The Hittite - Ben Bova [8]
They gladly backed away.
“This is wrong, Lukka,” said Zarton, his heavy brows knitting sullenly.
“Don’t make me kill you,” I said evenly. “Put the spear down and obey my orders.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Zarton closed his other hand around the haft of his spear. But before he could lower its iron point at me I leaped at him, drawing my sword in the same motion.
He staggered back against the tree, shocked, and I stuck the point of my sword into his gut, just below the breastbone, and rammed the full length of the blade up into his chest. He looked surprised, his eyes wide with astonishment that I had not waited for him to set himself. Then his expression faded to a bewildered confusion as his mouth filled with bright red blood and his legs no longer supported him.
With a feeble little gasp Zarton collapsed against the tree’s rough bark and slid to the ground. His eyes stayed open but they went cold and dead.
Yanking my sword from his body, I turned to face the other men. They all seemed just as shocked as Zarton had been.
“We march to Troy. I don’t care how far it is or how many battles we have to fight to get there. We march to Troy. Is that understood?”
They nodded and muttered.
“Troy is a great city. It rules the Dardanelles and the Aegean beyond the straits. We can find a place in the service of the Trojan king,” I told them. “ We can become true soldiers again, instead of marauding robbers.”
Perhaps they believed me. Perhaps not. I didn’t care, not at that moment with foolish young Zarton lying dead at my feet with the flies already buzzing about him. I knew only one thing for certain: I would reach Troy or die in the trying. I picked up his spear and pointed with it down the road toward Troy.
We marched.
Yet that night, after a long day’s trek, I saw Zarton again in my dreams. He rose out of the grave I had dug for him and stared at me from the underworld beyond the Styx, shaking his head sadly, sadly, his eyes brimming with tears.
In his arms he held my two baby boys.
6
It was nearly sunset, two days after I had killed Zarton. We were picking our way slowly down a gradual slope, through the undergrowth of a forest that had once been thick with lofty, broad-boled trees. But now half the trees had been cut down, their stumps overgrown with ferns and twisting vines. In the distance we heard the sound of woodcutters chopping away methodically.
That meant a village had to be nearby, or perhaps a larger town. Without a word of command from me, the men spread out, hefting their spears and moving silently through the underbrush, schooled by long experience.
The chunking sound of the axes grew louder as we made our way through the woods. The trees thinned even more, and I motioned the men to drop to their knees. Through the screening underbrush I saw a team of half-naked ax men sweating away at their work in the lengthening shadows of the dying day. Four of them were cutting wood, six more were scurrying to pile the cut logs into a lopsided cart pulled by a big dun-colored bullock patiently munching his cud.
“Move! Move, you dogs!” bellowed a mean-faced taskmaster at the team. His accent was harsh, barely understandable. “You’ve got to get this cart loaded and back in camp before the sun goes down.”
His men were bone-thin, ragged, staggering under the loads they carried.
“And you whoresons!” roared the taskmaster. “Swing those axes or by the gods you’ll think Zeus’ thunderbolts are landing on your backs!”
He brandished a many-thonged whip. He was a big man with powerful bare arms, but a potbelly hung out through his leather vest. Shaved bald, he had a thick bushy beard the color of cinnamon and a livid scar running down one side of his ugly face.
The woodcutters were guarded by five spearmen in leather jerkins studded with bronze bolts. Their spear points were bronze, I saw. Probably the short swords hanging at their sides were, too. Each of them wore little conical helmets that looked, at this distance, to be leather rather than metal.
Off in the hazy horizon the setting