Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

“You did it for the sake of a woman, I suppose?” the Frank said.

“For Sarah,” Hanukkah said. And he told them about the slave girl for the purchase of whose freedom he had enlisted in the deadly service of Buljan. “I'd never heard of this Filaq, to be honest, before I took this damned job. Never paid the slightest attention to royal genealogies or politics. Doubtless there is more to this story than I will ever-”

As they came around a bend in the road, Hanukkah's old nag shied, and reared up, and danced sideways into a thicket before the Frank succeeded in bringing it around, and then they sat a moment, staring at the dead men who had been laid by the side of the road in a neat row like the physician's instruments in his canvas roll. Kisa, Suleiman, Hoopoe, Bugha, they were all there, all nine of them, stripped of their weapons and armor, their waxen faces gawping at the sky. There was no sign of Filaq, or of the bag of gold.

They climbed down from their horses, and the giant unshouldered his ax. On one side of the road there was a sheer rock face and on the other a long, gentle rise to the pass. The rise was brown and treeless and could be concealing no one. They waited until it was dusk, and then as the bats began to circle they led the horses almost to the top of the rise, where they tied the animals and crept along on foot until they could see over the crest. Below them, widening like a horn, stretched a steep-sided valley that ran, in terraced ripples that were crosshatched with vineyards, all the way to the sea far below. About halfway down the slope, a great number of horses milled, cropping the grass. Beyond them, to the right of the road, Hanukkah made out the white tents, peaked and striped with green, of a company of Arsiyah, elite mercenaries, Muslims whose fathers had come from Persia two centuries ago and who had served the kings of Khazaria since long before the conversion of their employers to the teachings of the Jews. Hanukkah heard laughter, and the jangle of a lute, and smelled scorched grain and roast onions.

“Well, it looks like our boy found himself an army,” the African said, shaking his head. “So much the worse for him.”

With nightfall, a wind blew in over the sea, from the lands beyond the Khazar Sea and beyond the vast steppe of the north, from kingdoms of forest and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advancing darkness, and Amram knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his woolen cloak more tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men. Then, as if overhearing and taking pity on the maudlin trend of his thoughts, the wind carried to his nostrils from the fires of the troops camped in the valley the desert tang of a camel-dung fire, and with it the plangent cry of a soldier-muezzin calling his saddle-weary brothers to a belated Jumuah. Amram was surprised to learn that it was a Friday Bearing this strangely moving information, he crept back down to the fold of rock in which Zelikman and Hanukkah had hidden themselves, and then led by Zelikman, who honored the commandments in nearly the same measure as he despised them, the son of Ham, the son of Shem and the son of Japheth bowed their heads to greet the Sabbath bride before they rode down the mountain, toward the winter and the sea, to steal back Zelikman's horse.

It so happened that soon after he first set out from his village in pursuit of his stolen daughter, Amram had been employed as a horse thief It was a trade that he had continued to pursue intermittently ever since, in particular during his ten years of service in the armies of Constantinople, when he had been obliged, through the improvidence and cheeseparing of the emperor's quartermasters and longstanding custom of his border troops, to steal not only horses but also cattle, sheep, goats, fowl, grain, cheeses, fuel, skins, wool and hides. Everything but women: that was one custom Amram had always declined, while he held a command, to observe or to tolerate in his own men.

Amram supposed that Hillel must by now be accustomed to being stolen, having originally been provided to Zelikman during a raid the partners staged on a khan outside Damascus whose landlord, himself a broker of stolen horses, tried to cheat them after one of their performances.

After prayer they dined on the lees of their provisions and the last gristly hunks of goat, and Hanukkah offered thanks to God on their behalf, employing a Khazari melody that sounded throaty and sad to Amram's ear. Amram took out his shatranj board and thrashed Zelikman and Hanukkah twice apiece while they waited for the perfection of darkness. Then they crept back up to the crest of the pass.

Zelikman had tried to dissuade Hanukkah from joining them, in consideration of his wound, but Hanukkah would not hear of it, insisting that he felt so grateful to Zelikman for sewing him up so tightly, and salving him so efficaciously, that he was prepared if need be to crawl on his belly to the Arsiyah camp, and if tonight they should prove unsuccessful in retrieving the virtuous Hillel, then Zelikman might, should he ever choose to return home, ride on Hanukkah's back all the way to Francia or Saxony or the evening couches of the Sun himself

“Take care of what you say,” Amram advised him. “He healed me of a sword cut to the neck five years ago, and I've been carrying him on my back ever since.”

Then they started down in the darkness toward the horses. A hundred and ten, by Amram's count, strong animals well fed and stolid, they milled around the meadow to the east of the tents, a shifting patch of denser darkness against the night. Hobbled, loudly gourmandizing the dry chess grass, they were guarded by a pair of dismounted soldiers in long, dusty coats split up the front and elaborately bearing on the left sleeves embroidered quotations from the lips of the Prophet. A pair of pickets held the southern approach to the camp, and there were guards posted on the north and west sides of camp, all fine, tall, falcon-faced men, in excellent equipage and reasonable order, but to Amram's eye as he had studied them and their fellows in the last of the daylight they betrayed an indifference to their duty, a hint of discontent, as if they had better things to do and expected no trouble or enemy from any quarter. Something was roiling them. He wondered if perhaps they suffered from the discontent of indolence, patrolling a frontier that had been at peace too long, the last war between the Khazars and the armies of the Caliph having ended more than a hundred years ago. If they were men of spirit they might resent the posting and wish they could be in on the hot battles and fat prizes in the distant Crimea, where according to Hanukkah the armies of the new bek were busy reconquering the great cities of Feodosia and Doros to bring them under control once more of the candelabrum flag.

Dispatching the watchmen, discontented or not, was always the simplest part of a horse or cattle raid. In former times, Amram would have crept up on the pickets from their left and with one, two lateral strokes at the jugular sent them sinking to their knees. But it was true, as Zelikman argued, that if you were not swift enough in cutting their throats, men often managed to cry out, alerting their comrades, and sometimes you detached the head entirely from the neck, in which case there might sound, if you failed to catch it before it hit the dirt, a telltale drumbeat of the skull to give you away Killing the guards could also lead to later reprisals. Amram saw the value therefore in letting Zelikman go to work in his own fashion.