Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon

  They were two miles upslope of the fortress when they realized the smoke was too thick and dense for a rubbish or cook fire. It boiled and poured into the sky They tied the horses in a thicket along the bed of a stream in which a thin cold trickle of water ran and then crept along the stream bed until they were within half a league of the stronghold. Zelikman took from its pouch the curious glass that was his only patrimony a pair of flattened clear beads, devised by some genius of Persia, mounted on brass wire one behind another in a way that made it possible to see distant things in detail. The partners passed the Persian glass back and forth, taking turns surveying the stronghold, a large house of timber, mud and tile set atop a conical hill whose base was encircled by stout walls. It burned zealously, sending up rolling shafts of black smoke veined at their root with fire and moaning like the mouth of a cave. The massive wooden gates hung splintered, poleaxed and smoking, and the ramparts were garlanded with the bodies of helmeted guards, slain attackers armored in Turk style and bareheaded household retainers who had gone to their deaths armed with kitchen knives and hayforks. Over everything hung an odor of burning hay timber and a sweet stench of crackling fat that mocked both conquerors and conquered with its reminder of their universal nature as meat for the kites and buzzards that had already begun to draw lazy naughts across the high blue sky

  They watched the stronghold burn from the safety of the stream bed until the carrion birds began to alight and strut like princes on the walls and then, tying the dazed stripling to the overhanging branch of a willow crept up to the shattered oak jaws of the gate and scuttled inside, blades drawn.

  Someone was singing. Amram heard sawed strings and a voice at once lilting and raspy-an old man or woman-and they followed the sound of it up a crooked lane to the top of the hill, squelching through mud that was an impasto of dirt and blood, past the flyblown carcasses of women, children and defenders alike, some three dozen people in all, among them a crone and a babe in arms. Amram kept up a steady murmur of prayers for the souls of the butchered and his own in this grievous shambles. At the top of the hill in the archway of the main house, an eyeless old man sat on a bucket, scratching at a two-stringed gourd, warbling weird melismas on a madman's text.

  “Fine fellows,” Zelikman said, surveying the charred remains of a storehouse in which greasy pools of what had once been stacked bales of wool still bubbled and popped.

  “And numerous. Either the mahout underestimated or this Buljan has increased the number of men pursuing our young friend. I see the trace of at least a dozen horses.”

  They wasted an hour poking through the rooms and structures that had escaped the fire or cooled enough to permit inspection. But the storehouses and larders were all ash, and if the household treasury had escaped the looting hands of the attackers, it had not escaped the flames. In the end they returned to the stream bed empty-handed but for a pair of goats, handsome if singed. As they drew nearer to the willow tree where they had tied up Filaq, they found themselves confronted, and Amram confronted Zelikman, with the question of what to do, now, with their charge.

  “There is no reason, at this point, not to consider him our property by right,” Zelikman argued. “A gentleman of the road worthy of the title would convey him to the nearest slave market and see what price he fetched.”

  “I fear that explains our overall lack of success at this game, Zelikman,” Amram said. “Because I'm not going to do that.”

  “No,” Zelikman said sadly “Neither am I.”

  But when they returned to the willow tree, they found no stripling, only the raveled strands of a camel-hide lanyard swaying like willow branches in the breeze. This discovery dismayed Amram, but he was inclined, according to the tenets of his personal philosophy, to accept it and go along their way. He might have persuaded Zelikman of the wisdom of this course, but when they went to find the horses they had tied up in the copse, they found their saddlebags and Porphyro-gene but no trace of the gold from the inn or of the curly coated, big-nosed half-Arabian, Hillel.

  Hastily they tied the goats, slung them from Por-phyrogene's saddle and set off, riding tandem, up the track. Burdened by two riders, even a strong Parthian stallion could not hope to match the speed of the lithe and sure-footed Hillel, and by the time they reached the pass and the main road that descended in lazy switchbacks to the shore of the Caspian and then north to the city of Atil, Filaq's relative inexperience and unbalanced mental state held their only hope of retrieving him and, more important, Zelikman's horse, a loss that was already threatening to plunge Zelikman, the effects of his hemp pipe having long since dwindled, into a gloom that promised to be dark indeed.

  “This accursed country into which you led us has already cost me my hat,” Zelikman said. “Not to mention a sack of gold. But if it costs me Hillel too, I'll take it very ill indeed.”

