The Hittite Read Free Page A

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 notknow 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 disciplinewe 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.
    I had to find them. My father had been right in that. In all this world of chaos and misery, my two sons were all that really mattered. I can’t let them spend their lives in slavery. I will find them, no matter how long it takes or who stands in my way.

4

    What the wench called a village was a miserable collection of huts at a fork in the road we had been following. Worse, another raider band was already there. Several of the huts were ablaze, sending foul-smelling black smoke billowing into the bright morning sky. Magro and I lay concealed in a stand of half-grown wheat on a terraced hillside overlooking the village. The rest of my men were hunkered down on the other side of the knoll, out of sight.
    “They don’t look like soldiers,” Magro whispered to me.
    “Neither do we,” I