Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

As he backed, feinting and thrusting with Lancet at the Arsiyah who surrounded him all of them wide awake now but not entirely free, as any of them would have been ready to attest, of dreamlike bafflement at the sight of a gaunt moonlit phantom who menaced them with an overgrown bloodletting fleam, feeling his way with the boot heel of his hind foot through the doubtful maze of unstrung tents and plunging horses that loomed at his back, Zelikman felt a sharp jab on the shoulder. He whirled to find that he had been bitten, with implicit reproof at his foolhardiness in trying to rescue Amram single-handedly from an entire company of heavily armed cavalrymen, by the bastard offspring of a mountain tarpan and an Arab dam whose bloodlines ran all the way back to one of Al Khamsa, the five mother mares of the Prophet's own stable.

Zelikman threw his arm around Hillel's neck and nodded to the soldiers, and murmuring a phrase in the horse-charming mother tongue of his Abyssinian partner urged Hillel to split the narrow gap between two huge men with lances who were just now bearing down on him. Then, displaying no grace whatsoever and suffering a painful encounter between his teeth and his tongue, Zelikman executed the difficult maneuver of mounting a horse at full gallop. To outside observers, of which thankfully there could be, in the darkness, on this desolate slope, very few, he must have looked as if he were trying not to mount Hillel's saddle so much as to perform some foul outrage upon his neck.

The grooms had been busy gathering in the scattered horses, and troopers were soon mounted and in pursuit of Hillel as he carried Zelikman back up the slope heading south. But while the Khazar horses, like Hillel, were sturdy and sure-footed and bred to the steep, rocky tracks, all heart and lung and back, with hooves so hard they required no shoes, they lacked speed and Hillel's ineffable Arabian humor: a demonic intelligence that lay somewhere between perversity and fire. By the time he gained the pass, the pursuers were far behind. Hillel chose his way down to the fold in the rock where Hanukkah's dray and Porphyrogene waited. Zelikman drew a slow breath that felt as if it might have been his first inhalation since the moment he had seen Amram charging bareback into the heart of the camp. As he breathed out, tears came to his eyes. He wept silently, after the custom of shamed and angry men, so that when the pursuit party came tumbling, pounding scrabbling down the trail, past the fold in which he and Hillel stood concealed, he could hear the creak and rattle of their leather armor with its scales of horn; and when the Arsiyah returned, just before daybreak, at the very hour when all of creation seemed to fall silent as if fighting off tears, Zelikman could hear the rumbling of the men's bellies and the grit in their eyelids and the hollowness of failure sounding in their chests.

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