Orion and the Conqueror o-4

by Ben Bova

  He tugged at his beard, thinking, calculating. He knew that his crew could probably overpower Harkan and Batu, even though some of the other men were pushing themselves unsteadily to their feet, ready to fight despite their misery. But the battle would cost him more casualties and he had already lost his first mate and at least two other sailors. And he faced me alone—sword against dagger, true; but I could see that he did not like the odds.

  I decided to sweeten the deal. “Suppose I give you the rest of the money I have.”

  His eyes lit up. “You would do that?”

  “It would be better than fighting—for all of us.”

  He nodded quickly. “Done.”

  Thus we sailed to Byzantion and left the ferry and its captain at the dock there. I felt happy to be back in Philip’s domain. But Harkan had left the land in which he had been born and spent all his life. And he knew that he might never see Gordium again.

  I found the barracks where Philip’s soldiers were housed and announced myself as one of the king’s guard, returning from Asia with ten new recruits for the army. The officer in charge, a crusty old graybeard with a bad limp, put us up overnight and provided us the next morning with horses. I was anxious to reach Pella. Harkan was just as anxious to track down his children.

  We rode from one army station to the next, across Thrace and into Macedonia. Each night I could feel myself coming closer to Hera’s power. I tried not to sleep. I went for almost a week without closing my eyes for more than a few moments at a time. But at last the night came when I could stay awake no longer, and as I sat on a cot in an army barracks, my back against the rough logs of its wall, I finally drifted into a deep slumber.

  She came to me in dream, as she had before, beautiful, haughty, demanding.

  “You are returning at an auspicious time, Orion,” Olympias/Hera told me.

  I was standing before her in that magnificent chamber that did not exist in Pella yet was connected to the palace by a gateway that spanned the dimensions of spacetime. Olympias reclined on a throne that was almost a couch, carved from green bloodstone veined with dark streaks like rivulets of dried blood. Snakes slithered at her feet, twined across the back of the throne, coiled around her bare legs.

  I could not move, could not even speak. All I was able to do was to see her, decked in a gown of deepest black glittering with jeweled lights, like stars, her magnificent red hair tumbling past her shoulders, her yellow eyes fixed on mine. I could hear her words. I could breathe. My heart beat. But I know she could destroy me with a glance if she wished to.

  “Philip has taken a new wife,” she said, with a smile that was pure malice. “He has put me aside. I no longer reside in Pella, but have returned to my kinfolk in Epeiros. What say you to that?”

  I found that I could open my mouth. My voice was scratchy, coughing, as if I had not spoken in weeks.

  “You are allowing him to do so?” I asked.

  “I am allowing him to write his own death warrant,” Olympias answered. “And you, my obedient creature, will be the instrument of my vengeance.”

  “I will not willingly harm Philip.”

  She laughed. “Harm him unwillingly, then.”

  And then the pain struck me, wave upon wave of agony pouring over me like breakers rolling up on a beach. Through teeth clenched with anguish I managed to utter, “No. I will not.”

  The pain intensified as she watched, an amused smile flickering across her lips, her eyes smoldering with sadistic pleasure. I could not move, could not even cry out, but she seemed to sense every iota of the agony she was putting me through, and to relish each moment.

  Normally I can control pain, shut off my brain’s pain receptors. But I was not in control of my own body, my own mind. After an interminable time, though, the pain began to ease. I could not tell if I was regaining control of my own senses or if my tortured nervous system was simply beginning to fail under the continued stress.

  Hera’s face told me the answer. Her smile was fading, her pleasure waning. At length the pain ended altogether, although I still could neither speak nor move.

  “This grows tiresome,” she said peevishly. “You are strong, Orion. Perhaps we built you too well.”

  I wanted to answer her but could not.

  “No matter. What must be done will be done. And you will play your role in it.”

  Suddenly I was awake in the barracks, still sitting against the rough log wall. Every part of my body ached. Even my insides felt raw, inflamed, as if I had been roasted alive.

