Vengeance of Orion (20 page)

"Then I will continue to help you."

"And you will tell me
exactly
what they say to you, whenever they contact you again."

"If you wish," I said.

"I do not wish, Orion. I command. I can see your thoughts as clearly as words written across the sky in fire. You cannot hide anything from me."

"Then you see your own death."

He laughed, with genuine humor this time. "Ah, Orion, you truly believe that you can conquer the gods."

"You are not gods. You can delude ignorant nomads such as Joshua and his people, but I know you better."

"Of course you do," he patronized. "Now, get back to your Helen and let her try to wheedle you off to Egypt again."

There was nothing he did not know, I realized. He stood before me, and even in his disguise I could sense his condescending smile.

"Tell me one thing," I asked. "Why is Jericho so important? Why are these people of Joshua's so dear to your heart? Once you said that you are not so egocentric as to be pleased when people worship you. Is that still true?"

For a moment or two he did not answer. When he finally did, his voice was low and serious. "Yes, it is still true, Orion. It is pleasant to have my creatures adore me, I admit. But the real reason for Jericho, the real reason I will bring these people to rule this land of Canaan, is to humble those others who seek to thwart my plans. They stopped me at Troy, with your help. They will not stop me here!"

I had no reply to his words.

"They think me mad, do they? We shall see who is the true protector of the continuum. They will all bow to me, Orion. All of them!"

He turned and walked toward the river alone. I watched him in the deepening shadows of night, as the stars came out one by one, until his figure had disappeared into the darkness.

Chapter 30

"This could destroy all our plans, all our hopes."

Ben-Jameen's youthful face looked very grave. He stood in my tent alongside Lukka, with one of the Hatti soldiers behind, head hung low, two other soldiers flanking him, and a small angry crowd of Israelite men standing just outside in ominous silence.

Helen sat in the far corner of the tent, on a wooden chair that had been given to me by one of Ben-Jameen's brothers. One of the women had brought her a soft, feathered cushion, gaily decorated in bold stripes of red and blue.

But Ben-Jameen ignored her and said to me, "This Hittite soldier has had his way with one of the young women of my tribe, and now refuses to do the right thing by her."

I was surprised, almost stunned, at this. For weeks now we had lived in the Israelite camp without a hint of trouble. Hardly any of the women would have anything to do with men who were not of their own tribes. The few who did, young widows and the rare unmarried woman who did not worry about her virginity, had been enough to keep Lukka and his men reasonably happy.

But now one of the young women demanded marriage as the price of her lovemaking.

I looked at Lukka. His face was grimly impassive as he stood before me. I saw that his sword was at his side. Ben-Jameen, standing beside him, looked almost like a child: smaller, slimmer,

his youthful face unlined, unscarred by battle. But he was representing the honor of his tribe.

"Bring the man before me," I said.

Lukka raised a hand. "With your permission, my lord, I will speak for the prisoner."

I raised an eyebrow.

"It is customary among us," said Lukka. "I am his commanding officer. I am responsible for his conduct."

So that was the way the game would be played, I said to myself. Lukka was standing between me and the accused man. If I wanted to mete out punishment, it would have to touch Lukka first.

Ben-Jameen glanced at the bearded soldier, and seemed to understand what Lukka's words implied.

"The young lady in question," I asked Ben-Jameen, "was she forced?"

He shook his head. "She does not claim so."

"Was she a virgin?"

Ben-Jameen's eyes widened. "Of course!"

I turned to Lukka. He shrugged slightly, "That is a matter of her word against the word of the accused."

Ben-Jameen's face went red. "Do you mean that you claim she was not?"

I held up both hands to stop the fight before it truly started. "There is no way to prove the point, one way or the other." Then I asked, "What does she want of this man?"

"Marriage."

"Does her father approve of this?"

"He demands it!"

I looked past them to the accused soldier, but his head was bowed so low I could not see his face. To Lukka, I asked, "Is the man willing to marry this woman?"

"Yes, he will marry her."

