Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure

by Michael Chabon

  And Buljan drew his own short sword and before the captain of archers could flinch or turn heaved it up into the soft exposed region just under the captain's arm. There was no pain, at first, only heat and the rank breath of Buljan whistling through his teeth, and an unbearable sadness, and then one of the Northmen laughed as the captain sat down on the dock, and then it hurt. The Rus moved in a boiling tangle like a troop of murderous monkeys the captain had once seen ravaging a village, far away to the southeast in Hind, and his men unsheathed their daggers, and the captain closed his eyes. To his great surprise his death was accompanied or heralded by the sounding of ram's horns, which struck him as a little showy, perhaps, and then there was a silence that accorded more with his expectations, and he opened his eyes and saw his men standing with daggers ready and the Northmen milling, shoulders together and sullen-eyed like boys caught at mischief From the shore there came a coin-chink of stirrup and mail and harness bit, chiming over and over like some kind of bellicose carillon, and he turned and saw an army, the army, his army, wave after wave of riders and footmen pouring and clattering onto the embankment and filling in every inch of space between the wharves and the walls of the city And in their midst or at the head of them rode a slender young man with head erect and mouth full and scornful.

  He rode down the ramp and as he passed the elephant, reached up to stroke her flank. He reined his horse by the captain of archers and looked down, a beautiful young man, breathing hard like a green recruit about to make his first bloody charge.

  “Are you all right?” he said to the captain of the guard.

  “I may well die,” said the captain of archers, feeling as grateful for the sight of the young man as for a cold drink of water. And in fact the youth now threw down a waterskin, with a solemn nod. Then he leapt from the back of his horse and rushed at Buljan the usurper without warning or art, chopping with his sword as if it were an ax. It was an ugly move, and Buljan, who was among the best swordsmen of his people and generation, easily ducked it and sidestepped. The sword came whistling down and lodged with a discordant twang in the timber of the dock, and while the youth struggled to free its edge from the grip of the hard wood Buljan leaned forward, peering curiously at the face of the young man, and then catching hold of the youth and wrapping his long arms around him did something that struck the captain of archers, and no doubt every soul animal or human on the wharf that afternoon, as strange: he smelled him.

  “You,” he said, dismayed or delighted, it was hard to say The youth struggled, kicking and squirming and trying to reach around with his teeth and bite at Buljan, but the usurper held him easily and fast. He laughed a false laugh that held genuine bitterness, and turned to the army that watched motionless from the shore. “This is your new bek?” he called out. And he unsheathed his own dagger now and held it to the fine young throat. “This is no bek. This is the mother of a bek. She carries my seed in her belly!”

  The dagger flashed and his arm came up. It never came down. A thick gray vine snaked down and took hold of it and, like a Rus ceremoniously killing off an amphora of wine, hoisted Buljan into the air and brought him down against the dock. The breath huffed from Buljan's lungs and certain of his bones could be heard to break, and he lay there stunned, and no thing but the river moved or made a sound. Then Buljan's wife screamed as the elephant laced its trunk around his ankles, hoisted him again into the air and slammed him down once more, ensuring the fracture of skull and vertebrae. The elephant appeared to enjoy the business and repeated it several more times, and when the captain of archers at last averted his gaze from the mass of pulp and leather he saw that a ghostly scarecrow clad in black had appeared behind the twin daughters of Buljan to blindfold their faces with his long white fingers. At last the elephant lost interest or took pity and dragged the broken body across the timbers, leaving a bloody trail, to lay it—with a tenderness in which a sentimental man might infer a note of apology—at the feet of the widow of Buljan.

  The youth rose shakily to his feet and raised his sword and turned, slowly, around and around. By now the Rus were scrambling into the barge intended for the transport of the elephant, showing considerable alacrity and even a cowardly grace. The youth pointed to Ragnar Half-Face, who in his haste to flee had stumbled over several bolts of fine blue silk of Khitai, and a big man with skin the color of tarnished copper ran after him, surprisingly fleet for a gray-hair, and caught the Rus chieftain, and dragged him back to face the young man.

  “Who are you?” Ragnar said.

  “I am Alp,” said the young man, and the captain of archers knew him then, recalled from some parade or guard detail the piercing green eyes of the boy's mother's people.

  “You are not Alp,” Ragnar said. “You resemble him. But Alp died puking blood over the side of my ship, chained to a rowing bench.”

  The youth reached for his sword, but now the pale hand of the scarecrow shot out and took hold of the young man's wrist.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “You will die a far more unpleasant death still,” said the dark-skinned giant, “unless you return all that you have looted from the shores of this sea.”

  The giant pushed him to his knees, and Ragnar looked down, his greasy yellow braids tumbling around his face. Then he looked up again with a mercantile glint, his half-face twisted as if in wry pleasure, looking from the pale man to the dark.

  “What a pair of swindlers!” he said admiringly. “Gentlemen of the road, hustling a kingdom! Who are you?”

