The First Heroes Read online

  “Hail, Divine One!” he gasped, since not trying for a name that might be wrong seemed safest, too.

  “Yes, indeed, I am divine,” she said impatiently, as though the fact of his worship and blazing desire were hardly important. “I am Inaras, you are my hero, and let us be away from here.”

  She gestured, and the world dazed him with a sudden flare of light. Hupasiya blinked—

  —blinked again.

  And let out his breath in a slow gasp of wonder, all lust dashed from him by the suddenness of change. A moment ago, he had been standing amid his fields, yet now he was . . . wherever this was. A mountain peak . . . yes, with sharp rocks and ice all around him, and gusts of wind sending snow whirling up in little spirals, but he wasn’t cold, only . . .

  Only scared out of my senses. Scared as I never was in the heart of battle. This is a god, a goddess, the Goddess Inaras—what does she—

  “What do you want of me?” he burst out before he could control himself. And then, heart pounding, waited to be destroyed for his impertinence.

  But Inaras said only, “Illuyankas threatens.”

  “Your pardon, but I don’t—”

  “Have you mortals no wisdom at all? Learn!”

  She seized him in her arms. Her lips met his in a savage, sensual, demanding kiss, and in that instant Hupasiya saw, knew—

  It was Illuyankas the Dragon. Mighty being, terrible being, all strength, all hunger for power mortal and divine. Illuyankas, who had defeated the Storm-God himself, and with that defeat of the normal order of Nature had caused both the immense insult to the gods and the unnaturally long chill of winter.

  Inaras released him, and Hupasiya fell helplessly to his knees, gasping for breath. That kiss had nearly been strong enough to force the life from him. And yet, and yet, he was a man, a mortal man, and there was a thought deep in his mind that would not be denied: What would it be like to know that kiss again, what would it be like to feel those limbs about a man, to know the passion of a goddess . . .

  “I’ve been recruited.” Those were the only reasonably sane words he could find that would come forth. “Your pardon for any rudeness, great one, but—you want me to conquer that?” How could a mortal ever possibly succeed when the gods themselves could not?

  To Hupasiya’s immense relief, the goddess didn’t blast him where he stood. “It is precisely because you are mortal that you shall succeed.”

  And are you also so sure that the mortal will survive? But sarcasm almost certainly would get him turned to ash. At least Inaras didn’t seem able, or at least willing, to read the thoughts in his mind.

  “I know how mortals think,” she said, and disdain was in the words. “Name a reward.”

  What reward is worth my life? Hupasiya wanted to say something about his wife and children, anything to ensure their safety, but confronted by all that too-living, too-perfect female splendor, he could not focus his mind on them, or on his love for them. Instead, he heard himself say, “You, gracious lady. The price I name for my aid is a night with you.”

  He waited, heart pounding with renewed force. Oh, fool, fool! Surely she, goddess that she was, would refuse him, and he could only pray that she would not strike him down for his impertinence, and not take vengeance on his family, either.

  But to Hupasiya’s astonishment, after the briefest of silences, Inaras merely said, as though it meant nothing to her, “Done.”

  So fierce and hot a stare did she give him in the next instant that lust beyond all controlling blazed up in Hupasiya. His last clear thought as the goddess opened her arms to him was, And here I worried about a Dragon? This will probably kill me!

  At least he would die happy.

  But . . . he hadn’t died. He was himself, waking and standing without any memory of awakening and getting to his feet, yes, and with only the dimmest, most unsure memories of . . .of . . .a wife . . .? Children . . .? He couldn’t even be sure about what had just happened. And he—

  He was standing among others—

  The gods! He was surrounded by gods! These so very fierce with Life folk were never, never human men and women! That tall, handsome young deity in the fringed robes of a hundred different shades of green could only be Telepinus, he who oversaw all that grew. For a mindless instant Hupasiya wanted to ask, “What happened to this year’s harvest?” But he already knew the answer to that question: Illuyankas.

