Stephen Baxter: Bronze Summer

‘An eagle,’ Teel said.

‘What?’

‘I saw an eagle — a sea eagle, I think — wheeling away over there.’ He pointed out to sea. Teel was not a tall man but he was bulky, given to fat, and he habitually shaved his head to the scalp. Milaqa knew he was around thirty years old, but he looked younger, his face oddly round, like a baby’s.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ she said. ‘The eagles nest in crevices in the Wall’s outer face. Lots of birds do. And on the inner face too.’

‘Wearing away the Wall bit by bit, with each peck of a curious chick, each streak of guano on the growstone. Well. We can leave it to the Beavers to fret about that.’ His blue eyes were running in the cold breeze. ‘Thank you for coming up.’

‘Did I have a choice?’

‘Well, I didn’t drag you here, so yes, you had a choice. I know how difficult this is for you. To lose your mother in your sixteenth year, the year of your House choice — you’ll have to face the whole family at the equinox gathering-’

‘Don’t give me advice about my feelings, you ball-less old man.’

He laughed, unperturbed. ‘Ball-less, yes, I grant you. But not that old, surely.’

‘Let’s get this over.’ She walked deliberately to the sky burial platform. A couple of gulls had landed again; they fled into the air. Milaqa lifted her cloak so it covered her mouth. Teel had a linen scarf, grimy from use, that he pulled over his mouth and nose. And Milaqa looked closely at her mother’s body for the first time.

It had only been a month since Kuma had been brought home from the Albian forest where she had met her death. A fall from her horse had killed her, her companions had told the family, an aurochs chase that went wrong, the back of her skull smashed on a rock — an accident, it happened all the time, there would be no point hunting the great cattle in their tall forests if it wasn’t dangerous. Only a month. Yet Kuma’s head had already been emptied of its eyes, her gaping mouth cleansed of tongue and palate. Scraps of flesh and wisps of hair still clung, but enough bone had been exposed for Milaqa to be able to see the crater-like indentation in the back of the skull, the result of that fatal fall. This is my mother. Milaqa probed for feeling, deep in her heart. She had not cried when she had heard her mother was dead. Now all she seemed to feel was a deep and savage relief that it wasn’t her lying on this platform, her flesh rotting from her broken frame. Did everybody feel this way?

‘It works so quickly,’ Teel said, marvelling. ‘The processes of death. Look, of the body’s soft parts there’s not much left save the big core muscles.’ He pointed to masses of dull red meat beneath Kuma’s ribs. ‘The birds and the insects and the rats, all those little mouths pecking and chewing-’

‘Is this some kind of test? I know what you’re like. I grew up with you setting me tricky challenges, uncle.’

‘All for your own good. I wanted to show you something.’ He pointed to the flaw in the bronze breastplate. ‘Look at that.’

The breastplate, supposedly a gift from the tin miners of Albia to some Annid many generations back, was finely worked, incised with the rings and cup marks of the old Etxelur script. The damage was obvious close to. She inspected the rough slit, the flanges of metal folded back to either side. ‘What of it? When the next Annid takes the plate, this will be easily fixed.’

‘Perhaps so. But how do you imagine it got there?’

Milaqa shrugged. ‘During the accident. She fell from her horse, when it bucked before the charging aurochs.’

He nodded, and mimed a fall, tipping forward. ‘So she landed hard, and — what? A bit of rock punctured her breastplate?’

‘It’s possible.’ But she doubted it even as she spoke.

‘ But she fell backward. That’s what we were told — that’s how she got her skull stove in. You can see the wound, at the back of the head. So how, then, was the plate on her chest punctured?’

‘Come on, uncle. You never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer.’

He lifted his cloak back over his shoulder, revealing a mittened hand holding a bronze knife, and he began sawing at the net strands over Kuma’s torso. ‘Actually I don’t know the answer — not for sure. But I have a theory.’

He quickly cut enough strands to be able to peel back the netting, itself sticky, from Kuma’s chest. Then he reached under the breastplate to cut into its leather ties. Carefully, respectfully, he lifted the plate off Kuma’s body. It came away with a sucking sound, to reveal a grimy linen tunic. He slit through the rotting cloth and peeled that back to reveal Kuma’s chest, scraps of flesh and fat and muscle over ribs that gleamed white. Flies buzzed into the air, and there was a fresh stench, sharp and rotten.

Teel pulled off his deerskin mittens and handed them to Milaqa. ‘Hold these for me. This is going to be messy.’

And he dug his fingers into Kuma’s chest, in the gap between the racks of her ribs. Bone cracked. He pushed and probed, spreading his fingers into the soft mass beneath. He was looking for something. His expression was grim; Milaqa knew he had his squeamish side. Then his hand closed. He looked at Milaqa. He withdrew his hand, and held out his fist; black fluid and bits of flesh clung to his skin. He opened his hand to reveal a small object, flat, three-sided, evidently heavy and sharp, coated in ichor. He rubbed it on his cloak, and held the object up to his eye.

‘It’s an arrowhead,’ Milaqa said slowly.

He nodded. ‘ Somebody shot your mother — right in the heart. That’s how she died. The head injury surely happened as she fell from her horse, or was maybe faked later.’

‘But it must have gone right through her armour, her breastplate.’ Milaqa seemed to be thinking slowly, plodding from one conclusion to the next. ‘What arrowhead can pierce bronze?’

‘One like this,’ he said, holding out the point to her. ‘Iron.’

Far to the east, a generation-long drought gripped the land. People abandoned their failing farms and wandered in search of succour, or turned to raiding the rich trade caravans and ships. But the collapse of trade only worsened the crisis, when there were no more caravans to rob.

Eventually whole populations were on the move, by land and sea. And ancient empires crumbled.

Qirum heard the approach of the column long before it arrived at the city walls. The neighing of horses, the rattling of wagon wheels, a distant crowd murmur — all these disturbed his sleep, as did the bear-like snoring of Praxo in the next room. But it was the blare of bronze war trumpets that finally penetrated his ale-sodden head. The Hatti, of course, the great power of Anatolia, it was the Hatti who would be coming with mobs of captives from the cities they sacked, the countries they emptied.

And when booty flowed through Troy, and booty people, there was opportunity for a man like Qirum.

Qirum guessed it was close to noon. The room was windowless, and stank of farts, stale wine, piss and sex, but the walls of packed mud were cracked, nobody had bothered to repair them since the great fire set by the Greeks, and they admitted slabs of bright daylight. He sat up, pushing the thin linen blanket off his torso. The whore lay sleeping beside him, or feigning sleep at least. He found a pouch of wine, and one of water; he took draughts from one and then the other, and poked at the whore’s backside with his foot. ‘Get up and get out.’

She stirred reluctantly and sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘I need sleep.’ She was dark, with tousled black hair and brown eyes. She was only about fourteen; though her body was full, her face was small, round, like a child’s, and her mouth, bruised around the lips, had an habitual pout.