Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

Amram winced, and his lips moved a little in recitation of some Abyssinian charm intended to prevent the misfortune that had been named from coming into the world. Amram called himself a Jew, a son from the line of the Queen of Sheba when she lay, amid the hides of ibexes and leopards, with Solomon, David's son, but as far as Zelikman had ever been able to ascertain, Amram's only gods were those of fat luck and starveling misfortune. Nonetheless he entertained superstitions about ghosts and corpses, and only the profitability of the bogus duels persuaded him to risk attracting the regard of Death to the unusually protracted span of his life. The lean old Persian's little joke made Amram nervous, as did the prospect to Zelikman, for that matter, of being haunted by the giant black shade of his partner.

“What do you want, then, old cyclops?” Zelikman said, closing his shirt over the wound he had suffered, in the name of verisimilitude, during the fight. It stung painfully from the action of the ointment, a compound of wine, honey, barley mold and myrrh that Zelikman had been taught to formulate by his uncle Elkhanan, who in addition to being a rabbi and a great sage of the city of Regensburg had once served as physician to the court of Milan. The wound was not deep, but the specter of putrefaction terrified Zelikman in a way that the God of his fathers, despite strenuous efforts, had never quite managed to, and so he braved his pious uncle's ointment, though it made him irritable. “I don't like the sneer on your face.”

“I am not sneering, I swear to you,” the Persian said. “The errant tusk that spoilt my eye also cut the muscles of my cheek. I found myself endowed when it healed with this semblance of a contemptuous grin.” The disfigurement of his cheek grew more acute. “Though it serves for most occasions when I quit the company of elephants.”

“I have some training as a surgeon,” Zelikman said, drawing Lancet, the slender blade that had excited such amusement among the travelers at the caravansary, and sketching out possible lines and angles of incision a quarter-inch from the mahout's good cheek. Lancet was a queerer instrument than even the other man's elephant hook, Zelikman supposed, edge-less and sharp at its tip, stiff but balanced in the hand, useless for any martial purpose but the judicious skewering of organs. It had been forged to order by the same maker of instruments who supplied the rabbi-physicians of Zelikman's family with their scalpels and bloodletting fleams, in sly defiance of Frankish law, which forbade Jews to bear arms even in self-defense, even when an armed gang of ruffians dragged your mother and sister screaming from their kitchen and did rank violence to them in the street while you, a boy, were obliged to stand bladeless by. Violence, circumstance, the recklessness of the apostate and a chance meeting with an African soldier of fortune had driven Zelikman to hire himself out as a killer of men, and Amram had taught him to take pains with the work, but Zelikman was a healer by nature and heritage, and though it had begun as a black jest, he now prized Lancet most for the mercy of its accurate thrusts. “Perhaps I should trim the other side to match. Give you a smile that better reflects your contentment with the wonders of this world.”

Now it was the old mahout's turn to let a little joke make him nervous. He took a step away from Zelik-man.

“You saw the young one I travel with?” he said. “Filaq, come out. I call him Filaq, in Persian that's-

“Little elephant,” Amram said. He was nearly as gifted at languages as the contumelious myna.

“Yes. You don't see it now looking at this mess of bones, but the name suited him perfectly when he was young.”

From behind a mound of fresh hay stepped the stripling to whom Zelikman had consigned his hat just before the fight. Sullen-shouldered, thin at the wrists, freckled and green-eyed, wrapped in a bearskin too warm for the evening and too fine for a dusty caravansary stinking of pack animals and cheeses, the stripling had as yet no shadow on his chin or lip, but he stood nearly as tall as Zelikman, and from the rosiness of his complexion, the gloss of his close-cropped russet hair and a commingled look of shame and haughtiness in his eyes, the physician from Regensburg was able to infer fifteen or sixteen years of good food, clean linens and the expectation of having his wishes granted. In the gloom of night that had filled Zelikman's soul upon the destruction of his hat, which had cost him thirty ducats in the market at Ravenna, the hand of fortune lighted a slim taper. The stripling in the bearskin gave off an aroma, more powerful than that of horse dung or cheese or one-eyed Persians, of money

“Here is one whose safe delivery will pay better, I'll warrant, than your theatricals,” the mahout said.

“We don't stoop to ransom,” Amram said, no physician but a student all the same of men's corruptions. “Or truck with those that do so stoop.”

“But I have not stolen him.”

“And yet one sees at a glance,” Amram said, signaling to Zelikman by means of a slight inclination of his silver-tinged head that it was time to get Hillel saddled and be on their way to the clearing, half a league beyond the village, where they had arranged with the ostler to take payment for their show, “that he is not here willingly”

“Indeed he is not,” the mahout said in a tone of great weariness. “As he never tires of making clear to me. Three times since we left Atil that one has given me the slip.”

“Atil,” Zelikman said, and the little guttering flame burned steadier and brighter. “He is a Khazar?”

At the word “Khazar,” the stripling began to nod, slowly, and now hope flickered also in the peridot eyes. The stripling spoke a few words in a language that sounded like the speech of Turks and then astonished Zelikman by murmuring a dreamlike phrase in the holy tongue of the Jews. His barbaric accent rendered the words indecipherable, but they remained pregnant with longing, and in Zelikman they stirred a strong desire to see the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the Jewish yurts and pinnacles of Khazaria.

“Is there really such a place,” Zelikman asked the stripling, in the holy tongue, “where a Jew rules over other Jews as king?”

“What's that?” said the mahout sharply, alert to the stratagems and deceits of his young charge. “What is he saying?”

“We discuss the boy's suggestion that we kill you, cyclops, and conduct him back to Atil, where his family will reward us generously for his return,” Zelikman said, though of all the words spoken in the holy tongue by the stripling he in fact had recognized only one: home.

“I'd say that is unlikely,” said the old fighting man. “Not that he said such a thing, for he would say or do anything if it might mean a chance to fly home and seek a fool's revenge.” He reached for the ivory handle of his ankus and turned to the stripling. “Fool!” he barked, sounding very much as if he were scolding a recalcitrant beast. “What can you do, weak and friendless?”

The stripling's cheeks reddened, and he glared at his guardian, whose fixed sneer seemed cruelly apt.

“No,” the mahout said, “you two could expect no reward from that quarter, I think, seeing as how his parents and his uncles are murdered, his aunts and sisters sold into brothels and his brother to the benches of a Rus long ship. And this one to be sold or killed, too, if I can't deliver him before we're hunted down. We have a day on them, maybe less. Which brings me to you gentlemen. I am trying to convey this hotheaded fool to safety among his mother's people, in Azerbaijan, to install him in the walls of his grandfather's house, his mother's father being by reputation a hard customer. Watching your display tonight, I was able to discern not only the sham of it but the murderous art that fools the spectator into believing. I have 200 miles to ride and a manhunt to elude before I can fairly say I have discharged my duty, and I'd like very much to have you two along to help me do that.”