by Ben Bova
I got to my feet and gathered up my clothes, my iron-studded leather jerkin, my helmet and oxhide shield. As I stepped outside the crude lean-to that passed for a barn I saw that the sun was already tingeing the eastern horizon with a soft pink light.
My troopers were beginning to stir. Twelve of us were left, out of the original twenty. We did not look much like a squad of Hatti soldiers now, a unit of the army that served as the emperor’s mailed fist. Six months of living off the land, six months of raiding villages for food and fighting other marauding bands of former soldiers had transformed us into marauders ourselves.
I felt grimy. My beard itched as if tiny devils lived in it. There was a pond between the barn and deserted hut of a farm house. I waded into it. The water was shockingly cold, but I felt better for it.
By the time I had dried myself and pulled on my clothes, most of my men had risen from the blankets they had thrown on the ground and were stumbling through their morning pissing and complaining.
I waved to Magro, who had taken his turn as lookout, up on the big rock by the road. He came down and joined the men who were starting a cook fire. We had nothing but a handful of beans and a few moldy cabbages; the farm house and barn had already been picked clean, empty except for the sullen-faced wench we had found hiding in the dung pile.
I saw little Karsh sitting awkwardly on the ground, craning his neck to peer at the gash on his shoulder. He was a Mittani, not a true Hatti, but he was a good soldier despite his small size. More than a week ago he had taken a thrust by a screaming farmer who had leaped at us from behind a door, wielding a scythe. I myself had dispatched the wild-eyed old man, nearly hacking his head from his shoulders with one swing of my iron sword.
“How’s the shoulder, little one?” I asked. Karsh had been a downy-cheeked recruit when he had first joined my squad. Now he looked as lean and grim as any of us.
“Still sore, Lukka.”
“It was a deep wound. It will need time to heal completely.”
He nodded and we both knew what he feared. Some wounds never heal. They fester and spread until the arm has to be lopped off. That would mean Karsh’s death, out here with no surgeon, not even a priest to perform the proper rituals for keeping evil spirits out of his wound.
I went back inside the shadowy barn and nudged the sleeping woman with the toe of my boot. She stirred, groaned, and turned over to stare up at me: naked, dirty, smelling of filth.
“There must be a cache of food hidden somewhere nearby,” I said to her. “Where is it?”
She clutched her rough homespun shift to her and replied sullenly, “Other soldiers took everything before you got here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Would it still be the truth if we dangled your feet in the fire for a while?” I asked.
Her eyes went wide. “There’s a village not more than half a league down the same road you came in on,” she said quickly. “Many fine houses. More than all the fingers of both my hands!”
Yes, I thought. Fine houses will be guarded by armed men, especially if there are things in them worth stealing.
“Get yourself dressed,” I told her. “But do not come out of the barn until we leave. My men might mistake you for Asertu.”
Her heavy brows knit together, puzzled. “Who is Asertu?”
I had forgotten that we had come so far that these people did not know the Hatti gods. “Aphrodite,” I answered her. The goddess of love and beauty in this part of the world.
She actually smiled, thinking I was complimenting her.
My men were gathered around the cook fire, passing a wooden cup of broth from one to the next. I could smell the reek of stale cabbage from where I stood.
Looking around, I noted, “No one’s on watch.”
“We’re all awake, with our weapons to hand,” Magro said, handing the cup up to me. I took a sip. It was bitter, but at least reasonably hot.
“There’s a village less than a league down the road,” I told them. “Should be food there.”
“Where there’s food, there’s guards,” Zarton muttered. He was the biggest of my men, but never eager to fight.
“Villagers,” I said. “No match for trained Hatti soldiers.”
They mumbled reluctant agreement. My humor had fallen flat again. What was left of my squad hardly resembled a unit of trained Hatti soldiers. They still had their spears and shields, their swords and helmets, true enough, but our clothes had worn out months ago, replaced by what ever ragged, lice-crawling garments we could find among the terrified farmers and villagers we raided.
I had started by trying to trade with the people we came across, but what do soldiers have to trade besides their weapons? Sometimes villagers willingly provided us with what we demanded, just to be rid of us without bloodshed. Farmers usually fled as we approached, leaving their livestock and stores of grain or vegetables to us, glad to escape with their lives and their daughters.
The wench we had found hiding at this farm was lame. She could not run. But her family’s farmstead had already been picked clean by the time we got there. Which meant that there were other bandits in the area.
I formed up the men, reminded them that we might run across another band of raiders.
“But we’re not raiders,” said Magro, grinning mockingly. “We’re Hatti soldiers.”
The others all laughed. Yet I knew that only by keeping the discipline we had all learned under the empire could we hope to survive. It was what had kept us alive so far: twelve of us, at least, out of my original squad of twenty.
I marched them up onto the dusty meandering road, rutted from the wheels of oxcarts and wagons. The road led to the next village, the next fight, the next bloodletting. I told myself that it led to my wife and sons. It was the road that the slavers had taken, the road that ended in the great city at the edge of the sea, where the slave market auctioned off poor wretches to buyers from Thrace and Argos, from distant Crete and even mighty Egypt.
