Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416)

by Baxter, Stephen

  He was right, of course. Northlanders were comparatively few, and their very land survived only through continued and dedicated maintenance. Everybody had to play a part. “You sound like my mother.”

  “Good. My sister was a great Annid of Annids.”

  A priest stepped forward now, murmuring a prayer to the little mothers, and the babble of conversation hushed. The priest scattered a salty incense over Kuma’s shrunken corpse. Then, gently, he lifted the damaged breastplate away from her chest, and handed it to a member of the House of the Owl. The plate would be passed on to the next Annid of Annids, when she (or, just possibly, he) was chosen. Now the priest reverently wrapped up Kuma’s bones in a cloth blanket and lifted her up. Milaqa saw her mother’s head loll, the fleshless jaw gaping. Carrying the corpse, the priest made for the door. There he was met by a senior Annid, a severe older woman called Noli, and a procession began to form up behind them.

  “Walk with me,” Teel murmured to Milaqa.

  The two of them took their places at the rear of the group of Annids, who in turn led the priests and the wayfinders and the others, with the humble Beetles bringing up the rear. Then, to the soft beat of a drum, they shuffled forward, along a candlelit passage that led deeper into the Wall. They turned corners, and soon the last of the daylight was excluded. The corridor was musty and dry. When Milaqa glanced back she noticed the Beavers looking around, sniffing the air for damp, instinctively checking the walls for crumbling and mold. One of them carried a pot in which liquid growstone sloshed.

  “We’re walking very slowly,” she whispered to Teel. “I wish we could get this over with.”

  “Have you not been to one of these ceremonies before?”

  “Not since my father died, and I was very small then.”

  “Not even for the family?”

  “I always chose not to come. I suppose you’ll say that’s me running away from my responsibilities again.”

  “There are men and women younger than you who are already in their Houses of choice, training as wayfarers or builders—even as priests and Annids.”

  “I have no skill.”

  “Your languages are good. Everybody says that.”

  “I only learned them because of getting drunk with traders and sailors in the taverns in the Scambles, and nobody approves of that.”

  “It doesn’t matter how you learn. What matters is ability. With a skill like that you could become a Jackdaw.”

  She sniffed. “Like Voro? Haggling over tokens of clay? Traveling to mines in Albia, or stinking farms on the Continent? I don’t think so.”

  “Nevertheless you must do something. Actually I have an idea,” Teel said. “Something that might help you decide.”

  “I’m wary of your ideas.”

  “You’re probably right to be. Call it an assignment.”

  “What assignment?”

  But he had no time to reply, for they had reached the Hall of Interment.

  In the weak glow of smoky lamps this long, shallow room extended out of sight to left and right. The wall opposite was a smooth growstone surface with small alcoves cut into it in rows. Milaqa was reminded of a sandy river bank, the burrows of sand martins above the water. All the alcoves nearby were open, those further away blocked off, their shapes clearly visible in the discoloring of the growstone. There was a soft breeze. Somehow air reached this place, feeding the lamps, and the people who quietly spread out into the room.

  The priest stepped forward, lifted the slight bundle in his arms, and slid it into an alcove at chest height. He chanted a series of numbers: “One. One. Five. Four. Four. Two. Four. Two. Three. Five. Two.”

  A mason, clad in a cloak of beaver fur, armed with a shaped chisel, stepped forward. Briskly he stamped the priest’s number into the wall below Kuma’s alcove, using the ancient concentric circle number symbols of Etxelur. The priest began to chant, in a language so old it was unknown even to Milaqa.

  Teel murmured, “Do you remember this place from your father’s ceremony?”

  “I remember the holes in the wall. They scared me.”

  “Yes … The priest has recited the number of the day. Do you know about that? We began the counting from the very day Prokyid saved us from the Second Great Sea. Prokyid left us a system of cycles, based on the number five.” He spread his hand in the gloom. “For five fingers. The last of the priest’s eleven numbers was two; we are in the second day of the current eleventh cycle of five days. The second to last number was five. We are in the fifth element of the current tenth cycle of five fives, which is twenty-five days. The third to last number was three. We are in the third—”

  “The traders talk with a system based on tens. Hundreds, thousands.”

