Vengeance of Orion Page 19

  "Every princeling in Achaia sought my hand," she told me one night when we were camped in a little village ringed by a palisade of sharpened stakes. The village chief had decided to be hospitable to our band of armed men. Lukka and his men were being entertained by some of the local women. Helen and I had been offered a small hut of mud bricks. It was the first time we had been under a roof in weeks.

  She spoke wistfully, almost sadly, almost as if all that had happened to her had somehow been her own fault. "With so many suitors, my father had to be very careful in his choice. Finally he picked Menalaos, brother of the High King. It was a good match for him; it tied our house to the most powerful house in Argos."

  "You had no say in the matter?"

  She smiled at such an absurd idea. "I didn't see Menalaos until our wedding day. My father kept me well protected."

  "And then Aleksandros," I said.

  "And then Aleksandros. He was handsome, and witty, and charming. He treated me as if I were a person, a human being."

  "You went with him willingly, then?"

  Again her smile. "He never asked. He never took the risk that I might refuse him. In the end, despite his wit and charm, he still behaved like an Achaian: he took what he wanted."

  I looked deep into her bright blue eyes, so innocent, so knowing. "But in Troy you told me . . ."

  "Orion," she said softly, "in this world a woman must accept what she cannot change. Troy was better for me than Sparta. Aleksandros was more civilized than Menalaos. But neither of them asked me for my hand: I was given to Menalaos by my father; I was taken from him by Aleksandros."

  Then she added, almost shyly, "You are the only man I've had to pursue. You are the only one I've given myself to willingly."

  I took her in my arms and there was no more talking for that night. But still I wondered how much of her tale I could believe. How true was her passion for me, and how much of it was her way to make certain that I would protect her all the way to distant Egypt?

  The turmoil of our earlier travels eased after Cilicia. Robber bands and wandering contingents of masterless soldiery became rare. We no longer had to fight our way across the land. Yet each night Lukka had his men tend to their weapons and equipment as if he expected a pitched battle in the morning.

  "Now we head toward Ugarit," Lukka told me as we turned south once again. "We sacked the city many years ago, when I was just a youngling squire clinging to my father's chariot as we charged into battle."

  Past Ugarit we went. The once-mighty city was still little more than a burned-out shell, with shacks and shanties clinging to the blackened stumps of its walls where once mighty houses and fortified towers had stood. I saw the visible evidence of the power of the Hatti empire, strong enough to reach across mountains and plains to crush a city that defied its High King. And yet that power was gone now, blown away in the wind like the sands of a melting dune.

  For the first time since I had been up in the hills above Troy, I saw a forest, tall stately cedar trees that spread their leafy branches high overhead, so that walking through them was like walking down the aisle of a living cathedral that went on for miles and miles.

  And then, abruptly, we were in the rugged scorched hills of the desert. Bare stones heated by the pitiless sun until they were too hot to touch. Hardly any vegetation at all, merely little clumps of bushes here and there. Snakes and scorpions scuttled on the burning ground; overhead carrion birds circled waiting, waiting.

  We cut far inland over the broken hilly terrain, avoiding the coast and the port cities. Now and again a band of marauders accosted us, always to their sorrow. We left many bodies for those patient birds to feast on, although we lost four men of our own.

  The territory was a natural habitat for robbers: raw, lawless, a succession of broken barren hills and narrow valleys and defiles where ambush could be expected at every turn. The heat was like an oven, making the land dance in shimmering waves that sapped the strength from my men and their mounts.

  Helen rode in the cart, shaded by tenting made of the finest silks of Troy. The heat took the energy from her, too, and her lovely face became wan and drawn; like the rest of us, she was caked with grimy dust. But not once did she complain or ask us to slow our southward pace.

  "Meggido is not far from here," said Lukka one hot bright day, as the sweat poured down his leathery face and into his beard. "The Hatti and the Egyptians fought a great battle there."

