Bronze Summer

54

The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Early Spring

Four months after the attack on My Sun, after a desolating winter of hunger and want, of raid and counter-raid, of a slow bleed of deaths on either side, a woman came to the Wall.

She had escaped from New Troy. Once she had been a young mother of My Sun, the first community to be attacked. She had seen her children killed, and for months had been used as a warrior’s servant and whore. She had bided her time, killed a man, got away. She brought news that there was growing discontent in the Trojan camp, because the easy victories had stopped coming. The Northlanders had learned how to resist; every flood mound south of Etxelur had been turned into a citadel, a tough nut to crack.

And the woman said that Hadhe was still alive, and living in New Troy with Qirum.

Raka, acting quickly, summoned Noli, Deri, Teel, Milaqa, the party who had gone to New Troy before. Perhaps this was a chance to get through to Qirum, by sending Milaqa and others of Hadhe’s family. And maybe the Trojan would be in a mood to listen this time, if his campaign of brutality wasn’t working.

Milaqa sensed the tensions that lay behind this decision. Not everybody had Raka’s flexibility of thought. To talk again, talk to the pack of rapists and murderers Qirum’s men had proven themselves to be? But the longing for the killing to end drove the Annids to contemplate this course.

And, she wondered, maybe Qirum had taken Hadhe as a lure for just this kind of approach. Was Qirum wily enough to think that way?

But this time only Deri and Milaqa would go, Raka quickly decided. Deri the warrior who had already faced the Trojans, Milaqa his drinking companion from the old days, figures Qirum knew and could understand. Their job was to get through to the Trojan before more people died — and before Kilushepa in far Hattusa, alarmed by the news of the Trojan’s long-term plans against her, fulfilled her own threats to bring a stronger Hatti force to Northland and nip his ambitions in the bud. Nobody in Etxelur wanted to see more Hatti troops in Northland.

The travellers packed their kit.

Once more they began the journey of a few days to New Troy, walking steadily south down the Etxelur Way, Deri and Milaqa side by side. It was early spring, but the day was dismal and would be short, the air damp and cold. The year was still too young to show if the fire mountain’s shadow would be cast over the world for a third year, but the sun was ominously invisible today.

Away from the Wall the way soon deteriorated, overgrown with weeds. Deri stumbled on an ash sapling growing out of the road surface, his heavy winter cloak flapping. Milaqa suppressed a laugh. Deri snapped, ‘May the mothers curse those Trojans! Once this road was as clean and unspoiled as a baby’s skin. And why? Because we spent our time fixing it, pulling up the weeds, rather than building walls to keep out Trojans.’ They came to a flood, a swamp, thick with rotting matter, which the road, half submerged, crossed like a causeway. Milaqa pressed a cloth to her face. ‘And this,’ Deri said. ‘ I did this. I led a party to block the main dyke that once drained this swamp, a straight cut down to the valley of the Brother. What heartbreaking work that was! To ruin the labour of centuries. And all to make a bog to trap the boot of a Trojan.’

Maybe it was a symptom of Milaqa’s own detachment from the disaster unfolding over Northland, but she didn’t feel like shedding tears over a bit of muddy ground. ‘It’s not ruined. It can be fixed, when we get the time. It will dry out again. In the meantime, no chariot could ever pass through here. Isn’t that the idea? This is the grand strategy. Flood the land. Let the Trojans sink in the mud if they try to march, and in the meantime let the diseases that rise from the swamps pick them off one by one.’

‘But this is a perversion of what Northland is, Milaqa. It’s a place where people preserve life — not create death, like this. Ask a priest if you don’t believe me. I’m with Noli; I’m worried that if this goes too far we won’t be able to put it back together again. And it’s not just the land. You know, back at the Wall I met a little boy, one of a family of nestspills, who got caught up in a raid. He said he found an arrow, and stuck it in the eye of the man who was raping his mother. An arrow in the eye! Even if every Trojan in Northland left tomorrow, that incident will have left a scar in the heart of that boy that will last a lifetime. That’s the legacy of Qirum, the monster you have a ‘‘special bond’’ with, as Teel always says.’

She scowled. ‘That bond is what we’re relying on to keep us alive.’

‘Let’s hope that Qirum remembers that. And let’s hope all his half-tamed killers remember it too.’

Thus, bickering, stumbling, avoiding flooded ground and traps, they continued their way south.

They stopped a night in a little community called Mother’s Fingernail, after a distinctively shaped arc of sandstone that dominated its hearthspace. Deri had a friend here called Boucca, widow of an old companion from the fishing boats. The place was not far from My Sun, and had suffered from Trojan raids. Now the people lived in shacks amid the ruins of their houses, rings of burned-out stumps in the ground. But it was surviving, and the travellers were shown hospitality. That night Deri and Milaqa huddled under borrowed blankets in Boucca’s lean-to, windproof and warm.

