Orion and the Conqueror Page 27

  Pausanias went inside. To the queen, I imagined, breathless to tell her of the danger to their plans that I represented. I smiled to myself as I made my own camp for the night. No fire for me. I was not ready to be caught just yet. I let my horse crop the scrawny grass pushing up through the rocky ground while I armed myself with a handful of small stones and went hunting. I killed a hare, skinned it and ate its meat raw. It was tough, but nourishing enough. Then both the horse and I drank at a shallow stream bubbling down the hillside.

  She came to me in my dreams, of course.

  Hera was furious. No sooner had I closed my eyes in sleep than I found myself standing before her in a chamber so vast that I could see neither its walls nor its ceiling. Enormous columns of gray-green marble rose like a forest, dwarfing even the many-columned hall of the Great King. Hera sat on a throne that glowed faintly, completely alone, magnificently beautiful in a flowing white robe that left her slim arms bare except for her jeweled bracelets and armlets, all in the shape of coiling snakes.

  Staring down at me with fiery eyes, she snapped, "You are more trouble than you're worth, Orion."

  I smiled at her. "I accept that as a compliment."

  Her eyes blazed. She leaned forward slightly, hands clenching into white-knuckled fists, body rigid with tension.

  I felt the beginnings of the pain she had inflicted on me before, but I fought against it, strove to banish it from my consciousness. It faded away before it became anything more than an annoying tingling.

  Hera's face contorted into an even angrier frown.

  "It's not working," I said. "You can't punish me the way you once did."

  "You're being protected!" The thought seemed to surprise her.

  "Or perhaps I've learned to protect myself," I said, not daring to hope that Anya was near. She was the only one who would protect me, I knew.

  "Impossible. We wiped that capability from your mind before we sent you here."

  "We?" I asked. "You and the Golden One?"

  She did not need to answer; I knew.

  "You failed, then. My memories are returning. My abilities are growing."

  "We will destroy you, once and for all."

  I thought of Ketu. "And grant me the release of oblivion?"

  Hera glowered at me.

  "The Golden One fathered Alexandros, didn't he? The two of you are playing at kings and empires. Does it amuse you? Is there some point to it beyond your own pitiful entertainment?"

  "You don't understand anything, Orion."

  "Don't I? As far as I can see, you are serving the whims of Aten, the Golden One, whatever he's calling himself now. He wanted to create a Trojan empire that spanned Europe and Asia. I stopped him then. Now he gets you to help him create the empire he's wanted all along—by bearing his son, Alexandros, and allowing him to conquer the Persians."

  "Alexandros will conquer the whole world," Hera said. "He must, or this nexus in the continuum will unravel disastrously."

  "But Philip stands in his way. He has a new son now, one that he is certain comes from his own seed."

  "Philip will die."

  "At Pausanias' hand."

  "Of course."

  "Not if I can stop him."

  "You mustn't!"

  "Why not?"

  Her anger had faded. Now she seemed alarmed, almost frightened. But she pulled herself together, regained her self-control. Hera leaned forward again and smiled coldly at me.

  "Orion, consider: if this nexus unravels the fabric of spacetime, everything changes. You will be torn from Anya just as surely as the Earth will be destroyed in nuclear fire a few thousand years up the time-stream."

  "And if I obey you and allow Philip to be assassinated?"

  She shrugged her slim shoulders. "At least we will be dealing with a continuum we understand and can control."

  "What is this great crisis that Anya spoke of? What is happening elsewhere in the continuum?"

  Her face clouded over. "Problems so intricate that not even we Creators fully understand their implications. Anya is far from Earth, Orion, light-years off in interstellar space, attempting to deal with one aspect of the crisis."

  "Is she truly in danger?"

  "We are all in danger, Orion. The forces ranged against us are beyond comprehension."

  Her usual haughty, taunting tone was gone. She was visibly fearful.

  "How does this matter of Philip and Alexandros relate to Anya?"

