Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon [Chabon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

ON ANXIETIES ARISING

FROM THE IMPERMISSIBILITY,

HOWEVER UNREASONABLE,

OF AN ELEPHANT’S ROUNDING

OUT A PRAYER QUORUM

War,” said Joseph Hirkanos to the elephant. He spat on the grass and shook his head and pulled at the braided strands of his beard. The elephant snorted as if in agreement, with her usual air of stoic disdain, and went on ripping up sheaves of chess grass with her scarified trunk and stuffing them into her mouth. Her own warlike career long past, she was a great placid dam of at least fifty who had been captured by Normans decades ago in a raid on Muslim Sicily and fetched home to Francia to be neglected by a series of improvident barons until the day, six months ago, that she was absorbed, by way of payment, into the far-flung and arbitrary inventories of the Hirkanos clan. “Bad for the Radanites.”

“Not always,” said his nephew, a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness and who expended all of his energies, as far as Joseph could see, on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience. “War creates opportunities too.”

“In the short term,” Joseph said, and spat again. “Good in the short term is always bad in the long term.”

They stood on a low rise to the west of Atil, above the final bend in the tortuous road that led from the sources of the Danube, across plain and mountain and swamp, by ship and wagon, to the mouth of the Volga, a journey that had required eighteen months of hard travel. Joseph Hirkanos raised to his eyes one of those rare glasses of Persian manufacture that were a special line of his family’s trade and scanned the horizon of his woes. A plume of dust half a mile tall moved against the southern sky, slow and menacing, a quill scribing oaths of rebellion along the shores of the Khazar Sea. The reports he had received, discounted by half for lies and bluster and by two-thirds for wishfulness, portrayed the rebels as a tough shank of perhaps five hundred Arsiyah horsemen seething in a thin broth of Muhammadan irregulars and pimentoed with a fistful of Nestorians, pagans, worshipers of fire and Jews who wished for or foresaw the downfall of Buljan. All of them barbarians, in the view of Joseph Hirkanos, particularly the Khazar Jews. As with most of the Turkic hordes to come tumbling on horseback out of the eastern steppe, outward forms of worship were a matter of relative indifference to the Khazars, and Joseph had always suspected that their adoption of Judaism was not the result of divine calling so much as the mark of a politic reluctance to appear to side with either their country’s Christian or its powerful Muslim neighbors.

“Ten years since my last visit, and the exact moment I arrive, a war breaks out,” Joseph Hirkanos said bitterly. If the Khazars, that tolerant and pragmatic people, had fallen prey to doctrinal strife, what hope was there for the world? “A religious war.

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