Orion and the Conqueror

Chapter 19

With two dozen picked men—none of them from the Macedonian nobility—I escorted Ketu from Pella to the capital of the Persian Empire. I realized why Philip had picked only commoners for this mission: he wanted no one from a noble family to be in danger of being held hostage by the Great King.

“The Persian Empire is so very, very large,” Ketu told me as we rode toward Byzantion, “that the Great King has several capitals, one for each season of the year.”

I was far more interested in his knowledge of the Buddhist way of life than his knowledge of the empire. I worried about Philip but was glad to be out of the reach of Olympias, free from her control, free from the intrigues of Pella. But Ketu’s description of the Way, with its hope of achieving Nirvana and getting off the wheel of life, was what I wanted to know more about.

“The Buddha described it as the Eightfold Path,” he told me. “It is the true road to enlightenment. The key to the Way is to reject all desire. Every craving, every wish, every yearning must be driven from your soul absolutely. Achieve true desirelessness and you achieve the final blessedness of Nirvana.”

“Desirelessness,” I repeated—somewhat dubiously, I admit.

“Oh yes, that is the key to it all,” Ketu assured me. “The Buddha has instructed us thusly, ‘The cause of human suffering is undoubtedly found in the thirsts of the physical body and in the illusions of worldly passion.’ ”

The illusion of worldly passion. That reminded me of what Aristotle had said about Plato’s belief in pure ideas as opposed to physical sensations. The passions of this world seemed real enough to me, though.

“ ‘If these thirsts and illusions are traced to their source,’ ” Ketu intoned, “ ‘they are found to be rooted in the intense desires of physical instincts. Thus desire seeks that which it feels desirable, even if it sometimes causes death.’ ”

“But these instincts are built into us,” I objected. “They are part of the human makeup.”

“Yes, of course,” Ketu agreed. “That is why it is so difficult to overcome them.”

“Can a person overcome them?”

“The Buddha certainly did,” he answered. “So have others. It is very, very difficult, of course, but not totally impossible.” Then he fell back to his sing-song recitation, “ ‘If desire, which lies at the root of all human passion, can be removed, then passion will die out and all human suffering will be ended. This is called the Truth of the Termination of Suffering.’ ”

It sounded impossible to me. Remove all desire: food, drink, love, companionship, power, respect, the yearning for glory, the instinct for self-preservation, the yearning for justice—how could a man live without any desire at all?

As we rode to Kallipolis on the Chersonese, as we sailed across the narrow strait of the Hellespont into Asia, as we rode the dusty trails and rugged bare hills of Lydia toward Sardis where the Royal Road began, I begged Ketu for every scrap of information he knew about the Way.

In turn, Ketu was fascinated by my vague recollection of earlier lives. Under his prodding each night, I began to remember more and more.

“The whole world was covered with ice and snow,” I told him one night as we sat before our flickering camp fire. “Winter lasted all year long. There were giant beasts, like elephants except that they were bigger, and covered with shaggy fur.”

Ketu’s eyes glowed in the firelight as he listened. We always kept apart from the other men while we spoke of these things. I had no desire to have them laugh at me or, worse, spend the night arguing and tossing their own ignorant opinions around the fire.

“You remember Troy?” Ketu would ask.

“I was there when Hector almost broke into the Achaian camp and wiped out the Greeks.”

“And Helen? Was she as beautiful as the legends say?”

“The most beautiful woman on earth,” I answered honestly. I remembered that Helen and I had been lovers, but I did not speak of it. For all his lectures to me about the Eightfold Path and the need to remove all desires from one’s soul, Ketu was far from desireless.

Often we camped among shepherds with the tinkling bells of their sheep lulling us to sleep. Once we reached the Royal Road, we spent most nights in caravansaries, old weather-worn inns along the main road leading into the interior of the land. Most of them looked as if they had been there for centuries.

In some places, though, the caravansaries were gutted, burned out, abandoned.

“This is not good,” Ketu would mutter over and again. “This is not good. The power of the Great King must be weakening.”

More than once we were forced to sleep alone in the dark wilderness with nothing but our guttering fire and the distant howling of wolves. But whether we slept in comfortable caravansaries or under the glittering stars, each night I gleaned more from Ketu.

“ ‘This is the noble truth of sorrow,’ ” he recited. “ ‘Birth is sorrow, age is sorrow, disease is sorrow, death is sorrow. All the components of individuality are sorrow. And this is the noble truth of the arising of sorrow. It arises from craving, which leads to rebirth, which brings delight and passion.’ ”

“But aren’t delight and passion good things?” I asked.

“No, no, no!” Ketu exclaimed. “The noble truth of the stopping of sorrow is the complete stopping of craving, being emancipated from delight and passion. That is the noble truth of the Way which leads to the stopping of sorrow. That is the Eightfold Path.”

Very, very difficult indeed, I thought.

By day our little band rode through the hilly wastes of Phrygia, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanying long mule trains loaded with timber and hides and grain from the rich farmlands along the fringe of the Black Sea. We passed other caravans coming from the east, stately camels and sturdy oxen carrying ivory from Africa, silks from far Cathay and spices from Hindustan. More than once such caravans were attacked by bandits and we helped to fight them off. Strangely, when we rode by ourselves, just the twenty-six of us with our horses and spare mounts and pack mules, no bandits bothered us.

“They can see that you are armed soldiers,” Ketu told me. “They know that there is very little in your packs worth stealing. The caravans are much more tempting to them. Or a few travelers straggling along the road who can be slain easily and despoiled. But soldiers—no, I do not think they will try to molest us.”

Yet, more than once I spied lean, ragged men on horseback eyeing our little group from a distant hilltop as we rode along the Royal Road. Each time I heard Ketu chanting to himself:

“I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the Doctrine. I go for refuge to the Order.”

His prayers must have worked. We were not attacked.

As we inched toward the Zagros Mountains that bordered the Iranian plateau we saw the Great King’s soldiers here and there along the road, usually near the wells or caravansaries. Their task was to protect travelers, but the roads were too long and the soldiers too few for such protection to be more than a token. Besides, they always demanded “tax” money in return for the little protection they gave.

“They’re worse than the bandits,” said one of my men as we rode past a checkpoint on the outskirts of a small town. I had just paid the captain of the local soldiers a few coins’ “tax.”

“Paying them is easier than fighting them,” I said. “Besides, they are satisfied with very little.”

Ketu bobbed his head as he rode on my other side. “Accept what cannot be avoided,” he said. “That is part of the Eightfold Path.”

Yes, I thought. But still, it rankles.

Ketu seemed more worried than angry. “Only a year ago I passed this way, heading for Athens. There were almost no bandits and all the inns were flourishing. The king’s soldiers were plentiful. But now—the new Great King is not being obeyed. His power has diminished very quickly, very quickly indeed.”

I wondered if his empire’s internal problems would lead the Great King to agree to Philip’s terms, so that he would not have to fight the Greeks with his diminished army. Or would he, like Philip, use a foreign foe to weld his people together in newfound unity?

My sleep was becoming more uneasy each night, more restless. I did not really dream; at least, I remembered nothing in the morning except vague stirrings, blurred images, as if seen through a rain-streaked window. I did not visit the Creators’ domain, nor was I visited by Hera or any of the others. Yet my sleep was disturbed, as if I sensed a threat lurking in the darkness nearby.

We posted guards, even when we camped with caravans that had their own troops with them. I took my share of guard duty. I needed little sleep, and I especially liked to be up to watch the dawn rising. Whether in the cold and windswept mountains or out on the bare baking desert, it pleased me deep in my soul to watch the stars slowly fade away and see the sky turn milky gray, then delicate gossamer pink, and finally to see the sun rise, huge and powerful and too bright to look at directly.

“They worship me,” I remembered the Golden One saying, “in the form of the sun. I am Aten, the sun-god, the giver of life, the Creator of humankind.”

I had given up all hope of reaching Anya, the goddess whom I loved. Those troubling half dreams tormented my sleep, dim indistinct visions blurring my unconscious mind, stirring forgotten memories within me. I wondered if I could ever achieve the state of desirelessness that Ketu promised would bring me the blessed oblivion of Nirvana. The thought of getting off this endless wheel of suffering, of putting a final end to life, appealed to me more and more.

And then one night she came to me.

It was no dream. I was translated to a different place, a different time. It was not even Earth, but a strange world of molten, bubbling lava and stars crowding the sky so thickly that there was no night. It was like being inside an infinitely-faceted jewel—with boiling lava at your feet.

Somehow I hung suspended above the molten rock. I felt no heat. And when I put out my arms, they were blocked by an invisible web of energy.

Then Anya appeared before me, in a glittering uniform of silver mesh, its high collar buttoned at her throat, polished silver boots halfway up her calves. Like me, she hovered unharmed above the roiling sea of seething lava.

“Orion,” she said, urgency in her voice, “everything is changing very rapidly. I only have a few moments.”

I gazed on her incredibly beautiful face the way a man dying of thirst in the desert must look at a spring of clear, fresh water.

“Where are we?” I asked. “Why can’t I be with you?”

“The continuum is in danger of being totally disrupted. The forces arrayed against us are gaining strength with every microsecond.”

“How can I help? What can I do?”

“You must help Hera! Do you understand? It’s imperative that you help Hera!”

“But she wants to kill Philip,” I protested.

“There’s no time for argument, Orion. No time for discussion. Hera has a crucial role to play and she needs you to help her!”

I had never seen Anya look so pained, so wide-eyed with fright.

“You must!” she repeated.

“When can we be together?” I asked.

“Orion, I can’t bargain with you! You must do as you are commanded!”

I looked deep into Anya’s gray eyes. They had always been so calm before, so wise and soothing. Now they were close to panic.

And they were not gray, but yellow as a snake’s.

“Stop this masquerade,” I said.

Anya stared at me, open-mouthed. Then her face shifted, flowed like the boiling lava below me, and turned into Hera’s laughing features.

“Very good, Orion! Very perceptive of you!”

“You are a witch,” I said. “A demon sorceress.”

Her laughter was cold, brittle. “If you could have seen the expression on your face when you thought your precious Anya had deigned to appear to you!”

“Then all of this is an illusion, isn’t it?”

The seething ocean of magma disappeared. The jewel cluster of stars winked out. We were standing on a barren plain in Anatolia in the dark of a moonless night. I could see my camp, where Ketu and the soldiers slept. Two guards shuffled near the dying fire, their cloaks pulled tight around them. But they did not see us.

The metallic silver uniform Anya had been wearing had turned to copper red on Hera. Her flaming hair tumbled past her shoulders.

“Most of it was an illusion, Orion,” Hera said to me. “But there was one point of truth in it. You must help me. If you don’t, you will never see your beloved Anya again.”

“What did you mean about the continuum being in danger of disruption?”

“That doesn’t concern you, creature. You are here in this time and place to do my bidding. And don’t think that just because Philip has sent you far from Pella that I can’t reach out and pluck you whenever I choose to.”

“Is Anya in danger?”

“We all are,” she snapped. “But you are in the most danger of all, if you don’t obey me.”

I lowered my eyes. “What must I do?”

“When the time comes I will let you know,” she said haughtily.

“But how—”

She was gone. I was standing alone in the cold night. Far in the distance a wolf bayed at the newly-risen moon.

The more I learned from Ketu about the Way the more I was attracted to it. And repelled, at the same time.

“The key to Nirvana is desirelessness,” he told me over and again. “Give up all desire. Ask for nothing, accept everything.”