  “Well, so do the common folk, mostly. I’m told the priests’ count of days has reached somewhere over five thousand years.”

  It was an incomprehensible number. “We’ve been counting the days that long?”

  “Oh, yes. But our history goes back even before that, and we plan for a future stretching far ahead, and our calendar accommodates that. Remember, we have eleven cycles. The first cycle is five fives of fives of—”

  “What language is the priest using?”

  “It is said to be the language spoken even before Prokyid, perhaps in the time of Ana, who built Etxelur.”

  “Ana is a little mother. So is Prokyid.”

  “Yes, but they were both human too. Gods made incarnate. Don’t you know any of this? You aren’t cut out for the House of the Wolf, are you? The priest is consigning your mother to the endless sleep of the little mothers. The Wall is built not just of rock and growstone but of the bones of all our ancestors, back to the days of Prokyid, even the mythical time of Ana, who defied the First Great Sea. All our ancestors sleep in the stone that defies the sea.

  “The priest is reminding your mother that the Wall is not still. As the sea wears the Wall away at its front, we build it up at the back. Thus the Wall itself is like a slow tide, that marches slowly back across the land. And Kuma is learning that the day will come when the alcove of stone in which she lies will be opened by the sea, and then she will have a new flesh of stone, and muscles of air, and she too will join the endless war against the sea …”

  Another mason came forward with his bucket of growstone. With a shining bronze spoon he began to ladle it into the hole, sealing in Kuma until her liberation by the sea, in the far future.

  Milaqa thought about Teel. She had lost her father when she was very small, and her uncles, Teel and Deri, loomed huge in her memories of her childhood, these brothers of her mother, then young men with faces like her own. While Deri had taken her sailing in his fishing boat, Teel had played elaborate games with her, testing her mind, making her think. Now that her mother was gone, she reflexively looked to Teel for guidance. Yet there had always been something opaque about Teel. She had grown up not quite knowing if she understood him, or if she could trust him. She wished Deri was here. Or better yet her mother.

  She whispered, “What assignment were you talking about?”

  He pressed something into her hand. In the uncertain light of the wall lamps, she saw it was the iron arrowhead.

  “Find out who killed your mother, and why.”

  7

  Qirum decided that a queen should not enter Troy by climbing through a generations-old hole in city walls smashed by marauding Greeks. No, she would enter by the gates, like royalty.

  So he walked her around the walls. He’d had Praxo cut the shackles on her ankles, but at Praxo’s dogged insistence they kept the ropes on her wrists. Kilushepa must have been exhausted; if so, she did not show it in her face, or her gait, and as she walked on doggedly she gazed around, imperiously curious. Praxo followed, silent and resentful.

  As they skirted the city, to their left was what remained of the wooden outer walls and the double-ditch earthworks, built to keep out war chariots, now clogged with twenty years of debris. To the right was the shore, a long, sandy
beach, the lagoon beyond swampy and plagued by mosquitoes. Ships were pulled up on the strand, each the center of an impromptu camp, and sailors, traders, wives, children and whores followed rough trails between the ships and the city. It was the sea that had always given Troy its commanding position; the city dominated the sea lanes between Anatolia and Greece, and controlled trade with the rich lands of Asia to the north.

  Qirum said to Kilushepa, “The currents are strong here. Takes some skill landing. The traffic is not what it was twenty-five years ago, before the Greeks sacked the place. But it is a valuable site for all that.”

  “Of course. The logic of land and sea is unchanged, no matter how much men may loot and burn. Troy will recover. And is this the gate?”

