‘No,’ Qirum said bluntly. ‘Northland is not like any land you’ve seen before, Prince. Not a land of farms and cities, not like Greece or Anatolia or Egypt. There are great works there, canals and dykes and tremendous walls that span the horizon. But not cities. The people are wily, but there are not great swarms of them. They do not farm. They have a patina of civilisation, but in truth they are like the savages of the northern forests, or even the beasts that prey on them, for they live solely by what they can gather and hunt. And they are not experienced fighters, for they do not engage in war, as we do.’
The Spider nodded. When he spoke his speech was slurred from the heroic quantity he had already drunk. ‘I have heard your arguments before, Trojan. Yet I am still not sure I understand. If there are no slaves to take, no cities to sack-’
‘Not even goats to screw,’ a man called coarsely, and there was laughter.
‘Then what am I fighting for?’
‘For a kingdom,’ Qirum said, and he fixed his gaze on Protis and the Spider and the senior men, his expression intent. ‘A new kingdom. The land is the thing. The people are worthless. But we can bring in our own slaves, like your booty people, Protis, gathered from the collapsing polities of the east. The Hatti have always done this. With our slaves we will farm the rich land until we are fat on wheat and grain, and our cattle run as numberless as raindrops. And we will build our own cities, where none have sprouted before. Northland is an empty space, a hole in the world. We will fill it with a new realm not seen in the world before.’
The Spider grinned, showing his sharpened teeth. ‘New cities! I like that. Let mine be called Telipinu City.’
‘Yes!’ Qirum stood and paced. ‘You!’ He pointed at Urhi, who scrambled for a slate and stylus. ‘Write this down. Telipinu City. Protis City. Qirum City! New Troy, New Mycenae, New Hattusa! Write it down lest we forget.’
Protis watched Urhi, amused. ‘You are not yet a king, but you have a king’s scribe.’
‘I found him in Abydos, a city in the Troad, near Troy itself, which I besieged with the Spider at my side. I say I found Urhi. We burned his city, and he watched his family die, and as he was marched away with chains around his neck with a thousand others he loudly begged to be allowed to use his skills. My soft heart let him live a while longer. But he knows that I could cast him down once more in a moment, don’t you, good Urhi? Make sure you write that down too. Go on! Write it down!’
Urhi forced himself to smile as, with laughter raining around him, he worked his clay slate, his stylus pecking like a bird’s beak as he made the wedge-shaped characters.
Protis laughed. ‘A new kingdom, then. With you installed as king, and us as your companions, I suppose.’
He used a Greek word, basileis, which Urhi understood as meaning more than companions — it meant lords, with power and holdings of their own. And Protis and the Spider exchanged a glance which every man in the room could read, a glance that said that in the end these two would not be content to remain basileis of any man.
But Qirum said only, ‘You know my circumstances, Prince. I have lifted myself up from the ruin of my home city as a heavy stone is lifted from a pool of water, and now I address you as an equal.’ Qirum waved a hand. ‘Look at us, all survivors of the great smash-up of the states to the east — you Greeks, you Anatolians. You men of the Troad, my own country, from Troy and Abydos and Zeleia, and from the wider Anatolia, from Phrygia to Lycia. Even you Hatti, like the Spider here, who knew when to run from a burning house!’
The Spider said to Protis, ‘He has a particular distaste for the Hatti — don’t you, Trojan? For he was bested by a woman in Hattusa. Not just any woman, mind — the Tawananna herself.’
‘Yes! But one day I will return, at the head of a formidable army — an army raised in my own kingdom — and I will do to that dismal country what I should have done to Kilushepa when I first slept with her, and split it wide open from breast to pubis.’
That raised a coarse cheer.
‘We will be a great people,’ he went on, shouting, waving his arms, stalking back and forth. ‘And a new people. Not Greek or Trojan or Hatti any more. As tin and copper come together to make bronze, so our blood will mix to create a new people in a new kingdom — and all men will know our names, for ever, as we remember the Great King Sargon of Akkad. Tomorrow we will start, we will form up our forces for a great journey — and then a war!’ He won a louder cheer for that.
