Bronze Summer n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Protis watched Urhi, amused. ‘You are not yet a king, but you have a king’s scribe.’

  ‘I found him in Abydos, a city in the Troad, near Troy itself, which I besieged with the Spider at my side. I say I found Urhi. We burned his city, and he watched his family die, and as he was marched away with chains around his neck with a thousand others he loudly begged to be allowed to use his skills. My soft heart let him live a while longer. But he knows that I could cast him down once more in a moment, don’t you, good Urhi? Make sure you write that down too. Go on! Write it down!’

  Urhi forced himself to smile as, with laughter raining around him, he worked his clay slate, his stylus pecking like a bird’s beak as he made the wedge-shaped characters.

  Protis laughed. ‘A new kingdom, then. With you installed as king, and us as your companions, I suppose.’

  He used a Greek word, basileis, which Urhi understood as meaning more than companions — it meant lords, with power and holdings of their own. And Protis and the Spider exchanged a glance which every man in the room could read, a glance that said that in the end these two would not be content to remain basileis of any man.

  But Qirum said only, ‘You know my circumstances, Prince. I have lifted myself up from the ruin of my home city as a heavy stone is lifted from a pool of water, and now I address you as an equal.’ Qirum waved a hand. ‘Look at us, all survivors of the great smash-up of the states to the east — you Greeks, you Anatolians. You men of the Troad, my own country, from Troy and Abydos and Zeleia, and from the wider Anatolia, from Phrygia to Lycia. Even you Hatti, like the Spider here, who knew when to run from a burning house!’

  The Spider said to Protis, ‘He has a particular distaste for the Hatti — don’t you, Trojan? For he was bested by a woman in Hattusa. Not just any woman, mind — the Tawananna herself.’

  ‘Yes! But one day I will return, at the head of a formidable army — an army raised in my own kingdom — and I will do to that dismal country what I should have done to Kilushepa when I first slept with her, and split it wide open from breast to pubis.’

  That raised a coarse cheer.

  ‘We will be a great people,’ he went on, shouting, waving his arms, stalking back and forth. ‘And a new people. Not Greek or Trojan or Hatti any more. As tin and copper come together to make bronze, so our blood will mix to create a new people in a new kingdom — and all men will know our names, for ever, as we remember the Great King Sargon of Akkad. Tomorrow we will start, we will form up our forces for a great journey — and then a war!’ He won a louder cheer for that.

  ‘And now we will set out our case before our gods.’ He clapped his hands, and nodded to a senior slave. To a rumble of approval from the men a new feast was brought in, more wine, the meat of ritually slaughtered sheep. Priests brought bowls of entrails of birds and snakes, regarded as key sources of divination by Trojans.

  And then the holiest relics were produced. A small statue was set up beside Qirum’s throne, a plaster representation of a human figure with a bull’s head, its arms upraised. Qirum made his obeisance, muttering prayers. ‘The Storm God. You Greeks know him as Zeus, and the Hatti as Teshub. Closer to Troy than any city in the world, the god who has always fought at our side-’

  Protis said, ‘He wasn’t fighting too well on the day my father joined in your city’s sack.’

  Qirum snapped, ‘That is a quarrel for our fathers in the underworld. Troy’s most sacred statue of the Storm God was lost later, and not to the Greeks, but when Hatti raiders came to feast on the decaying corpse of their own supposed protectorate. This, though, this has been purified and blessed; this has seen endless sacrifices — in this, the Storm God is present.’ He bowed again, muttering prayers.

  Then he straightened up, and clapped his hands again. To a howl of appreciation from the increasingly drunken men three girls were brought in, chained together at neck and feet, all pale, all naked. One, Urhi saw, had been smeared by mud, the second, shivering, had been shaven bare from head to crotch, and the third appeared to be glistening wet — Urhi imagined that was the result of some viscous oil smeared on her skin rather than water, which would run off and dry. The girls stood before the leering, shouting men, huddling together for protection. Urhi wondered if they had been drugged.

  Qirum stalked before the girls, waving his wine cup so that droplets splashed the girls, red as blood on their pale flesh. ‘Here you are, you men — meet your first Northlanders. Healthy stock, aren’t they? All that wild meat they consume, I suppose. Snatched in raids by my most trusted men. Not a one over sixteen years old, and every one of them a virgin.

  ‘It is the Trojan way, the Anatolian way, to interrogate the gods of our enemies before going into battle. After all, what is war but a trial before the gods? And he who pleases the gods the most is permitted to win — and live. And so here they are, the goddesses of Northland, made incarnate before you. The little mothers, they call them, the little mothers of the earth and of the sea and of the sky, of dirt and damp and cold.

  ‘What have you to say for yourselves, mothers? What have you done with your people? Why have you kept the fire of war from their bellies, the genius of farming from their hearts? Why are your children so few, you mothers, ten where there could be a hundred, a hundred where there could be ten thousand? Are your wombs so barren?’ He lifted the heads of the bewildered girls with fingers under their chins, and he squeezed their breasts and grabbed their backsides, making them flinch.

  At length the Spider stood up and lifted his kilt. ‘I’ll tell you how I’d like to interrogate them.’

