Michael Chabon - Gentlemen of the Road

Amram nodded, crouched on top of the rock, listening for the hiss of Filaq's water against the hillside and looking down along the gray-green folds and gray-brown escarpments and granite ribs of the hillside to the valley where they would find the grandfather's fortress with its stout walls and its treasury laid open to the noble rescuers. He could see a thin vein of smoke. At the far side of the valley ran a last halfhearted scatter of foothills before the Caucasus gave out at the sea.

“Perhaps they arranged to have themselves actually murdered,” Amram said. “Just to make sure.”

Zelikman allowed that over the course of the past few days in Filaq's scabrous company, he had entertained suicidal thoughts of his own, at which Amram spoke a formula in the Ge'ez tongue effective at averting the evil eye, because Zelikman was prey to spells of black bile during which he would contemplate-and one bleak night in the city of Trebizond had ingested- the deadly tinctures that he carried in his saddlebags.

“Of course grief may have driven the boy mad,” Ze-likman continued in a dreamy tone, lowering the hat still farther as the smoke of his dudeen worked its charm. “To lose his mother and father. His crown and his palace. His elephants too. I suppose we ought to pity him.”

“Fine idea,” Amram said. “You go first.”

There was no sound from up the hillside now He craned his head and saw that Filaq was halfway to the ridgeline, scrabbling on his hands in the scattering gravel, hurrying toward the home that lay a hundred leagues north, and its ghosts. Amram let loose a polyglot string of curses that would have done honor to the old myna of the caravansary, jumped from the rock and started after Filaq with long strides of his hard-pumping legs. The sun beat down on his head, and he sweated, and thorns tore at his clothes, but he had been pursuing the spirit of his stolen daughter, Dinah, for nearly twenty years, in dreams and among the roads and kingdoms, and a loudmouthed Khazar could offer nothing in the way of a challenge to the hunter of a ghost girl.

“No,” Filaq said in wretched Arabic as Amram caught hold of the remains of the thong, which he had chewed through, and dragged him into the shade of a tall fir tree. “Please, lord. To home, please, you take me.”

He fell to his knees, and his large eyes, dazzling as the green armor of a scarab, filled with tears, and he employed with pitiable energy the tiny store that was known to him of Arabic's rich supply of blandishments and entreaties, insisting in broken phrases that he would rather be tortured and killed in Atil having at least made the attempt to avenge himself on Buljan than to live out his days as the ward of his grandfather's charity

Amram looked away, confused by this unprecedented display of deference from one who had been employed, just an hour before, in calling down leprous growths and pustules upon him. He pulled Filaq to his feet, recalling like a man reviewing the history of his amours the days of his distant youth when he had sought and sometimes gained revenge. Then he retied the thong that had been chewed, braiding three pieces together this time to make a stouter cord, and dragged Filaq back down through the brambles to the rock in whose lengthening shadow Zelikman still lay, pondering one of the useless paradoxes or baubles of philosophy with which he amused himself when under the influence of his pipe. When he noticed Amram's return, he stood up and approached the stripling.

“Everything ends in death,” he said in the holy tongue. “You know that, don't you?”

His expression was kind and his voice soft, teacherly Filaq nodded.

“Therefore revenge is superfluous. Unnecessary effort. One day Buljan will be bones in the dust. And so will you and I and that behemoth holding your leash. Revenge is the sole property of God.”

“I want him to suffer,” Filaq said. “To hurt, to writhe in pain.”

Zelikman blinked and then put his hand on Filaq's shoulder in a manner that showed both tenderness and scorn.

“You and God have a great deal in common,” he said. “Now, will you ride calmly behind me or do we need to bind you at the ankles, too?”

Filaq seemed to consider the question very seriously

“You had better bind my ankles,” he said.

It was done, and then Zelikman hoisted Filaq and slung him across the withers of his horse. The stripling muttered for a while and somewhat belatedly wished tumors onto the testicles of Zelikman's grandfather, but as they drew nearer to the fortress, he curled up still and silent and seemed resigned at last to his fortune.

They were two miles upslope of the fortress when they realized the smoke was too thick and dense for a rubbish or cook fire. It boiled and poured into the sky They tied the horses in a thicket along the bed of a stream in which a thin cold trickle of water ran and then crept along the stream bed until they were within half a league of the stronghold. Zelikman took from its pouch the curious glass that was his only patrimony a pair of flattened clear beads, devised by some genius of Persia, mounted on brass wire one behind another in a way that made it possible to see distant things in detail. The partners passed the Persian glass back and forth, taking turns surveying the stronghold, a large house of timber, mud and tile set atop a conical hill whose base was encircled by stout walls. It burned zealously, sending up rolling shafts of black smoke veined at their root with fire and moaning like the mouth of a cave. The massive wooden gates hung splintered, poleaxed and smoking, and the ramparts were garlanded with the bodies of helmeted guards, slain attackers armored in Turk style and bareheaded household retainers who had gone to their deaths armed with kitchen knives and hayforks. Over everything hung an odor of burning hay timber and a sweet stench of crackling fat that mocked both conquerors and conquered with its reminder of their universal nature as meat for the kites and buzzards that had already begun to draw lazy naughts across the high blue sky

They watched the stronghold burn from the safety of the stream bed until the carrion birds began to alight and strut like princes on the walls and then, tying the dazed stripling to the overhanging branch of a willow crept up to the shattered oak jaws of the gate and scuttled inside, blades drawn.

Someone was singing. Amram heard sawed strings and a voice at once lilting and raspy-an old man or woman-and they followed the sound of it up a crooked lane to the top of the hill, squelching through mud that was an impasto of dirt and blood, past the flyblown carcasses of women, children and defenders alike, some three dozen people in all, among them a crone and a babe in arms. Amram kept up a steady murmur of prayers for the souls of the butchered and his own in this grievous shambles. At the top of the hill in the archway of the main house, an eyeless old man sat on a bucket, scratching at a two-stringed gourd, warbling weird melismas on a madman's text.

“Fine fellows,” Zelikman said, surveying the charred remains of a storehouse in which greasy pools of what had once been stacked bales of wool still bubbled and popped.

“And numerous. Either the mahout underestimated or this Buljan has increased the number of men pursuing our young friend. I see the trace of at least a dozen horses.”

They wasted an hour poking through the rooms and structures that had escaped the fire or cooled enough to permit inspection. But the storehouses and larders were all ash, and if the household treasury had escaped the looting hands of the attackers, it had not escaped the flames. In the end they returned to the stream bed empty-handed but for a pair of goats, handsome if singed. As they drew nearer to the willow tree where they had tied up Filaq, they found themselves confronted, and Amram confronted Zelikman, with the question of what to do, now, with their charge.