Ben Bova - The Hittite

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.