Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure Read online

  “Character?” he said, signaling to the Sorb slave who waited, shivering, outside the booth. The day was bright and the sky as blue as the beard of his greatgrandfather's God, but the wind was cold and had a smell of rusty iron. “In this town that will be an anomaly”

  Head bowed, silenced forever at the root of the tongue by the bek's own dagger, the Sorb entered the booth bearing a steaming copper pot and poured into the bek's cup more of the infusion of dried camellia leaves, imported from Khitai at great expense, on which Buljan depended to keep up his spirits in the city. “Find me one more honest creature living in Atil and I will have myself a pair.”

  The agent only nodded his head and smiled a Radanite smile, which was not a smile at all but rather a promissory note to deliver one at some unspecified future date. He was a bony-faced fellow with light eyes, younger than the usual old rug dealer, the jet of his mustache and skimpy beard plaits contrasting starkly with his fair skin.

  “People saw the deaths of the previous elephants as an ill omen for their custodian,” Buljan continued, lowering the brim of his hat over his eyes. The hat was a fine piece of workmanship, also from Khitai, yak felt covered in panels of ultramarine silk embroidered in black and silver, but, crippled by headaches that made him sensitive to light, Buljan prized it chiefly for its wide brim. “One that proved accurate, which in my experience does not often happen with omens.”

  The Radanite was peering at the board, and though he quickly returned his gaze to Buljan, the latter did not fail to remark the scintilla of understanding in the merchant's eyes. Whatever fate awaited Buljan on the shatranj board, this Radanite saw it.

  “We of course had heard nothing about the recent changes in your government,” he said. “When we arrived and learned of the precarious situation, particularly here in the Qomr, our anxiety on your behalf was considerable.”

  “I should imagine so,” Buljan said, taking the infant from the bekun so that she might cover her breast. “And I look forward to perusing your stock.”

  As if this were a signal, the Radanite started to rise, more willing than most of his kind to show that he was eager to conclude business. Buljan glanced at his wife, who raised an eyebrow at this atypical display of haste.

  “I can spare you very little time,” Buljan said, rocking the baby with an audible slosh of the milk in its belly, resisting an urge to question the Radanite about his predicament on the shatranj board. Since wresting control of the bek's tripod, a measure he took only after concluding that a coup was not just necessary and advantageous to himself and his clan but also likely to succeed, he had experienced only doubt, rumor and rebellion. His solace, apart from sleeping in the tent of leaves, had been a strict policy of playing shatranj with opponents he knew he could defeat. “But surely not so little as that.”

  “Please,” the bekun said, holding out a silver plate on whose border running horses were chased in gold. She was a Rus, with copper hair and golden eyelashes. “Another sweet?”

  The Radanite lowered himself back to the carpet and took another little pellet of the paste of honey, roses and almond oil.

  “The premises are rather full, I imagine,” the Radanite said, glancing back at the inlaid board.

  “To the rafters,” the bek said. “Thanks to the recent foolishness.”

  “No doubt it was foolish, even demented, to unite behind the banner of an untried female, my lord. But one can hardly have expected the Muhammadans to enjoy the treatment they received at the hands of the Rus.”

  “Nor did I so intend,” Buljan said. “This empire is only as strong as its neighbors are weak. My predecessor coddled our Muhammadans, granting them so many privileges that they grew too strong, encouraging the caliph's northern hopes. And he all but ceded the Crimea to the Rus. He was mistaken in nearly all his policies, while the only mistake I made was failing to clean house properly. That has now been remedied. The common rebels I will permit to return to their homes and vineyards—or what remains of them. The mutinous Arsiyah will be dealt with appropriately.”

  “How sad,” the Radanite said. “That really is, if I may say, my lord, a remarkable hat.”

  Buljan stared at the Radanite, wondering what it was, aside from the madness of power, that had persuaded him that his destiny lay not on the open steppe but amid the meshes of the shatranj board that was city life.