  Besides, Hupasiya really didn’t think this was the time to ask any deity anything, not after . . . well, the details still weren’t at all clear in his mind, but whatever had happened . . . had happened.

  Hot breath on the back of his neck made Hupasiya whirl, going almost instinctively into a warrior’s crouch. He nearly let out a shout to find himself nose to nose with a lion, and sprang back a step, just barely keeping from landing on his rump. The lion gave a rumbling purr, almost as though laughing at him.

  “And this is your hero,” a woman murmured from behind the beast.

  That was Hebat, surely, since who else but she would keep a lion as a pet? Who else but Hebat could look so motherly and dangerous at the same time, she who was the Storm-God’s wife. And, for that matter, she who was Inaras’s mother—gods, had she, did she—did she know what her daughter and he had—

  What nonsense! These were the gods, and they would hardly be interested in anything so petty as human morality.

  “Glorious Lady,” he said, making a raised-hands gesture of reverence, “I make no claims of being a hero, nor do I make any claim to understand the ways and wishes of the divine. But surely we do share this one thing: We both wish an end to the Dragon to avenge a wrong and return the rightful order to the world.”

  “And how, little mortal,” Telepinus asked, “is that to be accomplished?”

  You didn’t snap back at someone who could easily destroy you. But something in Telepinus’s jeering tone struck an odd chord of memory in Hupasiya’s mind. He’d heard the same sort of so-superior backtalk from superior officers in the Hittite army. Then, too, he’d been unable to say what he was thinking. But he’d handled the situation then, and by the—by the gods, he’d handle it now.

  Crouching down, he cleared a patch of ground with a stick, then used the same stick to cut symbols in the earth. As he did, Hupasiya spoke in his most no-nonsense military voice, “To destroy a foe, we must first know his strengths and weaknesses.”

  When the gods were silent, Hupasiya prodded them, “I am, as you remind me, a mortal. What may seem quite ordinary to you will be new and unknown to me.”

  “Shall we then waste our time educating you?” Telepinus asked.

  Calmness. Can’t strike back at a superior officer. “It may seem a waste, Divine One, but the smallest of details so familiar it has been overlooked may provide us with a clue—and a weapon.”

  “The mortal shows a good line of reasoning,” Hebat murmured. “Let us agree with him and begin listing what we may know of the Dragon.”

  The gods listed feature after feature: Illuyankas’s strength; Illuyankas’s fury; Illuyankas’s envy of the gods. Obvious features, useless features. Hupasiya kept silent all the while, forcing himself to keep his uneasiness and growing despair from showing. Nothing here, nothing at all. But if he didn’t find some weapon against the Dragon, they were going to throw him against the Dragon, and there was a knife’s edge difference between being slain by Illuyankas or by angry gods.

  Eh, wait—Hupasiya held up a hand, not caring in that moment of sudden hope that he was interrupting Inaras. “What was that? What did you just say?”

  She stared at him, clearly too startled to be angry. “Why, that Illuyankas is large in all his appetites.”

  “Ah, yes, there it is! O Divine One, you have just given us the weapon we need!”

  As the gods listened, frowning slightly, Hupasiya told them his newly born plan.

  “That’s impossible!”

  “It can never work!”

  “There is no honor in this!”

>   “I am but human,” Hupasiya reminded them all. “It is my honor, not yours, Divine Ones, that is at stake. And I dare risk it.” He could feel the gods uncertainty as a chilly wind prickling his skin, so Hupasiya added, “What harm to this? If my plan fails, why, you are no worse off then you were before my arrival. But if it succeeds, then you are avenged.”

  “Interesting,” a stern voice said.

  The newcomer was a tall, powerfully built god, the dark masses of his hair like gathering storm clouds, his eyes flashing with the blue-white fire of the lightning. Even as Hupasiya bowed low before the Storm-God, he thought, at the point of terror when one is utterly calm, I was wondering when he would appear.

  “Let it be done,” the Storm-God said.

