their faces as she ran wild.
Cunegunde stopped beside the body of the dead elephant, and stared at it with an unreadable expression. She snuffled, and rumbled, and investigated its sounds and the pocks and scars of its hide. She redistributed her weight impatiently among the pillars of her frame, and some fundamental injustice or harsh fact about the world seemed to confront her afresh, with no gain in meaning or message. The dead animal was a distant cousin to her at best, Zelikman supposed, no nearer kin than Amram was to him.
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.
Cunegunde stopped beside the body of the dead elephant, and stared at it with an unreadable expression. She snuffled, and rumbled, and investigated its sounds and the pocks and scars of its hide. She redistributed her weight impatiently among the pillars of her frame, and some fundamental injustice or harsh fact about the world seemed to confront her afresh, with no gain in meaning or message. The dead animal was a distant cousin to her at best, Zelikman supposed, no nearer kin than Amram was to him.
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.
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