Bronze Summer

46

The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Midsummer Solstice

On the morning of the Giving, Milaqa found her uncle Teel waiting in the shade of his house in Old Etxelur. In his heavy, dark tunic, he was a lump of darkness on a bright if sunless day.

Together, saying little, they walked across the rich earth of the Bay Land towards the Wall. On this midsummer day the face of the Wall gleamed a brilliant bone-white, incised with galleries and adorned with banners celebrating the Giving. In crevices high in the face sea birds gathered in rustling swarms, terns and gulls, their guano striping the walls, and on the roof the great heads of long-dead Annids stared stoutly out to the excluded sea.

As always, people had come from afar for the ancient festival, and Giving celebrations were already under way all along the foot of the Wall. Milaqa heard laughter, saw running figures, glimpsed smoke rising from a dozen fires. As they walked along the track towards the Wall, Milaqa and Teel passed people sitting in little groups, blankets on the ground, fires blazing, while children ran and played. Milaqa smelled food, smoked fish, broiling meat. But many of these people looked thin, pale, gaunt after another hard season in the shadow of the fire mountain. Milaqa suspected many of them had come this year, not for the joy of the Giving, but for the dole of potato mash and salted fish they could expect from the Annids.

‘Everything’s odd,’ she said to Teel.

‘Is it?’

‘This is always such a special day. I’ll swear I remember Givings when I was only four or three or two. And yet even today we are all preoccupied.’

‘I don’t think the Trojan will be taking a day off.’

‘Oh, do you have to be so morbid? He’s still in Gaira, according to the spies and the spotters on the south coast. And it’s midsummer! Can’t we forget about Qirum just for one day?’

He glanced at her. ‘Because, you think, even if he does come, it would never be today? But it might be on just such a day as this that Qirum would choose to move. Think about it. Every culture knows the solstice; every culture marks it in some way, just as we do. And Qirum has a coalition of warlords to pull together, from a dozen shattered nations. Today would be an easy rallying point in time, if he needed one… It’s my job, and yours, to think of the worst possibility, while others hope for the best. Or maybe it’s just my personality. But I agree. It does no good to frighten the children.’

They walked on past the families, like dark clouds crossing. Teel was grim, morbid, obsessive, all the cares of Northland weighing him down. But he was also the uncle who had played elaborate games with Milaqa on other Giving days, long ago. She slipped her hand into his.

The Water Council was already in session by the time Teel and Milaqa arrived. Despite its archaic title, the Council was a general-purpose quarterly convocation of Annids and other senior folk. The meeting was taking place in a dedicated chamber deep within the body of the Wall, lit by oil lamps. The Annids were sitting or standing in little groups, arguing and complaining, as servants hurried between them bearing trays of food and drink. The air was thick with greasy smoke and laden with heat, and Milaqa felt as if she was being buried alive. But the Annids never went short of their treats, she noted sourly, whatever the weather.

Riban came to meet them, bearing drinks: beer for Milaqa, clear water for Teel. After having travelled across the Continent with them the young priest knew their taste. He led them to a small group centred on Raka, the still-new Annid of Annids. She had got herself stuck in a raging argument with Noli, the stern old Annid who had so opposed her own original appointment.

‘We must deal with the Trojans, one way or another,’ Raka insisted. ‘As well as the other powers. It is pointless and distracting to pretend that the great tide of warriors which is likely to break over us is not real!’

Noli said, ‘But it is not a tide that faces us, not a mindless thing, a force driven by the will of the gods. Not a Great Sea. It is an army, a mob of humanity. They need not be here; there were other choices that could have been made.’

Teel put in, ‘You went to Hattusa, Annid.’

She turned on him. ‘Where I stood helpless as you made your deals. It is you and your kind, Teel, who have brought disaster down upon us in your endless game-playing.’

‘Not game-playing,’ Teel said sternly. ‘Politics.’ He used a Greek word: politikos.

‘Even the word for what you do is foreign to us!’ she snapped at him. ‘To manipulate farmer-kings, to play off one against another. And now you plan to head off one lot of cattle-folk by planting another lot in the heart of Northland. How can you be sure we can rely on these Hatti?’

‘I think we can trust Kilushepa,’ Teel said. ‘She has as much reason to deal with the Trojan as we have. More, perhaps. If anybody is to blame for creating the monster it is Kilushepa. Without her he would still be a petty bandit screwing teenage whores in the wreck of his home city. She never imagined, I think, that after she cast him down he would rise up as he has.’

‘But Kilushepa herself is not secure in Hattusa,’ Raka said anxiously.

‘As long as she lasts she will support us. After all, she has sent a close ally in Muwa to serve as the general of her force here.’

‘What “force”?’ Noli sneered. ‘A thousand men? The rumours are that the Trojan has many times that number. The farmers will always outnumber us.’

Teel would have spoken again, but Raka raised a hand to silence him. ‘We can come through this trial. We will come through it. And we will do it with the blessing of the little mothers, without losing the essence of what we are, of what our country is, even though we are so few compared to the farmers. This is what we must tell the people.’ She was deeply impressive, and her words stirred Milaqa’s heart.

But then a cry went up, echoing through the galleries of the Wall. ‘The beacons! They are lit! Oh, they are lit!’

The Annid of Annids led the way, hurrying to the Wall roof. Noon was approaching, and the sky was brighter.

And all across the tremendous plain of Northland, on earthen mounds raised ages ago against the threat of flood, the beacon fires burned, pinpoints of brilliance. Teel touched Milaqa’s arm and pointed. She turned to see the fires coming alight all along the Wall’s upper parapet too.

‘I hate to say it,’ Teel said. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? About Qirum, and the midsummer day.’

The beacons were a wave of prearranged signals that had washed across Northland all the way from its southern coast. Now that wave of light had broken against the Wall itself, bringing with it a simple message. The Trojan was coming.