  But if any reply was made to this question, the captain of archers never heard it.

  That night Zelikman and Amram welcomed the Sabbath in the dosshouse on Sturgeon Street, with Hanukkah and Sarah and Flower of Life and a number of infidel whores who saw no greater harm in marking the sacred time of the country than in accommodating the needs of its men. The women and men alike covered their heads and hid their faces behind their hands and blessed the light. When the candles had burned down and the first of the night's clients—foreigners, sailors, Christians and the lapsed—had arrived, Amram took to a bedroom with Flower of Life. One by one everyone got up from the table and went through the curtain to work, leaving Zelikman and Hanukkah alone.

  “Where will you go?” Hanukkah said.

  “I am the great sage who suggested we try the road from the Black Sea to the Caucasus,” Zelikman said. “It's his turn to choose.”

  “I could come with you,” Hanukkah said, pulling at his pudgy chin as if trying out the idea on himself

  Zelikman reached over and patted him on the knee. “You have a woman to redeem,” he said.

  “And no gold to redeem her with.”

  “Come with me,” Zelikman said, and they wound down the crooked hall behind the common room, to a small chamber, hardly larger than a privy, in which Zelikman planned to spend the night, not willing to spoil his own melancholy or with it the pleasure of Amram. He opened one of his leather bags and took out a sack of dirhams mixed with gold scudi and Greek coin that represented about half the payment he had received for his services to the new bek of Khazaria, and handed it to Hanukkah.

  “I doubt she's worth half that,” he said irritably “Now go away and leave me alone. I wish to sulk.”

  Hanukkah embraced him and kissed him, his breath vinous and his emotion nettlesome to Zelikman, who sent the little bandit on his way with a kick in the seat of his breeches. Then Zelikman knelt on the floor beside his cot and passed an hour inventorying and consolidating his herbiary and pharmakon, thinking about his father, away in the stone and fog of Regensburg, and how he would interpret or respond to the abject, heartfelt, even florid letter of apology and recantation that the leathern old Radanite had extracted from Zelikman as payment for allowing first him and then the kagan to pose as one of them. When his gear was packed he took out his pipe and the last of his bhang. For a long time he sat, listening to the barking of dogs and to the sad fiddling of the rebab, thin and plaintive in the snowy air, with the flint and
striker in his hand. He was about to light the pipe when he heard a footstep outside his door. He reached for Lancet but she slipped into the room before he could get his fingers around the hilt. She had come to him as a girl, in a long wool skirt and a wool coat, hood trimmed with spotted fur. There was snow on her eyelashes and on the fur trim and about her an iron smell of snow He stood, and they looked at each other, and then stepped quickly together as if stealing an embrace against the coming of an enemy or a watchful governess.

  “I have never kissed a woman before,” he confessed to her when they parted again.

  “A man?”

  He shook his head.

  “Now you have accomplished both at once,” she said. “Quite a feat.”

  “I would invite you to share my bed,” Zelikman said. “But it is a poor one, and I fear that I would acquit myself very poorly in it.”

  “My standard of comparison is so low,” she said. “The fact that I'm actually consenting to it may compensate for your absence of technique.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  They took off their clothes, and climbed under the thin blanket, and warmed their hands in the darkness at the little fire they made. He verified, too quickly at first, that she was indeed female in all her particulars, and both of them were contented, for the moment, with that.

  “Will you go to Africa?” she asked him.

  “Maybe,” Zelikman said. “Filaq, ride with us. With me. Follow the roads, see the kingdoms.” He took hold of her again, improving somewhat upon his first performance. She stroked his hair and ran her hand along the cheek that he had shaved smooth of its bogus Radanite beard.

  “That isn't my true name, by the way,” she said. “Filaq.”

  “Will you tell me your true name?”

  “Only if you promise not to ask me to come with you,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  She paused, as if for effect, and then looked straight into his eyes.

  “My name is Alp,” she said. “I am the bek and kagan of Khazaria.”

  He was disappointed, but he felt the foolishness of that disappointment, and like a vial of tincture that had lost its volatility he put it aside.

  “Oho,” he said. “Bek and kagan.”

  “The current system has become unwieldy”

  “Swindler!” Zelikman said, knowing as he kissed her that no one would ever touch her as a woman again. “Hustling a kingdom.”

  In the morning when Zelikman woke she had gone, taking the knowledge of her true name with her. He went to rouse Amram, but his partner had already removed himself from the warm bed of Flower of Life and stood waiting in the yard, in a wolfskin cloak and a cloud of breath from the horses, stamping his feet, complaining of the chill in bones that were too old for love and for adventure and for dragging his African ass halfway around the world all on account of elephants.

  “Do you want to stay?” Zelikman said, looking up at a high small window cut into the stone wall, where Flower of Life now leaned, chin in hand, her face giving nothing away

  Amram swung up onto the back of Porphyrogene, and flicked the reins, and that was all the answer that he gave. And then they took the first road that led out of the city, unmindful of whether it turned east or south, their direction a question of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.

