Ben Bova - Orion and the Conqueror

By the time I was on the flat land again, with the smoke of distant farm houses smudging the horizon, my arm was healed and I felt reasonably strong.

I returned to the ways of the bandit. I had no other choice. My mission was to return to Pella, to do Hera’s bidding, no matter how I might hate to obey her. I stole a horse here, raided a barn there, broke into farm houses, chased down stray cattle, did what I needed to do to stay alive. I tried to avoid people whenever possible and only fought when I had no choice. Even so, I killed no human—although I left several men groaning with broken bones.

I pushed westward, toward the setting sun, toward Europe and Greece and Pella and Philip and Alexandros. And Hera. There was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind: Olympias was Hera and had been all along. Her witchcraft was nothing more than the innate powers of the Creators themselves.

I rode night and day, sleeping only rarely as my strength returned to normal, pushing myself to get back to Pella as quickly as I could. In my dreams, on those rare nights when I did sleep, Hera kept beckoning me, but no longer with the enticements of her body. She commanded me the way a mistress commands the lowliest of her slaves. She urged me to come to her. She demanded that I hurry.

I did the best I could, crossing whole nations in days, avoiding the main roads and the bigger towns, hunting or stealing what I needed and pushing constantly on toward the setting sun.

Until at last I reached Chalkedon.

It was a large city, bigger than Pella, smaller than Athens. A port city, across the Bosporus from Byzantion. Its streets were crooked, meandering down the slope from the city wall to the waterfront docks. Its buildings were old, in poor repair, dirty. Garbage stank in the alleys and even the main square looked dirty, uncared for. Inns and taverns were plentiful, however, and the closer I approached the docks the more the streets were lined with them. Knots of drunken sailors and keen-eyed merchants stood before open bars built into many of the house fronts, exchanging drinks and gossip, making bargains and deals for everything from Macedonian timber to slaves from the wild steppes beyond the Black Sea.

The busiest place in Chalkedon was the slave market, down by the docks. I was going to push past the crowd gathered there; I was looking for a cheap ride across the water into Byzantion. I had a few coins in a cloth purse I had taken from a horse trader who had made the mistake of travelling with only four guards.

But while I was trying to work my way through the crowd that filled the open-air slave market and spilled out across the street that led down to the docks, I stopped dead in my tracks. I saw Harkan.

He had changed his clothes and even trimmed his beard. Like most of the other men thronging the slave market, he wore a long plain coat over his more colorful robe, and covered his head with a felt cap. At a distance he looked like either a moderately prosperous merchant or the owner of a large farm who was shopping for hands to work it for him. But closer up, the scar on his cheek was clearly recognizable; so was the flinty look in his coal-dark eyes. I glanced around the crowd and spotted several of Harkan’s men, also with their beards neatly trimmed, wearing decent clothes.

I pushed through the murmuring, jostling pack of men waiting for the market to open, heading for Harkan. He was turned slightly away from me, but his eyes kept searching through the expectant crowd, on the alert for danger. Then he saw me.

His eyes went wide as I came up beside him, but he quickly mastered his surprise.

“Your pilgrimage is over?” he asked.

I nodded. “I’m heading back to Pella. I have responsibilities there.”

He nodded. “You look different.”

“Different?”

“Calmer. More certain of yourself, as if you are sure of what you are doing now.”

I felt a slight surprise at that, but inwardly I realized he was right. There was no turmoil within me now. I did not know exactly what I had to do, but I knew I must return to Pella and do Hera’s bidding, no matter what it might be.

Then I looked squarely into Harkan’s leathery face and realized for the first time that he reminded me of someone I had known. Another soldier, from long ago: Lukka the Hittite. He might have been Harkan’s forebear, they looked so much like one another. In Harkan’s eyes I saw something that I had noticed only once before, when he had spoken of his family. I realized why he was here.

“You are searching for your children,” I said.

“If they haven’t already been sold. I was told the people taken from Gordium were brought to the market here. They won’t let anyone except the wealthiest buyers inspect the cages before the auctioning starts.”

I thought a moment. “You are hoping to buy their freedom?”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

He shot a questioning glance at me. “What do you mean?”

“It will be difficult to continue your life as a bandit with an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter to take care of.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, pilgrim. For now, I’m seeking my children. What happens afterward, I’ll worry about after I’ve found them. First things first.”

I stayed at his side through the whole long miserable afternoon. The slave dealers paraded out their wares, one by one. Young women brought the highest prices; strong healthy-looking men young enough to work in the fields or the mines also made profits for the sellers. There were dozens of children, but they brought very little. Most of them were still not sold when the sun dipped behind the warehouses lining the docks and the auction ended.

Hardly a scattering of buyers was left in the square by then. The children, miserable, dirty, some of them crying, all of them collared by heavy iron rings, were led by their chains back to their pens.

While the slave dealers huddled off behind the auction block, counting their coins, the chief auctioneer climbed down wearily and headed toward the tavern across the square.

“It’s a shame,” said the chief auctioneer as we watched the children being led away. His leather-lunged voice was slightly hoarse from the long day’s work. “We can’t keep feeding those brats forever. They’re eating up any profit we might make on them.”

Falling in beside him, Harkan asked as casually as he could manage, “Where are they from?”

The auctioneer was a lean, balding man with a pot belly and cunning eyes. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Here and there. Phrygia, Anatolia; we got a clutch of them from Rhodes, believe it or not.”

“Have there been any from Gordium?”

He stopped walking and looked sharply at Harkan. We were more than halfway across the square, almost at the door to the tavern. “What is such information worth to you?”

Harkan’s face became a mask of granite. “It is worth a life, auctioneer. Yours.”

The man looked at me, then glanced back over his shoulder where the dealers were still gathered behind the block. A half-dozen armed men stood guard near them.

“You wouldn’t get to utter a single word,” Harkan said, his voice low with menace. “Now just tell me, and tell me truly. Have there been any children from Gordium here?”

“A month ago. Nearly a hundred of them. There were so many that the bidding went down almost to nothing. A bad show, a miserable show.”

“Who bought them?”

“Only a few were bought in the open auction. The bidding was too low. We can’t sell goods for nothing! Can’t give them away! The dealers closed the auction when the bidding went down too low to satisfy them.”

“So what happened to the children who weren’t bought?”