I thought I saw the soldier twitch, as if a hot needle had been jabbed into his flesh.

"Then what is the problem?"

"To marry into our tribe," Ben-Jameen said, "it is necessary to accept our religion."

"And that he will not do," said Lukka. "His god is Taru, the storm god, not some invisible spirit with no name."

I thought Ben-Jameen would burst. He turned flame red from the roots of his scalp all the way down his neck. If he had carried a weapon he would have attacked Lukka on the spot, I am sure.

I took him by the shoulders and made him face me. "Different men worship different gods, my friend," I said, as softly as I dared. "You know that."

He took a deep, shuddering breath. His face returned to something more like its normal color.

"Besides," Lukka added, "to join their religion he would have to be circumcised, and that he will not do."

"Is that necessary?" I asked Ben-Jameen.

He nodded.

I could hardly blame the man for refusing to allow himself to be circumcised. Yet he had picked the wrong woman to play with. She gave him sex and now expected her payment of marriage. The Israelites demanded that their women marry only men of their own faith, so he had to accept her religion. If he refused, we might well be overrun by her angry relatives who would slaughter us in the name of family honor and religious purity. Of course, we would take many of them to the grave with us, but it would end with all of us dead and Jericho still standing.

Almost, I wished that the Golden One was truly a wise and compassionate god who would descend upon us and bring the light of sweet reason to this thorny problem. Almost.

I looked Ben-Jameen in the eye and said, "My friend, it seems to me that if the man is willing to marry the young lady, that is sufficient. He did not go to her for religious revelation, but for love. You can't expect him to change his religion."

Before he could think of a reply, I added, "And, as you know, we have the sworn word of Joshua himself that once Jericho has fallen, we will be permitted to leave you and go on our way to Egypt. Is the young lady willing to accompany her husband to that land? Is her family willing to see her part from them?"

The youthful Israelite took a long time to consider his answer, frowning with thought as we all stood there, waiting for him to respond. He knew as well as I what was at stake here. Would he be willing to sacrifice this girl's honor for the sake of conquering Jericho?

It was Helen who broke the silence.

She rose from her chair and walked slowly toward me, saying, "You men cause such troubles! The poor girl, I understand how she feels."

Ben-Jameen stared at her. Helen wore a simple modest robe, but her golden hair and obvious beauty made even the simplest garments seem royal.

She came up beside me, and twisted the ring from her right index finger. It was a heavy circle of gold, set with a shining ruby.

"Give this to your kinswoman," Helen said, "and tell her it is a gift of a queen. She must be content with it, for the man she loves cannot marry her."

"But my lady . . ."

"Shush," said Helen. "What kind of a husband would she have, he did marry her? An unwilling man who would blame her for every drop of rain that falls upon him. A soldier who knows nothing but violence, and who would run away from her the first chance he gets. Or drag her back to Egypt, the land of her slavery. Tell her father that he should be happy to be rid of him. After Jericho falls and we have left, let him consider her a widow. This ring will help her to find a fitting husband from among her own people."

"But her honor," said Ben-Jameen.

"Nothing can replace that. Yet she gave it away willingly enough, did she not? She has made a grievous mistake. Don't force her to compound it with an even greater one."

Ben-Jameen held the ring in one hand. He looked at Helen, then turned to me. Scratching his head, he finally said, "I will bring this to her father, and see if he agrees with your wisdom, my lady."

"He will," Helen replied.

Ben-Jameen walked slowly out of my tent, passing the guarded soldier like a man lost so deeply in thought that he barely sees where he is heading. The men outside babbled and muttered and chattered as they all headed back toward the tents of their tribe.

I smiled at Helen. "Thank you. That was very thoughtful of you, very wise. And very generous."

She made a haughty little smile back. "Any price is worth it if it speeds the day when we can leave this wretched place."

Lukka agreed. Waving a hand to tell his soldiers to get back to their tents, he said to me, "Maybe now we can get back to the business of bringing down that damned wall."

