Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

‘Northlanders are full of shit.’

‘Well, they’re full of something, for you rarely see them starve.’

‘I thought we’d get away with it this year. It hits overnight, you know. The blight. One day you think you’re fine, the next your potatoes are rotting in the ground.’

Zida laughed, striding out. ‘Your choice, my friend. You decided to become a Man of the Weapons. I prefer my pay in silver, not in dusty land.’

‘But somebody has to work the land. If nobody grows any food, what will there be to buy with your silver?’

‘Whores,’ Zida cackled.

Kassu said no more, for he knew there was no more to say. Zida, a few years older than Kassu at thirty, was a solid man with a face left battered by years of warfare, of pitched battles against the enemies of the Hatti King, and in more recent years smaller-scale actions against packs of hungry wanderers and bandits. Zida really did think no further ahead than the next pay purse, the next whore. He was a soldier, he expected to die in battle sooner rather than later, so why worry about the future?

But Kassu had a wife, they had had a child who had died of an infant sickness despite all the ministrations of the surgeons and the priests, and they wanted to try again. And Kassu had come of age in the years when the great drought had clamped down, and the farmers had abandoned their land. He had seen the reasoning when King Hattusili had set up his scheme to have soldiers made Men of the Weapons, to be given farmland and tax breaks instead of a regular salary. Somebody had to work the land. It wasn’t just the shortage of food; when the farmlands were abandoned tax revenues imploded.

But Kassu was a city boy He had not anticipated the impact of the drought, and now the cold that worsened year on year. In the spring the plants would not grow and the trees would not bud; in warmer, moister intervals later in the year you might get a surge of growth, but then the early frost would ruin your crops, and anything that did grow the rabbits would take. They even chewed the bark off your fruit trees. In the very worst months your soil would dry out and blow away, just dust.

And now snow: snow, on Judas Day! In New Hattusa! He had thought last winter was as bad as it could get. What was to come this year?

Zida watched the snow fall suspiciously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t lie. Don’t want to leave tracks. They say Old Hattusa is cut off already. Snow in the passes.’

Kassu shrugged. ‘It always snows on Old Hattusa, up on that plateau. No wonder the kings moved out.’

‘You’ll be warm enough with that plump wife of yours.’

‘Not if you keep dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night.’

Zida laughed. ‘Who’s Palla, by the way?’

‘How do you know about Palla?’

‘You asked me if I was Palla before I had your dagger at your throat.’

‘A priest. Cousin of Henti. Quite high up; he works in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Arinna. Knows Angulli, I think, the Father of the Churches.’

‘So why’s he sleeping in your hovel?’

‘He’s close to Henti. Has been since they were kids. He came out a while back to bless the potato fields, when we heard the blight was in the neighbourhood. He’s come out to stay a few times since.’

Zida looked at Kassu. ‘That’s good of him,’ he said neutrally. ‘Can’t be much of a priest, though. Didn’t save your potatoes, did he?’

Kassu shrugged. As Zida seemed to be guessing in his own crudely insightful way, Palla had actually caused a lot of arguments between Kassu and his wife. Kassu resented the priest’s frequent visits, resented having to feed the man. ‘The will of Teshub Yahweh is not ours to question.’

Zida laughed again. ‘That’s for sure.’ But he spoke softly, for they were heading into empty country now, away from the city. He put his right hand on the hilt of his scabbarded sword, and Kassu found that he’d unconsciously done the same thing.

They moved without a light, but by now their eyes were fully open to the dark. The land, much of it disused farmland, was mostly empty. Once they saw an animal, like a big dog. It could have been a wolf; animals like deer and wolves had been spotted much closer to the city than they used to come. The abandoned countryside was reverting to the wild, some said, even so close to New Hattusa.

Kassu pictured the landscape. New Hattusa sat by the shore of a bay that opened up to the north; to the west a spit of land separated the bay from the Middle Sea. The city was protected by layers of defences, some inherited from the deeper past, some planned by the Hatti kings when they first moved the capital of their empire here. There were rivers to north and south, and to the east a tremendous New Wall, a mass of Northlander growstone and hard facing stone, that ran from the valley of the Scaramander in the south all the way to the Simoeis in the north. To the west, along the coast, there were sea walls and heavily defended harbours. The bay itself, where dredgers worked constantly to clear away the silt of the rivers, could be closed by the raising of a great chain across its mouth. And at the heart of all these defensive layers sat New Hattusa, Troy, within the ancient walls that had once famously failed to expel the Greeks, but had long since been rebuilt and had not been breached for a thousand years. But there were always threats, especially in these times of hunger and rootlessness. And given the way they were heading, Kassu guessed that this night the threat was approaching from the north, from the line of the Simoeis.

As they neared the river they sought out scraps of cover, staying away from the high ground, keeping to the shade of desiccated copses. Soon Kassu could smell the river itself, a stench of rot. The water was no more than a dribble through a bed of sour mud.

Then Kassu smelled woodsmoke.

He and Zida found a lying-up point in the ruins of a farmhouse, which they entered cautiously. This must once have been a favoured location, a bit of high ground close to the river, even if it was near the boundary of the city’s hinterland. Now the house was long looted, burned, looted again, and the interior was open to the sky. There was a huddle of bones lying in one corner, which Kassu didn’t look at too closely. The snow, falling heavier now, was collecting on what had once been quite a fine floor of stone tiles.

Crouching behind a broken wall the two of them peered out at the river valley. On the far side they saw a line of sparks, along the bank. Kassu tried to count the fires, but gave up when he got to thirty.

‘There they are,’ Zida muttered.

‘The river won’t be hard to cross. Not with the water as low as it is. You could just ford it.’

‘They might have started already, before it’s fully light. I would. Lucky for us a scout spotted them and came running back with the news. This is supposed to be part of the outer defence, along with the New Wall. If I were Himuili I’d build up this border. Walls and ramparts. The river isn’t enough of a barrier any more, you said it yourself.’

Kassu shrugged. ‘But Himuili can only do what the King and the Hazannu and the rest tell him to do.’ The Hazannu was the city’s top administrator, its mayor, a tough ex-soldier called Tiwatapara. ‘They haven’t got the manpower to do everything, not any more.’

‘So I’d buy some in. Rus. Scand even. Big hairy idiots the pack of them, but they can fight if you point them in the right direction.’

‘Who do you think they are? Turks? Franks, maybe?’

‘Hard to tell yet. Listen. You go back, take the bad news. I’ll wait until it’s lighter, identify them, count them, maybe spot when they cross if they haven’t started already.’