a din of raucous laughter rose up as the assembled leaders of Northland started on the evening’s mead.
16
The Trojan party, travelling ever deeper into the great country of Gaira, followed the valley until the river dissolved into its feeder tributaries. Then they climbed a long rise and emerged from the forest, to find themselves on an island of higher ground in a landscape coated by thick oak woodland. They had come several days’ walk from the beach where they had landed. Smoke rose here and there, but otherwise there was no sign of people.
Praxo approached Qirum and Kilushepa. ‘Vertix says we’re near the watershed. There’s a community of farmers a bit further on. We can trade for food and shelter. They know folk who will guide us to the big river that will lead us north and west to the land of the Bardi. And then — well, then we can start looking for a sea-going ship.’
Qirum nodded. He would not meet Praxo’s eyes. He had found it impossible to speak to the man since his conversation with Kilushepa some days earlier.
Praxo waited for a response. When none came, he just laughed and walked away.
Vertix led them down to lower land and back into dense forest, where they followed a track so narrow and winding it might have been made by deer. The men pushed along, grumbling.
As the day approached its end, at last they broke through into a clearing. Perhaps a hundred paces across, it was walled off by tall oaks with knots of hazel at their feet, and the open ground was studded by saplings. A handful of houses sat here, Qirum counted four, five, six, with frames of oak trunks covered by a thatch of leaves and reeds. Half the clearing seemed to be given over to a crop, wheat growing sparsely. In a pen of woven wicker a few scrawny sheep grazed apathetically. The rest of the clearing looked to Qirum like a hunters’ camp, with joints of a recently killed deer hanging dripping from a frame, a skin stretched out to dry, and heaps of spears, arrows, bows, amid the usual middens. A big open-air hearth crackled, smoke rising, with a huge pot suspended over it on a trestle. In one doorway a woman sat with her child on her lap, watching, uninterested.
A man came out of one of the huts, bare-chested, hobbling, leaning on a stick. He must have been well over forty. Vertix went to greet him, and they spoke.
Praxo, standing with Qirum, listened in. ‘He’s saying the men are away hunting, with most of the older kids. Just a few mothers here, with infants. There’s a big man who will talk with us when we get back
… This old one will bring us water. Not very quickly, probably.’
Kilushepa was peering around at the camp with contempt. ‘What a shabby place. Do these people think they are farmers? This isn’t a farm! This is a scrape. At Hattusa we have farms that stretch to the horizon. And in Egypt, along their great river — you could lose all of this in a single one of their fields.’ She walked to a house and kicked its support. ‘Call this a house? I have seen bigger hearths.’
And Qirum saw the compact little farm as she saw it, with eyes accustomed to the glories of cities like Hattusa, immense monuments of stone.
Now there was a commotion: a growl, a slap, a baby’s wail. A couple of the men, growing bored, had gone over to the woman nursing the baby. Now she was standing, her baby crying against her chest, and one man held a hand before a bloody mouth. ‘I only wanted to play with her spare titty! What’s wrong with that?’ The old man emerged from his hut again, shouting and waving his stick. Vertix hurried over, calling for calm.
Praxo growled, ‘I’d better go sort it out.’
‘No,’ Kilushepa said simply.
‘No?’ Praxo turned to her, huge, a dangerous expression on his face. ‘No, you say?’
‘Why deal with these people? Take the food you want. Have that woman. Have the old man if you want. Are you afraid of women and old men?’
Praxo glowered. ‘It’s not a question of fear. We’re here to trade with the Northlanders. That was my understanding. Not to burn our way through the forests of Gaira.’ Behind him a shoving match was developing between the old man and the rowers, while the baby screamed. ‘Tell her, Qirum.’
‘Praxo, you don’t tell me what to do,’ Qirum said, his anger seething, inchoate, directionless.
‘Evidently he does,’ Kilushepa murmured softly. ‘Or he thinks he does. Why do you think he speaks to you this way, Qirum? I wonder how he sees you — as the beaten boy on his knees before him?’
‘Enough,’ he snarled.
‘If you won’t start it, I will.’ She strode to the big hearth, picked a brand out of the fire, and prepared to hurl it at one of the houses.
‘No!’ Praxo strode across and grabbed her arm. ‘You do as I say, woman.’
‘And you will not defy me!’ Qirum’s words were a bark that sounded in his own head as if they had come from somebody else’s mouth, from the muzzle of a dog. He ran forward, and his right arm reached for the sword in its leather scabbard on his back, as if of its own accord.
It was over before he understood what he had done. His sword protruded from Praxo’s back, its tip thrusting from his front, ripping his tunic.
Praxo dropped to his knees and looked back at Qirum, astonished. He tried to breathe, and a pink froth bubbled from the wounds on his back and chest, and then a darker fluid gushed, almost black. He fell forward.
Qirum looked around. Everybody in the clearing was staring at him, the men from the boat, Vertix, the old man, the woman. ‘I-’ I did not do it. It was not me. Yet it was my hands, my arms, my sword.
Kilushepa, breathing hard, still held the burning brand. ‘That’s the end of that complication. Now let’s get on with things.’ She dropped the brand into the dirt, where it burned out harmlessly.
17
So Milaqa, submitting to Teel’s urging, attached herself to the party of traders led by Jackdaw Bren to meet the Hatti embassy. The meeting point was in a country called Kanti, in the south of Albia. They had to travel the length of Northland over the higher ground of the First Mother’s Ribs, by canal, horse carriage and on foot, until they reached the south-east corner of Albia, where the peninsula met Gaira and the Continent. Kanti was not like the open plains of Northland. Here the hills and valleys came in waves, small and closed in. After days of following river valleys and tracks through this shut-in landscape — and with the oppressive company of the traders, five of them including Bren and Voro — Milaqa longed for a glimpse of horizon.
It was a relief when the Kanti farmstead came into view on the higher ground. At least the farm was an open sprawl, on a hillside above a river bank. Around a big central house, long and square-cornered, fields were roughly scratched in the earth, storage pits, animals in pens, and the usual dumps of ordure and waste. Other, smaller buildings were scattered around. The animals were cattle, stunted-looking creatures much smaller than the graceful aurochs Milaqa was used to in Northland, and sheep and goats, long-legged, hairy creatures, exotic imports from the east. People worked in the fields, mostly women and children, poking at the chalky soil with sticks and pulling up weeds. The farm as a whole was encircled by stones, each as high as Milaqa’s waist and spaced a few paces apart.
And all of this was surrounded by the endless forest of southern Albia, the tremendous oaks with their long straight trunks. Milaqa could see there had been burning at the forest edge, where huge fallen trunks lay blackened and scorched, and bright new growths of saplings and hazel pushed into the light. The farm looked poor to Milaqa, the ground desiccated and weed-choked. Maybe the drought that was famously afflicting the Continent was breathing on Albia too — and, indeed, she knew that a number of nestspills from Albia had come to Northland in their distress.
The folk in the fields were distracted by the new arrivals, and stood and stared as they walked up towards the big house. One woman stood apart, at the head of the rough track by the house. Tall, slim, dressed in a robe of some ornate cloth, her hair close-cropped, she looked utterly out of place in this scrubby farm. A handful of men stood behind her, dressed like well-off Hatti, as Milaqa recognised. They all stood silent. You could see they were utterly dominated by the woman.
