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Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

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Michael Chabon Gentlemen of the Road

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“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?”

Фото

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.”

And he named a sum then, equal to five times the salary of a dekarch in the army of Byzantium.

“What did his family do,” Amram said slowly watching the boy, “that anyone should want to hunt them all down?”

“His father,” the mahout said, “was the bek, or war king, of the Khazars. And my master. I kept the royal war elephants, forty-nine pachyderms of Africa and Hind. Thirty years and more some of them were with me. I counted them my friends, I don't mind saying. As did this stripling. He grew up in the elephant pens, so to speak. As much as among the pomps and fripperies of the court.”

And there was something gauche or uncanny about the young prince, which Zelikman had been inclined to put down to inbreeding but now took for the fruit of having been raised with elephants.

“This past spring,” the mahout continued, his voice falling to a mournful rasp, “comes the pox, out of Persia, that kills or cripples all the great sad brutes. And as the bek had made a great fuss over his elephants (of which at present the emperor in Byzantium has only forty-seven, that's a fact), putting the likeness of an elephant on his own personal arms, and so forth, well, the deaths looked bad. A bad omen, you see. Some of those that were already intriguing against the bek took heart from this pox. A general, name of Buljan, he seizes his main chance and ambushes the poor old elephant-fancying fool on the Kiev road. Installs himself in the Qomr citadel straightaway Since then, Buljan's gone very carefully about the business of removing anybody-brothers, wives, sons-who might be harboring feelings of resentment over the whole business.”

“I am sorry about your animals, my friend,” Amram said, taking his horse by the reins and leading it to the door of the stable. “But we don't stoop to politics, either.”

“A word, Amram,” Zelikman said. “If I may.” They sent the Persian and the stripling out into the inn yard then, and as was their inveterate custom at a crossroads of fortune, bickered like a couple of Regens-burg fishwives. At first they argued about whether or not they had time to argue, or if arguing would cost them their appointment with the ostler in the clearing and then about whose fault it had been that they were never paid by the landlord of an inn outside Trebizond, and then Zelikman succeeded in returning the conversation to the subject of the elephant boy, and his grandfather's stronghold in Azerbaijan, and the easy money that delivering him thence represented, at which point they resumed an old, old argument over whose definition of “easy money” was the least commensurate with lived experience, and about who was afraid and whose courage had been more openly on display in the recent course of their partnership. Next they argued about the overall equity of that longstanding arrangement and who shouldered more of its burdens, which led inevitably to the question of the hat, and whether the demands of verisimilitude had required its assassination. Amram had just dredged up an ancient debacle at Tergeste when there was a soft moan from outside the stable, and then a sharp thud, like a muffled bell, that to Zelikman's ears had the unmistakable timbre of a skull hitting a wooden plank.


When they got outside they found the body of the unfortunate mahout, from whose throat a black-fletched arrow protruded. They got their heads down, scanning the roof line, but it was too dark to see anything. Zelikman heard breathing behind him and turned to find the stripling, behind a rain jar, face buried in his hands, weeping. Zelikman was alien to feelings of sympathy with young men in tears, having waked one morning, around the time of his fifteenth birthday, to find that by a mysterious process perhaps linked to his studies of human ailments and frailties as much as to the rape and murder of his mother and sister, his heart had turned to stone.

“Shut up,” he told the stripling, whispering the phrase in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavonic and, for good measure, Frankish, adjuring him to muzzle his goddamned snout. “Or I'll put an arrow in you myself”

But there was no time to make good on his threat because the next moment a drunken traveler stumbled out of the main hall of the caravansary and spotted Amram crouching down behind the wheel of a cart.

“It's the Nubian!” the traveler said, after his shock subsided, summoning his companions from their pots.

“I don't know why we couldn't leave when I said we should leave,” Amram said.

Then the men of the inn were on them, in a roaring alcoholic mass of fists and boots and curses that would have shamed the foulmouthed myna. A gang of Avars went for the shed where the weapons were checked. Zelikman stumbled to his feet and punched and shoved his way back into the stable. He drove out the horses and sent them plowing through the mass of angry travelers and leapt onto Hillel's back as Amram fought his way into his own saddle. With a mezair and a cut to the left and a pair of caprioles, Zelikman danced the horse through the tangle of men. Two quick strokes with Lancet freed the purse from the belt of the ostler. Then they galloped through the gates of the inn yard and out onto the road.

They plunged into the cover of the woods and crashed along through blades and bars of moonlight, and it was not until they joined the road again and turned southward toward Azerbaijan that Zelikman noticed the stripling riding behind Amram, clinging to the big man's waist and looking back at the moonlit road behind them and the ever more distant home to which it ran.

CHAPTER THREE



ON THE BURDENS AND CRUELTIES OF THE ROAD

Whatever their merits as companions, the Khazar elephants had apparently failed to teach good manners to Filaq, who began to curse his guardians as soon as they had put a mile between themselves and the caravansary and continued to do so for days afterward, in a gargling, double-reeded tongue that seemed to have been devised for no other purpose. Over the four nights of the journey into Azerbaijan, as they picked their way down serpentine tracks and through thundering gorges-avoiding the main road, traveling in darkness-the stripling paused his recitations only to eat, to doze in the saddle or wrapped in his bearskin in their fireless camps, and to make the two attempts at flight that at last necessitated his being bound and tied to the cantle.

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