I made my way to their cook wagon. There was a dog beneath the wagon, and he began to growl menacingly as I approached. I froze, wondering what to do. Then another part of my memory seemed to open to me, and I recalled a time long ago, before the Ice Age, when Neanderthals controlled the beasts of the forest with a form of mental telepathy.
I closed my eyes and visualized the dog, felt his fear, his hunger. In a strange distorted way I saw myself through the dog’s eyes, a dark figure against the starry sky, a stranger who smelled very different from the master and his kin. Mentally I soothed the dog, praised his faithfulness, added my scent to his category of accepted creatures, calmed him until he crawled out from under the wagon and let me pet him.
I rummaged quietly through the wagon’s stores, took onions and dried greens and a pair of apples. Meat I could always find for myself. But I sliced a filet of raw beef from the carcass hanging inside the wagon and gave it to the dog. One good turn deserves another.
By dawn I was far from their camp, cooking a lizard spitted on a stick with onions. Then I resumed my northwesterly trek.
Twice I raided farmsteads. They were rare in this semidesert hill country, but here and there flowed a stream, and then sooner or later there would be a village with lonely isolated farms scattered about it. The villages were walled, of course, but the farms were not.
Usually the men were out in the fields during the day. There was no war for them to worry about, and bandits generally picked on the towns or caravans where they could find gold or other valuables. Me, all I wanted was food.
I would leave the horses hidden some distance away in the trees and brush along the steam, then make my way to the farm house. They were made of dried mud brick, roofed with unfinished branches daubed with mud. I would burst in, sword in hand. The women and children would scream and flee. Then I would help myself to all the food I could carry. By the time the men came back from the fields I was long gone.
Mighty warrior, I told myself after each of those silly little raids. Terrifying women and children.
Then I came across real bandits.
The ground was rising, and off along the horizon I saw low-lying clouds that might have marked Lake Van. If it was the lake, I was more than halfway to my goal, with still two weeks to get there.
I camped for the night in a hollow and built a sizable fire. The nights were cold up here, but there were plenty of trees and windfalls for firewood. I ate the last of my latest farm fare and wrapped my cloak about me, ready for sleep. In two weeks or less I would see Anya. If Aten had told me the truth. The possibility that he was toying with me, as Hera had earlier, bothered me. Yet I had no choice but to push ahead. If there was any chance at all that Anya would be at Ararat, I was going to be there to see her.
I was just dozing off when I sensed them. A dozen men. More. Stealthily approaching my fire.
I always kept my sword beside me under my cloak. I gripped its hilt now and rose to a sitting position, letting the cloak drop from my shoulders. Fourteen men, I saw, skulking around in the shadows beyond the firelight. All of them armed. Too many to take on, even for me.
“You might as well come in and warm yourselves,” I said. “You’re making too much noise for me to sleep.”
One of them stepped close enough to the fire for me to see him clearly. Tall, well-built, scruffy beard turning gray, a scar across his left cheek. He wore a black leather corselet, stained and scuffed with hard use, and held an iron sword in his right hand. Bareheaded, but he looked like a soldier to me. Or rather, an ex-soldier.