  At dawn we resumed our trek toward Pella.

  “You are quiet this morning,” said Batu as we rode along the inland road.

  “You look as if you spent the night drinking,” Harkan said, peering at me with those flinty eyes.

  “Or wenching.” Batu laughed.

  I said nothing. But all that morning I was thinking that Olympias was biding her time, waiting for the proper moment to strike Philip down so that Alexandros could take the throne. That time was drawing near.

  The stables were the best place to learn the latest gossip. Each village we came to was abuzz with the news from the capital. Philip had indeed married Kleopatra, niece of Attalos. Olympias, who had been his chief wife for twenty-five years, had truly been sent packing back to her brother in Epeiros.

  “And Alexandros?” I asked.

  The news was awful. At the wedding feast, oily Attalos had smugly proposed a toast that Philip and his niece produce “a legitimate heir to the throne.”

  Alexandros leaped to his feet. “You call me bastard?” He threw his wine cup at Attalos, opening a gash on the older man’s forehead.

  Philip, seemingly stupefied with wine, staggered up from his couch. Some said he pulled a sword from one of the guards in murderous rage and wanted to kill Alexandros. Others claimed he was merely trying to get between Alexandros and Attalos to prevent a bloody fight from breaking out. The entire hall was on its feet; mayhem was in the air. Whatever Philip’s intention, his bad leg gave way and he sprawled clumsily to the wine-slicked floor.

  Shaking with fury, Alexandros stared down at his father for a moment, then shouted, “This is the man who would take us across into Asia. He can’t even get himself from one bench to the other.”

  Then he swept out of the hall, his Companions close behind him. Before dawn he and his mother had left Pella for Epeiros.

  “He is still there?” I asked.

  “So I hear. With his mother. In Epeiros.”

  “It’s too bad about the Little King,” said one of the stable men. “Bad business, his falling out with his father that way.”

  “But good riddance to the witch,” said another as we exchanged our horses.

  They were not going to get rid her that easily, I knew.

  BOOK III — TRAITOR

  Now o’er the one half-world

  Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

  The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates

  Pale Hecate’s offerings; and wither’d murder,

  Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf…

  Moves like a ghost

  Chapter 29

  At last we came to Pella, on a fine summer morning under an azure sky, with a cool breeze from the mountains moderating the heat of the sun. Harkan, riding beside me, murmured, “That’s a sizeable city.”

  I nodded, and noted that Pella had grown noticeably, even in the two years I had been away. New houses reached up into the hills, new arcades and markets spread along the high road. A cloud of gritty gray-brown dust hung over the city, kicked up by the many corrals where horses and mules stirred and whinnied, by the building work going on everywhere, by the traffic streaming along the high road and into the city’s streets.

  As we rode into the city itself Batu laughingly complained, “Such noise! How can a man think in all this bustle?”

  I had paid scant attention to the city’s constant din before, but once Batu had said it I realized that the cities in Asia were mu
ch quieter and more orderly than Pella. Certainly the marketplaces were noisy with the cries of sellers and arguments of buyers, but the other sections of those ancient cities were sleepy in the hot sun, orderly and quiet. Pella was more like a madhouse, with the constant din of construction hammering everywhere, chariots and wagons and horsemen clattering through the cobblestoned streets, people laughing and talking at the top of their lungs on almost every corner.

  No one stopped us or even paid us much attention as we rode up the main street toward Philip’s palace. The people were accustomed to seeing soldiers; the army was the backbone of Macedonian society and these people did not fear their army, as the peoples of the Persian Empire’s cities did.

  But at the palace gate we were stopped. I did not recognize any of the guards on duty there, so I identified myself and told their sergeant that I had brought Harkan and his men to join the army. The sergeant looked us over with a professional eye, then sent one of the boys lounging nearby to run for the captain of the guard.

