Orion and the Conqueror o-4 Read online

  He grinned at me as he pushed his shield against my spear, using it like a battering ram, edging closer to me. “Don’t run away, Orion,” he half-whispered to me. “You can’t escape your fate.”

  My knees went weak with surprise. Those tawny eyes glinting at me were the eyes of Aten, the Golden One.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” he said as he jabbed his spear at me. “You’ve seen me take human form before.”

  “Why now?” I asked, backing away from him.

  He laughed. “For sport! Why else?” And he rammed his spear at my midsection so hard and fast that I barely had the reflexes to flinch away. The sharp bronze point grazed my flank. The men crowding around us went “Oooh!” at the sight of my blood.

  I knew that my pitiful tree branch would be no match for him. He had as much speed and strength as I; perhaps more. I danced backward several steps, and as he advanced toward me I lunged forward with all my might and aimed the fire-hardened tip of my spear at his eyes. He raised his shield to catch my thrust and my spear stuck in the layers of oxhide, forcing him backward a few steps.

  Whirling, I dashed to the spear he had thrown at me. Now we were evenly armed, at least, although Aten still had that long shield and I had none. As I looked up I saw that both his young squires were tugging their hardest to pull my rude spear from his shield. It came out at last, sending them both tumbling onto their backs.

  Now Aten advanced upon me again, and I held my spear in two hands. To the watching men it must have seemed like a moment from the battle for Troy, champion against champion, spear against spear.

  For sport, he’d told me. He’d taken on human form and faced me in combat for sport.

  “Are you prepared to die for sport?” I asked him.

  “You tried to kill me once, do you remember?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought I’d give you the opportunity again.”

  He feinted, then raked his spear point upward, catching my spear and nearly knocking it out of my hands. Before I could recover he slashed downward again, slicing a long cut across my chest from shoulder to ribs. The watching men shouted their approval.

  “I’m faster than you, Orion,” Aten taunted. “And stronger. Do you think that I’d build a creature more powerful than myself?”

  I jabbed at his exposed left foot, then swung my spear in my two hands like a quarter-staff and cracked him hard on his helmet. The men gasped. Aten staggered backward, his taunts silenced for the moment.

  My mind was racing: If he defeats me, Neoptolemos wins this dispute against Odysseus, and his grandson goes on to father the line that eventually gives birth to Olympias. If I defeat Aten, however, and Odysseus is the victor over Neoptolemos, what will happen to the royal line of Epeiros? Is that why Aten has taken human form and inserted himself into this fight? To make certain that I am killed and Olympias is born a thousand years down the time stream?

  Those were the thoughts running through my mind as we fought. They sapped my confidence, made me uncertain of what I should do. But each time I saw the golden eyes of Aten smirking at me from behind his bronze helmet, hot fury boiled up within me: For sport. He is playing with me, playing with all the mortals here, toying with their lives and their hopes the way a cat torments a mouse.

  It seemed as if we fought for hours. Aten nicked me here and there, until I was bleeding from a dozen cuts and scratches. I could not get past his shield. He truly was as fast as I, perhaps even a little faster, so that whatever I tried to do against him he saw and protected himself against.

  Once I almost got him. I jabbed straight at his eyes and as he raised his shield, covering his vision for an instant, I swept the butt of my spear across his ankles, tripping him and sending him sprawling to the dusty ground. But he immediately covered his body with the long shield, even as I rammed my spear at him. The spear point caught in the shield and we became involved in an almost comical tug of war, me trying to wrestle the spear out of his shield, him struggling to his knees and then finally to his feet.

  The men were roaring with excitement as they crowded close around us. I finally yanked my spear free of his shield, but the effort sent me staggering backwards into the crowd. I stumbled, slipped, and went down.

  Aten was on me before I could blink. And I had no shield to hide behind. I saw his armored form looming over me, silhouetted against the brilliant sky, the sun at his back, his spear raised above his head as he started to plunge it into my heart.

  There was nothing I could do except ram my own spear into his groin while he impaled me. We both screamed in death agonies and the world went utterly black and cold.

  Chapter 26

  Pain woke me. My eyes fluttered open. I was back atop Mount Ararat, lying in the snow, but now it no longer covered me completely. Much of it had melted away. I saw a clear blue sky above me, so bright it hurt my eyes to look upon it.

  A snow-white fox was gnawing on my right forearm—a vixen, I could see from her gravid belly. It must be spring or close to it, I thought, and she is so desperate for food up in this barren waste at the mountaintop that she will attack a corpse.

  But I was not dead. Not yet. Automatically I shut down the pain receptors in my brain, even as I clutched at the vixen’s throat with my left hand so swiftly that she did not have time even to yelp. I ate her raw, unborn pups and all, and felt the nourishment streaming into my blood. My right hand was useless for the time being, although I had stopped the bleeding and wrapped the wound the vixen had made with her own pelt.

  It took me days to get down from Ararat’s summit. I had lain there in the snow for most of the winter, suspended in a frozen half-death while Aten or Hera or both of them used me to ensure the line of Neoptolemos so that Olympias could be born in this era.

