Bronze Summer

by Stephen Baxter

  Noli nodded silent agreement.

  But Teel was tense. ‘If we leave without the secrets of the iron—’

  Kilushepa held up a silencing finger. ‘You will get what you want – and I will get what I want – although things might not work out quite the way you expect.’

  Now Nuwanza, Kilushepa’s cousin, rose to his feet. The hubbub of conversation among the panku members died away.

  Nuwanza smiled at Kilushepa, and extended outstretched arms to the Northlanders. He was a portly man of about forty, and he struck Milaqa as sane, competent. ‘All children of the little mothers of sea, sky and earth are always welcome here in our magnificent capital, which bathes in the light of My Sun, our King. And we are aware that you have journeyed far and have braved many perils to bring us your gifts. Please, cousin – proceed.’

  So Kilushepa began. Sitting calmly, her voice carrying through the large room, she outlined again the journey they had undertaken – and the promise of potatoes and maize.

  She showed a sample seed potato from the sacks. ‘It will grow where no other useful crop survives, in the uplands, in poor soil, anywhere, given water. A given field will produce more raw food in the form of potatoes than any other crop. Potatoes can even be grown between grain crops, thus multiplying the value of a piece of cultivated land. As a root, the crop is difficult to steal, for it remains underground until it is dug up, and few raiding armies will pause to do that …’

  Milaqa marvelled as she spoke on, making a humble root crop seem almost glamorous. But so it was, she supposed, if your concern was the destiny of an empire, and how it was to be fed.

  ‘Finally – one can survive on nothing but this root, and cow’s milk … I am sure you can see how this will transform the potential of our farmland, and all our fortunes.’ Kilushepa handed the root to Nuwanza.

  ‘Such a humble thing,’ Nuwanza said, turning the potato over in his hands. ‘Yet each mouthful of food I put into my mouth is a humble thing.’ He glanced at the few sacks. ‘You cannot feed a city of fifty thousand on a handful of these roots, no matter how vigorously they grow, queen.’

  ‘No. It will take years – crop after crop must be planted, and protected, and harvested, and the seed dug in again. Nuwanza, what we must do, you and I and our allies in the palace, is to work for stability – frankly, to hold the empire together for the three or four or five years it will take for these new crops to start producing on a massive scale. With these crops, these gifts from the gods, as soon as the sky clears, the famine will be banished and a new generation will grow up fat and healthy. And then new Hatti armies will march out to subdue the rebellious dependencies, and once more impose the will of My Sun the King on surrounding nations.

  ‘But without this gift – and let us speak honestly, councillors, for if we do not acknowledge the magnitude of our debt we cannot begin to repay it – without it our empire might crumble. Hattusa itself might fall. Just as, indeed, we might already have fallen if not for the gift of the Northlanders’ mash, which filled the bellies of our troops when we had nothing else to give them.’

  Tushratta leaned forward grandly. He was a thin, older, more sinister-looking man than Nuwanza, Milaqa thought. ‘I do not deny the magnitude of your achievement in bringing us this treasure, fair Kilushepa. And this from a position of desolation, of false banishment.’

  Milaqa saw Kilushepa sit straighter at his use of that word ‘false’, an indication of how far her rehabilitation had already come.

  ‘But,’ went on Tushratta, ‘you ask too much in return. We cannot give up our Master of the Iron! For centuries our gifts of iron have awed the other Great Kings, of Egypt and Assyria … How can you expect us to sacrifice that?’

  Then followed a long and complicated sequence of negotiations, which Milaqa found hard to follow. Kilushepa argued that the Northlanders lived far away, and would pledge not to divulge the secret of iron-making to any of the Hatti’s local rivals. And they wanted the iron only for tools and weapons, not for gifts; they would not try to compete with the Hatti kings on that level. Noli confirmed this, speaking quietly. The Hatti seemed to think war-making was a rather vulgar and wasteful use of such a precious substance. ‘Like stopping up your enemy’s mouth with gold,’ said Tushratta.

  But the Master of the Iron had been in his post since the King himself was a small boy. How could such a venerable gentleman be taken away? Perhaps the Northlanders would be willing to leave an apprentice or two to learn the craft at the feet of the Master himself, and then take the secrets of the process home. But that could take years; the Northlanders insisted they needed the iron now.

