Gentlemen of the Road

already intriguing against the bek took heart from this pox. A general, name of Buljan, he seizes his main chance and ambushes the poor old elephant-fancying fool on the Kiev road. Installs himself in the Qomr citadel straightaway Since then, Buljan's gone very carefully about the business of removing anybody-brothers, wives, sons-who might be harboring feelings of resentment over the whole business.”

“I am sorry about your animals, my friend,” Amram said, taking his horse by the reins and leading it to the door of the stable. “But we don't stoop to politics, either.”

“A word, Amram,” Zelikman said. “If I may.” They sent the Persian and the stripling out into the inn yard then, and as was their inveterate custom at a crossroads of fortune, bickered like a couple of Regens-burg fishwives. At first they argued about whether or not they had time to argue, or if arguing would cost them their appointment with the ostler in the clearing and then about whose fault it had been that they were never paid by the landlord of an inn outside Trebizond, and then Zelikman succeeded in returning the conversation to the subject of the elephant boy, and his grandfather's stronghold in Azerbaijan, and the easy money that delivering him thence represented, at which point they resumed an old, old argument over whose definition of “easy money” was the least commensurate with lived experience, and about who was afraid and whose courage had been more openly on display in the recent course of their partnership. Next they argued about the overall equity of that longstanding arrangement and who shouldered more of its burdens, which led inevitably to the question of the hat, and whether the demands of verisimilitude had required its assassination. Amram had just dredged up an ancient debacle at Tergeste when there was a soft moan from outside the stable, and then a sharp thud, like a muffled bell, that to Zelikman's ears had the unmistakable timbre of a skull hitting a wooden plank.

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

Whatever 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,” Ze-likman 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