Bronze Summer n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The King stripped to a loincloth, and leaned so his hands were resting on his knees. ‘Don’t go easy on me, sergeant,’ he warned. ‘If I think you let me win I’ll have your head as a trophy. On the other hand, if you beat me…’ The sentence tailed off in another coughing fit. More blood speckles, Milaqa saw. Qirum’s bare skin was pale, slick with sweat, and oddly mottled with small black marks.

  If Erishum was troubled by this impossible balancing act he did not show it. Milaqa supposed he was used to the King’s capriciousness, and had after all survived so far. ‘I have no doubt you are the better suitor, lord. But you have to prove it first.’ He grinned, and crouched.

  Qirum laughed out loud. Then he launched himself at Erishum. The crowd roared and clapped as they clashed, heads together, straining, reaching. Erishum got the first break; he twisted, got his arm around the King’s neck, and flipped them both over backwards.

  And Qirum vomited blood. Erishum let him go in dismay and stood back.

  It was in at that moment that Milaqa, in a flash of understanding, realised what had been done — how she had been used, what the true purpose of this expedition to New Troy had always been. What she had done to Qirum’s petty empire, and to Qirum himself.

  On the day after that, Milaqa’s fourth in New Troy, nobody seemed to know what to do with her. She was brought food and drink in her room. The senior woman of the house was attentive to her needs. She was allowed to roam as she would.

  She was even allowed into the King’s bedchamber, where he lay on a couch.

  He was surrounded by soldiers, and by buckets full of blood and stool and piss; the stink was unbearable. She was not allowed to speak to Qirum, but she could not tell if he was conscious anyhow. From time to time he would cry out, as if in great pain. Scared-looking physicians came and went, desperately trying remedies. She heard them speaking of blood in the vomit and the urine, and of painful swellings in his groin and armpits. When they brushed past her, Milaqa saw they were spattered with the King’s blood.

  She retreated to the King’s big reception room. By the shrine with the restored mother goddess figure, the priests intoned steadily, asking Apollo god of plague to put aside his bow. There was nobody else here but the guards, who looked at her with black expressions. Milaqa went back to her room.

  That night she could not sleep. The house was full of people coming and going, and it rang with anxious talk, weeping, increasingly angry shouting. I did this, she thought. I brought this here.

  In the end she got out of bed and dressed in the pitch dark, in the most practical clothes she could find, and sat on her bed and waited.

  Just before dawn Erishum came to her room, bearing a lamp, oil burning in a shallow bowl. ‘I will take you back to your uncle.’

  ‘I must see Qirum.’

  He grunted. ‘Why? To apologise? To finish him off?’

  ‘Erishum, please-’

  ‘You will never see him again. Get ready.’

  She clambered off her bed. She glanced back once at the goods that had been brought with her, the Tawananna’s jewellery. It meant nothing to her.

  He led her through corridors, making for the street door.

  ‘What is happening?’

  ‘Protis is to challenge for the crown. But others oppose him. It makes no difference. Too many others are ill, and the contest is futile until this plague has run its course.’

  ‘Why must I leave?’

  ‘Because there are those who blame you for bringing the plague here.’

  ‘If it’s true I did not know, Erishum. I did not know! I have been used. You have to tell him, Erishum.’

  He did not answer.

  They reached the street, deserted in the dawn light. Milaqa imagined she could feel the fear washing out across the town from the King’s house. Erishum hurried her along to the house where Teel and the rest had lodged.

  When they reached the house she asked him directly, ‘If you think Qirum’s death is my fault, why release me?’

  ‘If you are innocent, it is just. If you are guilty, you will take your “gift” back to your own people. And, listen to me.’ He leaned towards her, his face hard, dark, grim. ‘I am but a soldier; I am no priest. But now I curse you. You and all your cowardly kind, you Northlanders. For what you have done here, your black crime, may our gods destroy you, and may your own gods, the mothers of sea and sky and earth, desert you. And as for you, I will wait for you in the underworld.’ And he turned and hurried away.

  Milaqa, deeply shaken, ducked quickly inside.

