The very air was thickening with smoke from the burning citadel.
I stepped into the shadowy interior of the house, my eyes quickly adjusting to the gloom. My heart sank. The room had been ransacked; table overturned, chairs smashed to splinters. The fireplace was cold and dark. I looked up to the loft where the beds were; silent, empty. The bedclothes had been torn off and ripped.
Then, in the far corner where my father had often told me tales of war and conquest, I saw his withered body on the packed earthen floor, huddled beneath a bloodstained cloak.
I had seen dead bodies before, by the score, by the hundreds. Yet the sight of my father there in the shadows made my throat go dry. I sank to my knees beside him and gently, gently turned him so I could see his face.
They had battered him terribly. Yet his eyes fluttered, then focused on me.
“Lukka …” His voice was a tortured sigh.
“Don’t try to speak. Let me—”
He clutched at my arm, his aged fleshless fingers still as strong as a hawk’s talons. “I knew you would return.” He coughed painfully. “I knew …”
“Quiet, Father. Quiet. I’ll get a healer, a priest.”
“No need. No use.”
He coughed blood.
“Your sons,” he gasped. “Gone …”
“Gone? Where?”
“They fled.” He coughed again, his frail body spasming in my arms. “Your wife was mad with panic. Slavers were breaking into the houses …”
“Slavers?”
“She feared them … she took my grandsons …”
The third child of war, I thought. The poor wretches who were not killed or maimed were made into slaves.
“Find them!” my father commanded me. Gripping my arm even harder, he hissed, “Find them. My grandsons. They are my flesh. Find them, Lukka. Find them!”
Those were his last words to me. He died in my arms, his blood soaking into the earthen floor while smoke from the burning thatch made my eyes sting and water.
2
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.
3
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