Troy. My wife and sons were being driven to the slave market at Troy. They were still alive, I was certain of it. And I knew that if I did not find them and free them there, I would lose them forever. They would be carried off to some foreign land, slaves for the rest of their lives.
I had to find them. My father had been right in that. In all this world of chaos and misery, my two sons were all that really mattered. I can’t let them spend their lives in slavery. I will find them, no matter how long it takes or who stands in my way.
4
What the wench called a village was a miserable collection of huts at a fork in the road we had been following. Worse, another raider band was already there. Several of the huts were ablaze, sending foul-smelling black smoke billowing into the bright morning sky. Magro and I lay concealed in a stand of half-grown wheat on a terraced hillside overlooking the village. The rest of my men were hunkered down on the other side of the knoll, out of sight.
“They don’t look like soldiers,” Magro whispered to me.
“Neither do we,” I answered.
“Bronze weapons,” Magro pointed out.
I nodded. They were bandits, then, not former soldiers. Only soldiers of the old emperor were gifted with iron swords. Each one was worth a man’s weight in silver.
“Looks like they’re ready to leave,” I whispered.
The bandits must have hit the village the previous day and spent the night, taking their fill of the food and wine and women. Now they had rounded up all the ragged, bedraggled people in the bare little patch of dirt that passed for a village square and methodically, one by one, slit the throats of any man young enough to fight. The women screamed and wailed, the white-bearded old men sank to their knees. The young men, their hands bound behind them, fell like sheep, unable to defend themselves. One of the women threw herself at the raiders but was knocked to the ground by a backhand cuff.
Once their grisly task was finished, the bandits piled as much
loot as each of them could carry and staggered out onto the left fork of the road. The women ran to their slain sons and husbands, raking their faces with their nails to add their own blood to what was already soaking the ground.
“What now?” Magro asked me. “They’ve picked the place clean.”
Still watching the backs of the departing bandits, I answered him, “They’ve done half our work for us. Now all we need to do is take the goods they’ve collected away from them.”
“I counted twenty-seven of them.”
I nodded. “Most of them will run at the sight of us.”
“Twenty-seven,” Magro repeated, unconvinced.
It was easy to overtake the bandits. They were still half-drunk and encumbered with the loot they carried. We trailed them to a wooded area, where we could approach them unnoticed, screened by the trees and ground foliage, and fell on them savagely.
In a few moments it was all over. They were fatally surprised. I killed three of the louts myself. Zarton, our big farm boy from the Zagros Mountains, put away five of them—or so he claimed. I counted twenty-two bodies sprawled on the bloody ground. The others fled shrieking for their lives.
“Food, wine, clothing … they did well for themselves,” said little Karsh as we picked over the bundles the bandits had dropped.
“That village was richer than it looked,” Magro said.
“Pick it up, all of it,” I told the men.
“There’s too much! How can we carry all this?” Even Zarton, who towered over most of us, looked unhappy at shouldering such a burden.
“We won’t be carrying it far,” I told them. “We’re bringing it back to the village.”
“Bringing it back?”
“We don’t need all this, and they’ll be very grateful to us for returning even half of it.”
They stared at me in disbelief. Only Magro seemed to understand what I was up to.
“You want to know which fork of the road leads to Troy,” he said to me softly as we trudged back to the village, laden with their goods.
I answered him with a nod. The men were sweating and grumbling, but I had to know which road the slavers had taken. I could not rest while there was still a chance that I might find my sons and my wife.
Would I have come so far if it was only my wife the slavers had taken? I wondered. She was a woman, and there are many women in the world. Yet she was the mother of my sons, and those two little boys were what drove me on. So I sought the fruit of my loins, driven by a dying old man’s will, while my men trudged unhappily back to the village the raiders had looted.
The villagers were indeed grateful, once they realized we intended to return some of their goods to them, rather than cause them more harm. They were a sad and pitiful lot, their young men still sprawled on the blood-soaked earth, their women still kneeling over them, crying and keening. The biting iron stench of their blood filled the air; if the women and old men did not get the corpses buried soon, there would be even worse smells.
The village’s white-bearded headman gladly told me that the right fork led toward Troy, but he had no idea how far the city might be.
“I have heard of it,” he told me, trying to maintain some shred of dignity in his quavering voice. “No one from this village has ever gone there.”
No one from this village has ever gone farther than the wheat fields and dung-spattered sheep pastures of the nearby hills, I thought.
I ordered my men to gather up enough food to feed us for a few days and enough trinkets and baubles to use as trade goods at the next village we came to. The villagers did not object. They could not, even if they desired to.
We left them standing there amid their dead, wailing to their gods.
5
The sun was high and hot as we climbed the wooded slope that led up to the next ridgeline. Suddenly Zarton dropped the loot he was carrying and rested his long spear against a tree.
“I’m going back,” he announced.
The men all stopped. I had been in the lead, so I had to turn around to face our mountain man.