  I saw her draw back, a flicker of exasperation touching her face. "You are a stubborn mule, Orion!"

  "Tell me," I demanded.

  She heaved an annoyed sigh. "We cannot get out of this nexus until its flow is resolved, one way or the other!" Hera blurted. "We are locked into this placetime, Aten and I, and will be until the decision is made! Either Philip dies or Alexandros. Until one of them is killed, we cannot return to the continuum to help Anya and the other Creators."

  "You're stuck here?"

  Very reluctantly she admitted, "Yes."

  I did not want to believe her, but suddenly much of what I had experienced made sense to me. When I had translated myself to the Creators' city it was empty and abandoned. Whenever I had left this placetime I had returned precisely to the same time and place again. If what Hera was telling me was true, she and Aten were trapped here also. That was why Anya could not come to me; she was enmeshed in this snare just as they were.

  Without meaning to, without even thinking about it, I burst out laughing.

  Hera's blazing anger returned. "You find this amusing?"

  "Incredibly so," I answered. "Your meddling with the continuum has finally caught up with you. You sent me here to be rid of me, and now you're trapped here with me!"

  I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks.

  Chapter 32

  Hera disappeared so abruptly that I felt a jolt of physical alarm at finding myself back in the predawn cold of the hills near Aigai.

  Pulling myself up to a sitting position, I waited and watched the dawn come up over the rugged eastern horizon. So Hera and Golden Aten are trapped in this nexus of the continuum, unable to get away from this placetime unless and until either Philip or Alexandros dies, I thought. Unable to reach Anya and the other Creators. Unable to help them in their battle out among the stars.

  I got to my feet, wondering what I was to do. I could not let them kill Philip; he had been just and true to me. He was the one pillar on which the safety and prosperity of his people rested. Kill Philip and Alexandros would become king and immediately go chasing off for the glory of conquering the world. Years of wars and killing. To what end? Why should I help to make that come about?

  Yet that is what Aten, the Golden One, had been scheming for all through the centuries since Troy. His vision of human destiny required an empire that brought together the wealth of Asia with the ideals of Europe. I remembered another time, another place, far to the east, when I was sent to assassinate the High Khan of the Mongols. Then my mission had been to prevent the Mongol empire from engulfing Europe.

  Hera honestly seemed to believe that what we did here in this placetime had profound consequences for the spacetime continuum as a whole. I had my doubts. I thought that Aten and the other Creators dabbled with the flow of the continuum, interfered with human history as a game among themselves, a pastime of the gods. They saw the human race as their creation, their playthings. Wars, empires, murder and human misery were simply amusements for them.

  Yet Hera seemed frightened enough. And Anya was in danger, she said. Somewhere out among the stars Anya was fighting a battle for her life.

  I shook my head. Maybe Hera was right: it was all beyond my comprehension. Yet I knew that what I was about to do would be pivotal. Aten and the other so-called gods had created me and a handful of other warriors to serve them, to be sent to specific critical points in the space- time continuum and alter the flow of events for the benefit of our Creators.

  They created us, but we created them. I remembered it
fully now. I remembered being sent back into the Ice Age to wipe out the Neanderthals. I remembered Anya taking human form to help me and the handful of creatures Aten had sent on that genocidal mission. I remembered how we survived the battles and the cold of centuries-long winter. How we peopled the earth. How we became the human race. How our descendants in the distant future became the Creators who made us and sent us back in time to start the chain of events that would ultimately lead to themselves.

  All this I remembered as I stood in the chilly dawn of the worn, stony hills. But nothing in my newfound memories told me what I should do next. Nothing except the unshakable realization that Anya was the only one among the Creators to care enough about any of us to share our dangers, our pains, our fate.

  I loved her. That much I knew without question. I thought she loved me. And she was in danger, far from this place and time.

  The whinny of my horse snapped me out of my reverie. I had left the steed loosely tethered to a scraggly bush so that it could reach the sparse grass growing among the rocks without wandering off too far.

