Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page A

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 Hillel, 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