had spread out the morning’s feast. There were boiled eggs, sweet cakes, rice with meat, and fresh melon and a selection of berries. There was also a pitcher of strong qaimaaq chai, green tea seasoned with cardamom seeds.
“Everything is good?” Fitrat looked at Lourds.
“Everything is fantastic. Does your wife cook?”
Fitrat looked embarrassed and shrugged. “When I am not home, of course.”
Lourds took a boiled egg and salted it. “What about when you are at home?”
“Sometimes. If she wants to make something special. I prefer to cook. It gives me time to spend with the children, and I have time to teach them something important.”
“Something important?”
Fitrat poured tea. “A man should teach his children things, yes?”
Lourds nodded, bit into his boiled egg, and started chewing.
“Normally, a man teaches his son, and maybe his daughter, about the job that he does.” Fitrat gave a small smile devoid of humor. “My job is killing people, and to keep other people from killing people. A necessary thing, but not one I would want to teach my children.”
“Yes, but I thought you enjoyed your job.”
Fitrat paused to sip his tea and think. “I see the need for my job. I have an aptitude for this kind of work. So I learned to be very good at it.”
“But you don’t enjoy it?”
“I save lives. I like saving lives. That part I enjoy very much.”
“From what Layla told me, your parents wanted you to be a doctor. You could have saved lives doing that.”
“Perhaps. But I have discovered I have another side. One that enjoys chasing bad people.” Fitrat grimaced. “Sometimes, when I was younger and thought more about such things, I wondered if perhaps something was wrong with me. That in some ways I was a bad person.”
“I don’t see that.” Lourds spooned up the rice and spicy meat, which was delicious. “I think what you’re experiencing is a sense of competition. Man against man.”
“I have come to this conclusion as well. It is this competition that draws me so fiercely. I enjoy winning.”
“That’s part of the warrior spirit. It’s why we insist on playing games against each other. Baseball. Football. Soccer.”
“Layla mentioned that you were a soccer player.”
“I enjoy the game very much.”
“Plus, it gets you out of work so you can come back to it refreshed.”
“That, too.”
Fitrat nodded toward the scrolls. “How are you coming with them?”
“The translation is taking shape slowly. The final scroll is written in code, as I said, and it’s very complicated. Almost every paragraph has got some new twist to it that requires further refinement.” Lourds picked up his notepad. “Callisthenes says that Aristotle felt his young protégé was marked for greatness as soon as he laid eyes on him. So Aristotle set out to make him the best student he could be.”
Fitrat broke a piece of flat bread and took a bite.
“But early in their relationship, Aristotle took Alexander to Delos in Greece.”
“You said a few nights ago that Delos was one of the most important sites in the Greek islands because so much of the Greek history and mythology took place there.”
Lourds nodded. “Exactly. According to Callisthenes, Aristotle took Alexander there when he was sixteen to get a better accounting of him as a man.”
“What does that mean?”
Lourds shrugged. “The scroll isn’t clear about that, but I get the sense that Aristotle wanted to make sure Alexander cherished the Greek ways. According to Callisthenes, Aristotle felt that Alexander was too inured to Greek life and was starting to look for something new. Remember, Alexander was Macedonian by birth. He’d adopted the Greek ways, too, looking to enrich his life.”
“That would explain why Alexander was so taken with Persian customs.”
“In the other scrolls I read, Callisthenes pulls apart from Alexander over that very trait of embracing the Persian culture. He felt that Alexander should remain a true Greek. He didn’t.”
“I took the liberty of looking up Callisthenes.”
Lourds was pleasantly surprised. “So what did you find?”
“That he was supposed to have died five years before Alexander. And that Alexander himself might have ordered the execution of Callisthenes or caused him to be locked up where he died of sickness or torture.”
“Yes, but history also holds that Callisthenes wrote the history of Alexander from beginning to end. We don’t know if there was more than one historical scribe named Callisthenes who worked with Alexander, or if later historians simply attributed their works to Callisthenes so the whole body of records would remain intact. That secret may have died when the