  Amram refrained from pointing out, though not without effort, that this Caucasian jaunt had originated in a pipe dream of Zelikman's. He had already seen the broken turf up ahead and the shaft of a black-fletched arrow protruding from a blasted trunk at the edge of a clearing about forty feet farther along. He swung down from the horse and crouched, creeping along on his heels, reading the alphabet of horseshoe prints and other stray marks of struggle.

  “Buljan's hunters have found him,” he said presently, having concluded his study of the text in the dirt. “They caught him there. He struggled. He knocked one of them down. And then they tied him, here, and put him on a horse. And set off again. Headed north.”

  “Why didn't they kill him?” Zelikman said. “At long last?”

  “Perhaps they did. But I see no sign of it.”

  “And Hillel? Yes. I see his marks.”

  He sat down under the blasted tree, and Amram could see him sinking, as a man watches the sun sink into the western sea, into the darkness of his thoughts. As little chance as they had stood of catching Hillel, their situation was now more hopeless still, for even if they somehow managed to catch the party of man-hunters, they would find themselves faced with odds of at least a dozen to one.

  “Get up,” Amram said.

  Zelikman looked up at him, his face blank, soot-streaked, filling with that unshakable weariness as rapidly as a staved-in hull fills with cold black sea.

  “Where is the point?” Zelikman said.

  “Here,” Amram said, drawing his dagger and holding it, as he had lately held it in the caravansary, less than the breadth of a finger from Zelikman's throat. “I would rather have your death on my conscience or, failing that, face a week's hard riding and a gang of armed bravos than suffer through a month or more of listening to your maunderings.”

  Zelikman considered the dagger and his partner's face and appeared seriously to weigh the three possibilities that Amram had just named. Then he held out his hand, and Amram dragged him to his feet.

  “Just when did you acquire a conscience?” Zelikman said.

  “A figure of speech. Which will it be?”

  Zelikman yanked the arrow out of the charred trunk and handed it with a shrug to Amram.

  “Only because I know how Hillel pines for me,” he said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ON THE SUBSTITUTION OF ONE ANGEL, AND ONE CAUSE, FOR ANOTHER

  All that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.

  He had failed as a farmer, a dealer in hides, a soldier, and now as a hunter of men, a trade he undertook on a misguided whim, riding as last-minute replacement for a more qualified killer whose career of violence ended in a tavern on the night before the hunting party set out from Atil to track down the last free survivor of Buljan's coup.

  The other f
ive manhunters who like Hanukkah had remained true to the cause-or at any rate to the gold- of their employer lay scattered around the ruin like the tumbled fragments of a colonnade. Among them were two of their erstwhile comrades, who had been turned by the haughty manner and readier gold of their prisoner and the promise of more gold to come. Distilled by the sun of two days, their stench was wafted tenderly in the direction of Hanukkah's nose by the beating wings of buzzards, which had arrived within hours of the slaughter, in their black finery, to feast.

  Beside him, nestled in the crook of his left arm, lay a skin in which remained a few swallows of clean water, which Hanukkah had been denying himself in the hour since dawn in the hope of hastening his demise. His belly wound had ceased to cause him much pain, which he took as a favorable sign that the angel had concluded whatever other business had been delaying him and was hastening even now to collect him. The recriminations that assailed Hanukkah through the first hours of his vigil were faded to a philosophical regret at the waste that attended all human ambition. It was only his vain desire to gain the money he needed to purchase the freedom of his beloved Sarah, a whore in a Sturgeon Street brothel, that had led him to offer his sword in the murderous service of Buljan. Hanukkah had no quarrel with the old bek, and in fact had been inclined to view him as an able leader, worthy of loyalty and tribute. He had been an unwilling participant in the raid on the stronghold in Azerbaijan, and in fact had spent the hour it endured cowering under a hay wagon at the back of a stable.

  Though only a week earlier the idea would have struck him as heresy, as he lay waiting to become carrion he considered that plump and vivacious Sarah was perhaps unworthy of his suffering and death, when after all, she chewed with her mouth open and her wind, when she had been consuming too much milk, gave off an unsettling odor of brimstone.

