Bronze Summer n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  As they neared the watchtower they saw stranger sights. In a cage of wood and rope a group of women, girls and boys sat in the dirt, many naked, waiting in silence. A few warriors were gathered around another cage, laughing and shouting, gambling with bits of gold and precious stone, goading the cage’s occupants with shouts and waved fists. Milaqa got close enough to glimpse what was going on inside the cage: two men, both naked, both without feet, their legs crudely wrapped in bloody cloth, were crawling in the dirt, dragging their bodies, trying to fight each other.

  They came to the watchtower itself. Kilushepa pointed up at a standard of wood and bronze that had been fixed to its roof: an eagle, once apparently two-headed, now headless altogether. ‘A sacred symbol,’ Kilushepa murmured. ‘Mutilated. How the world has fallen into decay…’

  A hefty guard stood by a narrow doorway. He recognised Qirum, ushered him through. Milaqa and Kilushepa followed. The watchtower was half-wrecked, Milaqa saw, peering around in the reduced light. On the ground floor there was a space for a hearth, heaped up with wood, unlit. A set of steps carved into the stone wall led up to the remains of a platform where, in more orderly times, soldiers of the King at Hattusa would have watched over the roadway. Now a loose canvas had been stretched over the open roof.

  ‘To keep out the rain,’ came a voice from the shadows, speaking precise Hatti. ‘Should it ever fall again… Come forward. You. The girl. I won’t bite; I’ve already eaten today.’

  Milaqa glanced at the others. Both Qirum and Kilushepa seemed utterly calm. She, however, was trembling. She took a step forward, then another. She had never felt so far from home. She kept seeing the pirate in her mind, his cleft tongue.

  As her eyes adapted to the dark she saw a man sitting on a tall chair, his back to the stone wall. He was slim, not bulky, but she sensed he was strong, whip-like. He wore a black-dyed tunic like his soldiers, but embroidered with gold thread. His hair was long at his back, in the Hatti fashion. Clean-shaven, no older than his mid-thirties, he might have been called handsome. But one eye was a blackened ruin.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Milaqa.’

  ‘You are a Northlander, I am told. Yet you understand Hatti.’

  ‘All Northlanders are educated.’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t doubt it. I wonder if they are all as brave as you. Why have you come here?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘I come for my cousin, Tibo. You took him from-’

  ‘Yes, yes. And now you are here — now you see me — what is the one question you wish to ask me?’

  She considered. ‘What happened to your eye?’

  ‘Ah. Good question.’ He sat back. ‘You understand I was governor here — we call it the Lord of the Watchtower — before the sky clouded over and the world ended? There was drought, famine, rebellion in my province.

  ‘So a man was sent from the King’s household in Hattusa to inspect the trouble. He had once been the Chief of the Wine Cellar, which is an old ceremonial title — very close to the King, an important man. He decided that all the trouble was my fault. His men jumped me before I could react. The punishment he ordained was blinding.’ He smiled. ‘A favourite of us Hatti. The men got as far as destroying one eye, before I got a hand free.

  ‘This chair, by the way, belonged to that former Chief of the Wine Cellar. He had it carried all the way from Hattusa. Imagine that. Fine piece of furniture, isn’t it? Even better now it is upholstered with the skin off the Chief’s own back.’

  Kilushepa stepped forward now. ‘Are you done frightening children?’

  The Spider hesitated. Then he stood, almost respectfully. ‘You were the Tawananna.’

  ‘I am the Tawananna. Tell me your true name.’

  ‘I am the Spider.’ He grinned, and spread his arms wide. ‘A good name for the ruler of this land of the dead, don’t you think? Where people live like flies off the carcasses of the dead, and I, the Spider, consume the flies-’

  ‘Your true name.’

  Again he seemed to hesitate. ‘Telipinu,’ he said at last. ‘I call myself Telipinu.’

  ‘You call yourself after a god?’

