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.