Bronze Summer

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘You are insane.’ But Milaqa saw there was no other choice than to follow her. She scrambled off the mound, found a spear, and stood by her cousin.

  And the chariot charged towards them. The driver was dragging at his reins, trying to control the horses, and the warrior and shield man were looking up at the notables on the flood mound. None of them seemed to notice the young women standing before them.

  Mi began running before the chariot reached them. Milaqa joined her, spear in hand. Mi jumped first, grabbed the chariot driver by the neck and fell back, pulling the astonished man off the chariot with her. Milaqa managed to leap up on the platform itself. Without thinking, she swung her spear and caught the warrior with its shaft. He fell from the chariot before he even saw her. But now the plummeting chariot, out of control, was tipping over. The last man, the shield bearer, yelling in fear and anger, swung his shield at Milaqa. She ducked, but the shield caught her on the back of the head, and she fell out of the chariot onto a mound of bodies, warm and slippery. She heard a splintering crash as the chariot went over – and then a huge weight fell on her back, knocking the air out of her.

  She sank into a dream of stone and bronze and iron.

  61

  ‘You idiot.’

  The words were in Hatti. That was the first thing Milaqa was aware of, that the language was Hatti.

  And then, that she was still alive. She opened her eyes. The daylight was fading from a clouded-over sky. Smoke billowed. She smelled grease, like meat burning. She tried to sit up, and pain banged in her skull.

  An arm around her shoulder lifted her to a sitting position. She turned her head cautiously. Kilushepa sat with her. They were back on the flood mound, she saw, sitting on a blanket spread on the bare earth.

  And on the plain before her, bodies lay strewn. People moved among them, some stripping the bodies of armour, clothes, boots, others hauling naked and broken corpses onto carts. Occasionally a wounded man would be found, and surgeons would be called. Many of the surgeons were Egyptian, brought in from that country by the Annids for their expertise, especially in the kinds of injuries to be expected in battle.

  Away from the battlefield pyres burned. And to the south, far off, more pyres.

  ‘That’s the Trojans,’ Kilushepa said. ‘Honouring their own dead. Since the fighting stopped for the day, behaviour has been civilised. The living have been returned on either side; the dead are not being dishonoured. Not that I’ve seen anyhow, despite the precedent set by that animal the Spider, and may he rot in the underworld for it.’ She glanced at Milaqa. ‘I take it you can understand me. That you remember your Nesili. The knock on the head—’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Although she wasn’t. Her body was a mass of bruises, and her aching head wasn’t even the most painful spot. Yet she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, at least not much, nor was any bone broken. She stretched, gingerly. ‘I’ve been lucky.’

  ‘You have.’ Kilushepa pointed to the wreck of a chariot, just below the mound. ‘Only heroes take on chariots on foot. Heroes and idiots, like you.’

  The memory returned sharply to Milaqa. ‘What about Mi?’

  ‘Worse off than you. She is back behind the lines. Your uncle Teel is caring for her. She will recover. She is with the rest of the soldiers, who are tending their wounds, eating their soldier-bread and drinking their wine, consuming the barley and goats’ cheese that they believe kills pain and restores strength. And you were left to my care.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  The queen stroked Milaqa’s hair. ‘I do marvel at you, child. What a mixture of rebel, hero and genius you are! I never saw the like. But you only did it because your cousin went first, didn’t you? I understand, you know. There have always been plenty of people like you in the Hatti court. You don’t really know what other people are feeling. You can only guess. So you do what they do without ever quite understanding why. It’s a flaw in your heart, child. And your uncle Teel shares the same flaw, I sense – or it’s a strength, depending on how you look at it. Depending on how it is used.’

  Milaqa, deeply disturbed, wasn’t sure she understood. ‘And the battle – is it over?’

  ‘No. The fighting just stopped, because of exhaustion. It may resume tomorrow. I have urged Raka to send an embassy to Qirum, to negotiate a truce.’

  ‘Our weapons. The iron arrows—’

  ‘They helped. The Trojan has the advantage in numbers, and without the iron, and without some good strategy from Muwa and his generals, the day would have been lost. But even with the iron we can never win a battle like this. Just as I have been telling Raka and any of your Annids who will listen. The trick is to pick a battle we can win.’

