by Ben Bova
I came close enough for them to recognize my face in the firelight. “I am Orion, of the House of Ithaca.”
That surprised them.
“Ithaca? Has Odysseus come here? The last we heard he had been lost at sea.”
They lowered their spear points as I came to within arm’s reach of them. “The last I saw of Odysseus was on the beach at Ilios,” I said. “I have been traveling overland ever since.”
One of them began to remember. “You were the one who had the storyteller for a slave.”
“The blasphemer that Agamemnon blinded.”
An old anger rose inside me. “Yes,” I replied. “The one Agamemnon blinded. Is the High King here?”
They looked uneasily at one another. “No. This is the camp of Menalaos.”
“Are there no other Achaian lords with him?”
“Not yet. But soon there will be. Menalaos is mad with rage since his wife ran away from him after Troy fell. He swears he won’t leave this land until she is returned to him.”
“If I were you, Orion,” said the third one, “I’d run as far from this camp as I could. Menalaos believes you took Helen from him.”
I ignored his warning. “How does he know she is in Egypt?”
The leader of the trio shrugged. “From what I hear, he’s had a message from some high and mighty Egyptian, telling him that the lady Helen has come here. They’re holding her in some palace someplace.”
“That’s what they say,” another of the guards agreed.
The story that Nefertu had unknowingly revealed to me was stunningly accurate. Nekoptah must have sent word to Menalaos as soon as Nefertu had reported Helen’s presence in Egypt, months ago. Of course Nefertu had recognized that she was an important woman of the Achaian nobility; he had finally told me as much. And Nekoptah, wily scoundrel that he was, immediately saw how he could use Helen as bait to bring Menalaos and the other warlords of the Sea Peoples into his own service.
I said, “Take me to Menalaos. I have important news to tell him.”
“The king is asleep. Wait until morning. Don’t be in such a hurry to get yourself killed.”
I debated within myself. Should I insist on waking Menalaos? They were giving me a chance to escape his anger. Should I go back to Lukka and our camp, then return in the morning? I decided to wait here at the beach and get a few hours’ sleep. Menalaos’s wrath seemed of little consequence.
They looked at me askance, but found a blanket for me and left me to sleep. I stretched out on the sand and closed my eyes.
To find myself in a strange chamber, surrounded by machines with blinking lights and screens that showed colored curving lines pulsing across them. The entire ceiling glowed with a cool light that cast no shadows.
I turned and saw the sharp-featured Creator I had dubbed Hermes. As before, he was clad in a glittering silver metallic uniform from chin to boots. He dipped his pointed chin once in greeting.
Without preamble he asked, “Have you found him yet?”
“No,” I lied, hoping that he could not see my mind.
He arched a brow. “Really? In all the time you’ve been in Egypt, you have no idea where he’s hiding?”
“I haven’t seen him. I don’t know where he is.”
With a thin smile, Hermes said, “Then I’ll tell you. Look into the great pyramid. Our sensors here detect a power drain focused on that structure. He is obviously using it as his fortress.”
I countered, “Or he is allowing you to think so, while actually he’s somewhere — or some when — else.”
Hermes’s eyes narrowed. “Yes… he is clever enough to decoy us. That’s why it is vital that you get inside the pyramid and see if he’s actually there.”
“I am trying to do that.”
“And?”
“I am trying,” I repeated. “There are complications.”
“Orion,” he said, making a show of being patient with me, “there is not much time left. We must find him before he brings down this entire continuum. He’s gone quite mad, and he’s capable of destroying us all.”
What of it? I thought. Perhaps the universes would be better off with all of us dead.
“Do you understand me?” Hermes insisted. “Time is running out for us. There is only a matter of days!”
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said. “I tried to penetrate the great pyramid, and it didn’t work. Now I must enter it physically, and for that I need the cooperation of the king, or possibly the chief priest of Amon.”
Hermes gusted a great impatient sigh. “Do what you must, Orion, but for the love of the continuum, do it quickly !”