  But when he remarked the travelers, a giant African and a black-hatted scarecrow crowded onto the broad back of a massive spotted horse that looked to be on the verge of collapse, Hanukkah forgot his resolve and took a long warm swig from his water skin. The sight of living beings who were not, presumably, eaters of dead flesh awoke a fresh desire in Hanukkah, despite the wound to his belly, to prolong his existence just a little while longer, and perhaps to see his plump Sarah once more.

  “Friends,” he called in Arabic, his voice a raucous barking.

  The African reined in the tottering horse with its flecked lips and wild eye, and the travelers dismounted, the African with a weary grace and no expression, the scarecrow with grimaces and a show of soreness in the underparts. The big man unsaddled the horse, peeled away the blanket and led the spotted stallion from the slaughtered men and scavenger birds to a blotch of patchy grass in the unpersuasive shade of a gnarled juniper. There was a thin trickle of fresh water a few rods beyond the tree, and the horse lay down its ears and snorted, once, scenting it. The African patted the horse's neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant's back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality

  The behavior of the second man was even more troubling, because as the Frank hobbled over to the ruined column where Hanukkah lay with his hand keeping his life in his body, he neither avoided nor ignored the sight of the carnage all around him but appeared actively to study it, stopping now and then to crouch beside a body and examine its situation and the nature of its wounds. At last he reached Hanukkah and regarded him with pale, almost colorless blue eyes that were shadowed by the wide brim of his black hat. Eyes as clear and cold as the doom they seemed inclined to pronounce on Hanukkah.

  “Are you the angel of death?”

  “Even worse, fatty,” the pale stranger said. “I'm the angel of fools.”

  He held Hanukkah's right hand and tried to pull it from the sword wound. As cold as his gaze appeared, his touch and his manner had something reassuring about them, and Hanukkah made no effort to resist. But he had been clutching his belly for so long with such force that his elbow would not unbend, and his hand was cemented in place by congealed blood.

  “Don't go anywhere,” the Frank said, and though it seemed impossible in this hostile place that fortune had chosen as the site of Hanukkah's death, he seemed to intend it as the sort of joke whose purpose was not to amuse, for there was nothing very amusing about it, but rather to reassure by suggesting that there remained to Hanukkah life enough to spare a little of it in polite pretending.

  “You're a physician,” Hanukkah realized, and in answer the Frank stood up, went to the saddlebags where the giant had dropped them, brought out a large leather drawstring pouch and a roll of canvas tied with ribbon and carried them back among the dead men to his patient. He unrolled the canvas, revealing a number of small steel implements whose function Hanukkah preferred not to imagine, and then unknotted the leather thong of the pouch. In the meantime, the black giant had begun his own survey of the campground, where three nights earlier Hanukkah and his fellows had shared a roast goat and a looted cask of sharab, and some fool had made the mistake of removing the gag from the stripling's mouth to see if, plied with drink, he might say or do something amusing. The African paid heed not just to the corpses but also to the situation of trees, rock and roadway, the footprints in the dust, the position of the sun in the sky. Looking at him, Hanukkah could not imagine how a man could differ more from the pale, fair scarecrow, but when the African came to stand beside his partner his eyes held an identical certainty of knowing what little there was of interest to know about Hanukkah, a paltry fatal handful of facts.

  “Open,” the Frank said. He held out a small pipe, the color of old bone, its bowl filled with a nasty-looking brown mixture, and when Hanukkah parted his cracked lips, the Frank struck a flint to the bowl of the pipe and encouraged Hanukkah to draw the thick, honeyed smoke into his lungs. Hanukkah coughed, and then drew again, and it was not long before he was aware of being filled, in rippling drizzles, by a stream of amber honey poured through his mouth and neck into the bottle of his soul. The scarecrow took hold of his arm again and slipped it from his belly like the loosened string of a robe.

  When Hanukkah came to himself he was seated, slumped, on the back of his own horse, with a burning sensation in his midsection and his arms around the waist of the man who had saved his life and who was now engaged in an argument, in an unknown language, with the African on his spotted Parthian. The sun had dipped behind the slope of the mountain along whose eastern skirt ran the road that led, hugging the southeast littoral of the Khazar Sea, from Azerbaijan to Atil. The air was crisp, the light wistful and the smell of the Frankish physician abominable, and Hanukkah knew that he was going to live.

  “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 busin
ess, 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”