  ‘I was born in Hattusa-’

  ‘I can tell that much from your accent,’ she said, dismissive. She turned away to inspect the tower, as if no longer interested in the man. There were piles of goods in the shadows here, gold artefacts, iron perhaps, amber, bronze. ‘You take the last of everything. You loot cities already ruined. You make people turn on each other — you make children into whores, you make cripples fight. What is it you want?’

  He grinned. ‘I am Telipinu. The Vanishing God, whose absence causes the rain to fail and crops to wither. Whose rages cause the very earth to shake. Look around. This is a world of destruction and decay, Queen. After decades of drought, and now the desertion of the sun, there’s nothing else left. What is a man to do but revel in it, while it lasts?’

  Qirum murmured, ‘We came here for a purpose.’

  ‘The boy?’ The Spider grinned. ‘I had him found. Your description was enough. He was a good fighter, as it turned out.’

  Milaqa wondered what that meant, what Tibo had gone through. She said, ‘So we can take him away.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t say that. He belongs to me now. Why should I give him back to you? What have you in exchange?’ His glare, though one-eyed, was probing.

  It was Kilushepa who broke the moment. ‘We have this.’ She dug into the pouch at her belt, and produced something small and pebble-like that she handed to him.

  He inspected it curiously. ‘What is this?’

  It was a potato.

  ‘We have more,’ Kilushepa said. ‘It is a seed. It is simple to grow, and produces ample food. As soon as this weather relents-’

  ‘I have eaten Northland food.’

  ‘This is what Northland food is grown from. This is their secret. Now I am giving it to you.’

  Milaqa turned on her. ‘Tawananna, are you insane? You give our treasure to this man?’

  Kilushepa deigned to look at her, and spoke in her broken Northlander. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing, child. First, I am trying to secure your cousin’s release, for until that is done we will not be able to move on to matters of importance. And second, this crop is the secret to recovery for the Hatti empire. For the whole world, perhaps. But for the first year, the second, its distribution must be controlled. Rationed. Surely you see that, for otherwise the hungry will eat even the seed stock, and all will be lost.’

  ‘But this man-’

  ‘Is a monster. I know. But he is the only functioning authority of any kind we have encountered since Troy. And until I return to Hattusa, until the centre imposes its control again, this is how it will remain. This is the kind we must deal with, like it or not.’ Kilushepa turned to the Spider and spoke in her own tongue. ‘For your people — in a year or two, if not now — this represents survival. For you, it represents redemption. Will you take it?’

  He stared at the root, holding it in both hands. Then he nodded, curtly. ‘The boy will be brought to you outside.’

  Kilushepa bowed. ‘Then our business here is done. Good luck, Telipinu.’ She turned away and made for the doorway.

  Qirum and Milaqa followed the Tawananna out. Milaqa whispered to Qirum, ‘That story about covering the chair with the skin of its owner. Was it true?’

  ‘Try not to think about it.’

  Tibo was brought from the back of the tower, his arm gripped by a burly warrior. His face was grimy, his clothes reduced to rags, his feet bare. He was struggling. ‘Get off me… get off!’ The warrior shoved him towards Qirum’s party. He fell and sprawled in the dirt. Immediately he was on his feet, and would have launched himself straight back at the warrior if Qirum hadn’t grabbed him around the waist. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all!’ Wild with rage, Tibo had to be dragged every step of the way out of the camp.

  And he told the story
of his abduction, in enraged, tearful fragments.

  How those who bundled him on the slave carts almost killed him, casually. And had just as casually spared him, on a whim.

  How he had been thrown into a kind of pen with other boys, and women and girls. How a boy, another prisoner, had tried to rape him, and he fought.

  How the guards thought this was amusing, and, drinking, laughing by the fire, they pulled him out of the cage and lined him up against one of their number. If he could throw the man to the floor first, before being thrown himself, he would be spared. He threw the man. But then there was another, and he threw him, and a third. The fourth man threw Tibo. And he was the one who raped him, at last.

  He told this story over and over, until they had got him away from the Spider’s camp, and into the arms of his father. And Deri wept. Milaqa had never seen her uncle weep in her whole life, because, he said, he had broken his promise to his dying wife that he would keep their only child safe.

