Vengeance of Orion Page 17

  "The captives are down there, between the boats. Take one-fifth of them, also."

  I shook my head. "I'd rather have horses and donkeys," I told Odysseus. "The children will be useless to us, and the women will merely cause fighting among my men."

  Odysseus eyed me carefully. "You speak like a man who has no intention of sailing to Ithaca with me."

  "My lord," I said, "you have been more than generous to me. But no man in this camp raised a hand to help my servant last night. Agamemnon is a cruel and vicious animal. If I returned to your land, I would soon be itching to start a war against him."

  Odysseus muttered, "That would be foolish."

  "Perhaps so. Better that our paths separate here and now. Let me take my men, and my blinded servant, and go my own way."

  The King of Ithaca stroked his beard for several silent moments, thinking it over. Finally he agreed. "Very well, Orion. Go your own way. And may the gods smile upon you."

  "And on you, noblest of all the Achaians."

  I never saw Odysseus again. When I returned to my tent, I told Lukka to send the men to pick up the loot I had chosen, and to find horses and donkeys to carry it—and us: I saw questions in his eyes, but he did not ask them. Instead he went to carry out my orders.

  As the sun began to sink behind the islands on the western horizon, and we gathered around the cook fire for the final meal of the day, a young messenger came running up to me, breathless.

  "My lord Orion, a noble visitor wishes words with you."

  "Who is it?" I asked.

  The teenager spread both hands. "I don't know. I was instructed to tell you that a noble of the royal house will visit you before the sun goes down. You should be prepared."

  I thanked him and invited him to share our meal. He seemed extraordinarily pleased to sit side by side with the Hatti soldiers. His eyes studied their iron swords admiringly.

  A noble visitor from the royal house. One of Agamemnon's people? I wondered who was coming, and why.

  As the long shadows of sundown began to merge into the purple of twilight, a contingent of six Achaian warriors marched toward our campfire, with a small, slim warrior in their midst. Either a very important person or a prisoner, from the look of it, I thought. The man in the middle seemed too small for any of the Achaian nobles I had met. He wore armor buckled over a long robe, and had pulled the cheek flaps of his helmet across his face, as if going into battle. I could not see his face.

  I stood and made a little bow. The mini-procession marched right up to my tent before stopping. I went to the tent and pulled open the flap.

  "A representative of the High King?" I asked. "Come to make certain that the old storyteller is truly blind?"

  The visitor said nothing, but ducked inside the tent. I went in after him, feeling a seething anger rising in me. I had not slept in two days, but my smoldering fury at Agamemnon kept me awake and alert.

  The visitor looked down at Poletes, lying on the straw pallet asleep, a greasy cloth across his eyes, the slits where his ears had been caked with dried blood. I heard the visitor gasp. And then I noticed that his hands were tiny, delicate, much too smooth to have ever held a sword or spear.

  I grasped the visitor by the shoulders, swung him around to face me, and pulled off the helmet. Helen's long golden hair tumbled past her shoulders.

  "I had to see . . ." she whispered, her eyes wide with fright.

  I spun her around to face the prostrate old storyteller. "Then see," I said gruffly. "Take a good look."

  "Agamemnon did this."

  "With his own hand. Your brother-in-law blinded him out of sheer spite. Drunk with power and glory, he celebrated his victory over Troy by mutilating an old man."

  "And Menalaos?"

  "Your husband stood by and watched. His men held me at spear point while his brother did his noble deed."

  "Orion, I wish I could . . . when I heard what had happened, I was so sick and angry . . ."

  But there were no tears in her eyes. Her voice did not shake. The words she spoke had nothing to do with what she actually felt, or why she was here.

  "What do you want?" I asked her.

  She turned toward me. "You see how cruel they are. What barbarians they can be."

  "You're safe now," I said. "Menalaos will make you his queen once more. Sparta may not be as civilized as Troy, but there is no Troy any longer. Be happy with what you have."

  She stared at me, as if trying to decide if she could dare to say what was in her mind.

  I felt my anger melting away under the level gaze of those exquisite sky-blue eyes.