  We dismounted and the sergeant offered us water for ourselves and our horses. Two of his men went with us to the fountain just inside the gate. They were treating us with civility, but with great care, as well.

  “What’s the news?” I asked the sergeant after slaking my thirst.

  He leaned casually against the doorjamb of the guard house, in the shade of the doorway—within arm’s reach of the clutch of spears standing there.

  “There’s to be a royal wedding within the month,” he said, his eyes on Harkan and the men by the fountain.

  “Philip’s marrying again?”

  That brought a laugh out of him. “No, no—he’s still content with his Eurydice, for the while. She’s presented him with a son, you know.”

  “A son?”

  “A truly legitimate heir,” the sergeant said. “No question about this babe being sired by a god.” He glanced around, then added, “Or whomever the Molossian witch bedded down with.”

  “And what of Alexandros?”

  The sergeant shrugged his heavy shoulders. “He had gone off to Epeiros with his mother when Philip married Eurydice, but the king called him back here to Pella.”

  “And he came back?”

  “You bet he did. He obeyed the king’s order, all right. He’d better, after all the trouble he stirred up.”

  I was about to ask what trouble Alexandros had stirred when the captain of the guard came tramping up to us, flanked by four fully-armed men. It was not Pausanias, but the officer of the day, a man named Demetrios. I recognized him; like me, he had been quartered in the barracks by the palace.

  “Orion,” he said, pronouncing my name like a heavy sigh.

  “I’ve returned, Demetrios, with seven new recruits for the army.”

  He looked at me sadly. “Orion, you’ll have to come with me. You’re under arrest.”

  I was stunned. “Under arrest? What for?”

  Harkan and Batu and the others came back toward us from the fountain. The sergeant stood up straighter and glanced at the spears resting by his side.

  Demetrios said, “Those are my orders, Orion. From the king himself. You are charged with desertion.”

  Before a fight broke out I said, “Very well. I’m willing to accept the king’s justice. But these men are volunteers for the army and they should be treated as such. They are professional soldiers, all of them.”

  Demetrios looked at them. “I’ll see that they’re well taken care of, Orion. But you must come with me.”

  “All right.”

  “I have to take your sword.”

  I unbuckled it and handed sword and belt to him.

  Harkan asked, “What will they do to you?”

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “Once I’ve had a chance to speak with the king this will all be cleared up.”

  Demetrios looked utterly dubious, but he did not contradict me. To the sergeant he said, “Take these men to the army barracks and have the officer in charge look them over. If they meet his approval, see that they’re properly housed and equipped.”

  “Yessir,” said the sergeant.

  Then he turned back to me. “Come along, Orion.”

  Escorted by Demetrios and his four fully-armed guards, I marched across the palace courtyard and into a prison cell.

  The cell was underground, beneath the palace, dark and so small that I could touch the walls on both sides without even extending my arms to their full reach. No window, except a barred slot on the heavy locked door. No bed; just a straw pallet on the bare dirt floor. And an earthenware jug for a chamberpot.

  “I really hate to do this to you, Orion,” Demetrios told me once we reached the cell. He came inside with me, while his men waited out in the dark corridor that was lit only by a weak shaft of dusty sunlight slanting in from an airshaft. “It’s the king’s standing order. The instant you showed up again in Pella you were to be arrested. For desertion.”

  “The king himself gave you this order?” I asked.

  “No!” Demetrios seemed shocked to think that the king would speak to him personally. “Pausanias gave me the order, months ago. But it’s from the king’s mouth; he told me so.”

  “How many months ago?” I asked. “Was it when the Hindi ambassador from the Great King returned to Pella?”

  “The Hindi…” Demetrios frowned with thought. “Oh, you mean the one with the name nobody can pronounce. No, I think it was before then. Yes, it had to be before then; I remember I was surprised that you’d be accused of desertion—of anything—because you were so far away in the Persian Empire. How’d the king know you’d deserted?”

  Indeed, I said to myself. How could he know what I was doing in Parsa before Ketu or anyone else returned to tell him?

