Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure

by Michael Chabon

  “Thank you,” he said, or tried to say, but his throat was raw and his lips half-sealed, and it did not emerge loud enough to interrupt the dispute between the African and the Frank. He said, in Arabic, “Thank you for finding my horse.”

  The African left off making whatever irritated point he had been trying to score against the Frank, turned his great head toward Hanukkah and said: “Have you any objection to this fellow's taking it as payment for saving your life? Provided that we agree to convey you to water, food and a road home before we part ways?”

  It was a reasonable and acceptable proposal, but there was a querulous note in the African's voice that made Hanukkah leery of agreeing too quickly

  “I am not sure my life is so valuable,” he said. “But if the terms are agreeable to the learned gentleman. …”

  “I don't want your old hack,” the Frank said, and the bones of his back stood out against the dusty black leather of his jerkin. “I want Hillel. And do not repeat, Amram, that a horse is a horse, because history, circumstances and I have disproved that argument many times.”

  “The manhunters are two days ahead of us,” the African said. “They're heavily armed and bound for a kingdom in which we have no business, no friends. Apart from your freakish half-Arabian sweetheart, for whom you have now, thanks to the openhandedness of this good Khazar, found adequate replacement, I see nothing that we stand to gain from the pursuit of that boy”

  “Our money,” the Frank said. “He has that too.”

  “I'm afraid not,” Hanukkah said. “It was divided among the bastards who put me and the others to the sword, with the promise of more on the boy's safe return to Atil, and greater reward still on the restoration of his family to the bek's tripod. He has an older brother named Alp, who was sold by the usurper into slavery among the Rus and whose cause the stripling advanced, along with the contents of his, or rather of your, sack of gold.”

  “The king of the great land of the Khazars rules with his ass slung in a tripod?”

  “The bek is not our king,” Hanukkah said, trying to explain how alone among the civilized peoples of the earth the Khazars, in their wisdom, had discovered a means by which men might, profitably and without excessive peril to their souls, serve two masters. There was the bek, who directed the daily course of men's affairs, in the teeming streets of Atil, in the profane worlds of warfare and commerce, and over him—over all the Khazar people, embodying them and their interests and speaking on their behalf to God and all his angels—there was the kagan, in his palace on his sacred island in the middle of the river Atil, whose word was law and whose face was never seen.

  “A kagan is the father, the mother and the lover of all his people. Nobody would lift a hand against him,” Hanukkah said. “But a bek has many enemies, and Buljan more than the usual. These enemies may have already begun to look for someone to oppose Buljan. I imagine that the boy Filaq, could easily find men to finance the ransom of Alp. After that it would be a matter of mustering soldiers, and I can tell you, for I've seen it with my own eyes, that this youth has a way with soldiers. He talked two-thirds of our number into betraying both our employer and the other third, among which, alas, I found myself”

  “Because you so love the cause of Buljan?”

  “No,” Hanukkah said. “I—I suppose it's only that I don't like changes in plan. I am slow to make up my mind.”

  “Slow-witted.”

  “If you like. But I obeyed an impulse in deciding to come along on this damned journey, and you see how that worked out.”

  The Frank turned on his horse now and stared at Hanukkah for a long moment as they started up the last rise before the pass. When they crested it, they would see the first shimmer of the Khazar, or Caspian, Sea, whose chill waters were no colder than the eyes of the Frank as they made their diagnosis of Hanukkah's heart.

  “You did it for the sake of a woman, I suppose?” the Frank said.

  “For Sarah,” Hanukkah said. And he told them about the slave girl for the purchase of whose freedom he had enlisted in the deadly service of Buljan. “I'd never heard of this Filaq, to be honest, before I took this damned job. Never paid the slightest attention to royal genealogies or politics. Doubtless there is more to this story than I will ever—”

  As they came around a bend in the road, Hanukkah's old nag shied, and reared up, and danced sideways into a thicket before the Frank succeeded in bringing it around, and then they sat a moment, staring at the dead men who had been laid by the side of the road in a neat row like the physician's instruments in his canvas roll. Kisa, Suleiman, Hoopoe, Bugha, they were all there, all nine of them, stripped of their weapons and armor, their waxen faces gawping at the sky. There was no sign of Filaq, or of the bag of gold.

  They climbed down from their horses, and the giant unshouldered his ax. On one side of the road there was a sheer rock face and on the other a long, gentle rise to the pass. The rise was brown and treeless and could be concealing no one. They waited until it was dusk, and then as the bats began to circle they led the horses almost to the top of the rise, where they tied the animals and crept along on foot until they could see over the crest. Below them, widening like a horn, stretched a steep-sided valley that ran, in terraced ripples that were crosshatched with vineyards, all the way to the sea far below. About halfway down the slope, a great number of horses milled, cropping the grass. Beyond them, to the right of the road, Hanukkah made out the white tents, peaked and striped with green, of a company of Arsiyah, elite mercenaries, Muslims whose fathers had come from Persia two centuries ago and who had served the kings of Khazaria since long before the conversion of their employers to the teachings of the Jews. Hanukkah heard laughter, and the jangle of a lute, and smelled scorched grain and roast onions.

