Gentlemen of the Road (4 page)

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

W
hatever 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.

The attempted escapes followed sullen requests to be permitted to void his bladder, an act the stripling refused to perform in proximity to his hosts, which Zelikman took for elephantine modesty and Amram for arrogance, suggesting that no doubt Prince Filaq shat gold and pissed date wine. After Filaq failed to return the second time and they were obliged to backtrack four leagues up the slope of a vinetangled, wasp-ridden mountainside to retrieve him, the partners bound him, but still he refused to favor them with the sight and smell of his royal excretions, and so Amram was regularly obliged to lead the youth on a leather thong far into the underbrush and leave him tied to a tree for a reasonable period before retrieving him.

“I have arrived at a new diagnosis,” Zelikman said, sitting in the shade of a bear-shaped outcrop of green granite, his damaged hat brought low over his eyes, puffing on a short Irish dudeen whose bowl he filled with a paste of hemp seed and honey. While Amram did not share the habit, he encouraged it, because the pipe inclined his partner toward a more charitable view of the imperfections that marred creation, for which the Jews of Abyssinia blamed a host of energetic demons but which Zelikman attributed to creation’s having occurred without divine will or intention, like the snarl of wrack and shells in a tide pool, a heresy that would have shocked a man more troubled than Amram by piety and which, like all Zelikman’s heresies, afforded its promulgator no comfort whatsoever. “The family of the Khazar bek arranged to make it
look
as if they had all been murdered by this Buljan fellow, as a way to rid themselves once and for all of that boy.”

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,” Zelikman 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.

“There is no reason, at this point, not to consider him our property by right,” Zelikman argued. “A gentleman of the road worthy of the title would convey him to the nearest slave market and see what price he fetched.”

“I fear that explains our overall lack of success at this game, Zelikman,” Amram said. “Because I’m not going to do that.”

“No,” Zelikman said sadly. “Neither am I.”

But when they returned to the willow tree, they found no stripling, only the raveled strands of a camel-hide lanyard swaying like willow branches in the breeze. This discovery dismayed Amram, but he was inclined, according to the tenets of his personal philosophy, to accept it and go along their way. He might have persuaded Zelikman of the wisdom of this course, but when they went to find the horses they had tied up in the copse, they found their saddlebags and Porphyrogene but no trace of the gold from the inn or of the curly coated, big-nosed half-Arabian, Hillel.

Hastily they tied the goats, slung them from Porphyrogene’s saddle and set off, riding tandem, up the track. Burdened by two riders, even a strong Parthian stallion could not hope to match the speed of the lithe and sure-footed Hillel, and by the time they reached the pass and the main road that descended in lazy switchbacks to the shore of the Caspian and then north to the city of Atil, Filaq’s relative inexperience and unbalanced mental state held their only hope of retrieving him and, more important, Zelikman’s horse, a loss that was already threatening to plunge Zelikman, the effects of his hemp pipe having long since dwindled, into a gloom that promised to be dark indeed.

“This accursed country into which you led us has already cost me my hat,” Zelikman said. “Not to mention a sack of gold. But if it costs me Hillel too, I’ll take it very ill indeed.”

Amram refrained from pointing out, though not without effort, that this Caucasian jaunt had originated in a pipe dream of Zelikman’s. He had already seen the broken turf up ahead and the shaft of a black-fletched arrow protruding from a blasted trunk at the edge of a clearing about forty feet farther along. He swung down from the horse and crouched, creeping along on his heels, reading the alphabet of horseshoe prints and other stray marks of struggle.