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Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

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Michael Chabon Gentlemen of the Road

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He had failed as a farmer, a dealer in hides, a soldier, and now as a hunter of men, a trade he undertook on a misguided whim, riding as last-minute replacement for a more qualified killer whose career of violence ended in a tavern on the night before the hunting party set out from Atil to track down the last free survivor of Buljan's coup.

The other five manhunters who like Hanukkah had remained true to the cause-or at any rate to the gold- of their employer lay scattered around the ruin like the tumbled fragments of a colonnade. Among them were two of their erstwhile comrades, who had been turned by the haughty manner and readier gold of their prisoner and the promise of more gold to come. Distilled by the sun of two days, their stench was wafted tenderly in the direction of Hanukkah's nose by the beating wings of buzzards, which had arrived within hours of the slaughter, in their black finery, to feast.

Beside him, nestled in the crook of his left arm, lay a skin in which remained a few swallows of clean water, which Hanukkah had been denying himself in the hour since dawn in the hope of hastening his demise. His belly wound had ceased to cause him much pain, which he took as a favorable sign that the angel had concluded whatever other business had been delaying him and was hastening even now to collect him. The recriminations that assailed Hanukkah through the first hours of his vigil were faded to a philosophical regret at the waste that attended all human ambition. It was only his vain desire to gain the money he needed to purchase the freedom of his beloved Sarah, a whore in a Sturgeon Street brothel, that had led him to offer his sword in the murderous service of Buljan. Hanukkah had no quarrel with the old bek, and in fact had been inclined to view him as an able leader, worthy of loyalty and tribute. He had been an unwilling participant in the raid on the stronghold in Azerbaijan, and in fact had spent the hour it endured cowering under a hay wagon at the back of a stable.

Though only a week earlier the idea would have struck him as heresy, as he lay waiting to become carrion he considered that plump and vivacious Sarah was perhaps unworthy of his suffering and death, when after all, she chewed with her mouth open and her wind, when she had been consuming too much milk, gave off an unsettling odor of brimstone.

But when he remarked the travelers, a giant African and a black-hatted scarecrow crowded onto the broad back of a massive spotted horse that looked to be on the verge of collapse, Hanukkah forgot his resolve and took a long warm swig from his water skin. The sight of living beings who were not, presumably, eaters of dead flesh awoke a fresh desire in Hanukkah, despite the wound to his belly, to prolong his existence just a little while longer, and perhaps to see his plump Sarah once more.

“Friends,” he called in Arabic, his voice a raucous barking.

The African reined in the tottering horse with its flecked lips and wild eye, and the travelers dismounted, the African with a weary grace and no expression, the scarecrow with grimaces and a show of soreness in the underparts. The big man unsaddled the horse, peeled away the blanket and led the spotted stallion from the slaughtered men and scavenger birds to a blotch of patchy grass in the unpersuasive shade of a gnarled juniper. There was a thin trickle of fresh water a few rods beyond the tree, and the horse lay down its ears and snorted, once, scenting it. The African patted the horse's neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant's back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality

The behavior of the second man was even more troubling, because as the Frank hobbled over to the ruined column where Hanukkah lay with his hand keeping his life in his body, he neither avoided nor ignored the sight of the carnage all around him but appeared actively to study it, stopping now and then to crouch beside a body and examine its situation and the nature of its wounds. At last he reached Hanukkah and regarded him with pale, almost colorless blue eyes that were shadowed by the wide brim of his black hat. Eyes as clear and cold as the doom they seemed inclined to pronounce on Hanukkah.

Фото

“Are you the angel of death?”

“Even worse, fatty,” the pale stranger said. “I'm the angel of fools.”

He held Hanukkah's right hand and tried to pull it from the sword wound. As cold as his gaze appeared, his touch and his manner had something reassuring about them, and Hanukkah made no effort to resist. But he had been clutching his belly for so long with such force that his elbow would not unbend, and his hand was cemented in place by congealed blood.

“Don't go anywhere,” the Frank said, and though it seemed impossible in this hostile place that fortune had chosen as the site of Hanukkah's death, he seemed to intend it as the sort of joke whose purpose was not to amuse, for there was nothing very amusing about it, but rather to reassure by suggesting that there remained to Hanukkah life enough to spare a little of it in polite pretending.

“You're a physician,” Hanukkah realized, and in answer the Frank stood up, went to the saddlebags where the giant had dropped them, brought out a large leather drawstring pouch and a roll of canvas tied with ribbon and carried them back among the dead men to his patient. He unrolled the canvas, revealing a number of small steel implements whose function Hanukkah preferred not to imagine, and then unknotted the leather thong of the pouch. In the meantime, the black giant had begun his own survey of the campground, where three nights earlier Hanukkah and his fellows had shared a roast goat and a looted cask of sharab, and some fool had made the mistake of removing the gag from the stripling's mouth to see if, plied with drink, he might say or do something amusing. The African paid heed not just to the corpses but also to the situation of trees, rock and roadway, the footprints in the dust, the position of the sun in the sky. Looking at him, Hanukkah could not imagine how a man could differ more from the pale, fair scarecrow, but when the African came to stand beside his partner his eyes held an identical certainty of knowing what little there was of interest to know about Hanukkah, a paltry fatal handful of facts.

“Open,” the Frank said. He held out a small pipe, the color of old bone, its bowl filled with a nasty-looking brown mixture, and when Hanukkah parted his cracked lips, the Frank struck a flint to the bowl of the pipe and encouraged Hanukkah to draw the thick, honeyed smoke into his lungs. Hanukkah coughed, and then drew again, and it was not long before he was aware of being filled, in rippling drizzles, by a stream of amber honey poured through his mouth and neck into the bottle of his soul. The scarecrow took hold of his arm again and slipped it from his belly like the loosened string of a robe.

When Hanukkah came to himself he was seated, slumped, on the back of his own horse, with a burning sensation in his midsection and his arms around the waist of the man who had saved his life and who was now engaged in an argument, in an unknown language, with the African on his spotted Parthian. The sun had dipped behind the slope of the mountain along whose eastern skirt ran the road that led, hugging the southeast littoral of the Khazar Sea, from Azerbaijan to Atil. The air was crisp, the light wistful and the smell of the Frankish physician abominable, and Hanukkah knew that he was going to live.

“Thank you,” he said, or tried to say, but his throat was raw and his lips half-sealed, and it did not emerge loud enough to interrupt the dispute between the African and the Frank. He said, in Arabic, “Thank you for finding my horse.”

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