Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

“Where will you go?” Hanukkah said.

“I am the great sage who suggested we try the road from the Black Sea to the Caucasus,” Zelikman said. “It's his turn to choose.”

“I could come with you,” Hanukkah said, pulling at his pudgy chin as if trying out the idea on himself

Zelikman reached over and patted him on the knee. “You have a woman to redeem,” he said.

“And no gold to redeem her with.”

“Come with me,” Zelikman said, and they wound down the crooked hall behind the common room, to a small chamber, hardly larger than a privy, in which Zelikman planned to spend the night, not willing to spoil his own melancholy or with it the pleasure of Amram. He opened one of his leather bags and took out a sack of dirhams mixed with gold scudi and Greek coin that represented about half the payment he had received for his services to the new bek of Khazaria, and handed it to Hanukkah.

“I doubt she's worth half that,” he said irritably “Now go away and leave me alone. I wish to sulk.”

Hanukkah embraced him and kissed him, his breath vinous and his emotion nettlesome to Zelikman, who sent the little bandit on his way with a kick in the seat of his breeches. Then Zelikman knelt on the floor beside his cot and passed an hour inventorying and consolidating his herbiary and pharmakon, thinking about his father, away in the stone and fog of Regensburg, and how he would interpret or respond to the abject, heartfelt, even florid letter of apology and recantation that the leathern old Radanite had extracted from Zelikman as payment for allowing first him and then the kagan to pose as one of them. When his gear was packed he took out his pipe and the last of his bhang. For a long time he sat, listening to the barking of dogs and to the sad fiddling of the rebab, thin and plaintive in the snowy air, with the flint and striker in his hand. He was about to light the pipe when he heard a footstep outside his door. He reached for Lancet but she slipped into the room before he could get his fingers around the hilt. She had come to him as a girl, in a long wool skirt and a wool coat, hood trimmed with spotted fur. There was snow on her eyelashes and on the fur trim and about her an iron smell of snow He stood, and they looked at each other, and then stepped quickly together as if stealing an embrace against the coming of an enemy or a watchful governess.

“I have never kissed a woman before,” he confessed to her when they parted again.

“A man?”

He shook his head.

“Now you have accomplished both at once,” she said. “Quite a feat.”

“I would invite you to share my bed,” Zelikman said. “But it is a poor one, and I fear that I would acquit myself very poorly in it.”

“My standard of comparison is so low,” she said. “The fact that I'm actually consenting to it may compensate for your absence of technique.”

“I understand,” he said.

They took off their clothes, and climbed under the thin blanket, and warmed their hands in the darkness at the little fire they made. He verified, too quickly at first, that she was indeed female in all her particulars, and both of them were contented, for the moment, with that.

“Will you go to Africa?” she asked him.

“Maybe,” Zelikman said. “Filaq, ride with us. With me. Follow the roads, see the kingdoms.” He took hold of her again, improving somewhat upon his first performance. She stroked his hair and ran her hand along the cheek that he had shaved smooth of its bogus Radanite beard.

“That isn't my true name, by the way,” she said. “Filaq.”

“Will you tell me your true name?”

“Only if you promise not to ask me to come with you,” she said.

“I promise.”

She paused, as if for effect, and then looked straight into his eyes.

“My name is Alp,” she said. “I am the bek and kagan of Khazaria.”

He was disappointed, but he felt the foolishness of that disappointment, and like a vial of tincture that had lost its volatility he put it aside.

“Oho,” he said. “Bek and kagan.”

“The current system has become unwieldy”

“Swindler!” Zelikman said, knowing as he kissed her that no one would ever touch her as a woman again. “Hustling a kingdom.”

In the morning when Zelikman woke she had gone, taking the knowledge of her true name with her. He went to rouse Amram, but his partner had already removed himself from the warm bed of Flower of Life and stood waiting in the yard, in a wolfskin cloak and a cloud of breath from the horses, stamping his feet, complaining of the chill in bones that were too old for love and for adventure and for dragging his African ass halfway around the world all on account of elephants.

“Do you want to stay?” Zelikman said, looking up at a high small window cut into the stone wall, where Flower of Life now leaned, chin in hand, her face giving nothing away

Amram swung up onto the back of Porphyrogene, and flicked the reins, and that was all the answer that he gave. And then they took the first road that led out of the city, unmindful of whether it turned east or south, their direction a question of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.