The Hittite (2 page)

My sons. My wife. Find them.

I took a spade from the corner by the fireplace, where my father had always kept his tools. Coughing from the thickening smoke, I dug a shallow grave for him there in his house, the home of my ancestors. I tried to remember the words for the dead, but my mind would not recall them. All I could think of was his final command to me. Find his grandsons.

If the slavers have found them they’re already dead, I thought. Slavers don’t keep young children, especially boys. Mouths to feed, and too small to do any useful work.

I got up from my knees while choking smoke filled the room and eager flames licked across the timbers of the roof. I stepped out onto the street. The air was thick with smoke. More houses were burning, I could see, as swaggering gangs of looters put the torch to what ever they could not carry away with them, roaring with drunken laughter. Men can turn into beasts so easily, I realized. Take away the authority of the emperor and even trained soldiers become looting, raping animals.

I wanted to kill them. Kill them all. Slash their guts out and watch their eyes go wide with pain and shock. But that was nonsense, of course. I could kill five of them, ten, a dozen. But in the end I would be swarmed under and cut to pieces. What would that accomplish? So I stayed my hand and waited in the doorway of the house in which I had been born.

The sky seemed to be darkening; drops of rain began to spatter the cobblestones. Not hard enough to stop the flames that were crackling on the roof, though.

My squad was nowhere to be seen. They’ll be back, I told myself. At sundown, they’ll return, just as I ordered them to.

But I wondered.

The world had split apart. The empire was in ashes and ruins. And my father had commanded me to find his grandsons, my little boys, and their mother, my wife: Aniti.

I had first met her on the day we were married in the temple of Asertu, nearly six years earlier. The two families had arranged the marriage while I was away on campaign with the army. A soldier’s life is not his own. I had been a soldier since I was fourteen, like my father before me. I had no choice; he was accustomed to giving commands and having them obeyed. Before my beard was anything more than a wisp he led me to the barracks and entered me in his squad. Thus I spent most of my days in long campaigns far from home, carrying out the emperor’s orders.

Aniti. I tried to remember how much time we had spent together in the years we had been married: a few months, all told. Enough to father two sons by her. She was a pleasant enough woman, not given to anger, never sullen. But I could not recall the color of her eyes, nor the sound of her voice.

The rain became heavier, making rivulets that flowed among the cobblestones. The roof of the house crashed down in a shower of sparks and flame, as if the gods honored my father’s grave with sacred fire. I pulled my cloak tighter around me while I stood in the chilling rain and waited for my men to return.

As it grew darker they began to show up. One, then a pair of them, then another three. By the time it was fully dark eighteen of the twenty were standing in the rain-soaked street, their cloaks over their heads.

“Nerik isn’t coming, Lukka,” said Magro, usually the jokester among my men. He wasn’t joking this day. He looked miserable beneath his dripping cloak. “I saw him go off with some of his friends from the barracks.”

“And Hartu?” I called to them. “Anybody seen him?”

Head shakes and mumbles. Hartu had family in the city, I knew. He

was the eldest son; his parents probably needed him more than I did— if

they still lived.

We were eighteen men, eighteen soldiers of an army that no longer

existed. As individuals we would be as helpless as any fleeing refugee.

But if we stayed together we might be able to survive. As one lone man

I could never hope to find my sons. But with my squad of disciplined

spearmen . . .

I made a decision. “All right. Form up. We march.” “March?” asked big, slow-witted Zarton. “To where?” “ To find my sons,” I told them.

For six months I led my squad of men westward, across the chaos and anarchy of the collapsed empire. We had to fight most of the way, against bandits, against villagers and farmers, against other desperate squads of former soldiers like ourselves.

Soon enough we discovered the remains of a refugee caravan. It had been attacked by bandits. The dead were strewn across the ground like a child’s broken toys. My wife and sons were not among them, thank the gods. I learned from one of the wounded guards who had been left to die that those who survived the attack were being herded to the slave market at Troy, far to the west, on the coast of the Aegean Sea.

