The Hittite Read Free Page B

answered.
    “Bronze weapons,” Magro pointed out.
    I nodded. They were bandits, then, not former soldiers. Only soldiers of the old emperor were gifted with iron swords. Each one was worth a man’s weight in silver.
    “Looks like they’re ready to leave,” I whispered.
    The bandits must have hit the village the previous day and spent the night, taking their fill of the food and wine and women. Now they had rounded up all the ragged, bedraggled people in the bare little patch of dirt that passed for a village square and methodically, one by one, slit the throats of any man young enough to fight. The women screamed and wailed, the white-bearded old men sank to their knees. The young men, their hands bound behind them, fell like sheep, unable to defendthemselves. One of the women threw herself at the raiders but was knocked to the ground by a backhand cuff.
    Once their grisly task was finished, the bandits piled as much loot as each of them could carry and staggered out onto the left fork of the road. The women ran to their slain sons and husbands, raking their faces with their nails to add their own blood to what was already soaking the ground.
    “What now?” Magro asked me. “They’ve picked the place clean.”
    Still watching the backs of the departing bandits, I answered him, “They’ve done half our work for us. Now all we need to do is take the goods they’ve collected away from them.”
    “I counted twenty-seven of them.”
    I nodded. “Most of them will run at the sight of us.”
    “Twenty-seven,” Magro repeated, unconvinced.
    It was easy to overtake the bandits. They were still half-drunk and encumbered with the loot they carried. We trailed them to a wooded area, where we could approach them unnoticed, screened by the trees and ground foliage, and fell on them savagely.
    In a few moments it was all over. They were fatally surprised. I killed three of the louts myself. Zarton, our big farm boy from the Zagros Mountains, put away five of them— or so he claimed. I counted twenty-two bodies sprawled on the bloody ground. The others fled shrieking for their lives.
    “Food, wine, clothing . . . they did well for themselves,” said little Karsh as we picked over the bundles the bandits had dropped.
    “That village was richer than it looked,” Magro said.
    “Pick it up, all of it,” I told the men.
    “There’s too much! How can we carry all this?” Even Zarton, who towered over most of us, looked unhappy at shouldering such a burden.
    “We won’t be carrying it far,” I told them. “We’re bringing it back to the village.”
    “Bringing it
back
?”
    “We don’t need all this, and they’ll be very grateful to us for returning even half of it.”
    They stared at me in disbelief. Only Magro seemed to understand what I was up to.
    “You want to know which fork of the road leads to Troy,” he said to me softly as we trudged back to the village, laden with their goods.
    I answered him with a nod. The men were sweating and grumbling, but I had to know which road the slavers had taken. I could not rest while there was still a chance that I might find my sons and my wife.
    Would I have come so far if it was only my wife the slavers had taken? I wondered. She was a woman, and there are many women in the world. Yet she was the mother of my sons, and those two little boys were what drove me on. So I sought the fruit of my loins, driven by a dying old man’s will, while my men trudged unhappily back to the village the raiders had looted.
    The villagers were indeed grateful, once they realized we intended to return some of their goods to them, rather than cause them more harm. They were a sad and pitiful lot, their young men still sprawled on the blood-soaked earth, their women still kneeling over them, crying and keening. The biting iron stench of their blood filled the air; if the women and old men did not get the corpses buried soon, there would be even worse smells.
    The village’s white-bearded