Ahmad laughed until he shook, then called for Kanuni to bring him his satchel. Once he had it in hand, he dug inside and pulled out the dried newts he’d bought from the old hag. “Here, you’ll be needing these,” he said.
Camels bite. A camel will, for no reason, spit on you, stomp you, kick you, bellow, burp, and fart at you. They are stubborn at their best, and cranky beyond all belief at their worst. If you provoke them, they will bite. If you insert a dehydrated amphibian elbow-deep in a camel’s bum, he considers himself provoked, doubly so if the procedure was performed while he was sleeping. Camels are wise to stealth. They bite.
“I can heal that,” Joshua said, looking at the huge tooth marks on my forehead. We were following Ahmad’s caravan along the Silk Road, which was neither a road nor made of silk. It was, in fact, a narrow path through the rocky inhospitable highland desert of what is now Syria into the low, inhospitable desert of what is now Iraq.
“He said sixty days by camel. Doesn’t that mean that we should be riding, not walking?”
“You’re missing your camel pals, aren’t you?” Josh grinned, that snotty, Son-o’-God grin of his. Maybe it was just a regular grin.
“I’m just tired. I was up half the night sneaking up on these guys.”
“I know,” said Joshua. “I had to get up at dawn to fix one of the saddles before we left. Ahmad’s tools leave something to be desired.”
“You go ahead and be the martyr, Josh, just forget about what I was doing all night. I’m just saying that we should get to ride instead of walking.”
“We will,” Josh said. “Just not now.”
The men in the caravan were all riding, although several of them, as well as Kanuni, were on horses. The camels were loaded down with great packs of iron tools, powdered dyes, and sandalwood bound for the Orient. At the first highland oasis we crossed, Ahmad traded the horses for four more camels, and Joshua and I were allowed to ride. At night we ate with the rest of the men, sharing boiled grain or bread with sesame paste, the odd bit of cheese, mashed chickpeas and garlic, occasionally goat meat, and sometimes the dark hot drink we had discovered in Antioch (mixed with date sugar and topped with foaming goat’s milk and cinnamon at my suggestion). Ahmad dined alone in his tent, while the rest of us would dine under the open awning that we constructed to shelter us from the hottest part of the day. In the desert, the day gets warmer as it gets later, so the hottest part of the day will be in the late afternoon, just before sundown brings the hot winds to leach the last moisture from your skin.
None of Ahmad’s men spoke Aramaic or Hebrew, but they had enough functional Latin and Greek to tease Joshua and me about any number of subjects, their favorite, of course, being my job as chief camel deconstipator. The men hailed from a half-dozen different lands, many we had never heard of. Some were as black as Ethiopians, with high foreheads and long, graceful limbs, while others were squat and bowlegged, with powerful shoulders, high cheekbones, and long wispy mustaches like Ahmad’s. Not one of them was fat or weak or slow. Before we were a week out of Antioch we figured out that it only took a couple of men to care for and guide a caravan of camels, so we were perplexed at why someone as shrewd as Ahmad would bring along so many superfluous employees.
“Bandits,” Ahmad said, adjusting his bulk to find a more comfortable position atop his camel. “I’d need no more than a couple of dolts like you two if it was just the animals that needed tending. They’re guards. Why did you think they were all carrying bows and lances?”
“Yeah,” I said, giving Joshua a dirty look, “didn’t you see the lances? They’re guards. Uh, Ahmad, shouldn’t Josh and I have lances—I mean, when we get to the bandit area?”
“We’ve been followed by bandits for five days now,” Ahmad said.
“We don’t need lances,” Joshua said. “I will not make a man sin by committing an act of thievery. If a man would have something of mine, he need only ask and I will give it to him.”
“Give me the rest of your money,” I said.
“Forget it,” said Joshua.
“But you just said—”
“Yeah, but not to you.”
Most nights Joshua and I slept in the open, outside Ahmad’s tent, or if the night was especially cold, among the camels, where we would endure their grunting and snorting to get out of the wind. The guards slept in two-man tents, except for two who stood guard all night. Many nights, long after the camp was quiet, Joshua and I would lie looking up at the stars and pondering the great questions of life.
“Josh, do you think the bandits will rob us and kill us, or just rob us?”
“Rob us, then kill us, I would think,” said Josh. “Just in case they missed something that we had hidden, they could torture its whereabouts out of us.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Do you think Ahmad has sex with Kanuni?” Joshua asked.
“I know he does. He told me he does.”
“What do you think it’s like? With them I mean? Him so fat and her so, you know?”
“Frankly, Joshua, I’d rather not think about it. But thanks for putting that picture in my head.”
“You mean you can imagine them together?”
“Stop it, Joshua. I can’t tell you what sin is like. You’re going to have to do it yourself. What’s next? I’ll have to murder someone so I can explain what it’s like to kill?”
“No, I don’t want to kill.”
“Well, that might be one you have to do, Josh. I don’t think the Romans are going to go away because you ask them to.”
“I’ll find a way. I just don’t know it yet.”
“Wouldn’t it be funny if you weren’t the Messiah? I mean if you abstained from knowing a woman your whole life, only to find out that you were just a minor prophet?”
“Yeah, that would be funny,” said Josh. He wasn’t smiling.
“Kind of funny?”
The journey seemed to go surprisingly fast once we knew we were being followed by bandits. It gave us something to talk about and our backs stayed limber, as we were always twisting in our saddles and checking the horizon. I was almost sad when they finally, after ten days on our trail, decided to attack.
Ahmad, who was usually at the front of the caravan, fell back and rode beside us. “The bandits will ambush us inside that pass just ahead,” he said.
The road snaked into a canyon with steep slopes on either side topped by rows of huge boulders and wind-eroded towers. “They’re hiding in those boulders on top of either ridge,” Ahmad said. “Don’t stare, you’ll give us away.”
Joshua said, “If you know that they’re going to attack, why not pull up and defend ourselves?”
“They will attack one way or another anyway. Better an ambush we know about than one we don’t. And they don’t know we know.”
I noticed the squat guards with the mustaches take short bows from pouches behind their saddles, and as subtly as a man might brush a cobweb from his eyelash, they strung the bows. If you’d been watching them from a distance you’d have hardly seen them move.
“What do you want us to do?” I asked Ahmad.
“Try not to get killed. Especially you, Joshua. Balthasar will be very angry indeed if I show up with you dead.”
“Wait,” said Joshua, “Balthasar knows we are coming?”
“Why, yes,” laughed Ahmad. “He told me to look for you. What, you think I help every pair of runts that wander into the market at Antioch?”
“Runts?” I had momentarily forgotten about the ambush.
“How long ago did he tell you to look for us?”
“I don’t know, right after he first left Antioch for Kabul, maybe ten years ago. It doesn’t matter now, I have to get back to Kanuni, bandits scare her.”
“Let them get a good look at her,” I said. “We’ll see who scares who.”
“Don’t look at the ridges,” Ahmad said as he rode away.
The bandits came down the sides of the canyon like a synchronized avalanche, driving their camels to the edge of balance, pushing a river of rocks and sand before them. There were twenty-five, maybe thirty of them, all dressed in black, half of them on camels waving swords or clubs, the other half on foot with long spears for gutting a camel rider.