  It was a break in the wall, flanked by two imposing stone columns carved with the image of the god Appaliunas. The god-stones had survived the fires, but the gates and wooden curtain wall had not, and traffic flowed around the standing stones, rough carts drawn by oxen and horses, people on foot, a few on horseback. Within the walls the city stank of dung and piss and rot. Kilushepa stared around without comment, at rubble and shacks and half-collapsed walls. The Pergamos still rose up, dominating the lower city, a citadel within a city. Hattusa itself was laid out like this; it was the Anatolian fashion. But this citadel’s watchtowers were smashed and fallen, and you could see the ruins of the palace, and the temples and abandoned mansions that surrounded it.

  “Once, this area was crowded with houses,” Qirum said to Kilushepa. Oddly he felt as if he was apologizing for his city. “Shops, traders’ posts, markets. There was a big slavers’ market just over there, and that big ruin was a granary. The houses crowded right up to the city walls. And there were tight little alleyways where you could barely see where you were going, and you’d always get lost. So they say …”

  As they stood there, children began to emerge from the rubble. Dust covered, they were the same color as the fallen houses. Kilushepa did not seem to see them, though they stood before her and plucked her robe. They came to her, Qirum saw, responding to her regal aspect, despite her own filthy clothes, and the dirt and blood on her face, and the bonds that still tied her wrists. Maybe she really was a queen.

  Qirum led Kilushepa to the broken-down house he had been sharing with Praxo. At least there were no whores hanging around looking for repeat business. He took her to the room he had been using, the one room that still had a roof on it. Kilushepa stood amid the debris as if she belonged to some other reality.

  “Sit.” Qirum indicated the pallet on the floor.

  Elegantly she settled down. Some of the tension seemed to leave her body. The room was warm, the light that flooded through the doorway bright.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I have been walking rather a long time. But my thirst is greater.”

  “Praxo. Water and wine. Go fetch some.”

  Praxo hovered in the doorway, huge, scowling. “No good will come of this, Qirum. Hump her, get it out of your system, and have done with it.”

  “Water!”

  Growling, Praxo went off.

  “He is jealous,” Kilushepa said with a smile. “I notice that, among young men who fight side by side.”

  “Forget him,” Qirum said.

  “Yes. Forget him. Here we are, the two of us, alone. Surely the gods have brought us together to serve their purposes. Let us tell each other who we are.”

  “You are really a Hatti queen?”

  “I was the senior wife of King Hattusili, who was the fifth of that name in our history. He in turn had taken the throne from his cousin Suppiluliama, the second of that name, who almost lost Hattusa at the height of the uprising.”

  “What uprising?”

  “The one we are still putting down. It is the famine, Qirum. Hungry people do not listen to princes or priests. They move to where they think the food is. They storm cities for their granaries. And then provinces and vassal territories rebel, and our neighbors make war and invade. Hattusa has always been surrounded by enemies, within and without. Some of our historians say it has been a wonder of diplomacy that we, my family, has managed to maintain the realm across five centuries … Of course we are not alone—even the Egyptians are suffering from the famine, and the Greeks’ petty kingdoms are falling like rotten fruit from a dead branch.

  “My husband, Hattusili, was able to take the throne from his cousin because he was able to promise a new source of food. We had been relying on grain from southern Anatolia and from Egypt, but the trade routes were precarious. And our access to our source of tin, too far to the east, was always uncertain. But my husband, as a young man, had traveled, and he forged a trading link with an empire far to the west of here, called Northland.” She said this word in a tongue with which Qirum was unfamiliar. “They send us tin from their own sources. And they send us food, great barrels of it, by the shipload. In return we send them wealth of various sorts. I think they see us as useful, because we help keep the pirates and raiders—people like you, Qirum—away from their ships, and ultimately their own lands and their allies.”

  “What kind of food? Grain, meat?”

  “Not that. Food made from the produce of plants we have no knowledge of. And they do not send us the seed stock so we cannot grow it ourselves. Northland is a strange country that nobody has ever been to and nobody knows anything about.”

  “And you were involved with this?”