The world is an endless round of suffering—that I knew. The Buddha taught that we endure life after life, constantly reborn to go through the whole pain-wracked cycle again, endlessly, unless we learn how to find oblivion.

“Meditate upon these truths,” Ketu instructed me. “See everything around you as Nirvana. See all beings as Buddha. Hear all sounds as sacred mantras.”

I was no good at all at meditation. And much of what seemed perfectly clear and obvious to Ketu was darkly obscure to my mind. The thought of final nothingness, the chance to escape the agony of life, was tempting, I admit. Yet, at the same time, oblivion frightened me. I did not want to cease to exist; I only wanted an end to my suffering.

Ketu would shake his head when I told him this. “The two are inextricably bound together, my friend, intertwined like the strands of a rope. To live is to suffer, to feel pain is to be alive. You cannot end one without ending the other.”

“But I don’t want an end to all sensation,” I confessed to him. “In my heart of hearts I don’t want complete oblivion.”

“Nirvana is not oblivion,” Ketu told me eagerly. “No, no! Nirvana is not a total extinguishing. All that is extinguished is the self-centered life to which the unenlightened cling. The truly real is not extinguished; indeed, only in Nirvana can the truly real be attained.”

I could not understand his abstractions.

“Think of Nirvana as a boundless expansion of your spirit. Through Nirvana you will enter into communion with the entire universe! It is not as if a drop of water is added to the ocean; it is as if all the oceans of the world enter a single drop of water.”

He was completely convinced of it and happy in his conviction. I could not overcome the doubts that assailed me. If I achieved nothingness, I would never see Anya again. Never know her love, her touch. If I found the final oblivion I would never be able to help her, and from all that I had gleaned from Hera, she needed my help desperately. Yet Hera was keeping me from her. How could I break through Hera’s control and—

I realized that I was far, very far, from being without desire.

On his part, Ketu remained fascinated by my claim to remember my earlier lives; at least, parts of some of them. For all I could remember were isolated fragments, a brief moment here, a snatch of a soldier’s song, the great dust clouds of the Mongol Horde on the march, the burning fury of a nuclear reactor running wild.

One sunrise, after another troubled, tossing night of obscure fears and blurred memories, I sniffed the crisp breeze blowing from the northwest as the men prepared their morning meal. We had camped in the open, along the shoulder of the long, wagon-rutted Royal Road in the middle of flat brown scrublands.

“Lake Van is in that direction,” I said to Ketu, pointing into the wind. “And beyond it is Ararat.”

His big soulful eyes widened at me. “You know the sacred mountain?”

“I lived near it once, with a hunting tribe…” My words dwindled away because that was all I could remember: the snow-capped mountain, steam issuing from one of its twin peaks, shrouding the heights in clouds.

“A hunting tribe?” he urged.

“It was a long time ago.” I tried all day to recall more, but the memories were locked away from me. I knew that Anya had been in that tribe with me, but there had been someone else. A man, the tribe’s leader. And Ahriman! I remembered the dark, brooding danger that he threatened. I remembered the cave bear that killed me for him.

A week later a new memory assailed me. We were near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, where the temples of Ishtar and Shamash once rose in glory. And mighty Sennacherib, who claimed that he himself had invented crucifixion as the most agonizing way to put his enemies to death. I remembered the rows of crosses lining the road as we marched back toward his palace—the grandest that had ever been built, he believed.

These were the memories that assailed my sleep. I had been in this ancient tortured land before, many times, many lives ago. The memories seemed to rise up from the blood-soaked ground like ancient ghosts, shifting, indistinct, tantalizing and almost frightening in a way. Anya was at the core of all these half-remembered lives. The goddess had taken on human form time and again, for my sake, to be with me, because she loved me. Was she trying to reach me now? Was she trying to break down the walls in my mind that separated us?

“I will never achieve Nirvana,” I confessed to Ketu one night as we took our supper at a well-guarded caravansary. We were almost at Susa, at the end of the Royal Road. The Great King obviously had a firmer grip on the land here.

“It takes time,” Ketu said gently, sitting across the table from me. We had been given a private booth since Ketu had told the innkeeper that he was an envoy of the Great King. “It takes many lifetimes to reach the state of blessedness.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll ever get there. I don’t even think I want to.”

“Then you will continue to endure life after life. Continue to suffer.”

“Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Ketu would not argue. “Perhaps,” was all he said, keeping his convictions to himself.

But he was curious. “Two weeks’ journey to the southwest is the mighty city of Babylon. What memories do you have of it?”

I concentrated, but nothing came forth.

“The hanging gardens?” Ketu prompted hopefully. “The great ziggurat?”

Something stirred at that. “Uruk,” I heard myself say. “Gilgamesh the king and his friend Enkidu.”

“You knew them?” His voice went hollow with awe.

I nodded, wishing that the memories would become clear to me. “I think I was Enkidu,” I said. “I know that Gilgamesh was my friend.”

“That was at the very beginning of time,” Ketu whispered.

“No,” I said. “It was long ago, but not at the beginning.”

“Ah, if only you could remember more.”

I had to smile at him. “You are not entirely desireless yourself, my friend.”

Chapter 20

We arrived in Susa at last, and a mighty city it was, but I saw almost none of it. We “Greeks” were told to camp outside the capital’s looming walls, while Ketu was escorted to the palace by a squad of the king’s soldiers.

He came back a few hours later, looking unhappy.

“The Great King and his court have already moved to Parsa. We must go there.”

Parsa was the springtime capital, a city unknown to Philip or even Aristotle. In time, Alexandros would call it Persepolis. We started out for Parsa, this time escorted by a troop of Persian cavalry, their horses glittering with gold-decorated helmets and silver-studded harnesses that jingled as we rode even farther east through gray-brown desert and hot, sand-laden winds.

When we finally arrived there, I saw that Parsa was magnificent, but it was not truly a city. The old Dareios, the one who had first invaded Greece nearly two centuries earlier, had built Parsa to be his personal monument. Laid out in the sun-baked brown hills on a flat terrace at the foot of a massive granite promontory, Parsa looked as if it had been carved out of the living rock itself. Indeed, the tombs of Artaxerxes and other Great Kings were cut deep into the cliff face.

Parsa was not a true city. It had no private homes, no market place, no existence at all except as a residence for the king and court for a few months each spring. Oh, a scattering of people lived there all year long, but they were merely caretakers to keep the place from falling into ruin from one royal visit to the next.

Yet it was magnificent: far bigger than Pella, far grander than Athens. The king’s palace was enormous; it had to be, to house his extensive harem. The meeting hall, where the court convened and the king sat to hear petitions, held a single room so large that fully a hundred pillars supported the vast expanse of the roof. Everywhere I looked I saw statues leafed in gold, gigantic reliefs on the walls of winged bulls, lions with men’s heads on them, or human forms with animals’ heads atop them. Among Philip’s Macedonians the lion was a common symbol; in Athens all the statues I had seen had been of men or women—humans, even when they were representing gods and goddesses.

To me, this Persian architecture seemed heavy, ponderous, almost ugly in comparison to the fluted grace of the Parthenon. These massive, gigantic buildings were meant to dwarf mortal men, to awe them and impress them with the power of the Great King, much like the colossal palaces of the Pharaoh in his cities along the Nile. The cities and temples of the Greeks were much more human in dimension. Here the buildings were gigantic, decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, with ivory from Hindustan and carnelian from the mountains that were called the Roof of the World.

Yet despite all this display of wealth and splendor—or perhaps because of it—the palace seemed to me more pompous than majestic.

What was impressive was the fantastic variety of peoples at the court; a thousand different nationalities were bound up in this vast empire. To reach Parsa we had already travelled through Phrygia, Cappadocia, Syria and the ancient land of Sumer between the Twin Rivers, over the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plain. Now I saw that there were even more lands and more peoples in the empire: swarthy Elamites and turbaned Parthians, olive-skinned Medes and dour lean Bactrians, dark men from distant Kush and eagle-eyed mountain dwellers from the Roof of the World. The Persians themselves were only a small minority among all these mixtures of peoples. The palace hummed with a hundred different languages, and buzzed with constant intrigues that made the machinations back at Pella seem like children’s games.

Dareios had only recently come to the throne, after the assassination of the previous Great King. The empire was in turmoil as the new king struggled to bring its far-flung peoples under his central control. We had seen the signs of chaos as we had travelled on the Royal Road. Here in the magnificent palace at Parsa I saw that Dareios was working hard to solidify his hold on the throne.

We were given a small house in the section of the city where the army was quartered, not far from the palace. The men quickly learned about the king’s harem and joked about how they would relieve the loneliness of so many women who had to wait upon the pleasure of one man.

“You mean he has a couple of hundred wives?” asked one of my men at dinner our first night there.

“They are concubines,” explained Ketu. “Not true wives.”

“But they’re his?”

“Oh yes, they are certainly his.”

“All those women for the king alone?”

“It is death for them even to see another man.”

Another shouted across our dining table, “Can we get them to keep their eyes closed?”

“If a man is found among them,” Ketu said, very seriously, “he is dismembered, a little at a time, over many, many days. They start by cutting off his testicles.”

That silenced their jokes, but only for a few moments.

“Might be worth it,” one of the men muttered, “if you can work your way through forty or fifty of ’em before they catch you.”

“Yah,” said another. “By then your balls would be all worn out anyway.”

To my surprise, Ketu asked me to come with him when he was granted his audience with the Great King.

“I want Dareios to see the kind of men that Philip has serving him,” he told me. Then his face relaxed into a warm smile. “Besides, my friend, I think you are burning with desire to see the man who rules this mighty empire.”

I had to admit that he was right. Another blow to my progress along the Eightfold Path.

Three days after we had arrived in Parsa, we were called to the great audience chamber of the hundred pillars. Ketu wore his best and most colorful robe, a striking pattern of bright red against lemon yellow. I had polished my bronze breastplate until it glowed like the sun. No weapons were allowed in the presence of the Great King, although I wore my dagger beneath the skirt of my chiton almost without thinking of it, it had become such a part of me.

There was enormous formality to an audience with the Great King. All morning one of the king’s masters of protocol, an elderly man with shaking, palsied hands, instructed us on how we were to prostrate ourselves before the throne, how we were not to look directly at the Great King, what forms of address we were to use. Actually, I was to use no form of address at all; Ketu was to do all the talking.

We were marched to the great audience hall by a full squad of soldiers, gleaming with gold and silver. At the enormous double doors, four times higher than my head, heralds announced us, an honor guard in golden armor formed up ahead and behind us, and we paraded through that forest of obsidian pillars toward the distant throne. A throng of noblemen stood watching, their robes resplendent, pearls and jewels gleaming from necklaces and earrings and bracelets. Most of them wore rings on every finger of both hands, even their thumbs.

As we walked the endless distance toward the throne, I saw that it was of carved ivory in the form of a peacock, with jewels in its tail glinting in the sunshine from the great skylight above it. The man sitting on it seemed small and slight against that magnificent throne. His robe was heavy with gold thread, jewels bedecked him, and he wore a massive crown of gold and still more glittering gems. His black beard was curled and oiled. His slippered feet rested on a special stool, since the Persians believed their king’s feet must never touch the ground.

Once we reached the foot of the throne the chief herald, standing to one side of the dais, spoke our names aloud once again. On that cue, we laid ourselves face down before the Great King. It rankled me to abase myself, but I reasoned that when in Parsa one does as the Persians do. I smelled great decadence here; all these jewels and formalities and shows of pomp spoke of the trappings of power rather than power itself. Philip’s court, in contrast, was about as formal as a group of friends meeting to discuss the price of horses at the marketplace.

