by Ben Bova
One of them stepped close enough to the fire for me to see him clearly. Tall, well-built, scruffy beard turning gray, a scar across his left cheek. He wore a black leather corselet, stained and scuffed with hard use, and held an iron sword in his right hand. Bareheaded, but he looked like a soldier to me. Or rather, an ex-soldier.
“I don’t have anything worth stealing,” I said, still sitting. Then I realized that they would happily slit my throat for the two horses.
The others slowly came closer, forming a ring around me and the fire.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
“My name is Orion. I’m heading for Ararat.”
“The sacred mountain? Why?”
“He’s a pilgrim,” said one of the other men, with a wolfish grin. Like the first, he wore the black leather corselet of a military uniform.
“Some pilgrim,” said the first.
“But that’s what I am,” I said, letting go of my sword and hauling myself to my feet.
“Orion the pilgrim, eh?” His voice was hard, suspicious.
“And what might your name be?” I asked.
“I’m Harkan the bandit, and these are my men.”
I said, “Harkan the soldier, I would have thought.”
He gave me a bitter smile that twisted the scar on his cheek. “Once we were soldiers. That was long ago. Now the Great King has no more use for us and we must make our own way.”
“Well, soldiers or bandits, you can see that I don’t have anything to steal.”
“Except two fine horses.”
“I need them to get to Ararat.”
“Your pilgrimage is going to end here, Orion.”
Fourteen against one are impossible odds. Unless I could make it a personal duel.
“I’ll make you a wager,” I said to him, trying to sound cheerful.
“Wager?”
“Pick your best two men. I’ll fight them both at the same time. If they win, you get my horses. If I win, you let me go in peace. With my horses.”
“A pilgrim who wants to fight. Who is your god, pilgrim, Marduk? Shamash? Who?”
“Athena,” I said.
“A woman!” laughed one of the men.
“A Greek woman!” They all began to laugh.
Even Harkan was grinning at me. “And what weapon does your goddess want you to use? A spinning wheel?”
They roared with glee.
I raised my bare hands. “These will be enough,” I said.
Their laughter cut off abruptly. I could see in their faces what they were thinking: This is a madman. Either he is mad, or he truly serves the goddess Athena.
“All right, pilgrim,” said Harkan, brandishing his sword in my face. “Let’s see what you can do.”
“Who else will help you?” I asked.
The grin came back. “Who else? Just me and my sword. That’s all I need.”
I flashed out my left hand and gripped his sword arm before he could twitch. With my right I grasped his belt and lifted him off his feet. He yelled as I held him aloft and then tossed him to the ground so hard that he dropped his sword and I heard the breath woof out of him.
The others stood frozen, eyes wide, mouths agape.
Harkan climbed painfully to his feet. “Zoser, Mynash—take him.”
They were experienced fighters. They moved warily, swords in hand, one to my left, the other to my right.
I feinted left, dived to my right, knocked Mynash off his feet with a rolling block and wrested the sword from his hand with a quick twist that made him yelp in pain. Zoser was swinging overhand at me. On one knee, I blocked his sword with Mynash’s and then pounded his midsection with an uppercutting left that lifted him completely off his feet. As he landed flat on his back with a heavy thud I pricked the skin of his throat with the point of the sword, then spun and did the same to Mynash.
Harkan smiled grimly at me. “Can you take three at a time?” Before I could answer, he went on, “Four? Ten? Twelve of us?”
I had impressed him, but he was no fool.
“You agreed to a bargain,” I said.
“That was only part of the bargain,” he replied. “The rest of it is this: we are heading toward the country around Lake Van. Better pickings up there and fewer of the Great King’s pretty soldiers to bother us. You’re heading that way yourself, so until we reach the lake you are one of my men. Agreed?”
“I prefer to go alone. I need to travel fast.”
“No faster than we!”
The bargain was clear. Accompany Harkan and his men or be slain here for my horses.
