Stephen Baxter: Bronze Summer

He turned to face her, his penis in his hand still dribbling. ‘Are you looking at my cock, Aunt Milaqa?’

‘Looking for it, maybe, little boy. Put it away before I throw you over too.’

‘All right, all right.’ He tied up his loincloth, dropped his tunic and ran off, disappearing into the maze of galleries.

‘Hello, Milaqa.’ Her cousin Hadhe came out along the passage, carrying a double armful of bowls of soil. One was full of vomit.

‘Let me help you with that.’ Milaqa took the vomit-filled bowl. ‘Little Blane, is it?’

‘Poor mite’s not been right all winter. The priests can’t do anything for him. Coughing all night, and he keeps Jaro and Keli awake too, and what he does eat he throws back up. I’m surprised we’ve not had to put him up on the roof already…’ Side by side the cousins tipped the bowls of soil into the waste gullies cut into the Wall face. ‘As for Jaro, a right pest he’s turning out to be, and as randy as his father, from what I remember of him, even if he doesn’t know what to do with his little man yet. He shows it to me the whole time, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got to a mother.’ Hadhe sighed, and brushed a lank of dirty hair back from her face.

Milaqa saw how tired her cousin looked, how ill, her face slack and grey, her shoulders stooped, her breasts heavy with milk. She was fifteen, a year younger than Milaqa. ‘It was good of you to take in Jaro. You already had your hands full after you lost Jac.’

Jac, Hadhe’s husband, had been a fisherman, whose first wife had died when Jaro was small. Then Jac had got himself caught in a storm and killed just after getting Hadhe pregnant with little Blane, her own second child.

Hadhe shrugged. ‘Everybody has kids. Half the kids die, or if they don’t their parents do, and you have to take in the orphans. This is the way we live our lives, isn’t it? Except you, up to now, anyway. Even you’ll have to settle down sometime.’

‘And be like you?’ Milaqa snapped. Hadhe recoiled, and Milaqa reached out her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

‘Yes, you did. Oh, forget it. You’re not yourself; I’ve seen that since your mother died. Speaking of which — when is her interment? Oh, it’s today, isn’t it? So why are you here?’

‘I…’ Milaqa didn’t really know.

From along the gallery, a child started crying.

Hadhe sighed. ‘That’s Blane. He needs me. And your mother needs you. Go, Milaqa.’ And she picked up her bowls and turned away.

Outside Troy’s broken walls, the land under a harsh noon sun was dusty, rocky, bare, marked by a few abandoned dust-bowl fields. Roads radiated away from this place, roads that had once carried the seaborne produce of Mycenae and the other Greek cities overland to much of Anatolia — roads now becoming invisible beneath the drift of the dust, the product of decades of drought. Qirum felt his mouth dry, his skin desiccating, and he pulled a soft felt hat from his belt to shield his brow from the spring sun.

Qirum and Praxo were not alone in coming out of Troy to greet the train. Alerted by the war trumpets, vendors drifted up to offer the troops water, food, trinkets, whores, and slavers came out to take a first look at the fresh merchandise.

And Qirum heard a deep rumble of thousands of voices. Here came the march.

They climbed a ridge to see better. The caravan was revealed as a tremendous column stretching back along the road from the east as far as Qirum could see, thousands of feet raising a long yellow dust cloud. Somewhere behind the column itself must come the baggage train, ox carts bearing the senior officers and a Hatti prince or two in command, and heaps of booty, gold and silver and defeated gods, and the tremendous quantities of food and water required to keep this shuffling crowd alive. There would even be cattle and sheep, stolen herds driven along the trail.

But the people came by first. The Hatti infantry walked in files alongside the main column, their officers on horseback. They were Hatti warriors, each with a loose shin-length robe tied around by a leather belt, and a conical helmet, spear and sword, and that oddly shaped shield of theirs, a slab of wood and leather with rounded corners and indents to either side. They all wore their hair long and plaited so it hung down their backs, and Qirum, who had fought Hatti, knew that this thick tail afforded a little extra protection to the neck. The walk had clearly gone on for many days; the soldiers looked footsore, their pace a dull plod. But their officers looked reasonably alert. From horseback they scanned the country for bandits and robbers, and watched the column of marchers they shepherded.

And that column was made up of ordinary folk, not soldiers, two or three or four abreast, men, women and children alike, shuffling in dull misery.

Qirum stared curiously at the booty people. He had seen such columns before, but you never got used to the sight. Here was the population of a town, or maybe even a whole country, emptied out once the fighting was done, the warriors killed off, the buildings looted and torched, grain stores and farms picked over — and the people rounded up and driven out. Most of the captives had their hands tied up with rope. Some were hobbled, and walked with difficulty. Most were clothed, some in the ragged remains of what might have been fine clothes, but some went naked, perhaps after some act of spite or punishment by their guards, or even after being robbed by their fellow captives. And many walked barefoot, with splashes of dried blood about battered feet and legs. Qirum saw few old folk, and nobody obviously lame, and few little ones, toddlers too heavy to carry but too young to be able to sustain the pace. The marches were a great winnowing, and their trails were always littered with corpses. As always some of the more attractive women and girls had evidently been used by the soldiers; you could see it in the way they walked, the state of their clothes, the bruising and the blood. Was there a lack of young men? They were always the most trouble, but the most valuable on the slave markets.

Most trudged in silence. Qirum realised now that the crowd murmur he had heard came mostly from the soldiers. This tremendous column was actually quiet, for its numbers.

Praxo nudged Qirum, for coming past them now was a group of young women — six or seven of them, no more than girls really, it was difficult to tell their ages under matted hair and caked dirt. They wore similar clothes, or the remains of them, tunics of pale linen edged with what looked like gold thread. Most walked with their heads down, as if they neither knew nor cared where they were. One had a kind of bag over her head, obscuring her face. A taller, perhaps older woman walked behind them, her long robe a shapeless rag, her face hidden by a dusty hood.

‘Come on,’ Praxo murmured to Qirum. ‘Let’s do some shopping.’

‘I doubt you’re going to find many fresh apples in that barrel, friend.’

‘They always keep some whole to get a better price from the slavers.’ He nudged Qirum’s back. ‘Go on. Pick a couple for us. You do the talking…’

They fell in pace with the column. Qirum nodded in a friendly fashion to the nearest soldier, a tough-looking veteran of maybe thirty who walked with a slight limp. He regarded Qirum and Praxo with blank contempt, as all soldiers regarded those who were not soldiers. But his interest quickened when Praxo dug a pouch out of his sack and threw it to him.

‘Wine and water,’ Qirum said, trying his Mycenaean Greek. ‘Keep it.’ The soldier took the pouch but looked blank. You never knew with Hatti soldiers; their empire was a conglomerate of many peoples, of vassal kingdoms and dependencies like Troy itself, all ruled by the kings at Hattusa. Qirum switched to the language the Hatti used themselves, which they called Nesili, supposedly the language of their old kings. ‘Wine and water,’ he repeated.