Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

“The prisoner moves his vizier to the seventeenth square, my lord, and respectfully offers you the opportunity to concede the game.”

With a distinct thud, Buljan, blind, dissolved in an impenetrable night of rage, dropped the baby onto the rug. The little girl screamed, and the mother screamed, and the twins gazed at their father as if he had just burst into flame.

“His life is not for sale,” Buljan said. He picked up the baby and handed it to his wife without a glance. “But it will cost you nothing to see it spilled into the dust.”

Under the windows of the donjon, to the very spot in the courtyard on which previous beks had put up their harvest booths, a detachment of six well-armed guards escorted the African. He was stripped to the waist, with his hands lashed behind his striped and bleeding back, his eyes fixed steadily before him.

A dozen carpenters carried in sawed planks and stout posts, and with hammers, pegs and thongs quickly assembled a wide table onto whose top two large blocks of wood were fixed on either side of center. Four grooms led in the horses, harnessed as for plowing, and then the African was asked, with fitting tenderness, to lie on his back between the blocks, which were intended to hold his torso in place as the horses disjointed him and carried his limbs to the corners of the yard, but the blocks proved to have been set too close to admit the span of his great back.

“What an appallingly inefficient way to kill a man,” the Radanite said, standing beside Buljan on a terrace overlooking the yard.

“What's that?” Buljan said.

“His offense was great, I will allow,” the Radanite said. “But surely not so great as the bek would show himself to be in having the mercy to permit me, with every assurance that the African will be sold to an exacting and implacable master, to purchase him.”

One of the carpenters had fetched a crowbar and set about prying loose the blocks.

“And what do you imagine, Radanite, his offense to have been?”

“Rebellion. Insurrection.”

“But he is not a Khazar subject.” And Buljan smiled, knowing it was foolish but enjoying nonetheless the sensation of puzzling one of that enigmatic tribe. “How could he then rebel? No, those are not the grounds of his punishment.”

The Radanite watched as the African was introduced successfully between the blocks, on either side of his rib cage, and as a horse was tightly cinched, by the reins of its harness, to each of his ankles and wrists. The African's face remained impassive; he seemed already to have crossed into the world of his ancestors. But something about the procedure appeared to trouble the Radanite, and his attention seemed to be focused on a particular horse, a bandy-legged, shaggy freak of a tarpan with a prominent nose.

“He beat you at shatranj,” the Radanite said with gratifying wonder in his voice.

“Nonsense,” the bek said. “I never lose at shatranj.”

He turned to one of his guards and extended a gloved hand. The guard brought forward the African's ax, and the bek hefted it.

“What would you give me for this?” he said. “I am sure it would fetch a good price for you farther down the road. After I have used it to disembowel its former owner, I will make a present of it.” He turned it over and ran his fingers along the runes. “I wonder what they say”

“I can tell you that,” the Radanite said, and translating freely into surprisingly good Khazari he shoved Buljan with his shoulder and snatched the ax. He leapt onto the balustrade of the terrace and as Buljan regained his feet cried out a word that sounded like a name, cried out from the depths of his soul: “Hillel!”

The shaggy horse reared and beat a tattoo on the skull of the carpenter who was tying him to the African's right leg, tore loose and charged across the yard. Just before the Radanite leapt he turned to Buljan and frowned as if trying to make up his mind. A moment earlier it would have been hard for Buljan to conceive of an astonishment greater than that which he already felt, but it was nothing compared with his surprise when the Radanite grabbed his embroidered silk hat. Then he leapt into space.

He landed with a grunt of pain athwart the horse's back and drove toward the giant, who was already employing his freed leg to kick at the line that bound his right one. The Radanite described a wild circuit around the table, slashing the cords with the ax blade, knocking aside the carpenters with the butt of the handle. By the time Buljan had recovered wit enough to give the order to stop them, the African was mounted bareback on one of the other horses, reunited with his ax, and the Radanite, clutching the silken headache hat, had gotten hold of a pike. The riders circled each other for a moment and then turned their mounts and rode for the gate of the yard.

Buljan leapt over the side of the terrace now, pushed one of his guards from a horse and took off across the yard, calling in his confusion for a volley from the archers on the roof The troops who followed him shied and reined their horses in, and one of the black-fletched arrows lodged with a humming snap in Buljan's shoulder as he followed the African and the Radanite through the gate, along the ringing cobbles into the porter's hall, cool, dank, with sparks from the hooves of the African's mount lighting up the dimness.

When Buljan emerged into Fortress Street and the migraine blaze of day, just before he tumbled in a swoon from his horse, he remarked the fat little deserter he hired to hunt down the daughter of his predecessor, hopping alongside a mule with one foot caught in the stirrup. Buljan rose from the ground, reached over the top of his back and yanked out the arrow with a nauseous wet pop that sent him again to his knees.

After being dragged along Fortress Street, the fat little deserter managed to mount his mule and went after his confederates, whooping like an idiot, the false Radanite trailing the unraveling banner of his head wrap and waving the purloined hat in the air, the African slinging his ax across his back, alive, bound for the open steppe and the infinite endless tracks that crosshatched it.

“Wait,” said the bek of Khazaria, with a plaintive-ness that surprised him. “Wait, you bastards.”

“He is in love with a hat,” said Flower of Life, frowning at Zelikma n thro ugh the croo k of A mram's arm.

Amram sat propped on an elbow, on a cloak spread across the timbered floor of her cubicle, admiring her. Her skin was of a smokier hue but as dark as his, and if she was younger than Amram she was not quite young, and at any rate the world and all its sorrows were younger than Amram or so it felt to him, and when he studied the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth he said to himself that his wife, had she lived, might have come to bear such a face.

“If so,” Amram said, somewhat weary of the matter of Zelikman and hats, “it would not be the first time.”

It was the profoundest hour of the night, their third as inmates of Princess Celestial Hind's dosshouse, a converted wool factory fronting on an alley off Sturgeon Street, not far from the Caspian wharfs. Stars at the narrow window, cicadas in the boxwood of the garden, from some other part of the house the sobbing of a bowed rebab, at the far end of the garden a brokenhearted wife or mother wailing for a dead man in the street. The wind from the steppe took up and carried off like booty the stench of the burned city, burned horsehair and plaster, burned carpets, the burned timbers of the bridge that joined the Khazar town on the left bank to the town of Muslims and foreigners on the right.