‘And now we will set out our case before our gods.’ He clapped his hands, and nodded to a senior slave. To a rumble of approval from the men a new feast was brought in, more wine, the meat of ritually slaughtered sheep. Priests brought bowls of entrails of birds and snakes, regarded as key sources of divination by Trojans.
And then the holiest relics were produced. A small statue was set up beside Qirum’s throne, a plaster representation of a human figure with a bull’s head, its arms upraised. Qirum made his obeisance, muttering prayers. ‘The Storm God. You Greeks know him as Zeus, and the Hatti as Teshub. Closer to Troy than any city in the world, the god who has always fought at our side-’
Protis said, ‘He wasn’t fighting too well on the day my father joined in your city’s sack.’
Qirum snapped, ‘That is a quarrel for our fathers in the underworld. Troy’s most sacred statue of the Storm God was lost later, and not to the Greeks, but when Hatti raiders came to feast on the decaying corpse of their own supposed protectorate. This, though, this has been purified and blessed; this has seen endless sacrifices — in this, the Storm God is present.’ He bowed again, muttering prayers.
Then he straightened up, and clapped his hands again. To a howl of appreciation from the increasingly drunken men three girls were brought in, chained together at neck and feet, all pale, all naked. One, Urhi saw, had been smeared by mud, the second, shivering, had been shaven bare from head to crotch, and the third appeared to be glistening wet — Urhi imagined that was the result of some viscous oil smeared on her skin rather than water, which would run off and dry. The girls stood before the leering, shouting men, huddling together for protection. Urhi wondered if they had been drugged.
Qirum stalked before the girls, waving his wine cup so that droplets splashed the girls, red as blood on their pale flesh. ‘Here you are, you men — meet your first Northlanders. Healthy stock, aren’t they? All that wild meat they consume, I suppose. Snatched in raids by my most trusted men. Not a one over sixteen years old, and every one of them a virgin.
‘It is the Trojan way, the Anatolian way, to interrogate the gods of our enemies before going into battle. After all, what is war but a trial before the gods? And he who pleases the gods the most is permitted to win — and live. And so here they are, the goddesses of Northland, made incarnate before you. The little mothers, they call them, the little mothers of the earth and of the sea and of the sky, of dirt and damp and cold.
‘What have you to say for yourselves, mothers? What have you done with your people? Why have you kept the fire of war from their bellies, the genius of farming from their hearts? Why are your children so few, you mothers, ten where there could be a hundred, a hundred where there could be ten thousand? Are your wombs so barren?’ He lifted the heads of the bewildered girls with fingers under their chins, and he squeezed their breasts and grabbed their backsides, making them flinch.
At length the Spider stood up and lifted his kilt. ‘I’ll tell you how I’d like to interrogate them.’
Qirum laughed, waved Protis forward, and began to remove his own kilt. ‘Just as I planned — come, friends, my basileis!’
The men roared, their faces greasy from meat, their chins stained by wine. The chains were removed from the girls.
Qirum arranged it so that each of the three leaders deflowered one virgin each. Then they each moved on to another girl, and then the third. The Spider went at it enthusiastically. Protis, though, was more fussy. He preferred to use the anus of his second girl and the mouth of the third, as if they were still virginal.
When the leaders were done the girls were taken out, but more whores were brought in for the crowd of leering men. The women disappeared in knots of bodies, like slabs of meat thrown to dogs.
Urhi forced himself to watch it all, and he tried not to think of what he had seen done to his wife and his daughter in their last hours.
The feasting continued to the dawn. Then Qirum called them all outside, for he had arranged another stunt. Once more he had his priests produce the three Northlander girls, naked and done out in their guises as the little mothers, their bruises treated, the blood washed from their thighs.
And Qirum had his soldiers hang the little mother of the sky from a scaffold by her wrists, so she turned in the wind; and the little mother of the sea was forced into a barrel of seawater that was nailed shut; and the little
