The Hittite Read Free

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