Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road

They moved as slow through the deep darkness as blind men skirting a pit, groping their way from outcrop to outcrop, observing as well as they could the course that Amram had decided for them, a wide arc that ran twenty rods to the east before cutting back along a westward radius, approaching from the guards’ left to gain half an instant on their sword arms if they managed to draw. Then as Hanukkah and Amram waited, backs pressed against a sheltering rock, Zelik-man loped, hunched down, toward the pickets, who stood, about forty feet apart, with their backs turned to each other, arguing the merits of Barbary horses. The moon rose, and in her faint, cool light Amram and Hanukkah watched Zelikman creep along. In his long and skinny shanks there was none of the grace but all the intensity of a cat going about its fatal mousing, the patience, the grim reserve of a predator. He rose up behind the nearer picket, covered the man's face with his leather-gloved hand and embraced him with the other arm. A moment later he eased the man to the earth. When, rarely, Zelikman recalled his mother to Amram, it was often a bedside memory of her seeing him through fevers and nightmares, or singing to him in the soft Latin dialect of her grandmothers, and the shade of that unknown Jewess always seemed to appear in Zelikman when he anesthetized a guard or watchman and laid him tenderly on the ground. In his bag of salves and pastes, Zelikman kept a large packet, a leaf of papyrus wrapped around a cake compounded of henbane, mandragora and nightshade, which when dissolved in a special preparation of vitriol, decanted onto a bandage and applied to the nostrils and mouth could induce a profound and instantaneous sleep. Hanukkah watched from behind the rock with his eyes wide and admiring as Zelikman went to work on the second picket and laid him out beside the first.

As they cut across the grass, moving more quickly now toward Zelikman and the horses, Amram could hear the snoring of the soldiers in their tents beyond. A last cricket scratched mournfully at its rebab. The stars wheeled toward winter, and there was light enough now to make out the blazes on the crops of some of the horses. Amram could smell the dusty musk of horse-hide and the sour sugar on their breath. He pulled his bit of Arab steel from his boot and moved among the legs of the horses, cutting the thongs that hobbled them one by one. The animals began to question one another with a sense of urgency that Amram could feel increasing, passing rumor and confusion among themselves. It would not be long before their agitation grew loud enough to alert the other pickets or wake the men snoring in the nearest tents. Amram was counting on the agitation, relying on the horses as sowers of panic, but that panic must not be permitted to flower in the wrong garden. He stood up and tried to find Zelikman in the dark, muscular flow of dismay and alarm around him and caught sight of the long, disdainful face of Hil-lel, his droll eye, just as Zelikman found him and swung up onto his back.

Amram mounted the horse that was nearest him, its girth feverish between his knees. For a moment the shadows and the smell of dust overwhelmed him, and his horse would not move, but he spoke a few words to it in Ge'ez, the mother language of humanity according to his people, the sound of which always had a pacifying effect on horses. As he spoke to the horses around him, they began to follow his mount, Amram squeezing his knees together and telling the horse how beautiful it was and how much he loved it, and they gathered speed and the rest of the herd came after. He could hear the chuff of their breath and now cries from the tents, a shout of the picket on the other side of the camp. The stampeding horses opened up and stretched toward the tents and the guttering fires of the Arsiyah. The moment arrived at which, by his own longstanding custom and the needs of the situation, he should peel off and let the horses carry on through the camp to dispose as they saw fit of the tent strings and the soldiers and rejoin Zelikman on higher ground.

That was when the melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars, who, having been apprehended by these soldiers, must eventually be conveyed by them to the usurper Buljan, their commander. It was the business of the world, Amram knew to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away. After long years of blessed absence, the return of merciful feelings toward what was, after all, only another motherless and fatherless child, struck Amram, bitterly, as a sign of his own waning powers to live life as it must be lived. Mercy was a failing, a state of error, and in the case of children a terrible waste of time.

Amram steadied himself without stirrups or reins, taking up a coarse fistful of mane, and lowered his head. In an instant he was in among the shouting men, the blazing brands, the screams of horses, tents collapsing and flapping like bats into the sky. The folly of his deviation became clear to him immediately. The moon shed too little light. He would never find the boy in this confusion.

He felt the great pumping heart-the fist of muscle, bone and sweat between his knees-torque and shudder, and there was the crack of a joint. He flew forward over the head of the horse, letting go of its stiff brush of a mane, and the size of his frame carried him so powerfully forward that he actually dragged the horse down on top of him as he went. They rolled over, and as if lightning and thunder had reversed themselves he tasted blood in the back of his mouth, and the hammer blow of a hoof landed squarely on his chest. He had a vague impression of men's hands taking hold of him by the arms, hoisting him to his feet, and then after that he felt and heard nothing for what seemed like a very long time.

When he opened his eyes, his arms and legs were tied, and he heard horses shying and the whistling of a whiplash blade that he knew at once to be Zelikman's. He lay on the ground inside a musty tent against whose wall firelight flickered and distended shapes swelled and lapsed in the manner of a shadow theater. Filaq lay beside him, on his side, with his arms tied and a gag in his teeth. Amram's own mouth remained free.

“They got sick of listening to you too?” he said.

Filaq nodded.

“They hurt you?”

He shook his head.

“Do they know who you are?”

Filaq considered the question for a moment and began to give his head a shake before settling on an inexpressive shrug.

“Hear that sound, boy?” Amram said. “That's Ze-likman. Thinking he can rescue me. One skinny little Jew with a needle. Think he can do it?”

Filaq shook his head.

“Well, you're right. He was as big a fool to come after me as I was to try to come after you. Should have just left you to your own sad devices.”

The whistle and clang of Zelikman's sword stilled, and a captain cried out an order. Then silence. A moment later the flap of the tent was thrown open. Hanukkah came stumbling in, pitched forward as if shoved from behind, and fell sprawling on the ground. He lay there sobbing and heaving for a moment while Amram listened for news from the shadow show on the other side of the tent wall, so that he would not have to ask the Khazar if the friend of his life was dead.

It was remarked by one of the eminent physician-rabbis of the city of Regensburg, in his commentary on the Book of Samuel, a work now lost but quoted in the responsa of Rabbi Judah the Pious, that apart from Torah the only subject truly worthy of study is the science of saving men's lives. Measured by the criterion of this teaching-propounded by his grandfather- Zelikman counted two great scholars among his present acquaintance, and one of them was a horse.