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After they left, I stretched out on the pallet that had been freshly laid beside Poletes's. The old man
tossed in his sleep and muttered something. I leaned on one elbow to hear his words.
"Beware of a woman's gifts," Poletes mumbled.
I sighed. "Now you utter prophecies instead of stories, old man," I whispered.
Poletes did not reply.
I fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the straw. I willed myself to remain here, on the plain of
Ilios, and not allow myself to be drawn to the realm of the Creators. I knew that danger beyond my
powers awaited me there.
Whether my willpower was strong enough to keep me from being summoned to the Creators' domain,
or whether Apollo, Zeus, and their company simply did not bother trying to reach me, I cannot say. All I
know is that I met no gods, angry or otherwise, in my sleep that night.
But I did dream. I dreamed of Egypt, of a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side
by burning desert. A land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless
there. A land of massive pyramids standing like strange, alien monuments amid the puny towns of men,
dwarfing all human scale, all human knowledge.
Andinside the greatest of those pyramids, I saw my own beloved, waiting for me, as silent and still as a
statue, waiting for me to bring her back to life.
The next morning I told Lukka that we would be leaving the camp and heading for Egypt.
"That's a far distance," he said. "Across hostile lands."
"That is where we're going," I insisted. "Will the men follow me?"
Lukka's brown eyes flicked up at mine, then looked away. "We've won three wagonloads of loot for a
few days' work and a couple of hours of hard fighting. They'll follow you, never fear."
"All the way to Egypt?"
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He made a humorless grin. "If we make it. The Egyptians hire soldiers for their army, from what I hear.
They no longer fight their own wars. If we get to their borders, we will find employment."
"Good," I said, happy to have an excuse that would urge them onward toward my goal.
"I'll start the men gathering wagons for our supplies," Lukka said.
I took his shoulder in my hand. "I may bring a woman with me."
He actually smiled. "I was wondering when you'd unbend."
"But I don't want the men dragging along camp followers. Will they resent my bringing a woman? Will it
cause trouble?"
Scratching at his beard, Lukka replied, "There've been plenty of women here in the camp. The men are
satisfied, for now. We can move faster without camp followers, that's certain. And we'll probably find
women here and there as we march."
I understood what he meant. "Yes, I doubt that our passage to Egypt will be entirely peaceful."
This time his eyes locked on mine. "I only hope that our leaving the camp is entirely peaceful."
I smiled grimly. He was no fool, this Hatti soldier.
Two nights later I bribed a teenaged boy to come with me to the camp of Menalaos. The area was not
really guarded: the few armed men who stood watch knew that there were no enemies present. They
were more intent on protecting their king's loot and slaves from thievery than anything else.
The youth and I found Helen's tent. Serving women loitered outside, eyeing me askance, as if they knew
what was about to happen. One of them ushered me into her mistress's tent. It was large, and Helen was
pacing in it nervously when we entered it.
Helen dismissed her servant, and with hardly a word between us, I knocked the startled youth
unconscious, stripped him, and watched Helen pull his rags over her own short-skirted chemise. She
pointed to a plain wooden chest, half as wide as the span of my arms, and as I hefted it she took up a
smaller box.
Still wordless, we walked out of the tent, past the women, past the careless guards, and toward the
riverbank, where Lukka and his men waited for us with horses, donkeys, and oxcarts.
We left the Achaian camp on the plain of Ilios in the dark of night, like a band of robbers. Riding on a
thickly folded blanket that passed among these people for a saddle, I turned and looked for one last time
at the ruin of Troy, its once-proud walls already crumbling and ghostlike in the cold silvery light of the
rising moon.
The ground rumbled. Our horses snorted and neighed, prancing nervously.
"Poseidon speaks," said Poletes from the oxcart, his voice weak but discernible. "The earth will shake
soon from his wrath. He will finish the task of bringing down the walls of Troy."
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The old man was predicting an earthquake. A big one. All the more reason for us to get as far away as
possible.
We forded the river and headed southward. Toward Egypt.
BOOK II: JERICHO
Chapter 25
AS Lukka had predicted, our journey was neither easy nor peaceful. The whole world seemed in
conflict. We trekked slowly down the hilly coastline, through regions that the Hatti soldiers called Assuwa
and Seha. It seemed that every city, every village, every farmhouse was in arms. Bands of marauders
prowled the countryside, some of them former Hatti army units just as Lukka's contingent was, most of
them merely gangs of brigands.
We fought almost every day. Men died over a brace of chickens or even an egg. We lost a few of our
men in these skirmishes, and gained a few from bands that offered to join us. I never accepted anyone
that Lukka would not accept, and he took in only other Hatti professionals. Our group remained at about
thirty men, a few more or less, from one month to the next.
I kept searching anxiously to our rear, every day, half expecting to see Menalaos leading his forces in
pursuit of his wayward queen. But if the Achaians were following after us, I saw no sign. And I slept at
nights without being visited by Apollo or Zeus or any of their kind. Perhaps they were busy elsewhere.
Or perhaps whatever fate they had prepared for me was waiting in Egypt, inside the tomb of a king.
The rainy season began, and although it turned roads into quagmires of slick, sticky mud and made us
miserable and cold, it also stopped most of the bands of brigands from their murderous marauding. Most
of them. We still had to fight our way through a trap in the hills just above a city that Lukka called
Ti-Smurna.
And Lukka himself was nearly killed by a farmer who thought we were after his wife and daughters.
Stinking and filthy, the farmer had hidden himself in his miserable hovel of a barn nothing more than a
low cave that he had put a gate to and rammed a pitchfork at Lukka's back when he went in to pick
out a pair of lambs. It was food we were after, not women. We had paid the farmer's wife with a bauble
from the loot of Troy, but the man had concealed himself when he had first caught sight of us, expecting
us to rape his women and burn what we could not carry off.
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