Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

The Spider said to Protis, ‘He has a particular distaste for the Hatti — don’t you, Trojan? For he was bested by a woman in Hattusa. Not just any woman, mind — the Tawananna herself.’

‘Yes! But one day I will return, at the head of a formidable army — an army raised in my own kingdom — and I will do to that dismal country what I should have done to Kilushepa when I first slept with her, and split it wide open from breast to pubis.’

That raised a coarse cheer.

‘We will be a great people,’ he went on, shouting, waving his arms, stalking back and forth. ‘And a new people. Not Greek or Trojan or Hatti any more. As tin and copper come together to make bronze, so our blood will mix to create a new people in a new kingdom — and all men will know our names, for ever, as we remember the Great King Sargon of Akkad. Tomorrow we will start, we will form up our forces for a great journey — and then a war!’ He won a louder cheer for that.

‘And now we will set out our case before our gods.’ He clapped his hands, and nodded to a senior slave. To a rumble of approval from the men a new feast was brought in, more wine, the meat of ritually slaughtered sheep. Priests brought bowls of entrails of birds and snakes, regarded as key sources of divination by Trojans.

And then the holiest relics were produced. A small statue was set up beside Qirum’s throne, a plaster representation of a human figure with a bull’s head, its arms upraised. Qirum made his obeisance, muttering prayers. ‘The Storm God. You Greeks know him as Zeus, and the Hatti as Teshub. Closer to Troy than any city in the world, the god who has always fought at our side-’

Protis said, ‘He wasn’t fighting too well on the day my father joined in your city’s sack.’

Qirum snapped, ‘That is a quarrel for our fathers in the underworld. Troy’s most sacred statue of the Storm God was lost later, and not to the Greeks, but when Hatti raiders came to feast on the decaying corpse of their own supposed protectorate. This, though, this has been purified and blessed; this has seen endless sacrifices — in this, the Storm God is present.’ He bowed again, muttering prayers.

Then he straightened up, and clapped his hands again. To a howl of appreciation from the increasingly drunken men three girls were brought in, chained together at neck and feet, all pale, all naked. One, Urhi saw, had been smeared by mud, the second, shivering, had been shaven bare from head to crotch, and the third appeared to be glistening wet — Urhi imagined that was the result of some viscous oil smeared on her skin rather than water, which would run off and dry. The girls stood before the leering, shouting men, huddling together for protection. Urhi wondered if they had been drugged.

Qirum stalked before the girls, waving his wine cup so that droplets splashed the girls, red as blood on their pale flesh. ‘Here you are, you men — meet your first Northlanders. Healthy stock, aren’t they? All that wild meat they consume, I suppose. Snatched in raids by my most trusted men. Not a one over sixteen years old, and every one of them a virgin.

‘It is the Trojan way, the Anatolian way, to interrogate the gods of our enemies before going into battle. After all, what is war but a trial before the gods? And he who pleases the gods the most is permitted to win — and live. And so here they are, the goddesses of Northland, made incarnate before you. The little mothers, they call them, the little mothers of the earth and of the sea and of the sky, of dirt and damp and cold.

‘What have you to say for yourselves, mothers? What have you done with your people? Why have you kept the fire of war from their bellies, the genius of farming from their hearts? Why are your children so few, you mothers, ten where there could be a hundred, a hundred where there could be ten thousand? Are your wombs so barren?’ He lifted the heads of the bewildered girls with fingers under their chins, and he squeezed their breasts and grabbed their backsides, making them flinch.

At length the Spider stood up and lifted his kilt. ‘I’ll tell you how I’d like to interrogate them.’

Qirum laughed, waved Protis forward, and began to remove his own kilt. ‘Just as I planned — come, friends, my basileis!’

The men roared, their faces greasy from meat, their chins stained by wine. The chains were removed from the girls.

Qirum arranged it so that each of the three leaders deflowered one virgin each. Then they each moved on to another girl, and then the third. The Spider went at it enthusiastically. Protis, though, was more fussy. He preferred to use the anus of his second girl and the mouth of the third, as if they were still virginal.

When the leaders were done the girls were taken out, but more whores were brought in for the crowd of leering men. The women disappeared in knots of bodies, like slabs of meat thrown to dogs.

Urhi forced himself to watch it all, and he tried not to think of what he had seen done to his wife and his daughter in their last hours.

The feasting continued to the dawn. Then Qirum called them all outside, for he had arranged another stunt. Once more he had his priests produce the three Northlander girls, naked and done out in their guises as the little mothers, their bruises treated, the blood washed from their thighs.

And Qirum had his soldiers hang the little mother of the sky from a scaffold by her wrists, so she turned in the wind; and the little mother of the sea was forced into a barrel of seawater that was nailed shut; and the little mother of the earth was buried alive. The men, still drunk, gambled on which of them would die the first, and the last.

The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Midsummer Solstice

On the morning of the Giving, Milaqa found her uncle Teel waiting in the shade of his house in Old Etxelur. In his heavy, dark tunic, he was a lump of darkness on a bright if sunless day.

Together, saying little, they walked across the rich earth of the Bay Land towards the Wall. On this midsummer day the face of the Wall gleamed a brilliant bone-white, incised with galleries and adorned with banners celebrating the Giving. In crevices high in the face sea birds gathered in rustling swarms, terns and gulls, their guano striping the walls, and on the roof the great heads of long-dead Annids stared stoutly out to the excluded sea.

As always, people had come from afar for the ancient festival, and Giving celebrations were already under way all along the foot of the Wall. Milaqa heard laughter, saw running figures, glimpsed smoke rising from a dozen fires. As they walked along the track towards the Wall, Milaqa and Teel passed people sitting in little groups, blankets on the ground, fires blazing, while children ran and played. Milaqa smelled food, smoked fish, broiling meat. But many of these people looked thin, pale, gaunt after another hard season in the shadow of the fire mountain. Milaqa suspected many of them had come this year, not for the joy of the Giving, but for the dole of potato mash and salted fish they could expect from the Annids.

‘Everything’s odd,’ she said to Teel.

‘Is it?’

‘This is always such a special day. I’ll swear I remember Givings when I was only four or three or two. And yet even today we are all preoccupied.’

‘I don’t think the Trojan will be taking a day off.’

‘Oh, do you have to be so morbid? He’s still in Gaira, according to the spies and the spotters on the south coast. And it’s midsummer! Can’t we forget about Qirum just for one day?’

He glanced at her. ‘Because, you think, even if he does come, it would never be today? But it might be on just such a day as this that Qirum would choose to move. Think about it. Every culture knows the solstice; every culture marks it in some way, just as we do. And Qirum has a coalition of warlords to pull together, from a dozen shattered nations. Today would be an easy rallying point in time, if he needed one… It’s my job, and yours, to think of the worst possibility, while others hope for the best. Or maybe it’s just my personality. But I agree. It does no good to frighten the children.’