  ‘What kind of battle?’

  Kilushepa hugged her close, an unexpectedly human gesture. ‘That will wait for tomorrow. You must wash away the dried blood, change your clothes. Look, they are lighting another pyre …’

  The men lowered their torches to the dark tangle of bodies, and they threw on whale oil, and soon the flames were rising high in the gathering night. Out on the field, Milaqa saw birds coming down to feed, rooks and buzzards, and dogs loped. When the men gathered up another corpse, Milaqa watched, astonished, as a cloud of butterflies rose up from the disturbed body, flying into the fading daylight.

  62

  The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Autumn Equinox

  After three days of fighting the Battle of the Wall finished inconclusively. The Trojans withdrew to their siege lines.

  Two months later the priests were still busy at their pits all along the roof of the Wall, and in the interment chambers deep within, storing the bones of the war dead within the growstone, readying them for the longer war against the sea.

  And yet again Milaqa was to be sent to face the Trojan in his lair.

  She was to be accompanied this time by her uncle Teel, Annid of Annids Raka, a gaggle of other Annids, priests and advisers – and by Kilushepa herself, with a squad of Hatti troops under the command of Muwa. Once again the bewildered, bloodied Northlanders were going to try to come to an accommodation with the monster in their midst.

  Milaqa had her own special mission once more. Again she was to be used to try to reach Qirum, who had retired to New Troy once the campaigning season was done – to speak to his heart, and to put an end to the war.

  She thought she understood what was really going on here, why such a formidable expedition had been formed around her. Milaqa knew enough of Qirum’s culture, she had seen it in Anatolia, to understand that marriages to seal unions between nations were common. Was that what was being planned here, with herself used as bait? After all as a daughter of an Annid of Annids she was the nearest Northland had to a princess, though it galled her to admit it. Well, Milaqa was now nineteen years old; she was nobody’s gift, nobody’s whore. Besides, every time she had been pushed at Qirum in this way before it had ended in disaster.

  Or maybe there was some deeper scheme here, she wondered, which she had yet to glimpse. If there was, Teel was giving her no hint. She had found all the high-ups increasingly obscure recently, Teel even more enigmatic than usual. She had no choice but to go along with their schemes, whatever they were, and wait for the chance to make her own decisions, take her own chances.

  When the procession formed up at the foot of the Wall, people stopped what they were doing to come and stare. Children leaned over soot-stained galleries, adults labouring to rebuild defensive ditches and ramparts stopped their work and leaned on heavy shovels, the priests looked down from the roof of the Wall. Even now Milaqa felt distanced from it all. It was as if she was the only real person in a world of puppets. Save, perhaps, for Qirum.

  Following the great Etxelur Way south, they were passed without trouble through the Trojan lines, the desultory besieging force left in place for the winter. Most of the Northlanders walked. Kilushepa, however, preferred to ride with her ladies in a horse-drawn carriage. She had gifts for Qirum and his basileis, a custom in the countrie
s they all came from, she said. The queen herself took special care of these items, which were wrapped securely in linen blankets and ox-hide and stored in her carriage and other carts.

  Milaqa, like most people in the Wall, had seen little of the country since Qirum had begun his siege, and she was shocked at its state, the canals and weirs blocked, the dams broken, the hearthspaces weed-choked or flooded, the houses burned. But the people had survived, mostly. After the first Trojan attacks they had melted into the countryside and lived as their ancestors had, supported by the land’s natural bounty. And now they too came out to stare as the procession passed, strange, wild-looking people.

  ‘The land itself is flourishing,’ Raka observed at one rest stop, as they sat by a broad marsh. She watched a family of harvest mice busy in a nest woven in the tall grass. ‘Perhaps there’s a lesson in that. The land, you know, that’s what’s important in the end, not our petty human squabbles. Perhaps we have lost sight of the will of the mothers.’

  Teel nodded. ‘Those who are to follow us will listen to the mothers’ wisdom, I am sure.’

  More of his enigmatic obliquity. Those who are to follow? Would Raka not be leading the recovery when peace came, Teel not still be gliding among the Annids with his hints and tricks?