Chapter 31

Joshua's "joyful noise unto the Lord" consisted of a marching band. He gathered together all the priests of his people in their most colorful robes and turbans, and had them march around the city's walls, carrying a beautifully crafted gold-plated wooden chest on a pair of long poles, preceded by seven men blowing on ram's horn trumpets and followed by more trumpets, drums, and cymbals.

The chest was a religious icon that Joshua called the ark of the covenant. I was never allowed to get close enough to see it in detail. In fact, Ben-Jameen insisted that merely to touch it would mean instant death. I wondered if it were some kind of equipment for communicating with the other realm in which the Golden One and his kind lived, but Ben-Jameen told me it contained two stone tablets bearing the laws given directly to Moses by their god.

I knew better than to argue religion, even with the youthful Ben-Jameen. The priests and their marching band made their joyful noise, circling the city walls all day long, fresh men coming up to replace tired ones as the day wore on.

Under cover of their music and chanting, we chipped away at the foundations of the main wall. Using Hittite iron spear points, we had broken through the two outer retaining walls, then tunneled fairly easily through the accumulated debris of thousands of years that made up Jericho's hill. There was room now for our diggers to make the tunnel high enough for a man to stand in. When we hit the main wall's foundations, Joshua started his priests in motion.

At first they marched some distance away from the wall, and the soldiers up on the parapets eyed them very suspiciously, waiting for some kind of surprise attack. But even by the end of the first day, more and more women and children were up on the walls, watching this strange and colorful procession.

For six days they marched and played their instruments and chanted while we scraped and scratched at the massive foundation of the wall. The citizens of Jericho lined the parapets now, waving and jeering. Now and then some child would throw something, but no missile of war was directed at the marchers. Perhaps the people of the city thought it unwise to fire upon priests, or unlucky to risk incurring the wrath of a god. Perhaps they thought that the Israelites were trying to drive them all mad with the constant music and chanting.

That is what Helen thought. "I can't bear that horrid noise anymore! My ears ache from it!"

It was night, and the only sounds outside our tent were the drone of insects and the distant voice of a mother singing a soft lullaby to her children.

"If you truly visit the gods," she said, "why can't you ask them to topple the wall for you?"

I smiled. "I did. And they told me to do it myself."

Despite herself, Helen smiled back. "The gods are not always kind to us, are they?"

"Tomorrow will be the end of it," I said to her. "We've finished the digging. Now comes the fire."

I left Helen alone in our tent and went out into the darkness to supervise the preparations for tomorrow's assault. All the men who had been working so hard at the digging were now bringing brushwood from the fields, dragging it through the tunnel, and piling it up at the base of the main wall's foundation.

As I had expected, the wall's dried bricks were framed every few yards by stout timbers. Some of them were very ancient, dry as tinder. When they caught fire, the whole section of the wall would cave in. Or so I hoped.

Through the whole long night the men brought the brushwood to the tunnel and packed it against the wall's foundation. Lukka and two of his best men were down there, supervising the work and poking air holes along the base of the wall, so that the fire would not choke itself to death.

Finally it was finished. Lukka came out as the first hint of gray began to lighten the sky behind the mountains of Gilead and Moab, far across the Jordan.

I went in to make a final inspection, crawling along the first part of the tunnel on my belly in total darkness, feeling like an earthworm, blind and hemmed in on all sides. After what seemed like an hour, I felt the roof of the tunnel rising. I could get up and crawl on my hands and knees and, at last, stand like a man once more.

I carried a torch with me, and pieces of flint and iron to strike a spark that would light it. But not until the day was bright and Joshua's priests were parading around the walls again. We wanted to keep the attention of Jericho's defenders on the music and the marchers as long as possible, to let the fire get so good a start that there would be no way to put it out before the wall caved in. I also sensed that Joshua valued the public-relations aspect of making it appear as if the priests' noise-making brought down the wall.

