Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

Milaqa, deeply disturbed, wasn’t sure she understood. ‘And the battle — is it over?’

‘No. The fighting just stopped, because of exhaustion. It may resume tomorrow. I have urged Raka to send an embassy to Qirum, to negotiate a truce.’

‘Our weapons. The iron arrows-’

‘They helped. The Trojan has the advantage in numbers, and without the iron, and without some good strategy from Muwa and his generals, the day would have been lost. But even with the iron we can never win a battle like this. Just as I have been telling Raka and any of your Annids who will listen. The trick is to pick a battle we can win.’

‘What kind of battle?’

Kilushepa hugged her close, an unexpectedly human gesture. ‘That will wait for tomorrow. You must wash away the dried blood, change your clothes. Look, they are lighting another pyre…’

The men lowered their torches to the dark tangle of bodies, and they threw on whale oil, and soon the flames were rising high in the gathering night. Out on the field, Milaqa saw birds coming down to feed, rooks and buzzards, and dogs loped. When the men gathered up another corpse, Milaqa watched, astonished, as a cloud of butterflies rose up from the disturbed body, flying into the fading daylight.

The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Autumn Equinox

After three days of fighting the Battle of the Wall finished inconclusively. The Trojans withdrew to their siege lines.

Two months later the priests were still busy at their pits all along the roof of the Wall, and in the interment chambers deep within, storing the bones of the war dead within the growstone, readying them for the longer war against the sea.

And yet again Milaqa was to be sent to face the Trojan in his lair.

She was to be accompanied this time by her uncle Teel, Annid of Annids Raka, a gaggle of other Annids, priests and advisers — and by Kilushepa herself, with a squad of Hatti troops under the command of Muwa. Once again the bewildered, bloodied Northlanders were going to try to come to an accommodation with the monster in their midst.

Milaqa had her own special mission once more. Again she was to be used to try to reach Qirum, who had retired to New Troy once the campaigning season was done — to speak to his heart, and to put an end to the war.

She thought she understood what was really going on here, why such a formidable expedition had been formed around her. Milaqa knew enough of Qirum’s culture, she had seen it in Anatolia, to understand that marriages to seal unions between nations were common. Was that what was being planned here, with herself used as bait? After all as a daughter of an Annid of Annids she was the nearest Northland had to a princess, though it galled her to admit it. Well, Milaqa was now nineteen years old; she was nobody’s gift, nobody’s whore. Besides, every time she had been pushed at Qirum in this way before it had ended in disaster.

Or maybe there was some deeper scheme here, she wondered, which she had yet to glimpse. If there was, Teel was giving her no hint. She had found all the high-ups increasingly obscure recently, Teel even more enigmatic than usual. She had no choice but to go along with their schemes, whatever they were, and wait for the chance to make her own decisions, take her own chances.

When the procession formed up at the foot of the Wall, people stopped what they were doing to come and stare. Children leaned over soot-stained galleries, adults labouring to rebuild defensive ditches and ramparts stopped their work and leaned on heavy shovels, the priests looked down from the roof of the Wall. Even now Milaqa felt distanced from it all. It was as if she was the only real person in a world of puppets. Save, perhaps, for Qirum.

Following the great Etxelur Way south, they were passed without trouble through the Trojan lines, the desultory besieging force left in place for the winter. Most of the Northlanders walked. Kilushepa, however, preferred to ride with her ladies in a horse-drawn carriage. She had gifts for Qirum and his basileis, a custom in the countries they all came from, she said. The queen herself took special care of these items, which were wrapped securely in linen blankets and ox-hide and stored in her carriage and other carts.

Milaqa, like most people in the Wall, had seen little of the country since Qirum had begun his siege, and she was shocked at its state, the canals and weirs blocked, the dams broken, the hearthspaces weed-choked or flooded, the houses burned. But the people had survived, mostly. After the first Trojan attacks they had melted into the countryside and lived as their ancestors had, supported by the land’s natural bounty. And now they too came out to stare as the procession passed, strange, wild-looking people.

‘The land itself is flourishing,’ Raka observed at one rest stop, as they sat by a broad marsh. She watched a family of harvest mice busy in a nest woven in the tall grass. ‘Perhaps there’s a lesson in that. The land, you know, that’s what’s important in the end, not our petty human squabbles. Perhaps we have lost sight of the will of the mothers.’

Teel nodded. ‘Those who are to follow us will listen to the mothers’ wisdom, I am sure.’

More of his enigmatic obliquity. Those who are to follow? Would Raka not be leading the recovery when peace came, Teel not still be gliding among the Annids with his hints and tricks?

One of Muwa’s men, bored, pulled his sword from its scabbard and began slashing at the long grass, where the harvest mice had made their nest. Kilushepa stopped him with a sharp word in the Hatti tongue. That surprised Milaqa. She would not have thought the Tawananna, who had refused even to acknowledge the existence of her own daughter in Etxelur, would care anything for mice.

They were still a long way out from New Troy when they were met by a patrol. And as they passed through deep layers of earthworks Teel looked quietly pleased. All this defensive effort was a response to the campaign of petty retaliatory raids he and others had been organising ever since Qirum had begun his own assaults on Northland communities.

Their reception at the gate in the wall around the lower town was prickly at first. Highly trained soldiers on both sides, some of whom must have met in battle only months before, faced each other down. But there was no trouble, both sides kept their discipline.

Qirum’s man Erishum came out to meet the Northlander party, and escorted them through the gate. The city inside the wall seemed emptied out to Milaqa, depopulated, with none of those hungry crowds she had seen last time. She wondered if the Northlanders held here had found a way to slip away from this kingdom of mud and hunger and gone back to the country, quietly abandoning Qirum’s dream.

They were shown to a house of mud brick and thatch, in the shadow of the walls of the citadel itself, evidently the house of some warlord evicted for the purpose. Carpeted inside and with tapestries on the walls, it seemed grand to Milaqa. Kilushepa said it was small and poky, but it would do. Erishum waited with them until a runner brought a message that Qirum would be prepared to meet Milaqa at sundown.

This sent Kilushepa into a kind of regal panic. ‘And it is already mid-afternoon! There is barely time to make this wild woman anything less than grotesque — oh! How I hate to rush these things.’

Milaqa glared at her, suspicious. ‘What “things”?’

Kilushepa chased out everybody but her serving women, Raka, and Teel — the only man, ‘but, ball-less, you will cause no offence,’ she said dismissively. Then she turned on Milaqa. ‘Strip.’

‘What? I will not.’

‘Do it, child, or I will have the soldiers do it for you, I don’t have time to waste.’ She clapped her hands. Her ladies, barefoot on the carpeted floor, hurried in with trunks of clothes and cosmetics brought from the carts.