“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.