  “It pains my uncle greatly that he is unable to treat with you in person, my lord,” the Radanite said. “But it was felt that I should come in his stead as soon as possible.” He glanced at the board again, and hesitated. “One hears rumors of a giant African.”

  “An enormous fellow,” Buljan said, understanding now “A prodigy Powerful. Well favored. Intelligent too.” He felt relief as the nature and mission of his interlocutor became clear to him. “It is a long time since we have had any slave-dealing Radanites in Atil. We heard your people had forsworn the trade in men.”

  “News can be slow to diffuse among my people,” the Radanite said apologetically, crinkling the corners of his eyes in a show of slyness.

  “How fortunate for you.”

  “May I—would it be possible, I wonder, to see this prodigy for oneself?”

  Before Buljan could reply, a guard entered and bowed, his face expressionless, having no understanding of, or interest in, the words he was about to pronounce.

  “The prisoner moves his vizier to the seventeenth square, my lord, and respectfully offers you the opportunity to concede the game.”

  With a distinct thud, Buljan, blind, dissolved in an impenetrable night of rage, dropped the baby onto the rug. The little girl screamed, and the mother screamed, and the twins gazed at their father as if he had just burst into flame.

  “His life is not for sale,” Buljan said. He picked up the baby and handed it to his wife without a glance. “But it will cost you nothing to see it spilled into the dust.”

  Under the windows of the donjon, to the very spot in the courtyard on which previous beks had put up their harvest booths, a detachment of six well-armed guards escorted the African. He was stripped to the waist, with his hands lashed behind his striped and bleeding back, his eyes fixed steadily before him.

  A dozen carpenters carried in sawed planks and stout posts, and with hammers, pegs and thongs quickly assembled a wide table onto whose top two large blocks of wood were fixed on either side of center. Four grooms led in the horses, harnessed as for plowing, and then the African was asked, with fitting tenderness, to lie on his back between the blocks, which were intended to hold his torso in place as the horses disjointed him and carried his limbs to the corners of the yard, but the blocks proved to have been set too close to admit the span of his great back.

  “What an appallingly inefficient way to kill a man,” the Radanite said, standing beside Buljan on a terrace overlooking the yard.

  “What's that?” Buljan said.

  “His offense was great, I will allow,” the Radanite said. “But surely not so great as the bek would show himself to be in having the mercy to permit me, with every assurance that the African will be sold to an exacting and implacable master, to purchase him.”

  One of the carpenters had fetched a crowbar and set about prying loose the blocks.

  “And what do you imagine, Radanite, his offense to have been?”

  “Rebellion. Insurrection.”

  “But he is not a Khazar subject.” And Buljan smiled, knowing it was foolish but enjoying nonetheless the sensation of puzzling one of that enigmatic tribe. “How could he then rebel? No, those are not the grounds of his punishment.”

  The Radanite watched as the African was introduced successfully between the blocks, on either side of his rib cage, and as a horse was tightly cinched, by the reins of its harness, to each of his ankles and wrists. The African's face remained impassive; he seemed already to have crossed into the world of his ancestors. But something about the procedure appeared to trouble the Radanite, and his attention seemed to be focused on a particular ho
rse, a bandy-legged, shaggy freak of a tarpan with a prominent nose.

  “He beat you at shatranj,” the Radanite said with gratifying wonder in his voice.

  “Nonsense,” the bek said. “I never lose at shatranj.”

  He turned to one of his guards and extended a gloved hand. The guard brought forward the African's ax, and the bek hefted it.

  “What would you give me for this?” he said. “I am sure it would fetch a good price for you farther down the road. After I have used it to disembowel its former owner, I will make a present of it.” He turned it over and ran his fingers along the runes. “I wonder what they say”

  “I can tell you that,” the Radanite said, and translating freely into surprisingly good Khazari he shoved Buljan with his shoulder and snatched the ax. He leapt onto the balustrade of the terrace and as Buljan regained his feet cried out a word that sounded like a name, cried out from the depths of his soul: “Hillel!”

