Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon

  He waited until he saw a small lizard emerge from a fissure in the rock and creep toward a narrow medallion of sunlight on the granite. Then he led Hillel up over the rise again and back down into the valley, where the tents had been struck and the horses rounded up and saddled and the troops moved out north along the road. Zelikman followed the track northward for five leagues or more and then came to a barren place where another road branched away running northeast toward the shore of the Caspian sea. A small mound of stones marked the presence in this place, at one time if not today, of some ancient god of the crossroads. If you kept on to the north you would come, Hanukkah had told them, to Atil, the Khazar capital, at the mouth of a river that was also called Atil, though some called it Volga. A fresh trail of horse dung and hoof prints marked the northeast road; the Arsiyah were bound for the Caspian shore.

  He followed them east for two days, in a steady downpour most of the way, through flooded gorges and spattering mud. The Arsiyah drove themselves hard, taking brief rest, lighting no fires, and after a day of bitter pursuit Zelikman understood the cause of their desperation: they were rushing to the relief of a regiment or a town that they feared might already be lost. Near dawn of the third day he caught his first whiff of the sea and narrowed the distance between himself and the Muhammadan troops until he could see the thongs of cloth-of-gold that enlaced their black queues, the splashes of mud on their leggings. As he came up a rise, he smelled smoke, and half a breath later he saw it, boiling and black. A thick, greasy smell like that which had hung over the stronghold in Azerbaijan. It was the smell of burning animals.

  Hillel nickered and stepped sideways, and Zelik-man mocked him tenderly for his cowardice. He swung down from the saddle and crept up to the top of the rise and trained the Persian glass on the ruination of a walled town built beside a broad estuary, flat roofs and minarets and a great white mosque giving up their matter and form to heaven in black gas and thick flakes of ash. Through the wooden gates, long strings of men and women and animals knotted and coiled as the townspeople abandoned their lives.

  Along the waterfront, burned ships broke slowly into black pieces, and the slant sails of dhows caught fire. Standing off beyond the shallows, dragon prows surveyed the despoiling of the walled town. Fair-haired Northmen in jerseys of barbarous red poled out to their ships on wide barges heavy-laden with bales and casks, with kegs and sacks and huddled women, and handed them up to their fellows on the decks, and poled back to the wharves again for more. The red-shirted men swarmed in the streets, and a dozen of them were at work with irons, prying loose the golden sheeting that clad the domes and minaret spires of the great mosque. They worked quickly and without their usual piling up of booty on the shore for the elaborate rites of their thievish creed, probably because some lookout not distracted by rape or robbery had chanced to gaze down from the shattered walls of the city and see the company of horsemen charging hard for the town gates.

  There was a turbulence around those gates now as, driving out the survivors, bright-shirted men put their shoulders to the oak beams and sealed off the living from the dead, the loot from the looted, and bought themselves the time they would need, or so they hoped, to get away. Zelikman had observed firsthand the thievery of Northmen, whom the people of this shore called “the Rus,” and what he had not witnessed he had learned from Amram, who had served alongside blond giants in the armies of the emperor. They were insane with bravery and fools for battle, but like men from one end of the world to the other, they were slaves to their appetites and to their love of treasure, and with their decks piled high with gold, fresh meat and casks of Georgian wine, the Northmen must as a matter of highest principle choose profitable retreat over the doubtful glories of combat.

  As they rode to relieve the town, the advance riders of the Arsiyah became entangled, as the Rus had doubtless planned it, in skeins of fugitives with their bundles and their animals. In the time it took the advance guard, plunging and kicking and laying about them with the blunt ends of their lances, to clear a path, the remainder of the company caught up. Through the Persian eyeglass Zelikman could clearly make out, in the midst of the surging horsemen, Amram and the youth, mounted together, something stiff in Amram's carriage betraying to Zelikman's eye that his hands were probably bound, and beside them Hanukkah slouched on the back of a desert ass. There was a delay as orders were given and lamentations heard and prayers offered, and then half the company was divided in two and sent to flank the walls of the city and gain the river mouth, where even now a lone barge set out toward the long ships with the last great fistful of plunder, poled with wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the rise, that the Rus had abandoned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they had perfected, their conquest of the city