Slaves. Slavers wouldn’t keep two little boys, they’d kill them on the spot. Aniti, my wife, what of her? I wondered. A woman isn’t responsible for what happens to her when she is in captivity, but still . . . a slave, powerless, defenseless. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to blot out the visions that came to my mind.

I thanked the dying guard and eased his way into the next life with a dagger to his throat. Then I searched the ground once again, until it was too dark to see, but my sons were not among the bodies scattered across the wreckage of the caravan.

So I pushed my men onward, toward Troy. They grumbled as soldiers always do, but they had no real choice. Together we were a formidable
band of men, armed and disciplined. We lived off the land, became little better than bandits ourselves.

Bad dreams filled my sleep: dreams of my infant boys lying broken and dead in a roadside ditch. Dreams of my wife on the auction block of the slave merchants.

Some nights I dreamed of Hattusas, saw the city in flames while ravaging mobs looted and raped through the streets. In my dream I saw the old emperor die, poisoned by his own sons, and I was powerless to help my emperor. Try as I might I could not move, could not even shout a warning to him.

Then it wasn’t the emperor who was dying, it was my father, his life’s blood seeping into the dirt floor of my house while choking smoke filled the room and eager flames licked across the timbers of the roof.

“Gone,” my father moaned. “Taken by slavers . . . your wife, your sons . . . gone . . . Find them . . . Find my grandsons.”

He died in my arms. The burning house crashed in on me.

I snapped awake and sat upright on the meager pallet of straw we had scraped together. Blinking the sleep away I slowly recalled where we were. A farmstead in the brown, scrubby hills off the royal road that led to Troy.

The farm wench beside me stirred slightly, then turned over, snoring.

I was soaked in sweat, like a weak woman instead of a Hatti soldier. In the gray light of early dawn I reached out my hand. My sword lay by my side. It had never been more than an arm’s length away from me, not for these past six months.

Perhaps my wife and children were already dead; we had found corpses enough along the royal road. But not my sons. Not my wife. Not yet.

How long can they live under the slavers’ lash? I wondered. My sons were little more than babies; the elder hardly five, his brother two years younger. How can she protect them, protect herself ? I felt as if I had been thrown into the deepest of all the world’s black pits, cut off from light and air and all hope. Suffocating, drowning, already dead and merely staggering through the motions of a living man.

Enough! I commanded myself. Don’t let despair swallow you. Battles are lost before they begin when soldiers surrender themselves to despair.

Reaching out my hand, I lifted my naked sword. Its solid weight felt comforting in the predawn gray. A Hatti soldier. What does that mean when the empire no longer exists? When there is no emperor to give commands, no army to carry the might of the imperial will to the far corners of the world?

All that matters to me now is my two little boys, I told myself. And my wife. I will find them. I will free them, no matter what it takes. Or die in the trying.

I got to my feet and gathered up my clothes, my iron-studded leather jerkin, my helmet and oxhide shield. As I stepped outside the crude lean-to that passed for a barn I saw that the sun was already tingeing the eastern horizon with a soft pink light.

My troopers were beginning to stir. Twelve of us were left, out of the original twenty. We did not look much like a squad of Hatti soldiers now, a unit of the army that served as the emperor’s mailed fist. Six months of living off the land, six months of raiding villages for food and fighting other marauding bands of former soldiers had transformed us into marauders ourselves.

I felt grimy. My beard itched as if tiny devils lived in it. There was a pond between the barn and deserted hut of a farm house. I waded into it. The water was shockingly cold, but I felt better for it.

By the time I had dried myself and pulled on my clothes, most of my men had risen from the blankets they had thrown on the ground and were stumbling through their morning pissing and complaining.

I waved to Magro, who had taken his turn as lookout, up on the big rock by the road. He came down and joined the men who were starting a cook fire. We had nothing but a handful of beans and a few moldy cabbages; the farm house and barn had already been picked clean, empty except for the sullen-faced wench we had found hiding in the dung pile.

I saw little Karsh sitting awkwardly on the ground, craning his neck to peer at the gash on his shoulder. He was a Mittani, not a true Hatti,
but he was a good soldier despite his small size. More than a week ago he had taken a thrust by a screaming farmer who had leaped at us from behind a door, wielding a scythe. I myself had dispatched the wild-eyed old man, nearly hacking his head from his shoulders with one swing of my iron sword.