“The Great King Dareios Codomannus, lord of all the world from the rising to the setting of the sun, conqueror of…”

It took the chief herald several minutes to speak all the titles and honorifics of the Great King. His voice was powerful, and he gave each title a dramatic intonation. At length he said to us grandly, “You may rise and gaze on his magnificence.”

Of course we had been instructed specifically not to look directly at the Great King. I clambered to my feet and gazed slightly off to his left, close enough to see him clearly.

Dareios III appeared much younger than Philip, although that might have been because he had led a much more comfortable life. His beard was so black that I thought it might have been dyed; it was curled and oiled like a woman’s locks. His face seemed to be powdered; it was noticeably whiter than any of the other Persians I had seen. Sitting on his massive throne of ivory and inlaid teak he looked somewhat small, as if the throne had originally been designed for a much larger man. His robes were so stiff and heavy that it was impossible for me to tell much about the body beneath them. But I would not have been surprised if Dareios were soft and pot-bellied. The jeweled crown he wore must have been much heavier than a battle helmet.

No queen sat beside him. There was not a woman in the entire vast audience hall. Off to his left, however, sat a dozen older men, some of them in soldier’s uniforms, others in robes: the king’s advisors and generals, I surmised.

Dareios leaned slightly toward the chief herald and spoke in a near-whisper, “Ask my ambassador for his report.”

The herald called out in his clarion voice, “Your report, ambassador of the Great King.”

I understood their language as easily as I understood the tongue of Philip and Demosthenes. Why did the Great King tell his herald to ask for Ketu’s report? Ketu spoke their language fluently. Then I realized that the Great King was considered too lofty to speak directly to his ambassador, or—horror of horrors—to have the ambassador speak directly to him. The chief herald was the go-between.

Bowing low, Ketu told the herald of Philip’s desire for peace, and his demand that the Greek islands and the cities of Ionia be granted their freedom. He phrased it all very diplomatically, using words such as “dearest wish” and “friendly request” instead of “offer” and “demand.” The chief herald relayed to Dareios exactly what Ketu had said, almost word for word, as if the king were deaf or his ears not attuned to hearing voices from the foot of his throne.

“Tell the ambassador that we thank him, and will in due time prepare a fitting answer for him to bring back to the Macedonian.”

“The Great King, munificent and all-glorious, thanks his servant the ambassador and will, in due time, present him with his gracious and sagacious command to the Macedonian royal house.”

I almost broke into a laugh at that word, “command,” thinking how Philip would react to it.

The king mumbled something more to the herald, who turned to me and announced, “The Great King, ruler of the earth and leader triumphant of battle, demands to know the name and origin of the barbarian presented with the ambassador.”

I was startled. He was referring to me. With only a moment’s hesitation, I said to the herald, “I am called Orion, in the service of Philip, king of Macedonia.”

Apparently my size had impressed the Great King, which may have been the real reason Ketu brought me with him to this audience. The Persians were not small men, but few of them had my height or the width of shoulder that I have. The king and chief herald buzzed briefly, then I was asked:

“Are you a Macedonian?”

“No,” I said, unable to hide my grin, “I am from one of the tribes conquered by the Macedonians.”

The Great King’s eyes widened. I laughed inwardly at his brief loss of self-control, hoping that he truly realized that Philip’s army was not afraid of size.

Inadvertently I looked directly at Dareios. Our eyes met momentarily, then he looked quickly away, blushing. And I knew in that instant that the man was a coward. We were instructed not to look directly at him, not because it would rouse his imperial wrath, but because he did not have the courage to look at men eye to eye.

The chief herald dismissed us. Bowing, we backed away from the throne for the prescribed distance, then were allowed to turn our backs and walk like men from the hall.

But we did not get far. At the great doors a Persian soldier stepped before us.

“Ambassador Svertaketu, barbarian Orion, follow me.”

He did not look like a Persian; his skin was more olive-toned and he was much bigger than the bejewelled dainty men I had seen at Dareios’ court. In fact, he was the biggest I had seen in Parsa, nearly my own height and size. And a squad of six other equally big soldiers fell into step behind us as he led us out of the audience hall into the bright warm sunshine of the early afternoon.

“Where are you taking us?” Ketu asked.

“To where I have been commanded to bring you,” said the soldier. His voice was deep, almost a growl.

“And where might that be?” Ketu probed.

“To see one of the Great King’s slaves, in the palace. A Greek slave.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

He turned a level, cool-eyed gaze at me. “What difference does that make?”

“You don’t look like a Persian. Your accent is different from the others we have spoken to.”

He thought about that as we walked out into the sunshine and across the flagstone square between the audience hall and the palace proper.

“I am from Media, from the high hills where the old worshippers still tend their sacred fires. My people, the Medes, conquered Babylon and created this great empire.”

His voice was flat, his tone unemotional. Yet I felt there was a world of scorn and bitterness behind his words.

“You are descended, then, from Cyrus the Great?” Ketu asked. It was more a statement than a question. Cyrus had founded the Persian Empire ages ago.

“From Cyrus, yes. Though today the Medes are hardly more than one tribe among the many that compose the empire, still we serve the Great King whose power has come from Cyrus’ mighty army. We serve, and we remember.”

Another sign of unhappiness in the empire. Another man with an unsettled grievance. It began to look to me as if the vast empire of the Great King were rotting from the inside. Perhaps Alexandros could conquer it after all.

But all such thoughts flew out of my head when I saw the “Greek slave” to whom the Median soldier had been commanded to bring us.

Demosthenes.

“Don’t look so surprised, Orion,” he said to me, sitting at his ease in a cushioned chair in a luxurious palace apartment. A slave woman knelt in the far corner of the room. The table in the room’s center was decked with a huge bowl of fruit and a silver decanter of wine chilled so well that its curved surface was beaded with water droplets. Demosthenes wore a long woolen robe of deep blue. He seemed to have recovered his aplomb since the last time I had seen him, or perhaps it was simply that he was not facing the fierce hatred of Alexandros. Still, he had grayed, and his eyes squinted beneath their bushy brows.

“You knew I was receiving the Great King’s gold,” Demosthenes said, leaning back in his chair.

“I did not know that you were his… servant.”

“I serve Athens,” he snapped. “And democracy.”

“The Great King supports democracy?”

Demosthenes smiled uneasily. “The Great King supports anyone who can help him defeat Philip.”

“Have you been exiled, then?” Ketu asked.

His smile turned grim. “Not yet. But Philip’s friends are working hard to have the Assembly ostracize me. That’s his way: show the open hand of peace and friendship while he gets his lackeys to stab you in the back.”

“Why have you sent for us?” asked Ketu.

As if he suddenly realized that he was being less than polite, Demosthenes indicated the other chairs with his out-swept hand. “Sit. Please, make yourselves comfortable. Slave! Bring cups for my guests.”

Ketu sat. I walked over to the window and looked down. A lovely courtyard garden was being tended by ragged dark-skinned slaves. Through the open doorway I saw the Median soldier and his squad lounging out in the corridor.

“Why have you summoned us?” I repeated Ketu’s question.

“I am now an advisor to the Great King. You might say that I have his ear. He has asked for my opinion of Philip’s offer. I want to hear what it is for myself, from the lips of the Great King’s ambassador.”

“You don’t need me for that,” I said.

“No, there’s something else that I want you for,” said Demosthenes.

“What is it?”

“The ambassador first.”

The slave brought us cups and poured the wine. It was cold and biting, yet warmed my innards as I drank of it. Ketu repeated Philip’s offer and demands practically word-for-word.

“Much as I expected,” Demosthenes muttered when the ambassador was finished, blinking nervously.

“What will be your advice to the Great King?” asked Ketu.

“That is for me to tell Dareios, not you,” he answered, with some of his old haughtiness. “You will learn of his decision when he is ready to give it.”

I thought I knew what Demosthenes would say to Dareios: refuse to surrender the cities and the islands, but make no warlike step against Philip. Demosthenes wanted to get Philip to start the war, so that he could tell the Athenians and anyone else who would listen that the barbarian king of Macedonia wanted to drown all the world in blood.

He looked at me as if he could read my thoughts. “You don’t like me, do you, Orion?”

“I serve Philip,” I replied.

“You think me a traitor to Athens? To all the Greeks?”

“I think that, no matter what you tell yourself, you serve the Great King.”

“Yes! I do!” He pushed himself out of his chair to face me on his feet. “I would serve the Furies and Chaos itself if it would help Athens!”

“But you said that Athens no longer listens to your voice, no longer wants your service.”

“That doesn’t matter. The danger of a democracy is that the people will be misled, will be tricked into following the wrong road.”

“I see. Democracy works fine as long as the people do what you want them to. If they vote otherwise, it is a mistake.”

“Most people are fools,” said Demosthenes. “They need leaders. They need to be told what to do.”

“And that is democracy?” I asked.

“Bah! No matter what the people think they want, I serve Athens and the cause of democracy! I will use the Great King, the Spartans, the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air if it helps me to fight Philip and his bastard son.”

It was my turn to smile. “You had your chance to fight them at Chaeroneia.”

The barb did not bother him in the slightest. “I’m a politician, Orion, not a warrior. I discovered that at Chaeroneia, true enough. Now I fight in the way I know best. And I will beat Philip yet.”

“I am a warrior, not a politician,” I replied. “But let me ask you this question: would Athens and its democracy be safer under the Great King’s authority, or under Philip?”

He laughed. “Yes, you’re no politician at all, are you? You see things in black and white too much.”

“So?”

“The Great King will leave Athens and the other cities of Greece alone, leave them free, if the threat of Philip can be eliminated. He wants the Ionian cities to remain in his empire. I am willing to let him have them in return for Athens’ freedom.”

Ketu spoke up. “That is the nature of politics: you give something to get something else. Give and take—favors, gifts, alliances… even cities.”

“Aristotle told me,” I said, “that the Persian Empire will inevitably engulf all of Greece. Athens will become a vassal of the Great King, just as Ephesos and the other Ionian cities are.”

Demosthenes frowned. “Aristotle is a Macedonian.”

“No—” objected Ketu.

“Stagyrite,” said Demosthenes. “They’ve been part of Macedon long enough.”

“But what of Aristotle’s prediction?” I asked. “If he’s correct, by helping the Great King you are slowly strangling the democracy you cherish so much.”

Demosthenes paced the length of the room, all the way to the window and back to me, before answering. “Orion, I have a choice between Philip and the Persians. Philip is at Athens’ gates; the Great King is many months’ journey away. Philip will swallow us up in a gulp, like a wolf—”

“But he has left Athens alone,” Ketu pointed out. “He has not occupied the city with his soldiers nor demanded any political power in the city’s government.”

“Of course not. What he does is to place his friends in power, Athenians whom he has bought with gold and silver. He uses our democracy to serve his own ends.”

“But he leaves your democracy untouched,” I said. “Would the Great King allow that, if he were in Philip’s place?”

“But he’s not.”

“He will be, sooner or later, if we can believe Aristotle.”

Demosthenes threw up his hands. “Bah! This is getting us nowhere.” He turned to Ketu. “Ambassador Svertaketu, I will ponder the terms you bring from Philip and make my recommendation to the Great King. You may go.”

I took a step toward the door.

“Not you, Orion,” said Demosthenes. “I have further words for you.”

Ketu glanced at me, then made a small bow to Demosthenes and left the room. The soldiers outside snapped to attention and escorted him down the corridor, to his own quarters in the palace, I presumed.

