Louis L'Amour · 1984 · global

Louis L'Amour's twelfth-century novel, and nothing like his westerns. Mathurin Kerbouchard's mother is murdered in Brittany and his father is a slave somewhere east of Baghdad. He sets out to find him and becomes, in turn, galley slave, scholar at Cordoba, merchant, physician and swordsman - crossing Europe with a caravan whose drum never stops walking.

1. 1
   Brittany

   Kerbouchard comes home to find his mother killed and the family lands taken by the Baron de Tournemine. He is seventeen, has nothing, and is taken almost at once as a galley slave - which is where the education begins.

2. 2
   Cadiz

   Free of the galley on the Spanish coast, he starts working his way inland through a Moorish Spain that is at this moment the most learned place in Europe, and where a man is measured by what he knows.

3. 3
   Cordoba

   He talks his way into the libraries as a student and then a translator, reading Averroes and John of Seville - a scholar's education got by cheek, in a city with four hundred thousand books when Paris had a few hundred.

4. 4
   Paris

   North with Safia, and he offends a master in front of his students and has to leave the city faster than he entered it - the schools of Christendom being, in his account, a good deal less impressive than the ones he has just left.

5. 5
   Provins

   He rejoins the merchant caravan at the fair - the Hansgraf's company, hundreds of wagons and armed men moving as a walking town, with a drum beating the pace that gives the book its title.

6. 6
   Kiev

   East across the steppe to trade cloth for furs, and the Petchenegs come down on the caravan in the open. Most of the merchants are killed. Kerbouchard, wounded, hides in the brush and heals himself and goes on alone.

7. 7
   Constantinople

   In the markets of Byzantium he sets up copying out from memory the books he read in Cordoba, and sells them - and learns from Safia's contact that his father is alive at Alamut, or was.

8. 8
   Alamut

   The Assassins' fortress in the Elburz mountains, held by Sinan's people and reckoned impregnable - and Kerbouchard goes in after a father he has not seen since he was a boy, twelve years and four thousand miles later.