Bronze Summer

by Stephen Baxter

  Teel just smiled.

  Kilushepa plucked at her sleeve. ‘Come. A king awaits.’

  Clutching the box, she turned and walked out through the door. Erishum gravely stood in the evening light. She tried to focus on the challenges that lay ahead, and put aside a growing unease.

  63

  When she walked into Qirum’s crowded inner chamber, carrying Kilushepa’s gift, at first the King simply stared.

  He had been lying on a couch by the window, where a filmy drape lifted in a soft breeze. Lamps burned in alcoves cut into the wall. The usual guards stood in the corners, and a single priest bowed before the small shrine at the back of the room. Bear-like military men, officers in elaborate tunics and leather kilts, were gathered on low stools, arguing over clay blocks scattered on a low table, apparently records of troop movements or provision shortfalls, the business of an army. A boy in a plain tunic stood by, nervously translating the languages of Qirum’s officers for those who needed it. Serving girls flitted around the men, bearing trays of drink and food, under the watchful eye of an older woman who stood by one door.

  And Qirum gazed at Milaqa, transformed by Kilushepa’s arts. At last he jumped up from his couch. ‘Out, all of you.’ The servants filed out immediately. The military men got up reluctantly, glaring at Milaqa. ‘Oh, leave the tablets, Asius, you fool. Out, out. You, priest. And you.’ He waved to his guards. They looked uncertainly at Erishum, who nodded, and they left their places. ‘Go on, all of you. You too, Erishum!’

  Erishum was the last to leave, evidently reluctant. When he had ushered the rest out, he pulled a heavy cover over the doorway.

  The two of them stood at opposite ends of the room, Qirum barefoot in a wine-stained robe, Milaqa still holding her box, from which the ox-hide wrap had once more been removed.

  ‘So we’re alone,’ Milaqa said. ‘For the first time since—’

  ‘Since I became the King.’ He laughed. ‘But really we’re never alone. Even now we’ll be watched. Even if I ordered it not to be so, my men know the consequences if anything should befall me through their negligence. But we are as alone as I will ever be until the time comes for me to venture into the underworld. By the Storm God’s teeth, Milaqa. Suddenly you are beautiful.’

  ‘You’re blushing.’

  ‘So are you. Right down to your—’

  ‘Stop looking.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, I can scarcely promise you that! Kilushepa’s doing, this, is it? That woman always did know how to twist my heart. And now she’s doing it even from afar – even though she knows that if I ever lay eyes on her again I will kill her with my bare hands.’

  She felt an absurd prickle of jealousy. ‘I’m standing here flapping in the wind. Must we talk of her?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ He took big clumsy steps towards her, reaching out. But he stopped short, and dropped his arms. ‘Milaqa, you occupy a special place in my spirit. I’ll never forget that you saved my life when Kilushepa betrayed me in Hattusa. It is a cruel fate that has separated us, a game of the gods that has put us on opposing sides in a war. And now, to see you like this – I am overwhelmed.’

  ‘As I will be soon,’ she said practically. ‘My robe is heavy, and this box is getting heavier. Could I sit down?’

  ‘Of course – I apologise. Sit with me.’ He went to the table, brushed the clay tablets and wine cups onto the floor with his arm, took the box and placed it on the table. He sat on the couch, patted it.

  She sat beside him cautiously; she didn’t entirely trust her dress. ‘The box is a gift from Kilushepa, and all of Northland. As from one great king to another, the Tawananna said. In this box, she said you’d know it, is something the Greeks took from Troy. She called it the Palladium.’

  His eyes widened. Then, eagerly, he took the box, turned it around, found a catch. The box’s lid slid open, pushed by some hidden spring. Within, on a bed of purple cloth, lay a small statue. To Milaqa’s eyes the stone figure of a woman with her arms upraised, worn almost to featurelessness and stained with smoke, was unimpressive. But Qirum was astonished. ‘It is true. Milaqa, no Trojan has seen this since the Greeks sacked my city before I was born, and took away our most precious treasures, our most sacred relics. This is the mother goddess. She is the one the Greeks call Athena, in some of her aspects.’

  ‘I can’t make out her face.’