  The argument seemed to be stuck in stalemate.

  Then Kilushepa rather grandly stood – the first time she had been on her feet in the whole session, Milaqa noted. ‘I have the solution,’ she announced. ‘It has just struck me – of course – you are right, good Tushratta, it is unreasonable to expect the King to give up his Master of the Iron. But the Master has an apprentice, and he seems an able lad, from what I’ve heard. I doubt if the King even knows he exists. And if he were to leave, no harm would be done to the iron-making tradition here, for the Master would soon find another assistant to train up.’ She turned to the Northlanders. ‘Annid Noli – would you consider this?’

  Teel grinned, and murmured to Milaqa. ‘Now we see Kilushepa’s tactics. We told her about the apprentice we wanted. Did you imagine the queen would ask for him from the beginning? No, for it would never have been granted. But by arguing so hard for the Master, Kilushepa makes the loss of the apprentice seem a trivial price to pay.’

  Advised by Teel, Noli agreed to the deal.

  But Milaqa was shocked when the panku, led by Tushratta, again refused, with bland smiles and apologies. Even the apprentice was too precious to be given up.

  Suddenly Teel’s smugness was gone; he was furious. He growled in their own tongue, ‘I’m starting to think these slimy creatures never meant to give us anything at all. This isn’t negotiation, not bargaining – this is robbery!’

  But Kilushepa, as calm as ever, continued to press her case. She at least did not seem downcast.

  Then a runner summoned Muwa. He went to the chamber door. When he returned, he looked grave. ‘Members of the council – honoured guests – I am afraid your discussion is moot. For Zidanza the apprentice won’t be going anywhere.’ He stood aside.

  Hunda walked in, heavily bloodstained. He bore a body, limp – a tall man, but lightly built, and dressed in a scarred leather apron. He put the body on the floor. The stink of blood was shocking in these fragrant surroundings.

  Kilushepa shrieked. Coming from such a calm woman, the sudden noise was doubly shocking. ‘Zidanza! Dead!’ She rushed to the body, and pulled back his apron. The hilt of a dagger protruded from the lower belly, which was a torn, bloody mass. Kilushepa grabbed the knife and hauled it out of the body, and the courtiers gasped and turned away.

  And while everybody else was distracted by Kilushepa’s performance, Milaqa stared at the body. At the young man’s face. At his chin.

  Hunda said, ‘The body was found not far from the citadel walls. He had been raped, I am sorry to say. There is bruising around his mouth, his thighs. Abused, raped, then killed.’

  Kilushepa held the knife resting on her palms, and showed it to Muwa, Noli, Teel, Milaqa. ‘Look at this! Do you know whose this is? Do you?’

  ‘It is the Trojan’s,’ Teel said. ‘There is no doubt.’

  Hunda nodded, as if reluctant to admit it. ‘But none saw Qirum do this.’

  Kilushepa pointed dramatically at Muwa. ‘But you heard him, Chief of Bodyguards. You were there in my apartment when I goaded him to make his threats. He said he would do anything he could to advance his own ambitions against the King. How better than to slaughter this apprentice, and then his Master of the Iron – for surely he will be the next victim? And the sexual frenzy that has been visited on the boy – is this not some kind of twisted revenge for Qirum’s pas
t, when in the ruins of Troy he was forced to prostitute his own young body to survive?’

  Muwa looked grim. ‘I’m afraid you are right, madam.’ He turned to his men. ‘Send the orders. Find this Trojan. Kill him if you have to. Make sure he gets nowhere near the Master of the Iron.’

  The meeting of the panku began to break up. The council members flooded out into the street, looking back with horror at the corpse, or with disdain, Milaqa thought, as if the boy were somehow ill-mannered to be bloody and dead in such surroundings.

  Over the hubbub, Nuwanza called across to the Northlanders, ‘I am afraid the Chief of Bodyguards was right. Our discussion has no further purpose; clearly we cannot give you what you want. Let us meet again tomorrow and consider some other recompense. You will leave Hattusa laden with treasures for the service you have performed for the King, believe me.’ He spread his hands. ‘But not the iron you sought.’