  "I don't want to be Sparta's queen or Menalaos's wife," Helen blurted. "Just one day in this miserable camp has made me sick."

  "You'll be sailing back to Mycenae soon, and then to . . ."

  "No!" she said, in a desperate whisper. "I won't go back with them! Take me with you, Orion! Take me to Egypt."

  Chapter 24

  It was my turn to stand there in the tent gawking with surprise.

  "To Egypt?"

  "It's the only really civilized land in the whole world, Orion. They will receive me as the queen I am, and treat me and my entourage properly. Royally."

  I should have refused her point-blank. But my mind was weaving a mad tapestry of revenge. I pictured the face of Agamemnon when he learned that his sister-in-law, for whom he had ostensibly fought this long and bloody war, had spurned his brother and run off with a stranger. Not a prince of Troy who abducted her unwillingly, but a lowly warrior, recently nothing but a thes, with whom she ran off at her own insistence.

  I had nothing much against Menalaos, except that he was Agamemnon's brother—and he did nothing to prevent Poletes's blinding.

  Let them eat the dirt of humiliation and helpless anger, I said to myself. Let the world laugh at them as Helen runs away from them I once again. They deserve it.

  They would search for us, I knew. They would try to find us. And if they did, they would kill me and perhaps Helen also.

  What of it? I thought. What do I have to live for, except to wreak vengeance against those who have wronged me? Apollo seeks to destroy me, now that I have helped to bring down Troy. What do I have to fear from two mortal kings?

  I looked down at Helen's beautiful face, so perfect, her skin as smooth and unblemished as a baby's, her eyes filled with hope and expectation, innocent and yet knowing. She was maneuvering me, I realized, using me to make her escape from these Achaian clods. She was offering herself as my reward for defying Agamemnon and Menalaos.

  "Very well," I said. "Poletes should be able to travel in two more days. We will leave on the second night from tonight."

  Helen's eyes sparkled and a smile touched the corners of her lips. I took her tiny hand in mine and kissed it, and she understood fully what I did not need to say.

  "The second night from tonight," she whispered to me. Then she stepped lightly to me and stood on tiptoes to kiss me swiftly on the lips.

  She fastened the oversized helmet back on her head, tucking her hair well inside it, and left with her escorts. I watched them march back toward Menalaos's boats, then sent one of Lukka's men to fetch the healer. His women came and dressed Poletes's wounds before he himself arrived.

  "Will he be able to travel in two days," I asked, "if he doesn't have to walk?"

  The healer gave me a stern look. "If he must. He is an old man, and death will claim him anyway in a few years."

  "Would traveling in a wagon harm him?"

  "Not enough to make much difference," he said.

  After they left, I stretched out on the pallet that had been freshly laid beside Poletes's. The old man tossed in his sleep and muttered something. I leaned on one elbow to hear his words.

  "Beware of a woman's gifts," Poletes mumbled.

  I sighed. "Now you utter prophecies instead of stories, old man," I whispered.

  Poletes did not reply.

  I fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the straw. I will
ed myself to remain here, on the plain of Ilios, and not allow myself to be drawn to the realm of the Creators. I knew that danger beyond my powers awaited me there.

  Whether my willpower was strong enough to keep me from being summoned to the Creators' domain, or whether Apollo, Zeus, and their company simply did not bother trying to reach me,

  I cannot say. All I know is that I met no gods, angry or otherwise, in my sleep that night.

  But I did dream. I dreamed of Egypt, of a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side by burning desert. A land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless there. A land of massive pyramids standing like strange, alien monuments amid the puny towns of men, dwarfing all human scale, all human knowledge.

  And inside the greatest of those pyramids, I saw my own beloved, waiting for me, as silent and still as a statue, waiting for me to bring her back to life.

  *

  The next morning I told Lukka that we would be leaving the camp and heading for Egypt.

  "That's a far distance," he said. "Across hostile lands."

  "That is where we're going," I insisted. "Will the men follow me?"