  One of Muwa’s men, bored, pulled his sword from its scabbard and began slashing at the long grass, where the harvest mice had made their nest. Kilushepa stopped him with a sharp word in the Hatti tongue. That surprised Milaqa. She would not have thought the Tawananna, who had refused even to acknowledge the existence of her own daughter in Etxelur, would care anything for mice.

  They were still a long way out from New Troy when they were met by a patrol. And as they passed through deep layers of earthworks Teel looked quietly pleased. All this defensive effort was a response to the campaign of petty retaliatory raids he and others had been organising ever since Qirum had begun his own assaults on Northland communities.

  Their reception at the gate in the wall around the lower town was prickly at first. Highly trained soldiers on both sides, some of whom must have met in battle only months before, faced each other down. But there was no trouble, both sides kept their discipline.

  Qirum’s man Erishum came out to meet the Northlander party, and escorted them through the gate. The city inside the wall seemed emptied out to Milaqa, depopulated, with none of those hungry crowds she had seen last time. She wondered if the Northlanders held here had found a way to slip away from this kingdom of mud and hunger and gone back to the country, quietly abandoning Qirum’s dream.

  They were shown to a house of mud brick and thatch, in the shadow of the walls of the citadel itself, evidently the house of some warlord evicted for the purpose. Carpeted inside and with tapestries on the walls, it seemed grand to Milaqa. Kilushepa said it was small and poky, but it would do. Erishum waited with them until a runner brought a message that Qirum would be prepared to meet Milaqa at sundown.

  This sent Kilushepa into a kind of regal panic. ‘And it is already mid-afternoon! There is barely time to make this wild woman anything less than grotesque – oh! How I hate to rush these things.’

  Milaqa glared at her, suspicious. ‘What “things”?’

  Kilushepa chased out everybody but her serving women, Raka, and Teel – the only man, ‘but, ball-less, you will cause no offence,’ she said dismissively. Then she turned on Milaqa. ‘Strip.’

  ‘What? I will not.’

  ‘Do it, child, or I will have the soldiers do it for you, I don’t have time to waste.’ She clapped her hands. Her ladies, barefoot on the carpeted floor, hurried in with trunks of clothes and cosmetics brought from the carts.

  Milaqa turned to Teel and Raka in outrage. ‘What is this? Is she to dress me up? Am I a doll, a toy?’

  ‘No,’ Raka said. ‘You are our ambassador. You must make an immediate impression on the Trojan, and the right one. Put yourself in Kilushepa’s hands. Look – Qirum calls himself a king. Kilushepa is a queen. How such people behave towards each other is a mystery to us, and with the mothers’ blessing it always will be. But she knows how you should present yourself to him.’

  Teel lay back on a couch, sipping water and wine. ‘Don’t argue for once, Milaqa. Trust the judgement of others.’

  ‘If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t be here at all.’

  Teel shrugged. He would not look her in the eye, which was unlike him.

  And Kilushepa was waiting, arms folded, glaring.

  Milaqa shrugged, and began to peel off her travelling clothes.

  ‘We will burn those,’ said Kilushepa.

  ‘We will not,’ replied Milaqa.

  As soon as she was naked the serving women closed in on her. They scrubbed her from head to toe with water and soaps, and washed her hair and dried it vigorously with towels. They even shaved her armpits, but she baulked when they tried to shave her pubic hair. Then they began to rub scented oils into her skin and hair.

  She sneezed. ‘There’s something getting up my nose.’

  ‘Stop complaining, child,’ Kilushepa snapped.

  ‘Try to enjoy it,’ Teel advised. ‘This is called being pampered.’

  ‘Give me the life of a soldier any day.’

  Now they dressed her in a robe of thick, colourfully striped wool. It looked beautiful, Milaqa had to admit. It seemed to shine in the light, and felt greasy to the touch; the wool was thick with oil. But the robe was cut so low in the front that her breasts were bare.

  She tried walking around. ‘Are you sure you’ve put it on the right way round? I feel ridiculous walking around with my udders hanging out. And it’s so heavy and clumsy I keep tripping up.’