  ‘She is old, and much loved – or was. Some of us believed that she had been smashed, not just stolen. What must Kilushepa have paid some Greek warlord for this? How did she find her in the first place? Well – now I have her.’ He bowed to the goddess, reverently lifted her from her bed of cloth, and carried her to the shrine cut into the thick wall. He placed the goddess carefully at the centre of the shrine, where she stood amid similar statues, none of them tall, all garlanded with tokens. ‘For now, lady, you may dwell in the King’s own personal shrine. And tomorrow we will begin work on a temple for you, a temple in New Troy finer than any in the old.’ Again he bowed, and murmured a prayer – and jumped back. ‘Ow!’

  Milaqa stared. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Something ran over my foot. A mouse!’ He came back to Milaqa and the box, reached down, lifted a fold of the purple cloth – and small brown forms squirmed out from under the cloth, out of the box, off the table and went scampering over the floor. He stared at Milaqa. ‘Did you see that? Mice – in a gift from the great Tawananna!’ He burst out laughing.

  She couldn’t resist it. Maybe it was the tension, the sheer incongruity. She laughed with him, even harder when one of the little rodents ran over her own leg, and she squealed with shock.

  Qirum cupped her face gently. ‘You are even more lovely when you laugh, dear Milaqa.’ He straightened up and strutted around the room. She saw something like the old energy, the confidence she remembered about him. ‘But even the mice are probably a good omen. Well, no doubt I can find a priest who will tell me so. One aspect of the deity the Greeks call Apollo is god of plagues and mice. Maybe the gods are trying to tell us to put an end to this plague of war that blights us. Maybe they are agreeing with Kilushepa, for once! For it’s obvious what she intends, you know. By sending you here like this. Looking like this. She knows exactly what message she is sending me.’

  ‘I think they are hoping for an alliance.’ She took a breath, and plunged on. ‘Of the kind you forge between your eastern countries. Where princesses are exchanged to bind nations by marriage.’

  He gestured. ‘I don’t have much of a country. Not yet.’

  ‘And I’m no princess.’

  ‘Ah, you always will be to me, dear Milaqa.’ He studied her. ‘Look – we don’t have to do what they say, you and I. There can be peace whether we marry or not. Or war, come to that. The rules don’t apply to us. Do they, Milaqa? They never did, and never will. Whether we marry or not is up to us – nobody else. But that’s not to say we can’t have some fun, preferably at somebody else’s expense.’ He clapped his hands, a sharp, shocking noise. ‘Woman! Bring wine!’

  The senior serving woman came bustling in immediately, bearing a tray of wine and fresh cups. Milaqa was impressed; evidently the servants had learned to anticipate their capricious ruler’s moods.

  ‘And send for my head of household. And Erishum. There may or may not be a wedding, but there’s certainly going to be a wedding feast. The way the Greeks do it, a pack of curs they may be but they do know how to have fun.’ As the woman hurried out, he called after her, ‘And musicians! Come, Milaqa.’ He held out his hand. ‘Will you dance with this humble suitor? For I am going to have to impress you to win your hand.’

  She stood, but held back. ‘In this dress?’

  ‘Oh, nobody’s watching. Well – only an entire kingdom. And I – ow!’ He hopped, and slapped at his leg. ‘Something bit me …’

  Kilushepa had begun packing as soon as Milaqa had been taken away by Erishum, snapping at her serving women as they packed and repacked bits of jewellery and cosmetics in her box
es.

  Teel sat with Raka. They were both drinking Trojan wine, imported by Qirum. Teel was getting drunk, but he suspected Raka wasn’t. He watched Kilushepa sourly. ‘Do you have any regrets about what we’ve done, woman? Any at all? If you weren’t so busy fussing over things at such a time—’

  ‘I certainly regret loading her up with so much jewellery. I suppose it’s possible it could be retrieved, once this is all over.’

  Teel grunted. ‘You will pluck it off my niece’s cold corpse, will you?’

  ‘Enough,’ Raka said tiredly. ‘We all agreed to this, Teel. In fact, as I remember, it was you who persuaded me to accept Kilushepa’s scheme in the first place. We are all complicit. We are each of us guilty, or none of us is.’

