“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.”