  AFTERWORD

  The original, working—and in my heart the true—title of the short novel you hold in your hands was Jews with Swords.

  When I was writing it, and happened to tell people the name of my work in progress, it made them want to laugh. I guess it seemed clear that I meant the title as a joke. It has been a very long time, after all, since Jews anywhere in the world routinely wore or wielded swords, so long that when paired with “sword,” the word “Jews” (unlike, say, “Englishmen” or “Arabs”) clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity like “Samurai Tailor” or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. True, Jewish soldiers fought in the blade-era battles of Austerlitz and Gettysburg; notoriously, Jewish boys were stolen from their families and conscripted into the czarist armies of nineteenth-century Russia. Any of those fighting men, or any of the Jews who served in the armed forces, particularly in the cavalry units, of their homelands prior to the end of WWI might have qualified, I suppose, as Jews with swords.

  But hearing the title, nobody seemed to flash on the image of doomed Jewish troopers at Inkerman, An-tietam, or the Somme, or of dueling Arabized courtiers at Muslim Granada, or even, say, on the memory of some ancient warrior Jew, like Bar Kochba or Judah Maccabee, famed for his prowess at arms. They saw rather, an unprepossessing little guy, with spectacles and a beard, brandishing a sabre: the pirate Motel Kamzoil. They pictured Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier. They saw their uncle Manny, dirk between his teeth, slacks belted at the armpits, dropping from the chandelier to knock together the heads of a couple of nefarious auditors.

  And, okay, so maybe I didn't look very serious when I told people the title. Yet I meant it sincerely, or half-sincerely or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I could not have entitled this book any more honestly than by means of anachronism and incongruity

  I know it still seems incongruous, first of all, for me or a writer of my literary training, generation, and pretensions to be writing stories featuring anybody with swords. As recently as ten years ago I had published two novels, and perhaps as many as twenty short stories, and not one of them featured weaponry more antique than a (lone) Glock 9mm. None was set any earlier than about 1972 or in any locale more far-flung or exotic than a radio studio in Paris, France. Most of those stories appeared in sedate, respectable, and generally sword-free places like The New Yorker and Harper's, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters-disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce—I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life. As for the two novels, they didn't stray in time or space any farther than the stories—or for that matter, any deeper into the realm of Jewishness: both set in Pittsburgh, liberally furnished with Pontiacs and Fords, scented with marijuana, Shalimar and kielbasa, featuring Smokey Robinson hits and Star Trek references, and starring gentiles or assimilated Jews, many of whom were self-consciously inspired, instructed and laid low by the teachings of rock and roll and Hollywood, but not, for example, by the lost writings of the tzaddik of Regensburg, whose commentaries are so important to one of the heroes of Gentlemen of the Road.

  I'm not saying—let me be clear about this—I am not saying that I disparage or repudiate my early work, or the genre (late-century naturalism) it mostly exemplifies. I am proud of stories like “House Hunting,” “S Angel,” “Werewolves in Their Youth,” and “Son of the Wolfman,” and out of all my novels I may always be most fond of Wonder Boys, which saved my life, kind of or saved me, at least, from having to live in a world in which I must forever be held to account for the doomed second novel it supplanted. I'm not turning my back on the stuff I wrote there, late in the twentieth century, and I hope that readers won't either. It's just that here, in Gentleman of the Road as in some of its recent predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories—Art Bechstein, Grady Tripp, Ira Wiseman— were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure.

  If this impulse seems an incongruous thing in a writer of the (“serious,” “literary”) kind for which I had for a long time hoped to be taken, it might be explained—as I think the enduring popularity of all adventure fiction might be explained—with si
mple reference to the kind of person I am. I have never swung a battle-ax or a sword. I have never, thank God, killed anybody. I have never served as a soldier of empire or fortune, infiltrated a palace or an enemy camp in the dead of night, or ridden an elephant, though I have— barely, and without the least confidence or style— ridden a horse. I do not laugh in the face of death and danger; far from it. I have never survived in the desert on a few swallows of acrid water and a handful of scorched millet. Never escaped from prison, the gallows or the rowing benches of a swift caravel. Never gambled my life and fortune on a single roll of the dice; if I lose $100 at a Las Vegas craps table, it makes me feel like crying.

  This is not to say that I have never had adventures: I have had my fill and more of them. Because adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, at the keyboard, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen.

  I guess what I'm trying to say is that if there is incongruity in the writer of a piece of typical New Yorker marital-discord fare like “That Was Me” (a story in my second collection) turning out a swords-and-horses tale like this one, it's nothing compared to the incongruous bounty to be harvested from the actual sight of me sitting on a horse, for example, or trying to keep from falling out of a whitewater raft, or setting off, as I have done from time to time with sinking heart and in certainty of failure but goaded into wild hopefulness by some treacherous friend or bold stranger, in search of a Springsteenian something in the night.