“Never! I won’t raise a finger to help you. I’ll work against you in every way I can.”
He made a deep dramatic sigh and took a step toward me. “Orion, we must not be enemies. You are my creation, my creature. Together we can save the continuum.”
“Once you killed her you made me your enemy.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head slightly. “I know. I understand.” Looking at me with those intent eyes once more, he said softly, “I miss her too.”
I tried to laugh in his face, but it came out like a snarl.
“Orion, I have been studying the situation carefully. There may — I say only may, mind you — be a way of restoring her.”
Despite his controls I leaped forward and almost grasped him by the shoulders. But my hands froze in midair.
“Not so fast!” the Golden One said. “It’s only a remote possibility. The risks are huge. The dangers…”
“I don’t care,” I said, my pulse roaring in my ears. “Bring her back to me! Restore her!”
“I cannot do it alone. And the others… those who opposed me at Troy, they will oppose me again. It will mean a deliberate change in the continuum of a magnitude that not even I have attempted before.”
I heard his words, but I could not comprehend their full meaning. Nor was I certain that he was telling me the truth.
“I never lie, Orion,” he said, reading my thoughts. “To restore her means tampering with the space-time continuum to such an extent that I could rip it apart just as surely as Ahriman once did.”
“But you and your other Creators survived that,” I said.
“Some of us did. Some of us did not. I told you that gods are not necessarily immortal.”
“And that they are not necessarily just or merciful, too,” I replied.
He laughed. “Just so. Just so.”
“Will you try to restore her?” My voice was almost begging.
“Yes,” he said. Before my heart could leap for joy he added, “But only if you obey me fully and completely, Orion. Her existence is in your hands.”
There was no sense trying to resist or dissemble. “What do you want me to do?”
For an instant he did not reply, as if he were formulating his plans on the spot. Then he said, “You are heading south, toward Egypt.”
“Yes.”
“You will soon encounter a wandering band of people who are migrating out of Egypt. Whole families, hundreds of them, traveling together with their flocks and tents. They seek to occupy this territory, to make it their own…”
“ Thisterritory?” I gestured around at the barren rocks and dead scrub.
“Even this,” replied the Golden One. “And they are opposed by the villagers and townspeople who already live here. You and your troop of soldiers will help them.”
“Why them?”
He smiled at me. “Because they worship me, Orion. They believe that I am not merely the mightiest god of them all, but the only god that exists. And soon, with your help, they will be perfectly right.”
Before I could ask another question, before I could even think, the Golden One disappeared and the pillar of smoke evaporated as if it had never been.
Chapter 27
WE pushed southward, down the river that flowed from one landlocked sea to another. There were villages dotted along its banks, protected by walls of dried mud bricks. Green farmlands fed by irrigation ditches stood in bold contrast to the bare browns and grays of the rocky hills. The people here were wary of strangers; too many wandering bands had come their way, anxious to take those green lands for themselves or, failing that, to pillage and loot the towns before moving on.
They traded with us, grudgingly, more in an effort to get us to leave their area as quickly as possible. I always kept Helen out of sight, inside the covered cart. And still I watched for signs of Achaians searching for us.
Then one hot afternoon, as the heat haze made a shimmering mirage out of a dry rocky canyon, we came across the advance scouts of the people the Golden One had told me about.
There were twenty of them, warriors, on foot, no two of them wearing the same kind or color of clothing or the same kind of weapons. A ragtag lot, at first glance. Smallish in stature, browned by the sun — just as we were, I realized.
They had arrayed themselves across the narrowest neck of the canyon as we approached them. I wondered if they thought they could stop us from passing through, if it came to a fight. Most of us were mounted on horses and donkeys. I thought we could punch through their thin screen if we had to.
But Lukka, scrutinizing them with a professional eye as we approached, said, “They’re not fools, despite their shabby clothes.”
“Do you recognize them?”
He shook his head the slightest distance it could move and still convey a negative. “They may be the Abiru that the villagers warned us against two days ago.”
I nosed my horse forward. “I’ll speak with their leader.”
He rode up beside me. “I can translate, if they speak any language of the empire.”
“I can understand their language,” I said.
Lukka gave me a strange look.
“It’s a gift from the gods,” I explained. “The gift of tongues.”
I rode slightly ahead and raised my hand in a sign of peace. One of the warriors walked up toward me, still holding his spear in his right hand. I slid down from my horse and stood on the dusty soil as he approached me. The heat beat down from the brazen sky and reflected off the scorching rocks. It was like standing in an oven. The only shade in sight was the sparse sliver along the canyon wall to my left. But this young warrior showed no interest in getting out of the hot sun.
His name was Ben-Jameen; he was the eldest son of a tribal chief. They called themselves the Children of Israel, he told me. Ben-Jameen was a youngster, his beard barely starting to sprout. But he was lean and hard-muscled; his eyes missed nothing as he scanned my two dozen men, the horses, donkeys, and oxcarts. He was tense and suspicious, gripping his spear tightly, as if prepared to use it at an instant’s notice.
When I told him that we were Hatti soldiers, he used the term “Hittites,” and seemed to relax slightly. He almost smiled.
“In whose service are you, then?” he asked.
“No one’s. We have come from a great war, far to the north and west of here. We helped to destroy the kingly city of Troy.”
His face went blank; he had never heard the name.
“Perhaps you know it as Ilium, by the straits called the Hellespont that lead into the Sea of Black Waters.”
Still no gleam of recognition.
I gave it up. “It was a war, and these men helped to take the city after a long siege.”
At that, something glimmered in his eyes. “Why are you here, then, in this land of Canaan?”
“We are traveling south, to Egypt, to seek service with the great king of that land.”
He glared at me, then coughed up phlegm and spat on the parched ground. ” Thatfor the Pharaoh! It took my people four generations to escape the slavery of Egypt.”
I made a shrug and replied, “We are a unit of professional soldiery. I have heard that the Egyptian king has need of soldiers.”
Those suspicious eyes fixed on me. “You are not in anyone’s service now?”
“No. The old empire has collapsed…”
“The God of Israel has smitten the Hittites,” he murmured, and now he truly did smile.
I glanced at Lukka, still on his horse, off to one side, and was glad that he could not understand the Hebrew tongue.
“And now He will smite the evil worshipers of Baal who shut themselves up in their city.” Ben-Jameen looked past me, at the men and their mounts, the carts, at Lukka sitting on his horse slightly behind me, and finally at me again. There was a new light in his eyes. “You will serve our God and our people and help us to take the city of Jericho, just as you took that northern city you spoke of.”