  Lukka's brown eyes flicked up at mine, then looked away. "We've won three wagonloads of loot for a few days' work and a couple of hours of hard fighting. They'll follow you, never fear."

  "All the way to Egypt?"

  He made a humorless grin. "If we make it. The Egyptians hire soldiers for their army, from what I hear. They no longer fight their own wars. If we get to their borders, we will find employment."

  "Good," I said, happy to have an excuse that would urge them onward toward my goal.

  "I'll start the men gathering wagons for our supplies," Lukka said.

  I took his shoulder in my hand. "I may bring a woman with me."

  He actually smiled. "I was wondering when you'd unbend."

  "But I don't want the men dragging along camp followers. Will they resent my bringing a woman? Will it cause trouble?"

  Scratching at his beard, Lukka replied, "There've been plenty of women here in the camp. The men are satisfied, for now. We can move faster without camp followers, that's certain. And we'll probably find women here and there as we march."

  I understood what he meant. "Yes, I doubt that our passage to Egypt will be entirely peaceful."

  This time his eyes locked on mine. "I only hope that our leaving the camp is entirely peaceful."

  I smiled grimly. He was no fool, this Hatti soldier.

  Two nights later I bribed a teenaged boy to come with me to the camp of Menalaos. The area was not really guarded: the few armed men who stood watch knew that there were no enemies present. They were more intent on protecting their king's loot and slaves from thievery than anything else.

  The youth and I found Helen's tent. Serving women loitered outside, eyeing me askance, as if they knew what was about to happen. One of them ushered me into her mistress's tent. It was large, and Helen was pacing in it nervously when we entered it.

  Helen dismissed her servant, and with hardly a word between us, I knocked the startled youth unconscious, stripped him, and watched Helen pull his rags over her own short-skirted chemise. She pointed to a plain wooden chest, half as wide as the span of my arms, and as I hefted it she took up a smaller box.

  Still wordless, we walked out of the tent, past the women, past the careless guards, and toward the riverbank, where Lukka and his men waited for us with horses, donkeys, and oxcarts.

  We left the Achaian camp on the plain of Ilios in the dark of night, like a band of robbers. Riding on a thickly folded blanket that passed among these people for a saddle, I turned and looked for one last time at the ruin of Troy, its once-proud walls already crumbling and ghostlike in the cold silvery light of the rising moon.

  The ground rumbled. Our horses snorted and neighed, prancing nervously.

  "Poseidon speaks," said Poletes from the oxcart, his voice weak but discernible. "The earth will shake soon from his wrath. He will finish the task of bringing down the walls of Troy."

  The old man was predicting an earthquake. A big one. All the more reason for us to get as far away as possible.

  We forded the river and headed southward. Toward Egypt.

  BOOK II

  JERICHO

  Chapter 25

  As Lukka had predicted, our journey was neither easy nor peaceful.

  The whole world seemed in conflict. We trekked slowly down the hilly coastline, through regions that the Hatti soldiers called Assuwa and Seha. It seemed that every city, every village, every farmhouse was in arms. Bands of marauders prowled the countryside, some of them former Hatti army units just as Lukka's contingent was, most of them merely gangs of brigands.

  We fought almost every day. Men died over a brace of chickens or even an egg. We lost a few of our men in these skirmishes, and gained a few from bands that offered to join us. I never accepted anyone that Lukka would not accept, and he took in only other Hatti professionals. Our group remained at about thirty men, a few more or less, from one month to the next.

  I kept searching anxiously to our rear, every day, half expecting to see Menalaos leading his forces in pursuit of his wayward queen. But if the Achaians were following after us, I saw no sign. And I slept at nights without being visited by Apollo or Zeus or any of their kind. Perhaps they were busy elsewhere. Or perhaps whatever fate they had prepared for me was waiting in Egypt, inside the tomb of a king.

  The rainy season began, and although it turned roads into quagmires of slick, sticky mud and made us miserable and cold, it also stopped most of the bands of brigands from their murderous marauding. Most of them. We still had to fight our way through a trap in the hills just above a city that Lukka called Ti-Smurna.