“As far as Lake Van, then,” I said.
He stuck out his right hand. “Agreed!” We clasped forearms to seal the bargain.
They did not travel as fast as I did alone, but fast enough. Harkan’s band was being hunted by the Great King’s men and they rode as if devils were hunting them down.
While I rode as if a goddess were calling me.
Chapter 22
From Harkan I learned that an empire always has troubles when a new king comes to the throne. Dareios III had been Great King for little more than a year. Apparently his first royal act was to poison his grand vizier—who had poisoned the man who had sat on the throne previously and then picked Dareios to be his pawn. This Dareios was no pawn. Yet many of the nations in the vast Persian Empire had immediately rebelled, wanting their own independence, before the new king could solidify his hold on the people, the government bureaucracy, the treasury, and the army. Especially the army.
“We’re from Gordium,” Harkan told me as we rode northward. It was a gray day, with a chill damp wind blowing down on us from the distant snow-capped mountains.
“Whoever holds Gordium holds the key to the heartland of all Asia Minor,” he went on. “Our prince rebelled against Dareios, thinking that he could make himself Great King, with luck.”
“He was wrong?” I prompted.
“Dead wrong,” said Harkan grimly.
The Great King summoned troops from many distant lands of the empire, far-off Bactria, wild mountain warriors from Sogdiana, Parthian cavalrymen and even Greek mercenary hoplites.
“We were outnumbered ten to one,” Harkan said. Then he ran a finger along the scar on his cheek. “That’s where I got this. We were lucky to escape with our lives.”
“What happened to Gordium?”
He did not answer for several moments, his eyes like dark chips of flint staring off into painful memories. The horses plodded on, noses into the damp wind.
“What usually happens to a city that’s lost its battle? They burned a lot of it. Raped our women, killed half the population, sold off the children into slavery. They dragged our prince back to Susa in chains. I hear they spent almost a week killing him.”
“Your own family…?”
“Dead. All of them. Maybe my children escaped, but if they did they’re slaves now.”
I did not want to ask more. I could feel the pain that he had kept inside himself always before.
“I had a son and a daughter. He was eight, she was six. I haven’t seen them since the day before the battle, almost a year ago.”
I nodded, but he went on:
“Wounded and all, I sneaked back into the city that night, looking for them. My wife lay dead in our house. My mother too. The bastards had raped them both, then put them to the sword. Half the city was in flames. The Great King’s men were looting everything they could carry. My children were gone.”
I thought of the way Philip had treated Athens. And Perinthos and the other cities he had won in battle or through diplomacy. Yet Demosthenes and the Persians called him a barbarian.
“I escaped into the hills, found others who had done the same. This little band of ours, we were all soldiers, once.”
“All from Gordium?”
“Most. Two from Cappadocia. One from Sardis, in Lydia.”
Now they were bandits, fleeing from the Great King’s vengeance. Living like parasites. Hunt
ed men. And I was one of them.
By going north we were putting distance between the king’s soldiers and ourselves. But the pickings were poorer the farther north we went. Until we came into the lake country, where there were good farms nestled in the valleys between the hill ridges, villages and market towns. And travelers on the roads.
We swooped down on the travelers. Most of them were merchants carrying precious goods such as silks, jewels, spices, wine. They were escorted by guards, of course, but we cut through them without mercy and took as much as we could carry.
At first I thought I could not kill men whose only fault was that they had goods Harkan and his bandits wanted to steal. But once the first spears were thrown, once the clang of blades rang out, all the old battle lust welled up in me and I fought as I had at Troy and Jericho and a thousand other placetimes. It was built into my genes, into the neural pathways of my brain. I took no joy in the killing, but I fought as if nothing else in the world mattered.
Afterward, when it was finished, when the blood lust ebbed away and I became sane once again, I did not like to look upon the bodies we had slain.
“What good are fine clothes and fancy jewelry to you?” I asked Harkan as we led a train of laden donkeys away from the dead bodies we had left in the road.