  “Well, it looks like our boy found himself an army,” the African said, shaking his head. “So much the worse for him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ON THE OBSERVANCE OF

  THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT

  AMONG HORSE THIEVES

  With nightfall, a wind blew in over the sea, from the lands beyond the Khazar Sea and beyond the vast steppe of the north, from kingdoms of forest and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advancing darkness, and Amram knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his woolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men. Then, as if overhearing and taking pity on the maudlin trend of his thoughts, the wind carried to his nostrils from the fires of the troops camped in the valley the desert tang of a camel-dung fire, and with it the plangent cry of a soldier-muezzin calling his saddle-weary brothers to a belated Jumuah. Amram was surprised to learn that it was a Friday Bearing this strangely moving information, he crept back down to the fold of rock in which Zelikman and Hanukkah had hidden themselves, and then led by Zelikman, who honored the commandments in nearly the same measure as he despised them, the son of Ham, the son of Shem and the son of Japheth bowed their heads to greet the Sabbath bride before they rode down the mountain, toward the winter and the sea, to steal back Zelikman's horse.

  It so happened that soon after he first set out from his village in pursuit of his stolen daughter, Amram had been employed as a horse thief It was a trade that he had continued to pursue intermittently ever since, in particular during his ten years of service in the armies of Constantinople, when he had been obliged, through the improvidence and cheeseparing of the emperor's quartermasters and longstanding custom of his border troops, to steal not only horses but also cattle, sheep, goats, fowl, grain, cheeses, fuel, skins, wool and hides. Everything but women: that was one custom Amram had always declined, while he held a command, to observe or to tolerate in his own men.

  Amram supposed that Hillel must by now be accustomed to being stolen, having originally been pr
ovided to Zelikman during a raid the partners staged on a khan outside Damascus whose landlord, himself a broker of stolen horses, tried to cheat them after one of their performances.

  After prayer they dined on the lees of their provisions and the last gristly hunks of goat, and Hanukkah offered thanks to God on their behalf, employing a Khazari melody that sounded throaty and sad to Amram's ear. Amram took out his shatranj board and thrashed Zelikman and Hanukkah twice apiece while they waited for the perfection of darkness. Then they crept back up to the crest of the pass.

  Zelikman had tried to dissuade Hanukkah from joining them, in consideration of his wound, but Hanukkah would not hear of it, insisting that he felt so grateful to Zelikman for sewing him up so tightly, and salving him so efficaciously, that he was prepared if need be to crawl on his belly to the Arsiyah camp, and if tonight they should prove unsuccessful in retrieving the virtuous Hillel, then Zelikman might, should he ever choose to return home, ride on Hanukkah's back all the way to Francia or Saxony or the evening couches of the Sun himself

  “Take care of what you say,” Amram advised him. “He healed me of a sword cut to the neck five years ago, and I've been carrying him on my back ever since.”

  Then they started down in the darkness toward the horses. A hundred and ten, by Amram's count, strong animals well fed and stolid, they milled around the meadow to the east of the tents, a shifting patch of denser darkness against the night. Hobbled, loudly gourmandizing the dry chess grass, they were guarded by a pair of dismounted soldiers in long, dusty coats split up the front and elaborately bearing on the left sleeves embroidered quotations from the lips of the Prophet. A pair of pickets held the southern approach to the camp, and there were guards posted on the north and west sides of camp, all fine, tall, falcon-faced men, in excellent equipage and reasonable order, but to Amram's eye as he had studied them and their fellows in the last of the daylight they betrayed an indifference to their duty, a hint of discontent, as if they had better things to do and expected no trouble or enemy from any quarter. Something was roiling them. He wondered if perhaps they suffered from the discontent of indolence, patrolling a frontier that had been at peace too long, the last war between the Khazars and the armies of the Caliph having ended more than a hundred years ago. If they were men of spirit they might resent the posting and wish they could be in on the hot battles and fat prizes in the distant Crimea, where according to Hanukkah the armies of the new bek were busy reconquering the great cities of Feodosia and Doros to bring them under control once more of the candelabrum flag.

  Dispatching the watchmen, discontented or not, was always the simplest part of a horse or cattle raid. In former times, Amram would have crept up on the pickets from their left and with one, two lateral strokes at the jugular sent them sinking to their knees. But it was true, as Zelikman argued, that if you were not swift enough in cutting their throats, men often managed to cry out, alerting their comrades, and sometimes you detached the head entirely from the neck, in which case there might sound, if you failed to catch it before it hit the dirt, a telltale drumbeat of the skull to give you away Killing the guards could also lead to later reprisals. Amram saw the value therefore in letting Zelikman go to work in his own fashion.

