“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.