  Kilushepa nodded, and Teel bowed gracefully, and thanked him.

  Milaqa plucked Teel’s sleeve, and whispered urgently in her own tongue, ‘That’s not Zidanza.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said mildly.

  ‘But it isn’t! Zidanza has a mole on his chin. I noticed it; it looked like a burn, but wasn’t. This man, whoever he is, has no mole.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s not the apprentice.’

  She was utterly confused. ‘Then who is he?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, does it? I see it now. The real Zidanza is in hiding. Soon we will smuggle him out of the city, and we will bring him back to Northland.

  ‘What a strategist the woman is! Kilushepa knew the panku would not give up the Master, or even his apprentice. But she wanted to fulfil the agreement she made with us; she sees the value of our friendship in the long term, where these fools cannot. So she arranged for this – subterfuge. We get the apprentice. They believe he’s dead, and will not miss him. In the meantime they have their Master, who will soon train another junior, once they stir him from his bed. And all the time the councillors think that Kilushepa has won them the secret of our foods for nothing! What a victory she has won.’

  ‘This is insane,’ Milaqa said. ‘And what of Qirum? Did he kill this stranger?’

  ‘Oh, of course not. Why would he?’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter either, does it?’

  ‘But why would Kilushepa falsely accuse Qirum? He saved her life – he was her lover.’

  ‘She’s said it herself. He was a stepping stone. Useful to her once, but he had become an irritant. Evidently she used this opportunity to resolve that problem too.’

  Anger burned; all she could think of was Qirum. ‘Is that how you see people too, uncle? As problems to be solved?’

  ‘This is how the world works, Milaqa. And if you want to be a Crow you need to learn to think more like Kilushepa. What a woman!’

  She turned on her heel, leaving him behind.

  At the door the sergeant was still waiting, his tunic stained by the blood of the stranger.

  ‘Please – Hunda …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Get me out of here. Out of the citadel. Now.’

  He hesitated for one heartbeat. Then he led her out into streets bubbling with agitation and rumour after the exit of the panku members. People flinched back from the bloodstained soldier. Hunda led Milaqa towards the gate of the citadel, but when she got the chance she turned a corner faster than he did, and disappeared from his sight. She felt tremendously guilty; Hunda was a good man, and today he was obviously bewildered by the events he was suddenly caught up in, and here she was using him unscrupulously. But she had to get to the gate before the palace bodyguards.

  When she arrived at the gate Qirum was still standing there, where she had last seen him. For once, it seemed, his own sense of self-preservation had deserted him. And, she noticed, there was no blood on him, no sign of a desperate struggle with an iron-maker. He asked, ‘How did it go? Did my Kilushepa—’

  ‘Your Kilushepa betrayed you. Run, Qirum.’

  His face clouded. ‘She would not.’

  ‘She claims you killed a man. An iron-maker.’

  ‘She would not – I did not!’

  ‘Where is your dagger?’

  He checked his belt. He drew a dagger, but it was not his – a clumsier design, good enough to mimic his own weapon’s weight and size. ‘She took it when I slept. After our love. She betrayed me. And the Northlanders? That snake Teel—’

  ‘He knew nothing of it. But now the deed is done, he relishes it—’

  ‘I am betrayed by all but you, Milaqa.’

  ‘Run. Hide. Get out of the city. You have only heartbeats before they come for you.’

  He hesitated. Then he kissed her, once, on the cheek, just as he had on the first day they had met. ‘I won’t forget this.’

  There was shouting behind her, from the citadel. She glanced back, saw men running, swords drawn – Hunda coming, yelling at her.

  When she looked again, Qirum was gone.

  And much later, when she got back to Hunda’s home – and she found Deri there, cradling a weeping, bloodstained Tibo – she discovered who it was who had killed the innocent man, whose rage and inchoate desire for revenge had been unleashed in so useful a fashion. They began to talk urgently about how to get the boy out of Hattusa before he suffered the dread judgement of a Hatti court.

  42

  Qirum walked into the camp of the Spider, alone this time, unarmed.

