Gentlemen of the Road Read Online Free PDF

sea.
    “Where is the point?” Zelikman said.
    “Here,” Amram said, drawing his dagger and holding it, as he had lately held it in the caravansary, less than the breadth of a finger from Zelikman’s throat. “I would rather have your death on my conscience or, failing that, face a week’s hard riding and a gang of armed bravos than suffer through a month or more of listening to your maunderings.”
    Zelikman considered the dagger and his partner’s face and appeared seriously to weigh the three possibilities that Amram had just named. Then he held out his hand, and Amram dragged him to his feet.
    “Just when did you acquire a conscience?” Zelikman said.
    “A figure of speech. Which will it be?”
    Zelikman yanked the arrow out of the charred trunk and handed it with a shrug to Amram.
    “Only because I know how Hillel pines for me,” he said.

CHAPTER FOUR

ON THE SUBSTITUTION OF
ONE ANGEL, AND ONE CAUSE,
FOR ANOTHER
    A ll that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.
    He had failed as a farmer, a dealer in hides, a soldier, and now as a hunter of men, a trade he undertook on a misguided whim, riding as last-minute replacement for a more qualified killer whose career of violence ended in a tavern on the night before the hunting party set out from Atil to track down the last free survivor of Buljan’s coup.
    The other five manhunters who like Hanukkah had remained true to the cause—or at any rate to the gold—of their employer lay scattered around the ruin like the tumbled fragments of a colonnade. Among them were two of their erstwhile comrades, who had been turned by the haughty manner and readier gold of their prisoner and the promise of more gold to come. Distilled by the sun of two days, their stench was wafted tenderly in the direction of Hanukkah’s nose by the beating wings of buzzards, which had arrived within hours of the slaughter, in their black finery, to feast.
    Beside him, nestled in the crook of his left arm, lay a skin in which remained a few swallows of clean water, which Hanukkah had been denying himself in the hour since dawn in the hope of hastening his demise. His belly wound had ceased to cause him much pain, which he took as a favorable sign that the angel had concluded whatever other business had been delaying him and was hastening even now to collect him. The recriminations that assailed Hanukkah through the first hours of his vigil were faded to a philosophical regret at the waste that attended all human ambition. It was only his vain desire to gain the money he needed to purchase the freedom of his beloved Sarah, a whore in a Sturgeon Street brothel, that had led him to offer his sword in the murderous service of Buljan. Hanukkah had no quarrel with the old bek, and in fact had been inclined to view him as an able leader, worthy of loyalty and tribute. He had been an unwilling participant in the raid on the stronghold in Azerbaijan, and in fact had spent the hour it endured cowering under a hay wagon at the back of a stable.
    Though only a week earlier the idea would have struck him as heresy, as he lay waiting to become carrion he considered that plump and vivacious Sarah was perhaps unworthy of his suffering and death, when after all, she chewed with her mouth open and her wind, when she had been consuming too much milk, gave off an unsettling odor of brimstone.
    But when he remarked the travelers, a giant African and a black-hatted scarecrow crowded onto the broad back of a massive spotted horse that looked to be on the verge of collapse, Hanukkah forgot his resolve and took a long warm swig from