Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

‘All right,’ Teel said hastily, hushing her. ‘Save the speeches for the Water Council. But do we have to tell him we will resist? As I said, if we can only buy some time-’

‘By lying?’ Noli looked at him with utter contempt. Teel rolled his eyes.

Qirum faced them, hands on hips, growing impatient. ‘Well?’

Noli looked down on him, stern, rather magnificent, Milaqa thought. She quietly handed the tablets back to him. ‘We reject your terms, Trojan. We will not rest until we have driven you from this land, and burned down this palace of shit you have built. Is that reply clear enough for you?’

Qirum was ominously still. For all his promises of safe conduct Milaqa felt their peril building with each heartbeat. At length he said, ‘I bring civilisation to this place. Civilisation, to replace your antique savagery. Do you think I grab power for its own sake? And your tone — do you Annids imagine you are superior to the cultures I represent? You may have no armies, but do you not control the water that feeds this land? Is it not just as the way the kings of Egypt and Hattusa control their great irrigation networks, and so control the people? Are we not images of each other?’ He was smouldering now. ‘Do you imagine you are superior to me, woman? Do you imagine you are better?’ And Milaqa knew the deepest levels of his personality were being exposed, the shameful memory of his boyhood.

‘This conversation serves no purpose.’ Noli turned on her heel and stalked from the room.

Qirum, furious now, lunged after her. But Milaqa grabbed his arm, despite the glares she got from Erishum and the guards. ‘Don’t, Qirum. She’s going to have to convince the Annids to fight you. If you send back her head in a basket you’ll make the argument for her.’ She tried not to flinch from the anger that burned in his eyes.

Then he calmed, apparently through sheer effort of will. ‘You’re right. Of course. You always were a wise one, as well as a truth-teller. I must be patient. After all, the next time I meet that woman she will be dancing on the end of my cock.’

She pulled away from him, repelled. ‘Is this why we must fight, Qirum? Because yet another woman has wronged you?’

He looked her full in the face, and she felt that strange, liquid, hot-metal sensation inside. ‘Milaqa — come to me. Fight by my side.’

‘You ask me such a thing, at a moment like this? Why?’

‘Because we must stand together, the likes of you and me. We who are outside. We who have no place. We have more in common with each other than with those who’ — he waved a hand at the others — ‘weigh us down.’

‘You’d have me fight my people, my family?’

He smiled. ‘I listened to you complain about them long enough in the Wall taverns.’

‘Perhaps. But I could not betray them.’

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose I would expect nothing less. Ah, Milaqa — even though the world has separated us, I pledge that I will never harm you.’

Teel plucked at her sleeve. ‘We must go. I think Noli is out of the building already. It would not do to become separated.’

Milaqa let herself be led away. Qirum stood alone, briefly, in this great room, in his palace of wood and mud and stone. He smiled at her, then turned away.

The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Late Autumn

Mi came running into the hearthspace of My Sun, her big Kirike’s Land bow slung over her shoulder. She was breathing hard, sweating despite the chill of the day. ‘They are coming,’ she said. ‘The Trojans! They are coming!’

Hadhe and Vala were sitting with the other women at the open-air fire in the hearthspace. They were working on the fruits of the autumn forests: acorns from the oaks being readied for the winter storage pit, and leaves, bark, flowers from the horse chestnuts, all of which could be used in cooking and in medicine.

For a heartbeat nobody moved. Somehow Hadhe couldn’t hear what Mi was saying, couldn’t take it in. Here was her village, her home, the neat houses around the central hearthplace, the big communal house standing proud on its flood mound, the hopeful symbols carved by Caxa into the high hillside that had become so popular that everybody called this place ‘My Sun’ now, rather than its old name of Sunflower. Even the bare earth of the new defensive rampart they had had to build did not spoil the beauty of the prospect. She took a deep breath, of air that was tinged with the smoke of the quietly crackling fire, and with a deeper, burning scent of the turning leaves. And the child inside her, five months into its term, turned in its contented sleep.

She looked at Mi, this urgent fourteen-year-old with her bad news. It had been five months since the Trojans had landed, three since Noli’s showdown with Qirum. The summer was long gone, the season when the soldiers liked to fight. They were safe, for this year at least. Weren’t they?

‘I saw purple hairstreaks today,’ she said.

‘What?’ Mi snapped. ‘What?’

‘Near the oaks, when we were gathering the acorns. What pretty butterflies they are. The sun was shining right through their wings. It’s been a funny year for butterflies and moths, but-’

‘Butterflies? Didn’t you hear what I said?’

Vala got up and put an arm around her daughter’s shoulder. ‘Mi? Are you sure?’

Mi pointed to the south, in the direction of New Troy. ‘I saw their fires, mother. Smoke. I crept closer.’

‘That was foolish-’

‘I took care!’ Mi snapped, defiant. ‘They would not see me! But I saw them. Men. Horses. Chariots. Weapons everywhere.’

‘They were hunting,’ Hadhe said. ‘That is what they do. They eat the bread from their farms, but they hunt for sport.’

‘These were too many for hunting. There were a hundred men — maybe more. I counted! And they had breastplates, plumes in their helmets, shields. I have seen this before. I have watched them train. It is a phalanx.’ Another Greek word that had entered the Northlanders’ vocabulary since the coming of King Qirum. ‘They are marching. They will be here tomorrow at the latest.’

Hadhe might be hesitating, but the alarm was spreading. The circle at the fire was breaking up, and the men emerged from the houses. One woman was calling for her children. Caxa came out of the shade of a house. Hadhe saw that the slender Jaguar girl had been sketching designs on a clay tablet.

‘What’s going on?’ Hesh came walking over from the house, pulling a rope belt around his tunic. Hadhe’s second husband was a heavy-looking man with an odd little ring of beard around his mouth. His first wife had died in childbirth, and he had no children of his own. He leaned over Hadhe and hugged his wife, his breath rich with stale Trojan beer. ‘You woke me up,’ he said, grinning at Mi. ‘All I could hear was your voice.’ He flapped his fingers like a duck’s beak. ‘Quack, quack.’

Mi was furious. Hadhe recalled she had already fought against the Midsummer Invasion, had already killed Trojans. She had a right to be furious, Hadhe supposed. ‘You’re a fool,’ Mi snapped at Hesh. ‘If my father was here-’

‘But he’s not,’ Vala said sternly. ‘And as Hadhe’s husband he is your uncle, girl. Show some respect.’

‘Respect?’ Mi stamped her foot in frustration. ‘Why won’t any of you listen to me?’

Hadhe, still sitting, said, ‘I believe you saw what you say, Mi. But — well, we must be sure. Maybe it’s just another show of force.’ And there had been plenty of those, including spectacular chariot drives along the wide straight avenues of Northland. All meant to intimidate. ‘And besides, we should be safe.’ The new defensive rampart that circled the community’s central hearthplace was a bank of earth taller than the tallest warrior, and out of sight beyond it was the ditch from which the earth for the bank had been dug, implanted with broken spears, arrowheads and thorns laced with various exotic poisons. All this had been set up at Raka’s order. ‘None of us wanted to build such a thing. You know I argued against it as a waste of effort.’