The Hittite (26 page)

I slept poorly, on the ground outside the tent, knowing full well what lay ahead of us. What little sleep I got was filled with fitful dreams of Egypt, a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side by burning desert. The Hatti had fought wars against the Egyptians, in the land of Canaan beside the Great Sea. But Egypt itself no Hatti soldier had ever seen. My dreams showed me a land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless there. A land of massive pyramids standing like enormous monuments to the gods amid the puny towns of men, dwarfing all human scale, human knowledge.

It was still dark when I decided I could sleep no more. Egypt. Far-distant Egypt. We would have to travel a long time, through strange kingdoms and hostile territory. To bring fair-haired Helen to Egypt.

Once the first gray hint of dawn started lighting the eastern sky I roused my men and got them ready to leave. After a cold breakfast of figs and stale bread we loaded my boys and Poletes into one of the wagons with Helen, muffled once again in Apet’s hooded black robe.

Then it struck me. “What about your servant?”

From inside the hood Helen answered, “I can’t go back for her, Lukka. She’ll have to remain behind.”

“But once Menalaos realizes you’ve gone . . .”

“Apet will say nothing.”

“Even when they put her feet in the fire?”

Sitting up on the wagon’s headboard, Helen was silent for a heartbeat. Then, “Apet knows that if I’m not back to her by sunrise I’ve fled with you. She has sworn to kill herself before Menalaos can even begin questioning her.”

I felt my jaw drop open. “And you’ll let her die?”

“She’s very old, Lukka. She would only slow us down.”

“You’ll let her die?” I repeated.

“She loves me,” Helen said, her voice firm, as if she had thought it all out in her head and made her decision.

I stared up at her. Helen avoided my eyes. “You said you loved her,” I said.

With a burst of impatience, she demanded, “What would you have me do? You’re a soldier. Will you invade Menalaos’ camp and steal my servant away? You and your five men?”

I had no answer for that.

Leaving Helen sitting in her black robe, I straddled the thickly folded blanket that served as a saddle and nosed my horse toward Magro, who was leading a string of three ponies.

“Go drive the wagon,” I told him, reaching for the reins he held. “I’ll take the horses.”

“We’re really going to Egypt?” he asked, smiling quizzically at me.

I nodded.

“With your woman?” Magro tilted his head in Helen’s direction.

“She’s not my woman.”

Still smiling, “Then who is she?”

I decided to evade his question, for the time being. “Will it cause trouble with the men? Jealousy?”

Magro scratched at his beard. “There’ve been plenty of women in the camp. Especially in the last two nights.”

“I don’t want the men dragging along camp followers.”

“The men are satisfied for now. We can move faster without camp followers, that’s for certain.”

I could see from the look in his eye that he was thinking I was already
dragging our little group down with two little boys and a blind old man. And now a woman.

Magro shrugged and let his smile grow wider. “We’ll find women here and there as we march, I suppose.”

I understood what he meant. “Yes. Our passage to Egypt won’t be entirely peaceful.”

His eyes locked on mine. “I hope we can leave the camp peacefully.”

I made myself smile back at him.

So we started out of the Achaian camp on the sandy beach. Ships were gliding out onto the sea, colorful sails bellying out as they caught the wind, carrying the victorious Achaians to their home cities. Troy still stood, gutted and burned black, its walls battered but still standing, for the most part. The sun rose in the east as it always does while our little pro cession of two carts and a dozen horses filed slowly through the gate that I had defended against Hector and down onto the strangely quiet plain of Ilios.

A pair of young warriors slouched by the gate, their spears on the ground, gnawing on haunches of roasted lamb. They waved lazily at us as we passed. Helen stayed inside the first wagon, tucked down among the bags of provisions with my two sons and Poletes.

We forded the shallow river and turned south, where the land rose slightly toward distant bare brown hills. I took over the wagon and let Magro take the horses. The rest of the men rode easily, glad to be mounted instead of afoot, as usual.

As we climbed the rutted trail I turned back for one last look at the ruin of Troy. The ground rumbled. Our horses snorted and neighed, prancing nervously. Even the donkeys pulling the carts twitched their long ears and hurried their pace unbidden.

