Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon

  Now it was the old mahout's turn to let a little joke make him nervous. He took a step away from Zelik-man.

  “You saw the young one I travel with?” he said. “Filaq, come out. I call him Filaq, in Persian that's-

  “Little elephant,” Amram said. He was nearly as gifted at languages as the contumelious myna.

  “Yes. You don't see it now looking at this mess of bones, but the name suited him perfectly when he was young.”

  From behind a mound of fresh hay stepped the stripling to whom Zelikman had consigned his hat just before the fight. Sullen-shouldered, thin at the wrists, freckled and green-eyed, wrapped in a bearskin too warm for the evening and too fine for a dusty caravansary stinking of pack animals and cheeses, the stripling had as yet no shadow on his chin or lip, but he stood nearly as tall as Zelikman, and from the rosiness of his complexion, the gloss of his close-cropped russet hair and a commingled look of shame and haughtiness in his eyes, the physician from Regensburg was able to infer fifteen or sixteen years of good food, clean linens and the expectation of having his wishes granted. In the gloom of night that had filled Zelikman's soul upon the destruction of his hat, which had cost him thirty ducats in the market at Ravenna, the hand of fortune lighted a slim taper. The stripling in the bearskin gave off an aroma, more powerful than that of horse dung or cheese or one-eyed Persians, of money

  “Here is one whose safe delivery will pay better, I'll warrant, than your theatricals,” the mahout said.

  “We don't stoop to ransom,” Amram said, no physician but a student all the same of men's corruptions. “Or truck with those that do so stoop.”

  “But I have not stolen him.”

  “And yet one sees at a glance,” Amram said, signaling to Zelikman by means of a slight inclination of his silver-tinged head that it was time to get Hillel saddled and be on their way to the clearing, half a league beyond the village, where they had arranged with the ostler to take payment for their show, “that he is not here willingly”

  “Indeed he is not,” the mahout said in a tone of great weariness. “As he never tires of making clear to me. Three times since we left Atil that one has given me the slip.”

  “Atil,” Zelikman said, and the little guttering flame burned steadier and brighter. “He is a Khazar?”

  At the word “Khazar,” the stripling began to nod, slowly, and now hope flickered also in the peridot eyes. The stripling spoke a few words in a language that sounded like the speech of Turks and then astonished Zelikman by murmuring a dreamlike phrase in the holy tongue of the Jews. His barbaric accent rendered the words indecipherable, but they remained pregnant with longing, and in Zelikman they stirred a strong desire to see the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the Jewish yurts and pinnacles of Khazaria.

  “Is there really such a place,” Zelikman asked the stripling, in the holy tongue, “where a Jew rules over other Jews as king?”

  “What's that?” said the mahout sharply, alert to the stratagems and deceits of his young charge. “What is he saying?”

  “We discuss the boy's suggestion that we kill you, cyclops, and conduct him back to Atil, where his family will reward us generously for his return,” Zelikman said, though of all the words spoken in the holy tongue by the stripling he in fact had recognized only one: home.

  “I'd say that is unlikely,” said the old fighting man. “Not that he said such a thing, for he would say or do anything if it might mean a chance to fly home and seek a fool's revenge.” He reached for the ivory handle of his ankus and turned to the stripling. “Fool!” he barked, sounding very much as if he were scolding a recalcitrant beast. “What can you do, weak and friendless?”

  The stripling's cheeks reddened, and he glared at his guardian, whose fixed sneer seemed cruelly apt.

  “No,” the mahout said, “you two could expect no reward from that quarter, I think, seeing as how his parents and his uncles are murdered, his aunts and sisters sold into brothels and his brother to the benches of a Rus long ship. And this one to be sold or killed, too, if I can't deliver him before we're hunted down. We have a day on them, maybe less. Which brings me to you gentlemen. I am trying to convey this hotheaded fool to safety among his mother's people, in Azerbaijan, to install him in the walls of his grandfather's house, his mother's father being by reputation a hard customer. Watching your display tonight, I was able to discern not only the sham of it but the murderous art that fools the spectator into believing. I have 200 miles to ride and a manhunt to elude before I can fairly say I have discharged my duty, and I'd like very much to have you two along to help me do that.”

  And he named a sum then, equal to five times the salary of a dekarch in the army of Byzantium.

  “What did his family do,” Amram said slowly watching the boy, “that anyone should want to hunt them all down?”

  “His father,” the mahout said, “was the bek, or war king, of the Khazars. And my master. I kept the royal war elephants, forty-nine pachyderms of Africa and Hind. Thirty years and more some of them were with me. I counted them my friends, I don't mind saying. As did this stripling. He grew up in the elephant pens, so to speak. As much as among the pomps and fripperies of the court.”

  And there was something gauche or uncanny about the young prince, which Zelikman had been inclined to put down to inbreeding but now took for the fruit of having been raised with elephants.