  It had sensed someone approaching, I suspected. I crawled up atop one of the bigger boulders and, flat on my belly, scanned the slope of the rocky hill below.

  Sure enough, there was Harkan in the armor of the royal guard, coming up the slope. He was alone. A pair of spears was tied to his mount's side and his sword rested against his hip. His helmet was tipped back on his head. He was peering at the hard stony ground, looking for some sign of me. If I just remained where I was he would pass me by a hundred yards or so and never know I was near. As long as my horse kept silent.

  I decided, though, to keep the bargain I had made with him. Scrambling to my feet I called out his name. His head jerked up and he raised one hand over his eyes. The sun was at my back.

  "Orion," he called back.

  By the time I had climbed down from the boulder he had dismounted and was walking up to me, leading his horse with one hand.

  We clasped forearms.

  "I brought some biscuits and cheese," Harkan said. "I thought you might be hungry."

  "Good. Let's have breakfast. It might look suspicious if you brought me in too early in the day."

  He made a small smile and went to the pack his horse carried. There was a skin of wine in the pack, too. And a handful of figs. The sun was getting high in the morning sky by the time we finished. I stood up, wiping my hands on the hem of my chiton, and saw that rain clouds were building up in the east.

  "Maybe we should get to the city before the storm arrives," I said.

  Harkan nodded glumly. Then he held out his hand. "Your dagger, Orion. Pausanias knows you have a dagger. I'd better take it."

  I felt a bit uneasy about that, but I slid my dagger from its sheath on my thigh and handed it to Harkan, hilt first.

  "Thank you," he said. And that was all he said as we mounted up and began the ride downhill to the road and then up the road to hilltop Aigai. Harkan's silence bothered me; it was as if something was troubling him.

  "What's the news?" I asked as we rode side by side.

  "Nothing much," he said, not turning to look at me.

  "Have you found your children?"

  He gave me a sidelong glance. "They're in Aigai; they belong to the king now."

  "Philip will give them back to you," I said. "Or sell them to you, at least."

  "You think so?"

  "Once you tell him that you're their father, he'll probably release them to you without payment."

  "He likes silver and gold, they say."

  "Even so, he knows what it is to be a father. He won't keep them from you."

  Harkan nodded grimly, like a man heading toward battle.

  "Pausanias was surprised that I broke out of my cell, was he?"

  "Surprised is hardly the word, Orion. He's been in a frenzy. He wants your head on a spear and he's promised a great reward for whoever brings you to him."

  "You're going to get the reward, then."

  "Yes," he said, without enthusiasm.

  We rode for a long, silent time. Something was obviously gnawing at Harkan. His children? The fact that he was turning me over to Pausanias?

  I asked, "Where's Batu? Why isn't he with you?"

  He did not reply at once. At length, though, Harkan said, "I thought it would look too obvious if the two of us brought you back. Too suspicious. Batu's riding through the hills on the other side of the road, with a full company of the guard. Searching for you."

  I nodded and he fell back into silence once more.

  Within a quarter-hour of our reaching the road, a whole contingent of guards galloped up to us.

  "You've got him!" exclaimed their leader. "Good!"

  He waved to a pair of riders at the end of his column and they trotted up to us. Chains jingled from the packs on their horses' rumps.

  The guard leader gave me a rueful look. "Sorry, Orion. Pausanias' orders. You're to be manacled and fettered. He's taking no chances on your getting away again."

  Harkan would not look at me, and the other guards seemed shame-faced to see one of their erstwhile comrades chained by the wrists and ankles. Even the two smiths who fastened the cuffs to me were almost apologetic as they drove home the rivets.

  So I arrived at Aigai with my hands cuffed behind my back, my ankles chained together, tossed across the back of my horse with my head dragging down in the dust, trussed like a sacrificial offering. Which, I realized, Pausanias meant me to be. My only hope was to see the king before Pausanias killed me.