Clapping his hands sharply enough to make the slave woman jump, Demosthenes said, “You too. Go. Leave us.”

She hurried for the door.

“And close the door behind you!”

She did as he commanded.

“All right, then,” I said. “What do you want of me?”

“Not him, Orion,” said a voice from behind me. “I’m the one who has a message for you.”

I turned and saw the Golden One, Aten, the self-styled god who created me. He glowed with energy. Golden hair, flawless face, body as strong and powerful as my own. He wore a magnificent robe of pure white, trimmed in gold. He had not been with us an instant earlier, and there was neither a door nor a window on that side of the room.

Glancing back at Demosthenes, I saw that he was frozen into immobility, like a statue.

“Don’t worry about him,” said the Golden One. “He can neither see nor hear us.”

His smile was wolfish. A shock of recognition raced through me. He looked like an older Alexandros—so much so that he could have been Alexandros’ father.

Chapter 21

“You recognize me,” said Aten, smiling with self-satisfaction.

“Where is Anya?” I asked.

“Athena,” he corrected. “In this timeplace she is known as Athena.”

“Where is she? Is she here?”

His smile disappeared instantly. “Anya will be here briefly; near here, at any rate. At a mountain called Ararat. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes!”

“She wants to see you there, but she can be there only for a very short time. It’s up to you to get there in time to meet with her.”

“When?”

“As you reckon time, in five weeks. Five weeks from today’s sundown. That is when she will appear at the summit of Ararat. Although why she continues to bother about you is beyond me.”

“Can you take me there?”

He shook his golden head. “Orion, I am your creator, not a delivery service.”

“But, five weeks—Ararat is so far away.”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you, Orion. If you want to see her, you will get there on time.”

Sudden anger welled up in me. “What is this, another one of your childish games? Some kind of a test to see if your creature can be made to jump through another hoop?”

“It’s not a game, Orion.” His face went hard, grim. “This is deadly serious.”

“Then tell me what’s going on!” I demanded.

With an exasperated huff, Aten answered, “It’s your own fault, creature. Anya took on human form because she felt sorry for you, and she found that she enjoyed being a human. She even thinks she loves you, whatever that means.”

“She does love me.” I said the words half as a hope, half to reassure myself.

“If it comforts you to think so,” sneered the Golden One. “Anya seemed so taken by the attractions of human form that some of the other Creators have dabbled at it. Hera and I came to this era and began to play at making kings and emperors.”

“You and Hera?”

“Does that shock you, Orion? I must confess that human passions can be very… intense. Almost satisfying.”

“Hera wants to make the son she bore to Philip into emperor of the whole world.”

“Bore to Philip?” Aten laughed aloud. “Don’t be stupid, Orion.”

“You fathered Alexandros!”

“As I said, Orion, human passions can be very amusing. Not merely the gross physical pleasures, but the excitement of setting one group against another, the chess game of armies and nations. It’s exhilarating!”

“Then why do you need me?” I demanded.

“You are part of the game, Orion. One of my chess pieces. A pawn, of course.”

“Hera said that the continuum is being threatened as never before. She said all of the Creators are in danger.”

His condescending smirk faded. “It’s all your fault, Orion,” he repeated. “Yours and Anya’s.”

“How so?”

“Taking on human form and living human lifetimes. Phah!”

“But you’re in human form,” I said.

“Only when it pleases me, Orion. What you see now is merely an illusion.” And Aten shimmered, shifted before my eyes, became a glowing sphere of brilliant gold, too bright to look at, like the sun. I had to throw my arms over my face. Still I felt the fierce intensity of his radiance.

“It is difficult to hold a conversation with a creature in our true form,” he said, pulling my hands away from my eyes. He was a human again.

“I… understand.”

He laughed at me again. “You think you understand, but you can’t comprehend even a millionth of it, Orion. Your brain was not built to encompass our abilities.”

I pushed my anger aside. “You said Anya will be at Ararat in five weeks.”

“Five weeks’ time. At sundown. On the summit of Ararat.”

“I will be there.”

He nodded. “It really doesn’t matter if you are or not. Apparently Anya feels sorry for you. But truly, our work would be easier if she simply forgot about you.”

“That’s not what she wants to do, is it?”

“No. Apparently not.” His face glowered with disapproval. “Well, I’ve delivered her message. Now I have my own tasks to accomplish.”

He began to fade.

“Wait!” I called, reaching out to grab his arm. My hand went through emptiness.

“What is it?” he said impatiently, shimmering, almost invisible.

“Why am I here, in this timeplace? What am I supposed to be accomplishing?”

“Nothing, Orion. Nothing at all. But as usual, you’ve managed to make a mess even of that.”

And he winked out like a candle flame snuffed by a gust of wind.

Demosthenes stirred, came back to life. He scowled at me, “You still here, Orion? I thought I had dismissed you with the ambassador.”

“I am leaving now,” I said, adding mentally, for Ararat.

The swiftest way to travel is alone. I knew I could not take the Macedonian soldiers with me, even had I wanted to. Their duty was to accompany Ketu back to Pella with the Great King’s reply to Philip’s offer, once Dareios got around to making his reply. That was my duty, too, but now I had a more urgent task to perform.

I had to get to Ararat, and that meant leaving my sworn duty to Philip and somehow getting out of Parsa despite all the soldiers guarding the palace city of the emperor.

So that night I stole a horse—two of the horses that we had ridden into Parsa upon, actually. I took them from the stables where our mounts had been put up. It was not particularly difficult. We exercised the horses every day, so the stable grooms were accustomed to seeing us. The two boys sleeping in the stables that night seemed more puzzled than upset that a man would want to exercise horses by the light of the moon. They soon settled back in their pallets of straw as I told them I would fit out my horse myself and did not need them to help me.

I walked the two horses to the palace gate. The guards were accustomed to keeping people from entering rather than leaving. Still they stopped me.

“Where do you think you’re going, barbarian?” asked their leader. There were four of them that I could see, perhaps more in the guard house built into the palace wall.

“It’s a nice night for a ride,” I answered easily.

“There’s an exercise course on the other side of the stables,” he said. In the moonlight, his face looked cold and hard. The three guards with him all carried swords, as he did. I could see a half-dozen spears leaning against the side of the guard house.

“I want to get outside the city, have a good run.”

“On whose authority? You can’t leave the palace grounds without permission.”

“I’m a guest of the Great King’s,” I said. “Isn’t that authority enough?”

“A guest!” He tilted his back and laughed. So did the others. I leaped onto the back of the nearer horse and kicked it into a gallop before they realized what was happening. The reins of my second horse were in my hand and it followed right behind me.

“Hey! Stop!”

I leaned against my mount’s neck, expecting a spear to come whizzing past. If they threw any I neither saw nor heard them as I clattered through the wide, paved avenues of Parsa, heading for the city wall.

They could not get a message to the guards at the wall faster than I could get there, I knew, but there was no time to waste palavering at the wall. I simply kept on going, since the gate was open. I could see the guards up ahead jerking their sleepy heads with surprise at the clopping of the horses’ hooves against the paving stones. The gate was only partly open, but wide enough if I got to it before they could push it closed. Surprise has its advantages. They stood in stunned disbelief as I galloped toward them, reacting too slowly to stop me. I heard them shouting. One of them even stepped out in my path and waved his arms, trying to shy the horses off. But they had the bit in their teeth and they were not going to stop. He jumped aside and we dashed through the gate and out into the broad moonlit scrubland.

I took no chances on being pursued, but kept speeding along until we cleared the first small ridge beyond the city walls. Then I quickly changed mounts and started off again. By morning I was in the hills, and when I looked back I could see the city, standing against its cliff like a precisely-engineered square. The road was empty except for a wagon train coming toward the same gate I had left by.

I was free. On my own. And hungry.

Thus I became a bandit, a hunted outlaw. Perhaps “hunted” is too strong a word to use. The lands of the Persian Empire were vast, the soldiers of the Great King concentrated in the cities and larger towns, or used as guards to escort important caravans. Otherwise, a bandit had little to fear. Except other bandits.

For the first few days I nearly starved. I was moving north and west, staying off the Royal Road, heading for the high mountain country and Ararat. The land about me was semi-desert, sparsely settled. There were irrigated farms near Parsa, of course, to support the city. But the farther away from Parsa I rode, the fewer the people and scarcer the food.

The horses could crop the miserable scrub easily enough. And, after the rumbling in my stomach got loud enough to remind my brain, I realize that I would have to do what they were doing, at least for the time being: live off the land.

Ground squirrels and snakes are not the preferred delicacies of the highly refined palate, but for those first several days out in the open they were good enough for me. Then I found a band of farmers driving a herd of cattle toward Parsa. I thought about offering them to work in exchange for a meal, but they obviously did not need a stranger to help them with what they were already doing by themselves. And strangers would probably be immediately suspect. And they were heading in the wrong direction, anyway. So I waited for nightfall.

They posted a single sentry, more to keep the cattle from straying than in fear of bandits, I suspect. They had dogs with them, too, but I managed to work my way upwind and sneak past them all once the moon had set. My old skills as a hunter returned to me when I needed them. Did I do this on my own, or had Aten or Anya or one of the other gods unlocked part of my memory?

I made my way to their cook wagon. There was a dog beneath the wagon, and he began to growl menacingly as I approached. I froze, wondering what to do. Then another part of my memory seemed to open to me, and I recalled a time long ago, before the Ice Age, when Neanderthals controlled the beasts of the forest with a form of mental telepathy.

I closed my eyes and visualized the dog, felt his fear, his hunger. In a strange distorted way I saw myself through the dog’s eyes, a dark figure against the starry sky, a stranger who smelled very different from the master and his kin. Mentally I soothed the dog, praised his faithfulness, added my scent to his category of accepted creatures, calmed him until he crawled out from under the wagon and let me pet him.

I rummaged quietly through the wagon’s stores, took onions and dried greens and a pair of apples. Meat I could always find for myself. But I sliced a filet of raw beef from the carcass hanging inside the wagon and gave it to the dog. One good turn deserves another.

By dawn I was far from their camp, cooking a lizard spitted on a stick with onions. Then I resumed my northwesterly trek.

Twice I raided farmsteads. They were rare in this semidesert hill country, but here and there flowed a stream, and then sooner or later there would be a village with lonely isolated farms scattered about it. The villages were walled, of course, but the farms were not.

Usually the men were out in the fields during the day. There was no war for them to worry about, and bandits generally picked on the towns or caravans where they could find gold or other valuables. Me, all I wanted was food.

I would leave the horses hidden some distance away in the trees and brush along the steam, then make my way to the farm house. They were made of dried mud brick, roofed with unfinished branches daubed with mud. I would burst in, sword in hand. The women and children would scream and flee. Then I would help myself to all the food I could carry. By the time the men came back from the fields I was long gone.

Mighty warrior, I told myself after each of those silly little raids. Terrifying women and children.

Then I came across real bandits.

The ground was rising, and off along the horizon I saw low-lying clouds that might have marked Lake Van. If it was the lake, I was more than halfway to my goal, with still two weeks to get there.

I camped for the night in a hollow and built a sizable fire. The nights were cold up here, but there were plenty of trees and windfalls for firewood. I ate the last of my latest farm fare and wrapped my cloak about me, ready for sleep. In two weeks or less I would see Anya. If Aten had told me the truth. The possibility that he was toying with me, as Hera had earlier, bothered me. Yet I had no choice but to push ahead. If there was any chance at all that Anya would be at Ararat, I was going to be there to see her.

