The Hittite

by Ben Bova

  Their faces were smudged with grime. The smocks they wore were filthy, tattered. I dropped down onto the sand and took off my sword. Both boys eyed it but made no move to touch it. Then I unlaced my boots and placed them carefully next to the sword.

  “Let’s take a swim,” I said, making myself smile at them.

  They made no move, no response.

  Getting slowly to my feet, I said, “In the water. We’ll pretend we’re dolphins.”

  “Mama told us not to go into the water,” little Uhri said in his high child’s voice.

  “Not above our knees,” added Lukkawi.

  Nodding, I replied, “That’s all right. I’ll hold you. We’ll look for fish.”

  I scooped Uhri up in one arm; he was as light as a little bird. I looked down at Lukkawi and offered him my free arm. He hesitated a moment, then reached up and allowed me to lift him off the sand. Both boys clutched at my neck and I stood there for a brief moment, my heart thumping beneath my ribs, my sons in my arms.

  And my heart melted. These were my sons. They trusted me to protect them, to provide for them, to show them how to become men. I felt a lump in my throat that I’d never known before.

  “We’re going into the water now,” I told them, my voice strangely husky. “It’s all right. I’ll hold you. You’ll be safe.”

  Slowly I waded into the water. Up to my knees. Up to my waist. When the boys’ feet touched the water they both squirmed.

  “It’s cold!”

  “No, no. That’s only the way it feels at first. You’ll get used to it and then it will feel warm.”

  I held them tightly and moved very slowly into deeper water. Uhri let go of me with one hand and splashed a wave into his brother’s face. Lukkawi splashed back. In a few heartbeats they were laughing and splashing, drenching me and each other.

  We laughed and played together. Before long the boys were paddling happily in the water.

  “Look! I’m a fish!” Lukkawi shouted, and then he squirted out a mouthful of water.

  “Me too!” cried Uhri.

  I sat on the sea bottom, only my head and shoulders above the waves, and watched my sons playing in the water. It was strange. I hardly knew these boys, yet once they clung to me, once they trusted me in the water, I felt as if they were truly mine forever. My father had been right. Flesh of my flesh: these boys were my sons and I would protect them and teach them and help them all I could to grow into strong, self-reliant men.

  When I told them it was time to get out of the water they both squalled with complaint. But when I said that I was hungry, they quickly agreed that they were hungry, too. They shivered as we walked back to the tents, despite the warm noontime sunshine. I stripped off their wet rags, rubbed them down with woolen blankets and found decent shifts for them to wear. They were too big, of course: Uhri’s dragged on the ground until I got one of the women to stitch a hem on it.

  We ate with my men: chunks of broiled goat and warm flat bread. The boys drank water, the men wine. There was plenty of meat to be had, since the sacrifices of the previous night.

  That made me think of Aniti again, and my guts clenched inside me. I told myself that there was nothing I could do about her. I had tried my best to save her and failed. Now I had my two sons to take care of. What’s done is done and not even the gods can unravel it. Yet my insides burned.

  Until my mind pictured Helen’s incredible face and golden hair. What’s happened to her? I found myself wondering. Does she still live?

  After our noonday meal I looked in on Poletes. He was awake, lying on his back on my cot, his eyes covered by a poultice-smeared rag.

  “How do you feel?” I asked him.

  For a few heartbeats he made no reply. Then, “The pain is easing, Master Lukka.”

  “Good. Tomorrow we leave this wretched place.”

  “Will you put me out of my misery then?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me. “No. You’ll come with us.”

  “I’ll be nothing but a burden to you.”

  “You’ll come with us,” I repeated. “We might need you.”

  “Need me?” he sounded genuinely surprised at the thought. “Need me for what?”

  “To tell the tale of Troy, old windbag. When we come to a village the people will gather ’round to hear your voice.”

  Again he fell silent. At last he murmured, “At least Agamemnon didn’t cut my tongue out.”

  “His knife would have broken on it, most likely.”

