Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

A boy emerged from a copse, walking out of the trees right into their path. The three of them stood stock-still, Milaqa, Deri, the boy. He was no more than twelve. He carried a basket of mushrooms. He was skinny, his face grimy, he went barefoot, and his ragged cloak did not look sufficient to keep him warm.

Milaqa smiled and stepped forward.

Deri touched her arm. ‘Careful.’

‘The Trojans brought no boys here. He has red hair. This is one of ours, even if he is working for the Trojans now.’ She spoke clearly in her own tongue. ‘Where are you from? Was it My Sun?’

The boy dropped the basket and ran, straight down the track towards the smoke of New Troy.

Milaqa cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘Tell them Milaqa has come. Milaqa, daughter of Kuma. I have come for my cousin Hadhe, who lives in the King’s house. Tell King Qirum that Milaqa has come to see him!’

Deri shrugged, and they walked on.

A little later a party approached, soldiers on horseback, and a cart pulled by oxen led by another Northlander boy. The party was commanded by a stocky man in the garb of a Hatti officer: Erishum, Milaqa recognised with relief, Qirum’s sergeant. Her chances of living through the day had increased markedly.

Erishum got down from his horse and peered at her. ‘Just as the boy said. You are Milaqa.’

‘I know,’ she replied in his tongue.

‘Mouthy little whore, aren’t you? I’ll take you to the King. But I warn you, he is in a foul mood today. As most days. Whatever you have to say, say it well. Get in the cart.’

It was a farm vehicle, or it had been, smelling of earth and dung. Two more soldiers climbed up beside them, their hands on their swords. Erishum kicked his horse’s flanks, the cart jolted away, and the party followed the road to New Troy.

They were taken briskly through the outer rampart. Within, Qirum’s estate seemed much changed to Milaqa since she had last seen it in the autumn. Of course the cold hand of winter lay on it now, but even so many of the newly walled-off fields looked abandoned. She saw few people — scarcely a wisp of smoke rose from the crude houses — and fewer animals, dogs, goats picking at the boggy ground. In one place she saw a gang of children, ill-clad, shivering, digging holes in the earth. They were watched over by a bored-looking Trojan who idly studied the bobbing rumps of the little girls.

As they neared the stone walls of Qirum’s citadel they climbed off the cart. The town was much changed too, shabbier, meaner, but much more crowded than in the autumn, though the country outside the walls was empty. Milaqa remarked on this to Deri. He murmured, ‘Perhaps they have all come here for food.’ As they followed Erishum through the town Milaqa saw children peering from the doors of the rough houses, while scared-looking women cowered indoors, and babies cried. These were not homes, not families, Milaqa thought; they were parodies of families, Qirum’s warriors with the bed-warmers they had taken from raids in Northland, or booty women driven in from the Continent. Some of these women must have been allowed to keep their kids, and others had babies inflicted on them by the endless rapes of their new ‘husbands’.

Once inside the citadel they were taken straight to Qirum in his house with the big central room. A big fire blazed in a hearth, and a linen screen covered the window, obscuring the view over the town. The priests were here, murmuring prayers to Apollo god of fevers and disease. Qirum himself lounged on his couch, a flagon of ale on the floor beside him. He wore a loose robe of some fine fabric, not a warrior’s garment, more like something you would wear to sleep. There was a sharp stink in the room, a cess-pit stench. There was no sign of Hadhe.

When he saw Milaqa and Deri, Qirum lurched to his feet. ‘Milaqa! So here we are again, two rejects from humanity reunited.’

Milaqa began to murmur a translation for Deri.

But Qirum waved that way. ‘Oh, get him out of here,’ he snapped at Erishum. ‘Feed him, bathe him, give him a whore, whatever he wants. Oh, no, better not, after all his mother’s probably one of the whores. Ha! Don’t harm him though. Just get him out of my sight.’

Deri glanced at Milaqa.

‘Go,’ she said, in her own tongue. ‘I’m more at risk with you standing here silently provoking him. This is why we came, uncle.’

Reluctantly Deri nodded. He bowed sharply to Qirum, then let Erishum lead him out.

‘So we’re alone,’ Qirum said. ‘Beer?’

‘Why not?’

He snapped a finger. In a heartbeat a barefoot serving girl came running with a brimming pot. Milaqa drank it gratefully. Qirum sat on his couch and patted it. She sat beside him, though at the couch’s far end.

‘Just like old times in the Scambles,’ Qirum said. ‘Save for a few gibbering priests and the guards in the corners.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘And what smells like a bucket of shit.’

‘It is a bucket of shit. Taken from a dead man, his last gift to this world. Ha!’ He drank his beer. ‘It’s all because of some poison or other your uncle and his irritating friends like to smear on their arrows. My physician is trying to work out what it is from a dead man’s turds. Listen. What causes sneezing and blisters, and then vomiting and shitting, and then muscle cramps, convulsions, choking, a heart attack?’

‘I’m no priest. Our priests give out the poisons.’

‘My surgeon thinks it might be hellebore. Some of the symptoms are similar. They use hellebore in Gaira, I know that. Is it hellebore?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Well, if it is, our antidotes don’t work, or so my useless clown of a head physician tells me.’

She grinned. ‘Things aren’t going as you expected, are they, King Qirum?’

‘No, they aren’t, by the Storm God’s left testicle. If it isn’t the poison it’s the sickness rising up from the soggy ground, and I have the priests chanting to Iyarri about that from morning to night. And then there are these wretched winter days of yours — if you can call them days at all!’ He gestured at the window. ‘Look — the light’s going already, and I’ve barely woken up. A man needs the sun, as does a field of wheat. We are men from countries of light and heat — decent places to live, not like this gloomy bog of yours.’

‘Then go back there.’

‘And then there’s the hunger. Our crops struggle to grow in these drowning fields. Some of your warriors and their Hatti scum allies have been mounting raids on the granaries. Takes a lot of courage, I’m sure, to sneak up on a grain of wheat. You know, I have people out there foraging. Like rooting pigs! They bring back mushrooms. Birds. Even crows, toppled from their nests! They dig up hibernating animals, dormice… Pah! Yet it is all we have.’

You are hungry because you do not know how to live here, Milaqa thought. Northlanders live off the land; they can easily melt away into the country for a few days. While you Trojans and the Greeks, used to your great stone cities crowded with people and loot and food, are left baffled. You cannot see the riches all around you, even at this time of year, in the rivers, the seas. And evidently those you use as slaves will not tell you.

She said sharply, ‘I thought you were feeding yourselves by raiding our communities. Like your raid on My Sun.’

‘Where? Oh, that was the first one, wasn’t it? Ah, yes — Hadhe, your cousin. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?’ He called to a servant, and briskly ordered her to summon Hadhe. ‘What were we saying — My Sun?’

‘That was easy pickings for you. And my own family suffered.’

He scowled, as if she was being unfair. ‘I saved Hadhe, didn’t I? And I didn’t wield every sword personally.’