Gentlemen of the Road

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh." [Afterword]

I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.

[A]dventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result -- and have been since at least the time of Odysseus -- of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home.

The wind of righteous adventure that had begun to sweep through the square subsided as this secret captain and master of the accumulated lore of soldierly skepticism began to explain that any king who controlled both the treasury and the army was, in the eyes of the world, legitimate, and that while no one could know the mind of God, the Almighty had in the past shown a marked tendency, in his view, to ratify public opinion.

Maybe I’m tired,” he said. “Maybe I’m tired of picking up life in bits and fistfuls and little drawstring bags. When you get to be as old as I am, there’s an appeal in the idea of seeing some business through from start to finish.

saddlebags and called for water to be heated. He knelt and removed his outer tunic and rolled the white sleeves of the inner one. He rubbed astringent oil into his hands and along his forearms to the elbow, to the amusement of the nephew, who drew a wrongheaded moral from the notion of a physician who medicated himself and not his patient. The stranger leaned in to sniff at the Italian’s breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow’s pulse. While he worked, he asked about the

bells. “I accept your kind invitation,” Zelikman said. “My services as a physician ought just to offset my fare.” The elephant gave a low moan, startling them, and a moment later they heard a faint trill, carried on the wind from off the river, and then another. “Trumpets,” the nephew said.

wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the rise, that the Rus had abandoned, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they

Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one’s home, or trying to return to it again.

Not always," said his nephew, a would-be sharp operator who lacked for the satisfaction of his ambition only the quality of sharpness, and who expended all of his energies, as far as Joseph could see, on preserving his opinions from contamination by experience.

All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men.

The African patted the horse's neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant's back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality

I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know,” Zelikman continued. “I am a gentlemen of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief, but on this one small principle of economy, damn you, and damn that troublemaking little stripling, and damn every one of those men out there, living men, in full possession, for the most part, of all their limbs and humors, I have to hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill them one man at a time.

open the door in the gate. She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence, but

You mendacious sons of bitches,” the mahout said

adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold.

Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence.

breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow’s pulse. While he worked, he asked about the

the greater involution and deeper patina of her left tooth in comparison to the right, the skeptical cast