The Hittite - Ben Bova [108]
I shook my head to drive away such thoughts. Madness. I’m just a servant, as far as she’s concerned: a professional soldier who can help her to get away. Nothing more. I looked again at Helen’s face, so beautiful even though battered, her eyes filled with hope and expectation, innocent yet knowing. She was maneuvering me, I realized, using me to make her escape from these Achaian barbarians. Was she offering herself as my reward for defying Menalaos and Agamemnon? No, I thought. She expects me to do what she wishes because she’s a noblewoman and I’m trained to follow orders.
“Very well,” I heard myself say to her. “We’ll leave at first light.”
Helen beamed a smile at me. “I’ll stay here, then. With you.”
“You can stay here in the tent with Poletes and my sons. You’ll have to sleep on the ground.”
Helen nodded gratefully. “I’ll be back in a few moments,” she said, in a half whisper, then hurried out, pulling the hood of Apet’s black cloak over her golden hair.
I realized she was attending to nature’s call. I turned and looked down Poletes. He was stirring on the cot, muttering something. I bent low hear his words. “Beware of a woman’s gifts,” he croaked.
I frowned at him. “Now you utter prophecies instead of stories, old man.”
Poletes did not reply.
8
I slept poorly, on the ground outside the tent, knowing full well what lay ahead of us. What little sleep I got was filled with fitful dreams of Egypt, a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side by burning desert. The Hatti had fought wars against the Egyptians, in the land of Canaan beside the Great Sea. But Egypt itself no Hatti soldier had ever seen. My dreams showed me a land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless there. A land of massive pyramids standing like enormous monuments to the gods amid the puny towns of men, dwarfing all human scale, human knowledge.
It was still dark when I decided I could sleep no more. Egypt. Far-distant Egypt. We would have to travel a long time, through strange kingdoms and hostile territory. To bring fair-haired Helen to Egypt.
Once the first gray hint of dawn started lighting the eastern sky I roused my men and got them ready to leave. After a cold breakfast of figs and stale bread we loaded my boys and Poletes into one of the wagons with Helen, muffled once again in Apet’s hooded black robe.
Then it struck me. “What about your servant?”
From inside the hood Helen answered, “I can’t go back for her, Lukka. She’ll have to remain behind.”
“But once Menalaos realizes you’ve gone . . .”
“Apet will say nothing.”
“Even when they put her feet in the fire?”
Sitting up on the wagon’s headboard, Helen was silent for a heartbeat. Then, “Apet knows that if I’m not back to her by sunrise I’ve fled with you. She has sworn to kill herself before Menalaos can even begin questioning her.”
I felt my jaw drop open. “And you’ll let her die?”
“She’s very old, Lukka. She would only slow us down.”
“You’ll let her die?” I repeated.
“She loves me,” Helen said, her voice firm, as if she had thought it all out in her head and made her decision.
I stared up at her. Helen avoided my eyes. “You said you loved her,” I said.
With a burst of impatience, she demanded, “What would you have me do? You’re a soldier. Will you invade Menalaos’ camp and steal my servant away? You and your five men?”
I had no answer for that.
Leaving Helen sitting in her black robe, I straddled the thickly folded blanket that served as a saddle and nosed my horse toward Magro, who was leading a string of three ponies.
“Go drive the wagon,” I told him, reaching for the reins he held. “I’ll take the horses.”
“We’re really going to Egypt?” he asked, smiling quizzically at me.
I nodded.
“With your woman?” Magro tilted his head in Helen’s direction.
“She’s not my woman.”
Still smiling, “Then who is she?”
I decided to evade his question, for the time being. “Will it cause trouble with the men?