Bronze Summer n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  He loomed over Praxo, who lay on his belly under a scrunched-up blanket that barely covered his hairy backside, his head tipped sideways, his mouth open, his big fleshy nose squashed, his snoring like an earthquake. Qirum’s closest companion was only a couple of years older than Qirum himself, only twenty-five, but the jowls and folds of his fleshy face made him look a good deal older than that. Praxo’s own whores — he preferred two at a time if he could afford them — had long gone, though at first glance it didn’t look as if they had had the nerve to rob the sleeping sailor.

  Qirum picked up a slat from the walls, and laid about Praxo’s back and arse with vigorous blows. ‘Up! Up, you beached whale. The day’s half gone, and there’s booty coming to town.’

  Praxo stirred, snorted, coughed, and rolled onto his back, leaving a puddle of snot where his nose had been. He had a monstrous waking erection that stuck up like a ship’s mast. He opened one eye. ‘Clear off, I need a piss.’ But then the martial trumpets sounded again, and a broad grin spread over Praxo’s grimy face.

  ‘Do what you have to do, my friend, but get on with it.’ Qirum pushed through the remains of a doorway and emerged onto the mud track outside. Once this had been a fair-sized street. But now it was greened over by weeds, and cluttered by huts, shacks and lean-tos, smoke trailing through their roofs. If you stood still for too long the kids came swarming out with their little hands out towards you, chattering, begging for food. Living like rats on a midden.

  Behind him he heard Praxo swear and strain at his stool.

  Qirum walked away up a low rise. From here he looked out over the ruined lower town towards the Pergamos, the citadel, with its ring of cracked walls, the palace with its fallen towers and smashed-in roof. Once this view would have been cluttered by crowding buildings, winding alleyways; now it was all but clear. This was Troy. Qirum had been born here — he had been conceived during the disastrous night of the fire that had ended the Greek siege — this was his home city, and always would be. But he had travelled widely; he had seen Mycenae and Hattusa and Ashur, he had seen what a city should be. Maybe Troy would recover some day, maybe it would get back to the greatness it had enjoyed. But not while drought and famine stalked the land, and populations fled and princes toppled everywhere. And he, Qirum, was meant for better than this. He dug a leather pouch from his belt, and absently sprinkled himself with scent, of lilies, roses, saffron crocuses. In a stinking world, a stinking city, smelling good was a sign of wealth, of posterity. Troy was the past, the place he had begun his journey in life, not the place he would end it.

  Praxo emerged at last, dressed in a tunic that looked more stain than cloth, with his weapons on his back, his battleaxe and heavy sword. He carried a sack with the bits of booty they carried to pay their way around the city. ‘That last stool was a beauty. I feel like I gave birth to a tree.’

  ‘Of all your revolting habits, your boasting about your bowel movements is the worst.’

  ‘I try to please.’

  The trumpets pealed again. Looking east over the outer city’s walls Qirum glimpsed movement, a river of people, the glitter of bronze, banners fluttering in the languid air. Hatti! He felt as if he could smell the gold. ‘Come on.’

  Praxo said, ‘You have an admirer.’

  Qirum glanced down. A boy, skinny, naked, no older than eight, turned and bent, showing his bare arse. Qirum turned away, disgusted.

  But Praxo lingered. ‘Oh, aren’t you going to give this little one a ride? Just for old times’ sake. After all he’s got to start somewhere in the world. Selling the only thing he’s got, just like you did. Come on, be a sport!’

  Qirum stalked away from the boy, from Praxo, emptied his head of the goading, and focused his gaze on the glitter of Hatti bronze.

  4

  On the day of her mother’s interment Milaqa woke early in her cell, deep in the belly of the Wall, in the District known as Great Etxelur. It had been an uneasy night, of dreams of dead iron punching through ribcages. It was a relief when the flickering torch glow around the door of her room was at last dimmed by the cold grey of dawn.