As they walked on, the next day they began to spot traces of Trojans: the prints of heavy boots pressed into mud on the track surface, the occasional turd deposited at the side of the road, the skin and gnawed bones of a hare discarded by a hasty fire whose embers were still warm.

They spent one more night on the road, huddled together in a lean-to of branches and brush. They had brought fire-making gear, kindling, dried meat, and there was a stream nearby for water. Milaqa slept well, despite the situation. She felt safe to be with her uncle, as she had when she was a little girl.

The next day, before noon, they saw the fires of New Troy rising from the plain ahead, gathering in a pall on a windless day.

Deri said they needed to be ready to meet scouts or foraging parties. So they walked with their cloaks thrown back, their weapons visible, their hands open. Milaqa began to call out in the Trojan tongue, and in Greek and Hatti: ‘We mean no harm. We come from the Wall. We were sent by the Annid of Annids. We are here to talk to your king. I am Milaqa daughter of Kuma, and your King Qirum has promised me his protection. We are from the Wall, from Etxelur. We come here in peace…’

A boy emerged from a copse, walking out of the trees right into their path. The three of them stood stock-still, Milaqa, Deri, the boy. He was no more than twelve. He carried a basket of mushrooms. He was skinny, his face grimy, he went barefoot, and his ragged cloak did not look sufficient to keep him warm.

Milaqa smiled and stepped forward.

Deri touched her arm. ‘Careful.’

‘The Trojans brought no boys here. He has red hair. This is one of ours, even if he is working for the Trojans now.’ She spoke clearly in her own tongue. ‘Where are you from? Was it My Sun?’

The boy dropped the basket and ran, straight down the track towards the smoke of New Troy.

Milaqa cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘Tell them Milaqa has come. Milaqa, daughter of Kuma. I have come for my cousin Hadhe, who lives in the King’s house. Tell King Qirum that Milaqa has come to see him!’

Deri shrugged, and they walked on.

A little later a party approached, soldiers on horseback, and a cart pulled by oxen led by another Northlander boy. The party was commanded by a stocky man in the garb of a Hatti officer: Erishum, Milaqa recognised with relief, Qirum’s sergeant. Her chances of living through the day had increased markedly.

Erishum got down from his horse and peered at her. ‘Just as the boy said. You are Milaqa.’

‘I know,’ she replied in his tongue.

‘Mouthy little whore, aren’t you? I’ll take you to the King. But I warn you, he is in a foul mood today. As most days. Whatever you have to say, say it well. Get in the cart.’

It was a farm vehicle, or it had been, smelling of earth and dung. Two more soldiers climbed up beside them, their hands on their swords. Erishum kicked his horse’s flanks, the cart jolted away, and the party followed the road to New Troy.

They were taken briskly through the outer rampart. Within, Qirum’s estate seemed much changed to Milaqa since she had last seen it in the autumn. Of course the cold hand of winter lay on it now, but even so many of the newly walled-off fields looked abandoned. She saw few people — scarcely a wisp of smoke rose from the crude houses — and fewer animals, dogs, goats picking at the boggy ground. In one place she saw a gang of children, ill-clad, shivering, digging holes in the earth. They were watched over by a bored-looking Trojan who idly studied the bobbing rumps of the little girls.

As they neared the stone walls of Qirum’s citadel they climbed off the cart. The town was much changed too, shabbier, meaner, but much more crowded than in the autumn, though the country outside the walls was empty. Milaqa remarked on this to Deri. He murmured, ‘Perhaps they have all come here for food.’ As they followed Erishum through the town Milaqa saw children peering from the doors of the rough houses, while scared-looking women cowered indoors, and babies cried. These were not homes, not families, Milaqa thought; they were parodies of families, Qirum’s warriors with the bed-warmers they had taken from raids in Northland, or booty women driven in from the Continent. Some of these women must have been allowed to keep their kids, and others had babies inflicted on them by the endless rapes of their new ‘husbands’.

Once inside the citadel they were taken straight to Qirum in his house with the big central room. A big fire blazed in a hearth, and a linen screen covered the window, obscuring the view over the town. The priests were here, murmuring prayers to Apollo god of fevers and disease. Qirum himself lounged on his couch, a flagon of ale on the floor beside him. He wore a loose robe of some fine fabric, not a warrior’s garment, more like something you would wear to sleep. There was a sharp stink in the room, a cess-pit stench. There was no sign of Hadhe.

When he saw Milaqa and Deri, Qirum lurched to his feet. ‘Milaqa! So here we are again, two rejects from humanity reunited.’

