The Hittite (6 page)

The Achaians were racing for the safety of the rampart with the Trojan chariots in hot pursuit, closely followed by the Trojan footmen running pell-mell, brandishing swords and axes. Here and there a Trojan would stop for a moment to sling a stone at the fleeing Achaians or drop to one knee to fire an arrow.

An arrow whizzed past me. Poletes ducked behind me for protection. I turned and saw my men edging back to where they had laid their spears and shields. We were alone along the length of the rampart’s top now; the slaves and
thetes
had already fled down into the camp. Even the overseer with his whip had vanished.

A noisy struggle was taking place at the gate. It was a ramshackle affair, made of warped planks taken from some of the boats. It was not a hinged door but simply a wooden barricade that could be wedged into the opening in the earthworks. Some men were frantically trying to put the gate in place while others were struggling to hold them back and keep it open until the remainder of the fleeing Achaian chariots could wheel through. I saw that Hector and his chariots would reach the gate in a few moments. Once past it, I knew, the Trojans would slaughter everyone in the camp.

“Stay here,” I said to Poletes, then called to my men, “Follow me!”

Without waiting to see if they obeyed me I dodged among the lopsided stakes planted along the rampart’s crest, heading toward the gate. Out
of the corner of my eye I saw a javelin hurtling toward me. It thudded into the ground at my feet; I stopped long enough to wrest it out of the ground, then started toward the gate again. Magro, Karsh and the others were a few paces behind me, spears in their hands, shields on their arms.

Hector’s chariot was already pounding up the sandy ramp that cut across the trench in front of the rampart. There was no time for anything else so I leaped from the rampart’s crest onto the ramp, where the panicked Achaians were still struggling over their makeshift gate.

I landed directly in front of Hector’s charging horses, naked to the waist, without shield or helmet. I yelled and, gripping the light javelin in both hands, pointed it at the horses’ eyes. Startled, they reared up, neighing.

For an instant the world stopped, frozen as if in a painting on a vase. Behind me the Achaians were straining to put up the barricade that would keep the Trojans from invading their camp. Before me Hector’s team of four nut-brown horses reared high, the unshod hooves of their forelegs almost in my face. I stood crouched slightly, the javelin in both my hands, pointed at the horses.

The horses shied away from me, their eyes bulging white with fear, twisting the chariot sideways along the pounded-earth ramp. I saw the warrior in the chariot standing tall and straight, one hand on the rail, the other raised above his head, holding a monstrously long blood-soaked spear.

Aimed at my chest.

He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet’s cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the color of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. On it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore.

My men were jumping to the ramp now, shields before them and
spears making a small hedgehog of points. Just as Hector cocked his arm to hurl his spear at me, an arrow from behind us caught his charioteer in the throat. Suddenly uncontrolled, the horses panicked and stumbled over each other on the narrow ramp. One of them started sliding along the steep edge of the trench. Whinnying with fear they backed and turned, tumbling the dead charioteer and Prince Hector both onto the sandy ground. Then they bolted off back down the ramp and toward the distant city, dragging the empty chariot with them.

Hector scrambled to his feet, his massive spear still in his hand. More Trojans were rushing up the ramp on foot, their chariots useless because Hector’s panicked team had scattered the other teams.

I glanced over my shoulder. My men had formed a solid line behind me, their spears forward. I stepped back and took my usual place on the right end of the line. I had no shield, but still I took my accustomed place.

The barricade was up now and Achaian archers were firing through the slits between its planks while others stood atop the rampart, hurling stones and spears. Hector held up his little shield against the missiles and backed away. A few Trojan arrows came our way but did no hurt.

The Trojans retreated, but only beyond the distance of a bowshot. There Hector told them to stand their ground.

The morning’s battle was ended. The Achaians were penned in their camp behind the trench and rampart, with the sea at their backs. The Trojans held the corpse-strewn plain.

