Milaqa felt a deep exhilaration as she hauled on her oar. She could feel the way the big muscles of her back and legs made the boat pivot on her blade. The boat itself was an extraordinary craft, quite unlike the oak-frame-and-hide boats of the Northlanders, which were designed for the rigors of the outer oceans. This was a black shadow on the water, sleek and menacing and startlingly fast when the rowers worked their oars properly. She had thrilled at her first sight of it, at the river mouth in southern Gaira. This boat was itself an instrument of war, as much a weapon as the bronze sword Qirum so cherished. And here she was, Milaqa of Etxelur at its oar!
But as the day wore on, without a glimmer of sunlight, the rowing went on and on too, with only brief breaks for drinks and food and for pissing over the side. The energy in her muscles drained away to be replaced by a dull fatigue, and the joints in her back and neck ached. And still it went on, and she had to make another stroke, and another, and another.
Qirum glanced around, stripped to the waist, his brow beaded with sweat, his slab-like body tensed. “Told you so!” he said. “You could be up there peeling apples for the Tawananna. But no, you knew best, and here you are, with your feet in the bilge and your muscles on fire. Told you so!”
She forced a grin. “Shame we aren’t in separate boats so I could race you, Trojan.”
He laughed, shaking his head. But then he turned away, and she had still another stroke to pull, and another.
Heading roughly north and east, they crossed a sea quite unlike Northland’s great oceans. This sea was a puddle, so crowded with small islands they were never out of sight of land. Smoke rose up from some of the islands, not from others. Following Qirum’s curt commands, Kilushepa kept them clear of all the islands. Occasionally they would see ships, looming on the horizon. Kilushepa steered well clear of these too, hiding the boat behind the curve of the world.
They made one overnight stop, on a small island that Qirum said had always been uninhabited. By the light of whale-oil lanterns—no moon was visible—they hauled the boat up on a beach of gritty sand, and made a camp in the lee of a bluff of rocks. Further inland the island was thick with trees and bushes, their leaves pallid, oddly tired-looking. Qirum detailed some of his crew to go off into the interior to hunt for game, while others walked the strand looking for shellfish.
Released from the punishment of her oar, Milaqa wanted nothing but to curl up on the sand and sleep. But the kindly local man advised Milaqa to take care of her body first, or she would be as stiff as a plank by the morning. So she ducked around a rocky outcrop to a more secluded part of the beach, stripped down to her loincloth and plunged into the water. It seemed saltier than what she remembered of Northland’s seas, and more buoyant, and it was cold, but she swam back and forth, letting the sea replenish her drained body, and feeling her muscles recover as they stretched against the water’s gentle resistance.
That night she slept a dreamless sleep. But the morning found her back at her oar, and the grim slog of completing the journey resumed.
31
The next day they got their first glimpse of the Anatolian shore. It was a thin brown stripe on the horizon, with low, worn hills, and long empty beaches against which waves broke in a skim of white, and not a splash of green anywhere. This was home for Qirum. He showed no pleasure in returning.
They turned, heading north, so they tracked the coast to their east, Milaqa’s left. The rowing got harder. There was a current against them, and a wind blew steadily from the north. Milaqa and the rest labored, but the landmarks on the shore seemed to crawl by. At last, on the northern horizon, Kilushepa pointed out a smudge of brown hanging over the land: smoke from the fires of Troy itself.
“There’s a bay,” Qirum said, panting as he worked his oar. “A headland … Once we round the headland and get into the bay we’ll be out of this current, sheltered from the wind, and life will get a lot easier. Not long now, I promise—”
“Weapons!” Kilushepa’s command was a harsh snap.
Milaqa looked up, confused. The men were already shipping their oars and scrambling for their spears and shields under their benches. Qirum looked over his shoulder, past Milaqa, and he swore, using his filthiest defamation of his Storm God.
And Milaqa looked back, along the length of the boat to the sea. There it was: a black scrap on the horizon that grew as she watched, a square of dark sail above a slim hull.
