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.”
“What good are gold and silver coins to you?”
“My children, Orion. If they’re still alive they were sent to the slave market in Arbela or Trapezus or one of the port cities along the coast. I’m going to find them and buy their freedom.”
I wondered if he would live long enough to find two stolen children in all the vastness of this huge empire.
We were close enough to Lake Van to see its waters glittering in the setting sun, far off on the horizon, like a sliver of gleaming silver. But Harkan’s attention was on the caravan wending along the road below the ridge on which we had camped.
It was a big caravan. I counted thirty-seven donkeys laden with cargo, sixteen wagons lumbering along behind teams of oxen. And fully two dozen guards, armed with spears and swords, shields slung on their backs, bronze helmets glinting in the sun.
“Rich as Croesus,” Harkan muttered as we watched from behind a screen of young trees and shrubbery.
“And heavily guarded,” I said.
He nodded grimly. “Tonight. While they’re asleep.”
I agreed that would be the best tactic. But then I looked into his hard dark eyes and said, “This is my last raid with you, Harkan. Tomorrow I set out for Ararat.”
His gaze did not waver an inch. “If we’re both alive tomorrow, pilgrim.”
The men of the caravan were no fools. They arranged their wagons into a rough square for the night and posted guards atop them. The others slept inside the square, where they kept four big fires blazing. The horses and donkeys were herded into a makeshift corral by the stream that meandered along the side of the road.
Harkan had military experience, that I could see from the attack he planned and the crisp, sure orders he gave. There were fifteen of us, nearly fifty of them, all told. We had to use stealth and surprise to offset their numbers.
Only the two Cappadocians among Harkan’s men were bowmen, so his plan was to kill the two guards nearest our position with arrows fired from the dark beyond the light of their fires.
“As the arrows are fired, the rest of us charge,” he commanded.
I nodded in the darkness. As I made my way through the trees to the place where we had tied our horses, I thought once again that I would be killing men I had no grievance against, strangers who would die for no reason better than the fact that they had possessions that we wanted to steal.