Island of Fire (The Age of Bronze) (6 page)

There had been another southern ox-driver in a horned helmet. Peirít’owo’s father had been among the
Zeyugelátes
, the
wánaks
of Kep’túr. Kep’túr! Diwoméde’s hopes rose again, despite his efforts to hold them in check. When they reached the big island, maybe he could manage to steal away, run into the mountains, join a band of shepherds. If there were any bands of herdsmen left in Kep’túr, he warned himself. If any herds of cattle or flocks of sheep still remained anywhere to be watched, he forced himself to consider.
Ai
, no matter, he answered himself. It would be better to die where Ak’áyan gods had walked than to continue this miserable existence among foreigners, serving barbarians. Some veteran of the Tróyan war might even chance upon his bones and give them a decent burial. Then at least his soul would not be doomed to wander forever, thirsting always, barred from the realm of the dead in ‘Aidé.

Thirst again! He swallowed the barley in his mouth. It was not really soft yet, but he was tired of chewing it. Almost immediately, he regretted the move. The grain sat in his stomach, as hard and heavy as it had been in his mouth, like so many pebbles. Only with the greatest of effort did he keep his stomach from rebelling and casting the stuff back up. Time wore on slowly and the rocking of the little ship began to lull him back to sleep again. Off and on, he woke briefly before dropping off again, until he had completely lost track of the days. The voices of men roused him in the heat of a day. Diwoméde could not make out their words. But someone was shouting commands and, at the same time, others quarreled furiously. The cold, harsh growl of Ainyáh dominated, the higher pitch of youthful Peirít’owo’s objections punctuating the other man’s speech, interrupting at odd intervals. Mixed in, from time to time, were voices that the captive did not recognize, some of them hurling curses in languages he did not know.

Light began to creep into Diwoméde’s prison and he found he was walled into the stern by piles of grain sacks. He could sit up. But there was no room to stand and he could hardly see over the sacks to the rest of the cargo. There seemed to be nothing else but barley – no copper ingots, no jars of wine or olive oil, no baskets of dried fruits or rolls of linen cloth. Water or wine was there somewhere, he knew. It had to be. Ainyáh’s motley band of Tróyan and Kanaqániyan refugees might leave Diwoméde to die of thirst, but they would not deprive themselves. Still, he could not see anything to drink, much less reach it. The crewmen seemed to have forgotten the slave beneath the platform at the ship’s stern. That was Ainyáh above him, manning the long steering oar. But Diwoméde did not dare draw the Kanaqániyan’s attention. Ainyáh was more likely to have Diwoméde beaten than given food and drink.

Once more, the slave lay down on his rough bed, trying to distract himself with thoughts of other things. Why had Ainyáh purchased him? He could not understand it. They were implacable enemies. Ainyáh had betrayed his own wife’s people and helped the Ak’áyans win the Tróyan war, years before. They had seemed to be on the same side at that point. But the Kanaqániyan had lost the woman herself when the city had been taken. He had nursed a grudge against the Ak’áyans for a decade, because of that loss, certain that an Ak’áyan warrior must have killed or abducted his wife. Diwoméde never knew the truth of the woman’s fate, but he suspected she had simply died in the great fire that had consumed the fallen citadel, as had so many other noncombatants. During the dismal ten-year period that followed the war, all the lands bordering the Great Green Sea had been plagued by disease, drought, famine, and more war. Only the southern empire of Mízriya survived intact, thanks to the gift of its divine river. Even that survival had not come without cost. The peoples of less fortunate lands fought desperately for a chance to settle in the fertile flood-plain of that blessed Black Land. Still, desperation was not enough. Mízriya’s king held them all at bay, despite the efforts of men from the former principalities of the Náshiyan empire to the northeast, in Assúwa. The banks of the wondrous river remained Mízriyan, in spite of attempts by refugees from Kanaqán, from the Libúwan desert, and from Ak’áiwiya – Peirít’owo’s father prominent among them.