Qirum began barking instructions. “Get ready. Use any weapons you have at hand. You too, ladies! I feared they would strike here, where every boat must round the headland to the bay. And see how they come upon us, riding down the summer winds as we labor against them, they have all the advantages. Of course anticipating trouble doesn’t necessarily mean you can avoid it. They’ll come alongside us, grapple us with hooks and ropes, maybe throw a net. Cut their ropes, slash their net. Don’t let them board! Or you will be rowing another boat across a river of blood before the day is done.”
They quickly got organized, the men with their weapons and shields ready to defend either side of the boat, depending on how the pirates came down on them. Milaqa had no weapons of her own save her bronze dagger. She picked up her oar, and held it before her like a club. Teel looked terrified, Deri and Riban grim. Tibo had an expression of relish. The black ship closed on them silent as smoke over the water. Milaqa could see detail now, rents in that big sail, a glint of metal—bronze swords and spear points.
None of this seemed real. The scene was almost peaceful, as they waited; the sea lapped, the wind sighed in their faces.
“They’re closing fast,” Deri said grimly. “They’ll pass by fast too. If they judge it wrong they’ll miss us altogether.”
Qirum said, “They’re good seamen. Must be, or they wouldn’t have survived. They might foul up. We won’t gamble our lives on it. She’s a big one. A fifty seater. If she’s fully manned we’re outnumbered many times over.”
“This is not how it ends for you, Trojan,” Kilushepa said calmly. “You, killed by a stranger for the scrap of food in your pack, the bit of gold in your pocket? You, who is destined to rule the world? You will survive this. So it’s a fifty seater. What’s your plan?”
He stared at her. Then he laughed out loud. “Gods, I am surrounded by monstrous women! But you are right, of course. We must not allow them close enough to use their advantage of numbers.” He rummaged under his bench for his bow and a leather quiver of arrows. “Milaqa. Get me the lantern from Kilushepa at the stern.” Feverishly he used his knife to saw a bit of cloth from his tunic, and tied it around an arrowhead. “Move, girl!”
She worked her way along the boat, between the watchful men, and fetched the lantern. She had to shield it from the wind with her body as Qirum struck a flint to light it. “Feed it,” he snapped at the man behind Milaqa’s bench, the Greek. The man ripped bits of cloth off his own tunic to fuel the flames.
The pirate ship was closing now. Some of its crew dug oars in the water to slow the ship as it bore down. Milaqa thought she heard them chant, a rapid, ugly noise; they were pumped up to fight.
“Milaqa.” Qirum dipped one arrowhead, wrapped in cloth, into the flame; it came up burning. “Help me. I’ll fire the arrows. And when they close, throw the lamp. Try to hit the sail. Do you understand? You’ll only get one chance.”
She picked up the lamp; it was a clay jug heavy with oil. “I’m ready.”
“Good, because—”
Because they were here.
The pirate was another Greek boat, Milaqa saw, a sleek black hull with savage painted eyes. The hull itself was battered and showed signs of patching, a hardened fighting ship. And as Qirum had predicted it was about twice the length of theirs, and seemed to swarm with men.
The ropes started flying over, weighted with stones, with hooks of sharpened bone. Qirum’s crew hacked at the ropes with their axes and blades. The pirates hauled with relish, laughing. Milaqa saw they were preparing to throw a weighted net over the boat, which would tr
ap them all. One man looked directly at her. He wore a skull plate nailed to his shaven head, and his face was crowded with tattoos. He opened his mouth to reveal sharpened teeth, and a tongue that was cleft like a snake’s. He barely looked human at all. She clenched her oar, recoiling, shocked, suddenly flooded with fear. She was nothing to this man, she saw, her own self worthless. To him she was a scrap of flesh to be robbed, used and discarded—and then forgotten, no doubt, before the night fell. What god would make a universe where such a horror could be inflicted on her?
But he hadn’t got her yet.
Qirum fired off a flaming arrow—but it missed, and sailed harmlessly into the sea, where its flame died. He fired another and hit a man in the chest; he screamed and fell backward into the sea. A third thunked into the pirate’s hull. And now, as the enemy ship closed, Qirum cried, “Milaqa!”
