‘That doesn’t matter, does it? I see it now. The real Zidanza is in hiding. Soon we will smuggle him out of the city, and we will bring him back to Northland.
‘What a strategist the woman is! Kilushepa knew the panku would not give up the Master, or even his apprentice. But she wanted to fulfil the agreement she made with us; she sees the value of our friendship in the long term, where these fools cannot. So she arranged for this — subterfuge. We get the apprentice. They believe he’s dead, and will not miss him. In the meantime they have their Master, who will soon train another junior, once they stir him from his bed. And all the time the councillors think that Kilushepa has won them the secret of our foods for nothing! What a victory she has won.’
‘This is insane,’ Milaqa said. ‘And what of Qirum? Did he kill this stranger?’
‘Oh, of course not. Why would he?’
‘Then who did?’
‘That doesn’t matter either, does it?’
‘But why would Kilushepa falsely accuse Qirum? He saved her life — he was her lover.’
‘She’s said it herself. He was a stepping stone. Useful to her once, but he had become an irritant. Evidently she used this opportunity to resolve that problem too.’
Anger burned; all she could think of was Qirum. ‘Is that how you see people too, uncle? As problems to be solved?’
‘This is how the world works, Milaqa. And if you want to be a Crow you need to learn to think more like Kilushepa. What a woman!’
She turned on her heel, leaving him behind.
At the door the sergeant was still waiting, his tunic stained by the blood of the stranger.
‘Please — Hunda…’
‘Yes?’
‘Get me out of here. Out of the citadel. Now.’
He hesitated for one heartbeat. Then he led her out into streets bubbling with agitation and rumour after the exit of the panku members. People flinched back from the bloodstained soldier. Hunda led Milaqa towards the gate of the citadel, but when she got the chance she turned a corner faster than he did, and disappeared from his sight. She felt tremendously guilty; Hunda was a good man, and today he was obviously bewildered by the events he was suddenly caught up in, and here she was using him unscrupulously. But she had to get to the gate before the palace bodyguards.
When she arrived at the gate Qirum was still standing there, where she had last seen him. For once, it seemed, his own sense of self-preservation had deserted him. And, she noticed, there was no blood on him, no sign of a desperate struggle with an iron-maker. He asked, ‘How did it go? Did my Kilushepa-’
‘Your Kilushepa betrayed you. Run, Qirum.’
His face clouded. ‘She would not.’
‘She claims you killed a man. An iron-maker.’
‘She would not — I did not!’
‘Where is your dagger?’
He checked his belt. He drew a dagger, but it was not his — a clumsier design, good enough to mimic his own weapon’s weight and size. ‘ She took it when I slept. After our love. She betrayed me. And the Northlanders? That snake Teel-’
‘He knew nothing of it. But now the deed is done, he relishes it-’
‘I am betrayed by all but you, Milaqa.’
‘Run. Hide. Get out of the city. You have only heartbeats before they come for you.’
He hesitated. Then he kissed her, once, on the cheek, just as he had on the first day they had met. ‘I won’t forget this.’
There was shouting behind her, from the citadel. She glanced back, saw men running, swords drawn — Hunda coming, yelling at her.
When she looked again, Qirum was gone.
And much later, when she got back to Hunda’s home — and she found Deri there, cradling a weeping, bloodstained Tibo — she discovered who it was who had killed the innocent man, whose rage and inchoate desire for revenge had been unleashed in so useful a fashion. They began to talk urgently about how to get the boy out of Hattusa before he suffered the dread judgement of a Hatti court.
42
Qirum walked into the camp of the Spider, alone this time, unarmed.
The warlord sat alone in the dark, in his shack of pointless treasures. Outside, the din of the camp continued, the animal noises of rutting and fighting. The Spider considered the Trojan. The new wounds he bore, from the hard journey he’d made to get back here. The obvious rage inside.
‘We need to talk,’ said Qirum.
‘What about?’
‘Northland. And the Tawananna. And…’
‘Yes?’
‘Revenge.’
THREE
43
The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Late Spring
‘Hit me,’ Hunda said. ‘I mean it. Come on. Hit me.’ He grinned.
Tibo just stood before the Hatti sergeant. A few soldiers watched idly, with Milaqa and Voro standing by uncomfortably. Before Hunda, Tibo was a boy-man before a man-boy, Milaqa thought. On a patch of Northland ground trampled to lifeless dust by Hatti soldiers’ boots, the two of them stood naked save for grimy loincloths, barefoot, without weapons, the dirt clinging to their legs.
Kilushepa had loaned the Northlanders a thousand or so warriors, and here they were, with many more followers — servants and slaves of the officers, weapon-makers and cooks and cobblers, dentists and doctors, and women, some of them wives, many of them booty-women with exotic looks and strange tongues, brought from places far from here. There were children running around, even infants, some of them conceived and born during this army’s long journey here by sea and land. One man, bizarrely, had a young piglet on a long rope. Meant for that evening’s meal, its snout twitched at the piles of filthy clothes, the boots, the smoking hearth.
Around the Hatti camp the ground was scored by sewage gullies and the ruts of chariot wheels, with further out an elaborate defensive earthwork of ditches and ramparts. It was a place of filth and stench, like a pen of animals, where disease had already run through the ranks like fire.
But Northland had to accept this great unnatural scab in its heart, because the reports were persistent and ominous. Qirum was building an army. The Trojans were coming to Northland.
The moment stretched, the challenge hanging in the air between the two fighters. Hunda was actually shorter than Tibo. Many of the Hatti struck the Northland folk as short — cattle-folk, they called them, stunted after growing up on a diet of rotten meat and teeth-grinding bread. And Tibo had bulked up; still just seventeen years old, he had pushed his body hard in the months since he had been freed from the camp of the warlord called the Spider. Yet it was obvious that size didn’t matter, even the mass of Tibo’s muscles didn’t matter. Even stripped to his loincloth, even with that thick braid of hair at his back hanging loose, Hunda looked like a soldier, a warrior. For all his size Tibo still looked like a frightened boy.
‘Come on, hit me,’ Hunda said again. He sounded almost gentle. ‘Or are you afraid? After what that Wilusan