  The shaggy horse reared and beat a tattoo on the skull of the carpenter who was tying him to the African's right leg, tore loose and charged across the yard. Just before the Radanite leapt he turned to Buljan and frowned as if trying to make up his mind. A moment earlier it would have been hard for Buljan to conceive of an astonishment greater than that which he already felt, but it was nothing compared with his surprise when the Radanite grabbed his embroidered silk hat. Then he leapt into space.

  He landed with a grunt of pain athwart the horse's back and drove toward the giant, who was already employing his freed leg to kick at the line that bound his right one. The Radanite described a wild circuit around the table, slashing the cords with the ax blade, knocking aside the carpenters with the butt of the handle. By the time Buljan had recovered wit enough to give the order to stop them, the African was mounted bareback on one of the other horses, reunited with his ax, and the Radanite, clutching the silken headache hat, had gotten hold of a pike. The riders circled each other for a moment and then turned their mounts and rode for the gate of the yard.

  Buljan leapt over the side of the terrace now, pushed one of his guards from a horse and took off across the yard, calling in his confusion for a volley from the archers on the roof The troops who followed him shied and reined their horses in, and one of the black-fletched arrows lodged with a humming snap in Buljan's shoulder as he followed the African and the Radanite through the gate, along the ringing cobbles into the porter's hall, cool, dank, with sparks from the hooves of the African's mount lighting up the dimness.

  When Buljan emerged into Fortress Street and the migraine blaze of day, just before he tumbled in a swoon from his horse, he remarked the fat little deserter he hired to hunt down the daughter of his predecessor, hopping alongside a mule with one foot caught in the stirrup. Buljan rose from the ground, reached over the top of his back and yanked out the arrow with a nauseous wet pop that sent him again to his knees.

  After being dragged along Fortress Street, the fat little deserter managed to mount his mule and went after his confederates, whooping like an idiot, the false Radanite trailing the unraveling banner of his head wrap and waving the purloined hat in the air, the African slinging his ax across his back, alive, bound for the open steppe and the infinite endless tracks that crosshatched it.

  “Wait,” said the bek of Khazaria, with a plaintive-ness that surprised him. “Wait, you bastards.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ON A CONSIGNMENT

  OF FLESH

  “He is in love with a hat,” said Flower of Life, frowning at Zelikma n thro ugh the croo k of A mram's arm.

  Amram sat propped on an elbow, on a cloak spread across the timbered floor of her cubicle, admiring her. Her skin was of a smokier hue but as dark as his, and if she was younger than Amram she was not quite young, and at any rate the world and all its sorrows were younger than Amram or so it felt to him, and when he studied the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth he said to himself that his wife, had she lived, might have come to bear such a face.

  “If so,” Amram said, somewhat weary of the matter of Zelikman and hats, “it would not be the first time.”

  It was the profoundest hour of the night, their third as inmates of Princess Celestial Hind's dosshouse, a converted wool factory fronting on an alley off Sturgeon Street, not far from the Caspian wharfs. Stars at the narrow window, cicadas in the boxwood of the garden, from some other part of the house the sobbing of a bowed rebab, at the far end of the garden a brokenhearted wife or mother wailing for a dead man in the street. The wind from the steppe took up and carried off like booty the stench of the burned city, burned horsehair and plaster, burned carpets, the burned timbers of the bridge that joined the Khazar town on the left bank to the town of Muslims and foreigners on the right.

  For two days and nights, since rumors first stole across the bridge with whispers of five hundred rebel Arsiyah put to death in the yard of the Qomr, the fugitive partners had been trapped by riot and counterriot with fifteen whores, male and female, among them Hanukkah's beloved Sarah; the procuress Celestial Hind, supposedly a bastard half-sister of the kagan; a cat; a weasel; and an ill-tempered macaque called For-tunatus, a name that delighted Amram, being “Zelik-man” put into Latin.

  “He won't drink,” Flower of Life observed.