  I hoped that the invitation would be made, Hupasiya thought. I knew that the invitation had to be delivered. I just never thought that I would be the one to deliver it.

  It was hardly work for a warrior. And yet it made sense, in a purely unemotional way. Illuyankas would never believe any offering made directly from the gods.

  And of course if something happens to the messenger, why, that is merely the inconvenient loss of a human.

  He hadn’t expected Illuyankas to live in a palace. And sure enough, this was a cave. A cavern, rather, he realized, once he had gotten through the narrow entrance. Excellent defense to keep enemies from following the Dragon into his home. His dark, chilly home.

  Illuyankas suddenly loomed up before him, a great mass of darker shadow against the darkness. Other shadows moved behind him.

  Wonderful. The Dragon has a family.

  Hupasiya promptly abandoned all thoughts of being a dragonslayer. One did not go up against an army with only one sword. Either deliver his message or die.

  “O great Illuyankas, the Storm-God sends you humble greetings.”

  That eerie repetitive snarl could almost have been a laugh. “Indeed . . .” It was the softest, coldest whisper of sound.

  “And to show you his sincerity,” Hupasiya continued, keeping his voice steady, “he has invited you to a great feast in your honor, out on the mountaintop where you two once fought. Will you not join him, O mighty Illuyankas?”

  He heard that eerie snarl-laugh echo in the darkness. “Warn the god of faintest breezes that I am coming.”

  Not only Illuyankas but his whole family followed Hupasiya out into the light. Nightmares, he thought, living nightmares, sleek and sinuous, scaled and furred, and impossible to see as any one kind of being. Hupasiya knew for the first time why even a god had been overcome.

  Something so fully a thing of old Chaos has no right still existing in the world of gods and mortals.

  Now, if only the gods have kept up their side of this trap . . .

  And if only their judgment of his character is correct . . .

  It was, it was! The Dragon and his children were not wasting time on gloating or threatening. They threw themselves on the food like so many starving creatures, gorging themselves on the meal.

  Gorging themselves as well on the drugs within the food. One by one, they staggered from the feast and fell. One by one, Hupasiya bound them with rope. Only Illuyankas did not fall. The Dragon stumbled and staggered toward his lair. But he was too bloated from his meal to slip through the cave’s narrow entrance. As the other gods slew the Dragon’s brood, the Storm-God fell upon Illuyankas like a thunderbolt, and slew him.

  Only Hupasiya did nothing. It was not a warrior’s way to slay a bound captive.

  I . . . am something other than a warrior . . . am I not? I cannot remember.

  “Come,” Inaras told him with a purr in her voice. “I have a reward for you, my hero, a fine house here in the mountains, on a cliff overlooking all the world, balanced on the four directions, with windows facing all of the four. You shall live here and want for nothing. And perhaps, perhaps, my hero, I shall visit you. I ask only this one thing of you, a little, little thing. Do not look out of the western window. That is the window of death.”

  Hupasiya felt nothing. He had done the gods’ bidding, he had been rewarded, and yet . . . nothing.

  “I will not look out of the western window,” he agreed, since that, too, meant nothing.

  It was a fine house, indeed, with servants to pamper him and fill his every wish. But he had no wishes. Inaras did visit him when the whim struck her. Each time she would warn him not to gaze out of the western window. But when she left, he once again would feel nothing.

  “I will not look out of the western window,” Hupasiya murmured.

  Why should he not? What else was there for him to do?

  He threw aside the curtain covering the western window and looked out and down to the foot of the mountains. A small farm nestled down there among the fuzz of new green growth, and if he stared, he could almost see a woman . . . two children . . .

  “Zaliya . . .?”

  As he said her name, memory returned with a rush. His wife, his family. “Inaras!” he shouted, brushing aside the servants who tried to silence him. “Inaras!”

  She was before him in a rush of air. “My hero, what is wrong?”

  “Let me go. I beg you, let me go!”

  Inaras straightened, looming over him. “You have disobeyed me.”