  35

  Nago, ten years older than Voro and far more experienced a hunter, pointed to a poorly concealed hearth, a scrap of linen clinging to bracken.

  Voro nodded, grinning.

  Deep in the folded hill country of the First Mother’s Ribs, Voro and Nago were tracking Caxa, as they would hunt a deer. Even after the clue Caxa herself had left them by etching her giant artwork on the hillside, it had taken them days to work their way up from the valley of the Brother River, following her trail. But now, at last, they had crossed a ridge coated with heather, and saw her smoke.

  The men rested, snuggling into the heather and sipping water from their flasks, before closing in for what Nago insisted on calling ‘the kill’. They were reasonably well hidden, Voro thought, though even the heather was sparse this year, and everybody doubted it would put on its usual autumn display of brilliant purple. But the thistles and poppies grew thickly. From this high vantage Voro looked south over the country. He could see the winding ribbon that was the Brother River, and the communities cut into the green along its banks, the characteristic hearthspaces connected by arrow-straight trackways. Further away, off to the south, he could just make out the shining water of the Sister, the two rivers curling towards their shared estuary off to the east. And beyond the rivers the tremendous plain of Northland itself stretched away. Despite the dismal summer, though it was so unseasonably cold, there was plenty of green in the clumps of forest, the reeds in the marshland. Given the landscape was so different from her own remote country, Voro thought, Caxa had done well to hide from them — indeed to have survived so long, more than a month, by living off the land, entirely alone. But she was here. No doubt about that. Voro only had to glance down at the hillside below him.

  From up here the pattern she had designed was foreshortened, but he had seen it from the villages of the valley of the Brother, from the lowland, as it had meant to be seen: a tremendous figure scrawled on the hill, a grotesque mashing together of a human baby with a fish’s body and a wolf’s head. It could only be Caxa, for, according to Xivu, this was characteristic of the art of her country. The markings had been made by scraping at the heather, by setting carefully controlled fires — it was a feat of ingenuity and persistence for one woman to have achieved all this alone. And she had completed it all in a single night. It had scared the life out of the people when they had woken the morning after to find this monstrosity glaring down from their hillside at them. But it had at last enabled Nago and Voro to track the girl down.

  Nago glanced at the sky, and rubbed his beaky nose. ‘So hard to tell the time of day. That’s the worst of this god-baffling sunless sky.’

  ‘That and the hunger.’

  ‘And the cold.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can get this done today-’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  The voice was a hiss from just behind them.

  Voro rolled on his back. He saw a blur rising from the heather, lithe, dark, coming at him. A human figure, face blackened, hand raised with a stone knife like a claw.

  Before Voro could move Nago rolled over and lashed out with one boot. The shadow fell away with a grunt, and Nago was on his knees before it, bronze knife in his hand. Nago could move remarkably quickly for such an old man, at thirty. ‘Enough,’ he snapped.

  Now they were still, the elusive shadow resolved. It was a girl, naked save for scraps of soft leather around her chest and loins, skin smeared with soil and leaf matter. Barefoot, lithe, no wonder she had been able to sneak up on them so easily.

  ‘Get away. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Put down the knife,’ Nago said. ‘Come on, child. It’s over. You don’t want to harm us.’

  Voro rummaged for the words in the Jaguar tongue Xivu had carefully coached into him. ‘We come as friends. You remember Nago. In his boat he saved you from the Hood. My name is Voro. We only want you to come home.’

  She hissed again, and crouched down. She had become more like an animal than a human, Voro thought. She replied in clumsy Etxelur tongue, ‘This is not my home. My home is far away, across the sea.’

  ‘Come back to my home, then,’ Voro said. ‘Please. You are welcome there.’

  ‘With Xivu?’

  ‘You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to. You can stay with Vala. You remember her-’

  ‘I must carve the head.’

  He spread his hands. ‘Everybody is hungry this year. Nobody is thinking of carvings on the Wall.’

