The Hittite - Ben Bova [4]
“Gone,” my father moaned. “Taken by slavers . . . your wife, your sons . . . gone . . . Find them . . . Find my grandsons.”
He died in my arms. The burning house crashed in on me.
I snapped awake and sat upright on the meager pallet of straw we had scraped together. Blinking the sleep away I slowly recalled where we were. A farmstead in the brown, scrubby hills off the royal road that led to Troy.
The farm wench beside me stirred slightly, then turned over, snoring.
I was soaked in sweat, like a weak woman instead of a Hatti soldier. In the gray light of early dawn I reached out my hand. My sword lay by my side. It had never been more than an arm’s length away from me, not for these past six months.
Perhaps my wife and children were already dead; we had found corpses enough along the royal road. But not my sons. Not my wife. Not yet.
How long can they live under the slavers’ lash? I wondered. My sons were little more than babies; the elder hardly five, his brother two years younger. How can she protect them, protect herself ? I felt as if I had been thrown into the deepest of all the world’s black pits, cut off from light and air and all hope. Suffocating, drowning, already dead and merely staggering through the motions of a living man.
Enough! I commanded myself. Don’t let despair swallow you. Battles are lost before they begin when soldiers surrender themselves to despair.
Reaching out my hand, I lifted my naked sword. Its solid weight felt comforting in the predawn gray. A Hatti soldier. What does that mean when the empire no longer exists? When there is no emperor to give commands, no army to carry the might of the imperial will to the far corners of the world?
All that matters to me now is my two little boys, I told myself. And my wife. I will find them. I will free them, no matter what it takes. Or die in the trying.
I got to my feet and gathered up my clothes, my iron-studded leather jerkin, my helmet and oxhide shield. As I stepped outside the crude lean-to that passed for a barn I saw that the sun was already tingeing the eastern horizon with a soft pink light.
My troopers were beginning to stir. Twelve of us were left, out of the original twenty. We did not look much like a squad of Hatti soldiers now, a unit of the army that served as the emperor’s mailed fist. Six months of living off the land, six months of raiding villages for food and fighting other marauding bands of former soldiers had transformed us into marauders ourselves.
I felt grimy. My beard itched as if tiny devils lived in it. There was a pond between the barn and deserted hut of a farm house. I waded into it. The water was shockingly cold, but I felt better for it.
By the time I had dried myself and pulled on my clothes, most of my men had risen from the blankets they had thrown on the ground and were stumbling through their morning pissing and complaining.
I waved to Magro, who had taken his turn as lookout, up on the big rock by the road. He came down and joined the men who were starting a cook fire. We had nothing but a handful of beans and a few moldy cabbages; the farm house and barn had already been picked clean, empty except for the sullen-faced wench we had found hiding in the dung pile.
I saw little Karsh sitting awkwardly on the ground, craning his neck to peer at the gash on his shoulder. He was a Mittani, not a true Hatti, but he was a good soldier despite his small size. More than a week ago he had taken a thrust by a screaming farmer who had leaped at us from behind a door, wielding a scythe. I myself had dispatched the wild-eyed old man, nearly hacking his head from his shoulders with one swing of my iron sword.
“How’s the shoulder, little one?” I asked. Karsh had been a downy-cheeked recruit when he had first joined my squad. Now he looked as lean and grim as any of us.
“Still sore, Lukka.”
“It was a deep wound. It will need time to heal completely.”
He nodded and we