Orion and the Conqueror (19 page)

Another sign of unhappiness in the empire. Another man with an unsettled grievance. It began to look to me as if the vast empire of the Great King were rotting from the inside. Perhaps Alexandros could conquer it after all.

But all such thoughts flew out of my head when I saw the "Greek slave" to whom the Median soldier had been commanded to bring us.

Demosthenes.

"Don't look so surprised, Orion," he said to me, sitting at his ease in a cushioned chair in a luxurious palace apartment. A slave woman knelt in the far corner of the room. The table in the room's center was decked with a huge bowl of fruit and a silver decanter of wine chilled so well that its curved surface was beaded with water droplets. Demosthenes wore a long woolen robe of deep blue. He seemed to have recovered his aplomb since the last time I had seen him, or perhaps it was simply that he was not facing the fierce hatred of Alexandros. Still, he had grayed, and his eyes squinted beneath their bushy brows.

"You knew I was receiving the Great King's gold," Demosthenes said, leaning back in his chair.

"I did not know that you were his . . . servant."

"I serve Athens," he snapped. "And democracy."

"The Great King supports democracy?"

Demosthenes smiled uneasily. "The Great King supports anyone who can help him defeat Philip."

"Have you been exiled, then?" Ketu asked.

His smile turned grim. "Not yet. But Philip's friends are working hard to have the Assembly ostracize me. That's his way: show the open hand of peace and friendship while he gets his lackeys to stab you in the back."

"Why have you sent for us?" asked Ketu.

As if he suddenly realized that he was being less than polite, Demosthenes indicated the other chairs with his out-swept hand. "Sit. Please, make yourselves comfortable. Slave! Bring cups for my guests."

Ketu sat. I walked over to the window and looked down. A lovely courtyard garden was being tended by ragged dark-skinned slaves. Through the open doorway I saw the Median soldier and his squad lounging out in the corridor.

"Why have you summoned us?" I repeated Ketu's question.

"I am now an advisor to the Great King. You might say that I have his ear. He has asked for my opinion of Philip's offer. I want to hear what it is for myself, from the lips of the Great King's ambassador."

"You don't need me for that," I said.

"No, there's something else that I want you for," said Demosthenes.

"What is it?"

"The ambassador first."

The slave brought us cups and poured the wine. It was I cold and biting, yet warmed my innards as I drank of it. Ketu repeated Philip's offer and demands practically word-for-word.

"Much as I expected," Demosthenes muttered when the ambassador was finished, blinking nervously.

"What will be your advice to the Great King?" asked Ketu.

"That is for me to tell Dareios, not you," he answered, with some of his old haughtiness. "You will learn of his decision when he is ready to give it."

I thought I knew what Demosthenes would say to Dareios: refuse to surrender the cities and the islands, but make no warlike step against Philip. Demosthenes wanted to get Philip to start the war, so that he could tell the Athenians and anyone else who would listen that the barbarian king of Macedonia wanted to drown all the world in blood.

He looked at me as if he could read my thoughts. "You don't like me, do you, Orion?"

"I serve Philip," I replied.

"You think me a traitor to Athens? To all the Greeks?"

"I think that, no matter what you tell yourself, you serve the Great King."

"Yes! I do!" He pushed himself out of his chair to face me on his feet. "I would serve the Furies and Chaos itself if it would help Athens!"

"But you said that Athens no longer listens to your voice, no longer wants your service."

"That doesn't matter. The danger of a democracy is that the people will be misled, will be tricked into following the wrong road."

"I see. Democracy works fine as long as the people do what you want them to. If they vote otherwise, it is a mistake."

"Most people are fools," said Demosthenes. "They need leaders. They need to be told what to do."

"And that is democracy?" I asked.

"Bah! No matter what the people
think
they want, I serve Athens and the cause of democracy! I will use the Great King, the Spartans, the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air if it helps me to fight Philip and his bastard son."

It was my turn to smile. "You had your chance to fight them at Chaeroneia."

The barb did not bother him in the slightest. "I'm a politician, Orion, not a warrior. I discovered that at Chaeroneia, true enough. Now I fight in the way I know best. And I will beat Philip yet."

"I am a warrior, not a politician," I replied. "But let me ask you this question: would Athens and its democracy be safer under the Great King's authority, or under Philip?"

He laughed. "Yes, you're no politician at all, are you? You see things in black and white too much."

"So?"

"The Great King will leave Athens and the other cities of Greece alone, leave them free, if the threat of Philip can be eliminated. He wants the Ionian cities to remain in his empire. I am willing to let him have them in return for Athens' freedom."

Ketu spoke up. "That is the nature of politics: you give something to get something else. Give and take—favors, gifts, alliances . . . even cities."