  The troopers set about scaling the towers that flanked the gate, but they could not gain a toehold in the masonry, and so they improvised a harness from rope and lashed a half-dozen horses together and set the team to work pulling at an iron hasp in the left-hand door. This proved to be futile as well, and men were sent to pile kindling at the doors’ base. Then Amram leapt from the horse and held out his arms, and his bonds were cut. He took hold of the rope that still bound the horses to the gate and, with a slap on the hindquarters of the biggest animal, put his own back into the effort. Zelikman could hear the singing of the rope and the low oaken moaning of the gate, followed a moment later by an echoing bang like the crack of an immense whip. The doors fell open, and with ululating cheers the riders poured into the city they had arrived at too late to save. The last Northmen hauled themselves, along with their booty, onto the only ship that had not yet set sail just as the first Arsiyah rode out onto the burning wharfs. Under the weight of horses and armor the wharfs collapsed, throwing up a spectacular cloud of vapor and sparks.

  Zelikman lowered the eyeglass, returned it to its doeskin pouch and then summoned Hillel and drove him at a gallop down to the town. The Arsiyah had seen him only by moonlight, with his hat lowered and his cloak flying. And if prior circumstance had inclined them to view him as an enemy-through soldierly habit, and because of his undeniable theft of the horse they had stolen from those who had stolen it from Ze-likman, who had stolen it from a thief-the Arsiyah would now be in need of him, with his salves and his ointments and his willingness to stoop to the lowly work of the surgeon.

  In the first group of refugees he fell among he found a dozen burned, punctured, battered and maimed, bleeding from raw and tumultuous wounds. Rumor of the miraculous advent of a white-skinned barber soon traveled all the way to the mouth of the river and back, so that to ride the seven rods that lay between him and the city gates required the remainder of the daylight, the better part of his pharmakon and his entire stock of fine silken thread.

  He entered the city caked in blood, hungry and hollowed out, having vomited twice in the course of the day in reaction to the odors emitted by particularly vile wounds, his eyes stung by smoke, the wailing of babies haunting his ears. He sat his horse, hardly aware of the crackling fires, the barren doorsteps and the empty holes of housefronts, the carrion birds, the soldiers who gaped at him as he passed, trusting Hillel to search out and choose the street or alley that would lead to Amram. They passed into a narrow defile flanked by high houses that reached out for one another as they rose overhead until they were parted only by a cool dark band of twilight. The horse's shoeless hooves struck the paving stones with a knock like iron on bones, and then they emerged into a broad square, nearly as spacious as the piazza at Ravenna, and there on the wide steps of the despoiled mosque, one of whose minarets stood blackened and frail as a burned-out brand, with his arm around the slim shoulders of Filaq and a snoring Hanukkah curled at his feet, wearing the dice-playing smile of a man who could never be surprised, sat Amram.

  He rose a little unsteady to his feet. His face was stre
aked with ash, ash lay on his hair and scalp and his eyes were crazed with pink. He came wincing down the steps of the mosque as if his back or hips were bothering him, and he and Zelikman fell into each other's arms. From within the mosque came the broken voices of men at prayer. Amram stank of burned tallow, smoke and a hard day's labor, but underneath it all there was the familiar smell of him like sun on dusty sandstone. The sound of prayer found some kind of grateful echo in Zelikman's heart.