I nodded, and found myself blinking at the first streaks of dawn in the clouded sky of the Egyptian shore.
Half a dozen armed guards were standing around me, one of them poking the butt of his spear into my ribs.
“On your feet, Orion. My lord Menalaos wants to roast your carcass for breakfast.”
I scrambled to my feet. They grabbed my arms and held me fast as they marched me off toward the king’s tent. I had no chance to reach for my sword, still laying on my blanket. But the dagger that I kept strapped to my thigh was still there, beneath my kilt.
Menalaos was pacing like a caged lion as the guards brought me before him. Several of his nobles stood uneasily before the tent, swords already at their sides, although they wore no armor. Menalaos was clad in an old tunic, and had a blood-red cloak over his shoulders. He was quivering with fury so that his dark beard trembled.
“It is you!” he bellowed as the guards brought me to him. “Light the fires! I’ll roast him inch by inch!”
The nobles — all of them younger than Menalaos, I noticed — looked almost frightened at their king’s rage.
“What are you waiting for?” he snapped. “This is the man who stole my wife! He’s going to pay for that with the slowest death agonies anyone has ever suffered!”
“Your wife is well and safe in the capital of Egypt,” I said. “If you will listen to me for a…”
Enraged, he stepped up to me and smashed a backhand blow across my mouth.
My temper snapped. I shrugged off the two men pinning my arms, then smashed them both with elbows to their middles. They fell gasping. Before they hit the ground I had whipped out my dagger and, clutching the startled Menalaos by the hair, I jabbed its point to his throat.
“One move from any of you,” I growled, “and your king dies.”
They all froze: the nobles, some of them with their hands already on their sword hilts; the other guards, their eyes wide, their mouths hanging open.
“Now then, noble Menalaos,” I said, loudly enough for them all to hear, even though my mouth was next to his ear, “we will discuss our differences like men, or face each other as enemies in a fair duel. I am not a thes or a slave, to be bound and tortured for your pleasure. I was a warrior of the House of Ithaca, and now I am the leader of an army of Egypt, an army that’s been sent here to destroy you.”
“You lie!” Menalaos snarled, squirming in my grasp. “The Egyptians have welcomed us to their shores. They are holding my wife for me, and have invited me to sail to their capital to reclaim her.”
“The chief minister of the Egyptian king has built a lovely trap for you and all the Achaian lords who come to this land,” I insisted. “And Helen is the bait.”
“More lies,” said Menalaos. But I could see that I had caught the interest of the other nobles.
I released my grip on him and threw my dagger onto the sand at his feet.
“Let the gods show us which of us is right,” I said. “Pick your best warrior and have him face me. If he kills me, then the gods will have shown that I am lying. If I best him, it will be a sign from the gods that you should listen to what I have to say.”
Murderous anger still flamed in Menalaos’s eyes, but the nobles crowded around eagerly.
“Why not?”
“Let the gods decide!”
“You have nothing to lose,
my lord.”
Seething, Menalaos shouted, “Nothing to lose? Don’t you understand that this traitor, this abductor — he’s merely trying to gain a swift clean death instead of the agony he deserves?”
“My lord Menalaos!” I shouted back. “On the plain of Ilios I begged you to intercede on behalf of the storyteller Poletes from the anger of your brother. You refused, and now the old man is blind. I’m not begging you now. I demand what you owe me: a fair fight. Not some young champion who rushes foolishly to his death. I want to fight you, mighty warrior. We can settle our differences with spears and swords.”
I had him. He took an inadvertent step back away from me, remembering that I had fought so well at Troy. But there was no way he could back out of facing me; he had told them all that he wanted to kill me. Now he had to do it for himself, or be thought a coward by his followers.
The entire camp formed a rough circle for the two of us while Menalaos’s servants armed him. This would be a battle on foot, not with chariots. One of the guards brought me my sword; I slung the baldric over my shoulder and felt its comforting weight against my hip. Three nobles gravely offered me my choice from several spears. I picked the one that was shorter but heavier than the others.
