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

that sound, boy?” Amram said. “That’s Zelikman. 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.

CHAPTER SIX

ON SOME PECULIARITIES
IN THE TRADING PRACTICES
OF NORTHMEN
    I t 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.
    As he backed, feinting and thrusting with Lancet at the Arsiyah who surrounded him all of them wide awake now but not entirely free, as any of them would have been ready to attest, of dreamlike bafflement at the sight of a gaunt moonlit phantom who menaced them with an overgrown bloodletting fleam, feeling his way with the boot heel of his hind foot through the doubtful maze of unstrung tents and plunging horses that loomed at his back, Zelikman felt a sharp jab on the shoulder. He whirled to find that he had been bitten, with implicit reproof at his foolhardiness in trying to rescue Amram single-handedly from an entire company of heavily armed cavalrymen, by the bastard offspring of a mountain tarpan and an Arab dam whose bloodlines ran all the way back to one of Al Khamsa, the five mother mares of the Prophet’s own stable.
    Zelikman threw his arm around Hillel’s neck and nodded to the soldiers, and murmuring a phrase in the horse-charming mother tongue of his Abyssinian partner urged Hillel to split the narrow gap between two huge men with lances who were just now bearing down on him. Then, displaying no grace whatsoever and suffering a painful encounter between his teeth and his tongue, Zelikman executed the difficult maneuver of mounting a horse at full gallop. To outside observers, of which thankfully there could be, in the darkness, on this desolate slope, very few, he must have looked as if he were trying not to mount Hillel’s saddle so much as to perform some foul outrage upon his neck.
    The grooms had been busy gathering in the scattered horses, and troopers were soon mounted and in pursuit of Hillel as he carried Zelikman back up the slope heading south. But while the Khazar horses, like Hillel, were sturdy and sure-footed and bred to the steep, rocky tracks, all heart and lung and back, with hooves so hard they required no shoes, they lacked speed and Hillel’s ineffable Arabian humor: a demonic intelligence that lay somewhere between perversity and fire. By the time he gained the pass, the pursuers were far behind. Hillel chose his way down to the fold in the rock where Hanukkah’s dray and Porphyrogene waited. Zelikman drew a slow breath that felt as if it might have been his first inhalation since the moment he had seen Amram charging bareback into the heart of the camp. As he breathed out, tears came to his eyes. He wept silently, after the custom of shamed and angry men, so that when the pursuit party came tumbling, pounding scrabbling down the trail, past the fold in which he and Hillel stood concealed, he could hear the creak and rattle of their leather armor with its scales of horn; and when