  The warlord sat alone in the dark, in his shack of pointless treasures. Outside, the din of the camp continued, the animal noises of rutting and fighting. The Spider considered the Trojan. The new wounds he bore, from the hard journey he’d made to get back here. The obvious rage inside.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Qirum.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Northland. And the Tawananna. And …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  THREE

  43

  The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Late Spring

  ‘Hit me,’ Hunda said. ‘I mean it. Come on. Hit me.’ He grinned.

  Tibo just stood before the Hatti sergeant. A few soldiers watched idly, with Milaqa and Voro standing by uncomfortably. Before Hunda, Tibo was a boy-man before a man-boy, Milaqa thought. On a patch of Northland ground trampled to lifeless dust by Hatti soldiers’ boots, the two of them stood naked save for grimy loincloths, barefoot, without weapons, the dirt clinging to their legs.

  Kilushepa had loaned the Northlanders a thousand or so warriors, and here they were, with many more followers – servants and slaves of the officers, weapon-makers and cooks and cobblers, dentists and doctors, and women, some of them wives, many of them booty-women with exotic looks and strange tongues, brought from places far from here. There were children running around, even infants, some of them conceived and born during this army’s long journey here by sea and land. One man, bizarrely, had a young piglet on a long rope. Meant for that evening’s meal, its snout twitched at the piles of filthy clothes, the boots, the smoking hearth.

  Around the Hatti camp the ground was scored by sewage gullies and the ruts of chariot wheels, with further out an elaborate defensive earthwork of ditches and ramparts. It was a place of filth and stench, like a pen of animals, where disease had already run through the ranks like fire.

  But Northland had to accept this great unnatural scab in its heart, because the reports were persistent and ominous. Qirum was building an army. The Trojans were coming to Northland.

  The moment stretched, the challenge hanging in the air between the two fighters. Hunda was actually shorter than Tibo. Many of the Hatti struck the Northland folk as short – cattle-folk, they called them, stunted after growing up on a diet of rotten meat and teeth-grinding bread. And Tibo had bulked up; still just seventeen years old, he had pushed his body hard in the months since he had been freed from th
e camp of the warlord called the Spider. Yet it was obvious that size didn’t matter, even the mass of Tibo’s muscles didn’t matter. Even stripped to his loincloth, even with that thick braid of hair at his back hanging loose, Hunda looked like a soldier, a warrior. For all his size Tibo still looked like a frightened boy.

  ‘Come on, hit me,’ Hunda said again. He sounded almost gentle. ‘Or are you afraid? After what that Wilusan savage did to you, you’ve got a lot to be afraid of, haven’t you, pretty boy?’

  Tibo roared and lashed out, a bunched fist at the end of a massive arm swinging towards Hunda’s head. But Hunda ducked underneath the swing and jabbed with a hand held flat like a blade, hitting Tibo just under his ribcage. Tibo folded, the air gushing out of him in a great sigh. Hunda slammed his fist into the boy’s temple, and Tibo was sent sprawling in the dirt.

  Around them the watching men laughed.

  ‘We should leave,’ Voro said. ‘I can’t watch this.’

  ‘Well, you can’t leave,’ Milaqa said. ‘You’ve got to talk to Muwa about the warning beacons.’

  ‘The Hatti won’t listen. You know what they’re like. They treat us with contempt.’

  She looked at him, exasperated. ‘What will your pricked pride matter when the Trojans come? You’re a Jackdaw. A trader. You’re supposed to make deals with strangers. If you can’t talk to some Hatti sergeant about a set of beacons that might save all our lives, then what’s the point of you?’

  ‘Look, Milaqa—’

  ‘Oh, just sort it out, Voro.’ She turned away from him.

  Tibo’s trial was not yet over. Hunda walked casually around the fallen Northlander, who lay on his belly, down on the dusty ground. ‘You’re a strong boy,’ Hunda said. ‘Nobody would deny that. That’s good. You want to fight. That’s good too. But you are a blunt blade. You hesitate. Maybe you feel how it would be to receive the punch you deliver. That slows you down, just for a fraction of a breath. But that’s enough to get you killed, because I can guarantee you that the animals Qirum has been recruiting from the ruins of the palace kingdoms are not going to be stopped by fretting how much they’re going to hurt you.’ On impulse he gestured to the soldier with the piglet. ‘Give me that.’