  Qirum laughed, waved Protis forward, and began to remove his own kilt. ‘Just as I planned — come, friends, my basileis!’

  The men roared, their faces greasy from meat, their chins stained by wine. The chains were removed from the girls.

  Qirum arranged it so that each of the three leaders deflowered one virgin each. Then they each moved on to another girl, and then the third. The Spider went at it enthusiastically. Protis, though, was more fussy. He preferred to use the anus of his second girl and the mouth of the third, as if they were still virginal.

  When the leaders were done the girls were taken out, but more whores were brought in for the crowd of leering men. The women disappeared in knots of bodies, like slabs of meat thrown to dogs.

  Urhi forced himself to watch it all, and he tried not to think of what he had seen done to his wife and his daughter in their last hours.

  The feasting continued to the dawn. Then Qirum called them all outside, for he had arranged another stunt. Once more he had his priests produce the three Northlander girls, naked and done out in their guises as the little mothers, their bruises treated, the blood washed from their thighs.

  And Qirum had his soldiers hang the little mother of the sky from a scaffold by her wrists, so she turned in the wind; and the little mother of the sea was forced into a barrel of seawater that was nailed shut; and the little mother of the earth was buried alive. The men, still drunk, gambled on which of them would die the first, and the last.

  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.

  47

  Qirum’s fleet had hauled anchor before dawn.

  As the long midsummer day wore on the ships pushed steadily west, tracking the shore of the great estuary the natives of this place called the Cut, following the southern coast of Northland. It was high tide, and the dark waters washed over stony beaches.

  Qirum himself was at the steering oar at the stern of his own ship, a big bristling pentecoster that would have dwarfed his old eight-man scow. His Greek pilot had given it a name, the Lion, after the Greek custom. Erishum, Qirum’s trusted sergeant, stood at the prow, weapons to hand. This ship was the lead in a motley fleet of over a hundred vessels scattered across the swelling water, ships stolen from kings and pirates, some even rightfully purchased, many of them heroically sailed out of the strait and north along Gaira’s coast with the Western Ocean. Ships that bore an army, its warriors and followers and their horses, even chariots and siege engines packed into their hulls.

  It was good to be back at sea. Qirum could hear men calling across the water, pilots passing bits of information, the crews mocking each other as fighting men always would. He could hear the horses too, their frightened whinnies carrying over the water. He relished the smell of pitch and resin, of the men’s wine and salted meat, even their earthy stink of piss and vomit, and above all the sharp salt scent of the air that lay over the ocean. Even to bring his army so far, to assemble such a fleet, was a huge achievement. And at this key moment, with the first landing on Northland soil imminent, it was Qirum’s ship that led, Qirum himself who guided it, he who would be the first to spring onto Northland soil, the first to fight, the first to kill.

  But that landing had yet to be made, that moment of glory yet to come. For now Qirum and his force were still at the mercy of the sea. Huge oceanic waves forced their way into this great throat of an estuary, and the boat creaked as it rose and fell. The men, most of them warriors from the eastern countries, looked uneasy, queasy, and more than one had emptied his guts over the side. At least the wind was strong enough for them to use their sails, but it blew too hard, driving the ships too fast for the comfort of the pilots, and it brought a bite of cold too on this unseasonably chill midsummer day.

  It was just as well, Qirum thought, that few of the men knew of the invisible traps that the Northlanders had plant
ed all along the shore.

  Now the traitor came back the length of the ship to speak to him. He had to step carefully past the twin ranks of rowers, twenty-five men in each, their gear stowed beneath their benches, their weapons to hand, their oars shipped. The man, arrogantly dressed in the Jackdaw-feather cloak of his ceremonial office in Northland society, himself looked unsteady; he was no sailor. But he smiled at the Trojan’s discomfort. ‘You’re doing well, Qirum. Just hold your course.’

  Qirum snarled, ‘I don’t need pats on the head from the likes of you, Bren.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. But nevertheless-’ He glanced up at a sunless sky. ‘A midsummer day, a clear still morning. The weather is kind, believe it or not. You should see the storms that ram their way up this estuary in the winter.’

  Qirum glanced to the shore to the north. It was a strand of empty shingle beach, with a blur of forest in the distance. To the south, nothing could be seen but water. This estuary was so wide that you could not see one bank from the other. ‘I see no walls. Where are the mighty Northland walls, as I saw in the north?’

  ‘There are some on the south coast, but nothing to match the structures in the north, like the great Wall that shelters Etxelur itself. Here the issue is the management of the great rivers, and the tidal washes, whose flow is diverted and channelled to keep them from tearing at the land. Look over there.’ He pointed to a section of coast that looked as if it had been undercut and slumped into the water. The exposed landscape, under a sward of green, was chalk, white as bone. ‘Without conscious management this very land would be cut away by the sea, as you see over there. You must understand that Northland is not just a question of walls. It is a system of water engineering that spans a whole country, a system designed and evolved to-’

  ‘So this precious land has been saved from the sea. I’ve heard all this before. To what end?’ He peered at the empty shoreline. ‘I see no people here.’