  She was a slave who claimed to originate among a wandering eastern people skilled at chiromancy called the Atsingani, a claim that Amram rather doubted since he had never heard of the Atsingani and he could not believe that any race that produced such fine-looking women could long escape the notice of the world.

  “He prefers his pipe.”

  “He will not sport with the girls.”

  “Never.”

  “Nor with the boys.”

  “No. Just count yourself fortunate,” Amram said, “that he has yet to regale you with accounts of the horrors he has seen wrought by pox on the organs of love.”

  “Then tell me,” she said, sitting up now to get a better look at Zelikman where he sat curled into himself on the window ledge, turning the hat over and over in his hands, studying the legend of embroidered vines as if it contained the answer to a riddle. “What is the matter with the man?”

  “He feels remorse. He is sad.”

  She thought it over and rejected it with a shake of her long head.

  “I still say he is in love, and maybe not with a hat.”

  “Highly doubtful.”

  “Are you sad? Filled with remorse?”

  “I've lost the knack,” Amram said. This was far from the truth and yet not entirely a lie. In the back garden, amid the boxwood and blackberry and half-wild grape vines, the splintered, staved-in remains of a teamster's cart, left over from the days when this had been the residence of Georgian wool factors, bore witness to the fury with which Amram and Mother-Defiler had greeted the news of the massacred men in the Qomr. But that was two days ago. He didn't want to think about the murdered troops anymore, or the big-mouthed stripling of a girl who had been their general. So he had failed to protect Filaq, and to keep his word to the poor dead mahout with his one eye and his ancient sword and his ever-suitable sneer. Amram had been living with the knowledge of failure all his adult life, since the day his daughter went down to the reeds of the river Birbir with a basket of laundry and never returned. That was Dinah's fortune. And what befell Filaq was Filaq's fortune, as failure was his; failure, and a hard-won knowledge of the immutability of Fortune itself The hell with it. He drew back Flower of Life's hair from her cheek. “But I might be sad when I have to leave your arms.”

  “Oh, ho. Very fine. But you can't leave.” “Not with a company at every city gate.” “Where would you go if you could leave?” Amram thought it over and felt a seam open onto a void whose terrible content was the possibility that there was nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family

  “It doesn't matter where you go, does it, not when you have a hat like that,” Amram said, wincing at the clank of false ch
eer in his tone. “Isn't that right, Zelikman?” In fact even if he were not a fugitive from the bek, and the streets not plied by creaking wagons bearing away the bodies of rioters and civil guards, Amram might have been content to remain as he was for a week or a month, in the company of Flower of Life, who had treated his wounds and relieved his sundry appetites, and sung him violent ballads in strange keys, all for a reasonable fee. “Give that boy a handsome bonnet and a good horse and he will make his bed on a grill over the Adversary's own cook-fire, won't you, friend?”

  Zelikman said nothing for a long time, long enough that Amram lay back on the figured carpet, stretched out with his head in the lap of Flower of Life and closed his eyes, and nearly forgot that he had even asked a question.

  Zelikman tossed the hat to the floor as if it, too, had been holed through the crown by a thrown dagger.

  “It's only a hat,” he said at last, his voice lost in a gloom as dense and chill as those that afflicted his homeland.

  Amram sat up, alarmed, resigned and irritated all at once, knowing that there was a correct thing to be done and that they must now do it, if only to put Zelikman out of his misery once and for all.

  “All right,” he said, “all right, damn you to hell, Zelikman, we'll go after her.”

  At this moment there was a pounding on the heavy oak door downstairs, and a commotion among the girls and boys on the second floor where trade was conducted, and then they heard the querulous voice of the procuress. Amram reached for his sword. His partner slid from the window ledge and grabbed the old curved shank with which Hanukkah had armed him, Zelikman having left Lancet in the care of the Radanites at the hostel when he set off four days ago to try to purchase Amram's freedom. Amram considered a leap through the window, into the garden, but in the end his curiosity won and he crept down the stairs to the lower landing.