Then it wasn’t the emperor who was dying, it was my father, his life’s blood seeping into the dirt floor of my house while choking smoke filled the room and eager flames licked across the timbers of the roof.

“Gone,” my father moaned. “Taken by slavers … your wife, your sons … gone … Find them … Find my grandsons.”

He died in my arms. The burning house crashed in on me.

I snapped awake and sat upright on the meager pallet of straw we had scraped together. Blinking the sleep away I slowly recalled where we were. A farmstead in the brown, scrubby hills off the royal road that led to Troy.

The farm wench beside me stirred slightly, then turned over, snoring.

I was soaked in sweat, like a weak woman instead of a Hatti soldier. In the gray light of early dawn I reached out my hand. My sword lay by my side. It had never been more than an arm’s length away from me, not for these past six months.

Perhaps my wife and children were already dead; we had found corpses enough along the royal road. But not my sons. Not my wife. Not yet.

How long can they live under the slavers’ lash? I wondered. My sons were little more than babies; the elder hardly five, his brother two years younger. How can she protect them, protect herself ? I felt as if I had been thrown into the deepest of all the world’s black pits, cut off from light and air and all hope. Suffocating, drowning, already dead and merely staggering through the motions of a living man.

Enough! I commanded myself. Don’t let despair swallow you. Battles are lost before they begin when soldiers surrender themselves to despair.

Reaching out my hand, I lifted my naked sword. Its solid weight felt comforting in the predawn gray. A Hatti soldier. What does that mean when the empire no longer exists? When there is no emperor to give commands, no army to carry the might of the imperial will to the far corners of the world?