  By the light of a single lamp, Teel sat by a couch, on which Raka lay under a heap of blankets. The Annid was unconscious. Milaqa saw swellings on her neck, like those on Qirum’s body.

  Teel, too, looked waxy, pale, and was breathing heavily. ‘This gift of Kilushepa’s travels quickly.’ He laughed, and coughed.

  The world seemed to swivel around Milaqa. ‘Then it’s true. You sent me to kill Qirum, not to woo him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Teel stood stiffly. ‘Oh, I am so tired… I’m sorry, child.’

  Milaqa launched herself at him. He tried to hold her off, but she was stronger than he was, and he could not stop her blows. ‘How could you? You are my uncle! All my life you have used me. How could you betray me like this?’

  ‘We had to,’ he said. ‘Because only you could do it. Only you, child! You with your relationship with Qirum. You with your heart like an empty cup. Only you would go back to the man, knowing what he had done to your own family. In a way you’re as much of a monster as he is. So we used a monster to trap a monster! It had to be done. Can’t you see that?’ Coughing, he sat again, clutching his chest. ‘Well, remember me, Milaqa, even if you can’t forgive me. I’m a sort of anti-Qirum, you know. I don’t suppose you’ll ever understand that. If a warrior brute like Qirum is the kind his country needs, brave, impulsive, impressive, I am what Northland needs. Cold, manipulative, scheming. I can imagine which of us history will favour. But you must remember me, I am the man who gave Northland iron, and changed the world. Ah, but none of it matters. I did love you so much when you were small. I’m sorry that it has come to this.’

  She wanted to kill him. She pulled back her fist.

  And she coughed convulsively, and her blood sprayed over him.

  FOUR

  65

  The Fourth Year After the Fire Mountain: Midsummer Solstice

  The day before the midsummer Giving was set aside for the blessing of the new monuments to the fallen Annids.

  The procession formed up in the great Hall of the Annids, deep within the Wall. The grand folk in their fine robes and cloaks of office circulated, murmuring as they got into their rank order. Voro found Milaqa, and here was Mi, blushingly dressed up in a costume not unlike that Milaqa had worn when she had been sent to seduce Qirum’s heart, and poison his body.

  A blast sounded, on a very ancient deer-bone horn.

  Riban took the first steps on the flight up to the Wall’s surface, leading the procession. The young priest wore an ornate deer-skull head-dress over purple-dyed hair, with holy words in the circle-and-slash Etxelur calligraphy painted on his cheeks, and his mouth bulged with the ancient wolf’s jaw pushed in there in place of his own extracted teeth. He looked the part, Milaqa thought. Riban was head of the House of the Wolves now, somewhat to his own surprise, but he was the most senior priest to have survived the plague, and now here he was leading the holiest of all Etxelur’s ceremonial processions, the commemoration of the Annids.

  Riban was not the only young Northlander to have stepped up in rank. Possibly thanks to Kilushepa’s stern advice about cleanliness and isolation, Hatti taboos imported to Northland, few in Northland beyond New Troy had died of the disease. But even deep within the Wall’s recesses some of the oldest and the very youngest, the highest to the lowest, had been taken by the plague. And so many of the great old Houses of Etxelur were led now by representatives of younger generations, and glancing around Milaqa saw that ma
ny of those wearing the ornate cloaks were no older than she was. The gathering had a youthful, refreshed feeling about it, she thought.

  Even if she would never feel young herself again. Not with all these deaths, in Northland and in New Troy, all of them coming from the opening of the box she had carried to Qirum’s chambers: her ‘black crime’, as Erishum had called it. Few knew what she had done, even here among the senior folk of Etxelur. But she felt as if it must be obvious, as if one of Caxa’s great Words had been carved into her chest.

  Amid these young people, however, the new Annid of Annids was older than her predecessor, Raka: Noli, who might have taken the post earlier if not for Bren’s manoeuvring, and who had now reluctantly accepted the responsibility. Today Kilushepa walked with her, the Tawananna as grandly dressed as Milaqa would have expected.