Panting from exertion, sweat streaming down my bare torso, I banged my fist on the flimsy wooden gate and a trio of grimy-faced youths opened it far enough for me and my men to slip through.

Poletes ran up to me. “Hittite, you must be a son of Ares! A mighty warrior to face Prince Hector!”

I said nothing, but glanced back at the plain, where Trojans were already dragging away their dead. How many of the proud lords on both sides of this war were now lying out there, stripped of their splendid armor, their jeweled swords, their young lives? I saw birds circling high above in the clean blue sky. Not gulls: vultures.

Others came up and joined Poletes’ praise as my men and I stood just inside the gate in the hot noontide sun. They surrounded us, clapping our backs and shoulders, smiling, shouting. Someone offered us wooden bowls of wine.

“You saved the camp!”

“You stopped those horses as if you were Poseidon himself!”

Even the crusty, hard-eyed overseer looked on me fondly. “That was not the action of a
thes
,” he said, eyeing me carefully. “Why are warriors working as laborers?”

I replied grimly, “Ask your High King.”

They edged away from us. Their smiles turned to worried glances. Only the overseer had courage enough to stand his ground and say, “Well, the High King should be pleased with you this day. And the gods, too.”

Poletes stepped to my side. “Come, Hittite. I’ll find you a good fire and hot food.”

I let the old storyteller lead us away from the gate, deeper into the camp, while we pulled on our shirts and leather jerkins.

“I knew you were no ordinary men,” he said as we made our way through the scattered huts and tents. “Not someone with your bearing. This must be a nobleman, I told myself. A nobleman, at the very least.”

“Only a soldier of the Hatti,” I replied.

“Pah! Don’t be so modest.” Poletes chattered and yammered, telling
me how my deeds looked to his eyes, reciting the day’s carnage as if he was trying to set it firmly in his memory for future recall. Every group of men we passed offered us a share of their midday meal. The women in the camp smiled at us. Some were bold enough to come up to us and offer freshly broiled meats and onions on skewers.

Poletes shooed the women away. “Tend to your masters’ hungers,” he snapped. “Bind their wounds and pour healing ointments over them. Feed them and give them wine and bat your cow-eyes at them.”

I smiled inwardly and wondered how much my men appreciated Poletes’ “protection.”

To me, the old storyteller said, “Women cause all the trouble in the world. Be careful of them.”

“Are these women slaves or
thetes
?” I asked him.

“There are no women
thetes
, Hittite. It’s unheard of! A woman, working for wages? Unheard of!”

“Not even prostitutes?”

“Ah! Yes, of course. But that’s a different matter. And in the cities there are temple prostitutes, protected by Aphrodite. But they are not
thetes
. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Then the women here in camp . . .”

“Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms.”

My wife was a slave of the High King’s. How can I get her away from him? I asked myself. Are my sons alive? Where are they?

We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas of blue and white stripes had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood on the deck before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead on the boat’s prow, a grinning dolphin’s face against a deep blue background.

“The camp of Odysseos,” Poletes explained to me in a low voice as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. “These are Ithacans.”

He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. “Reverence the gods, Hittite,” Poletes instructed me, surprised that neither I nor my men knew the custom.

The men around the fire praised me for my daring at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner-up and even Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. They soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me or my men about it.

I was happy to let them quarrel. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about this war.

They had been campaigning in the region each summer for many years. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the coastal lands, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the courage— and the forces— to besiege Troy itself.

But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then had changed his mind and taken her for himself. This insult was more than the haughty young Achilles could endure, even from the High King.

“The joke of it all,” said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb joint to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, “is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman.”

They all nodded and muttered agreement. The strain between Achilles and Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.

As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.

“Father Zeus speaks from Mount Ida,” said Poletes.

One of the foot soldiers, his leather jacket stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. “Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off.”

“Can’t fight in the rain,” one of the others agreed.

Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for what ever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseos’ boat. Through the driving rain I saw my men scurrying for the shelter of the tents scattered around Odysseos’ boats.