I was just dozing off when I sensed them. A dozen men. More. Stealthily approaching my fire.

I always kept my sword beside me under my cloak. I gripped its hilt now and rose to a sitting position, letting the cloak drop from my shoulders. Fourteen men, I saw, skulking around in the shadows beyond the firelight. All of them armed. Too many to take on, even for me.

“You might as well come in and warm yourselves,” I said. “You’re making too much noise for me to sleep.”

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. Hunted 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 disemboweled 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.

“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.

“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.

Pointing the blade at his throat, I said, “My gods have heard my prayer. What about yours?”

He stared up at me with the terror of death draining the color from his face. I drove the sword into the dirt next to his head; he squeezed his eyes shut, thinking I meant to kill him. Then he realized he had not been harmed and popped his eyes open again. I reached out a hand to help him to his feet.

The others simply gaped.

Turning to the young officer, I said, “I seek to join your forces, if you will have me.”

He swallowed once, then replied, “You must speak to my father about that.”

I picked up my spear and followed him deeper into the camp, leaving the others muttering and milling about. The youth led me past a makeshift corral where horses and mules stamped and whinnied, raising dust and reek. There was a row of tents on its other side. We went to the largest one, where a pair of men in bronze armor and tall spears stood a relaxed guard.

“Father,” he called as he stepped through the tent’s flap, “I’ve found a recruit for you.”

I ducked through and saw a solidly built man with thick gray hair and a grizzled beard sitting at a wooden table. He was obviously at his noon meal; the table was covered with bowls of steaming stew and fruit. A silver flagon stood next to a jeweled wine cup. Three young slave women knelt in the far corner of the tent.

The man looked oddly familiar to me: piercing jet-black eyes, wide shoulders, and beneath his half-opened robe I saw a broad, powerful chest. His bare arms bore heavy dark hair crisscrossed with white scars. He stared hard at me as I stood before his table, tugging at his grizzled beard as if trying to stir his memory.

“Orion,” he said at last.

I staggered back a step with surprise. “My Lord Odysseus,” I said.

It was truly Odysseus, whom I had served in the siege of Troy. He was older, gray, his face spiderwebbed with wrinkles. He introduced the young officer to me as his son Telemakos.

He smiled at me, although there was puzzlement in his eyes. “The years have been good to you. You don’t seem to have changed a bit since I last saw you on the plain of Ilios.”

“Are we in Ithaca?” I asked.

Odysseus’ face became grave. “Ithaca is far from here,” he murmured “My kingdom is there. My wife.” The steel returned to his voice. “And the dead bodies of the dogs who would have taken my kingdom, my house, and my wife to themselves.”

“The city before us is Epeiros,” said Telemakos.

“Epeiros?” I knew that name. It was the city where Olympias was to be born.

Odysseus shook his grizzled head wearily. “After all the years that I have been away from my home and my wife, the gods have seen fit to take me away once again.”

“The gods can be cruel,” I said.

“Indeed.”

Odysseus bade us both to sit down and share his meal. The slave women scurried out of the tent to bring more food while we pulled up wooden stools to the table. Although I had been a lowly thes when I had first met Odysseus, less than a slave, he had recognized my fighting prowess and made me a member of his house.

Now, as the slaves ladled the hot stew into wooden bowls for us, Odysseus told me his long and painful story.

When he left the smoking ruins of Troy to return to his kingdom of Ithaca, his ships were battered by a vicious storm and scattered across the wild sea.

“Poseidon has always been against me,” he said, quite matter-of-fact. “Of course, it did not help that I killed one of his sons, later on.”

He grew old trying to get back to Ithaca. Ships sank under him; most of his men drowned. One by one his surviving men deserted him, despairing of ever seeing Ithaca again, choosing to remain in the strange lands where they washed up rather than continue the struggle to reach home.

“And all that while, every unmarried swain in the lands around Ithaca was camping at my household door, courting my Penelope, laying siege to my wife and my goods.”

“They acted as if they owned the kingdom,” said Telemakos. “They even tried to murder me.”

“Thank the gods for Penelope’s good sense. She has the strength of a warrior, that woman does!” Odysseus grinned. “She refused to believe that I was dead. She would not accept any of those louts as husband.”

The two of them went into great detail about how the aspiring noblemen behaved like a plague of locusts, eating and drinking, arguing and fighting, cuffing the servants, assaulting the women, and threatening to kill everyone in the household if Penelope did not choose one of them to marry.

“I finally made it back to Ithaca to find my kingdom in ruins and my house under siege by these swine.”

Telemakos smiled grimly. “But we made short work of them, didn’t we, father?”

Odysseus laughed out loud. “It was more play than work. After I felled the first three or four of them the others went dashing away like rats at the sight of a terrier. Did they think that a man who has scaled the walls of Troy and fought real heroes in single combat would be frightened of a courtyard full of fatted suitors?”

“We cut them down like a scythe goes through wheat,” said Telemakos.

“Indeed we did.”

“So the kingdom is safely yours once again,” I said.

His smile evaporated.

“Their kinsmen have demanded retribution,” Telemakos said.

I knew what that meant. Blood feuds, dozens of them, all descending on Odysseus and his family at once.

“Among the slain was the son of Neoptolemos, King of Epeiros. So the kinsmen of the others have gathered together here in Epeiros, preparing to march to Ithaca, take it for themselves, and slay me in retribution.”

Neoptolemos was a name I had heard before: Olympias’ father, if I recalled correctly. But Olympias would not be born for a thousand years. Neoptolemos must be a ceremonial name carried by all the kings of Epeiros.

Unless—

“But we have marched here to Epeiros’ walls,” said Telemakos, “and laid siege to their city. With all of them bottled up inside the city walls.”

The youth seemed rather proud that they had carried the war to their enemies, rather than waiting for them to strike Ithaca.

Odysseus seemed less enthusiastic. “It is a fruitless siege. They refuse to come out and do battle and we lack the strength to storm the city.”

I remembered how long it had taken to capture Troy.

In a rare show of impatience, Odysseus banged the table with his fist hard enough to make the slaves cower. “I want to be home! I want to enjoy my last years with my wife, and leave a peaceful kingdom for my son. Instead the gods send me this.”

How like Philip he sounded. Except that Odysseus seemed to love his wife and trust his son fully.

“I wish there were something I could do,” I said to them. “Some way I could help.”

The ghost of a crafty smile played across Odysseus’ lips. “Perhaps there is, Orion. Perhaps there is.”

Chapter 25

That night I slept outside Odysseus’ tent. Telemakos, seeing that I had nothing except the clothes on my back and the crude spear I had fashioned, ordered his slaves to bring me a cloak and armor and proper weapons.

Strangely, Odysseus interfered. “A cloak only,” he said. “That will be enough for Orion for this night. And tomorrow.”

I did not object. Obviously he had some scheme in mind. Among the Achaians besieging Troy, Odysseus had been the wisest of the commanders. He could fight as well as any man, but he could also think and plan ahead—something that Agamemnon and Achilles and the others seldom did.

Morning broke and Odysseus summoned his rag-tag army before the main gate of Epeiros. Standing in his bronze armor, bareheaded, he raised his spear to the cloud-dotted sky and shouted in a voice powerful enough to crack the heavens:

“Men of Epeiros! Kinsmen of the dogs I slew in my home in Ithaca! Come out from behind your walls and fight! Don’t be cowards. You mean to make war upon me because I defended my wife and my honor. Here I am! Come and make your war this morning. It is a good day to fight.”

I saw dozens of heads rise up along the wall’s parapet, many of them helmeted in shining bronze. But no one replied to Odysseus.

He raised his voice again to them. “Are you afraid to die? What difference does it make if I kill you here or before the walls of Ithaca? You have declared blood feud against me and my family, haven’t you? Well here is your chance to settle the matter once and for all. Come out and fight!”

“Go away,” a man’s deep voice shouted back. “We’ll fight you when we’re ready. Our kinsmen are back at their cities raising thousands of men to come to our aid. When you see their dust on the road as they march here your blood will turn to water and you’ll piss yourself with fear.”

Odysseus laughed scornfully. “You forget, coward, that I fought on the plain of Ilios against the likes of mighty Hector and his brothers. I scaled the beetling walls of Troy with my wooden horse and razed the city to ashes. Do you think I fear a bunch of lily-livered milksops who are afraid to face me, spear to spear?”

The voice answered, “We’ll see who’s the coward, soon enough.”

Odysseus’ lips pressed into a hard angry line. Then he took a deep breath and called, “Where is Neoptolemos, king of this mighty city?”

No answer.

“Does Neoptolemos still rule in his own city, or have you taken over his household the way you tried to take over mine?”

“I am here, Odysseus the Ever-Daring,” piped a weak, trembling voice.

A frail old man in a blue robe climbed shakily to a platform up above the main gate. Even from the ground before the gate I could see that King Neoptolemos was ancient, withered, wizened, more aged even than Nestor had been, his head bald except for a few wisps of hair, a white beard flowing down his frail narrow chest. His eyes were sunk so deep into their sockets that at this distance they looked like two tiny dark pits. He must have been nearly toothless, for the lower half of his face had sunk in on itself as well.

“Neoptolemos,” said Odysseus, “it is a sad day when we must face each other as enemies. Well I remember my youth, when you were like a wise uncle to me.”

“Well should you remember my son, the companion of your youth, whom you have slain in your bloody fury.”

“I regret his death, King of Epeiros. He was among the suitors who tried to steal my wife and my kingdom from me.”

“He was my son. Who will follow me when I die? His own son is only a child, hardly five years old.”

Craning his neck at the blue-robed figure atop the city gate, Odysseus said, “A blood feud between us can do neither of us any good.”

“Bring me back my son and there will be no need for a feud,” the old man replied bitterly.

“Ah,” said Odysseus, “that I cannot do. Even though I visited Hades himself during the long years of my journey home, he would not let me bring any of the departed back to the land of the living.”

“You saw Hades?”

“Neoptolemos, revered mentor of my youthful days, if you knew the sufferings and toils I have had to endure you might forgive me even the death of your son.”

I stood a few feet away from Odysseus, leaning on my knobbly makeshift spear, and watched him charm Neoptolemos into asking for a recitation of his arduous journey from Troy back to Ithaca.

The sun rose high while Odysseus spoke of the storms that wrecked his ships, of the enchantress Circe who turned his men into animals; of the cave of Polyphemos, one of the Cyclopes, and his cannibal orgies.

“I had to kill him or be killed myself,” Odysseus related. “His father, Poseidon, stirred up even mightier storms against me after that.”

“You know that a father feels hatred for a man who slays his son,” said Neoptolemos. But I thought his thin, quavering voice was less harsh than it had been earlier.

Well past noon Odysseus kept on talking, holding everyone along the wall enchanted with his hair-raising tales. Slaves circulated among us with bowls of dried meat and fruit, flagons of wine. Odysseus took some of the wine, but kept on talking, telling his enemies of the dangers he had risked, the women he had left behind, in his agonizing urgency to return to his home and his wife.

“When at last I saw blessed Ithaca again,” he said, his powerful voice sinking low, “my very own house was besieged by men who demanded the hand of my Penelope, and behaved as if they already owned my kingdom.”

“I can understand the blood-fury that must have seized you,” said Neoptolemos. “But that does not return my son to me.”

“King of Epeiros,” Odysseus replied, “a blood feud between us will bring down both our households. Your grandson and my son will never live long enough to father sons of their own.”

“Sadly true,” Neoptolemos agreed.