  Poletes actually laughed a little. “I have you to thank for that small mercy, Master Lukka.”

  I grasped his knobby knee and shook it. “Rest now. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we travel.”

  “To where?”

  I shook my head, although he couldn’t see it. “South, I think. There are cities along the coast that might welcome a group of trained Hatti soldiers.”

  “And a blind old man.”

  “And two little boys,” I added.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon supervising my men as they assembled a pair of sturdy carts and a half-dozen donkeys to pull them. I would have preferred oxen, but they had all been sacrificed. We also had horses for each of us. The boys and Poletes would ride in one of the carts, with the food and water we had collected. Our loot and weapons were piled in the second cart.

  The boys tagged along with me all the long afternoon, getting underfoot, asking endless questions about where we were going, how long our trip would be—and whether we would meet their mother on our travels. I answered them abruptly, tried to shoo them out of the way, but they never strayed more than a spear’s length from my side.

  Once the tide came up, several of Odysseos’ boats put out to sea, pushed into the water by grunting, cursing men who scrambled aboard once the boats were afloat. I watched them unfurl their sails and head off into the sunset.

  At last all was ready. We gathered around the cook fire as the sun went down and had our last meal on the beach encampment along the plain of Ilios. In the last rays of the dying sun I saw that Agamemnon’s vengeance on the city was far from complete. Troy’s walls still stood: battered and sooty from the fires that had raged in the city, but despite the Achaians’ efforts most of the walls still stood.

  I brought my boys into my tent and made bedrolls out of fine Trojan blankets for them; they fell asleep almost as soon as they lay down. I stood over them while the shadows of dusk deepened. Their faces were as smooth and unlined as statues of baby godlings. All that had happened to them, all that they had suffered and lost, did not show one bit in their sleeping, trusting faces.

  At last I laid out a blanket for myself next to them. It was fully dark now, and tomorrow would not be an easy day, I knew.

  But before I could stretch out for sleep Magro called my name. I stepped out of the tent and he said softly, “We have a visitor.”

  7

  Standing in the lengthening shadows was Apet, in her black Death’s robe with its hood pulled up over her head. I sent Magro to his tent as I stepped up before her.

  “You come from Helen?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered. And without waiting for another word she turned and ducked inside my tent.

  A single candle burned beside my cot. It cast enough light to see Poletes lying there asleep, the greasy cloth across his eyes, the blood-caked slits where his ears had been, my two sleeping boys on the other side of the tent.

  She gasped. “They talked about it in the camp …”

  It was not Apet’s voice. I grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her toward me, then pushed down her hood. Helen’s bountiful golden hair tumbled past her shoulders.

  “You!”

  In the flickering light of the candle I saw that her face was battered, one cheek bruised blue-black, her eye swollen, her lower lip split and crusted with blood.

  “Menalaos?” I asked needlessly.

  Helen nodded numbly. “He was drunk. I did what he asked but he was so drunk he couldn’t
become aroused. He called me a witch and said I’d cast a spell over him. Then he beat me. Apet tried to stop him and he knocked her unconscious. He says he’ll kill us both once we get back to Sparta.”

  “How did you get away from him?”

  “He drank himself into a stupor. I told the guard that I was sending my servant to find a healer. Then I left Apet in the cabin and came searching for you.”

  Poletes moaned and shifted on the cot slightly.

  Helen looked down at him. “Agamemnon did this?”

  “With his own hand,” I answered, hot anger seething inside me. “Out of sheer spite. Drunk with power and glory, your brother-in-law celebrated his victory by mutilating an old man. And murdering my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “One of the victims of Agamemnon’s thanksgiving to the gods for his victory.”

  Helen lowered her eyes. But not before I saw that there was not one tear in them.

  “Your husband stood by and watched it all,” I said to her, my rage growing hotter. “His men held me at spear point while his brother did his noble deed.”

  She nodded and turned away from Poletes.

  “What do you want of me?” I asked her.

  In a flat, almost hopeless voice, Helen replied, “You see how cruel they are. What monsters they can be.”