Menalaos came forward out of a cluster of servants and nobles, armored from helmet to feet in bronze, carrying a huge figure-eight shield. In his right hand he bore a single long spear, but I noticed that his servants had placed several others on the ground a few paces behind him.
I had neither shield nor armor. I did not want them. My hope was to best Menalaos without killing him, to show him and the other Achaians that the gods were so much with me that no man could oppose me successfully. To accomplish that, I had to avoid getting myself spitted on Menalaos’s spear, of course.
I could feel the excitement bubbling from the Achaians circled around us. Nothing like a good fight before breakfast to stimulate the digestion.
An old man in a ragged tunic came out of the crowd and stepped between us. His beard was long and dirty-gray.
“In the name of ever-living Zeus and all the mighty gods of high Olympos,” he said, in a loud announcer’s voice, “I pray that this combat will be pleasing to the gods, and that they send victory to he who deserves it.”
He scuttled away and Menalaos swung his heavy shield in front of his body. With his helmet’s cheek plates strapped shut, all I could see of him was his angry, burning eyes.
I stepped lightly to my right, circling away from his spear arm, hefting my own spear in my right hand.
Menalaos pulled his arm back and flung his spear at me. Without an instant’s hesitation, he dashed back to pick up another.
My senses quickened as they always do in battle, and the world around me seemed to slow down into the languid motions of a dream. I watched the spear coming toward me, took a step to the side, and let it thud harmlessly into the sand by my feet. The Achaians “oohed.”
By this time Menalaos had grasped another spear. He pivoted and hurled this one at me, also. Again I avoided it. With his third spear, though, Menalaos came charging at me, screaming a shrill war cry.
I parried his spear with my own and swung the butt of it into his massive shield with a heavy thunk, hard enough to knock him staggering. He tottered to my left, regained his balance, and came at me again. Instead of parrying, this time I ducked under his point and rammed my own spear between his legs. Menalaos went sprawling and I was on top of him at once, my legs pinning his arms to the ground, my sword across his throat, between the chin flaps of his helmet and the collar of his cuirass.
He stared at me. His eyes no longer glared hate; they were wide with fear and amazement.
Sitting on the bronze armor of his chest, I raised my sword high over my head and proclaimed in my loudest voice: “The gods have spoken! No man could defeat one who is inspired by the will of all-powerful Zeus!”
I got to my feet and pulled Menalaos to his. The Achaians swarmed around us, accepting the judgment of the duel.
“Only a god could have fought like that!”
“No mortal could face a god and win.”
Although they crowded around Menalaos and assured him that no hero in memory had ever fought against a god and lived to tell the tale, they kept an arm’s length from me, and looked at me with undisguised awe.
Finally the old priest came up close and stared nearsightedly into my face. “Are you a god, come to instruct us in human form?”
I took a deep breath and made myself shudder. “No, old man. I could feel the god within my sinews when we fought, but now he has left, and I am only a mortal once more.”
Menalaos, bareheaded now, looked at me askance. But being defeated by a god was not shameful, and he allowed his men to tell him that he had done something very brave and wonderful. Yet it was clear that he held no love for me.
He invited me into his tent, where he watched me silently as servants unstrapped his armor and women slaves brought us figs, dates, and thick spiced honey. I sat on a handsomely carved ebony stool: of Egyptian design and workmanship, I noticed. It had not come from this fishing village, either.
Menalaos sat on a rope-web chair, the platter of fruit and honey between us. Once the servants had left us alone, I asked him, “Do you truly want your wife back?”
Some of the anger returned to his eyes. “Why else do you think I’m here?”
“To kill me and serve a fat hippopotamus who calls himself Nekoptah.”
He was startled at the chief minister’s name.
“Let me tell you what I know,” I said. “Nekoptah has promised you Helen and a share of Egypt’s wealth if you kill me. Correct?”
Grudgingly, “Correct.”