“And the same is true for all of you,” Odysseus said to the others along the wall. “You kinsmen of the men I have slain would slay me and my son. But then my kinsmen will be obliged to slay you. Where will it end?”

“The gods will decide that, Odysseus,” said the old king. “Our fates are not in our own hands.”

I was thinking that if Neoptolemos and his grandson are killed in this pointless blood feud, his line will end here in the Achaian age. There will be no descendants to father Olympias, many generations down the time stream. That is why I have been sent here, I realized. But what am I to do about it?

“Perhaps there is a way for us to learn the wishes of the gods in this matter,” Odysseus was saying.

“What do you mean?”

“A trial by combat. Single champions to face each other, spear against spear. Let the outcome of their battle decide the war between us.”

A murmur arose among the men on the wall. Neoptolemos turned to his right and then to his left. Some of the men up there gathered around him, muttering, gesturing.

“A trial by champions would be a good idea, King of Ithaca,” the old man finally replied. “But who could stand against such an experienced warrior as yourself? It would be an unequal fight.”

None of the dandies up there dared to face Odysseus in single combat.

Odysseus threw up his hands. “But I am the one you seek revenge against.”

Neoptolemos said, “No, no, Odysseus. As you yourself said, you faced mighty Hector and broke through the impenetrable walls of Troy. You have travelled the length and breadth of the world and even visited Hades in his underworld domain. Who among us would dare stand against you?”

Bowing his head in seeming acceptance, Odysseus asked, “Would you have me pick another to stand in my place?”

I saw Telemakos fairly twitching with eagerness, anxious to fight for his family’s honor and his own fame.

“Yes, another!” rose a shout among the men on the wall. “Pick another!”

Odysseus turned around as if casting about for someone to select. Telemakos took half a step forward but froze when his father frowned at him.

Turning back toward the gate, Odysseus called up to Neoptolemos, “Very well. We will let the gods truly decide. I will pick this ungainly oaf here.” He pointed toward me!

I heard snickers and outright laughter up on the wall. I must have looked like a country bumpkin in my leather vest and crude wooden spear. No wonder Odysseus had refused me better clothes and weapons. He had planned this ruse from the night before.

They swiftly agreed, and disappeared from the wall’s top while they selected their own champion.

“Orion,” said Odysseus to me, low and very serious. “You can save us all from a blood feud that will end my line and the old man’s as well.”

“I understand, my lord.”

He gripped my shoulder hard. “Don’t make it look too easy. I don’t want them to know that they’ve been hoodwinked.”

Telemakos, who had looked so disappointed a few moments earlier that I thought he would break into tears, was trying hard now to suppress a grin of elation.

At length the gates of the city opened and the men who had been lining the wall stepped out before us. Most of them wore bronze armor and kept a firm grip on their spears. Neoptolemos was carried out on a wooden chair fitted with handles for slaves to hold. They placed his chair on the ground and he got out of it, slowly, obviously in arthritic pain.

Before the fight could begin there were prayers and sacrifices and speeches to be made. It was late in the afternoon before the men cleared a space on the bare dusty ground and their champion stepped forward. He was almost as big as I, with a deep chest and powerful limbs. He wore a bronze cuirass, greaves, and a bronze helmet with nose piece and cheek flaps tied so tightly under his chin that I could see little more of his face than his light-colored eyes gazing out at me.

A young slave boy stood a few steps behind him, holding with both skinny arms a figure-eight shield of multiple layers of oxhide; it was so heavy it seemed it would topple the poor lad over at any moment. Another youth held a handful of long spears for him, their bronze tips glinting in the late afternoon sunlight.

His shield bore the figure of a single eye, and I remembered the eye of Amon that adorned the great pyramid of Khufu in distant Egypt. Was there some connection? I decided not. This was merely a variant of the evil eye that supposedly paralyzed opponents with terror.

I faced their champion with nothing but the crude spear I had hacked from the gnarled branch of a tree. Those pale eyes of his gleamed with the anticipation of easy victory. We circled each other warily, he behind his ponderous oxhide shield, which covered him from chin to sandals. Despite his solid build he was agile, light on his feet. I danced nimbly on the balls of my feet as my senses went into overdrive. I saw him pull his arm back so slowly that it seemed to take forever; then he hurled the spear at me with every ounce of strength in his powerful body.

I jumped to one side at last instant, and the crowd of men groaned as if disappointed that I hadn’t been spitted on the sharp bronze point. My opponent half-turned and his squire handed him another spear. I merely stood my ground until he began to approach me again. Then I jabbed my spear at him, letting its point bang against his oxhide shield.

He grinned at me as he pushed his shield against my spear, using it like a battering ram, edging closer to me. “Don’t run away, Orion,” he half-whispered to me. “You can’t escape your fate.”

My knees went weak with surprise. Those tawny eyes glinting at me were the eyes of Aten, the Golden One.

“Don’t look so shocked,” he said as he jabbed his spear at me. “You’ve seen me take human form before.”

“Why now?” I asked, backing away from him.

He laughed. “For sport! Why else?” And he rammed his spear at my midsection so hard and fast that I barely had the reflexes to flinch away. The sharp bronze point grazed my flank. The men crowding around us went “Oooh!” at the sight of my blood.

I knew that my pitiful tree branch would be no match for him. He had as much speed and strength as I; perhaps more. I danced backward several steps, and as he advanced toward me I lunged forward with all my might and aimed the fire-hardened tip of my spear at his eyes. He raised his shield to catch my thrust and my spear stuck in the layers of oxhide, forcing him backward a few steps.

Whirling, I dashed to the spear he had thrown at me. Now we were evenly armed, at least, although Aten still had that long shield and I had none. As I looked up I saw that both his young squires were tugging their hardest to pull my rude spear from his shield. It came out at last, sending them both tumbling onto their backs.

Now Aten advanced upon me again, and I held my spear in two hands. To the watching men it must have seemed like a moment from the battle for Troy, champion against champion, spear against spear.

For sport, he’d told me. He’d taken on human form and faced me in combat for sport.

“Are you prepared to die for sport?” I asked him.

“You tried to kill me once, do you remember?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought I’d give you the opportunity again.”

He feinted, then raked his spear point upward, catching my spear and nearly knocking it out of my hands. Before I could recover he slashed downward again, slicing a long cut across my chest from shoulder to ribs. The watching men shouted their approval.

“I’m faster than you, Orion,” Aten taunted. “And stronger. Do you think that I’d build a creature more powerful than myself?”

I jabbed at his exposed left foot, then swung my spear in my two hands like a quarter-staff and cracked him hard on his helmet. The men gasped. Aten staggered backward, his taunts silenced for the moment.

My mind was racing: If he defeats me, Neoptolemos wins this dispute against Odysseus, and his grandson goes on to father the line that eventually gives birth to Olympias. If I defeat Aten, however, and Odysseus is the victor over Neoptolemos, what will happen to the royal line of Epeiros? Is that why Aten has taken human form and inserted himself into this fight? To make certain that I am killed and Olympias is born a thousand years down the time stream?

Those were the thoughts running through my mind as we fought. They sapped my confidence, made me uncertain of what I should do. But each time I saw the golden eyes of Aten smirking at me from behind his bronze helmet, hot fury boiled up within me: For sport. He is playing with me, playing with all the mortals here, toying with their lives and their hopes the way a cat torments a mouse.

It seemed as if we fought for hours. Aten nicked me here and there, until I was bleeding from a dozen cuts and scratches. I could not get past his shield. He truly was as fast as I, perhaps even a little faster, so that whatever I tried to do against him he saw and protected himself against.

Once I almost got him. I jabbed straight at his eyes and as he raised his shield, covering his vision for an instant, I swept the butt of my spear across his ankles, tripping him and sending him sprawling to the dusty ground. But he immediately covered his body with the long shield, even as I rammed my spear at him. The spear point caught in the shield and we became involved in an almost comical tug of war, me trying to wrestle the spear out of his shield, him struggling to his knees and then finally to his feet.

The men were roaring with excitement as they crowded close around us. I finally yanked my spear free of his shield, but the effort sent me staggering backwards into the crowd. I stumbled, slipped, and went down.

Aten was on me before I could blink. And I had no shield to hide behind. I saw his armored form looming over me, silhouetted against the brilliant sky, the sun at his back, his spear raised above his head as he started to plunge it into my heart.

There was nothing I could do except ram my own spear into his groin while he impaled me. We both screamed in death agonies and the world went utterly black and cold.

Chapter 26

Pain woke me. My eyes fluttered open. I was back atop Mount Ararat, lying in the snow, but now it no longer covered me completely. Much of it had melted away. I saw a clear blue sky above me, so bright it hurt my eyes to look upon it.

A snow-white fox was gnawing on my right forearm—a vixen, I could see from her gravid belly. It must be spring or close to it, I thought, and she is so desperate for food up in this barren waste at the mountaintop that she will attack a corpse.

But I was not dead. Not yet. Automatically I shut down the pain receptors in my brain, even as I clutched at the vixen’s throat with my left hand so swiftly that she did not have time even to yelp. I ate her raw, unborn pups and all, and felt the nourishment streaming into my blood. My right hand was useless for the time being, although I had stopped the bleeding and wrapped the wound the vixen had made with her own pelt.

It took me days to get down from Ararat’s summit. I had lain there in the snow for most of the winter, suspended in a frozen half-death while Aten or Hera or both of them used me to ensure the line of Neoptolemos so that Olympias could be born in this era.

Now I proved myself worthy of my name; I lived by hunting, ferreting out the tiny rodents that were just beginning to come out of their winter burrows, tracking down the mountain goats and sheep on the lower slopes, even running down a wild horse over the course of several days until it dropped from exhaustion. So did I, almost.

By the time I was on the flat land again, with the smoke of distant farm houses smudging the horizon, my arm was healed and I felt reasonably strong.

I returned to the ways of the bandit. I had no other choice. My mission was to return to Pella, to do Hera’s bidding, no matter how I might hate to obey her. I stole a horse here, raided a barn there, broke into farm houses, chased down stray cattle, did what I needed to do to stay alive. I tried to avoid people whenever possible and only fought when I had no choice. Even so, I killed no human—although I left several men groaning with broken bones.

I pushed westward, toward the setting sun, toward Europe and Greece and Pella and Philip and Alexandros. And Hera. There was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind: Olympias was Hera and had been all along. Her witchcraft was nothing more than the innate powers of the Creators themselves.

I rode night and day, sleeping only rarely as my strength returned to normal, pushing myself to get back to Pella as quickly as I could. In my dreams, on those rare nights when I did sleep, Hera kept beckoning me, but no longer with the enticements of her body. She commanded me the way a mistress commands the lowliest of her slaves. She urged me to come to her. She demanded that I hurry.

I did the best I could, crossing whole nations in days, avoiding the main roads and the bigger towns, hunting or stealing what I needed and pushing constantly on toward the setting sun.

Until at last I reached Chalkedon.

It was a large city, bigger than Pella, smaller than Athens. A port city, across the Bosporus from Byzantion. Its streets were crooked, meandering down the slope from the city wall to the waterfront docks. Its buildings were old, in poor repair, dirty. Garbage stank in the alleys and even the main square looked dirty, uncared for. Inns and taverns were plentiful, however, and the closer I approached the docks the more the streets were lined with them. Knots of drunken sailors and keen-eyed merchants stood before open bars built into many of the house fronts, exchanging drinks and gossip, making bargains and deals for everything from Macedonian timber to slaves from the wild steppes beyond the Black Sea.