Milaqa began to murmur a translation for Deri.

But Qirum waved that way. ‘Oh, get him out of here,’ he snapped at Erishum. ‘Feed him, bathe him, give him a whore, whatever he wants. Oh, no, better not, after all his mother’s probably one of the whores. Ha! Don’t harm him though. Just get him out of my sight.’

Deri glanced at Milaqa.

‘Go,’ she said, in her own tongue. ‘I’m more at risk with you standing here silently provoking him. This is why we came, uncle.’

Reluctantly Deri nodded. He bowed sharply to Qirum, then let Erishum lead him out.

‘So we’re alone,’ Qirum said. ‘Beer?’

‘Why not?’

He snapped a finger. In a heartbeat a barefoot serving girl came running with a brimming pot. Milaqa drank it gratefully. Qirum sat on his couch and patted it. She sat beside him, though at the couch’s far end.

‘Just like old times in the Scambles,’ Qirum said. ‘Save for a few gibbering priests and the guards in the corners.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘And what smells like a bucket of shit.’

‘It is a bucket of shit. Taken from a dead man, his last gift to this world. Ha!’ He drank his beer. ‘It’s all because of some poison or other your uncle and his irritating friends like to smear on their arrows. My physician is trying to work out what it is from a dead man’s turds. Listen. What causes sneezing and blisters, and then vomiting and shitting, and then muscle cramps, convulsions, choking, a heart attack?’

‘I’m no priest. Our priests give out the poisons.’

‘My surgeon thinks it might be hellebore. Some of the symptoms are similar. They use hellebore in Gaira, I know that. Is it hellebore?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Well, if it is, our antidotes don’t work, or so my useless clown of a head physician tells me.’

She grinned. ‘Things aren’t going as you expected, are they, King Qirum?’

‘No, they aren’t, by the Storm God’s left testicle. If it isn’t the poison it’s the sickness rising up from the soggy ground, and I have the priests chanting to Iyarri about that from morning to night. And then there are these wretched winter days of yours — if you can call them days at all!’ He gestured at the window. ‘Look — the light’s going already, and I’ve barely woken up. A man needs the sun, as does a field of wheat. We are men from countries of light and heat — decent places to live, not like this gloomy bog of yours.’

‘Then go back there.’

‘And then there’s the hunger. Our crops struggle to grow in these drowning fields. Some of your warriors and their Hatti scum allies have been mounting raids on the granaries. Takes a lot of courage, I’m sure, to sneak up on a grain of wheat. You know, I have people out there foraging. Like rooting pigs! They bring back mushrooms. Birds. Even crows, toppled from their nests! They dig up hibernating animals, dormice… Pah! Yet it is all we have.’

You are hungry because you do not know how to live here, Milaqa thought. Northlanders live off the land; they can easily melt away into the country for a few days. While you Trojans and the Greeks, used to your great stone cities crowded with people and loot and food, are left baffled. You cannot see the riches all around you, even at this time of year, in the rivers, the seas. And evidently those you use as slaves will not tell you.

She said sharply, ‘I thought you were feeding yourselves by raiding our communities. Like your raid on My Sun.’

‘Where? Oh, that was the first one, wasn’t it? Ah, yes — Hadhe, your cousin. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?’ He called to a servant, and briskly ordered her to summon Hadhe. ‘What were we saying — My Sun?’

‘That was easy pickings for you. And my own family suffered.’

He scowled, as if she was being unfair. ‘I saved Hadhe, didn’t I? And I didn’t wield every sword personally.’

‘Well, we’ve learned to fight back since then.’

He grunted. ‘If you can call it fighting. You flood the ground — you cut your own roads, to stop us advancing. Sometimes when I attack a settlement, which is all but lost in the green in the first place, I find it empty! Abandoned! It is like fighting fog — like fighting the diseases that strike down my warriors. You won’t stand and fight like men!’

Because we would lose if we did, Milaqa thought. That was the prevailing wisdom of the Annids and the Hatti who advised them. She leaned forward. ‘This is why I am here — Deri and I — as well as for Hadhe. To make you see sense, Qirum. Your great adventure has not worked. You cannot defeat Northland, it is too big and ancient for that. Even the Wall is too big for you. And besides, we are prepared now. But nor can we defeat you, for we are too few. So this stalemate goes on, with pointless cruelty and suffering on both sides. Let us end this now.’

He laughed hollowly. ‘And then what? Shall I withdraw from Northland? My basileis would butcher me if I tried.’

‘Let’s just stop the fighting. That’s all the Annids want, for now.’

‘Ah, but I can’t, you see. There is a question of honour. And surely you know, little Milaqa, that all of this is only a step on the road to a greater goal.’