  I said nothing, but in my mind I pictured again Aniti’s final moments: the terror she must have felt. The pain.

  “He’s going to kill me, too, Lukka. He’s going to take me back to Sparta and kill me, but not until he’s had his fill of me. Then he’ll have his priests put me on the altar like a sacrificial sheep and slash my throat. Just as they did to your wife.”

  Her voice was rising, her eyes were wide, but it seemed to me that she was not panicking. Fearful, certainly. But she was not frenzied; instead she was grimly seeking a way out of the fate that loomed before her.

  I asked coldly, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “You will take me away from this camp. Now, to night, while they are all sleeping. You will take me to Egypt.”

  I almost laughed. “Is it the Queen of Sparta who commands me, or the princess of Troy?”

  Something flickered in her eyes, but Helen maintained her composure. “It is a woman who has nothing to look forward to but pain, humiliation, and death.”

  Like my wife, I thought. Like Aniti.

  “Do you want me to beg you?” Helen said, a tiny hint of a quaver in her voice. “Do you want me to drop to my knees and clasp your legs and beg you to save my life?”

  She was begging, I realized. In her own way, the most beautiful woman in the world was pleading with me to take her away from her rightful husband, a man who had just fought a war and conquered a powerful city to get her back. She was too proud to admit it, but she was beseeching me to help her escape her fate.

  “I have five men with me, not an army. Menalaos will track us down and kill us all.”

  “He won’t know I went with you,” she said, her words coming faster now that she felt some hope. “He’ll search the camp, the boats. We’ll be far from here by the time he realizes what’s happened.”

  “Egypt is a thousand leagues from here.”

  “But there are cities along the way. Miletus. Ephesus. Civilized kingdoms. Apet told me of Lydia, and of Phrygia, where King Midas turns anything he touches into gold!”

  “Egypt,” I muttered.

  “It’s the only truly civilized land in the whole world, Lukka. I will be received as the queen I am. They will treat me royally. Your men can find a place in the pharaoh’s army.”

  I should have refused her. I should have flatly told her it was madness and sent her back to Menalaos. But in my mind a mad tapestry of vengeance was weaving itself. I pictured the fat, stupid, cruel face of Agamemnon when he discovered that his sister-in-law, the woman for whom he had supposedly fought this long and bloody war, had spurned his brother and run off with a stranger. Not a prince of Troy, but a lowly Hittite soldier. Not carried off unwillingly, but run away at her own insistence.

  I saw Menalaos, too, he who had his men hold me at bay while his brother mutilated Poletes. He who beat this woman who stood pleadingly before me.

  Let them eat the dirt of humiliation and helpless fury, I said to myself. Let the world laugh at them while Helen runs away from them once again. They deserve it. They deserve all that and more.

  They would search for us, I knew. They would try to find us. And if they did they would kill me and my sons. And Helen, also, sooner or later.

  My sons. It was my duty to protect them. I had come all this way to find them, to save them from slavery. What Helen asked would put them in danger, put all of us in danger.

  And there was Helen herself. She was a queen, a woman of the nobility, while I was a common soldier. But she was willing to put herself in my charge, place her life in my hands. Her body, as well?

  I shook my head to drive away such thoughts. Madness. I’m just a servant, as far as she’s concerned: a professional soldier who can help her to get away. Nothing more. I looked again at Helen’s face, so beautiful even though battered, her eyes filled with hope and expectation, innocent yet knowing. She was maneuvering me, I realized, using me to make her escape from these Achaian barbarians. Was she offering herself as my reward for defying Menalaos and Agamemnon? No, I thought. She expects me to do what she wishes because she’s a noblewoman and I’m trained to follow orders.

  “Very well,” I heard myself say to her. “We’ll leave at first light.”

  Helen beamed a smile at me. “I’ll stay here, then. With you.”

  “You can stay here in the tent with Poletes and my sons. You’ll have to sleep on the ground.”