“How’s the shoulder, little one?” I asked. Karsh had been a downy-cheeked recruit when he had first joined my squad. Now he looked as lean and grim as any of us.

“Still sore, Lukka.”

“It was a deep wound. It will need time to heal completely.”

He nodded and we both knew what he feared. Some wounds never heal. They fester and spread until the arm has to be lopped off. That would mean Karsh’s death, out here with no surgeon, not even a priest to perform the proper rituals for keeping evil spirits out of his wound.

I went back inside the shadowy barn and nudged the sleeping woman with the toe of my boot. She stirred, groaned, and turned over to stare up at me: naked, dirty, smelling of filth.

“There must be a cache of food hidden somewhere nearby,” I said to her. “Where is it?”

She clutched her rough homespun shift to her and replied sullenly, “Other soldiers took everything before you got here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Would it still be the truth if we dangled your feet in the fire for a while?” I asked.

Her eyes went wide. “There’s a village not more than half a league down the same road you came in on,” she said quickly. “Many fine houses. More than all the fingers of both my hands!”

Yes, I thought. Fine houses will be guarded by armed men, especially if there are things in them worth stealing.

“Get yourself dressed,” I told her. “But do not come out of the barn until we leave. My men might mistake you for Asertu.”

Her heavy brows knit together, puzzled. “Who is Asertu?”

I had forgotten that we had come so far that these people did not
know the Hatti gods. “Aphrodite,” I answered her. The goddess of love and beauty in this part of the world.

She actually smiled, thinking I was complimenting her.

My men were gathered around the cook fire, passing a wooden cup of broth from one to the next. I could smell the reek of stale cabbage from where I stood.

Looking around, I noted, “No one’s on watch.”

“We’re all awake, with our weapons to hand,” Magro said, handing the cup up to me. I took a sip. It was bitter, but at least reasonably hot.

“There’s a village less than a league down the road,” I told them. “Should be food there.”

“Where there’s food, there’s guards,” Zarton muttered. He was the biggest of my men, but never eager to fight.

“Villagers,” I said. “No match for trained Hatti soldiers.”

They mumbled reluctant agreement. My humor had fallen flat again. What was left of my squad hardly resembled a unit of trained Hatti soldiers. They still had their spears and shields, their swords and helmets, true enough, but our clothes had worn out months ago, replaced by what ever ragged, lice-crawling garments we could find among the terrified farmers and villagers we raided.

I had started by trying to trade with the people we came across, but what do soldiers have to trade besides their weapons? Sometimes villagers willingly provided us with what we demanded, just to be rid of us without bloodshed. Farmers usually fled as we approached, leaving their livestock and stores of grain or vegetables to us, glad to escape with their lives and their daughters.

The wench we had found hiding at this farm was lame. She could not run. But her family’s farmstead had already been picked clean by the time we got there. Which meant that there were other bandits in the area.

I formed up the men, reminded them that we might run across another band of raiders.

“But we’re not raiders,” said Magro, grinning mockingly. “We’re Hatti soldiers.”

The others all laughed. Yet I knew that only by keeping the discipline
we had all learned under the empire could we hope to survive. It was what had kept us alive so far: twelve of us, at least, out of my original squad of twenty.

I marched them up onto the dusty meandering road, rutted from the wheels of oxcarts and wagons. The road led to the next village, the next fight, the next bloodletting. I told myself that it led to my wife and sons. It was the road that the slavers had taken, the road that ended in the great city at the edge of the sea, where the slave market auctioned off poor wretches to buyers from Thrace and Argos, from distant Crete and even mighty Egypt.

Troy. My wife and sons were being driven to the slave market at Troy. They were still alive, I was certain of it. And I knew that if I did not find them and free them there, I would lose them forever. They would be carried off to some foreign land, slaves for the rest of their lives.

I had to find them. My father had been right in that. In all this world of chaos and misery, my two sons were all that really mattered. I can’t let them spend their lives in slavery. I will find them, no matter how long it takes or who stands in my way.