Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  “It isn’t broken,” he told me. “I’ve had bones broken before. It’s only a bruise.”

  A sizeable bruise, I thought. But I had other thoughts in my mind.

  “We lost four men last night, but gained six new ones.”

  “Batu is the only one I’d trust,” Harkan muttered.

  “Still, you’ll have one man more than when I first met you.”

  He looked up at me. I was squatting on my haunches beneath his dripping canvas shelter.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Lake Van is in sight. I only have a few days left to make it to Ararat.”

  “You’ll never cover the distance in a few days, pilgrim.”

  “I must try.”

  He made a snorting sigh. “If I could stand up I’d try to stop you from leaving. You’re a valuable man.”

  “Only if I’m willing. I’ve got to leave, and the only way you could stop me would be to kill me. I would take a few of you with me if you tried that.”

  He grumbled but nodded. “Well, go then, pilgrim. Get on your way.”

  “I’ll take four of the horses.”

  “Four?”

  “You have more than you can use now.”

  “I could sell them in the next town we come to.”

  “I need four,” I repeated.

  “Four,” he agreed sourly. But as I got up and started out into the driving rain he added, “Good luck, pilgrim. I hope your goddess is waiting for you up there.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Chapter 23

  Through the rain, and the sunshine that followed it, and the next rainstorm a few days later I galloped, driving my horses without stop. I changed them frequently but still they began to limp and fail beneath me. Two of them died before I came to a village. I stole two more, killing six men in a furious fight before I could break loose. I was bleeding and hungry, but I had four fresh horses with me as I continued my grim dash to Mount Ararat.

  The rain turned to freezing sleet and then snow. The ground rose steadily. Again I drove the horses to their deaths, not caring about anything except reaching the summit of the mountain in time.

  In the back of my mind I wondered how a Creator who could manipulate time the way I can travel across distance needed to have me at Ararat’s summit within a certain span of hours. Why couldn’t Anya wait there for me as long as she needed to, and then return to the placetime where she started from? It made no sense to me.

  Yet I forged onward. The last of my horses gave out as I urged her on up the slope of the mountain. I slogged forward on foot, the snowcapped peak before me, shrouded in clouds and swirling gusts of snow that cast sparkling rainbows when the sun struck them.

  I was half dead myself by the time I reached the summit, stumbling through waist-high drifts of snow. I had not eaten in days. My body had repaired the wounds I had suffered, but that sapped energy too, and I felt weak as a newborn baby as I staggered to the flat mesa at the crown of Ararat. The mountain was twin-peaked, so I had chosen the higher of the two. Summit meant highest point, I reasoned. There was an old volcanic vent there, silent and cold as the snow heaped upon it.

  It was a whirling world of mist and snow, cold and wet and white. I could feel my body’s heat leaching out of me, draining away into the deep cold wet snow, sucked away by the misty icy wind. I searched for hours or perhaps days through that white snowy wilderness. Alone. I was entirely alone. Was I too late? Or too early? It did not matter to me. I would meet Anya here or die.

  At last I could not stand any more. I sank into the numbing snow, lost and alone, ready to die once again.

  I was freezing. I could sense my body shutting itself down, trying to protect my cells from freezing—to no avail. The cold was seeping into me, the spark of life ebbing away.

  I remembered another time, another place, when almost all the world was covered with snow and sheets of ice miles thick that stretched from the poles toward the equator. I had lived then, and died then, in the endless cold of a global winter. Died for her, for Anya, for the goddess I loved.

  It was impossible to judge distances in that featureless misty snowscape. Somewhere out there I thought I saw a light, perhaps just the sparkle of crystals caught by a stray beam of sunshine breaking through the ice fog. Perhaps—

  I struggled to my knees, to my frozen numbed feet. Shambling toward the sparkling light like a lurching snow monster, I saw that it was a glimmering silver sphere, no larger than my fist, hovering in the icy mist.