“But think a moment. Why would the king’s chief minister need an Achaian lord to get rid of one man, a barbarian, a wanderer who stumbled into Egypt in company of a royal refugee?”
Despite himself, Menalaos smiled. “You are no ordinary wanderer, Orion. You are not so easy to kill.”
“Did it ever occur to you that Helen is being used as bait, to lure you to your death — you, and all the other Achaian lords who come to Egypt with you?”
“A trap?”
“I didn’t come alone. An Egyptian army is waiting barely a day’s ride from here. Waiting until they can snare all of you in their net.”
“But I was told…”
“You were told to send word back to your brother and the other lords that they would be welcomed here, if you did as the king’s chief minister asked,” I said for him.
“My brother is dead.”
I felt a flash of surprise. Agamemnon dead!
“He was murdered by his wife and her lover. His prisoner Cassandra, also. Now his son seeks vengeance, against his own mother! All of Argos is in turmoil. If I return there…” His voice choked off and he slumped forward, burying his face in his hands.
Cassandra’s prophecy, the tales that got old Poletes blinded — they were true. Clytemnestra and her lover had murdered the High King.
“We have nowhere to turn,” Menalaos said, his voice low and heavy with misery. “Argos is upside-down. Barbarians from the north are pushing toward Athens and will be in Argos after that. Agamemnon is dead. Odysseus has been lost at sea. The other Achaian lords who are coming here to join me are coming out of desperation. We’ve been told that the Egyptians will welcome us. And now you tell me that it’s all a trap.”
I sat on the stool and watched the King of Sparta weep. His world was collapsing on his shoulders and he had no idea of where to turn.
But I did.
“How would you like to turn this trap into a triumph?” I asked him.
Menalaos turned his tear-filled eyes up toward me, and I began to explain. It would mean giving Helen back to him, and deep inside me I hated myself for doing that. She was a living, breathing woman, warm and vibrantly alive. Yet I bartered her like a piece of furniture or a gaudy ornament. The anger I felt within me I directed against the Golden One
; this is his doing, I told myself. His manipulations have tangled all our lives; I’m merely trying to put things right. But I knew that what I did I did for myself, to thwart the Golden One, to bring me one step closer to the moment when I could destroy him — and revive Athene. Love and hate were fused inside me, intermingled into a single white-hot force boiling and churning in my mind, too powerful for me to resist. I could barter away a queen who loved me, I could sack cities and slay nations to gain what I wanted: Athene’s life and Apollo’s death.
So I went ahead and told Menalaos how to regain his wife and win a secure place in the Kingdom of the Two Lands.
Nekoptah’s scheme was a good one. Practically foolproof. He had thought of almost everything. All I had to do was turn it against him.
Chapter 41
I moved through the next several weeks like a machine, speaking and acting automatically, my inner mind frozen so that the bitter voices deep within me could not catch my conscious attention. I ate, I slept without dreams, and I brought my plans closer to fruition, day by day.
There was a measure of bitter satisfaction in turning Nekoptah’s treacherous scheme against its creator. The fat priest had taken one step too far, as most schemers ultimately do. By sending Prince Aramset on this expedition, he had hoped to eliminate his only possible rival for kingly power. But Aramset was the key to my counter scheme. I followed Nekoptah’s plan to the letter except for one detail: Menalaos and the other Achaians would offer their loyalty to the crown prince, not the king’s chief minister. And Aramset would treat the Achaians honestly.
Vengeance against the chief minister gave me a taste of gratification. But only the ultimate vengeance, triumph against the Golden One, would bring me true pleasure. And I was moving toward that final moment when I would crush him utterly.
It was strange, I reflected. I had entered this world as a thes, less than a slave. I had become a warrior, then a leader of soldiers, then the guardian and lover of a queen. Now I was preparing to create a king, to decide who would rule the richest and most powerful land in this world. I, Orion, would tear the power of rulership from the bejeweled fingers of scheming Nekoptah and place it where it belonged: in the hands of the crown prince.