He was keenly aware of the value of manipulating people's opinions. Time and again he compared their crossing of the Jordan River dry-shod with Moses's leading them across the Sea of Reeds in Egypt. And he kept insisting that the people of Canaan must see that the God of Israel was mightier than their own gods, whom he considered to be false and nonexistent.

I had also brought a small candle with me, and used the flint to light it once I had reached the tunnel's end. The brushwood seemed to be ready to burn: enough of it packed against and under the wall's foundation to ignite the timbers. I could smell the night air, slightly damp, coming through the holes Lukka had poked through to the surface. It seemed enough to feed the fire its needed oxygen. All was ready, I thought.

I doused the candle, but the light did not disappear. Instead, it grew and glowed all around me until I realized that I had been transported once again to the realm of the Creators.

Four of them faced me, against that featureless glow of gold that they used to keep their world hidden from my eyes. Yet, if I concentrated hard enough, I could make out the faint traces of strange shapes behind them. Equipment of some kind? Instruments? We seemed to be in a huge chamber, rather than outdoors. A laboratory? A control center?

I recognized the neatly bearded Zeus, with Hera standing beside him. The two others were male; I had seen them before. One was slim and wiry, although as tall as Zeus. His face was narrow, with a long pointed chin, and closely cropped jet-black hair that came to a V on his high forehead that exactly matched the angle of his chin. His smile was sardonic; his eyes mischievous. I thought of him as Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the trickster and patron of thieves. The other was burly, big in the shoulders and arms, with thickly curled red hair and eyes as tawny as a lion's. Ares, god of war. Obviously.

All of them wore identical suits of shimmering metallic fabric, almost like uniforms. The only differences among them were color: Zeus wore gold, Hera copper red, Hermes was clad in silver, Ares in bronze.

"You continue to assist our demented Apollo," said Zeus. It was a flat statement, neither accusatory nor questioning, like a court clerk reading a charge.

I replied, "I continue to do what I must to revive the one called Athene."

"You have been warned, Orion," said Hera, her dark eyes flashing.

I made myself smile at her. "Would you destroy me, goddess? Put an end to me, at last? That would be a relief."

"You could be a long time dying," she purred.

"No!" snapped Zeus. "We're not here to threaten or punish. Our purpose is to find Apollo and stop his mad scheming before he destroys us all."

"And this creature," said the dark-haired Hermes, "knows where to find him."

"I'm not his keeper," I said.

"He certainly needs one," said burly Ares, chuckling at his own wit.

"We can open your brain, Orion, and fish out all your memories," Hera said.

"I'm sure you can. And many of them you'll find to be very painful."

Zeus waggled one hand impatiently. "You say that you don't know where the Golden One is."

"Yes, that's the truth."

"But could you find him for us?"

"So that you can destroy him?"

"What we do with him is of no concern to you, Orion," said Hera. "Considering how he's treated you, I should think you'd be happy to see him put out of the way."

"Can you revive Athene?" I asked.

Her gaze faltered, shifted away from me. The others looked uneasy, even Zeus.

"We're not here to talk about her," snapped the redhead. "It's Apollo we're after."

Before I could think out all the implications of it, I said, "I can lead you to him—after he has revived Athene."

"No one can revive her," blurted Hera, annoyed.

Zeus and the others glared at her.

I said, "After he has failed to revive her, then."

With a malicious smile, Hermes asked, "How do we know we can trust you?"

I shrugged. "Apparently you can find me when you want to. If you become convinced that I'm not living up to my end of the bargain, then do whatever you want with me. If Athene can't be revived, I'm not all that interested in living any longer."

Real sympathy seemed to fill Zeus's eyes. But Hera sneered skeptically, "And what of your current love, the beautiful Helen?"

"She loves me just as I love her," I answered. "As long as we are useful to one another, and no further."

Zeus ran a hand across his beard. "You will deliver Apollo to us when you are satisfied that he cannot revive Athene?"

"I will."

"We can't trust the word of a creature," said Hera. "This is madness! The longer we wait the more danger we . . ."