  “I was senior wife of Hattusili the Fifth. I was involved in the negotiations with the Northlanders. But Hattusili died. Some say it was plague.” Her face was blank. “He was succeeded by his nephew, Hattusili the Sixth, who is a callow boy much under the influence of another of his uncles. In our court, you may know, a queen who survives her husband has influence. I was Tawananna. I am Tawananna. I had priestly responsibilities, and was involved in diplomacy and affairs of state. It is our way.”

  “But Hattusili the Sixth—”

  “Or his uncle.”

  “Found you in the way.”

  “I was asked to help organize a major military expedition against the Arzawans, of western Anatolia, who as you know have always been a problem. But this was a ruse to get me out of Hattusa. Once I was alone with the King’s soldiers, away from the palace bodyguards, I was taken. Hands were laid on me.” She paused. Qirum could imagine what had followed. “I was thrown among the population of a captured city. Those around me did not believe I was who I said I was. So I was brought here. And then I met you.”

  “And in me, you saw …”

  “A chance.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Ultimately, to return to Hattusa in triumph. To remove the fool Hattusili from the throne along with his obnoxious uncle, and to install my own son in his place—if my boy survives.”

  Qirum was astonished; in this saga of palace politics and betrayal this was the first time she had mentioned she had children.

  “And, incidentally, I will save the Hatti kingdom from drought and famine, and secure our future for all time, so that we may fulfill our service to the great Storm God Teshub.” She was exhausted, he saw, barely able to sit up straight. Yet her words were strong and clear.

  He had to laugh, though. “Is that all? And how will you achieve that?”

  “By using my knowledge of Northland. My links with it. I will go there. We must acquire the seed stock behind their strange food. We cannot remain dependent on the goodwill of a country so far away. I have thought on this for a long time. It was a project I pursued before I was deposed, in fact. It remains a valid strategic goal. And with that treasure I will buy back my influence and position at court.”

  All this sounded impossible, a fantasy. He had only a hazy idea where Northland actually was; although he had traveled far compared to most, he could not even imagine such a journey. “The Northlanders won’t just give such a prize to you. Look at you—you’re in rags—you have no power to speak for the King in Hattusa. What could you possibly have to trade?�
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  “In these turbulent times, they and their allies will receive the partnership and the protection of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen.”

  There was a guffaw from the doorway—Praxo, laden with sacks of water. “Trojan, you need to stop up that mouth of hers with your pork sword before she makes me piss my pants laughing.” He threw down the sacks.

  Qirum set a sack before Kilushepa, and loosened the bonds at her wrists so she could drink.

  “I won’t tell you how much this water cost me,” Praxo said, settling to the floor. “There’s a secret pipeline, you know. Laid down in previous generations by wise rulers, to keep the town watered during sieges. There’s a sort of cabal that knows where it is, and runs it. About the only place you can get clean water in Troy nowadays. I hope what you’ve got between your legs is worth it, oh queen.”

  She did not reply. She merely drank, steadily.

  Gently, Qirum took the sack away from her. “Take it easy. Your stomach needs to get used to being full. You’re expecting me to help you achieve this dream you speak of?”

  “As I said, I don’t have much choice.” She turned that startlingly pale gaze on him again. “But perhaps the old gods favored me. For I saw something in you, Qirum. Something you may not know is there yourself. A hunger. I think you will rise up from this squalor, the ruins of a devastated town …”

  Praxo swigged wine and laughed. “You’ve got it wrong, lady. If not for this squalor he wouldn’t exist at all.”

  “Be still, Praxo.”

  “No, it’s true. He was conceived on the very night Troy fell to the Greeks. I don’t suppose he told you that. His mother was a highborn, supposedly, but everybody in Troy these days says they are descended from highborns—”

  “Shut up!”

  “And his father was a Greek. It was a rape! A quick in-and-out, and the lad goes on his way for a bit more plunder and mayhem, and if he still lives he probably doesn’t even remember it. Just one more hole to plug, in a long line of holes.” He gestured at Qirum. “And here’s the result. Neither Greek nor Trojan, unintended, wanted by nobody, dumped by his mother as soon as she could manage it, and left with nothing to sell but his little pink arse!”