  And Lukka himself was nearly killed by a farmer who thought we were after his wife and daughters. Stinking and filthy, the farmer had hidden himself in his miserable hovel of a barn—nothing more than a low cave that he had put a gate to—and rammed a pitchfork at Lukka's back when he went in to pick out a pair of lambs. It was food we were after, not women. We had paid the farmer's wife with a bauble from the loot of Troy, but the man | had concealed himself when he had first caught sight of us, I expecting us to rape his women and burn what we could not carry off.

  He lunged at Lukka's unprotected back, murder in his frightened, cowardly eyes. Fortunately I was close enough to leap between them, knocking the pitchfork away with my arm.

  The farmer expected to be killed by inches, but we left him trembling, kneeling in the dung of his animals. Lukka said little, as usual, but what he said spoke volumes.

  "Once again I owe you my life, my lord Orion."

  I replied lightly, "Your life is very important to me, Lukka."

  I did not sleep with Helen. I hardly touched her. She traveled with us as part of our group, without complaining of the hardships, the bloodletting, the pain. She made her own bed at night, out of horse blankets, and slept slightly separated from the men. But always closer to me than anyone else. I was content to be her guardian, not her lover. If that surprised her, she gave no hint of it. She wore no jewels and no longer painted her face. Her clothes were plain and rough, fit for traveling rather than display.

  Still she was beautiful. She did not need paints or gowns or jewelry. Even with her face smudged by mud and her hair tied up and tucked under the cowl of a long dirty cloak, nothing could hide those wide blue eyes, those sensuous lips, that unblemished skin.

  Poletes gained strength and even some of his old cynical spirit. He rode in the creaking oxcart and pestered whoever drove the cart to tell him everything he saw, every leaf and rock and cloud, in detail.

  Ephesus was the sole exception to our litany of warfare. We had spent the morning trudging tiredly uphill through a rainstorm, soaked and cold and aching. About half of the men were mounted on horses or donkeys. Helen rode beside me on a light dun-colored pony, wrapped in a dark blue hooded cloak, soggy and heavy with rain. I h
ad sent three of our men on foot ahead as scouts. Several others trailed behind, a rear guard to warn us of bandits skulking behind us—or Achaians trying to catch up with us.

  As we came to the top of the hill, I saw one of our scouts waiting for us beside the muddy road.

  "The city." He pointed.

  The rain had slackened, and Ephesus lay below us in a pool of sunlight that had broken through the gray clouds. The city glittered like a beacon of warmth and comfort, white marble gleaming in the sunshine.

  We all seemed to gain strength from the sight, and made our way down the winding road from the hills to the seaport city of Ephesus.

  "The city is dedicated to Artemis the Healer," said Lukka. "Men from every part of the world come here to be cured of their ailments. A sacred spring has water with magical curative powers." He frowned slightly, as if disappointed in his own gullibility. Then he added, "So I'm told."

  There were no walls around Ephesus. No army had ever tried to take it or sack it. By a sort of international agreement, this city was dedicated to the goddess Artemis and her healing arts, and not even the most barbarian king dared to attack it, lest he and his entire army fall to Artemis's invisible arrows, which bring plague and painful death.

  Helen, listening to Lukka explaining these things to me, rode up between us. "Artemis is a goddess of the moon, and sister of Apollo."

  That made my heart quicken. "Then she favored Troy in the war."

  Helen shrugged beneath her sodden cloak. "I suppose so. It did her no good, though, did it?"

  "But she will be angry with us," Lukka said.

  So is her brother, I knew, although they are not truly brother and sister. I made myself smile and said aloud to Lukka, "Surely you don't believe that the gods and goddesses hold grudges?"

  He did not reply, but the expression on his dour face was not a happy one.

  Whatever its patron deity, Ephesus was civilization. Even the streets were paved with marble. Stately columned temples of fluted white marble were centers of healing as well as worship. The city was accustomed to hosting visitors, and there were plenty of inns available. We chose the first one we came to, at the edge of the city. It was almost empty since the few who traveled in the rainy season preferred to be in the heart of the city or down by the docks where the boats came in.