  She clambered off her bed, a pallet of soft deerskin on a growstone platform, heaped with blankets of aurochs wool and cloth. Moving quickly in the cold, she stripped off yesterday’s tunic and loincloth. She drank water from the bowl she had brought in last night, and emptied her bladder into a channel that led her urine away to the fullers’ tanks somewhere deep in the fabric of the Wall. She voided her bowels into her night bowl, cleaned herself with a handful of dried moss, and pulled on fresh clothes, leggings and boots. She took her cloak, picked up the night bowl, and pulled back the heavy linen door flap.

  And for a heartbeat she paused, and looked back at her room in the glow from the passage torches. This was a new apartment, freshly cut into impossibly ancient growstone. The bed, table, shelves were all made of the original growstone too, lumps of it left unremoved by the artisans who had carved out these rooms. Such apartments, brand new, exclusive and very expensive, were owned by the House of the Owl, the Annids, and were really meant for clerks and other officers of the Annid order, or were used in a pinch by guests of the government of Northland. Milaqa had been loaned it as a favour by her mother, the Annid of Annids, and her stuff, her clothes, the little pouch with mementoes of her mother, sat in the alcoves chipped into the walls. Well, Kuma was dead now, and once the interment was done Milaqa would have to give up the apartment. But when the Annids came to throw her out, at least they would find the place tidy and clean, dignified. She let the door flap fall closed.

  She walked out along the passage towards its open end, and the gathering light of the spring sky. She passed other doors on the way, and heard human sounds, people softly moving about their morning business, a baby crying. The corridor gave onto a gallery cut into the Wall’s growstone face. She made her way a few paces along to a vertical gutter incised into the face, where she dumped her night soil. The ordure slithered down the gutter, heading for a heap at the Wall’s base, where it would be collected by workers of the House of the Beetle to be dug into the soil far from the Wall.

  The waking world below the Wall was a plain stretching off to the far distance, punctuated by sheets of water and soft low hills. From here you could make out the artifice of the whole world, from the flood mounds on which the big communal houses sat, to the dead-straight lines of the main tracks and the great diagonal canals, a framework which contained patches of forest and marsh in its tidy quilted pattern. Fires sparked everywhere, and smoke rose up through the morning mist. Already people were making their way towards the Wall along the main tracks, bringing fish, meat, eel, wildfowl — the fruit of the marshlands brought to feed the communities of the great growstone heap. Along the canal banks people were out too, throwing offerings of broken bronze tools or pottery or scraps of food into the water, praying for the beneficence of the little mothers.

  And over all this loomed the face of the Wall, within which she stood. It curved inwards, subtly, a tremendous concave flank to match the stout belly of its sea-facing side. Thanks to the curve Milaqa could make out much of the detail of its nearby face: the etching of the galleries where lamps flickered and people walked, the ladders and netting hanging from the balconies, and a huge, rickety scaffolding of wood where workers were already out fixing a deep crack in the face with fresh growstone. Up above, on the Wall’s roof, she could make out great frames with sails that turned languidly in the breeze; day and night the invisible muscles of the wind lifted pallets of excess water from the foot of the Wall and dumped it into the ocean. There were birds too, a few early arrivals already colonising cracks and crevices in this huge human-built cliff. Later in the year the boys would be climbing across the Wall’s face, clinging to crevices with fingers and bare toes — searching for eggs, just as she and Hadhe, her cousin and closest friend, used to when they were a few years younger.

  This was Great Etxelur, the District that was the very heart of the Wall, looming o
ver the huddle of Old Etxelur below. But beyond the nearby clutter the Wall went on and on, to east and west, until it became a pale line in the misty air that stretched to the horizon, inhabited all along its length, the Districts strung out like shells on a bracelet. Children often grew up believing the Wall went on for ever. The truth was almost as staggering; the Wall had its limits, it did come to an end, but not until it had spanned the whole of the northern shore of Northland, a reach of very many days’ travel.

  And all along that length, and across hundreds of human generations, it kept the ocean at bay. It was deliciously scary, if you were snuggled up safe in your bed at night deep inside the Wall, to think that the sea level was far above your head.

