Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

For two days and nights, since rumors first stole across the bridge with whispers of five hundred rebel Arsiyah put to death in the yard of the Qomr, the fugitive partners had been trapped by riot and counterriot with fifteen whores, male and female, among them Hanukkah's beloved Sarah; the procuress Celestial Hind, supposedly a bastard half-sister of the kagan; a cat; a weasel; and an ill-tempered macaque called For-tunatus, a name that delighted Amram, being “Zelik-man” put into Latin.

“He won't drink,” Flower of Life observed.

She was a slave who claimed to originate among a wandering eastern people skilled at chiromancy called the Atsingani, a claim that Amram rather doubted since he had never heard of the Atsingani and he could not believe that any race that produced such fine-looking women could long escape the notice of the world.

“He prefers his pipe.”

“He will not sport with the girls.”

“Never.”

“Nor with the boys.”

“No. Just count yourself fortunate,” Amram said, “that he has yet to regale you with accounts of the horrors he has seen wrought by pox on the organs of love.”

“Then tell me,” she said, sitting up now to get a better look at Zelikman where he sat curled into himself on the window ledge, turning the hat over and over in his hands, studying the legend of embroidered vines as if it contained the answer to a riddle. “What is the matter with the man?”

“He feels remorse. He is sad.”

She thought it over and rejected it with a shake of her long head.

“I still say he is in love, and maybe not with a hat.”

“Highly doubtful.”

“Are you sad? Filled with remorse?”

“I've lost the knack,” Amram said. This was far from the truth and yet not entirely a lie. In the back garden, amid the boxwood and blackberry and half-wild grape vines, the splintered, staved-in remains of a teamster's cart, left over from the days when this had been the residence of Georgian wool factors, bore witness to the fury with which Amram and Mother-Defiler had greeted the news of the massacred men in the Qomr. But that was two days ago. He didn't want to think about the murdered troops anymore, or the big-mouthed stripling of a girl who had been their general. So he had failed to protect Filaq, and to keep his word to the poor dead mahout with his one eye and his ancient sword and his ever-suitable sneer. Amram had been living with the knowledge of failure all his adult life, since the day his daughter went down to the reeds of the river Birbir with a basket of laundry and never returned. That was Dinah's fortune. And what befell Filaq was Filaq's fortune, as failure was his; failure, and a hard-won knowledge of the immutability of Fortune itself The hell with it. He drew back Flower of Life's hair from her cheek. “But I might be sad when I have to leave your arms.”

“Oh, ho. Very fine. But you can't leave.” “Not with a company at every city gate.” “Where would you go if you could leave?” Amram thought it over and felt a seam open onto a void whose terrible content was the possibility that there was nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family

“It doesn't matter where you go, does it, not when you have a hat like that,” Amram said, wincing at the clank of false cheer in his tone. “Isn't that right, Zelikman?” In fact even if he were not a fugitive from the bek, and the streets not plied by creaking wagons bearing away the bodies of rioters and civil guards, Amram might have been content to remain as he was for a week or a month, in the company of Flower of Life, who had treated his wounds and relieved his sundry appetites, and sung him violent ballads in strange keys, all for a reasonable fee. “Give that boy a handsome bonnet and a good horse and he will make his bed on a grill over the Adversary's own cook-fire, won't you, friend?”

Zelikman said nothing for a long time, long enough that Amram lay back on the figured carpet, stretched out with his head in the lap of Flower of Life and closed his eyes, and nearly forgot that he had even asked a question.

Zelikman tossed the hat to the floor as if it, too, had been holed through the crown by a thrown dagger.

“It's only a hat,” he said at last, his voice lost in a gloom as dense and chill as those that afflicted his homeland.

Amram sat up, alarmed, resigned and irritated all at once, knowing that there was a correct thing to be done and that they must now do it, if only to put Zelikman out of his misery once and for all.

“All right,” he said, “all right, damn you to hell, Zelikman, we'll go after her.”

At this moment there was a pounding on the heavy oak door downstairs, and a commotion among the girls and boys on the second floor where trade was conducted, and then they heard the querulous voice of the procuress. Amram reached for his sword. His partner slid from the window ledge and grabbed the old curved shank with which Hanukkah had armed him, Zelikman having left Lancet in the care of the Radanites at the hostel when he set off four days ago to try to purchase Amram's freedom. Amram considered a leap through the window, into the garden, but in the end his curiosity won and he crept down the stairs to the lower landing.

Two soldiers in armor stood in the hall, settling with the procuress the fate of a slim, pale girl in a thin wrapper of muslin, all elbows and knees, her close-cropped hair the red of a sorrel horse. Her head hung down and her shoulders were hunched, her arms bound at the wrists with a length of silk cord. She stared at the floor while terms were contracted for her indenture to the House of Princess Celestial Hind on Sturgeon Street, with a percentage to be paid every month in gold dirhams to a certain gentleman whose name need not be mentioned and who, let it be known, had recovered swiftly from his injury, the severity of which rumor had greatly exaggerated.

As soon as the door was bolted behind the soldiers, whom the procuress had encouraged to depart with the offer of a gratis hour when they came off duty in the company of the best fare her poor house could offer, Zelikman pressed past Amram and hurried to the girl. He stood hesitating for an instant, looking her up and down, taking in her dull gaze and broken stance, and though the hesitation was not unexpected it so lacked his partner's usual bright detachment, it brimmed so with pity and regret, that Amram had to look away Then Zelikman used the knife to cut the silk cord, put his arm around her shoulders, ignoring the flinch from the girl's arms, and asked if she thought she could walk up two flights of stairs to a room that was quiet and where, after he had cared for her, she could be alone, or in company, whichever she preferred.

She did not reply at first and seemed not to have heard or understood, and for a moment Amram feared that her soul had been damaged in some irreparable way But then she raised her head, cheeks bearing the swollen imprint of the hand of a man, and saw Zelik-man and Amram and the monkey and the whores all staring at her like a prodigy fallen from a cloud and open to a number of dire interpretations. She grabbed at Zelikman's sheltering arm as if to push it away then changed her mind and took hold of his hand, and nodded.

“I need you to put me back together,” she said. “I have a man to kill.”

He led her up the stairs by the hand and Amram followed, with Flower of Life carrying a basin of hot water and some slashed bedsheets on a battered tin tray. Amram spread the billowing cloak over the whore's pallet and they laid the girl down. Zelikman suggested that her treatment might require removing her shift and the girl Filaq said in a burst of harsh Khazar that he should damn well do what he needed to do.