"Aristotle told me," I said, "that the Persian Empire will inevitably engulf all of Greece. Athens will become a vassal of the Great King, just as Ephesos and the other Ionian cities are."

Demosthenes frowned. "Aristotle is a Macedonian."

"No—" objected Ketu.

"Stagyrite," said Demosthenes. "They've been part of Macedon long enough."

"But what of Aristotle's prediction?" I asked. "If he's correct, by helping the Great King you are slowly strangling the democracy you cherish so much."

Demosthenes paced the length of the room, all the way to the window and back to me, before answering. "Orion, I have a choice between Philip and the Persians. Philip is at Athens' gates; the Great King is many months' journey away. Philip will swallow us up in a gulp, like a wolf—"

"But he has left Athens alone," Ketu pointed out. "He has not occupied the city with his soldiers nor demanded any political power in the city's government."

"Of course not. What he does is to place his friends in power, Athenians whom he has bought with gold and silver. He
uses
our democracy to serve his own ends."

"But he leaves your democracy untouched," I said. "Would the Great King allow that, if he were in Philip's place?"

"But he's not."

"He will be, sooner or later, if we can believe Aristotle."

Demosthenes threw up his hands. "Bah! This is getting us nowhere." He turned to Ketu. "Ambassador Svertaketu, I will ponder the terms you bring from Philip and make my recommendation to the Great King. You may go."

I took a step toward the door.

"Not you, Orion," said Demosthenes. "I have further words for you."

Ketu glanced at me, then made a small bow to Demosthenes and left the room. The soldiers outside snapped to attention and escorted him down the corridor, to his own quarters in the palace, I presumed.

Clapping his hands sharply enough to make the slave woman jump, Demosthenes said, "You too. Go. Leave us."

She hurried for the door.

"And close the door behind you!"

She did as he commanded.

"All right, then," I said. "What do you want of me?"

"Not him, Orion," said a voice from behind me. "I'm the one who has a message for you."

I turned and saw the Golden One, Aten, the self-styled god who created me. He glowed with energy. Golden hair, flawless face, body as strong and powerful as my own. He wore a magnificent robe of pure white, trimmed in gold. He had not been with us an instant earlier, and there was neither a door nor a window on that side of the room.

Glancing back at Demosthenes, I saw that he was frozen into immobility, like a statue.

"Don't worry about him," said the Golden One. "He can neither see nor hear us."

His smile was wolfish. A shock of recognition raced through me. He looked like an older Alexandros—so much so that he could have been Alexandros' father.

Chapter 21

"You recognize me," said Aten, smiling with self-satisfaction.

"Where is Anya?" I asked.

"Athena," he corrected. "In this timeplace she is known as Athena."

"Where is she? Is she here?"

His smile disappeared instantly. "Anya will be here briefly; near here, at any rate. At a mountain called Ararat. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes!"

"She wants to see you there, but she can be there only for a very short time. It's up to you to get there in time to meet with her."

"When?"

"As you reckon time, in five weeks. Five weeks from today's sundown. That is when she will appear at the summit of Ararat. Although why she continues to bother about you is beyond me."

"Can you take me there?"

He shook his golden head. "Orion, I am your creator, not a delivery service."

"But, five weeks—Ararat is so far away."

He shrugged. "It's up to you, Orion. If you want to see her, you will get there on time."

Sudden anger welled up in me. "What is this, another one of your childish games? Some kind of a test to see if your creature can be made to jump through another hoop?"

"It's not a game, Orion." His face went hard, grim. "This is deadly serious."

"Then tell me what's going on!" I demanded.

With an exasperated huff, Aten answered, "It's your own fault, creature. Anya took on human form because she felt sorry for you, and she found that she enjoyed being a human. She even thinks she loves you, whatever that means."

"She does love me." I said the words half as a hope, half to reassure myself.

"If it comforts you to think so," sneered the Golden One. "Anya seemed so taken by the attractions of human form that some of the other Creators have dabbled at it. Hera and I came to this era and began to play at making kings and emperors."

"You and Hera?"

"Does that shock you, Orion? I must confess that human passions can be very. . . intense. Almost satisfying."

"Hera wants to make the son she bore to Philip into emperor of the whole world."

"Bore to Philip?" Aten laughed aloud. "Don't be stupid, Orion."

"
You
fathered Alexandros!"

"As I said, Orion, human passions can be very amusing. Not merely the gross physical pleasures, but the excitement of setting one group against another, the chess game of armies and nations. It's exhilarating!"

"Then why do you need me?" I demanded.

"You are part of the game, Orion. One of my chess : pieces. A pawn, of course."

"Hera said that the continuum is being threatened as never before. She said all of the Creators are in danger."

His condescending smirk faded. "It's all your fault, Orion," he repeated. "Yours and Anya's."

"How so?"

