The Hittite - Ben Bova [2]
I stepped into the shadowy interior of the house, my eyes quickly adjusting to the gloom. My heart sank. The room had been ransacked; table overturned, chairs smashed to splinters. The fireplace was cold and dark. I looked up to the loft where the beds were; silent, empty. The bedclothes had been torn off and ripped.
Then, in the far corner where my father had often told me tales of war and conquest, I saw his withered body on the packed earthen floor, huddled beneath a bloodstained cloak.
I had seen dead bodies before, by the score, by the hundreds. Yet the sight of my father there in the shadows made my throat go dry. I sank to my knees beside him and gently, gently turned him so I could see his face.
They had battered him terribly. Yet his eyes fluttered, then focused on me.
“Lukka . . .” His voice was a tortured sigh.
“Don’t try to speak. Let me—”
He clutched at my arm, his aged fleshless fingers still as strong as a hawk’s talons. “I knew you would return.” He coughed painfully. “I knew . . .”
“Quiet, Father. Quiet. I’ll get a healer, a priest.”
“No need. No use.”
He coughed blood.
“Your sons,” he gasped. “Gone . . .”
“Gone? Where?”
“They fled.” He coughed again, his frail body spasming in my arms. “Your wife was mad with panic. Slavers were breaking into the houses . . .”
“Slavers?”
“She feared them . . . she took my grandsons . . .”
The third child of war, I thought. The poor wretches who were not killed or maimed were made into slaves.
“Find them!” my father commanded me. Gripping my arm even harder, he hissed, “Find them. My grandsons. They are my flesh. Find them, Lukka. Find them!”
Those were his last words to me. He died in my arms, his blood soaking into the earthen floor while smoke from the burning thatch made my eyes sting and water.
2
My sons. My wife. Find them.
I took a spade from the corner by the fireplace, where my father had always kept his tools. Coughing from the thickening smoke, I dug a shallow grave for him there in his house, the home of my ancestors. I tried to remember the words for the dead, but my mind would not recall them. All I could think of was his final command to me. Find his grandsons.
If the slavers have found them they’re already dead, I thought. Slavers don’t keep young children, especially boys. Mouths to feed, and too small to do any useful work.
I got up from my knees while choking smoke filled the room and eager flames licked across the timbers of the roof. I stepped out onto the street. The air was thick with smoke. More houses were burning, I could see, as swaggering gangs of looters put the torch to what ever they could not carry away with them, roaring with drunken laughter. Men can turn into beasts so easily, I realized. Take away the authority of the emperor and even trained soldiers become looting, raping animals.
I wanted to kill them. Kill them all. Slash their guts out and watch their eyes go wide with pain and shock. But that was nonsense, of course. I could kill five of them, ten, a dozen. But in the end I would be swarmed under and cut to pieces. What would that accomplish? So I stayed my hand and waited in the doorway of the house in which I had been born.
The sky seemed to be darkening; drops of rain began to spatter the cobblestones. Not hard enough to stop the flames that were crackling on the roof, though.
My squad was nowhere to be seen. They’ll be back, I told myself. At sundown, they’ll return, just as I ordered them to.
But I wondered.
The world had split apart. The empire was in ashes and ruins. And my father had commanded me to find his grandsons, my little boys, and their mother, my wife: Aniti.
I had first met her on the day we were married in the temple of Asertu, nearly six years earlier. The two families had arranged the marriage