  Now I proved myself worthy of my name; I lived by hunting, ferreting out the tiny rodents that were just beginning to come out of their winter burrows, tracking down the mountain goats and sheep on the lower slopes, even running down a wild horse over the course of several days until it dropped from exhaustion. So did I, almost.

  By the time I was on the flat land again, with the smoke of distant farm houses smudging the horizon, my arm was healed and I felt reasonably strong.

  I returned to the ways of the bandit. I had no other choice. My mission was to return to Pella, to do Hera’s bidding, no matter how I might hate to obey her. I stole a horse here, raided a barn there, broke into farm houses, chased down stray cattle, did what I needed to do to stay alive. I tried to avoid people whenever possible and only fought when I had no choice. Even so, I killed no human—although I left several men groaning with broken bones.

  I pushed westward, toward the setting sun, toward Europe and Greece and Pella and Philip and Alexandros. And Hera. There was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind: Olympias was Hera and had been all along. Her witchcraft was nothing more than the innate powers of the Creators themselves.

  I rode night and day, sleeping only rarely as my strength returned to normal, pushing myself to get back to Pella as quickly as I could. In my dreams, on those rare nights when I did sleep, Hera kept beckoning me, but no longer with the enticements of her body. She commanded me the way a mistress commands the lowliest of her slaves. She urged me to come to her. She demanded that I hurry.

  I did the best I could, crossing whole nations in days, avoiding the main roads and the bigger towns, hunting or stealing what I needed and pushing constantly on toward the setting sun.

  Until at last I reached Chalkedon.

  It was a large city, bigger than Pella, smaller than Athens. A port city, across the Bosporus from Byzantion. Its streets were crooked, meandering down the slope from the city wall to the waterfront docks. Its buildings were old, in poor repair, dirty. Garbage stank in the alleys and even the main square looked dirty, uncared for. Inns and taverns were plentiful, however, and the closer I approached the docks the more the streets were lined with them. Knots of drunken sailors and keen-eyed merchants stood b
efore open bars built into many of the house fronts, exchanging drinks and gossip, making bargains and deals for everything from Macedonian timber to slaves from the wild steppes beyond the Black Sea.

  The busiest place in Chalkedon was the slave market, down by the docks. I was going to push past the crowd gathered there; I was looking for a cheap ride across the water into Byzantion. I had a few coins in a cloth purse I had taken from a horse trader who had made the mistake of travelling with only four guards.

  But while I was trying to work my way through the crowd that filled the open-air slave market and spilled out across the street that led down to the docks, I stopped dead in my tracks. I saw Harkan.

  He had changed his clothes and even trimmed his beard. Like most of the other men thronging the slave market, he wore a long plain coat over his more colorful robe, and covered his head with a felt cap. At a distance he looked like either a moderately prosperous merchant or the owner of a large farm who was shopping for hands to work it for him. But closer up, the scar on his cheek was clearly recognizable; so was the flinty look in his coal-dark eyes. I glanced around the crowd and spotted several of Harkan’s men, also with their beards neatly trimmed, wearing decent clothes.

  I pushed through the murmuring, jostling pack of men waiting for the market to open, heading for Harkan. He was turned slightly away from me, but his eyes kept searching through the expectant crowd, on the alert for danger. Then he saw me.

  His eyes went wide as I came up beside him, but he quickly mastered his surprise.

  “Your pilgrimage is over?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I’m heading back to Pella. I have responsibilities there.”

  He nodded. “You look different.”

  “Different?”

  “Calmer. More certain of yourself, as if you are sure of what you are doing now.”

  I felt a slight surprise at that, but inwardly I realized he was right. There was no turmoil within me now. I did not know exactly what I had to do, but I knew I must return to Pella and do Hera’s bidding, no matter what it might be.

  Then I looked squarely into Harkan’s leathery face and realized for the first time that he reminded me of someone I had known. Another soldier, from long ago: Lukka the Hittite. He might have been Harkan’s forebear, they looked so much like one another. In Harkan’s eyes I saw something that I had noticed only once before, when he had spoken of his family. I realized why he was here.

  “You are searching for your children,” I said.

  “If they haven’t already been sold. I was told the people taken from Gordium were brought to the market here. They won’t let anyone except the wealthiest buyers inspect the cages before the auctioning starts.”

  I thought a moment. “You are hoping to buy their freedom?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  He shot a questioning glance at me. “What do you mean?”

  “It will be difficult to continue your life as a bandit with an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter to take care of.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, pilgrim. For now, I’m seeking my children. What happens afterward, I’ll worry about after I’ve found them. First things first.”

  I stayed at his side through the whole long miserable afternoon. The slave dealers paraded out their wares, one by one. Young women brought the highest prices; strong healthy-looking men young enough to work in the fields or the mines also made profits for the sellers. There were dozens of children, but they brought very little. Most of them were still not sold when the sun dipped behind the warehouses lining the docks and the auction ended.

  Hardly a scattering of buyers was left in the square by then. The children, miserable, dirty, some of them crying, all of them collared by heavy iron rings, were led by their chains back to their pens.

  While the slave dealers huddled off behind the auction block, counting their coins, the chief auctioneer climbed down wearily and headed toward the tavern across the square.

