Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

‘Northlanders don’t use slaves,’ snapped Riban, the priest.

Qirum stared at him for a long moment. ‘Then you can pull the cart yourself — ’

Screams pierced the air. Milaqa whirled around.

There was a crash of splintering wood, and a clang, strangely, of bells. From over the outer wall sparks arced in the air, torches or burning arrows, falling towards houses of wood and mud and straw.

A whole section of the wooden palisade came crashing down, and horses burst through the wall, rearing and neighing, pairs of them drawing chariots, from whose platforms huge men in armour roared and slashed with swords and axes. The chariots were jet-black, as were the men’s garments. That strange, alarming sound of chiming came from bells tied around the horses’ necks. It was chaos, suddenly spreading inwards from the wall.

People ran, screaming. Some got away, but mothers slowed to pick up their children, and many folk were so weakened by hunger or illness they could barely run at all, and the charioteers soon caught up with them. And where the flaming arrows fell houses were starting to burn.

Qirum glared. ‘Raiders! Once the King’s forces would have driven off such a mob long before they got to the city-’

‘Never mind that,’ snapped Kilushepa. ‘What do we do, Trojan?’

‘The citadel. They won’t harm us if we can get there. Come.’

Kilushepa ran, dragging Noli by the hand. The rest of the party followed. Qirum, Deri, Riban, Tibo, even Teel, all drew swords and backed up, protecting the rest. Milaqa drew her own dagger.

For the raiders it was becoming a kind of sport. The charioteers ran down the people, the swordsmen hacking at the fleeing crowd as you would cut your way through dense undergrowth. And now Trojans were being grabbed and thrown back to be taken by the following foot troops — women and girls mostly, a few young men. This attack was for captives then, slaves and whores. Maybe the charioteers would ignore the Northlanders, Milaqa thought, if they were satisfied with the easier meat of the unarmed city dwellers, but she was ashamed of the thought even as it formed.

And suddenly, without warning, Tibo ran forward, sword raised, screaming, heading straight for the charging charioteers. Qirum tried to grab him, but Tibo was too fast. He was the only warrior running towards the invaders, Milaqa saw. He closed on the chariots and swung his sword, apparently aiming for a horse’s neck. A charioteer easily parried it — the sword went flying out of the boy’s hands — and with a single fist, a savage yank, the man hauled Tibo over the chariot, and he was lost.

‘No!’ Milaqa tried to run after him.

But she was held around the waist. It was Deri, Tibo’s father. ‘Not now,’ he said, desperate, dragging her back towards the citadel. ‘We’ll get him back. But not now.’

More chariots came, a swarm of them pouring in a flood through the breached wall, and the death and the burning spread out across the city, to the screams of the people and the chiming of the horses’ bells.

The Northlanders fled to the citadel.

Troy was a broken city. Even when the raiders had gone there was no sense of order, no authority beyond the petty gang lords who strutted through the rubble-strewn streets like emperors.

Still, Qirum seemed to find it easy to do his deals in the aftermath of the raid. He quickly secured the services of a handful of warriors, all former Hatti soldiers, or so they claimed. These men looked tough to Milaqa, but uncomfortably hungry, and she had no idea how to judge their loyalty. And Qirum turned up a couple of carts, hard to find in a city where even timber for the fires was growing scarce. He failed to locate any horses, but he did manage to get the Northlanders some food, fish and dried meat. He promised that none of it was rat flesh, or worse.

Hattusa was far to the east of here, many more days’ travel, in the Land of the Hatti. But for now it was not Hattusa they sought but a boy from Northland.

‘We will find him,’ Qirum assured Deri. ‘Find him and save him. Stick with me. You will see.’ Tibo had made himself close to Qirum, Milaqa realised. Maybe Qirum had adopted him as a kind of pet, a half-tamed wolf cub. Just as he had adopted Milaqa, maybe, another impulsive affection that made no particular sense. Whatever the reason, Qirum seemed determined to see through his pledge.

His men meanwhile had been quietly extracting information from the survivors of the raid. The leader of the black charioteers was a man who called himself the Spider. It was said that he had been a military commander under the Hatti regime, before going rogue. Now he was one of the most feared of the bandit warlords who had sprouted like weeds in an increasingly lawless country. He was believed to have a base to the east. With that knowledge Kilushepa was prepared to allow a diversion to pursue Tibo.

‘We are heading east anyhow,’ Qirum told her.

‘As long as the time we lose is not excessive.’

Teel growled, ‘And as long as we don’t get ourselves killed confronting this Spider.’

Milaqa hissed, ‘Shame on you, uncle. Don’t let Deri hear you say that. Tibo is your blood, as he is mine.’

Teel, as he often did, looked shifty, uncomfortable, priorities conflicting in his head. ‘We didn’t come here for this, for a rescue mission. He’s probably dead already — you understand that, don’t you? We’re trying to save empires here. We can’t save everybody, Milaqa.’

‘But we can try,’ she snapped back fiercely.

After three uncomfortable, uneasy nights in Troy, they left the city and set out east. They were the survivors of Qirum’s party of Northlanders, and the dozen Trojan warriors he had hired. The Trojans took turns hauling the two carts on which Kilushepa and Noli rode, along with their baggage. The warriors grumbled or bragged every step of the way.

The road to the east was decaying, rutted. This was a country that Qirum called Wilusa — a shattered, starving place, and unseasonably cold when the wind picked up under the sunless sky. The fields were dry and unworked, the houses and barns looted and collapsed. Irrigation channels scored the land, but they were dry too, dust-filled and weed-choked. Teel pointed out the remains of stands of forest, long since cut to the ground for firewood.

From the beginning Qirum imposed a careful rationing system. It was just as well, Milaqa thought, for otherwise his hungry warriors would have finished the food they had brought from Troy in days, and then probably started in on the precious seed potatoes. And he allowed his warriors to hunt. Once they saw a herd of goats, running wild, and the men chased them, but the animals, hardy survivors themselves, were too quick.

They passed a stone watchtower. There was no sign of the soldiers who must once have manned it.

Kilushepa seemed dismayed by this abandonment. ‘By such means as this tower we Hatti maintained security for generations,’ she said to Noli and Milaqa. ‘We were a great nation. Once we destroyed Babylon. Once we defeated the Egyptians, at Kadesh, in the greatest battle the world has ever known. But our empire was always under threat. The Hatti kingdom itself is a patchwork of many peoples, surrounded by a buffer of restless vassals and dependencies. So we built an empire like a fortress, with fortified towns connected by roads for the troops, marked out by watchtowers like this. Or at least that was how it used to be…’

They came to a river that flowed roughly south to north, towards the great northern sea that lay beyond the strait where Troy was situated. It was low and silty, the banks choked with reeds, but the water flowed and was fresh, and they refilled their skins and jugs.