  We were skirting the shores of a sizable lake. Villages lay scattered around it, and we had been able to barter some of our goods for provisions. The lake water was bitter-tasting, but better than thirst. We filled our canteens and barrels with it.

  "Who won?" I asked.

  Lukka considered the question with his usual grave silence, then replied, "Our High King Muwatallis claimed a great victory for us. But we never returned to that place, and the army came back to our own lands much smaller than it was when it went out."

  Around the lake we traveled, and then down the river that flowed southward out of it. Villages were sparse here. Farming, even along the river, was difficult in the dry powdery soil. Most of the villages lived on herds of goats and sheep that nibbled the sparse grass wherever they could find it. These people also spoke of Meggido, and told of the enormous battles that had been fought for it from time immemorial. But they gave the city a slightly different name: Armaggeddon.

  The weather was getting so hot that we took to moving only in the very early morning and again late in the day, when the sun had gone down. We slept during the coldest hours of the night, shivering in our blankets, and tried to sleep during the hottest hours of midday.

  One morning I walked on ahead, taking my turn as advance scout. The day before we had beaten off an attack by a determined party of raiders. They did not have the look of bandits about them. Like us, they seemed to be members of an organized troop, well armed and disciplined enough to back away from us in good order once they realized we were professional soldiers.

  I climbed a little rise in the rugged, barren ground and, with one hand shading my eyes, surveyed the shimmering, wavering, hellish landscape.

  Rocks and scrub, parched grass turning brown under the sun, except for the thin line of green along the banks of the river.

  Up on the top of a rocky hill I saw a column of grayish-white smoke rising. It looked strange to me. Not like the smoke of a fire that curls and drifts on the wind, this was almost like a pillar, densely packed, swirling in on itself, and rising straight up into the bright, blinding sky. The smoke itself seemed to glow, as if lighted from within.

  I scrambled across the rocky desert toward the column of smoke. As I trudged up the slope of the hill, I felt a strange tingling in my feet. It grew stronger, almost painful, as I neared the top.

  The hilltop was bare rock, except for a couple of tiny outcroppings of bare brown dead-looking bushes. The column of smoke streamed directly from the rock toward the sky, with no apparent source. My legs were jangling as if someone were sticking thousands of pins into them.

  "Better to take off your boots, Orion," came a familiar voice. "The nails in them conduct electrostatic forces. I have no desire to cause you undue pain."

  Sullen anger flooded through me as I grudgingly tugged off the boots and tossed them aside. The tingling sensation did not disappear entirely, but subsided to the point where I could ignore it.

  The Golden One stepped out of the base of the smoke column. He seemed somehow older than I had ever seen him before, his face more solemn, his eyes burning with inner fires. Instead of the robes I had seen him wearing when I had been on the plain of Ilios, he had draped himself in a plain white garment that seemed to be made of rough wool. It glowed softly against the swirling pillar of grayish smoke behind him.

  "For your disobedience, I should destroy you." He spoke in a quiet, level, controlled tone.

  My hands itched to reach his throat, but I could not move them. I knew that he controlled me, that he could stop my heart's
beating with the flick of an eyebrow, could force me to kneel and grovel at his feet merely by thinking it. The fury within me rose hotter than the sun-baked stone on which I stood barefoot, hotter than the blazing cloudless sky that shone like hammered brass above us.

  I managed to say, as I stood with my fists clenched helplessly at my sides, "You can't destroy me. The others won't let you. They opposed you at Troy, some of them. Blame them for your defeat."

  "I do, Orion. I will have my vengeance against them. And you will help me to achieve it."

  "Never! I won't raise a finger to help you. I'll work against you in every way I can."

  He made a deep dramatic sigh and took a step toward me. "Orion, we must not be enemies. You are my creation, my creature. Together we can save the continuum."

  "Once you killed her you made me your enemy."

  He closed his eyes and bowed his head slightly. "I know. I understand." Looking at me with those intent eyes once more, he said softly, "I miss her too."