  “It’s a shame,” said the chief auctioneer as we watched the children being led away. His leather-lunged voice was slightly hoarse from the long day’s work. “We can’t keep feeding those brats forever. They’re eating up any profit we might make on them.”

  Falling in beside him, Harkan asked as casually as he could manage, “Where are they from?”

  The auctioneer was a lean, balding man with a pot belly and cunning eyes. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Here and there. Phrygia, Anatolia; we got a clutch of them from Rhodes, believe it or not.”

  “Have there been any from Gordium?”

  He stopped walking and looked sharply at Harkan. We were more than halfway across the square, almost at the door to the tavern. “What is such information worth to you?”

  Harkan’s face became a mask of granite. “It is worth a life, auctioneer. Yours.”

  The man looked at me, then glanced back over his shoulder where the dealers were still gathered behind the block. A half-dozen armed men stood guard near them.

  “You wouldn’t get to utter a single word,” Harkan said, his voice low with menace. “Now just tell me, and tell me truly. Have there been any children from Gordium here?”

  “A month ago. Nearly a hundred of them. There were so many that the bidding went down almost to nothing. A bad show, a miserable show.”

  “Who bought them?”

  “Only a few were bought in the open auction. The bidding was too low. We can’t sell goods for nothing! Can’t give them away! The dealers closed the auction when the bidding went down too low to satisfy them.”

  “So what happened to the children who weren’t bought?”

  “They were sold in a lot. To a Macedonian. Said he was from their king.”

  “Philip?” I asked.

  “Yes, Philip of Macedon. He needs lots of slaves now that he’s master of Athens and all the rest of the Greeks.”

  “This is the truth?” Harkan asked, gripping the auctioneer’s skinny forearm almost hard enough to snap the bone.

  “Yes! The truth! I swear it!”

  “The few who were bought by men here,” Harkan went on urgently, “were any of them an eight-year-old boy, with hair the color of straw and eyes as black as mine? Or a six-year-old girl with the same coloring?”

  The auctioneer was sweating and trying to pry Harkan’s fingers off his forearm. He might as well have tried to dig through the city wall with a dinner fork.

  “How can I remember?” he yelped. “There were so many, how can I remember an individual boy or girl?”

  “Let him be,” I said to Harkan. “The chances are that your children are on their way to Pella.”

  He released the auctioneer, who dashed through the tavern’s door without another word.

  “To Pella. In Macedonia.” Harkan drew in a great painful breath. “Then I’ll never see them again.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I know little of Philip and his kingdom, but I’ve heard that they don’t tolerate bandits there. Philip’s men keep the law. There’s no place for me there.”

  I smiled at him and placed my hand on his shoulder. “My friend, Philip does not tolerate banditry, true enough. But he has the finest army in the world, and he is always ready to welcome new recruits.”

  I had heard that in ancient times heroes had swum across the Hellespont. Alexandros had sworn to his Companions that he would do it one day himself. Perhaps I could swim the Bosporus; it was narrower than the Hellespont, although its current was swift and treacherous. It would be far easier to buy a place on one of the ferries that plied between Chalkedon and Byzantion. And, of course, I could not expect Harkan or his men to swim.

  His band had dwindled to nine men over the winter. The others had drifted off, tired of their bandit ways, trying to find their way back to their home villages or looking for a new life for themselves. I was glad to see that among the remaining nine wa
s Batu. Harkan told me he was a strong fighter, with a cool, calculating mind.

  “They say there are Macedonian troops in Abydos,” Harkan told me, “down by the Hellespont.”

  “Truly?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the word in the marketplace.”

  Philip’s show of strength, I realized—holding a bridgehead on the Asian side of the water in case he ultimately decided to move the bulk of the army against the Great King. Diplomacy works best when it’s backed by power.

  “We’ll get to Pella faster by taking passage across the Bosporus to Byzantion,” I decided.

  “That takes money, pilgrim. We don’t have enough coin to buy passage for the eleven of us.”

  “Then how do you expect to buy—” I stopped myself in mid-sentence. I knew the answer before I finished asking the question. Harkan was saving whatever coin he had amassed to buy back his children.

  So I said instead, “I know where there is coin aplenty.”

  Harkan grasped my hint. “The slave dealers?” He smiled grimly at the thought. “Yes, they must have more coins than old Midas himself.”

  “But they are always heavily protected,” said Batu. “Their homes are guarded and they never venture into the streets alone.”

  “We are strong enough to overpower such guards,” I said.

  “Yes, I agree,” said Batu. “But before we could take their coin to the docks and get aboard a boat, the city’s guards would be upon us.”

  I nodded. He was right. Brute force would not work; the city was too small. An attack on one of the rich slave dealers would immediately bring out the whole force of guards and the first thing they would do would be to halt all the femes attempting to leave the docks.

  “Then we must use guile,” I said.

  Chapter 27

  It rained that night, which was all to the good. I stood beneath the gnarled branches of a dripping olive tree, studying the house of the richest slave dealer in Chalkedon. Harkan and Batu were at my side, shoulders hunched, wet, miserable and apprehensive.