Read Gentlemen of the Road for Free Online Page B

tightly around his shoulders and knew in his heart that he would end his days in some winter kingdom, among wintry men. Then, as if overhearing and taking pity on the maudlin trend of his thoughts, the wind carried to his nostrils from the fires of the troops camped in the valley the desert tang of a camel-dung fire, and with it the plangent cry of a soldier-muezzin calling his saddle-weary brothers to a belated Jumuah. Amram was surprised to learn that it was a Friday. Bearing this strangely moving information, he crept back down to the fold of rock in which Zelikman and Hanukkah had hidden themselves, and then led by Zelikman, who honored the commandments in nearly the same measure as he despised them, the son of Ham, the son of Shem and the son of Japheth bowed their heads to greet the Sabbath bride before they rode down the mountain, toward the winter and the sea, to steal back Zelikman’s horse.
    It so happened that soon after he first set out from his village in pursuit of his stolen daughter, Amram had been employed as a horse thief. It was a trade that he had continued to pursue intermittently ever since, in particular during his ten years of service in the armies of Constantinople, when he had been obliged, through the improvidence and cheeseparing of the emperor’s quartermasters and longstanding custom of his border troops, to steal not only horses but also cattle, sheep, goats, fowl, grain, cheeses, fuel, skins, wool and hides. Everything but women: that was one custom Amram had always declined, while he held a command, to observe or to tolerate in his own men.
    Amram supposed that Hillel must by now be accustomed to being stolen, having originally been provided to Zelikman during a raid the partners staged on a khan outside Damascus whose landlord, himself a broker of stolen horses, tried to cheat them after one of their performances.
    After prayer they dined on the lees of their provisions and the last gristly hunks of goat, and Hanukkah offered thanks to God on their behalf, employing a Khazari melody that sounded throaty and sad to Amram’s ear. Amram took out his shatranj board and thrashed Zelikman and Hanukkah twice apiece while they waited for the perfection of darkness. Then they crept back up to the crest of the pass.
    Zelikman had tried to dissuade Hanukkah from joining them, in consideration of his wound, but Hanukkah would not hear of it, insisting that he felt so grateful to Zelikman for sewing him up so tightly, and salving him so efficaciously, that he was prepared if need be to crawl on his belly to the Arsiyah camp, and if tonight they should prove unsuccessful in retrieving the virtuous Hillel, then Zelikman might, should he ever choose to return home, ride on Hanukkah’s back all the way to Francia or Saxony or the evening couches of the Sun himself.
    “Take care of what you say,” Amram advised him. “He healed me of a sword cut to the neck five years ago, and I’ve been carrying him on my back ever since.”
    Then they started down in the darkness toward the horses. A hundred and ten, by Amram’s count, strong animals well fed and stolid, they milled around the meadow to the east of the tents, a shifting patch of denser darkness against the night. Hobbled, loudly gourmandizing the dry chess grass, they were guarded by a pair of dismounted soldiers in long, dusty coats split up the front and elaborately bearing on the left sleeves embroidered quotations from the lips of the Prophet. A pair of pickets held the southern approach to the camp, and there were guards posted on the north and west sides of camp, all fine, tall, falcon-faced men, in excellent equipage and reasonable order, but to Amram’s eye as he had studied them and their fellows in the last of the daylight they betrayed an indifference to their duty, a hint of discontent, as if they had better things to do and expected no trouble or enemy from any quarter. Something was roiling them. He wondered if perhaps they suffered