In retaliation for the attempted invasion of his land, the Mízriyan ruler had sent his mercenaries out to raid the homelands of those who had participated in the failed invasion. In their turn, warriors from all the petty kingdoms of Ak’áiwiya had joined in a punitive expedition against the Great King of the southern empire. Blood begets blood, after all, and vengeance cries out for still more revenge. Ainyáh had led the Ak’áyan fleet south with Peirít’owo at his side, ostensibly for their own share of revenge against the so-called Great House of Mízriya. But these two veterans of the earlier campaign had actually led Ak’áiwiya’s army into a trap. Ak’áyans died by the thousands at the hands of the forewarned Mízriyan warriors and their allies. Those of the attackers who survived – like Diwoméde – were sold into slavery.

But now, these same traitors, Aiyáh and Peirít’owo, were carrying Diwoméde out of Mízriyan captivity, and north, toward his homeland. Why? What more could they possibly want from him? He pondered the question until his head ached, but no answer came. The memories of those earlier disasters only grieved his soul. He forced his thoughts to turn away. But it was dark and all sounds were muffled. There was no room to move about, no way to relieve himself that would not leave him lying in his own waste. He was acutely uncomfortable and could think of no way to ease that discomfort.

He had known such harsh captivity before. Years earlier, on his way home from the Tróyan war, he had been captured after an abortive raid on a northern land and locked in a storeroom with no light but the little that peeked under the door. It had been a great, heavy door that had been bolted on the outside, immovable. Sweat trickled down his back and the hairs on the back of his neck rose as he remembered. Long days had stretched into weeks in that darkness, with little water and less food. He and his companions suffered the excruciating agony of wounds that festered, rotting, as they lay surrounded by the stench of their own wastes. One by one, his fellow warriors had all died. He had been alone then, too weak and sick even to pray for death any longer. That was when his enemy had cut off the outer half of his foot. A moan escaped his lips as he thought of it. He drew his knees to his chest, reaching for the mangled limb.

His memories were hazy after that. But his concubine had been there, he knew. He pictured Dáuniya sitting over him, washing the arrow wound in his shoulder, easing the fire in his shattered foot with poppy-tinged oil, stroking his hair, bathing his fevered limbs. “Beloved,” she always called him. She claimed that, captive though she might be, she had chosen him for her husband. It had made him angry at first. He was her master, her lord, he would often remind her. “
Owái
, Diwiyána,” he moaned to himself, “I would gladly hand over all the bronze I ever gained in every war if I could hear Dáuniya call me ‘beloved’ or ‘husband’ again.”

Beside the woman, through it all, had been an older foot-soldier, T’érsite. The man was nothing pleasant to look at, as wide as a bull, with few teeth and less hair on his head. He had a disrespectful tongue, as well. He claimed to be a king’s bastard and even Diwoméde’s own uncle. As a
qasiléyu
commanding a fortress, Diwoméde had laughed off that claim more than once. Still, the ungainly T’érsite had always given Diwoméde an unparalleled loyalty. It had been T’érsite who engineered Diwoméde’s deliverance from that previous captivity. That serving man, that captive woman – nothing and no one else had ever held greater value for Diwoméde. The slave was filled with such longing to see those two again that his throat ached. The dull pain slowly spread through his whole body.

“Think of something else,” Diwoméde whispered to himself. What was it that Ainyáh had said to the slave merchant? The Kanaqániyan had bought Diwoméde for another. Who? T’érsite! His heart leaped at the thought that it might be the serving man who had again devised his release. But no, that could not be, not this time, he told himself sternly. He and T’érsite were Argives. Argo’s last king had fallen in the invasion of Mízriya. It was true that Diwoméde had formerly been a
qasiléyu
, an important man in the land of Argo. But his queen bore nothing but hatred for him. Whether the
wánasha
Lawodíka had remarried to provide a new
wánaks
for the land, or whether she ruled Argo herself now, she would not pay good bronze to save her enemy (as she considered Diwoméde to be) from captivity. Besides, the long years of drought and famine had drawn men to her realm from all over southern Ak’áiwiya. Argo was still the largest, richest, and most powerful of the Ak’áyan kingdoms. She had no need to buy any man’s services when a thousand others would volunteer to take his place for nothing but a nod of her royal head.