“Now the great lords will arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of our dead. To night their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their charred bones.” He sighed. “That’s how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes.”

I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the frothing sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except sit like dumb animals and wait for the sun to return.

I crouched as close as I could to the boat’s hull, smelling the sharp tang of the pitch they had smeared over the planks to keep the vessel watertight. My wife is among the slaves in Agamemnon’s camp, I knew. Are my sons with her? Are they still living?

Suddenly I realized that a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf ‘s pelt draped over his head and shoulders, dripping with the pounding rain. Knee-length tunic, a short sword buckled at his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.

“You’re the Hittite?” he shouted over the driving rain.

I got to my feet and saw that I stood several fingers taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.

“I am Lukka,” I replied. “My men are—”

“Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.

“To where?”

Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseos wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”

Poletes scrambled up and pranced happily in the mud beside me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, to a rope ladder that led up to the deck.

“I knew Odysseos was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”

It was slippery going, clambering up the rope ladder in the wind-whipped rain. I feared that Poletes would fall. But, following Odysseos’ man, we made it to the boat’s deck and ducked under the striped canvas. The Ithacan opened a wooden chest and tossed a pair of large rags at us.

“Dry yourselves,” he said curtly. We did, gladly, as he shucked the dripping wolf ‘s pelt he’d been wearing and slung it to the deck with a wet slapping sound.

I threw my towel next to his sodden pelt. Poletes did the same. For long moments we stood there while the Ithacan looked us up and down.

“Presentable enough,” he muttered, more to himself than to us. Then he said, “Follow me.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance as we walked behind him around a wooden cabin. And there sat Odysseos, King of Ithaca.

He was sitting behind a bare trestle table, flanked on either side by two standing noblemen in fine woolen cloaks. He did not appear to be a very tall man; what I could see of legs seemed stumpy, though heavily muscled. His chest was broad and deep. Later I learned that he swam in the sea almost every morning. His thick strong arms were circled with leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. Puckered white scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.
There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.

The rain drummed against the canvas, which bellied and flapped in the wind scant finger widths above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. I felt chilled and Poletes, with nothing but his ragged loincloth, hugged his shivering body with his bare arms.

Odysseos wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had thrown a lamb’s fleece across his wide shoulders. His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair that showed a trace of gray. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.

“You are a Hittite?” were his first words to me.

“I am, my lord.”

“Why have Hittites come to Troy?”

I hesitated, trying to decide how much of the truth I should speak to him. Swiftly I realized that it had to be either everything or nothing.

“I seek my wife and two young sons who have been taken captive, my lord.”

He rocked back on his stool at that. Clearly it was not an answer he had expected.

“Your wife and sons?”

“My wife is among the High King’s slaves,” I added. “If my sons live, they must be with her.”

Odysseos glanced up at the nobleman standing on his left, whose hair and long beard were dead white. His limbs seemed withered to bones and tendons, his face a skull mask. He had wrapped a blue cloak around his chiton, clasped at the throat with a medallion of gold. Both noblemen appeared weary and drained by the morning’s battle although neither of them bore fresh wounds as Odysseos did.

The King of Ithaca returned his attention to me. “Who is he?” he asked, pointing to Poletes.

“My servant,” I answered.

Odysseos nodded, accepting the storyteller. Lightning flashed and he looked up, waiting for the thunder. When it came at last he muttered, “The storm moves away.”

Indeed, the rain seemed to be slacking off. Its pelting on the canvas of the tent was noticeably lighter.

At last Odysseos said, “You did us a great service this morning. Such service should be rewarded.”

The frail old whitebeard at his left spoke in an abrasive nasal voice, “You fought this morning like a warrior born and bred. Facing Prince Hector by yourself! Half naked, too! By the gods! You reminded me of myself when I was your age! I was absolutely fearless then! As far away as Mycenae and even Thebes I was known. Let me tell you—”

Odysseos raised his right hand. “Please, Nestor, I pray you forgo your reminiscences for the moment.”

