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.