  The day was growing lighter while she stood here. The time of her mother’s interment, at noon, was not far away. She ought to go to the great meeting chamber known as the Vestibule, the entrance to the deeper warrens that led to the Hall of Interment. She ought to be talking gravely about her dead mother to aunts and nieces, to her mother’s colleagues in the House of the Owl.

  Or she could run off and see if Hadhe was up yet. Hadhe, Milaqa’s cousin, had children, two of her own and one adopted, and her little one was ill, which was why she was spending the winter in the shelter of the Wall, on the outskirts of the neighbouring District, the Scambles. Her own home, a house in a place called Sunflower down by the Brother River, would have been too damp for a sickly little boy.

  The kids would have got Hadhe up by now.

  Impulsively Milaqa turned to her left, to the east, away from the Vestibule, and began to run lightly along the galleries, the roughened growstone secure under her feet. She greeted people she knew, and nodded to strangers, and grinned at the children who were already swarming everywhere, even so early on a cold day. On the big scaffolding platform the workers stirred their huge ceramic pots of growstone, pouring in crushed rock and lime and water. These members of the House of the Beaver, mostly men, called out to her as she passed, every word obscene, and she made fist-pumping gestures back at them.

  She ducked inwards, into the body of the Wall. She climbed staircases and hurried along torchlit corridors cut through the growstone itself. As she ran on the nature of the galleries and passages subtly changed. Here, for instance, marigolds from the marshland, early bloomers, had been gathered and stuck in pots cut into the walls. The Wall was not the same everywhere, and nor were the people living in it, its Districts as different as the villages of the plain, each unique if only in small ways. And the further you went, the more different the people became, even in the way they dressed and spoke. Milaqa, who had a talent for languages as much as for anything, knew that a Wall-dweller from the western end, near the Albia coast, could not communicate with an inhabitant from the eastern end, near the estuary of the World River. And yet they all inhabited the same Wall, the one immense building; and they all worked together to maintain the Wall and the lands it depended on.

  She loved this place, the crowded communities, the corridors and galleries, the taverns — even the graffiti on the walls, layers of it, the sharp-cut recent additions obliterating the older marks beneath, some in forgotten languages. It was probably the nearest she was ever going to come to the cities of the east that the traders and travellers told of, where people lived in great heaped-up stone piles. Northland, her homeland, with its canals and landscapes and its smattering of people, with its emptiness and austerity and duty, wasn’t enough for her. But the Wall itself was something else.

  She soon came to where Hadhe was staying, in a chalet in the growstone loaned her by a fisher family who were wintering on Kirike’s Land. Milaqa was greeted by the sight of a ten-year-old boy calmly standing by a waste duct with his tunic pulled up, urinating into the air. His young bladder was strong, and the pale liquid arced far out into the void.

  ‘Jaro, stop that,’ she said, stalking up. ‘Use the gutters like everybody else. How would you like it if you woke up to find somebody pissing on your head?’

  He turned to face her, his penis in his hand still dribbling. ‘Are you looking at my cock, Aunt Milaqa?’

  ‘Looking for it, maybe, little boy. Put it away before I throw you over too.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He tied up his loincloth, dropped his tunic and ran off, disappearing into the maze of galleries.

  ‘Hello, Milaqa.’ Her cousin Hadhe came out along the passage, carrying a double armful of bowls of soil. One was full of vomit.

  ‘Let me help you with that.’ Milaqa took the vomit-filled bowl. ‘Little Blane, is it?’

  ‘Poor mite’s not been right all winter. The priests can’t do anything for him. Coughing all night, and he keeps Jaro and Keli awake too, and what he does eat he throws back up. I’m surprised we’ve not had to put him up on the roof already…’ Side by side the cousins tipped the bowls of soil into the waste gullies cut into the Wall face. ‘As for Jaro, a right pest he’s turning out to be, and as randy as his father, from what I remember of him, even if he doesn’t know what to do with his little man yet. He shows it to me the whole time, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got to a mother.’ Hadhe sighed, and brushed a lank of dirty hair back from her face.

  Milaqa saw how tired her cousin looked, how ill, her face slack and grey, her shoulders stooped, her breasts heavy with milk. She was fifteen, a year younger than Milaqa. ‘It was good of you to take in Jaro. You already had your hands full after you lost Jac.’

