“You are a soldier, Zarton,” I said evenly. “You follow orders just as the rest do. My orders.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “There’s no empire anymore, Lukka. Why keep up the pretense?”
They all knew why. We were fighting our way toward Troy to find my wife and sons. It was my will that drove us on now, not the emperor’s, but I had to be just as hard and inflexible as he had been. Otherwise we would all be lost and I would never find my sons.
“Pick up your goods and get back on the march,” I commanded.
He actually grinned at me. “I’m not a soldier anymore, Lukka. I quit.”
“You can’t quit. Not unless I allow you to.”
Zarton stood up a little straighter. The other men edged away from us.
“I’m going back to the village,” he repeated, slowly, stubbornly.
“No you’re not.”
Usually he was an easygoing, amiable sort. But like the ox he resembled, he could be obstinate. And dangerous. Yet I knew that if I allowed him to leave, several of the other men would go with him. Discipline would evaporate. My squad would disintegrate before my eyes and I would have no chance what ever of reaching distant Troy.
Zarton gripped his spear in one ham-sized fist. It was more than half again his own considerable height. He looked at me with real sadness in his ice-blue eyes.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Lukka. Don’t stand in my way.”
“I don’t want to kill you, boy, but if you don’t obey me I’ll be forced to.”
I had no spear, only the sword in its scabbard by my side. Being left-handed is an advantage in a sword fight because most men are accustomed to fight against right-handers, and my left-handed stance confuses them. But this would not be a sword fight: Zarton hefted his spear.
Before any of the other men could make up their minds about which of us to back, I said loudly: “Stand back, all of you. This is between Zarton and me, no one else.”
They gladly backed away.
“This is wrong, Lukka,” said Zarton, his heavy brows knitting sullenly.
“Don’t make me kill you,” I said evenly. “Put the spear down and obey my orders.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Zarton closed his other hand around the haft of his spear. But before he could lower its iron point at me I leaped at him, drawing my sword in the same motion.
He staggered back against the tree, shocked, and I stuck the point of my sword into his gut, just below the breastbone, and rammed the full length of the blade up into his chest. He looked surprised, his eyes wide with astonishment that I had not waited for him to set himself. Then his expression faded to a bewildered confusion as his mouth filled with bright red blood and his legs no longer supported him.
With a feeble little gasp Zarton collapsed against the tree’s rough bark and slid to the ground. His eyes stayed open but they went cold and dead.
Yanking my sword from his body, I turned to face the other men. They all seemed just as shocked as Zarton had been.
“We march to Troy. I don’t care how far it is or how many battles we have to fight to get there. We march to Troy. Is that understood?”
They nodded and muttered.
“Troy is a great city. It rules the Dardanelles and the Aegean beyond the straits. We can find a place in the service of the Trojan king,” I told them. “We can become true soldiers again, instead of marauding robbers.”
Perhaps they believed me. Perhaps not. I didn’t care, not at that moment with foolish young Zarton lying dead at my feet with the flies already buzzing about him. I knew only one thing for certain: I would reach Troy or die in the trying. I picked up his spear and pointed with it down the road toward Troy.
We marched.
Yet that night, after a long day’s trek, I saw Zarton again in my dreams. He rose out of the grave I had dug for him and stared at me from the underworld beyond the Styx, shaking his head sadly, sadly, his eyes brimming with tears.
In his arms he held my two baby boys.
6
It was nearly sunset, two days after I had killed Zarton. We were picking our way slowly down a gradual slope, through the undergrowth of a forest that had once been thick with lofty, broad-boled trees. But now half the trees had been cut down, their stumps overgrown with ferns and twisting vines. In the distance we heard the sound of woodcutters chopping away methodically.
That meant a village had to be nearby, or perhaps a larger town. Without a word of command from me, the men spread out, hefting their spears and moving silently through the underbrush, schooled by long experience.
The chunking sound of the axes grew louder as we made our way through the woods. The trees thinned even more, and I motioned the men to drop to their knees. Through the screening underbrush I saw a team of half-naked ax men sweating away at their work in the lengthening shadows of the dying day. Four of them were cutting wood, six more were scurrying to pile the cut logs into a lopsided cart pulled by a big dun-colored bullock patiently munching his cud.
“Move! Move, you dogs!” bellowed a mean-faced taskmaster at the team. His accent was harsh, barely understandable. “You’ve got to get this cart loaded and back in camp before the sun goes down.”
His men were bone-thin, ragged, staggering under the loads they carried.
“And you whoresons!” roared the taskmaster. “Swing those axes or by the gods you’ll think Zeus’ thunderbolts are landing on your backs!”
He brandished a many-thonged whip. He was a big man with powerful bare arms, but a potbelly hung out through his leather vest. Shaved bald, he had a thick bushy beard the color of cinnamon and a livid scar running down one side of his ugly face.
The woodcutters were guarded by five spearmen in leather jerkins studded with bronze bolts. Their spear points were bronze, I saw. Probably the short swords hanging at their sides were, too. Each of them wore little conical helmets that looked, at this distance, to be leather rather than metal.
Off in the hazy horizon the setting sun was tinting the clouds with flaming red. Beyond the edge of the forest and a bare dusty plain that stretched on the other side of a meandering river, I could make out the battlements of a walled city.
Troy!
The city was built on a dark bluff, and beyond it I could see the glittering silver of the sea. It had to be Troy, it could be no other, I told myself. We had reached our destination at last.
Five armed soldiers keeping watch over fewer than a dozen woodcutters. The soldiers looked young, callow. I decided we could afford a peaceful approach.
“On your feet, all of you, and follow me,” I said to my men in a low voice. “That’s Troy there in the distance. We’re almost there.”
Magro huffed with disbelief. “Don’t tell me we’ll sleep under a roof to night.”
I grinned at him as I hefted Zarton’s spear. “Come on.”
The young spearmen stiffened with surprise as we stepped out of the foliage and presented ourselves. They gripped their long bronze-tipped spears and backed away from us a few steps. We were twelve to their five.
The loudmouthed whip master fell silent. The woodcutters stopped their work and gaped at us. They were sweating, filthy, bare to the waist, mostly emaciated old men barely strong enough to lift an ax. They stared about wildly, as if they would break and run at the slightest excuse.
“Is that city Troy?” I asked, pointing with my right hand. I gripped the spear in my left, of course.
“Who are you?” one of the spearmen demanded, his youthful voice cracking with surprise and fear. “What are you doing here?”
I barely understood him. He spoke a dialect that I had never heard before, heavy and guttural. It had been many months since anyone had spoken Hatti to us; we had learned the local language as we trekked across the
