Free Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon Page A

desire for revenge that they can’t see how greatly to their advantage it will be if they can go against the hated Rus with the entire Khazar army at their backs, under the authority of a new bek. Furthermore—”
    “You’ve constructed an argument,” Zelikman observed dryly.
    “I was inspired to do so,” Amram said, “when I observed that you were busy constructing a funk.”
    “Furthermore.”
    “Furthermore, I hope your head is not too far inside your dudeen to notice how lightly manned Buljan’s left the garrison here. They’re down to half their usual strength. I’m sure the man thought he was being clever, opening the south to plunder by the Rus. Pulling their attention and their long ships away from the Crimea. Suddenly all those fat Crimean cities get left open to reconquest by Khazaria. But it looks to me now as if Buljan stretched himself a little thin across the middle.”
    “I imagine this is supposed to reassure me,” Zelikman said, “by suggesting that Atil will be only lightly defended. And yet all it does is worry me more about the deviousness of this Buljan. These men we’ve gathered around us are being led to the slaughter, my friend. And I can see no reasons for it but greed, religion and other such vanities.”
    “And revenge,” Filaq said quietly.
    “The greatest vanity of all,” Zelikman said without looking at the stripling. “It’s soldiering , Amram. I want nothing to do with soldiers, armies, chains of command. All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men.”
    He gathered his cloak around him and stalked off to the edge of the camp, by the tall grass at some distance from the fire, with his face turned toward Francia, a hunch in his narrow shoulders. Every so often he rose and took a few steps and muttered to himself and then sat down again.
    “He is given to brooding,” Hanukkah said.
    “He gives me a pain,” Amram said.
    “He misses his home,” Filaq said. “Or so he told me.”
    “He told you that?” Amram said, surprised. Zelikman was not a man for nostalgia or confession even under the influence of his pipe, and the scant recollections of life in Regensburg that he had offered up over the years fell well short, to say the least, of longing. “What did he say?”
    “It’s far, the land of the Franks,” Filaq declared and then nodded sagely, as if impressed by the breadth of his own learning. He held up his hands, palms facing each other and separated by a foot of firelight. “I have seen it in a book of maps, in the library of a gentleman my father used to take me to visit.”
    At the mention of his father or the memory of that library with its precious maps, Filaq’s soft voice turned raspy with emotion. Amram wondered if a boy holding a book of maps of the world felt as if he possessed the world and if Filaq now felt, remembering, that he had lost it. Filaq watched the brooding scarecrow alone at the edges of the dark, and an unwonted softness entered his strange green eyes. He was a hard boy, orphaned and imperious, but in the days since his momentary failure of nerve Filaq had shown clear signs to Amram of incipient fitness to command. He woke on his own in the dark of morning and retired having ensured that curfew was in force and universally observed. He held himself apart from the men as he had from Zelikman and Amram, sleeping in his own tent, performing his ablutions and elimination in private, riding usually at the head of the train with none beside him and none before, but he fell in regularly among the ranks, during the course of a day, all the way back to the weakest and most useless of the stragglers, to join them for a song or find shoes for the unshod. That afternoon he had made over his entire double share of the bribe to be divided among the feeblest and most miserable of the men. He rode well and looked fine on horseback, and he saw to it that those tending the animals were competent