  Jac, Hadhe’s husband, had been a fisherman, whose first wife had died when Jaro was small. Then Jac had got himself caught in a storm and killed just after getting Hadhe pregnant with little Blane, her own second child.

  Hadhe shrugged. ‘Everybody has kids. Half the kids die, or if they don’t their parents do, and you have to take in the orphans. This is the way we live our lives, isn’t it? Except you, up to now, anyway. Even you’ll have to settle down sometime.’

  ‘And be like you?’ Milaqa snapped. Hadhe recoiled, and Milaqa reached out her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Oh, forget it. You’re not yourself; I’ve seen that since your mother died. Speaking of which — when is her interment? Oh, it’s today, isn’t it? So why are you here?’

  ‘I…’ Milaqa didn’t really know.

  From along the gallery, a child started crying.

  Hadhe sighed. ‘That’s Blane. He needs me. And your mother needs you. Go, Milaqa.’ And she picked up her bowls and turned away.

  5

  Outside Troy’s broken walls, the land under a harsh noon sun was dusty, rocky, bare, marked by a few abandoned dust-bowl fields. Roads radiated away from this place, roads that had once carried the seaborne produce of Mycenae and the other Greek cities overland to much of Anatolia — roads now becoming invisible beneath the drift of the dust, the product of decades of drought. Qirum felt his mouth dry, his skin desiccating, and he pulled a soft felt hat from his belt to shield his brow from the spring sun.

  Qirum and Praxo were not alone in coming out of Troy to greet the train. Alerted by the war trumpets, vendors drifted up to offer the troops water, food, trinkets, whores, and slavers came out to take a first look at the fresh merchandise.

  And Qirum heard a deep rumble of thousands of voices. Here came the march.

  They climbed a ridge to see better. The caravan was revealed as a tremendous column stretching back along the road from the east as far as Qirum could see, thousands of feet raising a long yellow dust cloud. Somewhere behind the column itself must come the baggage train, ox carts bearing the senior officers and a Hatti prince or two in command, and heaps of booty, gold and silver and defeated gods, and the tremendous quantities of food and water required to keep this shuffling crowd alive. There would even be cattle and sheep, stolen herds driven along the trail.

  But the people came by first. The Hatti infantry walked in files alongside the main column, their officers on horseback. They were Hatti warriors, each with a loose shin-length robe tied around by a leather b
elt, and a conical helmet, spear and sword, and that oddly shaped shield of theirs, a slab of wood and leather with rounded corners and indents to either side. They all wore their hair long and plaited so it hung down their backs, and Qirum, who had fought Hatti, knew that this thick tail afforded a little extra protection to the neck. The walk had clearly gone on for many days; the soldiers looked footsore, their pace a dull plod. But their officers looked reasonably alert. From horseback they scanned the country for bandits and robbers, and watched the column of marchers they shepherded.

  And that column was made up of ordinary folk, not soldiers, two or three or four abreast, men, women and children alike, shuffling in dull misery.

  Qirum stared curiously at the booty people. He had seen such columns before, but you never got used to the sight. Here was the population of a town, or maybe even a whole country, emptied out once the fighting was done, the warriors killed off, the buildings looted and torched, grain stores and farms picked over — and the people rounded up and driven out. Most of the captives had their hands tied up with rope. Some were hobbled, and walked with difficulty. Most were clothed, some in the ragged remains of what might have been fine clothes, but some went naked, perhaps after some act of spite or punishment by their guards, or even after being robbed by their fellow captives. And many walked barefoot, with splashes of dried blood about battered feet and legs. Qirum saw few old folk, and nobody obviously lame, and few little ones, toddlers too heavy to carry but too young to be able to sustain the pace. The marches were a great winnowing, and their trails were always littered with corpses. As always some of the more attractive women and girls had evidently been used by the soldiers; you could see it in the way they walked, the state of their clothes, the bruising and the blood. Was there a lack of young men? They were always the most trouble, but the most valuable on the slave markets.