  Helen nodded gratefully. “I’ll be back in a few moments,” she said, in a half whisper, then hurried out, pulling the hood of Apet’s black cloak over her golden hair.

  I realized she was attending to nature’s call. I turned and looked down Poletes. He was stirring on the cot, muttering something. I bent low hear his words. “Beware of a woman’s gifts,” he croaked.

  I frowned at him. “Now you utter prophecies instead of stories, old man.”

  Poletes did not reply.

  8

  I slept poorly, on the ground outside the tent, knowing full well what lay ahead of us. What little sleep I got was filled with fitful dreams of Egypt, a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side by burning desert. The Hatti had fought wars against the Egyptians, in the land of Canaan beside the Great Sea. But Egypt itself no Hatti soldier had ever seen. My dreams showed me a land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless there. A land of massive pyramids standing like enormous monuments to the gods amid the puny towns of men, dwarfing all human scale, human knowledge.

  It was still dark when I decided I could sleep no more. Egypt. Far-distant Egypt. We would have to travel a long time, through strange kingdoms and hostile territory. To bring fair-haired Helen to Egypt.

  Once the first gray hint of dawn started lighting the eastern sky I roused my men and got them ready to leave. After a cold breakfast of figs and stale bread we loaded my boys and Poletes into one of the wagons with Helen, muffled once again in Apet’s hooded black robe.

  Then it struck me. “What about your servant?”

  From inside the hood Helen answered, “I can’t go back for her, Lukka. She’ll have to remain behind.”

  “But once Menalaos realizes you’ve gone …”

  “Apet will say nothing.”

  “Even when they put her feet in the fire?”

  Sitting up on the wagon’s headboard, Helen was silent for a heartbeat. Then, “Apet knows that if I’m not back to her by sunrise I’ve fled with you. She has sworn to kill herself before Menalaos can even begin questioning her.”

  I felt my jaw drop open. “And you’ll let her die?”

  “She’s very old, Lukka. She would only slow us down.”

 
“You’ll let her die?” I repeated.

  “She loves me,” Helen said, her voice firm, as if she had thought it all out in her head and made her decision.

  I stared up at her. Helen avoided my eyes. “You said you loved her,” I said.

  With a burst of impatience, she demanded, “What would you have me do? You’re a soldier. Will you invade Menalaos’ camp and steal my servant away? You and your five men?”

  I had no answer for that.

  Leaving Helen sitting in her black robe, I straddled the thickly folded blanket that served as a saddle and nosed my horse toward Magro, who was leading a string of three ponies.

  “Go drive the wagon,” I told him, reaching for the reins he held. “I’ll take the horses.”

  “We’re really going to Egypt?” he asked, smiling quizzically at me.

  I nodded.

  “With your woman?” Magro tilted his head in Helen’s direction.

  “She’s not my woman.”

  Still smiling, “Then who is she?”

  I decided to evade his question, for the time being. “Will it cause trouble with the men? Jealousy?”

  Magro scratched at his beard. “There’ve been plenty of women in the camp. Especially in the last two nights.”

  “I don’t want the men dragging along camp followers.”

  “The men are satisfied for now. We can move faster without camp followers, that’s for certain.”

  I could see from the look in his eye that he was thinking I was already dragging our little group down with two little boys and a blind old man. And now a woman.

  Magro shrugged and let his smile grow wider. “We’ll find women here and there as we march, I suppose.”

  I understood what he meant. “Yes. Our passage to Egypt won’t be entirely peaceful.”

  His eyes locked on mine. “I hope we can leave the camp peacefully.”

  I made myself smile back at him.

  So we started out of the Achaian camp on the sandy beach. Ships were gliding out onto the sea, colorful sails bellying out as they caught the wind, carrying the victorious Achaians to their home cities. Troy still stood, gutted and burned black, its walls battered but still standing, for the most part. The sun rose in the east as it always does while our little pro cession of two carts and a dozen horses filed slowly through the gate that I had defended against Hector and down onto the strangely quiet plain of Ilios.