"Be quiet," said Zeus. He spoke softly, but Hera stopped in midsentence. Turning his gray eyes back to me, he said, "I
will
trust you, Orion. The fate of the continuum depends on your word. If you are false to us, it will mean not only your own destruction, and not only our destruction, but the end of this continuum—the utter ruination of the entire space-time in which we exist."

"You're going to let the Golden One play out his game at Jericho?" Ares was wide-eyed with incredulity. "You're going to feed his madness?"

"I am going to trust Orion," replied Zeus. "For the time being."

All three of the others started to speak at once, but I never heard what they said. Zeus smiled and nodded at me, then moved his right hand slightly.

And abruptly I was in the utter darkness of the tunnel's end, under the foundation of the main wall of Jericho.

I stood there trembling for several minutes. The end was in sight, I knew. They might not be able to track down the Golden One, but they certainly could keep track of me. The instant our paths crossed, they would jump and seize him, kill him, before he had the chance even to try to revive the goddess I had loved.

I forced my body to calm itself. The bitter perversity of the situation was almost laughable. I wanted to destroy the Golden One. They wanted to destroy the Golden One. But I had to protect him until he had made his attempt to revive Athene. I doubted that I could do that. And the more I thought about it, the more I
^:
despaired of his ability to bring her back to me.

Yet—he was clever enough, powerful enough, to elude their grasp. They could not find him, even though they knew that he was at work here at Jericho. They were in fear of him, in fear for their lives. Perhaps he was truly the most powerful among them. And, while they were trying to find him and destroy him, he was scheming to destroy them. I was caught in the middle of their Olympian struggle.

A faint sound startled me. A hooting, bleating noise. The ram's horn trumpets! Blinking, I realized that thin gray pencils of morning light were angling down into the cavern where I stood. Joshua had started up his parade again. It was time for the final stroke against Jericho.

I struck the flint and lit the torch, then put it to the piles of j brushwood stacked against the wall's foundation. Dry as the desert in this season of heat, the bare twigs and branches burst into flame instantly. I backed away from the sudden heat, then realized that I had better get out of the tunnel as quickly as I could.

I ducked into the lower part of the tunnel and scuttled along like a four-limbed spider, the heat glowing at my back, reaching for me. I wondered if the fire would take the timbers that shored up the tunnel roof, trapping me in its collapse. I was crawling on my belly now, much slower than I wanted to be going. Dimly I remembered other lives, other deaths: in the boiling fury of a volcano's eruption, in the blazing maelstrom of a runaway nuclear reactor.

Smoke was making me cough. I kept my eyes closed; not that I could have seen anything in the pitch-blackness of the tunnel. I snaked forward, driven by the heat behind me and the hint of fresh air ahead.

Suddenly a pair of strong hands grabbed my wrists and I felt myself being pulled along the scrabbly ground. I opened my eyes and saw Lukka, tugging, grunting, swearing as he pulled me into the daylight and safety.

We got to our feet, surrounded by the Hatti soldiers. They were fully armed now, with shields and armor ready for battle.

"Is it working?" I asked Lukka.

He smiled grimly. "Come see for yourself."

We went together outside the tent and looked toward the city. Thin spirals of smoke were rising from the base of the wall. As I watched, they went from whitish-gray to a darker, more ominous color. The smoke thickened.

"The timbers must have caught," said Lukka.

Off around the curve of the wall, the Israelite priests still blew their horns, thumped their drums, clanged their cymbals. They chanted the praises of their Lord, and the people of Jericho stood atop their doomed wall, watching the display, jeering or laughing as they pleased.

I turned my gaze back toward the tents of the main Israelite camp. The men were forming up in ranks. They wore no uniforms, had precious little armor among them, but every man carried some sort of shield and either a sword or a spear. They were ready for battle.

As the procession of priests rounded the curve of the wall, Joshua gave the order for his men to march. I estimated there were several thousand of them, from teenagers to graybeards. They marched in step with the priests, although their parallel circuit was much farther from the wall, out of bowshot range.