The old man looked displeased but sank back in silence.

“You say you seek your wife and sons,” Odysseos resumed. “Then you are not here as a representative of your emperor?”

Again I hesitated. And again I decided there was nothing to tell him but the truth.

“There is no emperor, my lord. The lands of the Hatti are torn with civil war. The empire has crumbled.”

Their jaws dropped open. Odysseos swiftly recovered, but he could not hide the smile that crossed his face.

Nestor blurted, “Then the Hittites are not sending troops to aid the Trojans?”

“No, my lord.”

“You came here by yourself ?” Odysseos asked.

“With the eleven men of my squad.” Poletes coughed beside me, and I added, “And my servant.”

Rubbing his beard with one hand, his eyes going crafty, Odysseos murmured, “Then Troy can expect no help from the Hittites.”

Nestor and the other nobleman broke into happy smiles. “This is indeed good news,” said Nestor. “Wonderful news!”

Odysseos nodded, then said, “But it doesn’t change the situation we face. Hector is camped on the plain outside our rampart. Tomorrow he will try to break through and drive us into the sea.”

That sobered the other two.

He looked up at me again. “We owe you a reward. What would you have?”

Immediately I replied, “My wife and sons.”

“You say they are among Agamemnon’s slaves.”

“I saw my wife there, yes, my lord.”

Odysseos breathed out a sigh. “Slaves are the property of he who owns them.”

“They are my sons,” I said firmly. “Little more than babies. And she is my lawful wife.”

He rubbed at his beard again. “The High King is touchy these days about giving up his slaves. He’s in the midst of a dispute with young Achilles about a slave woman.”

“That’s none of my affair, my lord.”

“No, it isn’t. But still . . .” He glanced up at Nestor again, who remained stone silent now. For long moments Odysseos sat there, saying nothing. It appeared to me that he was thinking, planning. At last he got to his feet and stepped around the table to clasp me on the shoulder.

“What is your name, Hittite?”

“I am called Lukka, my lord.”

“Very well, Lukka,” he said. “I will speak to Agamemnon— when the time is right. Meanwhile, welcome into the house hold of the King of Ithaca. You and your men.” Poletes shuffled his feet slightly. “And your servant,” Odysseos added.

I was not certain of what I should do until I saw Nestor frowning slightly and prompting me by motioning with both hands, palms down. I knelt on one knee before Odysseos.

“Thank you, great king,” I said, hoping it was with the proper degree of humility. “I and my men will serve you to the best of our abilities.”

Odysseos took the armlet from his bicep and clasped it on my arm. “Rise, Lukka the Hittite. Your courage and strength shall be a welcome
addition to our forces.” To the officer who had led us in, still standing behind Poletes and me, he said, “Antiklos, see that they get proper garb and all else that they require.”

Then he nodded a dismissal at me. I turned and we marched away from Odysseos and the two others. Poletes was beaming at me, but I realized that my travel-worn clothes must look threadbare to the Achaians. Antiklos looked me up and down again as if measuring me, not for clothing, but as a fighter.

As we left the tent and went back into the weakening rain I could hear Nestor’s piercing voice, “Very crafty of you, son of Laertes! By bringing him into your house hold you gain the favor of Athene, whom he undoubtedly serves. I couldn’t have made a wiser move myself, although in my years I’ve made some very delicate decisions, let me tell you. Why, I remember when Dardanian pirates were raiding the coast of my kingdom and nobody seemed to be able to stop them, since King Minos’ fleet had been destroyed in the great tidal wave. Well, the pirates captured a merchant boat bearing a load of copper from Kypros. Worth a fortune, it was, because you know that you can’t make bronze without copper. No one knew what to do! The copper was . . .”

His voice, loud as it was, finally faded as we made our way through the faltering drizzle back down the rope ladder to the beach.