Ben Bova - Orion and the Conqueror

“Maybe we should get to the city before the storm arrives,” I said.

Harkan nodded glumly. Then he held out his hand. “Your dagger, Orion. Pausanias knows you have a dagger. I’d better take it.”

I felt a bit uneasy about that, but I slid my dagger from its sheath on my thigh and handed it to Harkan, hilt first.

“Thank you,” he said. And that was all he said as we mounted up and began the ride downhill to the road and then up the road to hilltop Aigai. Harkan’s silence bothered me; it was as if something was troubling him.

“What’s the news?” I asked as we rode side by side.

“Nothing much,” he said, not turning to look at me.

“Have you found your children?”

He gave me a sidelong glance. “They’re in Aigai; they belong to the king now.”

“Philip will give them back to you,” I said. “Or sell them to you, at least.”

“You think so?”

“Once you tell him that you’re their father, he’ll probably release them to you without payment.”

“He likes silver and gold, they say.”

“Even so, he knows what it is to be a father. He won’t keep them from you.”

Harkan nodded grimly, like a man heading toward battle.

“Pausanias was surprised that I broke out of my cell, was he?”

“Surprised is hardly the word, Orion. He’s been in a frenzy. He wants your head on a spear and he’s promised a great reward for whoever brings you to him.”

“You’re going to get the reward, then.”

“Yes,” he said, without enthusiasm.

We rode for a long, silent time. Something was obviously gnawing at Harkan. His children? The fact that he was turning me over to Pausanias?

I asked, “Where’s Batu? Why isn’t he with you?”

He did not reply at once. At length, though, Harkan said, “I thought it would look too obvious if the two of us brought you back. Too suspicious. Batu’s riding through the hills on the other side of the road, with a full company of the guard. Searching for you.”

I nodded and he fell back into silence once more.

Within a quarter-hour of our reaching the road, a whole contingent of guards galloped up to us.

“You’ve got him!” exclaimed their leader. “Good!”

He waved to a pair of riders at the end of his column and they trotted up to us. Chains jingled from the packs on their horses’ rumps.

The guard leader gave me a rueful look. “Sorry, Orion. Pausanias’ orders. You’re to be manacled and fettered. He’s taking no chances on your getting away again.”

Harkan would not look at me, and the other guards seemed shame-faced to see one of their erstwhile comrades chained by the wrists and ankles. Even the two smiths who fastened the cuffs to me were almost apologetic as they drove home the rivets.

So I arrived at Aigai with my hands cuffed behind my back, my ankles chained together, tossed across the back of my horse with my head dragging down in the dust, trussed like a sacrificial offering. Which, I realized, Pausanias meant me to be. My only hope was to see the king before Pausanias killed me.

I got an upside-down worm’s-eye view of Aigai’s massive main gate and its thick wall, its dirt streets winding upward to the citadel at the very crown of the hill, and the even sturdier wall and gate of the castle proper.

But they did not take me to the king. Despite my protests they dragged me from my horse and down into the ancient dungeons of the castle that had been since time immemorial the seat of the kings of Macedonia.

“Take me to the king!” I shouted again as they locked me into a cell. My throat was getting hoarse from my unheeded demands. “I must see the king and warn him!”

To no avail. They dumped me into the dirt-floored cell, still chained. The last one to leave me was Harkan. He waited until all the others had filed out, then knelt beside me.

Ah-hah! I thought. Now he’s going to tell me that he’ll return and get me out of this.

But instead he whispered swiftly, “I’m sorry, Orion. It was you or my children. She’s promised to give them back to me if I brought you in.”

She. The queen. Olympias. Hera.

“She means to kill me,” I said.

He nodded wordlessly and then left me lying there on the floor of the cell. The door clanged shut and I was alone in the darkness.

But not for long. My eyes were just adjusting to the gloom when I heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside. The door was unlocked and pushed open. Two jailers came in and, grunting, lifted me by my armpits to a sitting position and dragged me across the cell until my back was propped up against the rough stone wall.

They left and Olympias stepped into the cell. Pausanias came in behind her, holding a torch in his right hand.

“We should kill him now and get it over with,” Pausanias muttered.

“Not just yet,” said Olympias. “He may still be of value to us, once Philip is dead.”

I saw the ageless eyes of Hera in her beautiful, cruel face.

“What value?” Pausanias snapped.

“You question me?”

He immediately yielded to the iron in her voice. “I just wanted to know—that is, he’s dangerous. We should be rid of him.”

“After Philip is killed,” Olympias whispered. “Then you can have him.”

“Do you think I won’t go through with it?” Pausanias snapped. “Do you think I need a prize, a reward, to make me kill the king?”

“No, of course not,” she soothed. “But wait until afterward. It will be better afterward, I promise you.”

Pausanias stepped closer to me. “Very well. After.” Then he kicked me with all his might squarely on the side of my head. As I slid toward unconsciousness I heard him growl, “I owed you that.”

I remained unconscious willingly, deliberately. My body lay in the musty cell, chained hand and foot, but my mind was aware and active. I sought out the city of the Creators once again, seeking the only refuge I could think of.

My eyes opened on that grassy hill above the empty and abandoned city. The sun glittered on the sea, the flowers nodded to the passing breeze, the trees sighed as they had sighed for a hundred million years. Yet I could not approach the city any closer than I had before. Once again that invisible barrier held me in its grip.

There was nowhere for me to go except back to Macedonia, back to that dark dungeon in Aigai, chained and helpless while Hera goaded Pausanias into murdering his king. There was no way I could get to Philip in time to warn him.

Or was there? If I could not get out of my cell to go to Philip, could I bring him here to this ageless bubble of spacetime to be with me? I paced along the soft grassy slope, thinking hard, noting absently that as long as I walked away from the city I was not hindered by the barrier.

How often had the Creators summoned me here? How many times had I made the transition from some place and time to this eternal city? I knew what it felt like so well that I could translate myself here without their aid, without their even knowing it. Could I stretch that power to pluck Philip from Aigai and bring him here, even briefly, to warn him?

As I pondered the problem I thought I heard the faintest, subtlest echo of laughter. Mocking, cynical laughter that seemed to say to me that I had never moved myself through the continuum unaided, that I did not have the power to translate a molecule from one placetime to another, that everything I thought I had done on my own was really done for me by one of the Creators.

No , I raged silently. I have achieved these things by myself. Anya told me so in a previous life. The Creators were even becoming wary of my increasing powers, fearful that I would one day equal them despite all they tried to do to stop me. That is why they wiped my memory and sent back to ancient Macedonia. But it didn’t work. I am learning again, growing, gaining strength despite their betrayals.