Gentlemen of the Road

by Michael Chabon

  At first light, around the time that the body of the kagan-a body that had already begun to manifest decidedly uncorpselike signs of movement-was being carried by an ill-assorted trio into a springhouse near a little-used gate of the Palace through which corpses and those who tended to them traditionally passed, the watch posted atop Qizl caught sight of a scattering of black seeds against the flickering gray of the southern horizon. At first the seeds drifted nearly motionless as milkweed pouf but as they blew nearer they cut long, slow grooves in the water. They grew wings and sprouted brazen necks that seemed to reach devouring toward Atil, like eels contending from a tidepool for a castoff morsel on a rock. The ships’ sails bellied and swung about on the spars as they drove against the north wind, cutting a zigzag course. By the third hour, when the breathless messenger at last found the bek and transmitted the sealed order, two dozen long ships were rounding the headland on whose summit Buljan stood in the falling snow, waiting to see if-as every other soul on Qizl, along the river, watching from the walls of the city hoped-the Northmen meant to sail on. News of the death of the kagan had sped across the city after the hoisting of the rune flag, accompanied in an imperial style by a retinue of rumors that the Rus, the Muslims or the bek himself were responsible.

  Buljan was trying to decide just what it was that he hoped for as he tore open the seal on the final command of Zachariah. He conned the document without displaying interest or distress. He turned to the javshi-gar who stood by his side, a captain of archers in a scale-mail coat.

  “Signal the ships,” he told the javshigar, motioning to a scribe for a tablet and stylus. “I want to parley with Ragnar, if he is still in command of them.” With the stylus and with an urgency that betrayed his calm expression he pressed a series of runes into the wax of the tablet. “If not, then whoever keeps those yellow dogs leashed.” He handed the tablet back to the scribe and told him, “Take this to the bekun.” Then he mounted his horse and sent it at a canter down the hill toward the Caspian wharfs.

  As the remnant of that giant fleet-launched at midsummer from the viks of the North to fatten, with Buljan's full consent and encouragement, on the Muhammadan cities of southern Khazaria-returned to the mouth of the river they called Volga, the Northmen richer and covered in glory but their ranks thinned by plague and battle and an appalling toll of alcoholism, the army of Khazaria was completing its long homeward tramp to Atil. Having reduced three Crimean cities and brought their populations back under the candelabrum flag, the Khazar army found itself obliged to abandon its campaign in the rebellious Crimea, summoned home by an urgent appeal from Buljan a Muhammadan uprising, northern cities swooning like maidens at the feet of a boy general and his army of peasants. Though scouts had since brought back reports of the rebellion's collapse, the total absence of any trace of disturbance surprised the tarkhan of the Crimean force now as he urged his horse down from the hills along the road that ran east toward the city. All around Atil lay only a great silent waste, dotted with silver marsh and green scrub and devoid of men or horses. He could see plumes of smoke rising up from the Khazaran side that must be remnant of the rioting that his scouts had reported, but they were few and thin. Unless the rioters themselves had gained control of and pacified Atil, there would be little employment for his troops here, and their frantic homeward march across a hundred leagues of forest and desert and steppe a fruitless journey, futile at either end. The falling snow, twisting in lazy helices to settle in streaks and patches on the plain, seemed both to embody and to enhance the pointlessness of the haste and fury with which he had driven his troops over the last week. Politics, cowardice and the corrupt broils of leadership had spoiled the campaign, and the tarkhan with the romantic pessimism of old veterans felt the missed opportunity, in his bones, as one that would never again present itself to the Khazars. There was no hope for an empire that lost the will to prosecute the grand and awful business of adventure.

  His melancholy reflections were interrupted by the return of his aide-de-camp, his broad Bulgar face tight with suppressed information, from a quick trip up to the front of the column.

  “A caravan,” the Bulgar said. “Radanite, by the look of them.”