“Poseidon speaks,” said Poletes from the depths of the wagon, his voice weak but clear. “The earth will shake soon from his wrath. He will finish the task of bringing down the walls of Troy.”

The old storyteller was predicting an earthquake. A big one. All the more reason to get as far away as possible.

Then Hartu, riding at the rear of our little group, pointed and shouted, “Lukka! Riders!”

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a cloud of dust. Riders indeed, I thought. Probably sent by Menalaos to search for his missing wife.

I snapped the reins, urging the donkeys onward. Thus we left Troy.

As I had feared, our journey southward was neither easy nor peaceful.

The whole world seemed to be in conflict. We trekked slowly down the hilly coastline, through regions that the Hatti called Assuwa and Seha. Once these people had been vassals of the emperor; now they were on their own, without the armed might of the Hatti to protect them, without the emperor’s law to bring order to their lives.

It seemed that every city, every village, every farm house was in arms. Bands of marauders prowled the countryside, some of them former Hatti army units just as we had been, most of them merely gangs of brigands. We fought almost every day. Men died over a brace of chickens, or even an egg. We lost a few men in these skirmishes and gained a few from bands that begged to join us. I never accepted anyone who was not a former Hatti soldier, a man who understood discipline and knew how to take orders. Our little band grew sometimes to a dozen men, never fewer than six.

I kept anxiously searching our rear, every day, for signs of Menalaos’ pursuit. Helen tried to convince me that her former husband would be glad to be rid of her, but I thought otherwise. There were times when the hairs on the back of my head stood up. Yet, when I turned to search, I could find no one following us.

I did not sleep with Helen. I hardly touched her. She traveled as one of our group, watching after my sons when she wasn’t tending to Poletes.
She never complained of the hardships, the bloodletting, the pain. She made her own bed on the ground out of blankets and slept slightly separated from the men. But always closer to me than anyone else. She wore no jewels and no longer painted her face. Her clothes were plain and rough, fit for traveling rather than display. It wasn’t easy, but I was determined to be her guardian, not her lover; too many complications and jealousies lay in that direction. If my coolness surprised her, she gave no hint of it.

Yet at night as I lay on the cold, hard ground I cursed myself for a fool. I knew that if I wanted her she would yield to me. What choice would she have? But I couldn’t take her that way. No matter the urges of my body, I could not force myself on her. Each night I felt more miserable, more stupid. And each night I dreamed of Helen, although sometimes her face changed to Aniti’s.

Poletes slowly grew stronger, and began to learn how to feel his way through his blindness. He was very good with my sons, amusing them for hours with his endless trove of stories about gods and heroes, kings and fools.

The boys were a constant source of joy for me. And worry. Too innocent to understand the dangers we faced, they played rough-and-tumble games whenever we camped. On the march they ran alongside our carts or begged rides on the horses, then returned to their wagon with Poletes or Helen. But even then they kept themselves busy turning empty flour sacks into tents, broken tools into magic swords. It never ceased to amaze me how little boys could turn almost anything into a toy.

I tried to keep them out of sight when we were in a village or town. And I insisted that Helen stay well hidden among the sacks and bundles in the wagons. She grew impatient, of course, as women will.

“But no one knows of me here,” she said as we approached the city of Ti-smurna. “We’re hundreds of leagues from Troy.”

I was sitting on the wagon’s highboard beside her, working the donkeys’ reins. Behind us, among the bales and baggage, Poletes was spinning a tale about Herakles to my two eagerly listening boys. The men
were riding the horses up ahead of us and the other wagon was trundling along in the rear, with the string of extra horses ambling along behind.

I shook my head. “How do you know that Menalaos or some other Achaians haven’t come to this city in search of you?”

She was wearing a simple shift, and the long weeks on the road had thinned her face somewhat. Her flawless skin was coated with dust, but her glorious hair shone in the sunlight like a torrent of gold.

Helen laughed at my fears. “ We left Ilios before Menalaos realized I was gone, Lukka. He couldn’t have gotten here ahead of us.”

“Couriers ride fast horses,” I said.

“We would have seen them on the road long before this,” she countered.

“Ships travel faster still.”