“We can sell them or trade them.”
I felt surprised. “People will deal with bandits?”
He gave one of his rare, bitter laughs. “People will roll in cow dung, Orion, if they think they can profit by it.”
I found that he was telling the truth. We sold off all the goods we had stolen, even the mules, at the next village we came to. Harkan sent one of his men ahead to tell the villagers we were coming. By the time we arrived in their miserable, muddy central square the farmers and merchants and their wives flocked to our little group, picking over our stolen goods, bartering grain and wine and fruit for silks and gold-wrought cups and hides of thick-wooled mountain goats.
I noticed, though, that Harkan did not show the jewels we had taken from the merchant’s chests, or from his dead body. Those he kept.
“They have no coin here, Orion. The jewels we’ll sell in a market town, where they have coins of gold and silver.”
“What good are gold and silver coins to you?”
“My children, Orion. If they’re still alive they were sent to the slave market in Arbela or Trapezus or one of the port cities along the coast. I’m going to find them and buy their freedom.”
I wondered if he would live long enough to find two stolen children in all the vastness of this huge empire.
We were close enough to Lake Van to see its waters glittering in the setting sun, far off on the horizon, like a sliver of gleaming silver. But Harkan’s attention was on the caravan wending along the road below the ridge on which we had camped.
It was a big caravan. I counted thirty-seven donkeys laden with cargo, sixteen wagons lumbering along behind teams of oxen. And fully two dozen guards, armed with spears and swords, shields slung on their backs, bronze helmets glinting in the sun.
“Rich as Croesus,” Harkan muttered as we watched from behind a screen of young trees and shrubbery.
“And heavily guarded,” I said.
He nodded grimly. “Tonight. While they’re asleep.”
I agreed that would be the best tactic. But then I looked into his hard dark eyes and said, “This is my last raid with you, Harkan. Tomorrow I set out for Ararat.”
His gaze did not waver an inch. “If we’re both alive tomorrow, pilgrim.”
The men of the caravan were no fools. They arranged their wagons into a rough square for the night and posted guards atop them. The others slept inside the square, where they kept four big fires blazing. The horses and donkeys were herded into a makeshift corral by the stream that meandered along the side of the road.
Harkan had military experience, that I could see from the attack he planned and the crisp, sure orders he gave. There were fifteen of us, nearly fifty of them, all told. We had to use stealth and surprise to offset their numbers.
Only the two Cappadocians among Harkan’s men were bowmen, so his plan was to kill the two guards nearest our position with arrows fired from the dark beyond the light of their fires.
“As the arrows are fired, the rest of us charge,” he commanded.
I nodded in the darkness. As I made my way through the trees to the place where we had tied our horses, I thought once again that I would be killing men I had no grievance against, strangers who would die for no reason better than the fact that they had possessions that we wanted to steal.
I thought of Ketu and the lessons he had tried to teach me of the Eightfold Path. Desire nothing. I almost laughed aloud. But then I remembered his telling me about the older gods, the deities that the Hindis had worshipped long before Buddha. If all men are reborn after death, what does it matter if they are slain?
What was it he had told me that Krishna says in one of their poems? “Thy tears are for those beyond tears… The wise grieve not for those who live; and they grieve not for those who die—for life and death shall pass away.”
All right, I told myself as I led my horse along the dark trail along the top of the ridge. I’m going to help some of those men find new lives for themselves.
Like a good general, Harkan had scouted the area thoroughly during the daylight hours. We moved as quietly as wraiths along the top of the ridge, and then led our horses carefully down the trail he had found to the road below. It was a cloudy night, damp and raw and threatening rain. We could see the bright blaze of the caravan’s campfires up ahead. We stopped short of the dancing light the fires threw and mounted our horses. A cold drizzle began to sift down from the low clouds.
