"My house is yours," Raupasha said. If it is mine, really, she thought.

Hollard was carrying a dog in his arms; a puppy, rather, flop-eared and spotted. Azzu-ena looked at it and raised her brows.

"Lord Kenn'et," she said. "I thought your people had a horror of touching dogs, even more than ours."

"Only unclean dogs," he said.

"Unclean?" she asked, baffled.

"Dogs that are left to run around towns and villages, untended and eating filth."

"Oh. You mean that dogs such as nobles keep for hunting, or shepherds, are not unclean."

"Ah… approximately, yes." He turned to the Mitannian girl, smiling. "I think you told me that dogs are not a pollution to your folk, either?"

"No," Raupasha said, shaking her head and stifling a giggle. The puppy was making a determined effort to lick the Nantukhtar commander's face, and then chewing at the leather strap across his chest that supported his belt and sword. He is so grave and dignified, and it is worrying him like a piece of rawhide, she thought.

"We honor them," she went on solemnly aloud, "For we say that they neither break faith nor lie. My foster father kept a kennel of hunting hounds, and we had mastiffs to protect the sheep."

"Well, this one's from King Shuriash's kennels," he said. "I thought you might like to have it."

Raupasha nodded and reached out eagerly. The puppy came to her with the indiscriminate love of its kind, and she did giggle when it licked her chin.

"I shall call him Sabala," Raupasha said. At his look, "It means 'Spotted One,' " she said, and looked a little baffled when he laughed.

She put the wiggling bundle of young dog down, pushing it away gently with a foot when it tried to chew on her ankle. It chewed the table leg for a while instead and then collapsed into sleep with its head on her foot.

Azzu-ena rose. "I must go," she said. "The time of my studies at the house of healing is come." She looked at her wrist, which bore one of the tiny timekeepers; Raupasha shook off a certain unease at seeing time divided so… relentlessly.

"Will you stay, Lord Kenn'et, and drink the cocoa with me?" Raupasha said, and then caught herself. Do not be forward. Her foster parents had warned her that the outer world was not so relaxed as their own manor.

The Nantukhtar hesitated. "For a short while," he said, looking at the mass of papers on the table. "I brought you a book."

"Ah… thank you, but I do not read your language well enough yet," Raupasha said with a sigh.

"This is something our printing shop made up for locals… for the people of the land," he said.

I do not think local means exactly that, Raupasha thought with a little resentment. I think it means "backward, " as one might speak of a hill tribe or the Aramaeans.

She took the book eagerly anyway. The first page held a wonder that made her gasp, a drawing of a donkey so lifelike that she had to laugh-it was planting its feet and braying, pulling back against the hands that hauled on its bridle.

" 'A' is for Ass," she read-there was an explanation in Akkadian in the upper right corner. A frown. "I thought that meant…" She tapped her rump.

"Ah… well, the word has two meanings-soldier's talk is sometimes a little… uncouth," Lord Kenn'et said. "I hope you like the book."

"Oh, yes! Only…"

"Only?"

"Well, I have been reading much. In my home, I had work-seeing to the spinners and weavers, and sometimes we would hunt gazelle. I hope you don't think that was unseemly; my foster father sometimes treated me like the son my father hoped to have."

Hollard laughed, and she blushed, remembering their customs. Of course he doesn't think it's unseemly! Raupasha scolded herself.

"Well, perhaps you could get out more here," he said.

"Is it allowed?" she said, her eyes drifting to the door. A warrior armed with a thunder-thrower… a rifle… was stationed there.

"Well, of course!" Hollard shook his head. "Yes, you can travel around. The guard's for your protection." He paused, knitting his brows in thought.

What a strange man, Raupasha thought. He speaks to me as if I were his favorite sister, or sometimes as if I was a man. It was strange, yes, but not unpleasing, most of the time. Sometimes it felt… insulting.

"How's this?" he said. "Would you like to learn to ride horses, as we do?"

"Oh, yes!"

"God damn it!" Walker shouted. "God damn it to fucking hell, I wanted them both alive!"

The officers were uneasy; they always were when their lord spoke in his birth-tongue. Most of them-the Achaeans among them, anyway- tried to forget that he had not been born among them. English was the tongue of sorcery, too.

The horses stamped and curvetted, blowing; they weren't tired by the gallop, only excited by the run and the belling of the hounds. The dogs milled about, uncertain, looking at the bloodied body on the ground and the man who stood at bay beyond it, his back to the crag. This pack was not used to hunting men.

Walker swung out of the saddle. The mountain soil crunched beneath his boots, and he was acutely conscious of the nervousness of the men confronting Agamemnon. The king's face was nearly purple; he'd run far and fast for a man his age and weight, after the chariot crashed. It was a warm late-spring day, but they were high enough now that it was a little cooler; Walker felt the mountain wind cuffing at his sweat-damp hair. Somewhere not too far away a goat bell tinkled.

The high king of Mycenae had turned at bay against a vertical rise of rock that broke out of the steep slope. To either side it gave to almost-vertical cliffs where a few straggly pines found root. He straightened as his breath came back to him, tears running down his cheeks into his white-shot gray beard.

"My son," he whispered, looking at the body before him. A sword lay not far from the dead man's hand; his face was young, beard a mere black down on his cheeks. "My son."

"I wanted that one alive!" Walker snarled to the guardsmen, and they paled.

"Lord, he attacked us," one of them said.

"Shut up. He was a stripling, and I needed him."

Damn. I could have married him off to one of my daughters, and that would have been perfect. I wish Odikweos hadn't been here and come along. The Ithakan was pale and silent in the rear ranks, a cluster of his own men around him.

"Lord King," Walker said, forcing unction into his voice. "It's a great pity your son was killed by accident-doubtless the gods required the sacrifice."

Agamemnon squared his shoulders, and suddenly he was no longer a fat old man weeping before a triumphant enemy. "Better he should die in battle than live as your slave, outlander."

"My father-in-law is distraught in his grief," Walker said loudly. My father-in-law was making a break for it to raise a revolt against his lawagetas, he thought, but the dynastic reminder would make the Achaeans happier.

He saw a few nods at that; Walker's infant son by Iphigenia would have as good a claim to the throne as anyone, now. He went on:

"Or he would not speak so of the father of his grandson. Come, my lord-we must return to Mycenae and arrange the funeral games."

"The gods' curse is upon the land," Agamemnon said hoarsely. "That I listened to you and brought evil witchcraft within the kingdom."

"Lord King-"

The older man ignored him. He reached up and touched his forehead, where a graze was bleeding. "This is the blood that is shed for the land," he said, holding the hand out for all to see. "The blood of Zeus the Father, the blood of Poseidaion, the blood of the kings. The gods know the value of the given sacrifice."

Walker knew suddenly what the older man intended. "Grab him! Now!"

A half-dozen men lunged forward, Ohotolarix first among them. Agamemnon took two steps to his right, spreading his arms to the sun.