Read Online Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon - Free Book Online

side.
    “Sit,” he said, “please.”
    He sat the Frank down on the steps, pulled off his boots and fetched some water from a cistern. Some of the water he mixed with wine and passed to Zelikman in an overturned steel helmet. The rest he used to wash the blood from Zelikman’s hands and face and to bathe his feet. From this mild and voluntary act of self-abasement, from the routine business of cistern and dipper and the wringing of a cloth, from the Frank’s pale feet with their surprisingly soft ankles, Hanukkah derived a measure of comfort and regained his spirits. He found a neglected passage behind the mosque that the Rus had disdained to plunder, and in a cellar there a pair of toothless old sisters who at extortionate prices provided him with cold porridge, some lentils and mint, a bag of apples and the butt of a lamb sausage. He gave the food to Zelikman, who ate, and drank, and rested, talking to the African in Greek or Latin.
    The subject of their conversation appeared to be Filaq, who sat slumped on the steps of the mosque with his chin in his hands, wearing a mask of tear streaks and ash. The stripling had scarcely moved in the hours since the Arsiyah mercenaries had paroled their prisoners to shift for themselves, saying nothing at all for what struck Hanukkah as an abnormally long period of time. With his smudged cheeks and staring eyes he seemed younger than ever, a child with an empty belly too weary to sleep. He did not appear to notice when the Arsiyah at last came trudging out of the mosque and clattering down the steps around him, stooped as by time or a heavy load, their gait uncertain, their evening lifting of their voices toward far-off Mecca having done little to ease the painful knowledge of their failure to defend this Muhammadan town from destruction by the Northmen. They loitered in the square, cast down, aimless. Their commander was dead, drowned in the collapse of the wharves. The surviving captains could not come to agreement on whether they ought to pursue and punish the Rus or return to Atil and face condemnation, and possibly execution, by the bek for having disobeyed his direct order that no one interfere with or harass the Northmen in their “trading mission” among the peoples of the littoral. This order was accompanied by rumors that these same ambitious Northmen had backed the new bek in his coup; but an order it remained. Now the Arsiyah, whose most prized asset as with all mercenary elites was not their skill at arms and horsemanship or fearsome reputation but the stainless banner of their loyalty, found themselves confronted by the dawning awareness that the only thing less forgivable than a mutiny was a mutiny that failed.
    “They will go south, to Derbent,” said the first captain, a florid, gaunt man bleeding from a dozen cuts, naming the next great Muslim town on the littoral. “We must anticipate them there.”
    His fellow captain, stout and languid of manner, pointed out the unlikeliness of their arriving at Derbent in time or force enough to stop the Northmen, who had the advantage of a prevailing north wind, and then by way of epilogue composed on the spot an unfavorable judgment on the gaunt captain’s intelligence in even offering such a futile suggestion. The two officers were separated by their men only long enough to permit a general exchange of insults that soon devolved into a melee. In the course of the fighting, the lean captain ran onto the sword point of the stocky one and added his own life to the day’s grim total and to the slick, rank slurry of blood and dust that filmed the square.
    A shrill horseman’s whistle split the air, and the soldiers abandoned the violence of their grief and turned to listen to the words of a trooper who had stayed out of the fracas, a wiry, bowlegged veteran nearly as grizzled as Amram, one of those men of no great rank or bravery who by virtue of heartlessness, opportunism and a long streak of luck outlasted all their