‘The day when you mould an army out of Northland clay, and march on Hattusa? This is all so you can get your revenge on Kilushepa, isn’t it?’

He grinned, and drank more beer. ‘More or less. We are all driven by personal goals, Milaqa. What else is there in life? And my goal is to destroy that bitch, and the country that spawned her.’

Yet there was more he did not know. ‘Qirum. I probably shouldn’t tell you this. Your plans against Kilushepa. She knows.’

‘Of course she does. She probably has spies in this very room.’ He glanced at his priests, who seemed to shiver slightly, no doubt hearing every word. ‘What of it?’

‘She is no fool. We have had a new embassy from Hattusa. Her position there is strong once more. She does not intend to let you become a significant threat. Not significant enough to damage her, in any case.’

He sat up. ‘What does that mean? Is she coming herself?’

‘She is sending more troops. Soon there will be a Hatti force here strong enough to-’

‘ Is she coming herself? She is, isn’t she? Well, well. My showdown with the bitch queen might not be as remote as I have feared.’ His eyes were alight with passion; he no longer seemed drunk at all.

‘I shouldn’t have told you.’

‘Your Annids will say you shouldn’t. But you and I know you have done the right thing, Milaqa, don’t we? You came here to bring forward the ending of this war. Well, I believe you have. Just not the way those dried-up old sticks on the Wall intended you to. Ha!’

‘Milaqa?’

Hadhe stood in the doorway. Her hair was tied up, her skin looked oiled, and she wore an expensive-looking gown that did not conceal the swelling of her pregnancy, now eight months advanced.

Milaqa ran forward, and the cousins embraced. ‘Your children are fine,’ Milaqa said quickly. ‘Keli and Blane. After My Sun, they both reached the safety of the Wall, and they live there still, with the family.’

Hadhe was trembling. Milaqa imagined having to wait so many months for such brief, vital pieces of news. ‘Thank you. And Jaro-’

‘There was no sign of him. He may have died in the fighting. The bodies were burned, we could not tell. And Hesh — lost too.’

She nodded. ‘But Hesh lives on through his unborn child. I will mourn them later. Thank you, Milaqa.’

Qirum was pacing now. ‘How touching. Say what you have to say to each other and get out. I have much thinking to do. You, guard — send for the basileis.’

Hadhe murmured in the Etxelur tongue, ‘I haven’t seen him as animated as this since winter closed in.’

‘I gave him some news — I fear I have made a terrible mistake.’

Hadhe shook her head. ‘Nothing we do or say is right or wrong in the presence of such men as this; all we can do is survive.’ Under the expensive facial oils she looked old, Milaqa thought, old and worn out, and there was something elusive in her eyes. She was not yet eighteen years old. ‘Things could have been worse for me, in My Sun, on that terrible day. I was lucky, comparatively. Your poor aunt Vala-’

‘I know. They found her body in the ruins of the mound house.’

‘She survived the fire mountain, but she could not survive the Trojans. I survived. I did not deserve to, for I had argued against defending ourselves against the Trojans. I could not believe it was true, that it could ever happen. If I had not, perhaps we would have been better prepared.’

‘I have some sway over Qirum. In some ways he’s so like a child, you know. Maybe I can persuade him to let you go. Deri is here. We could get you home.’

Hadhe patted her bump. ‘No. I cannot travel — not now. As I said, I am surviving here. More than that. I am trying to be a wife to Qirum. A companion at least. I think he needs that.’

That baffled Milaqa. It didn’t sound like Hadhe at all. What was going on in her mind?

But there was no time to discuss it further, for the generals were arriving for their council, and Qirum was impatient for them to be gone. After a hasty goodbye to Hadhe, Milaqa was hurried out of the palace.

It was only later, when Erishum and his guards had escorted Deri and Milaqa far from New Troy and set them walking north again, that Milaqa discovered that the bronze dagger she kept at her waist had gone.

Qirum’s response to Milaqa’s mission came a month later. The Trojan army left their city and marched on the Wall.

The bulk of Qirum’s army followed the great central track of the Etxelur Way. As they advanced, Northlanders fled or hid.

Qirum established his main camp just off Etxelur Way on the south bank of the Milk River, an easy march from the Wall’s central District of Great Etxelur. Even as he dug in, he began a cycle of patrols and raids far along the face of the Wall to east and west, cutting tracks and smashing dykes and weirs, seeking to cut off Etxelur from the country that sustained it. For their part the Annids ordered the digging of great ramparts and ditches before the line of the Wall. As the weather eased the fishing fleets went out; the oceans would provision the Wall even if the country could not.

So the siege was set. Both sides dug in, and on both sides the dying continued.