For an instant she could not move. She couldn’t take her eyes off the tattooed man, who grinned, and beckoned to her, an obscene gesture. Qirum called again.
With all her strength Milaqa hurled her lantern.
It smashed against the base of the pirate’s mast, and flame blossomed. The men scrambled away from the sudden fire, trying to douse it using seawater scooped up with bilge buckets. The rowers managed to cut the last of the ropes, and the pirate ship drifted away, and Qirum loosed more arrows, picking off the men. Tibo whooped, and hurled his spear uselessly after the pirate vessel.
“Now row!” Qirum shouted. “Let’s put some distance between us! Take your oars!”
The oarsmen, including Milaqa and Qirum, quickly settled. Soon they were in the familiar rhythm, chanting together now, a triumphant, “One—pull! One—pull!” Milaqa, looking out over the stern as she rowed, saw the blazing pirate ship recede into the distance. The crew, abandoning their attempt to save the ship, leapt into the water.
“The gods spared us,” muttered Qirum as he rowed. “If you had failed with your throw, Milaqa, even by a hand’s breadth—and there’s a great deal of luck involved in lobbing from one moving ship into another—we would all be dying, spilling our blood into the water by now. They toy with us, the gods, our little lives and deaths amuse them …”
Kilushepa put away her own knife. Throughout the incident she had not moved from her bench at the stern, as expressionless as if nothing important had happened at all.
But Milaqa gave way to a deep shuddering. She couldn’t get the image of the tattooed face out of her mind, that cleft tongue. He had come so close. She longed to be somewhere safe, to have the stout bulk of the Wall around her.
The kindly Greek behind her put his hand on her shoulder, squeezed.
32
They made landfall in Troy’s harbor later the same day.
They left the boat with Qirum’s Greek recruits, and made the short walk along a rutted road toward the city itself. They were all heavily laden with packs, save for Kilushepa and Noli, and they walked slowly, getting used to being on the land again, and in silence—exhausted, shocked, Milaqa thought. Teel had barely spoken since the pirate attack. Even Deri was subdued. Only Tibo, marching just behind Qirum, looked bright, curious.
Milaqa had had an air of unreality since the attack, as if the pirates had killed her, as if she were a ghost walking. She tried to concentrate on the landscape around her. What could she make of it? Well, this road from the harbor had once been paved. Now the stones were broken and scattered, the road long unrepaired. The land itself had been heavily farmed, as you could tell from the tight pattern of boundary walls—you could even see the scraped lines where the ground had been painfully prepared to take the seed. But on this summer day, when the fields should have been plump with green, only weeds grew, and ravens pecked at the hard, dry soil. In one field she saw a big skeleton, maybe a horse, picked clean, the eyes in its long skull gaping.
Qirum marched through this fallen landscape without comment.
The walls of Troy loomed before them, a band across the countryside. A pall of orange smoke rose up from a hundred fires, and within the walls the buildings were a jumble of scorched stone. It was like a vast tomb, Milaqa thought, like the mound-tombs built by the silent priests of Gaira, stone boxes where dusty men would rummage through the heaped-up bones of their ancestors. Troy would be the first large city Milaqa had actually entered. At Mycenae and other way stations, Qirum had always urged the party to stay hidden in the country outside. The cities now, he always said, swarming with the starving and desperate, were more dangerous than the lands beyond their walls. But they were going into Troy.
When the breeze shifted, subtly, Milaqa smelled death, the harsh, sour stink of it. She covered her mouth with the collar of her tunic.
As they neared the city, the tracks branched out, heading for different gates. Qirum chose a track, and they came to a ditch that Qirum said was designed to keep out bandits on chariots. As they crossed by a light wooden bridge, Milaqa saw the ditch was full of corpses—many of them children—a rotting, angular mass. Here was the source of that stench, then. They hurried over the bridge, for they all knew that the gods of disease lingered around fresh corpses. Qirum clapped his hands, and carrion birds rose up in a squawking cloud.