"Taking on human form and living human lifetimes. Phah!"

"But you're in human form," I said.

"Only when it pleases me, Orion. What you see now is merely an illusion." And Aten shimmered, shifted before my eyes, became a glowing sphere of brilliant gold, too bright to look at, like the sun. I had to throw my arms over my face. Still I felt the fierce intensity of his radiance.

"It is difficult to hold a conversation with a creature in our true form," he said, pulling my hands away from my eyes. He was a human again.

"I . . . understand."

He laughed at me again. "You think you understand, but you can't comprehend even a millionth of it, Orion. Your brain was not built to encompass our abilities."

I pushed my anger aside. "You said Anya will be at Ararat in five weeks."

"Five weeks' time. At sundown. On the summit of Ararat."

"I will be there."

He nodded. "It really doesn't matter if you are or not. Apparently Anya feels sorry for you. But truly, our work would be easier if she simply forgot about you."

"That's not what she wants to do, is it?"

"No. Apparently not." His face glowered with disapproval. "Well, I've delivered her message. Now I have my own tasks to accomplish."

He began to fade.

"Wait!" I called, reaching out to grab his arm. My hand went through emptiness.

"What is it?" he said impatiently, shimmering, almost invisible.

"Why am I here, in this timeplace? What am I supposed to be accomplishing?"

"Nothing, Orion. Nothing at all. But as usual, you've managed to make a mess even of that."

And he winked out like a candle flame snuffed by a gust of wind.

Demosthenes stirred, came back to life. He scowled at me, "You still here, Orion? I thought I had dismissed you with the ambassador."

"I am leaving now," I said, adding mentally,
for Ararat.

The swiftest way to travel is alone. I knew I could not take the Macedonian soldiers with me, even had I wanted to. Their duty was to accompany Ketu back to Pella with the Great King's reply to Philip's offer, once Dareios got around to making his reply. That was my duty, too, but now I had a more urgent task to perform.

I had to get to Ararat, and that meant leaving my sworn duty to Philip and somehow getting out of Parsa despite all the soldiers guarding the palace city of the emperor.

So that night I stole a horse—two of the horses that we had ridden into Parsa upon, actually. I took them from the stables where our mounts had been put up. It was not particularly difficult. We exercised the horses every day, so the stable grooms were accustomed to seeing us. The two boys sleeping in the stables that night seemed more puzzled than upset that a man would want to exercise horses by the light of the moon. They soon settled back in their pallets of straw as I told them I would fit out my horse myself and did not need them to help me.

I walked the two horses to the palace gate. The guards were accustomed to keeping people from entering rather than leaving. Still they stopped me.

"Where do you think you're going, barbarian?" asked their leader. There were four of them that I could see, perhaps more in the guard house built into the palace wall.

"It's a nice night for a ride," I answered easily.

"There's an exercise course on the other side of the stables," he said. In the moonlight, his face looked cold and hard. The three guards with him all carried swords, as he did. I could see a half-dozen spears leaning against the side of the guard house.

"I want to get outside the city, have a good run."

"On whose authority? You can't leave the palace grounds without permission."

"I'm a guest of the Great King's," I said. "Isn't that authority enough?"

"A guest!" He tilted his back and laughed. So did the others. I leaped onto the back of the nearer horse and kicked it into a gallop before they realized what was happening. The reins of my second horse were in my hand and it followed right behind me.

"Hey! Stop!"

I leaned against my mount's neck, expecting a spear to come whizzing past. If they threw any I neither saw nor heard them as I clattered through the wide, paved avenues of Parsa, heading for the city wall.

They could not get a message to the guards at the wall faster than I could get there, I knew, but there was no time to waste palavering at the wall. I simply kept on going, since the gate was open. I could see the guards up ahead jerking their sleepy heads with surprise at the clopping of the horses' hooves against the paving stones. The gate was only partly open, but wide enough if I got to it before they could push it closed. Surprise has its advantages. They stood in stunned disbelief as I galloped toward them, reacting too slowly to stop me. I heard them shouting. One of them even stepped out in my path and waved his arms, trying to shy the horses off. But they had the bit in their teeth and they were not going to stop. He jumped aside and we dashed through the gate and out into the broad moonlit scrubland.

I took no chances on being pursued, but kept speeding along until we cleared the first small ridge beyond the city walls. Then I quickly changed mounts and started off again. By morning I was in the hills, and when I looked back I could see the city, standing against its cliff like a precisely-engineered square. The road was empty except for a wagon train coming toward the same gate I had left by.

I was free. On my own. And hungry.

Thus I became a bandit, a hunted outlaw. Perhaps "hunted" is too strong a word to use. The lands of the Persian Empire were vast, the soldiers of the Great King concentrated in the cities and larger towns, or used as guards to escort important caravans. Otherwise, a bandit had little to fear. Except other bandits.