  ‘No,’ Kilushepa all but snarled. ‘It’s you who are heavy and clumsy, you great she-aurochs. Lift your feet when you walk. Lift!’

  Now she was sat on a stool with a mirror of polished bronze held up before her face, and the cosmetics were applied. These came from tiny boxes of glass and silver and gold, themselves ancient and exquisite, the travelling kit of a queen. Milaqa’s oiled hair was teased into curls and glossy tumbles down her neck. A white power was applied heavily to her face, so she turned pale as a ghost, then bright red starbursts were carefully painted on her cheeks, chin, forehead. Black kohl was delicately applied around her eyes, by a girl younger than she was, who came so close Milaqa could smell the spiced meat on her breath. Perfume was dabbed at her neck, her breasts, a scent of rich flowers.

  Then she was made to stand, and the finishing touches were applied. A bodice and golden belt were tied around her waist – the belt was heavy, she was astonished to find, it was not plate, it was solid gold, from Kilushepa’s personal collection. A brooch was fixed to each side of her bare chest, and bangles, more gold and silver, were slipped over her arms. Kilushepa herself set a headband in her hair, richly jewelled.

  When Milaqa stood to face Raka and Teel, she rattled.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ Raka said.

  ‘I’m ridiculous.’

  ‘Not in Qirum’s eyes,’ Kilushepa said. ‘To him you will be the embodiment of royalty, of a Trojan princess. The fulfilment of a dream – a woman fit for the king he imagines he has become. And within this beautiful shell is you, Milaqa, the mate of his soul. To him, you will be perfect.’

  ‘And irresistible,’ said Teel, grinning sourly.

  There was a murmuring outside the house. A lady came running in.

  ‘It is time,’ the Tawananna said. ‘You have been summoned. Already! I told you, we did not have a breath to spare.’ She faced Milaqa one last time, critically, her mouth pursed. ‘It’s been like putting rouge on the cheeks of an ox. But the results are moderately acceptable, for which I take full credit.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Erishum will escort you to the citadel, to meet Qirum. He has a carriage.’

  ‘I’ll walk.’

  ‘You will use the carriage. Once you’re in the King’s presence – well, of course, you’ve no idea how to behave, but n
either does that brutish Trojan, so I suppose it will not matter. Don’t trip over. Don’t drink too much. Try not to hit anybody.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘One more thing.’ Kilushepa snapped a finger, and a girl came running with a package still sealed in ox-hide from the journey. As the servant began hastily picking at knots, Teel and Raka watched intently. Suddenly the atmosphere was tense, but Milaqa could not imagine why. The girl unwrapped the hide and an inner linen cover to reveal a box. Shallow, about the length of Milaqa’s forearm, it was elaborately carved with images of oak leaves and mice, and inset with gold. Kilushepa took this, and handed it to Milaqa. It was not heavy.

  ‘A gift,’ Kilushepa said. ‘We have sent tokens for Protis and the other savages. But this is for Qirum himself.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A gift fit for the king Qirum imagines he is. A treasure from old Troy, looted when the Greeks sacked the city, and acquired by me at great expense. The Greeks called it the Palladium. Qirum will know what it is.’ She glared at Milaqa. ‘Do you understand? This must be opened by Qirum himself. This gift is for him and him alone.’

  Milaqa nodded, not much interested in one more bit of manipulation. She took the ox-hide from the girl and wrapped up the box again, to keep it safe while she carried it.

  Raka stood, came to Milaqa, and unexpectedly hugged her, leaning over the box. ‘I must not smudge your face. Even in my eyes you look beautiful. Thank you, Milaqa. The mothers will reward you for this. And I—’ She broke away, and Milaqa was startled to see tears in her eyes.

  Teel stepped up now. ‘Don’t mind her. She always was sentimental, that one. She’s got worse since she’s had to send soldiers out to die. Well. Good luck, Milaqa. You made a good Crow, in the end, even if your training was a little unusual. As was your career. But then we live in unusual times.’ He patted her arm.

  She stared into his face. His skin was slack, a plump man’s face emptied by years of privation. A face that hid secrets. He seemed to want to say more, but now, in this last moment, the flow of words on which he had built his career failed him. ‘What are you keeping from me this time, uncle?’