  I nearly collapsed more than once, but at last I reached it. The sphere hung in midair, shimmering like a soap bubble. I tried to look into it, as if it were a magician’s crystal ball.

  “Orion,” I heard Anya’s voice call faintly. “Orion, are you there? I can’t maintain the discontinuity much longer.”

  “I’m… here.” My throat was raw, flaming. My voice sounded as if it came from the pits of hell.

  “Orion! I can barely see you! Oh, my poor suffering darling!”

  “I’m here,” I repeated. In that tiny glowing silver sphere I thought I could vaguely make out her form, standing alone, dressed in her metallic uniform, some kind of silvery helmet in one hand.

  “I wish I could help you. I wish I could reach you.”

  “Just to know… you…” I had to force the words out. “It’s enough.”

  “The crisis is upon us, Orion. We need your help.”

  I would have laughed if I had the strength. I was dying and they needed my help.

  “You must return to Pella. You must obey Hera. It’s important. Vital!”

  “No. She’s contemptible.”

  “I can do nothing if you don’t obey her. No matter how it seems, I love you and I want to help you, but you must follow Hera’s commands.”

  “She’ll… murder… Philip.”

  “It must be. What she wants is what must be. Otherwise the entire strand of your present spacetime will unravel. We can’t afford to have that, Orion! The crisis is too deep. We can’t deal with anything more.”

  “She… hates… you.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except resolving the crisis. You’ve got to stop fighting against us, Orion! You must do as Hera commands!”

  I found the energy to shake my head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m… dying.”

  “No! You mustn’t die! We can’t revive you. All our energies are committed. You’ve got to get back to Pella and help Hera.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Perhaps more than a moment. When I opened them the silver sphere had vanished and Anya’s urgent, fearful voice was only a memory. I heard nothing except the keening wind, felt nothing except the numbness of freezing death creeping toward my heart.

  Was it real? Had I really seen Anya, spoken my mumbled, half-frozen words to her? Or was it all a fevered delirium, the wild imaginings of a mind near death? Had I truly seen her or was I merely imagining what I wanted to see?

  I floundered aimlessly through the waist-deep snow, for how long I have no way of knowing. I was like a ship without a rudder, a drunkard without a home. Anya wanted me to return to Pella and serve the witch Olympias, the self-styled goddess Hera. To murder Philip. To set Alexandros on the throne of Macedonia and start him on his bloody conquest of the rest of the world.

  I could not do it. I could barely move my legs and force myself through the snow. The cold was getting worse, the wind sharper. It howled and laughed at me, stumbling and wallowing through the snowdrifts, lurching like an automaton set on a task it cannot understand.

  Slowly, all sensation left me. Inexorably my strength ebbed away. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. I fell a hundred times and struggled to my feet a hundred times. But the remorseless cold was too much for me. I pitched face down again and this time I could not get up. Little by little, the snow covered me entirely in a grave of icy white. My bodily functions shut down, one by one. My breathing almost stopped altogether; my heart rate slowed to one sluggish beat every few
minutes, just enough to keep my brain alive. I dreamed, long jumbled strange distorted dreams of my previous lives, of all the times I had died, of the times I had loved Anya in all the various human guises she had assumed. For love of me. For love of a creature that her fellow Creator had fashioned to be his tool, his toy, his hunter and assassin and warrior.

  I had been built to lead a team of warriors just like myself back to the Ice Age strongholds of the Neanderthals. My mission was to hunt them down and kill them all, every last Neanderthal man, woman, and child. So that my descendants, so-called Homo sapiens sapiens could inherit not only the earth, but the entire span of spacetime that made up the continuum. My Creators were my descendants, far-future offspring of the humans they had built and sent back into time.

  But once you begin to tamper with the flow of the continuum you set up shock waves that cannot easily be controlled. The price of the Creators’ meddling with space-time was that they had to constantly strive to correct the waves they had set in motion. If they did not, their continuum would shatter like a crystal goblet hit by a laser blast and they would be erased from spacetime forever.