  ‘But two of us are staying, to share the fate we have ordained for poor Milaqa, and the Trojans of course, but I care not a jot for them. And she—’ he gestured at Kilushepa, ‘—is running away to save her scrawny hide.’

  Kilushepa stood so her maid could hang her cloak on her back, and fixed it with a gold clasp at her neck. ‘I would take offence at that, Northlander, were you not effectively a dead man already, by your own choosing. Our work is done here. What good does it do to stay? Guilt, you say, Annid? What guilt? Guilt at the fate of Milaqa? You understand that girl as well as I do – I know you do, Teel. You see the flaw in her, the emptiness. Let her be useful for once in her life. Or is it guilt at this “dishonourable” ploy? Look – fools like Qirum speak of waging war with honour. But it is all lies. Qirum destroyed your little communities with overwhelming force, there is no honour in that. And when the fire comes, or the storm, or the flood or the drought, no amount of these heroes’ precious courage or honour will help them survive.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘All that will save you is up here. Intelligence. Cunning. And the determination to use it. Which is what enabled your fabled Ana to beat off the Great Sea of legend, from what I’ve heard of your tradition.’

  ‘You’ve done this kind of thing before,’ Raka said. ‘You Hatti.’

  Kilushepa sniffed. ‘It is in the annals. We have an old prayer to the plague gods: “Shoot my enemy, but when you come home unstring your bow and cover your quiver.” The first incident of record was some generations ago, when the King sent donkeys infected with plague into the lands of our enemies the Arzawans. We won the war, and now the Arzawans remember that fever as “the Hatti plague”. There have been a number of instances since then.’ She spoke dismissively. ‘We have experts in these things. The box I brought to Northland is not the only one of its kind stored deep in the royal vaults of Hattusa, like memories of the horrors of the past. There are cages of mice and rats, tended by specially trained priests. Pieces of cloth cut from the bodies of the dead, which in some cases can carry a memory of the disease itself.’

  ‘Weapons of last resort,’ Teel said.

  ‘Precisely. And is this not a time for a last resort? After all, that foolish battle you let yourself be talked into waging did even more damage than merely exhausting you. My spies say that before the battle the Trojans were on the brink of fissuring. Sieges are wearing on the besiegers as well as the besieged. But we invited them to battle exactly as Qirum would have wished, we met Qirum on ground he would have chosen, and we enabled him to motivate his men and unite his warring commanders in the process.’ She pointed at Raka. ‘You boast that this is the oldest civilisation in the world. You boast that you have saved the Jaguar people across the Western Ocean, just as you have saved the Hatti empire from dissolution. Perhaps you have. But that is all in the past. Today, Raka, you are Annid of Annids, and if Northland were to fall now it would be entirely your responsibility. And that is why you have allowed me to do what I have done. Because you had to, and don’t tell me otherwise.’

  Raka simply nodded. ‘I have asked Muwa to take back one more message to Etxelur for me.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The name of my preferred successor.’

  Kilushepa sneered. ‘How noble you both are. I hope it comforts you when the Trojans pursue your shades into the underworld.’ She glanced around, as if to make sure she’d left nothing, and without further farewells she marched out of the house.

  ‘Well,’ Teel said in the sudden silence, ‘at least that’s the last we’ll see of her, and that’s a comfort.’ He reached for the jug. ‘More wine? We may as well finish this.’

  64

  It took Qirum three days to organise his betrothal feast.

  Milaqa spent much of the first day with him. She stayed in his house, at the heart of his citadel. She had her own room, her own little squad of servants dedicated to her, which she found distressing as some of them were clearly Northlander slaves. But she slept alone, and her relationship with Qirum remained chaste, as it had always been. He did not even kiss her, he hugged her only as a brother might. ‘For now,’ he said, winking broadly.

  But on the second day Qirum said he had to attend to the business of his kingdom, and he huddled in his private chamber with his officers, ministers and priests. Meanwhile Milaqa was distracted by a string of visitors, embarrassed-looking officers who showed up in polished armour and bearing elaborate gifts: clothes, cosmetics, jewellery. These were the rival ‘suitors’ Qirum had ordered to come and woo her, in competition with him. Even Erishum showed up, bowing gravely, bearing a rather pleasing silver pendant.

