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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

ON THE OBSERVANCE OF
THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT
AMONG HORSE THIEVES
    W ith 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