Bronze Summer

THREE
43

The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Late Spring

‘Hit me,’ Hunda said. ‘I mean it. Come on. Hit me.’ He grinned.

Tibo just stood before the Hatti sergeant. A few soldiers watched idly, with Milaqa and Voro standing by uncomfortably. Before Hunda, Tibo was a boy-man before a man-boy, Milaqa thought. On a patch of Northland ground trampled to lifeless dust by Hatti soldiers’ boots, the two of them stood naked save for grimy loincloths, barefoot, without weapons, the dirt clinging to their legs.

Kilushepa had loaned the Northlanders a thousand or so warriors, and here they were, with many more followers — servants and slaves of the officers, weapon-makers and cooks and cobblers, dentists and doctors, and women, some of them wives, many of them booty-women with exotic looks and strange tongues, brought from places far from here. There were children running around, even infants, some of them conceived and born during this army’s long journey here by sea and land. One man, bizarrely, had a young piglet on a long rope. Meant for that evening’s meal, its snout twitched at the piles of filthy clothes, the boots, the smoking hearth.

Around the Hatti camp the ground was scored by sewage gullies and the ruts of chariot wheels, with further out an elaborate defensive earthwork of ditches and ramparts. It was a place of filth and stench, like a pen of animals, where disease had already run through the ranks like fire.

But Northland had to accept this great unnatural scab in its heart, because the reports were persistent and ominous. Qirum was building an army. The Trojans were coming to Northland.

The moment stretched, the challenge hanging in the air between the two fighters. Hunda was actually shorter than Tibo. Many of the Hatti struck the Northland folk as short — cattle-folk, they called them, stunted after growing up on a diet of rotten meat and teeth-grinding bread. And Tibo had bulked up; still just seventeen years old, he had pushed his body hard in the months since he had been freed from the camp of the warlord called the Spider. Yet it was obvious that size didn’t matter, even the mass of Tibo’s muscles didn’t matter. Even stripped to his loincloth, even with that thick braid of hair at his back hanging loose, Hunda looked like a soldier, a warrior. For all his size Tibo still looked like a frightened boy.

‘Come on, hit me,’ Hunda said again. He sounded almost gentle. ‘Or are you afraid? After what that Wilusan savage did to you, you’ve got a lot to be afraid of, haven’t you, pretty boy?’

Tibo roared and lashed out, a bunched fist at the end of a massive arm swinging towards Hunda’s head. But Hunda ducked underneath the swing and jabbed with a hand held flat like a blade, hitting Tibo just under his ribcage. Tibo folded, the air gushing out of him in a great sigh. Hunda slammed his fist into the boy’s temple, and Tibo was sent sprawling in the dirt.

Around them the watching men laughed.

‘We should leave,’ Voro said. ‘I can’t watch this.’

‘Well, you can’t leave,’ Milaqa said. ‘You’ve got to talk to Muwa about the warning beacons.’

‘The Hatti won’t listen. You know what they’re like. They treat us with contempt.’

She looked at him, exasperated. ‘What will your pricked pride matter when the Trojans come? You’re a Jackdaw. A trader. You’re supposed to make deals with strangers. If you can’t talk to some Hatti sergeant about a set of beacons that might save all our lives, then what’s the point of you?’

‘Look, Milaqa-’

‘Oh, just sort it out, Voro.’ She turned away from him.

Tibo’s trial was not yet over. Hunda walked casually around the fallen Northlander, who lay on his belly, down on the dusty ground. ‘You’re a strong boy,’ Hunda said. ‘Nobody would deny that. That’s good. You want to fight. That’s good too. But you are a blunt blade. You hesitate. Maybe you feel how it would be to receive the punch you deliver. That slows you down, just for a fraction of a breath. But that’s enough to get you killed, because I can guarantee you that the animals Qirum has been recruiting from the ruins of the palace kingdoms are not going to be stopped by fretting how much they’re going to hurt you.’ On impulse he gestured to the soldier with the piglet. ‘Give me that.’

The man brought the animal over. Hunda snapped a finger and beckoned to another of his men, who tossed over a bronze dagger, which Hunda stabbed down through the rope and into the earth, tethering the pig. The piglet walked around, snuffling at the ground around the dagger. It did not seem to be frightened; like most young animals it was too busy being curious about the newness of the world.

The boy struggled to his feet.

‘Kill it,’ Hunda said.

‘What?’ Tibo looked at the piglet, his own empty hands.

‘Kill it. Right now. Prove to me that you can. Or you’ll drink nothing for the next day but your own piss. Now!’

Tibo gathered both fists into a club. Staggering slightly, he stood over the pig, legs splayed, and flexed his body, preparing to use all his core strength, Milaqa saw. The piglet looked up, still apparently unafraid. Tibo hesitated, for one more heartbeat.

Then he swung his fists down, smashing the animal’s skull with a crunch like a walnut under a heel. The men whooped and applauded, catcalling in a dozen tongues. Tibo struck again. There was a stickier impact as his fists drove into the grey mass within the skull, and blood fountained and splashed. The piglet’s body twitched, its legs scrabbling as if it was trying to run. Tibo brought down his fists over and over, reducing the animal’s head to a bloody pulp of flesh and splintered bone.

Voro looked as if he might vomit. Hunda grinned, arms folded.