  They had bound themselves to the wheel of existence, to the ordeal of endless lifetimes, endless struggle. And they had tied me to their wheel with them. I was their servant, to be sent into placetimes to do their bidding. But they had not reckoned on the possibility that their creature could fall in love with one of them. Or that one of them could fall in love with a creature.

  I served the Creators because I was built to do so. Often I had no choice; my will was extinguished by their control. But I recalled that on more than one occasion I had found a way to circumvent their control, found ways to fight against them, to thwart them. The Neanderthals still existed in their own separate branch of the continuum because of me. Troy fell because of my thirst for vengeance, not Achilles’. I was slowly acquiring knowledge and strength. Even haughty Aten had admitted that I was gaining godlike powers.

  That is why they wiped my memory clean and exiled me to this placetime. To get rid of me. To leach my mind of the abilities I had so painfully learned over so many lifetimes. To put me away until they needed me again.

  I loved Anya. And now she was telling me that I had to obey murderous, scheming Hera, despite my own feelings and desires. But how could I obey anyone, lying frozen and as good as dead in the snow at the top of lofty Mount Ararat?

  Chapter 24

  For an immeasurable span of time I lay in abyssal cold and darkness. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. My feeble thoughts, fading as my body froze, wandered to Ketu’s concept of Nirvana. Was this the end of all sensation, the end of all wants and needs, the ultimate oblivion?

  But somewhere in that dark nothingness I began to feel a hollow sinking sensation that gradually deepened into a wild, panicky impression that I was falling, plummeting through empty space like a meteor blazing across the sky. Abruptly I felt myself lying on a rough, uneven surface. Something hard was poking painfully into the small of my back. But the cold had gone; in fact, I felt comfortably warm as I sat up and opened my eyes.

  I was sitting on a rocky hillside that descended to a heaving dark sea, where churning waves broke against the black boulders and sent up showers of spray. The salt tang of the sea reached me even up near the crest of the ridge where I sat, blinking away the memories of death, trying to adjust my mind to this new existence. There was a narrow crescent of sandy beach beyond the boulders, and then steep cliffs of bare rock. It was a gray day, yet not really chilly. The wind coming off the water was warm and wet, gusting fitfully. The trees up at the crest of the ridge sighed and rustled. I could see that the incessant sea breeze had bent and twisted them into hunched, lopsided forms like stunted arthritic old men.

  I rose gingerly to my feet. I felt strong and alert. I knew I was a long way from Ararat, perhaps in a different era altogether. Then I realized that my clothing now consisted of a brief leather skirt and a leather vest so sweat-stained and cracked with age that it looked black. My dagger was still strapped to my thigh beneath the skirt. My feet were shod in rude sandals, bound to my ankles with leather thongs.

  Where I was, and why I had been placed here, I did not know. I saw a trail threading through the rocks down the hillside to the narrow curving strip of white sand and an even narrower road that ran along the coastline. I headed for that road.

  Then a new thought struck me. Who had sent me here? Hera, or Anya? Or one of the other Creators, perhaps—Aten, the Golden One?

  By the time I reached the side of the road I felt like a blind man groping in unfamiliar territory, wondering which direction to take. To my right, the road followed the coast and then disappeared in a cut between two rocky cliffs. Far to my left, it swung inland from the beach and climbed up into the hills I had just come down from.

  I decided to go to the right. The surf was rolling up peaceably enough on this narrow strip of sandy beach, but up ahead the waves smashed against the black rocks with thunderous roars. No one else was in sight, and as I walked along I wondered if Hera or the Golden One had sent me to a time before any human beings existed. But no, I reasoned: the road I followed was unpaved yet definitely the work of men, not an animal trail. I could see ruts in it worn by wheels.

