Gentlemen of the Road
“Now she crossed in utter dark, swimming the river at the last hour of night, naked and freezing, preserved from drowning only by the saving company of gentlemen of the road fated someday to be hanged. Greased with tallow, sidearms strapped to their backs, their clothes tied around their necks in bituminized bladders, huffing, gasping. The river in autumn still flowing swift and in its motion burning colder than ice. When she first slipped into the water on the Khazaran side she felt panic, iron... bands and deadweights on her chest and ankles, and then numbness like a toxin in her muscles, a fatal resignation. And then Zelikman’s hand reaching for her, dragging at her wrist, shoulder, hair, his voice at once harsh and tender hissing, Swim you lazy bitch.At the southern tip of the island that was shaped like a letter qof they splashed up a stone embankment and clambered stiff and stumbling like unarticulated iron beings. Unslinging their sacks, they rolled in the grass and shadows of a laurel grove in which, so her father had told her, a kagan new-crowned was forced to his knees and informed, with his neck in the loop of a silken garrote, of the precise day and hour on which he would be returned to the spot and dispatched, by a slipknot, to the afterlife of kings.Cold humming in her, she dressed hurriedly and led Amram and Zelikman up out of the grove and along the scarp toward the southern or Bee Gate.MoreLess
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