Bronze Summer (39 page)

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.

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.

49

The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Autumn

And soon Qirum was building what was rumoured to be a city in the very heart of Northland: ‘New Troy’, only days to the south of the Wall itself.

All this came in the course of another difficult summer without sunlight, another summer of hard scavenging on land and sea – a summer soon terminated by early frosts. The Trojan was feared by all, understood by nobody. Many believed he was the embodiment of the little mothers’ abandonment of the world. Nobody but a few hotheads wanted to fight him.

Then Qirum offered to talk.

Milaqa thought the three men from New Troy looked utterly out of place here. Fully armoured, bristling with weapons, heavily muscled, they were like lions among young deer. Yet Raka faced the men bravely, though she was dwarfed by them, and spoke well and clearly.

Teel murmured, ‘An embassy from a king! The newest king in the whole world, I imagine.’

Deri was disgusted. ‘Just another brute from a pack of brutes – but a tough one.’

‘Yet he appears to have come here offering peace between us.’

‘Peace, brother! There can no more be peace between us and the cattle-folk than between fire and water.’

‘But he is not talking of peace,’ Milaqa murmured. ‘Maybe my Trojan is better than yours, uncle . . .’ The priest who was translating Erishum’s Trojan and Raka’s Etxelur tongue spoke clearly enough for all to hear. ‘I think the word the priest gave as “peace” was not quite that. Not “treaty” either.’

Teel eyed her. ‘You spent more time than any of us with Qirum; you should know what he means to say if anybody does. Then what is the man offering?’

‘The word is more like “challenge”.’

The Annids who surrounded Raka didn’t really know what the warriors wanted. None of them understood a warrior-prince like Qirum, Milaqa realised. But any opportunity to avoid further bloodshed should be taken.

An agreement was reached. A party would be sent to New Troy to hear Qirum out. And as Raka pondered who would travel, Teel wormed his way forward and whispered urgently in her ear, pointing back at Deri and Milaqa.

It was quickly decided that the elder Annid Noli, representing Raka, would lead just three people back to New Troy, with Qirum’s warriors, drawn from the group who had earlier travelled to Hattusa: Teel himself, Deri who since his defiant fighting on the day of the Midsummer Invasion had proven himself a symbol of Northland’s robust defiance – and Milaqa. Milaqa who had been able to translate Erishum’s phrasing more accurately than Raka’s own translator. Milaqa who, as everybody seemed to have heard by now, knew Qirum himself more closely than anyone in Northland. She wasn’t given the chance to refuse.

As the meeting broke up Milaqa felt a swirl of emotions. She was still just eighteen years old. Here she was about to walk into the very heart of an epochal conflict. And once again she would be dealing with Qirum, the most exciting, terrifying, disturbing element in her life.

Mostly she was resentful. ‘You’re using me,’ she accused Teel. ‘Again. Because you think I have a connection to Qirum.’

‘Well, you do.’ He grinned at her anger. ‘You always did.
And
you helped him escape in Hattusa. I could say this is all your fault.’

She flared. ‘I’ll never apologise for saving a life. Kilushepa plotted to have him killed – his reputation destroyed – it was all lies, and you know it.’

‘Fine. But what did you
think
would follow?’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, little Crow. You’re right, an impulse to save a friend can never be wrong, whatever that friend chooses to do with the life you give him back. And, yes, I’m using you. I have no choice. In such times one must use every available resource. But I haven’t forgotten I’m your uncle. I know I’m supposed to protect you, not lead you into danger. Forgive me.’

‘Forgive you for what?’

‘For the next time I do it. You should get ready; Erishum wants to leave tomorrow.’

Milaqa went straight to the Scambles and got comprehensively drunk.

50

The party would walk to New Troy, Noli ordained. Traditionally Northland folk did not ride – horses were beasts of the cattle-folk – though many had started to learn since acquiring horses from New Troy, or the Hatti. So it would be now.

As the four of them gathered before the Wall, Noli, Teel, Deri, Milaqa, in stout walking boots with light packs on their backs, Erishum laughed at their stubbornness. But he sent his two warriors ahead on horseback, taking his own mount with them, while he walked with the Northlanders. He would be one man, alone among four. Milaqa imagined the minds of both Deri and Erishum turning back to the bloody day of the Midsummer Invasion. But with Noli sternly watching both men as if they were wilful children, no words were spoken, and their swords stayed sheathed.

New Troy was two days’ ride south of the Wall. The journey on foot, down the ancient Etxelur Way, would probably take four or five days. Erishum claimed that Qirum, King of New Troy, had purposely planted his city no closer to the Wall as evidence of good intentions, Erishum said, a peaceful gesture. If he was ever minded to do it, it would take more than a day for him to march on Etxelur, by which time the Wall folk would have plenty of warning. He had deliberately left a thick barrier of space and time between them, hoping for peace, said Erishum.

Noli merely grunted. ‘If he were so eager for peace, the Trojan would not have come to our country at all.’