  I tried to laugh in his face, but it came out like a snarl.

  "Orion, I have been studying the situation carefully. There may—I say only may, mind you—be a way of restoring her."

  Despite his controls I leaped forward and almost grasped him by the shoulders. But my hands froze in midair.

  "Not so fast!" the Golden One said. "It's only a remote possibility. The risks are huge. The dangers . . ."

  "I don't care," I said, my pulse roaring in my ears. "Bring her back to me! Restore her!"

  "I cannot do it alone. And the others . . . those who opposed me at Troy, they will oppose me again. It will mean a deliberate change in the continuum of a magnitude that not even I have attempted before."

  I heard his words, but I could not comprehend their full meaning. Nor was I certain that he was telling me the truth.

  "I never lie, Orion," he said, reading my thoughts. "To restore her means tampering with the space-time continuum to such an extent that I could rip it apart just as surely as Ahriman once did."

  "But you and your other Creators survived that," I said.

  "Some of us did. Some of us did not. I told you that gods are not necessarily immortal."

  "And that they are not necessarily just or merciful, too," I replied.

  He laughed. "Just so. Just so."

  "Will you try to restore her?" My voice was almost begging.

  "Yes," he said. Before my heart could leap for joy he added, "But only if you obey me fully and completely, Orion. Her existence is in your hands."

  There was no sense trying to resist or dissemble. "What do you want me to do?"

  For an instant he did not reply, as if he were formulating his plans on the spot. Then he said, "You are heading south, toward Egypt."

  "Yes."

  "You will soon encounter a wandering band of people who are migrating out of Egypt. Whole families, hundreds of them, traveling together with their flocks and tents. They seek to occupy this territory, to make it their own . . ."

  "This territory?" I gestured around at the barren rocks and dead scrub.

  "Even this," replied the Golden One. "And they are opposed by the villagers and townspeople who already live here. You and your troop of soldiers will help them."

  "Why them?"

  He smiled at me. "Because they worship me, Orion. They believe that I am not merely the mightiest god of them all, but the only god that exists. And soon, with your help, they will be perfectly right."

  Before I could ask another question, before I could even think, the Golden One disappeared and the pillar of smoke evaporated as if it had never been.

  Chapter 27

  We pushed southward, down the river that flowed from one landlocked sea to another. There were villages dotted along its banks, protected by walls of dried mud bricks. Green farmlands fed by irrigation ditches stood in bold contrast to the bare browns and grays of the rocky hills. The people here were wary of strangers; too many wandering bands had come their way, anxious to take those green lands for themselves or, failing that, to pillage and loot the towns before moving on.

  They traded with us, grudgingly, more in an effort to get us to leave their area as quickly as possible. I always kept Helen out of sight, inside the covered cart. And still I watched for signs of Achaians searching for us.

  Then one hot afternoon, as the heat haze made a shimmering mirage out of a dry rocky canyon, we came across the advance scouts of the people the Golden One had told me about.

  There were twenty of them, warriors, on foot, no two of them wearing the same kind or color of clothing or the same kind of weapons. A ragtag lot, at first glance. Smallish in stature, browned by the sun—just as we were, I realized.

  They had arrayed themselves across the narrowest neck of the canyon as we approached them. I wondered if they thought they could stop us from passing through, if it came to a fight. Most of us were mounted on horses and donkeys. I thought we could punch through their thin screen if we had to.

  But Lukka, scrutinizing them with a professional eye as we approached, said, "They're not fools, despite their shabby clothes."

  "Do you recognize them?"

  He shook his head the slightest distance it could move and still convey a negative. "They may be the Abiru that the villagers warned us against two days ago."

  I nosed my horse forward. "I'll speak with their leader."

  He rode up beside me. "I can translate, if they speak any language of the empire."

  "I can understand their language," I said.

  Lukka gave me a strange look.