The busiest place in Chalkedon was the slave market, down by the docks. I was going to push past the crowd gathered there; I was looking for a cheap ride across the water into Byzantion. I had a few coins in a cloth purse I had taken from a horse trader who had made the mistake of travelling with only four guards.

But while I was trying to work my way through the crowd that filled the open-air slave market and spilled out across the street that led down to the docks, I stopped dead in my tracks. I saw Harkan.

He had changed his clothes and even trimmed his beard. Like most of the other men thronging the slave market, he wore a long plain coat over his more colorful robe, and covered his head with a felt cap. At a distance he looked like either a moderately prosperous merchant or the owner of a large farm who was shopping for hands to work it for him. But closer up, the scar on his cheek was clearly recognizable; so was the flinty look in his coal-dark eyes. I glanced around the crowd and spotted several of Harkan’s men, also with their beards neatly trimmed, wearing decent clothes.

I pushed through the murmuring, jostling pack of men waiting for the market to open, heading for Harkan. He was turned slightly away from me, but his eyes kept searching through the expectant crowd, on the alert for danger. Then he saw me.

His eyes went wide as I came up beside him, but he quickly mastered his surprise.

“Your pilgrimage is over?” he asked.

I nodded. “I’m heading back to Pella. I have responsibilities there.”

He nodded. “You look different.”

“Different?”

“Calmer. More certain of yourself, as if you are sure of what you are doing now.”

I felt a slight surprise at that, but inwardly I realized he was right. There was no turmoil within me now. I did not know exactly what I had to do, but I knew I must return to Pella and do Hera’s bidding, no matter what it might be.

Then I looked squarely into Harkan’s leathery face and realized for the first time that he reminded me of someone I had known. Another soldier, from long ago: Lukka the Hittite. He might have been Harkan’s forebear, they looked so much like one another. In Harkan’s eyes I saw something that I had noticed only once before, when he had spoken of his family. I realized why he was here.

“You are searching for your children,” I said.

“If they haven’t already been sold. I was told the people taken from Gordium were brought to the market here. They won’t let anyone except the wealthiest buyers inspect the cages before the auctioning starts.”

I thought a moment. “You are hoping to buy their freedom?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

He shot a questioning glance at me. “What do you mean?”

“It will be difficult to continue your life as a bandit with an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter to take care of.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, pilgrim. For now, I’m seeking my children. What happens afterward, I’ll worry about after I’ve found them. First things first.”

I stayed at his side through the whole long miserable afternoon. The slave dealers paraded out their wares, one by one. Young women brought the highest prices; strong healthy-looking men young enough to work in the fields or the mines also made profits for the sellers. There were dozens of children, but they brought very little. Most of them were still not sold when the sun dipped behind the warehouses lining the docks and the auction ended.

Hardly a scattering of buyers was left in the square by then. The children, miserable, dirty, some of them crying, all of them collared by heavy iron rings, were led by their chains back to their pens.

While the slave dealers huddled off behind the auction block, counting their coins, the chief auctioneer climbed down wearily and headed toward the tavern across the square.

“It’s a shame,” said the chief auctioneer as we watched the children being led away. His leather-lunged voice was slightly hoarse from the long day’s work. “We can’t keep feeding those brats forever. They’re eating up any profit we might make on them.”

Falling in beside him, Harkan asked as casually as he could manage, “Where are they from?”

The auctioneer was a lean, balding man with a pot belly and cunning eyes. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Here and there. Phrygia, Anatolia; we got a clutch of them from Rhodes, believe it or not.”

“Have there been any from Gordium?”

He stopped walking and looked sharply at Harkan. We were more than halfway across the square, almost at the door to the tavern. “What is such information worth to you?”

Harkan’s face became a mask of granite. “It is worth a life, auctioneer. Yours.”

The man looked at me, then glanced back over his shoulder where the dealers were still gathered behind the block. A half-dozen armed men stood guard near them.

“You wouldn’t get to utter a single word,” Harkan said, his voice low with menace. “Now just tell me, and tell me truly. Have there been any children from Gordium here?”

“A month ago. Nearly a hundred of them. There were so many that the bidding went down almost to nothing. A bad show, a miserable show.”

“Who bought them?”

“Only a few were bought in the open auction. The bidding was too low. We can’t sell goods for nothing! Can’t give them away! The dealers closed the auction when the bidding went down too low to satisfy them.”

“So what happened to the children who weren’t bought?”

“They were sold in a lot. To a Macedonian. Said he was from their king.”

“Philip?” I asked.

“Yes, Philip of Macedon. He needs lots of slaves now that he’s master of Athens and all the rest of the Greeks.”

“This is the truth?” Harkan asked, gripping the auctioneer’s skinny forearm almost hard enough to snap the bone.

“Yes! The truth! I swear it!”

“The few who were bought by men here,” Harkan went on urgently, “were any of them an eight-year-old boy, with hair the color of straw and eyes as black as mine? Or a six-year-old girl with the same coloring?”

The auctioneer was sweating and trying to pry Harkan’s fingers off his forearm. He might as well have tried to dig through the city wall with a dinner fork.

“How can I remember?” he yelped. “There were so many, how can I remember an individual boy or girl?”

“Let him be,” I said to Harkan. “The chances are that your children are on their way to Pella.”

He released the auctioneer, who dashed through the tavern’s door without another word.

“To Pella. In Macedonia.” Harkan drew in a great painful breath. “Then I’ll never see them again.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I know little of Philip and his kingdom, but I’ve heard that they don’t tolerate bandits there. Philip’s men keep the law. There’s no place for me there.”

I smiled at him and placed my hand on his shoulder. “My friend, Philip does not tolerate banditry, true enough. But he has the finest army in the world, and he is always ready to welcome new recruits.”

I had heard that in ancient times heroes had swum across the Hellespont. Alexandros had sworn to his Companions that he would do it one day himself. Perhaps I could swim the Bosporus; it was narrower than the Hellespont, although its current was swift and treacherous. It would be far easier to buy a place on one of the ferries that plied between Chalkedon and Byzantion. And, of course, I could not expect Harkan or his men to swim.

His band had dwindled to nine men over the winter. The others had drifted off, tired of their bandit ways, trying to find their way back to their home villages or looking for a new life for themselves. I was glad to see that among the remaining nine was Batu. Harkan told me he was a strong fighter, with a cool, calculating mind.

“They say there are Macedonian troops in Abydos,” Harkan told me, “down by the Hellespont.”

“Truly?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the word in the marketplace.”

Philip’s show of strength, I realized—holding a bridgehead on the Asian side of the water in case he ultimately decided to move the bulk of the army against the Great King. Diplomacy works best when it’s backed by power.

“We’ll get to Pella faster by taking passage across the Bosporus to Byzantion,” I decided.

“That takes money, pilgrim. We don’t have enough coin to buy passage for the eleven of us.”

“Then how do you expect to buy—” I stopped myself in mid-sentence. I knew the answer before I finished asking the question. Harkan was saving whatever coin he had amassed to buy back his children.

So I said instead, “I know where there is coin aplenty.”

Harkan grasped my hint. “The slave dealers?” He smiled grimly at the thought. “Yes, they must have more coins than old Midas himself.”

“But they are always heavily protected,” said Batu. “Their homes are guarded and they never venture into the streets alone.”

“We are strong enough to overpower such guards,” I said.

“Yes, I agree,” said Batu. “But before we could take their coin to the docks and get aboard a boat, the city’s guards would be upon us.”

I nodded. He was right. Brute force would not work; the city was too small. An attack on one of the rich slave dealers would immediately bring out the whole force of guards and the first thing they would do would be to halt all the femes attempting to leave the docks.

“Then we must use guile,” I said.

Chapter 27

It rained that night, which was all to the good. I stood beneath the gnarled branches of a dripping olive tree, studying the house of the richest slave dealer in Chalkedon. Harkan and Batu were at my side, shoulders hunched, wet, miserable and apprehensive.

“The wall is high,” murmured Batu, his deep resonant voice like a rumble of distant thunder.

“And the gods know how many guards he has in there,” said Harkan nervously.

“Six,” I told him. “And another dozen sleeping in the servants’ quarters on the other side of the courtyard.”

“How do you know that?” Harkan’s harsh whisper sounded surprised, disbelieving.

“I spent all evening watching, from the branches of that big oak tree across the street.”

“And no one saw you? No one noticed?”

“This is a very quiet street in a very rich neighborhood. My only trouble was getting past the constables’ patrol down at the foot of the hill. Once I slipped past them there was no one on the street except a fruit vendor and his cart. I waited until he had gone around the corner and then climbed the tree. Up there the leaves were thick enough to keep me hidden. It was fully dark when I came down.”

I heard Batu chuckle in the darkness.

“Is my report satisfactory?” I asked Harkan.

“For a pilgrim,” he grumbled, “you have strange ways.”

We agreed that they would wait out of sight in the deep shadows beneath the olive trees that lined the residential street. They would have to deal with any of the city constables or private guards who might pass by.

“The rain helps us,” I said. “There will be no casual strollers this night.”

“And it discourages the guards on the other side of the wall from roaming the grounds,” Batu added.

I nodded. “If I’m not back by the time the sky begins to lighten, go back to the inn, gather up the rest of the men, and get out of town.”

“You speak as if you were the commander, Orion,” said Harkan.

I grasped his shoulder. “I speak as if I want you and your men to get away safely even if I am captured.”

“I know,” he said. “The gods be with you.”

“They always are,” I replied, knowing that he had no idea of the bitterness behind my words.

“Good luck,” said Batu.

I shook my rain-soaked cloak to make sure it would not hamper my movements, then stepped from under the dubious shelter of the tree. The rain felt cold, almost stinging, although there was barely any wind at all. The wall surrounding the slave dealer’s house was high, with spikes and sharp-edged potsherds embedded in its top. The groundskeepers had cut down any trees growing along the length of the wall. Its whitewashed surface was blank and smooth, offering no handholds.

So I ran from the olive tree, across the brick-paved street, and leaped as high as I could. My sandalled right foot slapped against the wall and I stretched my right arm to its limit. My fingers found the edge of the wall as my body slammed against it almost hard enough to dislodge me. Mindful of the sharp pottery bits and spikes up there, I hung for a moment by the fingertips of both hands, then pulled myself up until my eyes could see the top of the wall. It looked like a little forest of sharp objects.

Carefully I pulled myself up to my elbows and got one leg levered up onto the edge of the wall. There was not much room that wasn’t covered with cutting edges or spikes. The one thing I worried about was the dogs. During my afternoon and evening observation of the house and grounds I saw several large black dogs trotting through the garden or lolling outside the doors, tongues hanging out and teeth big and white. The rain would help; dogs do not like being cold and wet any more than people do, and the steady downpour would deaden my scent. Or so I hoped.

I edged across the jagged potsherds and spikes and lowered myself slowly to the grass. Dropping to one knee, I waited long moments as the rain sluiced coldly down my neck and bare arms and legs. Nothing was moving in the dark courtyard. There were no lights in the servants’ quarters and only one lamp gleaming feebly in the main house, through a window on the ground floor.

My senses hyperalert, I scuttled quickly to the closest window of the main house. Its shutters were closed tight. I heard a growl from their other side, low and menacing, a warning from the dog who had been sleeping inside. I backed away, then moved to the farther corner of the house and froze in my tracks. A guard sat there, trying to stay out of the rain beneath the overhang of the second story, his cloak wrapped tight around him, his chin on his chest—asleep or not, I could not tell.