For the first few days I nearly starved. I was moving north and west, staying off the Royal Road, heading for the high mountain country and Ararat. The land about me was semi-desert, sparsely settled. There were irrigated farms near Parsa, of course, to support the city. But the farther away from Parsa I rode, the fewer the people and scarcer the food.

The horses could crop the miserable scrub easily enough. And, after the rumbling in my stomach got loud enough to remind my brain, I realize that I would have to do what they were doing, at least for the time being: live off the land.

Ground squirrels and snakes are not the preferred delicacies of the highly refined palate, but for those first several days out in the open they were good enough for me. Then I found a band of farmers driving a herd of cattle toward Parsa. I thought about offering them to work in exchange for a meal, but they obviously did not need a stranger to help them with what they were already doing by themselves. And strangers would probably be immediately suspect. And they were heading in the wrong direction, anyway. So I waited for nightfall.

They posted a single sentry, more to keep the cattle from straying than in fear of bandits, I suspect. They had dogs with them, too, but I managed to work my way upwind and sneak past them all once the moon had set. My old skills as a hunter returned to me when I needed them. Did I do this on my own, or had Aten or Anya or one of the other gods unlocked part of my memory?

I made my way to their cook wagon. There was a dog beneath the wagon, and he began to growl menacingly as I approached. I froze, wondering what to do. Then another part of my memory seemed to open to me, and I recalled a time long ago, before the Ice Age, when Neanderthals controlled the beasts of the forest with a form of mental telepathy.

I closed my eyes and visualized the dog, felt his fear, his hunger. In a strange distorted way I saw myself through the dog's eyes, a dark figure against the starry sky, a stranger who smelled very different from the master and his kin. Mentally I soothed the dog, praised his faithfulness, added my scent to his category of accepted creatures, calmed him until he crawled out from under the wagon and let me pet him.

I rummaged quietly through the wagon's stores, took onions and dried greens and a pair of apples. Meat I could always find for myself. But I sliced a filet of raw beef from the carcass hanging inside the wagon and gave it to the dog. One good turn deserves another.

By dawn I was far from their camp, cooking a lizard spitted on a stick with onions. Then I resumed my northwesterly trek.

Twice I raided farmsteads. They were rare in this semi-desert hill country, but here and there flowed a stream, and then sooner or later there would be a village with lonely isolated farms scattered about it. The villages were walled, of course, but the farms were not.

Usually the men were out in the fields during the day. There was no war for them to worry about, and bandits generally picked on the towns or caravans where they could find gold or other valuables. Me, all I wanted was food.

I would leave the horses hidden some distance away in the trees and brush along the steam, then make my way to the farm house. They were made of dried mud brick, roofed with unfinished branches daubed with mud. I would burst in, sword in hand. The women and children would scream and flee. Then I would help myself to all the food I could carry. By the time the men came back from the fields I was long gone.

Mighty warrior, I told myself after each of those silly little raids. Terrifying women and children.

Then I came across real bandits.

The ground was rising, and off along the horizon I saw low-lying clouds that might have marked Lake Van. If it was the lake, I was more than halfway to my goal, with still two weeks to get there.

I camped for the night in a hollow and built a sizable fire. The nights were cold up here, but there were plenty of trees and windfalls for firewood. I ate the last of my latest farm fare and wrapped my cloak about me, ready for sleep. In two weeks or less I would see Anya. If Aten had told me the truth. The possibility that he was toying with me, as Hera had earlier, bothered me. Yet I had no choice but to push ahead. If there was any chance at all that Anya would be at Ararat, I was going to be there to see her.

I was just dozing off when I sensed them. A dozen men. More. Stealthily approaching my fire.

I always kept my sword beside me under my cloak. I gripped its hilt now and rose to a sitting position, letting the cloak drop from my shoulders. Fourteen men, I saw, skulking around in the shadows beyond the firelight. All of them armed. Too many to take on, even for me.

"You might as well come in and warm yourselves," I said. "You're making too much noise for me to sleep."

One of them stepped close enough to the fire for me to see him clearly. Tall, well-built, scruffy beard turning gray, a scar across his left cheek. He wore a black leather corselet, stained and scuffed with hard use, and held an iron sword in his right hand. Bareheaded, but he looked like a soldier to me. Or rather, an ex-soldier.

"I don't have anything worth stealing," I said, still sitting. Then I realized that they would happily slit my throat for the two horses.

The others slowly came closer, forming a ring around me and the fire.

"Who are you? Why are you here?"

"My name is Orion. I'm heading for Ararat."

"The sacred mountain? Why?"

"He's a pilgrim," said one of the other men, with a wolfish grin. Like the first, he wore the black leather corselet of a military uniform.