  “Late as usual,” Amram said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ON THE SEIZING OF A LOW MOMENT

  Hanukkah had been kicked awake by worse men, among them his own father, and so the curses he muttered, with his eyes shut and the honeyed hand of a dream still caressing his thigh, extended no further into history than the African's great-grandmother and confined themselves to envisioning her use by scabby Pecheneg stallions, making only glancing reference to the attentions of Bactrian camels. The true object of Hanukkah's spleen was wakefulness itself and the world that it would oblige his five outraged senses to certify. Hanukkah had soldiered in the army of an empire at peace and had thus dealt and witnessed death only in small batches, and he was shocked by the scale of slaughter he had seen today, wrought by foreign invaders against Khazar men and women like him- children of Kozar the son of Togarmah the son of Gomer the son of Japheth the son of Noah- “people of the felt walls,” burners of dung fires, sworn to the solitary god of the clear blue sky, whether that god was called Tengri, Jehovah or Allah. Most of all he was shocked by the pointless butchering of a stranded Rus, mute, dazed and trembling with some fever, white as a fish belly, who was dragged by the Arsiyah from his hiding place and slashed open like a gushing sack of wine. After that, Hanukkah curled up on the steps of the mosque and withdrew into sleep and his dream of Sarah, of the faint smell of burning sandalwood when she took his head into her lap, a dream from which Amram's toe now dislodged him with all the tenderness of a boathook

  Hanukkah sat up, and opened his eyes, and saw amid the smoke, dust devils and steady snow of ash a gaunt, bloodied figure, tottering, asleep on his feet, his black cloak crusted and dragging behind him, the air around him wavering in a madness of flies.

  At the sight of the Frank who had saved his life, Hanukkah felt something swell inside him, like the bladder that kept a sturgeon buoyant and swimming true in the dark of the Khazar Sea. Men could be broken more terribly than he had ever imagined; but they could also be repaired. Hope was a powerful cordial, and for a moment, with the burn of it at the back of Hanukkah's throat, he could only stand there, barking like a goose. Then he wiped his face on his filthy sleeve and hurried to Zelikman's side.

  “Sit,” he said, “please.”

  He sat the Frank down on the steps, pulled off his boots and fetched some water from a cistern. Some of the water he mixed with wine and passed to Zelik-man in an overturned steel helmet. The rest he used to wash the blood from Zelikman's hands and face and to bathe his feet. From this mild and voluntary act of self-abasement, from the routine business of cistern and dipper and the wringing of a cloth, from the Frank's pale feet with their surprisingly soft ankles, Hanukkah derived a measure of comfort and regained his spirits. He found a neglected passage behind the mosque that the Rus had disdained to plunder, and in a cellar there a pair of toothless old sisters who at extortionate prices provided him with cold porridge, some lentils and mint, a bag of apples and the butt of a lamb sausage. He gave the food to Zelikman, who ate, and drank, and rested, talking to the African in Greek or Latin.

  The subject of their conversation appeared to be Filaq, who sat slumped on the steps of the mosque with his chin in his hands, wearing a mask of tear streaks and ash. The stripling had scarcely moved in the hours since the Arsiyah mercenaries had paroled their prisoners to shift for themselves, saying nothing at all for what struck Hanukkah as an abnormally long period of time. With his smudged cheeks and staring eyes he seemed younger than ever, a child with an empty belly too weary to sleep. He did not appear to notice when the Arsiyah at last came trudging out of the mosque and clattering down the steps around him, stooped as by time or a heavy load, their gait uncertain, their evening lifting of their voices toward far-off Mecca having done little to ease the painful knowledge of their failure to defend this Muhammadan town from destruction by the Northmen. They loitered in the square, cast down, aimless. Their commander was dead, drowned in the collapse of the wharves. The surviving captains could not come to agreement on whether they ought to pursue and punish the Rus or return to Atil and face condemnation, and possibly execution, by the bek for having disobeyed his direct order that no one interfere with or harass the Northmen in their “trading mission” among the peoples of the littoral. This order was accompanied by rumors that these same ambitious Northmen had backed the new bek in his coup; but an order it remained. Now the Arsiyah, whose most prized asset as with all mercenary elites was not their skill at arms and horsemanship or fearsome reputation but the stainless banner of their loyalty, found themselves confronted by the dawning awareness that the only thing less forgivable than a mutiny was a mutiny that failed.

  “They will go south, to Derbent,” said the first captain, a florid, gaunt man bleeding from a dozen cuts, naming the next great Muslim town on the littoral. “We must anticipate them there.”

