Bronze Summer

48

The inlet Bren called Shark Bay was the outflow of a minor river. A narrow valley with walls of eroded chalk led inland from the beach.

As the ship turned to face the shore, as the landing at last approached, Qirum gave up his place at the steering oar to his pilot, grabbed his weapons and armour, and made for the prow, Erishum at his side. The two boats following were commanded by Protis and the Spider, his two basileis, and were filled with their best fighters. These three boats, the hardened spear-point of the entire force, would make the first landings, and the heroes they carried were ready to win the day for the Trojan force.

Bren pointed out the features of the shore. ‘The Annids decided that the whole coast could not be rendered impassable. We Northlanders do rely on trade. This place was chosen as a safe landing. It was thought well enough defended naturally, by its sandbanks. Can you see?’ The sandbanks were visible as a maze of pale brown shadows under the water. ‘If you don’t know this coast, any experienced sailor would avoid this inlet.’

‘But if you do know it, there is a way through.’

‘Yes, as I told your pilot-’

‘Then get back to the stern and tell him anew. I don’t want any mistakes now we’re so close.’

The traitor hurried back.

The rowers worked more gingerly now as the pilots carefully guided the ships through the banks. As they passed the men threw out markers, pigs’ bladders weighted with rocks, to guide the ships following.

Erishum pointed to the shore. ‘They’re ready for us.’

Qirum peered that way, and saw the glint of metal, a fence of spears, just inland from the water’s edge. The enemy at last, silently waiting. He grinned. ‘Good. We need a fight to sharpen our wits. It’s too many days since I killed a man-’

An arrow hissed through the air; it fell short of the ship, but not by much.

‘Shields!’ Qirum snapped.

Behind him the rowers, without missing a beat, manhandled their shields over their heads. The first arrows clattered down into the boat.

‘Somebody has a good arm,’ Erishum said.

‘Maybe the same freak of nature who set fire to our sail. He will pay for that, in time.’ More arrows fell now as they came within range of the shore, and Qirum and Erishum raised their own shields. But Qirum stood proud in the prow of his ship, defying the Northlanders’ lethal hail.

The landing itself was only moments away. Qirum felt his heart race, his blood surge. Of the whole operation the landing required the most skill. If you got your run at the shore just right, if you timed the very strokes, then you could drive your ship half a length up the shore before it came to rest, and that alone could punch a hole in any defence. But the rowers had to work precisely to the rhythm of the drummers, even though they kept having to duck behind their shields, for all the time the enemy bombardment continued, the fall of arrows thickening. Mostly the arrows clattered harmlessly against shields or armour, or hit the wooden deck, but some, as always, found a way through to flesh, and a man would scream, and the ship juddered as a rower was lost.

And now the first answering wave of arrows from the ships behind the lead flew over Qirum’s head, falling on the shore, and the first Northlanders, surely, began to die. Encouraged, the men rowed faster, their discipline growing tighter. Qirum felt the salt wind in his face as the boat leapt forward, and the hail of arrows from both sides thickened in the air.

The hull struck the sea bottom with a shuddering crunch, and slid over the shingle, and the last of the water surged around the prow. Qirum raised his sword with a roar. Even before the boat came to rest he leapt out into the surf.

Nago, with Deri at his side, stood firm at the centre of the Northlander line. They both wore armour borrowed from the Hatti. The plan was to strike at the Trojans just as they landed, when they were most vulnerable, with the bulk of their force still trapped at sea. Nobody expected this small force defending the beach to hold for long, but the more damage it could do the better.

But here came the ships! Somehow, whenever he had imagined this moment, Nago had never thought of the ships themselves. Now here they were, three of them rearing up out of the beach, sliding on their wooden bellies over the rough stones of the beach, with painted eyes glowering as if they meant to devour the defending warriors themselves. They were monsters, an aquatic nightmare. It was hard not to flee in superstitious terror.

And the first man was already out of the still-moving lead boat, short, stocky, his face livid with a kind of rage. Nago knew this man. It was Qirum himself, first to set foot in the country he meant to make his own. The Northlanders held their line — all save one man who broke and ran forward, yelling, waving a sword. Qirum ducked inside the man’s clumsy slice and slashed his own short, heavy sword across the man’s midriff, cutting through cloth and flesh and stomach wall. The man fell forward into the seawater, and blood spilled red. Qirum laughed, exultant.