  I got an upside-down worm's-eye view of Aigai's massive main gate and its thick wall, its dirt streets winding upward to the citadel at the very crown of the hill, and the even sturdier wall and gate of the castle proper.

  But they did not take me to the king. Despite my protests they dragged me from my horse and down into the ancient dungeons of the castle that had been since time immemorial the seat of the kings of Macedonia.

  "Take me to the king!" I shouted again as they locked me into a cell. My throat was getting hoarse from my unheeded demands. "I must see the king and warn him!"

  To no avail. They dumped me into the dirt-floored cell, still chained. The last one to leave me was Harkan. He waited until all the others had filed out, then knelt beside me.

  Ah-hah! I thought. Now he's going to tell me that he'll return and get me out of this.

  But instead he whispered swiftly, "I'm sorry, Orion. It was you or my children. She's promised to give them back to me if I brought you in."

  She. The queen. Olympias. Hera.

  "She means to kill me," I said.

  He nodded wordlessly and then left me lying there on the floor of the cell. The door clanged shut and I was alone in the darkness.

  But not for long. My eyes were just adjusting to the gloom when I heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside. The door was unlocked and pushed open. Two jailers came in and, grunting, lifted me by my armpits to a sitting position and dragged me across the cell until my back was propped up against the rough stone wall.

  They left and Olympias stepped into the cell. Pausanias came in behind her, holding a torch in his right hand.

  "We should kill him now and get it over with," Pausanias muttered.

  "Not just yet," said Olympias. "He may still be of value to us, once Philip is dead."

  I saw the ageless eyes of Hera in her beautiful, cruel face.

  "What value?" Pausanias snapped.

  "You question me?"

  He immediately yielded to the iron in her voice. "I just wanted to know—that is, he's dangerous. We should be rid of him."

  "After Philip is killed," Olympias whispered. "Then you can have him."

  "Do you think I won't go through with it?" Pausanias snapped. "Do you think I need a prize, a reward, to make me kill the king?"

  "No, of course not," she soothed. "But wait until afterward. It will be better afterward, I promise you."

  Pausanias stepped closer to me. "Very well. Aft
er." Then he kicked me with all his might squarely on the side of my head. As I slid toward unconsciousness I heard him growl, "I owed you that."

  Chapter 33

  I remained unconscious willingly, deliberately. My body lay in the musty cell, chained hand and foot, but my mind was aware and active. I sought out the city of the Creators once again, seeking the only refuge I could think of.

  My eyes opened on that grassy hill above the empty and abandoned city. The sun glittered on the sea, the flowers nodded to the passing breeze, the trees sighed as they had sighed for a hundred million years. Yet I could not approach the city any closer than I had before. Once again that invisible barrier held me in its grip.

  There was nowhere for me to go except back to Macedonia, back to that dark dungeon in Aigai, chained and helpless while Hera goaded Pausanias into murdering his king. There was no way I could get to Philip in time to warn him.

  Or was there? If I could not get out of my cell to go to Philip, could I bring him here to this ageless bubble of spacetime to be with me? I paced along the soft grassy slope, thinking hard, noting absently that as long as I walked away from the city I was not hindered by the barrier.

  How often had the Creators summoned me here? How many times had I made the transition from some place and time to this eternal city? I knew what it felt like so well that I could translate myself here without their aid, without their even knowing it. Could I stretch that power to pluck Philip from Aigai and bring him here, even briefly, to warn him?

  As I pondered the problem I thought I heard the faintest, subtlest echo of laughter. Mocking, cynical laughter that seemed to say to me that I had never moved myself through the continuum unaided, that I did not have the power to translate a molecule from one placetime to another, that everything I thought I had done on my own was really done for me by one of the Creators.

  No, I raged silently. I have achieved these things by myself. Anya told me so in a previous life. The Creators were even becoming wary of my increasing powers, fearful that I would one day equal them despite all they tried to do to stop me. That is why they wiped my memory and sent back to ancient Macedonia. But it didn't work. I am learning again, growing, gaining strength despite their betrayals.