  ‘But that is why I was brought here. I had no choice. I have had no choice since the day I was born.’

  Nago sighed. He tucked away his knife, and dug a flask of water out of his pack, offered it to her. She ignored him. Nago said, ‘If you put it like that, which of us has any choice, child? We just have to make the most of what we’re given.’

  But she scowled at him.

  Voro touched Nago’s shoulder. ‘Let me talk to her alone for a moment. We’re more the same age.’

  Nago snorted. ‘If it were up to me I’d just truss her up and bring her home. All right, do it your way. But I will only be a dagger’s throw away if she gets those claws out again.’ He walked a few paces away and settled down to a meal of dried meat from his pack.

  ‘You say you have no choice,’ Voro said carefully to the girl in her own tongue. ‘Yet you have had choices that you have not taken. You could have just disappeared. Northland is huge, empty. You could have gone off to Albia or Gaira, or even further, and before long you’d have found people who had never heard of Northland at all — let alone of the Land of the Jaguar. You could have disappeared. Yet you did not. Instead you made this huge, terrifying mark on the hill. You chose to do that. Why?’

  She looked at her hands. ‘It is in my blood. As in my father’s, and my grandfather’s… It is what I do. I make art. Big art, to provoke awe in people. Or fear. Or longing… I had no choice. I could not walk away and — catch eels.’

  He nodded. ‘And you have to make the head of Kuma, for that is what you do.’

  ‘And the head of the Jaguar king,’ she said evenly, ‘which will kill me.’

  He grinned. ‘I’ll help you. I promise. I won’t let this Xivu take you off to be killed.’ He had talked this through with Raka and Vala, neither of whom had much sympathy for the Jaguar priest. They would surely offend no gods of Northland if they let this girl live — only the strange, savage gods from across the ocean who ordained her wasteful death, and Northlanders had no fear of them.

  And for Voro, perhaps saving a life would recompense for his part in the taking of a life.

  She stared at him, struggling to believe. ‘Tibo said he would help me.’

  ‘He saved your life on the fire mountain,’ Voro said sternly. ‘Now it’s my turn. I’m a clever chap. I will find a way. Will you come?’

  36

  The last few days of the long journey to Hattusa were the hardest of all.

  With increasing confidence Kilushepa led the party along rutted roads and trails that took them away from
the coastal plain. The abandoned farms of the lower land petered out, and they entered a spectacular landscape of deep-cut gorges and sharp ridges. This upland was inhabited only by birds, scrubby grass and spindly trees, and the few farms crowded in the valleys. It was a landscape that made you work hard, for the Hatti roads cut through gorges and valleys and over ridges and summits without sympathy for mere human limbs, and the men hauling the carts grunted with the effort. And the lowland opened up as they rose, with sweeping views stretching far away, across an ocean of farms and scrubby forest patches, with glimpses of even mightier mountains on the horizon. Milaqa had grown up in Northland, a tremendous plain. She had never seen country like this.

  Sometimes they saw herders, gaunt men tracking herds of gaunt cattle across the dusty plain. They glimpsed deer, wolves. Once they heard a deep rumble, like a groan in the earth itself, that Qirum said was probably a lion.

  And still they climbed. Soon they were so high that the air was even colder than it had been at the level of the sea, a deep, bitter, dry cold that dug into your bones when the wind was up. Each morning they found their gear covered in frost, though it was still late summer, and on the shaded sides of the hills the men pointed wonderingly to patches of snow not melted since the winter.

  This was the forbidding landscape within which the Hatti had set their capital city.

  They came upon a patrol of foot soldiers. It was the first evidence they’d had that Hattusa was still functioning at all. Qirum called the party to a halt. The six soldiers were dressed in what Milaqa had come to recognise as standard Hatti kit, each with a long tunic, a thick leather belt, a conical helmet with a brilliant feathered plume, boots that curled up oddly at the toe, and their black hair grown long and thickly plaited at the back. The soldiers each carried sword, spear, pack. This was just as the Spider’s troops had been equipped, save that their kit had been dyed black.