Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

But not today, Qirum suddenly decided.

‘No.’ He held back the Spider’s arm. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, man. I have a better idea. The rest of you stay back. You!’ he called in Etxelur-speak.

The boy turned. He actually had a sword in a scabbard at his side. His hand went to the hilt.

‘Don’t dare!’ Qirum roared, striding across the churned-up ground. ‘And don’t run!’

The boy stood stock-still, snared by the command. He took his hand from the sword.

Qirum stood over him. The boy’s tunic was encrusted with blood. Piss trickled down one leg. Comically, he had crushed acorns stuck in his hair. He was no older than twelve, thirteen. Yet he looked back at a warrior-king with a trace of defiance. On impulse Qirum reached out and ruffled his hair. ‘Name?’

‘I am Liff. Liff, son of Medoc, son of — ’

‘I don’t care whose spawn you are. Do you want to live, warrior Liff?’

‘All men die.’

‘True. But not today.’ Qirum pointed. ‘You go that way, north. You find the Wall. The Annids. You understand? You tell them what you saw. You tell what King Qirum did here. Yes?’

The boy just looked at him, baffled.

‘Go.’ He shoved the boy’s shoulders with his fingertips. The boy stumbled. ‘Go, go!’

The boy couldn’t seem to turn his back. But at last the spell broke, and he turned and ran, heading for the great Northland track that headed north.

Qirum turned away and walked back to his men.

The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Early Spring

Four months after the attack on My Sun, after a desolating winter of hunger and want, of raid and counter-raid, of a slow bleed of deaths on either side, a woman came to the Wall.

She had escaped from New Troy. Once she had been a young mother of My Sun, the first community to be attacked. She had seen her children killed, and for months had been used as a warrior’s servant and whore. She had bided her time, killed a man, got away. She brought news that there was growing discontent in the Trojan camp, because the easy victories had stopped coming. The Northlanders had learned how to resist; every flood mound south of Etxelur had been turned into a citadel, a tough nut to crack.

And the woman said that Hadhe was still alive, and living in New Troy with Qirum.

Raka, acting quickly, summoned Noli, Deri, Teel, Milaqa, the party who had gone to New Troy before. Perhaps this was a chance to get through to Qirum, by sending Milaqa and others of Hadhe’s family. And maybe the Trojan would be in a mood to listen this time, if his campaign of brutality wasn’t working.

Milaqa sensed the tensions that lay behind this decision. Not everybody had Raka’s flexibility of thought. To talk again, talk to the pack of rapists and murderers Qirum’s men had proven themselves to be? But the longing for the killing to end drove the Annids to contemplate this course.

And, she wondered, maybe Qirum had taken Hadhe as a lure for just this kind of approach. Was Qirum wily enough to think that way?

But this time only Deri and Milaqa would go, Raka quickly decided. Deri the warrior who had already faced the Trojans, Milaqa his drinking companion from the old days, figures Qirum knew and could understand. Their job was to get through to the Trojan before more people died — and before Kilushepa in far Hattusa, alarmed by the news of the Trojan’s long-term plans against her, fulfilled her own threats to bring a stronger Hatti force to Northland and nip his ambitions in the bud. Nobody in Etxelur wanted to see more Hatti troops in Northland.

The travellers packed their kit.

Once more they began the journey of a few days to New Troy, walking steadily south down the Etxelur Way, Deri and Milaqa side by side. It was early spring, but the day was dismal and would be short, the air damp and cold. The year was still too young to show if the fire mountain’s shadow would be cast over the world for a third year, but the sun was ominously invisible today.

Away from the Wall the way soon deteriorated, overgrown with weeds. Deri stumbled on an ash sapling growing out of the road surface, his heavy winter cloak flapping. Milaqa suppressed a laugh. Deri snapped, ‘May the mothers curse those Trojans! Once this road was as clean and unspoiled as a baby’s skin. And why? Because we spent our time fixing it, pulling up the weeds, rather than building walls to keep out Trojans.’ They came to a flood, a swamp, thick with rotting matter, which the road, half submerged, crossed like a causeway. Milaqa pressed a cloth to her face. ‘And this,’ Deri said. ‘ I did this. I led a party to block the main dyke that once drained this swamp, a straight cut down to the valley of the Brother. What heartbreaking work that was! To ruin the labour of centuries. And all to make a bog to trap the boot of a Trojan.’

Maybe it was a symptom of Milaqa’s own detachment from the disaster unfolding over Northland, but she didn’t feel like shedding tears over a bit of muddy ground. ‘It’s not ruined. It can be fixed, when we get the time. It will dry out again. In the meantime, no chariot could ever pass through here. Isn’t that the idea? This is the grand strategy. Flood the land. Let the Trojans sink in the mud if they try to march, and in the meantime let the diseases that rise from the swamps pick them off one by one.’

‘But this is a perversion of what Northland is, Milaqa. It’s a place where people preserve life — not create death, like this. Ask a priest if you don’t believe me. I’m with Noli; I’m worried that if this goes too far we won’t be able to put it back together again. And it’s not just the land. You know, back at the Wall I met a little boy, one of a family of nestspills, who got caught up in a raid. He said he found an arrow, and stuck it in the eye of the man who was raping his mother. An arrow in the eye! Even if every Trojan in Northland left tomorrow, that incident will have left a scar in the heart of that boy that will last a lifetime. That’s the legacy of Qirum, the monster you have a ‘‘special bond’’ with, as Teel always says.’

She scowled. ‘That bond is what we’re relying on to keep us alive.’

‘Let’s hope that Qirum remembers that. And let’s hope all his half-tamed killers remember it too.’

Thus, bickering, stumbling, avoiding flooded ground and traps, they continued their way south.

They stopped a night in a little community called Mother’s Fingernail, after a distinctively shaped arc of sandstone that dominated its hearthspace. Deri had a friend here called Boucca, widow of an old companion from the fishing boats. The place was not far from My Sun, and had suffered from Trojan raids. Now the people lived in shacks amid the ruins of their houses, rings of burned-out stumps in the ground. But it was surviving, and the travellers were shown hospitality. That night Deri and Milaqa huddled under borrowed blankets in Boucca’s lean-to, windproof and warm.

As they walked on, the next day they began to spot traces of Trojans: the prints of heavy boots pressed into mud on the track surface, the occasional turd deposited at the side of the road, the skin and gnawed bones of a hare discarded by a hasty fire whose embers were still warm.

They spent one more night on the road, huddled together in a lean-to of branches and brush. They had brought fire-making gear, kindling, dried meat, and there was a stream nearby for water. Milaqa slept well, despite the situation. She felt safe to be with her uncle, as she had when she was a little girl.

The next day, before noon, they saw the fires of New Troy rising from the plain ahead, gathering in a pall on a windless day.

Deri said they needed to be ready to meet scouts or foraging parties. So they walked with their cloaks thrown back, their weapons visible, their hands open. Milaqa began to call out in the Trojan tongue, and in Greek and Hatti: ‘We mean no harm. We come from the Wall. We were sent by the Annid of Annids. We are here to talk to your king. I am Milaqa daughter of Kuma, and your King Qirum has promised me his protection. We are from the Wall, from Etxelur. We come here in peace…’