A Hatti officer roared, ‘Scrape these bastards off the beach!’

The defenders charged, bellowing, in their line, and Nago and Deri ran with them. Nago pumped air into his lungs and clenched his muscles, a fisherman trying to become a fighter, trying to remember the training the Hatti corporals had given him.

And he saw the first Trojan he was going to close with, a huge fellow from the lead boat. He carried a sword in his scabbard and a spear in his hands, but he had no shield. Rather he was kitted out with full armour, bronze sheets on his breast and over his thighs, jointed extensions to protect his neck and shoulders, and his face was shielded by a grill of bronze under a boar-tusk helmet. It chilled Nago that he could not see the man’s face, this stranger determined to kill him. The man came at Nago with a muscular roar.

Don’t hesitate: that was the one message the Hatti corporals had rammed into the heads and hearts of the Northlander fishermen and canal-dredgers. Don’t hesitate to strike, to kill, or you will be killed.

Nago ducked under the Trojan’s sword thrust and swung his own weapon, hoping to cut the man down at his legs, only to have the blade clatter against shaped armour plates on the shins. A spear stabbed down, and Nago rolled on his back on damp sand to avoid the thrust. He struggled to his feet, but while he was still off-balance the warrior raised his spear again. Nago, almost falling, lunged at the man with his sword point-first, probing, finding a joint in the armour — and he drove his sword up under the man’s right shoulder plate, sliding it beneath the metal and into soft flesh. The warrior collapsed, gurgling behind his mask. He would have pulled Nago down, but Nago stayed upright, stepping back, holding onto the hilt of his sword, feeling how it tore through the man’s body as he fell. The Trojan landed on his back, like an upended crab in the shallow seawater. Nago dragged out his sword, positioned the blade again, and thrust down into the man’s mouth, driving through soft tissue until the blade ground on bone. The man coughed frothy blood, and subsided.

Nago pulled back the sword, breathing hard. For a heartbeat he could not hear the battle rage around him, could not see the grounded ships or the bloody froth. Just him and the man who he had killed, that was all that populated his world. He longed to be in his boat. Just him and the ocean.

Then a sword blade flashed past his face, and the severed hand of a Greek warrior, still clutching the dagger that would have killed Nago, fell in the spray. The man dropped back screaming, blood pumping from his arm.

Deri reached over Nago to finish the man off with a sharp thrust through the ribs. He straightened up, bleeding from a cut to his shoulder, breathing hard, his leggings soaked with spray. ‘Don’t make me save you again, cousin.’ And then he twisted away, to take on another massive Trojan.

Nago raised his sword and looked around. More ships were landing. Eager to get into the fray, men were splashing out into deep water, struggling with heavy shields or armour. There were horses scrambling in the surf too, Nago saw. And the Hatti and Northlanders were wading out to meet the invaders. Arrows and stones hailed onto the struggling mass from the boats further out, and from defenders deeper inland. The whole of the littoral was becoming a shapeless melee, with a thrashing of blades and spears, and blood ran everywhere, bright crimson among the fallen; even the sea ran red. Nago already felt exhausted, as if his fight with the huge armoured man had used up his energy for the day. Yet it was barely begun.

He charged forward, back into the tangle of fighting.

The first man he met had no armour, no weapons; he floundered in the surf, having apparently fallen out of his ship. Nago swiped at his throat with his sword blade and left the man dying on his knees. Next came a formidable man with a long plaited queue like a Hatti. The two exchanged three heavy blows with their swords, each parrying the other, before the man slipped in the water and Nago drove his sword through his quilted tunic and into his belly, and thrust and dragged.

And the third man was Qirum. Nago’s last vision was of the Trojan’s open mouth, laughing, his flashing bloodstained sword.

Pain, bright as sunlight off the sea.

To Mi, watching from the long grass above the beach, the battle was a press of squirming meat and blood and metal that filled the bay.

She saw Nago fall. In an instant the fighting closed over him like a bloody tide, and his body was lost. One of her own family, cut down by Qirum. Something congealed deep inside Mi, hard and sharp, an arrowhead of determination.

Still the ships further out crowded in, trying to land. Mi took her quiver of arrows, and her finely made Kirike’s Land bow, and she fired off her arrows one by one, sending them high into the air so they fell among the incoming ships and so were sure to kill only the enemy.

She would not pull back from the beach until all her arrows were gone.