  And it was on that day that she first began to suspect Qirum was growing ill. In the few moments she did spend with him his breathing was rattling and heavy, and he coughed frequently. But he was not a man with the patience for illness, and he ignored the symptoms, while his generals discreetly ignored the spittle he sprayed over their clay tablets and maps, and over their persons.

  On the third day the feast itself was set up in an open space in the outer city, beyond the citadel. Everybody was ordered to attend, to watch. There was music, dancing, feasting, tables laden with elaborate dishes from across the Continent, even some plainer Northland fare. The ordinary folk turned up, but there was no sense of joy; Milaqa thought they wore ghastly forced grins, in the presence of a capricious king with the power of life and death. And anyhow there weren’t many of them to be rounded up in the first place.

  The highlight of the day was the competition between Milaqa’s suitors. Qirum asked Milaqa to sit on a kind of throne to preside over the contest, wearing the outfit she had worn when she had come here three days before. The day was comparatively sunny, comparatively mild, but even so it was cold enough that her nipples were hard as stones.

  In Qirum’s own country and in Greece such contests were conducted in deadly earnest, between princes who might be seeking to win not just a bride but a good alliance for their nations. So it was serious stuff, the tests of archery and slingshotting and spear-throwing, the hand-to-hand fighting with swords and spears – fighting intense enough for wounds to be inflicted, despite the expensive armour on display.

  An older man called Urhi, a scribe, was ordered to stand by and make careful notes of the outcomes of all these futile contests. Milaqa thought he looked as if he was going mad with boredom, an intelligent man in a land of brutal young fools, and she wondered what his story was, how he had got here. Qirum had disrupted many ordinary lives in the course of his spectacular career.

  And Qirum himself was manic. At first he threw himself into as many contests as he could. But his breath was short, and when he coughed Milaqa thought she saw speckles of blood. So he withdrew, and missed the boxing too, and saved himself for the culmination of the day, his favourite sport, the wrestling.

  At a suggestion from Erishum, the King sat out the preliminary bouts, waiting until a victor among the other ‘suitors’ had emerged to challenge him. That man was Erishum himself. Milaqa could not tell if that was a genuine victory or not. Anyhow it was he who would face the King, surrounded by a crowd of courtiers, warriors, generals, and the common people of the city.

  The King stripped to a loincloth, and leaned so his hands were res
ting on his knees. ‘Don’t go easy on me, sergeant,’ he warned. ‘If I think you let me win I’ll have your head as a trophy. On the other hand, if you beat me …’ The sentence tailed off in another coughing fit. More blood speckles, Milaqa saw. Qirum’s bare skin was pale, slick with sweat, and oddly mottled with small black marks.

  If Erishum was troubled by this impossible balancing act he did not show it. Milaqa supposed he was used to the King’s capriciousness, and had after all survived so far. ‘I have no doubt you are the better suitor, lord. But you have to prove it first.’ He grinned, and crouched.

  Qirum laughed out loud. Then he launched himself at Erishum. The crowd roared and clapped as they clashed, heads together, straining, reaching. Erishum got the first break; he twisted, got his arm around the King’s neck, and flipped them both over backwards.

  And Qirum vomited blood. Erishum let him go in dismay and stood back.

  It was in at that moment that Milaqa, in a flash of understanding, realised what had been done – how she had been used, what the true purpose of this expedition to New Troy had always been. What she had done to Qirum’s petty empire, and to Qirum himself.

  On the day after that, Milaqa’s fourth in New Troy, nobody seemed to know what to do with her. She was brought food and drink in her room. The senior woman of the house was attentive to her needs. She was allowed to roam as she would.

  She was even allowed into the King’s bedchamber, where he lay on a couch.

  He was surrounded by soldiers, and by buckets full of blood and stool and piss; the stink was unbearable. She was not allowed to speak to Qirum, but she could not tell if he was conscious anyhow. From time to time he would cry out, as if in great pain. Scared-looking physicians came and went, desperately trying remedies. She heard them speaking of blood in the vomit and the urine, and of painful swellings in his groin and armpits. When they brushed past her, Milaqa saw they were spattered with the King’s blood.