That stopped her. She knew that Menalaos had dozens of boats to send in search of her, if he wished. Even though we had traveled along the coast road most of the way, the road cut well inland in several places. A boat could have passed and we would never have seen it.

But Helen replied, “He’d never send one of his precious boats to seek me. He’d never admit I’d gotten away from him once again. No, Lukka, he’s telling everyone he killed me and burned my body. He’s not trying to find me.”

I nodded wearily. It was no use arguing with her. She was determined to believe what she wanted to believe. But I still felt that uneasy prickling sensation that warned me we were being followed.

Ti-smurna was a sizable city, the largest in the land of the Arzawa, who had been vassals of the Hatti emperor until the empire dissolved in civil war. I decided to bypass it. The men grumbled; they had been looking forward to finding a decent inn and sleeping under a roof for a change. With women. Helen became angry at my decision.

“You’re being foolish!” she snapped at me. “You’re frightened of shadows.”

I said nothing. A man doesn’t argue with an angry woman. I let her rant. Poletes talked to her that evening, while we camped within sight of the city’s walls. I don’t know what he said to her, but she calmed down.

Lukkawi and Uhri goggled at the walls of Ti-smurna, and the towers of the citadel that rose above them. To them, it was a magic city of princes and warriors. To me, it was a well-defended city, but hardly impregnable. I could see where a determined army with proper siege equipment could break through those walls and take the city. I wondered what kind of an army they had.

I sent Harta and one of the new men, a Phrygian named Drakos who spoke the local tongue well, into the city to see what they could learn. They returned a day later to report there was no knowledge of the fall of Troy or of Achaians seeking Helen. Yet I worried about being pursued. We skirted Ti-smurna and moved on, southward, still following the coast road.

The rainy season began, and although it turned the roads into quagmires of slick, sticky mud and made us miserable and cold, it also stopped most of the bands of brigands from their murderous marauding. Most of them, at least. We still had to fight our way through a trap in the hills a few weeks south of Ti-smurna.

I myself was nearly killed by a farmer who thought we were after his wife and daughters. Stinking and filthy, the farmer had hidden himself in his miserable hovel of a barn— nothing more than a low cave that he had put a gate to— and rammed a pitchfork in my back when I went in to pick out a pair of lambs. It was food we were after, not women. We had paid the farmer’s fat, ugly wife with a bauble from the loot of Troy, but the man had concealed himself when he had first caught sight of us, expecting us to rape his women and burn what ever we could not carry away with us.

He lunged at my back, murder in his frightened, cowardly eyes. Fortunately, Magro was close enough to knock his arm away partially. The pitchfork’s tines caught in my jerkin and rasped along my ribs; I felt them like a sawtoothed knife ripping into me.

Magro clouted him to his knees while I sank against the dank wall of the cave, hot blood trickling down my side. The farmer expected us to kill him by inches, and Magro had drawn his sword, ready to hack his head off. But I stopped him. We left him quaking and kneeling in the dung of his animals.

Back at the wagons, Magro helped me take off my leather jerkin and the linen tunic beneath it. The tunic was soaked with blood and badly ripped.

“It didn’t go deep,” Magro said.

I felt weak, sweaty. “Deep enough to suit me,” I muttered, lowering myself to the ground.

Tiwa came up with clean rags and a bucket of water. Helen walked slowly toward me, her eyes wide, her lips trembling.

“You’re hurt,” she gasped.

“It’s not serious,” I said, trying to sound brave. “I’ve had worse.”

She knelt at my side and took the bucket and rags from Tiwa. Without a word she dipped them in the water and began to gently clean my wounds. It hurt, but I said nothing. The men gathered around and watched until Helen tied two of the rags around my rib cage with her own hands.

“The bleeding will stop soon,” Magro muttered. Then he and the other men turned away, leaving Helen and me alone.

“Thank you,” I said to her, my voice half choking in my throat.

She nodded wordlessly, then got to her feet and walked back to the wagon. My two little boys were standing there by the donkeys, staring at me. I waved them over to me.

I could see the fear in their eyes.

“It’s nothing,” I said to them. “Just a scratch.”

Lukkawi made a tiny smile. To his brother he said bravely, “No one can kill our father.”

I wished that was true.