I took no chances. Sliding along the wall almost like a snake, I was within arm’s reach before he realized I was there. With one hand I muffled his mouth and with the other I chopped the back of his neck. I felt him go limp. Then I sat him down again exactly as he had been, chin on chest, cloak secure around him.

I swung up onto the overhang and climbed to the second-floor window. It too was shuttered, but I gripped it by the slats in one hand as I hung there and forced it open with only a slight groaning, squeaking noise. Not enough to warn anyone, I hoped.

I pulled myself through the window and into the dark room. My eyes were fully adjusted to the dark and I swiftly saw that this was a bedchamber and that a woman lay asleep in the bed, tossing unhappily and muttering in her dreams. I tiptoed past her and went out into the corridor beyond her door.

It was a balcony, actually, that ran along all four sides of the house’s inner courtyard. Sleeping chambers and other rooms lined its entire length. The area below was lit by that one feeble lamp I had seen from outside. It was a large central atrium, with rooms opening onto it. Peering through the polished wood railing of the balcony, I could see two guards squatting by the door, miserable in the chilly rain. The dog that had growled at me was pacing nervously across the flooring beneath the balcony on the far side of the atrium, his claws clicking against the stones. He looked up at me, ears pricked, but apparently he had been trained not to climb the stairs. He was a ground-floor dog, and for that I was extremely grateful.

Now the question was, where did the dealer keep his money? I smiled to myself in the shadows. In his own room, I was willing to bet. But which room was his?

I stood there for long moments, studying the area. The balcony was lined with doors, all of them closed. They were all single doors, except for those at the far end of the balcony, opposite the side where the stairs were. Double doors. Handsomely carved, at that.

Staying in the shadows along the wall, I made my way swiftly and silently to those double doors. They were locked, of course. Very well. I retreated, testing each of the other doors as I went until I found one that opened for me. The room inside was unoccupied; it looked like a storage room, with shelves lining two of its walls. There was only a narrow slit of a window, but I pushed its shutter open and stuck my head out into the rain. The wall was smooth and straight; no handholds, no ledge or anything else to plant my feet upon. But there was the roof above.

I squeezed out through the narrow window, stood up precariously on its sill, and reached for the overhanging eave. The roofing tiles were slippery from the rain, but I managed to haul myself up onto the sloping roof. As quietly as I could, I edged across the tiles to the spot where the master bedroom must be. Leaning over the eaves I saw a double window. One of the shutters was even open a little. The master of the house liked fresh air. Good!

I swung down and went in through the window as silently as a shadow. And heard the growl of a guard dog.

I had no time to waste. The dog was standing before me, fangs bared. There was no time to try to soothe it; in another instant it would start to bark and rouse the entire house. Faster than it could react I seized it by the throat and yanked it up off its feet. It clawed at me and tried to snap at my face but I kept it at arm’s length as I squeezed the breath from its throat. It jerked convulsively, then went limp. I eased the pressure of my hands. I could feel a pulse beat in its neck, heard it sucking in air. I let the animal down gently, hoping it would remain unconscious long enough for me to find the dealer’s coins.

The embers of a dying fire glowed in the bedroom fireplace. The slave merchant lay asleep. I saw that his chamber had only a single door. There must be an anteroom out there, probably with guards on duty in it.

Looking around, I saw a massive cabinet standing in one corner of the bedchamber. Tall as the ceiling, deep enough for a man to walk into, two ornate doors locked tight. There was a writing desk next to it.

There must be a key to those doors, I reasoned, and it must be near to the owner’s hand. I tiptoed to the edge of his bed and saw that, sure enough, the key was on a chain around his neck. How to get it without waking him? Guile, a voice in my mind answered me. Guile, not force. Remember, you don’t want him to know that you’ve been here.

Then I smiled to myself. Properly used, force can be a form of guile.

I went to the glowing embers of his fire, took the tongs from beside the fireplace, and lifted out a smoldering chunk of wood. I could hear the dog beginning to stir, whining. I blew hard on the half-burned ember and it glowed brighter. Then I swiftly crossed the room and touched it to the drapes of the windows, the clothing piled atop a chest, the bedclothes themselves. They began to smoke and smolder.

I pegged the ember back into the fireplace in a red arc of sparks, then gave the sleeping old man a mighty shove that knocked him flat onto the floor on the other side of the bed. Before he could raise his head I dashed to the open window and ducked through it, hanging outside in the rain by my hands.

“Fire!” I heard him screech. “Fire!”

Lifting myself to eye level I saw him run through the smoke to his door and fling it open. I felt the draft that immediately blew through the room, setting the smoldering bedclothes into real flames.

“Fire, you idiots!” he screamed to the startled guards in his anteroom. “Get water! Quickly!”

He dashed to that big double-doored cabinet and fumbled the key from the chain around his neck. With shaking hands he unlocked the doors and pulled them open. I could see in the growing light of the flames that he had several chests in there, and dozens of smaller boxes sitting on shelves. There were also row upon row of scrolls: his business records, I guessed.

The dog bolted past him and out the door as the window curtains burst into flame. The heat singed the hairs on the backs of my hands and made me duck my head below the window sill.

When I looked up again the dealer had tucked several boxes under his scrawny arms and was trying to lock the doors once again. The flames were licking higher; the canopy over the bed came crashing down and he finally gave up and dashed from the room.

I had only a few moments to act. I hauled myself through the window once again and went straight to the cabinet. Yanking its doors wide I pawed through several of the smaller boxes inside. They were all filled with coins. I took two of them to the window and tossed them on the ground, then raced back to the fireplace. Grabbing the largest half-burned log there, I blew it alight and then used it as a torch to set the scrolls afire inside the cabinet.

Heavy steps were pounding up the stairway, running along the balcony. Voices were yelling, dogs barking, women shrieking. Over them all I heard the piercing high screech of the slave dealer cursing at his men and screaming that the whole house would be destroyed.

Seeing the cabinet nicely ablaze I dashed back to the window and jumped to the ground below. I scooped up the two boxes of coins, ran through the night and the rain to the wall, stopping only to glance back over my shoulder at my handiwork. Smoke was pouring from the windows now, with flames flickering through. With a bit of luck the whole house would burn down.

I unlatched the front gate and stepped out onto the street as if I were walking to meet some friends. Which I did—Harkan and Batu were still beneath the olive tree.

“Time for us to leave,” Harkan said. “The whole neighborhood is waking up.”

I agreed, but held him up long enough to show him the two boxes of coins.

Batu’s eyes went round. “I could return to Africa and live like a prince with that much money.”

Harkan merely grunted. “You make a fine burglar,” he said, “for a pilgrim.”

Laughing, we left the slave merchant’s house burning. He will never know he’s been robbed, I thought. Even if he suspects it, he will have no way to know who did it. We could see the smoke even from the docks, once the sun came up.

Chapter 28

We found a ferry about to cast off from the dock and, after a quick haggle with its captain, all eleven of us trooped aboard. The captain was a good-sized man, his skin nut-brown from long years in the sun, his hair and beard just beginning to show flecks of gray. He eyed us suspiciously, but he hefted the bag of coins I gave him and gave the order to weigh anchor.

It was a fat little tub with a single mast and an open deck. The captain barked orders from a raised poop at the stern. Pens of goats took up most of the forward deck space, their smell overpowering until we got the wind behind us. Our men sat on the deck planks, resting their backs against bales of cloth and coils of rope or the boat’s gunwales.

Slaves rowed us out into the channel, then the wind filled the boat’s triangular sail and we cut through the harbor and out into the powerful current of the Bosporus. The boat began to bob up and down like a cork and most of Harkan’s men began to turn various shades of green. The sailors laughed as their passengers moaned and staggered for the rail.

“Not into the wind, you fool!” roared the captain as one man after another emptied his guts into the churning water.

I went to the rail also, but well away from the seasick, vomiting men. I stared out at Europe across the way, the brown mud-brick buildings of Byzantion basking in the morning sunlight. Somehow I knew that this undistinguished collection of drab buildings would one day become a mighty city, a center of empire where palaces and churches and mosques would dot the skyline with magnificent domes and graceful minarets.

For now, though, Byzantion was little more than a strategically placed seaport, part of Philip’s Macedonian hegemony.

“We’re not getting any closer,” Harkan murmured in my ear. I turned to him, surprised. He looked grim.

Batu came up beside me on the other side. “We seem to be turning around.”

It was true. We were heading back toward the harbor of Chalkedon. The rest of Harkan’s troop was too sick to notice or to care, sprawled on the deck or draped over the rail. The sail flapped uselessly and the stench of the goats washed across the deck, making matters even worse. Harkan gripped the rail with both hands, knuckles white, face pale green.

I looked up at the captain. There were signal flags flying from the stern. He was staring intently at the docks we had left barely half an hour earlier. Signal flags were fluttering from the pole back there. Then I saw that the sailors had all armed themselves with swords. Even the slaves had tucked clubs into their belts. Our weapons were stacked up forward, next to the goat pens, and none of our men was in condition to use them.

I headed for the captain’s perch on the poop deck but two armed sailors stopped me at the ladder.

“Captain!” I called up to him. “What are you doing?”

“Returning a pack of thieves to justice,” he said, with a laugh.

“What makes you think we’re thieves?” I shouted.

He pointed to the signal flags. “Someone burned the house of an important person during the night. And you paid too much too easily for your passage this morning.”

I thought over the situation for all of three seconds. Harkan’s men were in no condition to fight; Harkan himself looked barely able to stand on his feet. The sailors were all armed and ready to start slitting throats. The captain was very pleased with himself; he would return a fraction of the coins I had given him to the dealer, and no doubt receive a reward for returning us to the city’s authorities.

The two men before me were grinning smugly. Perhaps that is what decided me.

I grabbed each of them by the jaw before they could even flinch and banged their heads together so hard it sounded like an ax striking a sturdy old oak. As they slid to the deck, unconscious or dead, I whisked the swords from their belts and tossed them to the startled Harkan and Batu. Harkan fumbled and dropped his sword. Batu caught his cleanly and thrust it through the belly of the first sailor who came charging toward them. As he screamed Harkan recovered his sword and the two of them advanced against a half-dozen sailors, toward the rest of our troop who were still sprawled miserably on the deck.

I leaped up the ladder in two bounds, whipping out the dagger from its sheath on my thigh. A sailor in a ragged tunic was hanging onto the tiller with both hands. Next to him stood the captain, looking very surprised. The first mate stood between me and the captain, sword in hand. My senses went into overdrive. I saw the muscles in his arm flex, his legs tense as he prepared to move to my unguarded left. I feinted with my left forearm against his sword wrist and, stepping into him, drove my dagger under his chin and into the base of his skull. I stepped over his slumping body to face the captain.

He too had a sword in hand but he seemed to have no inclination to use it. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Harkan and Batu standing back to back over the seasick men, a circle of sailors and slaves ringing them with swords and clubs. The boat, unattended except by the one man at the tiller, was still drifting toward Chalkedon’s harbor.

The captain said easily, “Put down your dagger or your friends will all be thrown to the fishes.”

“You’ll feed the fishes first, I promise you.”

He smiled at me. “Kill me, and how will you sail this boat?”

I smiled back. “I watched your men this morning. I can sail this tub to Egypt if I need to.”

His smile widened into a grin that revealed several missing teeth. “You don’t lack confidence, thief.”

“You have our money,” I said. “Take us across to Byzantion as you agreed to do.”

“Then when I return to Chalkedon they’ll blame me for letting you escape.”

“You have a few dead men to show that you didn’t let us go without a fight.”

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.