Three times in his life Zelim joined a caravan on the Silk Road and made his way to Samarkand. The first time was just a couple of years after the death of Passak, and he traveled on foot, having no money to purchase an animal strong enough to survive the trek. It was a journey that tested to its limits his hunger to see the place: by the time the fabled towers came in sight he was so exhausted-his feet bloody, his body trembling, his eyes red-raw from days of walking in clouds of somebody else's dust-that he simply fell down in the sweet grass beside the river and slept for the rest of the day there outside the walls, oblivious.

He awoke at twilight, washed the sand from his eyes, and looked up. The sky was opulent with color; tiny knitted rows of high cloud, all amber toward the west, blue purple on their eastern flank, and birds in wheeling flocks, circling the glowing minarets as they returned to their roosts. He got to his feet and entered the city as the night fires around the walls were being stoked, their fuel such fragrant woods that the very air smelt holy.

Inside, all the suffering he'd endured to get here was forgotten. Samarkand was all that his father had said it would be, and more. Though Zelim was little more than a beggar here, he soon realized that there was a market for his storytelling. And that he had much to tell. People liked to hear him talk about the baptism at Atva; and the forest; and Nazar and his fate. Whether they believed these were accounts of true events or not didn't matter: they gave him money and food and friendship (and in the case of several well-bred ladies, nights of love) to hear him tell his tales. He began to extend his repertoire: extemporize, enrich, invent. He created new stories about the family on the shore, and because it seemed people liked to have a touch of philosophy woven into their entertainments, introduced his themes of destiny into the stories, ideas that he'd nurtured in his years with Passak.

By the time he left Samarkand after that first visit, which lasted a year and a half, he had a certain reputation, not simply as a fine storyteller, but as a man of some wisdom. And now, as he traveled, he had a new subject: Samarkand.

There, he would say, the highest aspirations of the human soul, and the lowest appetites of the flesh, are so closely laid, that it's hard sometimes to tell one from the other. It was a point of view people were hungry to hear, because it was so often true of their own lives, but so seldom admitted to. Zelim's reputation grew.

The next time he went to Samarkand he traveled on the back of a camel, and had a fifteen-year-old boy to prepare his food and see to his comfort, a lad who'd been apprenticed to him because he too wanted to be a storyteller. When they got to the city, it was inevitably something of a disappointment to Zelim. He felt like a man who'd returned to the bed of a great love only to find his memories sweeter than the reality. But this experience was also the stuff of parable; and he'd only been in the city a week before his disappointment was part of a tale he told.

And there were compensations: reunions with friends he'd made the first time he'd been here; invitations into the palatial homes of men who would have scorned him as an uneducated fisherman a few years before, but now declared themselves honored when he stepped across their thresholds. And the profoundest compensation, his dis covery that here in the city there existed a tiny group of young scholars who studied his life and his parables as though he were a man of some significance. Who could fail to be flattered by that? He spent many days and nights talking with them, and answering their questions as honestly as he was able.

One question in particular loitered in his brain when he left the city. "Do you think you'll ever see again the people you met on the shore?" a young scholar had asked him,

"I don't suppose so," he'd said to the youth. "I was nothing to them."

"But to the child, perhaps…" the scholar had replied.

"To the child?" said Zelim. "I doubt he even knew I existed. He was more interested in his mother's milk than he was in me."

The scholar persisted, however. "You teach in your stories," he said, "how things always come round. You talk in one of them about the Wheel of the Stars. Perhaps it will be the same with these people. They'll be like the stars. Falling out of sight…"

"… and rising again," Zelim said.

The scholar offered a luminous smile to hear his thoughts completed by his master. "Yes. Rising again."

"Perhaps," Zelim had said. "But I won't live in expectation of it."

Nor did he. But, that said, the young scholar's observation had lingered with him, and had in its turn seeded another parable: a morose tale about a man who lives in anticipation of a meeting with someone who turns out to be his assassin.

And so the years went on, and Zelim's fame steadily grew. He traveled immense distances-to Europe, to India, to the borders of China, telling his stories, and discovering that the strange poetry of what he invented gave pleasure to every variety of heart.

It was another eighteen years before he came again to Samarkand; this-though he didn't know it-for the last time.

By now Zelim was getting on in years and though his many journeys had made him wiry and resilient, he was feeling his age that autumn. His joints ached; his morning motions were either water or stone; he slept poorly. And when he did sleep, he dreamed of Atva; or rather of its shore, and of the holy family. His life of wisdom and pain had been caused by that encounter. If he'd not gone down to the water that day then perhaps he'd still be there among the fishermen, living a life of utter spiritual impoverishment; never having known enough to make his soul quake, nor enough to make it soar.

So there he was, that October, in Samarkand, feeling old and sleeping badly. There was little rest for him, however. By now the number of his devotees had swelled, and one of them (the youth who'd asked the question about things coming round) had founded a school. They were all young men who'd found a revolutionary zeal buried in Zelim's parables, which in turn nourished their hunger to see humanity unchained. Daily, he would meet with them. Sometimes he would let them question him, about his life, about his opinions. On other days-when he was weary of being interrogated-he would tell a story.

This particular day, however, the lesson had become a little of both. One of the students had said: "Master, many of us have had terrible arguments with our fathers, who don't wish us to study your works."

"Is that so?" old Zelim replied, raising an eyebrow. "I

can't understand why." There was a little laughter among the students. "What's your question?"

"I only wondered if you'd tell us something of your own father."

"My father…" Zelim said softly.

"Just a little."

The prophet smiled. "Don't look so nervous," he said to the questioner. "Why do you look so nervous?"

The youth blushed. "I was afraid perhaps you'd be angry with me for asking something about your family."

"In the first place," Zelim replied gently, "I'm far too old to get angry. It's a waste of energy and I don't have much of that left. In the second place, my father sits before you, just as all your fathers sit here in front of me." His gaze roved the thirty or so students who sat cross-legged before him. "And a very fine bunch of men they are too." His gaze returned to the youth who'd asked the question. "What does your father do?"

"He's a wool merchant."

"So he's out in the city somewhere right now, selling wool, but his nature's not satisfied with the selling of wool. He needs something else in his life, so he sends you along to talk philosophy."