  They moved as slow through the deep darkness as blind men skirting a pit, groping their way from outcrop to outcrop, observing as well as they could the course that Amram had decided for them, a wide arc that ran twenty rods to the east before cutting back along a westward radius, approaching from the guards’ left to gain half an instant on their sword arms if they managed to draw. Then as Hanukkah and Amram waited, backs pressed against a sheltering rock, Zelik-man loped, hunched down, toward the pickets, who stood, about forty feet apart, with their backs turned to each other, arguing the merits of Barbary horses. The moon rose, and in her faint, cool light Amram and Hanukkah watched Zelikman creep along. In his long and skinny shanks there was none of the grace but all the intensity of a cat going about its fatal mousing, the patience, the grim reserve of a predator. He rose up behind the nearer picket, covered the man's face with his leather-gloved hand and embraced him with the other arm. A moment later he eased the man to the earth. When, rarely, Zelikman recalled his mother to Amram, it was often a bedside memory of her seeing him through fevers and nightmares, or singing to him in the soft Latin dialect of her grandmothers, and the shade of that unknown Jewess always seemed to appear in Zelikman when he anesthetized a guard or watchman and laid him tenderly on the ground. In his bag of salves and pastes, Zelikman kept a large packet, a leaf of papyrus wrapped around a cake compounded of henbane, mandragora and nightshade, which when dissolved in a special preparation of vitriol, decanted onto a bandage and applied to the nostrils and mouth could induce a profound and instantaneous sleep. Hanukkah watched from behind the rock with his eyes wide and admiring as Zelikman went to work on the second picket and laid him out beside the first.

  As they cut across the grass, moving more quickly now toward Zelikman and the horses, Amram could hear the snoring of the soldiers in their tents beyond. A last cricket scratched mournfully at its rebab. The stars wheeled toward winter, and there was light enough now to make out the blazes on the crops of some of the horses. Amram could smell the dusty musk of horse-hide and the sour sugar on their breath. He pulled his bit of Arab steel from his boot and moved among the legs of the horses, cutting the thongs that hobbled them one by one. The animals began to question one another with a sense of urgency that Amram could feel increasing, passing rumor and confusion among themselves. It would not be long before their agitation grew loud enough to alert the other pickets or wake the men snoring in the nearest tents. Amram was counting on the agitation, relying on the horses as sowers of panic, but that panic must not be permitted to flower in the wrong garden. He stood up and tried to find Zelikman in the dark, muscular flow of dismay and alarm around him and caught sight of the long, disdainful face of Hil-lel, his droll eye, just as Zelikman found him and swung up onto his back.

  Amram mounted the horse that was nearest him, its girth feverish between his knees. For a moment the shadows and the smell of dust overwhelmed him, and his horse would not move, but he spoke a few words to it in Ge'ez, the mother language of humanity according to his people, the sound of which always had a pacifying effect on horses. As he spoke to the horses around him, they began to follow his mount, Amram squeezing his knees together and telling the horse how beautiful it was and how much he loved it, and they gathered speed and the rest of the herd came after. He could hear the chuff of their breath and now cries from the tents, a shout of the picket on the other side of the camp. The stampeding horses opened up and stretched toward the tents and the guttering fires of the Arsiyah. The moment arrived at which, by his own longstanding custom and the needs of the situation, he should peel off and let the horses carry on through the camp to dispose as they saw fit of the tent strings and the soldiers and rejoin Zelikman on higher ground.

  That was when the melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars, who, having been apprehended by these soldiers, must eventually be conveyed by them to the usurper Buljan, their commander. It was the business of the world, Amram knew to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away. After long years of blessed absence, the return of merciful feelings toward what was, after all, only another motherless and fatherless child, struck Amram, bitterly, as a sign of his own waning powers to live life as it must be lived. Mercy was a failing, a state of error, and in the case of children a terrible waste of time.

  Amram steadied himself without stirrups or reins, taking up a coarse fistful of mane, and lowered his head. In an instant he was in among the shouting men, the blazing brands, the screams of horses, tents collapsing and flapping like bats into the sky. The folly of his deviation became clear to him immediately. The moon shed too little light. He would
never find the boy in this confusion.

  He felt the great pumping heart—the fist of muscle, bone and sweat between his knees—torque and shudder, and there was the crack of a joint. He flew forward over the head of the horse, letting go of its stiff brush of a mane, and the size of his frame carried him so powerfully forward that he actually dragged the horse down on top of him as he went. They rolled over, and as if lightning and thunder had reversed themselves he tasted blood in the back of his mouth, and the hammer blow of a hoof landed squarely on his chest. He had a vague impression of men's hands taking hold of him by the arms, hoisting him to his feet, and then after that he felt and heard nothing for what seemed like a very long time.

  When he opened his eyes, his arms and legs were tied, and he heard horses shying and the whistling of a whiplash blade that he knew at once to be Zelikman's. He lay on the ground inside a musty tent against whose wall firelight flickered and distended shapes swelled and lapsed in the manner of a shadow theater. Filaq lay beside him, on his side, with his arms tied and a gag in his teeth. Amram's own mouth remained free.

  “They got sick of listening to you too?” he said.

  Filaq nodded.

  “They hurt you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do they know who you are?”

  Filaq considered the question for a moment and began to give his head a shake before settling on an inexpressive shrug.

  “Hear that sound, boy?” Amram said. “That's Ze-likman. Thinking he can rescue me. One skinny little Jew with a needle. Think he can do it?”