  And Caxa the sculptress walked ahead even of the Annid of Annids, even ahead of Kilushepa, with the priest at the very head of the procession. A proud young woman of the Land of the Jaguar with her big polished mirror-stone hanging over her chest, she looked awed, even nervous. Milaqa knew she preferred to be alone, working steadily at her art. But she seemed to find the patient presence of Riban at her side reassuring. And at least, Caxa knew, she did not have to die today; the plague had taken Xivu, that fretful conscience of the Jaguar kings, and after her work in the war Noli had promised the sculptor her protection.

  Behind these principals came other senior figures, Northlanders walking side by side with Hatti. There were many other embassies: wolf-like Albians, priest-like Gairans, warrior-like Greeks, exotic Egyptians with painted faces and towering crowns — even a party from across the Western Ocean, from the Land of the Sky Wolf, proud warriors with tremendous feathered headdresses and snake tattoos.

  There were more Northlanders than usual too, hailing from Wall Districts from the Albian terminus to the World River estuary. The great and ancient community of the Wall itself had almost crumbled under the pressure from the Trojan, and there were apologies to be made, relationships to be rebuilt. But in the end those who had fought in the war had come from end to end of the Wall for the common cause, and that was the foundation for the future.

  And towards the rear of the column walked the likes of Milaqa, Voro, Mi and others, too junior for their order of precedence to matter.

  They emerged into the air on the parapet of the Wall, before the gleaming new sculpted heads. Out to the north a bank of thick black cloud loomed over a steel-grey ocean, threatening bad weather later.

  A breeze blew up, sharp, surprisingly cold for midsummer.

  Nuwanza shivered visibly and drew his thick woollen cloak tighter around him. This frail elderly Hatti was the second cousin of Kilushepa who had done so much to secure the Tawananna’s successful rehabilitation in the court of the Hatti king. He had rarely travelled outside Hattusa itself before, and had now made a gruelling trek across the Continent all the way to Northland and the Wall. And now this fragile old fellow was to be the husband of Mi, a seventeen-year-old warrior.

  ‘So,’ Voro said to Mi, ‘how’s the boyfriend?’

  Mi walked between Voro and Milaqa now, her cheeks painted bright red, her muscular archer’s arms folded over her bare breasts. ‘Shut up.’

  Milaqa tried not to laugh. ‘You’re a woman who wrestles three-man war chariots. Look at him! You’ll probably break him on your first night.’

  Mi scowled, pursing brightly painted lips. ‘Everybody says it’s my duty to marry him.’

  Voro nodded. ‘It is. Sealing alliances with marriages. It’s what they do, out east; it’s what they understand.’

  ‘Yes, but why me? I’m no more a princess than she was,’ she said, glaring at Milaqa.

  Milaqa sighed. ‘Maybe not. But I admit you look better in the costume than I ever did. Look, Mi — you’ll survive out there. You’re tough. Everybody saw that in the war. It’s the reason you were chosen, I think. And the old man won’t last for ever.’ She grinned. ‘Not in your bed!’

  Mi scowled again. ‘Well, I’m taking my bow, and my iron-tipped arrows. Nuwanza has said I could help train their army’s archery corps. I think he said that. My Hatti still isn’t good.’

  ‘There you go,’ Voro said. ‘Women have a strong role in Hattusa. The Hatti aren’t like the Greeks. Kilushepa herself is proof of that. You’ll find a place.’

  ‘And it’s warmer in Hattusa,’ Milaqa said. ‘Besides, you won’t have to walk around like that all the time.’

  ‘Good.’ Mi looked down at her bare chest. ‘I prefer to be strapped down, frankly. Helps with the bow action. I hope it’s all worth it,’ she said, more uncertain, suddenly seeming much younger. ‘Worth me giving up my whole life like this. I hope this alliance of Hatti and Northlanders will work, though I can’t imagine how.’

  ‘I think it has a chance,’ Voro said. ‘I was involved in some of the negotiations, with the other Jackdaws. Under Kilushepa and King Hattusili the Hatti empire seems to be stabilising. They are establishing treaties of trade and mutual aid with us. They have done this kind of thing before, as their records show — treaties with Egypt, for instance, sealed by royal marriages. Now they’re also talking to the new rulers in Egypt, and in Assyria. And they are sending military missions west into Greece.’