No king from the north would take an interest in him, either, Diwoméde knew. Always relatively backward, even those kingdoms that had escaped the worst effects of the drought had suffered from the disorders that had accompanied it. Besides, it had been a northern land, Attika, that had held him captive all those years before. He had exacted a terrible vengeance for that, before the ill-fated Mízriyan campaign. At the time, it had seemed the honorable thing to do, for the sake of the souls of his fallen companions. Now he was no longer sure that he knew what honor was anymore. But right or wrong, Diwoméde knew he could expect no help from the feathered
P’ilístas
of northern Ak’áiwiya.

Not that the southern ox-drivers, the
Zeyugelátes
, were in any better position to assist him. Not only was Argo’s queen against him, but her power would prevent the other southern kings from helping him, at the same time. But maybe, the slave thought, Ainyáh’s client could be Orésta. By now, he would probably be the king of Argo’s southern neighbor, the kingdom of Lakedaimón. Diwoméde recalled with considerable anguish how the previous king of that land, Meneláwo, had gone down with his ships in Mízriya’s broad river. Orésta was Diwoméde’s half-brother and the only legitimate son of the Great
Wánaks
who had commanded the Ak’áyans at Tróya. But Lawodíka, Agamémnon’s daughter, hated her brother Orésta even more than she despised Agamémnon’s bastard, Diwoméde. No, Orésta would have all that he could handle, keeping his older sister at bay and holding Lakedaimón as his own. If indeed he still held it!

Whatever lay ahead for Diwoméde in Kep’túr, it could not be good, he concluded. His only hope was to escape. But could he do it? No matter, he told himself. If he died in the attempt, at least it would be a quick death, and, if not quite honorable, at least less spirit-crushing than by slow starvation. He rose to his knees and tried to push the topmost sacks of grain out of his way. The opening between the sack and the deck had to be enlarged if he was to get out. But, weak from hunger, dizzy with thirst and from the oppressive heat, he could not budge a single one. Tears of frustration welled in his eyes and he threw himself down again, only to be rewarded by a poke in the side by a sharp twig among the brush cushioning the ship’s hull.

That gave him an idea and a breath of something that was not quite hope. He broke off the stiff, little branch and stabbed the top sacks of grain in several places, tearing through the coarse linen easily. With trembling hands, he enlarged the holes he had made, allowing the kernels of barley to pour out He worked the sacks eagerly, kneading them with his calloused hands, speeding the process, sweeping the growing pyramids of grain down into the cracks among the sacks below, spreading the kernels across the space allotted to him there in the hold.

As Diwoméde toiled, his eyes moved nervously upward toward the rowing benches and the feet resting on the planks below. Every so often he paused, breathlessly straining to hear a sign that the men above noticed his activity. Dust soon filled the air as the grain continued to spill. He struggled to suppress his coughing, so as not to draw attention to what he was doing there, below. He continued to work at the sacks with one hand, cupping the other over his nose and mouth.

Ainyáh and his crew were tired from the long hours with little sleep and much rowing and sailing. They were angry with one another for no particular reason, and wasted considerable energy airing pointless complaints. “We should have reached Kep’túr by now,” one young man told his fellow rowers irritably. “We must be traveling in circles. I am sick of this endless, open sea. Let us go back to Libúwa. At least we had plenty of beer to drink there.”

“Go back!” Peirít’owo cried, angrier at the notion than was necessary, since their course had not changed. “Are you mad? Have the
maináds
carried off your senses? Our journey is nearly over and you seriously think that we would be better off going back the way we came?”

“Is that not what I just said?” the first man demanded, just as furious as the Kep’túriyan. “How do you know that we are almost there, anyway? Do not try to tell me that you can read our position by the stars, either. I have heard that lie before. It is utter nonsense! No sailor can do that.”

Peirít’owo hopped down from the platform at the stern of the ship to confront the oarsmen, where he was resting on his bench, his heavy oar in his lap. “
Ai gar
, the only nonsense here is spewing from your own mouth, Askán! Every true mariner on the Great Green Sea knows the night sky and its stars, as well as a shepherd knows the road to his pasture with its trees and stones! Now, shut your muzzle and keep your eyes on the sail. If the wind does not pick up soon, we will be rowing again. Save your strength for that.”