  “This past spring,” the mahout continued, his voice falling to a mournful rasp, “comes the pox, out of Persia, that kills or cripples all the great sad brutes. And as the bek had made a great fuss over his elephants (of which at present the emperor in Byzantium has only forty-seven, that's a fact), putting the likeness of an elephant on his own personal arms, and so forth, well, the deaths looked bad. A bad omen, you see. Some of those that were already intriguing against the bek took heart from this pox. A general, name of Buljan, he seizes his main chance and ambushes the poor old elephant-fancying fool on the Kiev road. Installs himself in the Qomr citadel straightaway Since then, Buljan's gone very carefully about the business of removing anybody-brothers, wives, sons-who might be harboring feelings of resentment over the whole business.”

  “I am sorry about your animals, my friend,” Amram said, taking his horse by the reins and leading it to the door of the stable. “But we don't stoop to politics, either.”

  “A word, Amram,” Zelikman said. “If I may.” They sent the Persian and the stripling out into the inn yard then, and as was their inveterate custom at a crossroads of fortune, bickered like a couple of Regens-burg fishwives. At first they argued about whether or not they had time to argue, or if arguing would cost them their appointment with the ostler in the clearing and then about whose fault it had been that they were never paid by the landlord of an inn outside Trebizond, and then Zelikman succeeded in returning the conversation to the subject of the elephant boy, and his grandfather's stronghold in Azerbaijan, and the easy money that delivering him thence represented, at which point they resumed an old, old argument over whose definition of “easy money” was the least commensurate with lived experience, and about who was afraid and whose courage had been more openly on display in the recent course of their partnership. Next they argued about the overall equity of that longstanding arrangement and who shouldered more of its burdens, which led inevitably to the question of the hat, and whether the demands of verisimilitude had required its assassination. Amram had just dredged up an ancient debacle at Tergeste when there was a soft moan from outside the stable, and then a sharp thud, like a muffled bell, that to Zelikman's ears had the unmistakable timbre of a skull hitting a wooden plank.

  When they got outside they found the body of the unfortunate mahout, from whose throat a black-fletched arrow protruded. They got their heads down, scanning the roof line, but it was too dark to see anything. Zelikman heard breathing behind him and turned to find the stripling, behind a rain jar, face buried in his hands, weeping. Zelikman was alien to feeli
ngs of sympathy with young men in tears, having waked one morning, around the time of his fifteenth birthday, to find that by a mysterious process perhaps linked to his studies of human ailments and frailties as much as to the rape and murder of his mother and sister, his heart had turned to stone.

  “Shut up,” he told the stripling, whispering the phrase in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavonic and, for good measure, Frankish, adjuring him to muzzle his goddamned snout. “Or I'll put an arrow in you myself”

  But there was no time to make good on his threat because the next moment a drunken traveler stumbled out of the main hall of the caravansary and spotted Amram crouching down behind the wheel of a cart.

  “It's the Nubian!” the traveler said, after his shock subsided, summoning his companions from their pots.

  “I don't know why we couldn't leave when I said we should leave,” Amram said.

  Then the men of the inn were on them, in a roaring alcoholic mass of fists and boots and curses that would have shamed the foulmouthed myna. A gang of Avars went for the shed where the weapons were checked. Zelikman stumbled to his feet and punched and shoved his way back into the stable. He drove out the horses and sent them plowing through the mass of angry travelers and leapt onto Hillel's back as Amram fought his way into his own saddle. With a mezair and a cut to the left and a pair of caprioles, Zelikman danced the horse through the tangle of men. Two quick strokes with Lancet freed the purse from the belt of the ostler. Then they galloped through the gates of the inn yard and out onto the road.

  They plunged into the cover of the woods and crashed along through blades and bars of moonlight, and it was not until they joined the road again and turned southward toward Azerbaijan that Zelikman noticed the stripling riding behind Amram, clinging to the big man's waist and looking back at the moonlit road behind them and the ever more distant home to which it ran.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON THE BURDENS AND CRUELTIES OF THE ROAD

  Whatever their merits as companions, the Khazar elephants had apparently failed to teach good manners to Filaq, who began to curse his guardians as soon as they had put a mile between themselves and the caravansary and continued to do so for days afterward, in a gargling, double-reeded tongue that seemed to have been devised for no other purpose. Over the four nights of the journey into Azerbaijan, as they picked their way down serpentine tracks and through thundering gorges-avoiding the main road, traveling in darkness-the stripling paused his recitations only to eat, to doze in the saddle or wrapped in his bearskin in their fireless camps, and to make the two attempts at flight that at last necessitated his being bound and tied to the cantle.

  The attempted escapes followed sullen requests to be permitted to void his bladder, an act the stripling refused to perform in proximity to his hosts, which Zelikman took for elephantine modesty and Amram for arrogance, suggesting that no doubt Prince Filaq shat gold and pissed date wine. After Filaq failed to return the second time and they were obliged to backtrack four leagues up the slope of a vinetangled, wasp-ridden mountainside to retrieve him, the partners bound him, but still he refused to favor them with the sight and smell of his royal excretions, and so Amram was regularly obliged to lead the youth on a leather thong far into the underbrush and leave him tied to a tree for a reasonable period before retrieving him.