“There has been a great massacre,” Tibo said.
“No, my would-be warrior,” Qirum said. “Nothing so dramatic. The only battle being waged here is against hunger and thirst and disease, and these are the fallen foot soldiers of that battle. This is where they bring out the corpses each morning—the bodies of those who succumbed during the night.” He wrinkled his nose at the stink. “They used to burn them. Looks like even that discipline has been abandoned.”
From close to, the wooden palisade around the city wasn’t as formidable a barrier as it had seemed from further out. Its face was patched, the breaches jammed with rough agglomerations of timber and rubble, and it was scorched by fire. It had evidently suffered many attacks. Still, the wall clearly served to keep undesirables out. When they got to the gate they found people gathered around—crowds of them, sitting in an eerie silence. There were even crude lean-tos, huddled up against the ramparts.
These people watched as Qirum’s party passed. Their skin, their clothes, were the color of the dust they sat in. Children, wide-eyed, listless and with swollen bellies, came forward to the travelers, hands out. Many of these wretches bore terrible wounds, Milaqa saw, hideous scars crossing little faces, severed limbs ending in fly-swarming stumps. Wounds that were memories in flesh of flashing bronze swords wielded by mighty heroes.
The gate itself was just another breach in the wall, through which ran a rutted track. Men lounged here, in armor of leather and with shields of wood, their kit poorer than Qirum’s bronze breastplate, though their swords gleamed from polishing. The largest of them stood in front of Qirum as he tried to pass. “No entry,” he said in rough Trojan. “King’s orders.”
“And who is king now? Never mind.”
The warrior looked briefly impressed by his accent. But he said, “I’d walk on if I were you, brother. Troy’s full. And no food to be had anyhow.”
“You look well fed enough,” snapped Kilushepa in her own tongue. “But then palace guards always are, aren’t they? Always the most privileged, until at last they betray their masters.”
Qirum raised his eyes to the heavens. “Please—stay silent.”
The warrior looked at the Tawananna suspiciously. “What did she say? Who is she?”
“Never mind,” Qirum said. “Look …” He dug into a pouch at his belt, and produced a fleck of gold. “Imagine how many whores you can buy with this. I am sure there are plenty of those still in Troy.”
But the man seemed doubtful about accepting the gold. “You’ve been away a long time, brother. Things are bad in here. I’m telling you honestly, you seem a decent sort. Whatever you’re seeking here has probably long gone.”
Qirum forced a grin. “How bad can it be?” He produced another flake. “This bad?”
The warrior hesitated. “Make
it two for me and each of my buddies here”—there were four in all—“and you can go in and see for yourself.”
Milaqa saw Qirum’s jaw work. This was obviously far more than he had expected to pay. But unless they got into Troy they couldn’t achieve anything else. “Very well.” He dug out more flakes.
The warrior counted them out, and handed their share to his companions. “On you go, brother. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
So they approached the gate. At Qirum’s brisk orders the men formed a loose ring around the women, weapons to hand.
And Milaqa entered Troy.
She easily spotted the palace mound. It was just as Qirum had described it, a hill at the northern end of the city surrounded by its own stout stone walls. But many of the buildings even within the citadel walls were burned out, their stones tumbled. Outside the central citadel Troy was a ruin—evidently destroyed long ago, for weeds had grown over broken walls and fallen roofs. People crowded in here even so, hollow adults, children peering apathetically from lean-tos. Smoke rose from dozens of fires, contributing to the brown fug above. More mutilated children crowded around the travelers, hands held out in supplication. Qirum touched his sword and snarled to keep them at bay. Milaqa remembered how she had once dreamed of the glories of the cities of the east, over cups of ale in the Scambles.
“There are no dogs here,” Noli said. “Did you notice that? All long gone into the pot, I suppose.”
Qirum brought them along a path that ran beside a length of smashed-down wall. “This was one of the city granaries, a big one. Never rebuilt since the Greek firestorm. There’s no point coming here, to the city, yet the people come even so. For this is where the priests are, and the King, who promised to protect them and feed them.
Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416) Page 19