He shook his head.
“Now you have accomplished both at once,” she said. “Quite a feat.”
“I would invite you to share my bed,” Zelikman said. “But it is a poor one, and I fear that I would acquit myself very poorly in it.”
“My standard of comparison is so low,” she said. “The fact that I'm actually consenting to it may compensate for your absence of technique.”
“I understand,” he said.
They took off their clothes, and climbed under the thin blanket, and warmed their hands in the darkness at the little fire they made. He verified, too quickly at first, that she was indeed female in all her particulars, and both of them were contented, for the moment, with that.
“Will you go to Africa?” she asked him.
“Maybe,” Zelikman said. “Filaq, ride with us. With me. Follow the roads, see the kingdoms.” He took hold of her again, improving somewhat upon his first performance. She stroked his hair and ran her hand along the cheek that he had shaved smooth of its bogus Radanite beard.
“That isn't my true name, by the way,” she said. “Filaq.”
“Will you tell me your true name?”
“Only if you promise not to ask me to come with you,” she said.
“I promise.”
She paused, as if for effect, and then looked straight into his eyes.
“My name is Alp,” she said. “I am the bek and kagan of Khazaria.”
He was disappointed, but he felt the foolishness of that disappointment, and like a vial of tincture that had lost its volatility he put it aside.
“Oho,” he said.
“The current system has become unwieldy”
“Swindler!” Zelikman said, knowing as he kissed her that no one would ever touch her as a woman again. “Hustling a kingdom.”
In the morning when Zelikman woke she had gone, taking the knowledge of her true name with her. He went to rouse Amram, but his partner had already removed himself from the warm bed of Flower of Life and stood waiting in the yard, in a wolfskin cloak and a cloud of breath from the horses, stamping his feet, complaining of the chill in bones that were too old for love and for adventure and for dragging his African ass halfway around the world all on account of elephants.
“Do you want to stay?” Zelikman said, looking up at a high small window cut into the stone wall, where Flower of Life now leaned, chin in hand, her face giving nothing away
Amram swung up onto the back of Porphyrogene, and flicked the reins, and that was all the answer that he gave. And then they took the first road that led out of the city, unmindful of whether it turned east or south, their direction a question of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.
