Bronze Summer (29 page)

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.

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.

Their sergeant approached the travellers. Two of his men pointed spears, while the others headed for the carts.

‘Take it easy,’ Qirum murmured in Trojan. ‘They’re just inspecting us. Don’t give them cause to get upset.’ His men scowled, but kept their hands away from their weapons.

The sergeant, a weary-looking veteran, called in clear Nesili, ‘Who leads you?’

‘I do.’ The Tawananna stepped forward.

The sergeant looked her up and down cautiously. ‘And you are?’

She smiled easily. ‘Do you not remember me? I was never very good at showing my face to the people. Always too busy with affairs of family and state. I am Kilushepa, Tawananna, aunt of Hattusili the Sixth – who I presume still occupies the throne?’

‘He does.’ The sergeant peered at her. ‘If you are the Tawananna, they said you were dead. And that before you were dead you were a traitor.’

‘Lies.’

‘You tried to poison the King.’

Kilushepa was utterly fearless. ‘Would I dare return if that was so? I was betrayed by my enemies at court, that much is true.’

‘If those enemies still live, why have you returned? For revenge?’

‘Not that. To help. For Hattusa, and all the Hatti realm, faces a terrible crisis. You must see that.’

‘It’s true, it’s true,’ he said grimly. ‘My own wife and kids – well. You don’t need to hear my little troubles.’

‘The question is,’ Kilushepa said, ‘will you let us pass?’

He looked uncertain. ‘I’m just a sergeant.’

Teel murmured to Milaqa, ‘And yet what he decides now will shape all of history to come. What an extraordinary scene to witness. But he’s not the first common soldier to be put in such a position, and he won’t be the last. Every time there is a palace coup the decision of a lowly bodyguard can shape the destiny of a trembling empire.’

‘You speak as if you’re not here,’ Milaqa whispered back. ‘As if you’re outside it all, looking in. Reading about it in some archive.’

‘Maybe it helps me control my fear.’

Kilushepa simply smiled at the sergeant. ‘What is your name?’

‘Hunda, madam.’

‘Hunda, then. Follow your heart.’

‘Hmm. Well, you’re impressive enough. And if it’s true your family betrayed you, they deserve what’s coming to them.’ Milaqa had learned that to the Hatti family loyalty was the strongest bond – and to betray family was a powerful taboo, which even a king dared not break. ‘On the other hand, if you’re lying, you’ll soon get what’s coming to
you
. You may pass. No – I’ll escort you the rest of the way. The country isn’t as safe as it used to be.’

So the Hatti soldiers formed up around the party, and they moved on, with the sergeant leading, and Kilushepa on her cart. The Hatti soldiers and Qirum’s hired Trojan thugs eyed each other with contempt and hostility. Tension crackled.

And soon they came over a final rise, and at last Hattusa was laid out before them.

The great city, capped by a fug of smoke from its endless fires, was ringed around by a circuit of walls, mud brick over stone, painted brilliant white and topped by arrowhead crenellations, walls that strode up hillsides and over summits and ridges and along cliff edges, punctuated by huge blocky towers. In one place there was a tremendous structure, a square base tapering up to a flat summit, the sloping sides combed by steps. The outer wall simply rose up and over even this vast obstacle, although it was broken by an enormous gate. And the walls were not restricted to the outer curtain but extended inward in loops and folds, enclosing whole districts within the city itself. It was extraordinary – ghastly – a place of exclusion and control, as you could see at a glance.

But Milaqa could see that this monstrous fort-city had fallen on hard times, for the great walls were scorched and scarred, and the familiar mud-brown tide of a shanty town had washed up against the outer curtain.

They set off down a slope, following the track, heading for a gate in the south-west corner of the wall curtain.

‘Of course we don’t have your growstone,’ Kilushepa said. ‘Perhaps that’s the next secret I should trade for, and we could build even higher. But even so, we’ve done rather well, haven’t we? It would take you the best part of a day just to walk around the circuit of the outer walls.’