Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

They turned and headed south, working upstream. Kilushepa said they would find fords and bridges. Here, by the water, there were more houses, just shacks of reeds and bits of timber, hearths that looked recently used. But they never saw any signs of the people who must live here. The soldiers routinely robbed what they could find, pulling apart the little houses, emptying the traps and lines of any catches.

‘They must see us coming,’ Milaqa said. ‘They run and hide.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Teel murmured. ‘We must look like bandits to them. Which of course we are, to all intents and purposes.’

Another day on from the watchtower they came to a small town, sprawling by a river bank studded with jetties. The party approached cautiously. The town was laid out a little like Troy, Milaqa could see, though on a much smaller scale, with a ditch and palisade surrounding an inhabited area within which a stone-walled citadel rose proud on a hillock. And just as at Troy shanties and lean-tos were pressed up against the outer rampart, a wrack of people washed up by a tide of hunger.

The road led them across the defensive ditch to an open gateway. There was a crowd gathered by the gate, pushing and shoving. Milaqa heard raised voices, shouting, and a man’s agonised cry. Qirum’s party slowed. The warriors touched the hilts of their swords.

Teel said nervously, ‘We don’t need any more trouble.’

Deri growled, ‘We’re not leaving until we’re sure Tibo is not here.’

‘If the Spider’s black chariots are at work here,’ Kilushepa said, ‘I think we’d know it by the screams.’

‘Perhaps they’ve been here,’ Qirum said. He stepped forward, hands on hips, peering; the light under the unending cloud was uncertain. ‘For I think that’s one of the Spider’s men who’s doing the screaming.’

The mob surrounded a man dressed entirely in black, Milaqa saw now. They had him by the arms, and were dragging him under the gateway in the wall.

Qirum said, ‘Left behind, I imagine. And now taking punishment on behalf of them all.’

Deri said urgently, ‘He might know where Tibo has been taken.’

‘Yes. Come with me — you, Deri, and Milaqa. You others wait, and keep your weapons hidden.’ He set off immediately, with Deri and Milaqa hurrying behind.

And Kilushepa followed, striding boldly. Qirum just looked at her, and hurried on.

When they got to the gateway Milaqa saw immediately what the inflamed people were trying to do. The gate was a rough arch of stout wooden timbers. Ropes had been thrown over the arch, and were tied to the charioteer’s chest, wrists and feet. Men started to haul at the ropes, and a baying cry went up. The captive was clearly to be dragged into the air by the big band around his chest. He was struggling, squirming. His face was a mask of blood, his eyes were pits of darkness, and his long black tunic was stained rust-brown. He was a big man physically, Milaqa saw, but there was no sense of violence about him.

Milaqa said to Qirum, ‘They will haul him over the arch.’

‘Yes. And bend him backwards until he snaps like a twig. A crude but effective punishment, I suppose… Kilushepa! Wait!’

But the queen, with an impressive burst of speed, was already striding towards the mob. ‘Stop this!’ Her voice, imperious, carried over the yelling of the mob. Even the captive was silenced.

Qirum hurried to her side and walked with her. ‘Is this wise?’

‘These are my people. I am still their Tawananna. Stop this, I say — stop it now!’

A woman approached her, ragged, limping. She led a little girl by the hand. ‘Who are you to tell us what to do?’

‘I am queen. I am Kilushepa. I am Tawananna.’

‘Kilushepa’s dead. That’s what I heard.’

‘Then you heard wrong. Here she is, here I am, in the flesh. Here I am, returning to Hattusa to take up the reins of power — and to ensure that people like you are protected once more.’

Milaqa was lost in admiration for this woman, who faced a murderous mob and held them spellbound with a few words, even if she must know she was making promises she could not keep.

And the captive, bound, blinded and bloodied, twisted and turned his head. ‘Tawananna? Is it you? I heard you speak, just once. I would never forget that voice.’ He spoke clear Nesili, his accent like Kilushepa’s.

She walked up to him. The mob melted back, to Milaqa’s continuing astonishment. ‘What is your name, man?’

‘I am Kurunta. You would not know me. There is no reason why… I was a scribe in the palace precinct. In great Hattusa! An archivist. I wrote, I read-’

The woman with the little girl pushed forward again. ‘This man ran with the Spider. His men raped me. They killed my husband, and my son. And my little girl — look, Tawananna!’ She pulled the girl forward and exposed her face, and another ghastly injury inflicted by a hero’s sword. Milaqa turned away.

But Kurunta twisted free of the grasping hands. ‘Tawananna! Save me! I was a scribe before the world ended, and the Spider took me, and I woke in this nightmare of killing. Look what these people did to me!’ He held up his arms. Milaqa saw that his hands had been cut off, his eyes put out. ‘Look what they did!’

Kilushepa said to Qirum, ‘We need this man. Pay off these people. Then let us leave this place.’

And she walked away, back towards the carts, leaving Qirum facing a surging, yelling mob.

After leaving the town the party continued to track the river, heading upstream, roughly south. This was the way to the Spider’s main camp, according to Kurunta.

Kurunta rode with Kilushepa. Noli allowed the young priest Riban to tend to Kurunta’s wounds, his ruined eyes, the crudely cauterised stumps of his arms, and to give him infusions of herbs to dull the pain. The drugs made Kurunta light-headed, and he talked and talked, like a lost child. Milaqa, curious, walked alongside the cart, following his stilted Hatti tongue as best she could.

‘My father was a court scribe, and his father before him. We lived in a fine house within the walls of Hattusa. Once my father met the King himself, and took down his personal account of a battle. He was served food… little birds stuffed with olives… he said he never tasted the like. I married, I had a family. Two boys. Oh, we knew about the famine, the drought. How could you not, with the records we clerks kept and copied? But it always seemed remote. Not for us in Hattusa, fed on grain from Egypt.

‘But then I was sent to the north coast, to a city called Lazawa.’ A place Milaqa had never heard of. ‘There had been a rebellion, raids by the Kaskans — a mess. I was one of a party sent to gather facts on how the country was recovering now that the rebellion was put down, or so the governor had told the King. This report would be brought back to the court.

‘So we went out into the country. We had a corps of the Standing Army of the Left to accompany us, under an overseer who reported to the King’s own brother. I felt safe.

‘We had a great deal of trouble on the way, but we reached Lazawa. And there we found that everything we had been told about the outcome of the rebellion was an utter lie. The town was a smoking ruin, the grain stores looted, the people driven off or enslaved by the Kaskans. There was not even food for us. Not even for our horses!

‘And it was as we considered what we should do that the Spider fell on us…’

The Spider had been a regional governor, a ‘Lord of the Watchtower’ as the Hatti called it. As the years of drought wore on, the commands from the centre had grown sporadic and contradictory, and the cycle of supply and troop replenishment slowly broke down. Then the fire-mountain clouds closed in, and people started to starve, and the man had gone rogue altogether.