Bronze Summer (43 page)

Once outside, Hadhe wrapped her free arm around her body in the chill as Qirum dragged her down the mound. My Sun was all but unrecognisable from the home it had been just that morning. Only three houses still stood; the rest had been burned, the storage pits broken open and robbed. Even the rampart had been smashed down in a dozen places. In one corner men and boys huddled, Hadhe saw, naked too, roped together at hands and feet. And a stack of corpses had been heaped up, all stripped.

The soldiers in the hearthspace seemed oblivious to all this. They tended their feet and inspected damage to shields and armour. The ground was scuffed and littered with their armour and boots, with their turds and pools of their piss, with splashes of drying blood. Some men were wounded, with cuts and burns salved with potions, honey, grease, mashed-up roots. A surgeon with a kit of bronze tools – forceps, chisels, a saw – prepared to set a broken arm. The man was held down by his companions, a bit of wood between his teeth.

There were some Trojan dead. They had been set out respectfully near the gate through the rampart, and covered with blankets stolen from the houses. Hadhe found no joy in seeing that some Trojans, at least, had fallen today.

Sila was dragged off to one of the surviving houses, and Leb to the next, and Qirum took Hadhe to the third. A skein of geese crossed the sky. Greylags, perhaps.

Qirum pushed her inside the house. The floor was littered with furs, there was a heavy wooden couch, and a serving girl, barefoot, stood by a low table laden with food, water and wine. As it happened this had been the house of Sila’s family. Qirum clapped his hands to send the girl away. He kicked off his boots, threw himself back on the couch, and considered Hadhe.

Hadhe stood in the middle of the floor. She was tempted to cover her body with her arms, but she stood tall, still hoping she might be spared because of her pregnancy.

‘Speak to me,’ he said, in heavily accented Etxelur-speak. ‘You hear me? I know Milaqa.’

‘She . . .’ Hadhe hadn’t said a word since the morning, and her throat was dry as dust. She tried again. ‘She is my cousin.’

‘You want water?’ He threw over a sack.

She grabbed it and gulped it down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Hadhe.’

‘
Haa-thee
. I saw your face before.’

‘I’m Milaqa’s cousin,’ she repeated.

That word baffled him, but he seemed to get the idea. ‘The battle. What did you think?’ He sought for the words. ‘Frightening? Like wild animals, were we?’ He growled and made mock-claws with his fingers. ‘I want to make your Annids frightened. That way they won’t fight. That way people won’t have to die. They have to learn. I offered peace; they rejected it. This is what happens when you reject peace.’

‘I have children,’ she blurted.

He pointed at her belly. ‘In there? I don’t care.’

‘No . . .’ She saw no point in telling him other than the truth. ‘Three. Three other children. Two have been taken away to the Wall . . . The third. A boy. He fought.’

He shrugged. ‘If he lives, he is with the slaves. You will never see him again.’

‘Only yesterday I did not believe you would come. Not like this.’

‘You were wrong.’

‘I even argued against preparing, defending ourselves.’

‘Wrong.’

‘What will happen to us?’

He shrugged. ‘The men will be slaves. But we are a long way from those who buy slaves. We may have no use for them. The women will be sold as slaves too. Or, if you are not sold, you will cook, clean, spin, draw water for my soldiers. Or’ – he patted the couch – ‘you may keep my bed warm.’

Anger flared. She took a step forward, almost stumbled. ‘You slaughter our children. Murder our husbands. And you expect us to sleep with their killers? What horror is this?’

He laughed at her. ‘It is our way. All across Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, the whole of the east. Women are booty.’ His face hardened. ‘If you don’t stay with me, I will give you to the Spider. You’ll be dead by morning. With me, maybe you’ll live. Your baby inside you will live.’

‘Why? Why do you want me?’

‘For your cousin. For Milaqa.’ He lifted his tunic, revealing an erection. ‘I’m being kind to you.’

She hesitated. Then she knelt beside the couch.

Torches were applied to the surviving houses, and dirt was kicked on the big central hearth. Then the column formed up, and Protis led the march south, out of the smashed community.

But Qirum lingered, along with the Spider, and a handful of picked men. The Spider, in his days before joining Qirum, had developed a particular trick in these situations that Qirum never tired of watching.

The men stayed just out of sight of the ruined village, as the sounds of the marching column slowly receded, and waited. The sunless sky brightened slowly. From the forest, a wild pig came rooting in the ruined hearthspace, looking for scraps. Qirum noticed a strange sign in the Etxelur script, loops and lines, cut into the hillside. Idly, he considered sending a man up there to break it up. Something to be done later. He began to feel sleepy, after the hard work of yesterday.

And then the Spider grinned and pointed at the acorn pit, beside the ruined fire. Qirum saw one hand emerge, then a blond head, and a slim body. Soon a boy climbed out of the pit, bloodstained, bewildered.

For a while the watching men allowed the boy to wander around the ruined village. Nobody else came out. Then the Spider unsheathed his sword. This was his speciality – to return to devastated farms and villages and cities, to wait until those who had hidden away came stumbling out into the ruins, and then to slaughter them in turn. It was the exquisite shock on the victims’ faces that seemed to thrill the Spider, the sudden horror of one who had thought he was saved.

But not today, Qirum suddenly decided.

‘No.’ He held back the Spider’s arm. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, man. I have a better idea. The rest of you stay back. You!’ he called in Etxelur-speak.

The boy turned. He actually had a sword in a scabbard at his side. His hand went to the hilt.

‘Don’t dare!’ Qirum roared, striding across the churned-up ground. ‘And don’t run!’

The boy stood stock-still, snared by the command. He took his hand from the sword.

Qirum stood over him. The boy’s tunic was encrusted with blood. Piss trickled down one leg. Comically, he had crushed acorns stuck in his hair. He was no older than twelve, thirteen. Yet he looked back at a warrior-king with a trace of defiance. On impulse Qirum reached out and ruffled his hair. ‘Name?’

‘I am Liff. Liff, son of Medoc, son of —’

‘I don’t care whose spawn you are. Do you want to live, warrior Liff?’

‘All men die.’

‘True. But not today.’ Qirum pointed. ‘You go that way, north. You find the Wall. The Annids. You understand? You tell them what you saw. You tell what King Qirum did here. Yes?’

The boy just looked at him, baffled.

‘Go.’ He shoved the boy’s shoulders with his fingertips. The boy stumbled. ‘Go, go!’

The boy couldn’t seem to turn his back. But at last the spell broke, and he turned and ran, heading for the great Northland track that headed north.

Qirum turned away and walked back to his men.

54

The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Early Spring

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.

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.