  ‘ “Military missions,” ’ Milaqa said sourly. ‘That’s one translation. “Invasion” is another.’

  Voro shrugged. ‘But the Greek kingdoms have all but collapsed. There are already children whose parents were clerks and scribes, growing up in the forests like bandits. Order needs to be imposed from somewhere. We have agreed that we will each have our own domains of influence on the Continent. We will have Albia and Gaira, for instance, and also the Land of the Jaguars and the other countries across the Western Ocean.’

  ‘That’s nice of them,’ Milaqa said, ‘since the Hatti have no ships that can reach those places anyhow.’

  ‘But the Greeks had never sailed into our Northern Ocean either, before they blockaded us. Who knows what the future holds? Milaqa, this is a moment of flux, of change — a pivot of history. Oh, the Hatti are not perfect, but Kilushepa herself remembers how it is to be a booty person. Maybe we can come out of this with a better world, a better way of living.’

  ‘If only we all believe it can be so,’ she said cynically.

  ‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘If only we believe.’ And he looked directly at her, as if trying to reach her.

  From the boy so mortified at being unable to have prevented her mother’s death, Voro had grown. He was stockier, graver than he had once been. And he seemed stronger too — or maybe it was just that so much of her own strength had been dissipated by her brush with the plague. He had always cared for her; she had always known that, under her dismissal and contempt. Was she ready now to accept Voro’s calm, loyal patience?

  But what did she have to offer him? She was a burned-out shell. Kilushepa’s surgeons had warned her gravely that survivors of the coughing plague often had difficulty carrying children. And she could never tell him her secret. Never tell him of the black crime.

  She was distracted by clouds thickening the sun, a fresh bite in the freshening wind.

  ‘I need time,’ she blurted, then instantly regretted it.

  Once that would have driven him away. Now he just held her hands. ‘I know.’

  Beside them, Mi smiled.

  Together they turned to face the Wall’s new stone heads.

  Riban climbed a platform and, arms outstretched, his face distorted, began gabbling words from a language more ancient, it was said, than the age of Ana herself, who had founded the Wall and saved Northland. But everyone knew what Riban was saying. He celebrated the visages of Raka and Kuma, who had joined the row of those who glared at the ocean that the Wall had defied for hundreds of generations already, and would defy for much longer yet.

  Through the long winter Milaqa had watched Caxa and her assistants labour at the heads. They were made not of the local sandstone but of a
harder rock, said to originate from dead fire mountains in the north of Albia. Caxa had insisted on using only the techniques traditional among her people; she had roughed out the faces from the ferociously resistant rock with stone hammers, and then had used drills and abrasives, polishing and scraping with ever finer materials, to complete the details. There were markings in the Etxelur script, rings and tails, with the names of the Annids and a brief declaration of their achievement. There was a time stamp too, a string of numbers, a mark of when they had lived and died, recorded in the long calendar of Etxelur. The resulting heads were huge, each as tall as a human being. The faces were stylised in the way of the Jaguar folk, with flattened noses, broad lips, large eyes — yet they were recognisably Kuma and Raka.

  And beneath Kuma’s head lay a single iron arrowhead, placed there by Milaqa — the thing that had killed her mother, buried for ever beneath this symbol of her eternal triumph.

  Riban’s peroration was almost done. He raised his hands to the sky, and called in plain language on the little mothers of sea, earth and sky to welcome the Annids to their undying hearths.

  And in that instant snow blew in, a sharp, thick flurry that came flying on the wind from the north, off the sea. People murmured in confusion and shock. The snow soon began to gather on the huge profiles of the stone heads, in their eyes, their nostrils.

  Snow, at midsummer. Milaqa remembered a soldier’s curse. May your own gods, the mothers of sea and sky and earth, desert you. She turned away, sheltering her face from the sting of the snowflakes.

  66

  The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice was remembered only in myth.

  But the ice remembered.

  And now the long retreat was over.