The two Cappadocians were still afoot. They crept a little closer, then a little closer still. I could see the guards atop the wagons, backlit by the campfires, perfect targets. One of them was standing; the other hunched down with his cloak wrapped around him. The Cappadocians knelt and fitted arrows to their bows. They pulled their bowstrings back to their chests and let loose.
At that instant we charged, leaving the two bowmen to mount their horses and follow us in.
I saw both the guards topple over as we yelled our wildest and drove our horses through the gaps between the wagons. Men were scrambling in the light of the fires, reaching for arms, rubbing sleep from their startled eyes. As my body accelerated into overdrive, the world slowed around me into a languid, torpid dream.
I speared a man who was clutching a blanket around him as he tried to shake his sword loose from its scabbard with one hand. His mouth went round and his eyes bulged as my spear penetrated his chest. I wrenched the spear free and he tumbled to the ground in slow motion, as if he no longer had any bones in his limbs.
A spear came hurtling out of the darkness. I ducked under it and rode down the man who had thrown it at me. Wise in the ways of battle, he threw himself on the ground, flat on his face, to give me almost no target for my charging lunge. But in my overdrive state I had plenty of time to see what he was doing. As he slowly, slowly dropped to his hands and knees and then flattened himself onto his belly I adjusted the aim of my spear point and skewered him. His head jerked up and he screamed, his face distorted in agony. My spear dug into the ground and snapped as I rode past him.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harkan’s horse go down, with him pinned beneath it. A half-dozen armed men were rushing to finish him off. I charged into their midst as I pulled my sword, slashing on both sides of me, taking arms from shoulders, splitting skulls into bloody pulps.
I dismounted and hauled Harkan’s dying horse off his leg. He limped aside, tried to stand up and failed. I lifted him bodily with one hand and swung him up onto my horse. He still had his sword in his right hand. A lean swarthy warrior came at me with a spear, holding an oblong shield in front of him. I grabbed the spear with my left hand and wrenched it away from him, split his shield with one overhand blow of my sword and then dise
mboweled him.
Four of our men were down, but most of the caravan’s guards were already dead or wounded. The merchants and their servants were fighting too, but not very effectively. I killed two more guards and was advancing on an overweight, paunchy merchant in a splotched robe when he threw down his sword and fell to his knees.
“We surrender!” he screeched. “We surrender! Spare us!”
Everyone froze for an instant. Harkan, up on my horse, pointed his sword at the guard who faced him on foot. The man took a step back, looked around and saw that no one was fighting any more, and threw his sword on the ground in disgust. He was a tall, rangy man with black skin, half naked, obviously roused from his sleep. But there was blood on his sword and fire in his eye.
“Spare us, spare us,” the fat merchant was blubbering. “Take what you want, take everything, but spare our lives.”
Harkan did that. He sent the merchant and the few servants he had left alive off on some of the donkeys, into the drizzling night, leaving all their goods behind. And their slain.
Six of the guards still lived, after Harkan’s men had given their wounded mercy killings. They too were professional soldiers turned mercenaries in the turmoil of the Great King’s accession to the throne.
“You can go with your former employer or you can join us,” Harkan offered them.
The tall black man said, “What do we gain by joining you?” His voice was a deep rich baritone.
Harkan grinned viciously in the firelight. “An equal share of all we take. A price on your head. And the joy of following my orders at all times.”
“I don’t speak for the others,” said the black man, “but I would rather take what fat merchants own than guard it for them.”
“Good! What’s your name? Where are you from?”
“Batu. From far away, the land beyond Egypt where the forest goes on forever.”
The five other erstwhile guards also agreed to join Harkan’s band, but grudgingly, I thought, without the unfettered enthusiasm of Batu.
By morning it was raining hard and Harkan’s leg was blue and swollen from hip to mid-calf. He sat beneath the canvas shelter we had fashioned amid the trees back up on the ridge with his bruised leg stretched out straight and raised up off the damp ground by resting his heel on an overturned helmet.