“What do you mean?” I asked, stepping past half a dozen of the men to stand before Zarton.
He shrugged, a big, slow-witted powerful young ox. “I’m going back to that village. I’m not going on with you.”
I glanced at the men closest to me. Some seemed puzzled by Zarton’s words, but a few were nodding with understanding. Why keep on this grueling trek across the ruins of the empire when we can settle down in that village and be welcomed by the widows and daughters who need men to protect them? I saw it in their eyes.
“You are a soldier, Zarton,” I said evenly. “You follow orders just as the rest do. My orders.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “There’s no empire anymore, Lukka. Why keep up the pretense?”
They all knew why. We were fighting our way toward Troy to find my wife and sons. It was my will that drove us on now, not the emperor’s, but I had to be just as hard and inflexible as he had been. Otherwise we would all be lost and I would never find my sons.
“Pick up your goods and get back on the march,” I commanded.
He actually grinned at me. “I’m not a soldier anymore, Lukka. I quit.”
“You can’t quit. Not unless I allow you to.”
Zarton stood up a little straighter. The other men edged away from us.
“I’m going back to the village,” he repeated, slowly, stubbornly.
“No you’re not.”
Usually he was an easygoing, amiable sort. But like the ox he resembled, he could be obstinate. And dangerous. Yet I knew that if I allowed him to leave, several of the other men would go with him. Discipline would evaporate. My squad would disintegrate before my eyes and I would have no chance what ever of reaching distant Troy.
Zarton gripped his spear in one ham-sized fist. It was more than half again his own considerable height. He looked at me with real sadness in his ice-blue eyes.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Lukka. Don’t stand in my way.”
“I don’t want to kill you, boy, but if you don’t obey me I’ll be forced to.”
I had no spear, only the sword in its scabbard by my side. Being left-handed is an advantage in a sword fight because most men are accustomed to fight against right-handers, and my left-handed stance confuses them. But this would not be a sword fight: Zarton hefted his spear.
Before any of the other men could make up their minds about which of us to back, I said loudly: “Stand back, all of you. This is between Zarton and me, no one else.”
They gladly backed away.
“This is wrong, Lukka,” said Zarton, his heavy brows knitting sullenly.
“Don’t make me kill you,” I said evenly. “Put the spear down and obey my orders.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Zarton closed his other hand around the haft of his spear. But before he could lower its iron point at me I leaped at him, drawing my sword in the same motion.
He staggered back against the tree, shocked, and I stuck the point of my sword into his gut, just below the breastbone, and rammed the full length of the blade up into his chest. He looked surprised, his eyes wide with astonishment that I had not waited for him to set himself. Then his expression faded to a bewildered confusion as his mouth filled with bright red blood and his legs no longer supported him.
With a feeble little gasp Zarton collapsed against the tree’s rough bark and slid to the ground. His eyes stayed open but they went cold and dead.
Yanking my sword from his body, I turned to face the other men. They all seemed just as shocked as Zarton had been.
“We march to Troy. I don’t care how far it is or how many battles we have to fight to get there. We march to Troy. Is that understood?”
They nodded and muttered.
“Troy is a great city. It rules the Dardanelles and the Aegean beyond the straits. We can find a place in the service of the Trojan king,” I told them. “We can become true soldiers again, instead of maraud
ing robbers.”
Perhaps they believed me. Perhaps not. I didn’t care, not at that moment with foolish young Zarton lying dead at my feet with the flies already buzzing about him. I knew only one thing for certain: I would reach Troy or die in the trying. I picked up his spear and pointed with it down the road toward Troy.
We marched.
Yet that night, after a long day’s trek, I saw Zarton again in my dreams. He rose out of the grave I had dug for him and stared at me from the underworld beyond the Styx, shaking his head sadly, sadly, his eyes brimming with tears.
In his arms he held my two baby boys.
6
It was nearly sunset, two days after I had killed Zarton. We were picking our way slowly down a gradual slope, through the undergrowth of a forest that had once been thick with lofty, broad-boled trees. But now half the trees had been cut down, their stumps overgrown with ferns and twisting vines. In the distance we heard the sound of woodcutters chopping away methodically.
That meant a village had to be nearby, or perhaps a larger town. Without a word of command from me, the men spread out, hefting their spears and moving silently through the underbrush, schooled by long experience.
The chunking sound of the axes grew louder as we made our way through the woods. The trees thinned even more, and I motioned the men to drop to their knees. Through the screening underbrush I saw a team of half-naked ax men sweating away at their work in the lengthening shadows of the dying day. Four of them were cutting wood, six more were scurrying to pile the cut logs into a lopsided cart pulled by a big dun-colored bullock patiently munching his cud.
“Move! Move, you dogs!” bellowed a mean-faced taskmaster at the team. His accent was harsh, barely understandable. “You’ve got to get this cart loaded and back in camp before the sun goes down.”
His men were bone-thin, ragged, staggering under the loads they carried.
“And you whoresons!” roared the taskmaster. “Swing those axes or by the gods you’ll think Zeus’ thunderbolts are landing on your backs!”