  “I have arrived at a new diagnosis,” Zelikman said, sitting in the shade of a bear-shaped outcrop of green granite, his damaged hat brought low over his eyes, puffing on a short Irish dudeen whose bowl he filled with a paste of hemp seed and honey. While Amram did not share the habit, he encouraged it, because the pipe inclined his partner toward a more charitable view of the imperfections that marred creation, for which the Jews of Abyssinia blamed a host of energetic demons but which Zelikman attributed to creation's having occurred without divine will or intention, like the snarl of wrack and shells in a tide pool, a heresy that would have shocked a man more troubled than Amram by piety and which, like all Zelikman's heresies, afforded its promulgator no comfort whatsoever. “The family of the Khazar bek arranged to make it look as if they had all been murdered by this Buljan fellow, as a way to rid themselves once and for all of that boy”

  Amram nodded, crouched on top of the rock, listening for the hiss of Filaq's water against the hillside and looking down along the gray-green folds and gray-brown escarpments and granite ribs of the hillside to the valley where they would find the grandfather's fortress with its stout walls and its treasury laid open to the noble rescuers. He could see a thin vein of smoke. At the far side of the valley ran a last halfhearted scatter of foothills before the Caucasus gave out at the sea.

  “Perhaps they arranged to have themselves actually murdered,” Amram said. “Just to make sure.”

  Zelikman allowed that over the course of the past few days in Filaq's scabrous company, he had entertained suicidal thoughts of his own, at which Amram spoke a formula in the Ge'ez tongue effective at averting the evil eye, because Zelikman was prey to spells of black bile during which he would contemplate-and one bleak night in the city of Trebizond had ingested- the deadly tinctures that he carried in his saddlebags.

  “Of course grief may have driven the boy mad,” Ze-likman continued in a dreamy tone, lowering the hat still farther as the smoke of his dudeen worked its charm. “To lose his mother and father. His crown and his palace. His elephants too. I suppose we ought to pity him.”

  “Fine idea,” Amram said. “You go first.”

  There was no sound from up the hillside now He craned his head and saw that Filaq was halfway to the ridgeline, scrabbling on his hands in the scattering gravel, hurrying toward the home that lay a hundred leagues north, and its ghosts. Amram let loose a polyglot string of curses that would have done honor to the old myna of the caravansary, jumped from the rock and started after Filaq with long strides of his hard-pumping legs. The sun beat down on his head, and he sweated, and thorns tore at his clothes, but he had been pursuing the spirit of his stolen daughter, Dinah, for nearly twenty years, in dreams and among the roads and kingdoms, and a loudmouthed Khazar could offer nothing in the way of a challenge to the hunter of a ghost girl.

  “No,” Filaq said in wretched Arabic as Amram caught hold of the remains of the thong, which he had chewed through, and dragged him into the shade of a tall fir tree. “Please, lord. To home, please, you take me.”

  He fell to his knees, and his large eyes, dazzling as the green armor of a scarab, filled with tears, and he employed with pitiable energy the tiny store that was known to him of Arabic's rich supply of blandishments and entreaties, insisting in broken phrases that he would rather be tortured and killed in Atil having at least made the attempt to avenge himself on Buljan than to live out his days as the ward of his grandfather's charity

  Amram looked away, confused by this unprecedented display of deference from one who had been employed, just an hour before, in calling down leprous growths and pustules upon him. He pulled Filaq to his feet, recalling like a man reviewing the history of his amours the days of his distant youth when he had sought and sometimes gained revenge. Then he retied the thong that had been chewed, braiding three pieces together this time to make a stouter cord, and dragged Filaq back down through the brambles to the rock in whose lengthening shadow Zelikman still lay, pondering one of the useless paradoxes or baubles of philosophy with which he amused himself when under the influence of his pipe. When he noticed Amram's return, he stood up and approached the stripling.

  “Everything ends in death,” he said in the holy tongue. “You know that, don't you?”

  His expression was kind and his voice soft, teacherly Filaq nodded.

  “Therefore revenge is superfluous. Unnecessary effort. One day Buljan will be bones in the dust. And so will you and I and that behemoth holding your leash. Revenge is the sole property of God.”

  “I want him to suffer,” Filaq said. “To hurt, to writhe in pain.”

  Zelikman blinked and then put his hand on Filaq's shoulder in a ma
nner that showed both tenderness and scorn.

  “You and God have a great deal in common,” he said. “Now, will you ride calmly behind me or do we need to bind you at the ankles, too?”

  Filaq seemed to consider the question very seriously

  “You had better bind my ankles,” he said.

  It was done, and then Zelikman hoisted Filaq and slung him across the withers of his horse. The stripling muttered for a while and somewhat belatedly wished tumors onto the testicles of Zelikman's grandfather, but as they drew nearer to the fortress, he curled up still and silent and seemed resigned at last to his fortune.