She picked up the lamp; it was a clay jug heavy with oil. ‘I’m ready.’
‘Good, because-’
Because they were here.
The pirate was another Greek boat, Milaqa saw, a sleek black hull with savage painted eyes. The hull itself was battered and showed signs of patching, a hardened fighting ship. And as Qirum had predicted it was about twice the length of theirs, and seemed to swarm with men.
The ropes started flying over, weighted with stones, with hooks of sharpened bone. Qirum’s crew hacked at the ropes with their axes and blades. The pirates hauled with relish, laughing. Milaqa saw they were preparing to throw a weighted net over the boat, which would trap them all. One man looked directly at her. He wore a skull plate nailed to his shaven head, and his face was crowded with tattoos. He opened his mouth to reveal sharpened teeth, and a tongue that had been cleft like a snake’s. He barely looked human at all. She clenched her oar, recoiling, shocked, suddenly flooded with fear. She was nothing to this man, she saw, her own self worthless. To him she was a scrap of flesh to be robbed, used and discarded — and then forgotten, no doubt, before the night fell. What god would make a universe where such a horror could be inflicted on her?
But he hadn’t got her yet.
Qirum fired off a flaming arrow — but it missed, and sailed harmlessly into the sea, where its flame died. He fired another and hit a man in the chest; he screamed and fell backward into the sea. A third thunked into the pirate’s hull. And now, as the enemy ship closed, Qirum cried, ‘Milaqa!’
For an instant she could not move. She couldn’t take her eyes off the tattooed man, who grinned, and beckoned to her, an obscene gesture. Qirum called again.
With all her strength Milaqa hurled her lantern.
It smashed against the base of the pirate’s mast, and flame blossomed. The men scrambled away from the sudden fire, trying to douse it using seawater scooped up with bilge buckets. The rowers managed to cut the last of the ropes, and the pirate ship drifted away, and Qirum loosed off more arrows, picking off the men. Tibo whooped, and hurled his spear uselessly after the pirate vessel.
‘Now row!’ Qirum shouted. ‘Let’s put some distance between us! Take your oars!’
The oarsmen, including Milaqa and Qirum, quickly settled. Soon they were in the familiar rhythm, chanting together now, a triumphant, ‘One — pull! One — pull!’ Milaqa, looking out over the stern as she rowed, saw the blazing pirate ship recede into the distance. The crew, abandoning their attempt to save the ship, leapt into the water.
‘The gods spared us,’ muttered Qirum as he rowed. ‘If you had failed with your throw, Milaqa, even by a hand’s breadth — and there’s a great deal of luck involved in lobbing from one moving ship into another — we would all be dying, spilling our blood into the water by now. They toy with us, the gods, our little lives and deaths amuse them…’
Kilushepa put away her own knife. Throughout the incident she had not moved from her bench at the stern, as expressionless as if nothing important had happened at all.
But Milaqa gave way to a deep shuddering. She couldn’t get the image of the tattooed face out of her mind, that cleft tongue. He had come so close. She longed to be somewhere safe, to have the stout bulk of the Wall around her.
The kindly Greek behind her put his hand on her shoulder, squeezed.
32
They made landfall in Troy’s harbour later the same day.
They left the boat with Qirum’s Greek recruits, and made the short walk along a rutted road towards the city itself. They were all heavily laden with packs, save for Kilushepa and Noli, and they walked slowly, getting used to being on the land again, and in silence — exhausted, shocked, Milaqa thought. Teel had barely spoken since the pirate attack. Even Deri was subdued. Only Tibo, marching just behind Qirum, looked bright, curious.
Milaqa had had an air of unreality since the attack, as if the pirates had killed her, as if she was a ghost walking. She tried to concentrate on the landscape around her. What could she make of it? Well, this road from the harbour had once been paved. Now the stones were broken and scattered, the road long unrepaired. The land itself had been heavily farmed, as you could tell from the tight pattern of boundary walls — you could even see the scraped lines where the ground had been painfully prepared to take the seed. But on this summer day, when the fields should have been plump with green, only weeds grew, and ravens pecked at the hard, dry soil. In one field she saw a big skeleton, maybe a horse, picked clean, the eyes in its long skull gaping.
Qirum marched through this fallen landscape without comment.
The walls of Troy loomed before them, a band across the countryside. A pall of orange smoke rose up from a hundred fires, and within the walls the buildings were a jumble of scorched stone. It was like a vast tomb, Milaqa thought, like the mound-tombs built by the silent priests of Gaira, stone boxes where dusty men would rummage through the heaped-up bones of their ancestors. Troy would be the first large city Milaqa had actually entered. At Mycenae and other way stations, Qirum had always urged the party to stay hidden in the country outside. The cities now, he always said, swarming with the starving and desperate, were more dangerous than the lands beyond their walls. But they were going into Troy.
When the breeze shifted, subtly, Milaqa smelled death, the harsh, sour stink of it. She covered her mouth with the collar of her tunic.
As they neared the city the tracks branched out, heading for different gates. Qirum chose a track, and they came to a ditch that Qirum said was designed to keep out bandits on chariots. As they crossed by a light wooden bridge, Milaqa saw the ditch was full of corpses — many of them children — a rotting, angular mass. Here was the source of that stench, then. They hurried over the bridge, for they all knew that the gods of disease lingered around fresh corpses. Qirum clapped his hands, and carrion birds rose up in a squawking cloud.
‘There has been a great massacre,’ Tibo said.
‘No, my would-be warrior,’ Qirum said. ‘Nothing so dramatic. The only battle being waged here is against hunger and thirst and disease, and these are the fallen foot soldiers of that battle. This is where they bring out the corpses each morning — the bodies of those who succumbed during the night.’ He wrinkled his nose at the stink. ‘They used to burn them. Looks like even that discipline has been abandoned.’
From close to, the wooden palisade around the city wasn’t as formidable a barrier as it had seemed from further out. Its face was patched, the breaches jammed with rough agglomerations of timber and rubble, and it was scorched by fire. It had evidently suffered many attacks. Still, the wall clearly served to keep undesirables out. When they got to the gate they found people gathered around — crowds of them, sitting in an eerie silence. There were even crude lean-tos, huddled up against the ramparts.
These people watched as Qirum’s party passed. Their skin, their clothes, were the colour of the dust they sat in. Children, wide-eyed, listless and with swollen bellies, came forward to the travellers, hands out. Many of these wretches bore terrible wounds, Milaqa saw, hideous scars crossing little faces, severed limbs ending in fly-swarming stumps. Wounds that were memories in flesh of flashing bronze swords wielded by mighty heroes.
The gate itself was just another breach in the wall, through which ran a rutted track. Men lounged here, in armour of leather and with shields of wood, their kit poorer than Qirum’s bronze breastplate, though their swords gleamed from polishing. The largest of them stood in front of Qirum as he tried to pass. ‘No entry,’ he said in rough Trojan. ‘King’s orders.’
‘And who is king now? Never mind.’
The warrior looked briefly impressed by his accent. But he said, ‘I’d walk on if I were you, brother. Troy’s full. And no food to be had anyhow.’
‘You look well fed enough,’ snapped Kilushepa in her own tongue. ‘But then palace guards always are, aren’t they? Always the most privileged, until at last they betray their masters.’
Qirum raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Please — stay silent.’
The warrior looked at the Tawananna suspiciously. ‘What did she say? Who is she?’
‘Never mind,’ Qirum said. ‘Look…’ He dug into a pouch at his belt, and produced a fleck of gold. ‘Imagine how many whores you can buy with this. I am sure there are plenty of those still in Troy.’