  "It's a gift from the gods," I explained. "The gift of tongues."

  I rode slightly ahead and raised my hand in a sign of peace. One of the warriors walked up toward me, still holding his spear in his right hand. I slid down from my horse and stood on the dusty soil as he approached me. The heat beat down from the brazen sky and reflected off the scorching rocks. It was like standing in an oven. The only shade in sight was the sparse sliver along the canyon wall to my left. But this young warrior showed no interest in getting out of the hot sun.

  His name was Ben-Jameen; he was the eldest son of a tribal chief. They called themselves the Children of Israel, he told me. Ben-Jameen was a youngster, his beard barely starting to sprout. But he was lean and hard-muscled; his eyes missed nothing as he scanned my two dozen men, the horses, donkeys, and oxcarts. He was tense and suspicious, gripping his spear tightly, as if prepared to use it at an instant's notice.

  When I told him that we were Hatti soldiers, he used the term "Hittites," and seemed to relax slightly. He almost smiled.

  "In whose service are you, then?" he asked.

  "No one's. We have come from a great war, far to the north and west of here. We helped to destroy the kingly city of Troy."

  His face went blank; he had never heard the name.

  "Perhaps you know it as Ilium, by the straits called the Hellespont that lead into the Sea of Black Waters."

  Still no gleam of recognition.

  I gave it up. "It was a war, and these men helped to take the city after a long siege."

  At that, something glimmered in his eyes. "Why are you here, then, in this land of Canaan?"

  "We are traveling south, to Egypt, to seek service with the great king of that land."

  He glared at me, then coughed up phlegm and spat on the parched ground. "That for the Pharaoh! It took my people four generations to escape the slavery of Egypt."

  I made a shrug and replied, "We are a unit of professional soldiery. I have heard that the Egyptian king has need of soldiers."

  Those suspicious eyes fixed on me. "You are not in anyone's service now?"

  "No. The old empire has collapsed . . ."

  "The God of Israel has smitten the Hittites," he murmured, and now he truly did smile.

  I glanced at Lukka, still on his horse, off to one side, and was glad that he could not understand the Hebrew tongue.

  "And now He will smite the evil worshipers of Baal wh
o shut themselves up in their city." Ben-Jameen looked past me, at the men and their mounts, the carts, at Lukka sitting on his horse slightly behind me, and finally at me again. There was a new light in his eyes. "You will serve our God and our people and help us to take the city of Jericho, just as you took that northern city you spoke of."

  "We are not seeking service here," I said. "We are traveling to Egypt."

  "You will serve the God of Israel," Ben-Jameen insisted. Then, softening slightly, he said, "At least come and spend the night in our camp and meet our great leader Joshua."

  I hesitated, sensing a trap.

  The youngster smiled shyly. "He would never forgive me if I allowed you to leave without bringing you to him. I would be disgraced before my father's eyes."

  It was difficult to argue with him.

  "Besides," he added, the smile brightening slightly, "it will be impossible for you to go farther south without running into other groups of our people. We are a multitude."

  I bowed to the inevitable and accepted his offer of hospitality as graciously as I could.

  The Israelites were indeed a multitude, hundreds of families camped on a wide plain between the river they called Jordan and the worn, bare, baked-brown mountains. Their tents dotted the green plain, and their flocks stirred clouds of dust when they were driven from pasture to the rough fences of their nightly fold.

  With the setting sun turning the western sky blood red, and the hot wind blowing down off those scorched mountains, the smell of those flocks was almost overpowering. No one seemed to notice it except us newcomers. Families were gathering before each tent, starting the evening cooking fires, chattering in their guttural language, children running, boys shouting at each other as they played with wooden swords and shields, girls screeching with high-pitched laughter.

  But what caught my eyes, and Lukka's, was the walled city sitting atop a low hill in the middle of the plain. It dominated the region, just as Troy had dominated the plain of Ilios.

  "That is Jericho," I told Lukka.