  “I remember!” Demetrios said. “It was during all that hubbub when the king married Attalos’ niece and Olympias stormed off to Epeiros with Alexandros.”

  “That’s when the order was given?”

  He bobbed his head up and down. “Yes, I remember it clearly now.”

  “And you received the order from Pausanias?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said, looking around at the stone walls of my cell, “please tell Pausanias I am back, and safely lodged in my new quarters.”

  In the dim light of the cell I could not make out the expression on his face, but Demetrios’ voice sounded strained. “I will tell him, Orion. Believe me, I’m going to him right now.”

  “Thank you.”

  He left me alone in the cell. The thick wooden door, reinforced with iron strapping, swung shut. I heard the bolt shoot home. I was in almost total darkness, alone except for the dagger strapped to my thigh. Then I noticed a pair of red beady eyes glowering in the darkest corner of the cell. I would not be totally alone, I realized. There were the rats.

  I had plenty of time to think. The hours dragged by slowly in that dark cell. I counted the days by the times that the jailor shuffled by and shoved a shallow metal bowl of thin gruel through the slot at the bottom of the door. It was decent enough. He took the chamberpot, too, when I left it by the slot. No one came in to change the straw, though.

  I can go for many days without sleep, and I feared to lie down on that straw pallet and offer myself to the rats that chittered in the darkness. In the dim recesses of my memory I recalled Anya being killed by a pack of huge, fierce rats in the filth and slime of a city’s subterranean tunnels. Her name was Aretha in that lifetime and I had been powerless to save her.

  I tried to focus my thoughts on Pella and Philip and Olympias, on this time and place, on the commands that Hera had given me—and others.

  There was no doubt in my mind that Hera was manipulating all of us now: Alexandros, me, even Pausanias. She had taken on human form and become Olympias, Queen of Macedon, the witch of Pella. She had created a son, Alexandros. She and Aten.

  Seeing Anya take on human form and fall in love with one of their creatures, Hera did the same. And so did Aten, the Golden
One, the cynical self-styled progenitor of the human race, the one who had called himself Apollo at Troy. They created Alexandros, the godling, the golden-haired offspring of the Golden One. Now Hera/Olympias was scheming to make him King of Macedon and eventually conqueror of the whole world.

  “Why?” I asked in the dark solitude of my prison cell. “Why are they doing this?”

  I knew there was only one way to find out. I had to face them myself, in their own domain. But to do that I had to put this body of mine into sleep, and leave it at the mercy of those hungry, baleful eyes.

  Or did I? If one can truly master time, then I could leave this place in the continuum, seek out the Creators in their city by the sea, and return to this cell with no real time elapsed.

  If I could truly master time.

  For long hours I paced my cell, wondering if I could do it, trying to remember those other times when the Creators had moved me through the continuum to do their bidding. Their blocks against my memory were strong but I had a powerful motivation to break through: Anya had told me, on Ararat, that she was in danger. I wanted to be with her, facing whatever it might be at her side, ready to fight for her as she had fought for me so many times. Hera and the Golden One and perhaps the other Creators as well were all trying to keep us apart. Raw anger flamed through me. I would break through their control. I would do it even if it cost me my body, my life, my existence.

  As I laid myself down on the damp, smelly straw, I smiled inwardly at the thought of Ketu and his Eightfold Path. Perhaps this time the Creators would end me forever. Almost, I felt glad of that possibility. Almost. But in my deepest soul I had no desire for final oblivion. I wanted to find Anya and know her love again.

  I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep. The last thing I sensed was the squeaking jabber of the rats.

  I ignored them and concentrated on translating myself through the continuum to the city of the Creators. What were the physical sensations that I had felt those other times? A wave of infinite cold, as if my body had been displaced into the deepest reaches of empty space, out beyond the farthest galaxies, out where no star had ever shone. A falling sensation, weightlessness, and then—