I thought a moment. “You are hoping to buy their freedom?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
He shot a questioning glance at me. “What do you mean?”
“It will be difficult to continue your life as a bandit with an eight-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter to take care of.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I, pilgrim. For now, I’m seeking my children. What happens afterward, I’ll worry about after I’ve found them. First things first.”
I stayed at his side through the whole long miserable afternoon. The slave dealers paraded out their wares, one by one. Young women brought the highest prices; strong healthy-looking men young enough to work in the fields or the mines also made profits for the sellers. There were dozens of children, but they brought very little. Most of them were still not sold when the sun dipped behind the warehouses lining the docks and the auction ended.
Hardly a scattering of buyers was left in the square by then. The children, miserable, dirty, some of them crying, all of them collared by heavy iron rings, were led by their chains back to their pens.
While the slave dealers huddled off behind the auction block, counting their coins, the chief auctioneer climbed down wearily and headed toward the tavern across the square.
“It’s a shame,” said the chief auctioneer as we watched the children being led away. His leather-lunged voice was slightly hoarse from the long day’s work. “We can’t keep feeding those brats forever. They’re eating up any profit we might make on them.”
Falling in beside him, Harkan asked as casually as he could manage, “Where are they from?”
The auctioneer was a lean, balding man with a pot belly and cunning eyes. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Here and there. Phrygia, Anatolia; we got a clutch of them from Rhodes, believe it or not.”
“Have there been any from Gordium?”
He stopped walking and looked sharply at Harkan. We were more than halfway across the square, almost at the door to the tavern. “What is such information worth to you?”
Harkan’s face became a mask of granite. “It is worth a life, auctioneer. Yours.”
The man looked at me, then glanced back over his shoulder where the dealers were still gathered behind the block. A half-dozen armed men stood guard near them.
“You wouldn’t get to utter a single word,” Harkan said, his voice low with menace. “Now just tell me, and tell me truly. Have there been any children from Gordium here?”
“A month ago. Nearly a hundred of them. There were so many that the bidding went down almost to nothing. A bad show, a miserable show.”
“Who bought them?”
“Only a few were bought in the open auction. The bidding was too low. We can’t sell goods for nothing! Can’t give them away! The dealers closed the auction when the bidding went down too low to satisfy them.”
“So what happened to the children who weren’t bought?”
“They were sold in a lot. To a Macedonian. Said he was from their king.”
“Philip?” I asked.
“Yes, Philip of Macedon. He needs lots of slaves now that he’s master of Athens and all the rest of the Greeks.”
“This is the truth?” Harkan asked, gripping the auctioneer’s skinny forearm almost hard enough to snap the bone.
“Yes! The truth! I swear it!”
“The few who were bought by men here,” Harkan went on urgently, “were any of them an eight-year-old boy, with hair the color of straw and eyes as black as mine? Or a six-year-old girl with the same coloring?”
The auctioneer was sweating and trying to pry Harkan’s fingers off his forearm. He might as well have tried to dig through the city wall with a dinner fork.
“How can I remember?” he yelped. “There were so many, how can I remember an individual boy or girl?”
“Let him be,” I said to Harkan. “The chances are that your children are on their way to Pella.”
He released the auctioneer, who dashed through the tavern’s door without another word.
“To Pella. In Macedonia.” Harkan drew in a great painful breath. “Then I’ll never see them again.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I know little of Philip and his kingdom, but I’ve heard that they don’t tolerate bandits there. Philip’s men keep the law. There’s no place for me there.”
I smiled at him and placed my hand on his shoulder. “My friend, Philip does not tolerate banditry, true enough. But he has the finest army in the world, and he is always ready to welcome new recruits.”
I had heard that in ancient times heroes had swum across the Hellespont. Alexandros had sworn to his Companions that he would do it one day himself. Perhaps I could swim the Bosporus; it was narrower than the Hellespont, although its current was swift and treacherous. It would be far easier to buy a place on one of the ferries that plied between Chalkedon and Byzantion. And, of course, I could not expect Harkan or his men to swim.
His band had dwindled to nine men over the winter. The others had drifted off, tired of their bandit ways, trying to find their way back to their home villages or looking for a new life for themselves. I was glad to see that among the remaining nine was Batu. Harkan told me he was a strong fighter, with a cool, calculating mind.
“They say there are Macedonian troops in Abydos,” Harkan told me, “down by the Hellespont.”
“Truly?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the word in the marketplace.”
Philip’s show of strength, I realized—holding a bridgehead on the Asian side of the water in case he ultimately decided to move the bulk of the army against the Great King. Diplomacy works best when it’s backed by power.
“We’ll get to Pella faster by taking passage across the Bosporus to Byzantion,” I decided.
“That takes money, pilgrim. We don’t have enough coin to buy passage for the eleven of us.”
“Then how do you expect to buy—” I stopped myself in mid-sentence. I knew the answer before I finished asking the question. Harkan was saving whatever coin he had amassed to buy back his children.
So I said instead, “I know where there is coin aplenty.”
Harkan grasped my hint. “The slave dealers?” He smiled grimly at the thought. “Yes, they must have more coins than old Midas himself.”
“But they are always heavily protected,” said Batu. “Their homes are guarded and they never venture into the streets alone.”
“We are strong enough to overpower such guards,” I said.
“Yes, I agree,” said Batu. “But before we could take their coin to the docks and get aboard a boat, the city’s guards would be upon us.”
I nodded. He was right. Brute force would not work; the city was too small. An attack on one of the rich slave dealers would immediately bring out the whole force of guards and the first thing they would do would be to halt all the femes attempting to leave the docks.
“Then we must use guile,” I said.
Chapter 27
It rained that night, which was all to the good. I stood beneath the gnarled branches of a dripping olive tree, studying the house of the richest slave dealer in Chalkedon. Harkan and Batu were at my side, shoulders hunched, wet, miserable and apprehensive.
“The wall is high,” murmured Batu, his deep resonant voice like a rumble of distant thunder.
“And the gods know how many guards he has in there,” said Harkan nervously.
“Six,” I told him. “And another dozen sleeping in the servants’ quarters on the other side of the courtyard.”