approaching Zelikman warily, one hand extended like a man searching out a stairhead in the dark. He wore a mail shirt and one boot and no pants, with his arm in a sling and a bruise on his cheek, a hangover folded about him like a cloak, tottering, squinting, a loop of his woolen bedroll caught in a link of his mail so that the blanket dragged along behind him in the mud. “Is that you?”
And he reached out, his pudgy cheeks slack, his bright little eyes drained by surprise of any visible emotion, to tug at one of the braids of Zelikman’s beard. But the day was not yet replete with wonders, because before Zelikman could reply there were shouts from the rear and then the blatting tantara of an inhuman horn. A fissure opened in the mass of soldiers, and like a dike giving way before the ransacking arm of a flood they fell back or ran to get out of the path of Cunegunde, the elephant, who came shambling toward the gates of Atil, her hide scrubbed, oiled and glistening in the sun, caparisoned in purple silk and cloth of gold, the tips of her tusks capped with gilded leather sheaths. On her back in a large rush basket jostled the nephew of Joseph Hirkanos with three or four of his uncles, clutching the sides of the basket. The effect of the fine silk robes they wore, like that of the bright ribbon braiding their beards and moustaches, was spoiled to a degree by the expressions of terror on
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