To begin with the walk south was easy, even pleasant, if Milaqa didn’t pay too much attention to the company she was keeping. It was close to the autumn equinox now, and though there had been precocious frosts the weather was fine, a watery sun for once showing through the usual high cloud. For all she liked to bury herself in smoky Scambles taverns deep within the carcass of the Wall, Milaqa was enough of a Northlander to feel her spirit expanding as they crossed the tremendous flat expanse of the country, the green land crossed by the dead-straight lines of tracks and dykes, the communities like knots in a weave. But the poor summer had left its mark in marshland choked with dead reeds, trees already shedding stunted leaves, a land that was strangely quiet in the absence of many familiar birds. The fungi were flourishing this cold autumn, especially colonising the dead tree trunks, from little bright white dots to huge powdery puffballs, and the most common sort, bright red caps flecked with white. Deri, only half-joking, urged Erishum to sample these Northland fruits. The Hatti was wary enough to refuse the poisonous gifts.

Erishum, in fact, barely noticed the country at all. Milaqa knew that to the Hatti and the Trojans and Greeks this landscape was unbuilt, unmade, unfarmed, an un-world. To them, Northland was worse than incomprehensible. It was invisible.

They spoke little during the walk. And Milaqa had too much time to think about the Trojan.

Qirum! He had long been the most vivid character in Milaqa’s own life. Now, three months after his Midsummer Invasion and his planting of a city in the very heart of Northland, he was by far the most vivid personality in the country, perhaps the whole world. But to Milaqa he was not Qirum the warrior, Qirum the ruler – he was not King Qirum. To her he was Qirum the man, savage, magnificent, murderous, laughing, and when she thought of him she felt hot inside, as if her heart was melting like a bit of Zidanza’s iron in the forge, ready to be hammered into some new shape.

Did she love him? Did she lust for him? She could not tell. You might as well lust after the sun. She had always sensed that if she got too close to him she would be burned up. Yet he shone so much more brightly than other men! Maybe that was why, at the comparatively elderly age of eighteen, though she was no virgin and had had a string of brief, furtive relationships, most of them forged and finished in the Scambles, she was still effectively alone, still had no children – unlike cousin Hadhe, say, with her new husband and growing children, and pregnant again too. Qirum was distorting Milaqa’s life with his powerful enigmatic fascination, just as he was distorting everything about the way life was lived in Northland. But his actions had already caused people to die – including a member of her own family, Nago. And now Milaqa had to deal with him again.

After a couple of days they started to see evidence of Qirum’s presence. The country looked abandoned. The ancient track ran through empty settlements, past broken houses and cold hearths, empty fish racks, eel traps left unset. The managed country itself showed signs of a lack of maintenance, reeds clogging weirs, dykes choked by weeds. In one settlement they disturbed deer grazing on wild flowers that carpeted a hearthspace evidently untrodden by human feet for months.

‘This can’t go on,’ Noli muttered. ‘Leave it too long and things will start to break down, and once that starts it will be difficult to recover. Northland needs constant tending.’

A half-day further on they came to a wall. It was just a low rampart crudely dug out of the ground, backed up by the ditch from which the dirt had been taken. But it cut right across the venerable Northland track.

Noli paced before the barrier, fuming at this latest insult to her land’s tradition. Speaking through Milaqa she challenged Erishum. ‘I suppose this land is now “owned” by Qirum.’

Erishum grinned easily. ‘Oh, no. This is one of the estates the King has granted to the Lord Protis. We’ve yet to come to the King’s own lands.’

He led them west, following a rough track along the line of the rampart. Beyond the rampart, looking south, Milaqa glimpsed horses, cattle, sheep: farmers’ livestock brought to Northland. They soon came to a gate, and a track that led south into the estate, running off to the flat horizon. Like the rampart itself, the track had nothing to do with the older layout of Northland. Two warriors waited by the gate, huddled in cloaks against the cold, a small fire burning before a crude shelter of poles and deerskin. They were wary as the party approached, but relaxed when they recognised Erishum. The Hatti spoke to them softly in an Anatolian language Milaqa did not recognise. In response, one of them took to his horse and galloped off south.

‘We can wait here in the warm,’ Erishum said, indicating the shelter, the fire. ‘Qirum will send a chariot—’

‘We will walk,’ Noli said through Milaqa.

Erishum shrugged. He said something in his own tongue to the remaining soldier, who looked Noli up and down and laughed.

The party walked on through the scruffy gate, and Milaqa felt an odd shiver that she had suddenly walked into a land where, perhaps, the will of the little mothers of sky, sea and land no longer held sway. They came to more ramparts and low walls, some little more than scratches in the ground. These were not defensive but markers, field boundaries. People were working with spades and picks, and oxen dragged ards to turn the soil. In some places, crops were already growing.

‘Farmers in Northland,’ Teel said. ‘We’re seeing history, Milaqa. And all because of Qirum, the waif from the ruins of Troy – a king!’

‘A king,’ Deri said drily, ‘who approaches even as you speak, brother.’

Milaqa turned to see, her heart pounding. Noli stood firm and tall, an Annid of Etxelur, her travelling cloak drawn around her, her face expressionless.

The party came along the rough track through the farmland, a handful of men riding horses, an empty chariot, a few troopers jogging alongside. Qirum jumped extravagantly from his horse before it had even pulled up. His warriors, in the garb of Hatti soldiers, watched the Northlanders more warily.