  As I walked along, the sun dipped below the dismal gray clouds, heading for the flat horizon of the even grayer sea. The road cut between the cliffs, then curved around another crescent-shaped beach. The coastline must be scalloped with these little beaches hugging the rugged hillsides, I thought. The sea was probably teeming with fish, but I had nothing with which to catch any. So when the sun touched the water’s edge, red and bloated, I hiked up into the woods at the crest of the hills to hunt for my dinner.

  By the time it was fully dark I was sitting before a small fire, hardening the point of a rough-hewn spear in its flames, digesting a supper of field mouse and green figs.

  I started out along the coast road again at sunrise, my makeshift spear on my shoulder. Before long I came upon a fork; one branch continued along the coast, the other cut inland, up into the hills. I started up the hill road, thinking that it must lead somewhere. Yet for most of the day I saw no one else at all. Strange, I thought. Long ages of use had pounded the road hard and almost smooth, except for the ruts worn into it from the wheels of carts and wagons. Still I saw no one at all until well past noon.

  Then I saw why no one else was using the road. In the distance, crowning a steep hill off to one side of the road, a walled city sat beneath the hot high sun. And what looked like a small army was camped outside its wall. It reminded me of Troy, except that this city was inland and the besiegers were not camped among their boats on the shore.

  For long moments I hesitated, but finally I decided to follow the road to that camp. There must be some purpose for my being here, I reasoned. Perhaps this little war was it.

  The discipline at the camp was extraordinarily lax, even compared to the unhappy camp of Philip’s army before Perinthos. Men milled about, all of them armed but none of them in anything I could describe as a uniform. Most of them wore leather corselets. Their swords were bronze. They seemed to have no discipline at all.

  Then a soldier in bronze breastplate spotted me. “You there! Stand fast! Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  He was young enough so that his beard was nothing more than a few wisps. His shoulders were wide, though, and his eyes as black as onyx.

  “I am a stranger in these parts,” I replied. “My name is Orion.”

  A few of the other men-at-arms gathered around us, eyeing me casually. I had to admit that I was not much to look at.

  “Where’d you get that spear?” one of them asked, grinning. “Hephaistos make it for you?”

  Their accent was much different from the Macedonians. It was an older variant of the tongue.

  “I can just see the Lame One forging that mighty weapon up on Olympos!”

  They all broke into laughter.

&
nbsp; “Zeus must be jealous of him!”

  “Naw, he probably stole it from Zeus!”

  I stood there like a bumpkin and let them slap their thighs and roar with laughter. The young officer, though, barely cracked a smile.

  “You are not from these parts?” he asked me.

  “No. I come from far away,” I said.

  “Your name—you call yourself Orion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was your father?”

  I had to think fast. “I don’t know. I have no memory of my childhood.”

  “Doesn’t know who his father is.” One of the men nudged his nearest companion in the ribs.

  “I am a warrior,” I said, realizing that there was no word for soldier in their dialect.

  “A warrior, no less!” The men found that uproarious. Even the young officer smiled. Others were gathering around us, making something of a crowd.

  I dropped my spear to the ground and pointed to the one who was making all the remarks. “A better fighter than you, windbag,” I challenged.

  His laughter turned to a hard smile. He pulled the bronze sword from the scabbard at his hip and said, “Pray to whatever gods you worship, stranger. You’re about to die.”

  I faced him empty-handed. Not a man offered me a weapon or made any objection. The windbag was an experienced fighter, I could see. His sword arm was scarred, his eyes focused hard on me. I simply stood before him, hands at my sides. But I could feel my body going into overdrive, slowing down the world around me.

  The flex of the muscles in his thighs gave him away. He began to lunge at me, a simple straight thrust to my belly. I saw it coming, sidestepped, and grasped his wrist with both my hands. I flipped him over my hip and twisted the sword out of his hand in the same motion. He landed on his back with a thud like a sack of wet laundry dropped from a height.