The Hittite - Ben Bova [22]
“You’re the Hittite?” he shouted over the driving rain.
I got to my feet and saw that I stood several fingers taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.
“I am Lukka,” I replied. “My men are—”
“Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.
“To where?”
Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseos wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”
Poletes scrambled up and pranced happily in the mud beside me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, to a rope ladder that led up to the deck.
“I knew Odysseos was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”
14
It was slippery going, clambering up the rope ladder in the wind-whipped rain. I feared that Poletes would fall. But, following Odysseos’ man, we made it to the boat’s deck and ducked under the striped canvas. The Ithacan opened a wooden chest and tossed a pair of large rags at us.
“Dry yourselves,” he said curtly. We did, gladly, as he shucked the dripping wolf ‘s pelt he’d been wearing and slung it to the deck with a wet slapping sound.
I threw my towel next to his sodden pelt. Poletes did the same. For long moments we stood there while the Ithacan looked us up and down.
“Presentable enough,” he muttered, more to himself than to us. Then he said, “Follow me.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance as we walked behind him around a wooden cabin. And there sat Odysseos, King of Ithaca.
He was sitting behind a bare trestle table, flanked on either side by two standing noblemen in fine woolen cloaks. He did not appear to be a very tall man; what I could see of legs seemed stumpy, though heavily muscled. His chest was broad and deep. Later I learned that he swam in the sea almost every morning. His thick strong arms were circled with leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. Puckered white scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.
The rain drummed against the canvas, which bellied and flapped in the wind scant finger widths above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. I felt chilled and Poletes, with nothing but his ragged loincloth, hugged his shivering body with his bare arms.
Odysseos wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had thrown a lamb’s fleece across his wide shoulders. His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair that showed a trace of gray. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.
“You are a Hittite?” were his first words to me.
“I am, my lord.”
“Why have Hittites come to Troy?”
I hesitated, trying to decide how much of the truth I should speak to him. Swiftly I realized that it had to be either everything or nothing.
“I seek my wife and two young sons who have been taken captive, my lord.”
He rocked back on his stool at that. Clearly it was not an answer he had expected.
“Your wife and sons?”
“My wife is among the High King’s slaves,” I added. “If my sons live, they must be with her.”
Odysseos glanced up at the nobleman standing on his left, whose hair and long beard were dead white. His limbs seemed withered to bones and tendons, his face a skull mask. He had wrapped a blue cloak around his chiton, clasped at the throat with a medallion of gold. Both noblemen appeared weary and drained by the morning’s battle although neither of them bore fresh wounds as Odysseos did.
The King of Ithaca returned his attention to me. “Who is he?” he