“She does love me.” I said the words half as a hope, half to reassure myself.
“If it comforts you to think so,” sneered the Golden One. “Anya seemed so taken by the attractions of human form that some of the other Creators have dabbled at it. Hera and I came to this era and began to play at making kings and emperors.”
“You and Hera?”
“Does that shock you, Orion? I must confess that human passions can be very… intense. Almost satisfying.”
“Hera wants to make the son she bore to Philip into emperor of the whole world.”
“Bore to Philip?” Aten laughed aloud. “Don’t be stupid, Orion.”
“You fathered Alexandros!”
“As I said, Orion, human passions can be very amusing. Not merely the gross physical pleasures, but the excitement of setting one group against another, the chess game of armies and nations. It’s exhilarating!”
“Then why do you need me?” I demanded.
“You are part of the game, Orion. One of my chess pieces. A pawn, of course.”
“Hera said that the continuum is being threatened as never before. She said all of the Creators are in danger.”
His condescending smirk faded. “It’s all your fault, Orion,” he repeated. “Yours and Anya’s.”
“How so?”
“Taking on human form and living human lifetimes. Phah!”
“But you’re in human form,” I said.
“Only when it pleases me, Orion. What you see now is merely an illusion.” And Aten shimmered, shifted before my eyes, became a glowing sphere of brilliant gold, too bright to look at, like the sun. I had to throw my arms over my face. Still I felt the fierce intensity of his radiance.
“It is difficult to hold a conversation with a creature in our true form,” he said, pulling my hands away from my eyes. He was a human again.
“I… understand.”
He laughed at me again. “You think you understand, but you can’t comprehend even a millionth of it, Orion. Your brain was not built to encompass our abilities.”
I pushed my anger aside. “You said Anya will be at Ararat in five weeks.”
“Five weeks’ time. At sundown. On the summit of Ararat.”
“I will be there.”
He nodded. “It really doesn’t matter if you are or not. Apparently Anya feels sorry for you. But truly, our work would be easier if she simply forgot about you.”
“That’s not what she wants to do, is it?”
“No. Apparently not.” His face glowered with disapproval. “Well, I’ve delivered her message. Now I have my own tasks to accomplish.”
He began to fade.
“Wait!” I called, reaching out to grab his arm. My hand went through emptiness.
“What is it?” he said impatiently, shimmering, almost invisible.
“Why am I here, in this timeplace? What am I supposed to be accomplishing?”
“Nothing, Orion. Nothing at all. But as usual, you’ve managed to make a mess even of that.”
And he winked out like a candle flame snuffed by a gust of wind.
Demosthenes stirred, came back to life. He scowled at me, “You still here, Orion? I thought I had dismissed you with the ambassador.”
“I am leaving now,” I said, adding mentally, for Ararat.
The swiftest way to travel is alone. I knew I could not take the Macedonian soldiers with me, even had I wanted to. Their duty was to accompany Ketu back to Pella with the Great King’s reply to Philip’s offer, once Dareios got around to making his reply. That was my duty, too, but now I had a more urgent task to perform.
I had to get to Ararat, and that meant leaving my sworn duty to Philip and somehow getting out of Parsa despite all the soldiers guarding the palace city of the emperor.
So that night I stole a horse—two of the horses that we had ridden into Parsa upon, actually. I took them from the stables where our mounts had been put up. It was not particularly difficult. We exercised the horses every day, so the stable grooms were accustomed to seeing us. The two boys sleeping in the stables that night seemed more puzzled than upset that a man would want to exercise horses by the light of the moon. They soon settled back in their pallets of straw as I told them I would fit out my horse myself and did not need them to help me.
I walked the two horses to the palace gate. The guards were accustomed to keeping people from entering rather than leaving. Still they stopped me.
“Where do you think you’re going, barbarian?” asked their leader. There were four of them that I could see, perhaps more in the guard house built into the palace wall.
“It’s a nice night for a ride,” I answered easily.
“There’s an exercise course on the other side of the stables,” he said. In the moonlight, his face looked cold and hard. The three guards with him all carried swords, as he did. I could see a half-dozen spears leaning against the side of the guard house.
“I want to get outside the city, have a good run.”
“On whose authority? You can’t leave the palace grounds without permission.”
“I’m a guest of the Great King’s,” I said. “Isn’t that authority enough?”
“A guest!” He tilted his back and laughed. So did the others. I leaped onto the back of the nearer horse and kicked it into a gallop before they realized what was happening. The reins of my second horse were in my hand and it followed right behind me.
“Hey! Stop!”
I leaned against my mount’s neck, expecting a spear to come whizzing past. If they threw any I neither saw nor heard them as I clattered through the wide, paved avenues of Parsa, heading for the city wall.
They could not get a message to the guards at the wall faster than I could get there, I knew, but there was no time to waste palavering at the wall. I simply kept on going, since the gate was open. I could see the guards up ahead jerking their sleepy heads with surprise at the clopping of the horses’ hooves against the paving stones. The gate was only partly open, but wide enough if I got to it before they could push it closed. Surprise has its advantages. They stood in stunned disbelief as I galloped toward them, reacting too slowly to stop me. I heard them shouting. One of them even stepped out in my path and waved his arms, trying to shy the horses off. But they had the bit in their teeth and they were not going to stop. He jumped aside and we dashed through the gate and out into the broad moonlit scrubland.
I took no chances on being pursued, but kept speeding along until we cleared the first small ridge beyond the city walls. Then I quickly changed mounts and started off again. By morning I was in the hills, and when I looked back I could see the city, standing against its cliff like a precisely-engineered square. The road was empty except for a wagon train coming toward the same gate I had left by.
I was free. On my own. And hungry.
Thus I became a bandit, a hunted outlaw. Perhaps “hunted” is too strong a word to use. The lands of the Persian Empire were vast, the soldiers of the Great King concentrated in the cities and larger towns, or used as guards to escort important caravans. Otherwise, a bandit had little to fear. Except other bandits.
For the first few days I nearly starved. I was moving north and west, staying off the Royal Road, heading for the high mountain country and Ararat. The land about me was semi-desert, sparsely settled. There were irrigated farms near Parsa, of course, to support the city. But the farther away from Parsa I rode, the fewer the people and scarcer the food.
The horses could crop the miserable scrub easily enough. And, after the rumbling in my stomach got loud enough to remind my brain, I realize that I would have to do what they were doing, at least for the time being: live off the land.