  A quarter of a league on, where the road finally abandoned the hills for the plain of Atil, a modest train of horses and wagons became entangled with the main body of the Crimean force, and the tarkhan dismounted and approached the lead Radanite wagon, a monstrous thing of heavy timber with tenoned wheels nearly as tall as the tarkhan drawn by two teams of massive, humped oxen, shaggy as wisents. It was driven by a young trader with a foolish way of smiling. On one side of him sat a rawhide-faced old mummy, thin and dark, with eyes as charitable as an eagle's. On the other side of the witless-looking driver a huge, fat Radanite with an unaccountably regal bearing beamed down, his pudding of a face so suffused with smugness or pleasure that the tarkhan immediately suspected the caravan of smuggling, or duty evasion, then dismissed the suspicion, knowing that none of their ilk would ever make such an arrant display of mercantile subterfuge. Next it struck him that this cheerful imperiousness might itself be a kind of subterfuge, and he ordered the contents of the wagon unloaded and checked against the bills of lading and the tax warrants from the customs house of Atil.

  “Your excellency will naturally find that all of our documents are in order,” the old mummy said. “Though obtaining them at all was a considerable feat, given the turmoil that prevails in the Palace this morning.”

  Thus the tar khan and his army learned of the death of the kagan. He ordered his troops to dismount and face the Palace, and there was a loud rush as of wind over thick grasses as they knelt in the road, their armor creaking, and prostrated themselves on the dense, half-frozen ground.

  “Very sad,” said the great fat Radanite, giving his cheeks a rueful shake. “Tragic, really”

  The tarkhan gave the order for a halt while he had a fire built and sat the merchants around it. He questioned them at length and in his mounting urgency and confusion failed, perhaps, to remark that his interlocutors were offering information, speculation and unfounded hearsay in a style that ill befitted and was hardly characteristic of Radanites. The snowflakes fell into the fire with an endless chorus of derisive hissing, and as the snow settled on the soldiers and the wagons and the rattling leaves of the boxwood trees, and as the Radanites concluded their testimony to the perfidy and outrages committed by the stooge and lackey Bul-jan, there presented itself to the tarkhan the odious question of what he ought to do next. Though he despised and misunderstood politics he was accustomed to wading through it as, when pressing an attack, through the slick of gore underfoot. Word of the massacre of the Arsiyah was already passing in half-whispers through his army, among whom there were many Muhammadan troopers. Treachery, regicide, rebellion; and a week's march behind him a Crimean city left ripe and unchastened. And meanwhile this great wisent of a Radanite blandly suggesting, with all due respect, and as if this were anything but the most unwelcome observation in the history of generalship, that the future of the kaganate might well lie in his capable hands.

  “Who is that?” said the old mummy, rising slowly to his feet. The tarkhan turned and saw three riders coming up the road from the city. One was a young man, dressed in thick leggings, quilted Greek tunic and stained leather armor of the sort worn by the Rus, but with the face and the unmistakable green eyes of a Khazar. The others were a giant black man and a thin pale fellow, dressed in tattered oddments of armor and rag. The big one's eyes conducted what the general recognized as a professional assessment of their size, arms and mettle without betraying any hint of his conclusions, and the thin one bothered only to look politely scornful as if he found the whole idea of armies a bore. The young one rode right up to the tarkhan, whose hand went to his sword. The green eyes stirred a memory in the tarkhan, of the smell of linden flowers maddening the twilight on the eve of the Battle of Balanjar, in a meadow above a deep gorge from which there issued the distant boom of a riv
er, and of the green-eyed bek who had inspired his commanders that night with a song of the hero Dede Korkut. He let go of the hilt of his sword.

  “You know me,” said the young man.

  “I know you,” the tarkhan said, not quite convinced.

  “You held me on your knee, Chorpan,” the young man said. “You told me a story about my namesake, Alp Er, and the wolf You gave me a bow of horn, yes? Now I and my friends have slipped the chains that bound us to the rowing benches of the Rus, and come up from the river to find you.”

  “To what end?”

  “To assume command of this army,” said the young man, “and avenge all the crimes that Buljan has committed.”

  The general heard something in this Alp's voice that he did not fully credit, and saw something in the face that he wanted to believe. He turned from the familiar gaze of the young man to a consideration of his soldiers, who had risen to their feet and stood watching the scene between their general and a beardless stripling with studied and sullen disinterest. Perhaps their desire to live another day outweighed their thirst for battle, but if you added to the latter their abhorrence of doing nothing at all, the balance tipped. For his part he wanted nothing more than to exercise his heart and right arm and leave all questions of credit and belief, of consideration and desire, to others who would do with them what they would, whether men died or generals or empires.

