engaged in an argument, in an unknown language, with the African on his spotted Parthian. The sun had dipped behind the slope of the mountain along whose eastern skirt ran the road that led, hugging the southeast littoral of the Khazar Sea, from Azerbaijan to Atil. The air was crisp, the light wistful and the smell of the Frankish physician abominable, and Hanukkah knew that he was going to live.
“Thank you,” he said, or tried to say, but his throat was raw and his lips half-sealed, and it did not emerge loud enough to interrupt the dispute between the African and the Frank. He said, in Arabic, “Thank you for finding my horse.”
The African left off making whatever irritated point he had been trying to score against the Frank, turned his great head toward Hanukkah and said: “Have you any objection to this fellow's taking it as payment for saving your life? Provided that we agree to convey you to water, food and a road home before we part ways?”
It was a reasonable and acceptable proposal, but there was a querulous note in the African's voice that made Hanukkah leery of agreeing too quickly
“I am not sure my life is so valuable,” he said. “But if the terms are agreeable to the learned gentleman. …”
“I don't want your old hack,” the Frank said, and the bones of his back stood out against the dusty black leather of his jerkin. “I want Hillel. And do not repeat, Amram, that a horse is a horse, because history, circumstances and I have disproved that argument many times.”
“The manhunters are two days ahead of us,” the African said. “They're heavily armed and bound for a kingdom in which we have no business, no friends. Apart from your freakish half-Arabian sweetheart, for whom you have now, thanks to the openhandedness of this good Khazar, found adequate replacement, I see nothing that we stand to gain from the pursuit of that boy”
“Our money,” the Frank said. “He has that too.”
“I'm afraid not,” Hanukkah said. “It was divided among the bastards who put me and the others to the sword, with the promise of more on the boy's safe return to Atil, and greater reward still on the restoration of his family to the bek's tripod. He has an older brother named Alp, who was sold by the usurper into slavery among the Rus and whose cause the stripling advanced, along with the contents of his, or rather of your, sack of gold.”
“The king of the great land of the Khazars rules with his ass slung in a tripod?”
“The bek is not our king,” Hanukkah said, trying to explain how alone among the civilized peoples of the earth the Khazars, in their wisdom, had discovered a means by which men might, profitably and without excessive peril to their souls, serve two masters. There was the bek, who directed the daily course of men's affairs, in the teeming streets of Atil, in the profane worlds of warfare and commerce, and over him-over all the Khazar people, embodying them and their interests and speaking on their behalf to God and all his angels-there was the kagan, in his palace on his sacred island in the middle of the river Atil, whose word was law and whose face was never seen.
“A kagan is the father, the mother and the lover of all his people. Nobody would lift a hand against him,” Hanukkah said. “But a bek has many enemies, and Buljan more than the usual. These enemies may have already begun to look for someone to oppose Buljan. I imagine that the boy Filaq, could easily find men to finance the ransom of Alp. After that it would be a matter of mustering soldiers, and I can tell you, for I've seen it with my own eyes, that this youth has a way with soldiers. He talked two-thirds of our number into betraying both our employer and the other third, among which, alas, I found myself”
“Because you so love the cause of Buljan?”
“No,” Hanukkah said. “I–I suppose it's only that I don't like changes in plan. I am slow to make up my mind.”
“Slow-witted.”
“If you like. But I obeyed an impulse in deciding to come along on this damned journey, and you see how that worked out.”
The Frank turned on his horse now and stared at Hanukkah for a long moment as they started up the last rise before the pass. When they crested it, they would see the first shimmer of the Khazar, or Caspian, Sea, whose chill waters were no colder than the eyes of the Frank as they made their diagnosis of Hanukkah's heart.
“You did it for the sake of a woman, I suppose?” the Frank said.
“For Sarah,” Hanukkah said. And he told them about the slave girl for the purchase of whose freedom he had enlisted in the deadly service of Buljan. “I'd never heard of this Filaq, to be honest, before I took this damned job. Never paid the slightest attention to royal genealogies or politics. Doubtless there is more to this story than I will ever-”
As they came around a bend in the road, Hanukkah's old nag shied, and reared up, and danced sideways into a thicket before the Frank succeeded in bringing it around, and then they sat a moment, staring at the dead men who had been laid by the side of the road in a neat row like the physician's instruments in his canvas roll. Kisa, Suleiman, Hoopoe, Bugha, they were all there, all nine of them, stripped of their weapons and armor, their waxen faces gawping at the sky. There was no sign of Filaq, or of the bag of gold.
They climbed down from their horses, and the giant unshouldered his ax. On one side of the road there was a sheer rock face and on the other a long, gentle rise to the pass. The rise was brown and treeless and could be concealing no one. They waited until it was dusk, and then as the bats began to circle they led the horses almost to the top of the rise, where they tied the animals and crept along on foot until they could see over the crest. Below them, widening like a horn, stretched a steep-sided valley that ran, in terraced ripples that were crosshatched with vineyards, all the way to the sea far below. About halfway down the slope, a great number of horses milled, cropping the grass. Beyond them, to the right of the road, Hanukkah made out the white tents, peaked and striped with green, of a company of Arsiyah, elite mercenaries, Muslims whose fathers had come from Persia two centuries ago and who had served the kings of Khazaria since long before the conversion of their employers to the teachings of the Jews. Hanukkah heard laughter, and the jangle of a lute, and smelled scorched grain and roast onions.
“Well, it looks like our boy found himself an army,” the African said, shaking his head. “So much the worse for him.”
CHAPTER FIVE
With nightfall, a wind blew in over the sea, from the lands beyond the Khazar Sea and beyond the vast steppe of the north, from kingdoms of forest and snow that Amram understood to be the habitations of witches and snow djinn and warrior women who rode on the backs of bears and of giant deer. In the wind was a promise only of ice, storm and advancing darkness, and Amram knelt on the northern slope of a strange mountain, far from home, drew his woolen cloak more 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.