  His fellow captain, stout and languid of manner, pointed out the unlikeliness of their arriving at Derbent in time or force enough to stop the Northmen, who had the advantage of a prevailing north wind, and then by way of epilogue composed on the spot an unfavorable judgment on the gaunt captain's intelligence in even offering such a futile suggestion. The two officers were separated by their men only long enough to permit a general exchange of insults that soon devolved into a melee. In the course of the fighting, the lean captain ran onto the sword point of the stocky one and added his own life to the day's grim total and to the slick, rank slurry of blood and dust that filmed the square.

  A shrill horseman's whistle split the air, and the soldiers abandoned the violence of their grief and turned to listen to the words of a trooper who had stayed out of the fracas, a wiry, bowlegged veteran nearly as grizzled as Amram, one of those men of no great rank or bravery who by virtue of heartlessness, opportunism and a long streak of luck outlasted all their fellows and so ranked as secret commanders of their troops. When this old veteran had the ears of his comrades, he explained, with patience and regret, and with Hanukkah keeping up a whispered translation into Arabic for the benefit of Amram and Zelikman, that they must now consider their company disbanded and, each man taking a share of water and food and a horse, scatter to the winds and the mountains, like drops of mercury on a rumpled carpet. In Hanukkah's view there was merit in this suggestion, but it was so greatly outweighed by shame and ignominy that a number of Arsiyah, unable to refute the old veteran's wisdom, sat down in the shadow of the mosque and cried.

  The spectacle of weeping cavalrymen seemed to have a stimulating effect on Filaq. He rose to his feet, nose wrinkled as if in disgust, fists balled at his sides, and called for the men's attention. In his thin and reedy voice, he harangued the troopers in terms that made the most hardened soldiers among them flush, while those who had been lamenting fell silent. One or two sniggered at the youth's use of a particularly vile Bulgar epithet and smiled at each other under lowered brows.

  “What does he say?” Zelikman asked Hanukkah

  “He says,” Hanukkah said in a whisper, “that he has a proposition to make, but it is to be heard only by men in full possession of their manhood, and not by a mob of blubbering grandmothers who would spare the Northmen the trouble of gelding them by performing that service upon themselves.”

  “What proposition?”

  “I can only imagine,” Hanukkah said, “having sampled his wares in that line a week ago, sitting around the fire with my fellow gentlemen of the road.”

  But now that Filaq had the attention of the soldiers, he seemed to lose his nerve or his taste for handin
g out abuse, and wavered, blinking and swallowing, as if the thread of his own argument eluded him. Amram glanced at Hanukkah, then rubbing his chin contemplated the soldiery, who stood in the square gazing down at their bloody buskins like farmhands awaiting the lash. In one of their Western tongues Amram put a solemn question to Zelikman. Its import appeared to consist in assessing his partner's readiness for some hard business whose profit was outweighed by its impracticability. Zelikman's face expressed first grave reservation and then utter lack of interest. Amram went to Filaq and took up a place just behind and to the right of him.

  “Go on,” Amram told him, in passable Khazari, giving him a gentle push. “Do it.”

  Filaq pushed back, the expression on his face wondering and doubtful, reluctant and eager, returned for an instant to childishness.

  “It isn't going to work,” he said.

  “Probably not,” Amram agreed. “It's a terrible idea. But it seems that nobody here has a better one.”

  Filaq nodded and climbed to the top step of the mosque. He ran the back of a hand across his forehead and stood looking down at the weary soldiers, searching for the words to wake them.

  “Do they know who he is?” Zelikman said. “Who his father was?”

  “They will now,” Hanukkah said.

  So Filaq told his story, turning fine phrases in the dialect of the palaces and gardens. He asked them first to remember the fair and temperate rule of his father, the late bek, of whom, he now revealed, he was the youngest son. At this there was a murmuring among the soldiers, and one of them said that indeed Filaq resembled very strongly the late bekun, whom the soldier had seen once during the festivities attending the Feast of Tabernacles in Atil.