  “I confess that I'm intrigued by your proposition, not to mention your audacity,” the tarkhan said. “But I feel constrained to point out that in fact it was a bow of ash wood, not horn.”

  The young man blinked. The thin, pale rider coughed into his fist, and tried not quite successfully to conceal his amusement. The giant's horse bumped as if by chance against the horse of the green-eyed young man, jarring him out of his hesitation.

  “My mistake,” said the stripling.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ON FOLLOWING THE ROAD TO ONE'S DESTINY, WITH THE USUAL INTRUSIONS OF VIOLENCE AND GRACE

  For half a day the captain of archers-a javshigar in the Army of the Khazar with fifteen years of service to the candelabrum flag-had suffered, shifting from foot to foot, pulling now at his mustache, now at the fingers of his glove, as the warrior king to whom he had sworn loyalty by oaths so ancient and binding they resisted even the power of the autumnal Disavowal haggled and pleaded for the safety of the house of Bul-jan with a barbarous swaggering Rus butcher whom the vicissitudes of the plunderous life had left only half a face.

  Then as in ages to come it was a point of contention whether the Northmen were better endowed by their greedy and termagant gods for commerce or slaughter, but in the judgment of the captain of archers these were complementary gifts. Hour after hour the two men dickered, the bek with his wife at his side, his children squalling or staring in dumb wonder at the Rus. The Northmen sprawled along the wharf like white mountains in bloodstained tunics, encouraging Ragnar Half-Face to turn the greasy Khazar upside down by the ankles and shake him until every last dirham fell out of his pockets. Around them long trains of Buljan's slaves staggered down from the Qomr with armloads and sacks of gold and silver plate, gemstones and ivory silks and spices and perfumed wood, making up the price of passage for Buljan and his household. The Rus rowed the booty out to their ships and then rowed back again blowing and grinning and hungry for more. The captain of archers fidgeted and coughed and rolled his eyes at his men, as if such cupidity and dishonor were an inevitable but minor aspect of the human predicament akin to sharptonguedness in a wife, but felt a hot needle of outrage sounding his belly He prayed to his own God of Outrage, Iehovah, to send a righteous thunderbolt to strike the half-leering Rus chieftain down or, at the very least, to satisfy the bastard, and once and for all rid Khazaria of the stain of cowardice and the smell of the Northmen and of the ruinous usurper Buljan. But when the captain saw them bringing down the new elephant and felt the thrill of dismay running through all the stout Khazar archers of his company, he felt the insufficiency of prayer to the relief of grievous outrage. He settled his armored cap more firmly on his head, and cleared his throat, and with a hand on the hilt of his Damascene poniard strode heels knocking against the dock over to the side of the man who in a show of bankrupt bravery had proclaimed himself bek, and lowering his eyes, his voice clear but his manner as yet tinged with the long habit of obedience, said, “I regret, honored Buljan, that I must place you under arrest.”

  At once all the Northmen got up and unsheathed their blades or spoke eager promises to their axes. There were at least two hundred of them, and though rumor had described them as flux-ridden and liver-sore and spent, they were now in possession of a kingly treasure, with the promise of an elephant and a chance of bloodshed, and looking fresher and gayer by the instant. The archer had his twenty men, their shooting skill blunted at close range, their daggers inadequate. High up on the walls of the city another company of archers looked down, fine marksmen all and as prone to outrage at the scandal of the looting of the elephant, but their grasp of the situation at a bowshot was no doubt limited. Meanwhile, the bek's personal bodyguards, thick-skulled glowering Colchians, owned impenetrable minds and loyalty only to their paymaster.

  “Must you,” Buljan said in a distracted way, watching the magnificent old animal swing down the ramp with its womanly gait, ringing like gongs the sawed planks each as thick as a strong man's wrist. When the captain had last seen the beast she was caparisoned and painted like a whore at carnival, but now she came wearing nothing but the rich gray terrain of her hide, scarred and dignified and so replete with power in the shifting under the skin of her monstrous musculature that she seemed to the captain to embody the antiquity and might of the kaganate-and in her imminent journey from the embankment to the barge that stood waiting to tow her up the river to the home of the Northmen, where she would surely perish in the cold and the dark, that empire's passing. “I wonder how?”

  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.