  “Yes, I admit it. I have seen my wife and family—Inaras, Lady, Divine One, I love them! Let me go.”

  Her hair swirling about her, her eyes blazing with blue-white fire, Inaras shouted, “I treat you as I treat no mortal man! I give you the love of my body. And you—is this treason my repayment?”

  “I am mortal, yes. I cannot live as a god. Inaras, please, you do not need me and my family does.”

  “They shall want for nothing ever again!”

  It took him only a moment to realize the possible threat latent in that statement. The dead want for nothing. “No!” And was that why he felt . . . nothing? Was he already dead? “It doesn’t matter if I am one among the dead if my family is safe. Take my life if you must—but let them live!”

  It took greater courage than ever it had to face down the enemy, but Hupasiya dropped to his knees, head bent, waiting for the blow that was sure to come.

  There was utter silence for an agonizingly long time. “You are dead to me,” Inaras said at last. “This shall not have happened.”

  Hupasiya stepped out of his farmhouse, then stopped dead, breathing deeply. He still looked very much like the true Hittite warrior he’d been just a few short years ago: burly and muscular, with a narrow scar like a white blaze of lightning seaming his face, although his hair had turned in one short night from black to white.

  “Husband?”

  He turned to face Zaliya with a smile. “Smell the air, love. The springtime has come at last.”

  In the opening volume of S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket series, the Information Age found itself confronting—and entirely surrounded by—the Late Bronze Age of the thirteenth-century B.C. Even as guns, germs, and steel (not to mention three-masted barques, radio, and a money economy) bring about a completely different kind of Iron Age in the course of the novels, no one, not even the Nantucketers, must ever underestimate the timeless power of cunning.

  Blood Wolf

  S. M. STIRLING

  His name was Kreuha Wolkwos—Blood Wolf, in the tongue of the Keruthini folk—and he was the greatest of all the warriors of his people, although still unwedded and barely old enough to raise a thick yellow down on his cheeks. Even before that fuzz sprouted he had been called a man in the korios, the war-band of the youths who spent the summer living like a wolf pack in the woods off what they could hunt and steal. Now even householders and the clan chiefs called him a man, for six heads of his taking—the oldest weathered down to a skull, the newest still ripe—were spiked to the lintel above his father’s house-door. This year he had come to his full height, a finger’s-span below six feet, rangy and long-limbed; agile enough to run out on the yoke-pole of a chariot while the team galloped, fast enough on his own feet to chase dow
n deer and cut their throats with his knife. At a full run he could throw his narrow-bladed javelins through a rolling hoop of rawhide half a hundred paces distant, and in a wrestling bout few men could keep their shoulders off the ground once Blood Wolf’s hands closed on them. At the Sun Festival he had thrown the sacrificial bull by its horns and then danced the night through by the side of the Spring Queen.

  Two horses and eight cattle were his by soru-rechtos, booty-right, taken in lawful raids, besides sheep, bronze, cloth, and a girl who would be valuable if she lived to womanhood. Many men hated him for his toploftiness, but none had dared face him for some time. Two of those heads on his father’s lintel were fellow-tribesmen, slain within the sacred wands after due challenge. His name was often spoken around the hearthfires, and all knew that—if he lived to be a householder—the ruler of the tribe, the High Reghix, would make him successor to the broad lands of his father. Then he would surely become a great chief whose name lived forever.

  Right now that pride was lost in a dull misery as he scrambled to the lee side of the boat and puked helplessly, bringing up only a spatter of thin, bitter bile into an ocean that heaved gray and white with foam beneath a cold October sky of racing gray cloud.

  His stomach had been empty since the first few minutes of the daylong voyage from the mainland to Alba, the White Isle. One of the boatmen pushed him aside as he adjusted a rope, and he was too weak to return a blow for the insult. Only when the fifty-foot length ceased moving beneath him did he raise his head.

  “Get your arse out of our boat, wild-man,” the crewman said.