cloth and flesh and stomach wall. The man fell forward into the seawater, and blood spilled red. Qirum laughed, exultant.
A Hatti officer roared, ‘Scrape these bastards off the beach!’
The defenders charged, bellowing, in their line, and Nago and Deri ran with them. Nago pumped air into his lungs and clenched his muscles, a fisherman trying to become a fighter, trying to remember the training the Hatti corporals had given him.
And he saw the first Trojan he was going to close with, a huge fellow from the lead boat. He carried a sword in his scabbard and a spear in his hands, but he had no shield. Rather he was kitted out with full armour, bronze sheets on his breast and over his thighs, jointed extensions to protect his neck and shoulders, and his face was shielded by a grill of bronze under a boar-tusk helmet. It chilled Nago that he could not see the man’s face, this stranger determined to kill him. The man came at Nago with a muscular roar.
Don’t hesitate: that was the one message the Hatti corporals had rammed into the heads and hearts of the Northlander fishermen and canal-dredgers. Don’t hesitate to strike, to kill, or you will be killed.
Nago ducked under the Trojan’s sword thrust and swung his own weapon, hoping to cut the man down at his legs, only to have the blade clatter against shaped armour plates on the shins. A spear stabbed down, and Nago rolled on his back on damp sand to avoid the thrust. He struggled to his feet, but while he was still off-balance the warrior raised his spear again. Nago, almost falling, lunged at the man with his sword point-first, probing, finding a joint in the armour — and he drove his sword up under the man’s right shoulder plate, sliding it beneath the metal and into soft flesh. The warrior collapsed, gurgling behind his mask. He would have pulled Nago down, but Nago stayed upright, stepping back, holding onto the hilt of his sword, feeling how it tore through the man’s body as he fell. The Trojan landed on his back, like an upended crab in the shallow seawater. Nago dragged out his sword, positioned the blade again, and thrust down into the man’s mouth, driving through soft tissue until the blade ground on bone. The man coughed frothy blood, and subsided.
Nago pulled back the sword, breathing hard. For a heartbeat he could not hear the battle rage around him, could not see the grounded ships or the bloody froth. Just him and the man who he had killed, that was all that populated his world. He longed to be in his boat. Just him and the ocean.
Then a sword blade flashed past his face, and the severed hand of a Greek warrior, still clutching the dagger that would have killed Nago, fell in the spray. The man dropped back screaming, blood pumping from his arm.
Deri reached over Nago to finish the man off with a sharp thrust through the ribs. He straightened up, bleeding from a cut to his shoulder, breathing hard, his leggings soaked with spray. ‘Don’t make me save you again, cousin.’ And then he twisted away, to take on another massive Trojan.
Nago raised his sword and looked around. More ships were landing. Eager to get into the fray, men were splashing out into deep water, struggling with heavy shields or armour. There were horses scrambling in the surf too, Nago saw. And the Hatti and Northlanders were wading out to meet the invaders. Arrows and stones hailed onto the struggling mass from the boats further out, and from defenders deeper inland. The whole of the littoral was becoming a shapeless melee, with a thrashing of blades and spears, and blood ran everywhere, bright crimson among the fallen; even the sea ran red. Nago already felt exhausted, as if his fight with the huge armoured man had used up his energy for the day. Yet it was barely begun.
He charged forward, back into the tangle of fighting.
The first man he met had no armour, no weapons; he floundered in the surf, having apparently fallen out of his ship. Nago swiped at his throat with his sword blade and left the man dying on his knees. Next came a formidable man with a long plaited queue like a Hatti. The two exchanged three heavy blows with their swords, each parrying the other, before the man slipped in the water and Nago drove his sword through his quilted tunic and into his belly, and thrust and dragged.
And the third man was Qirum. Nago’s last vision was of the Trojan’s open mouth, laughing, his flashing bloodstained sword.
Pain, bright as sunlight off the sea.
To Mi, watching from the long grass above the beach, the battle was a press of squirming meat and blood and metal that filled the bay.
She saw Nago fall. In an instant the fighting closed over him like a bloody tide, and his body was lost. One of her own family, cut down by Qirum. Something congealed deep inside Mi, hard and sharp, an arrowhead of determination.
Still the ships further out crowded in, trying to land. Mi took her quiver of arrows, and her finely made Kirike’s Land bow, and she fired off her arrows one by one, sending them high into the air so they fell among the incoming ships and so were sure to kill only the enemy.
She would not pull back from the beach until all her arrows were gone.
49
The Second Year After the Fire Mountain: Autumn
After the landing that became known as Midsummer Invasion, Qirum quickly broke through the crust of defences on the south coast. Hopes that the invaders would be hampered by the marshy country and the relative scarcity of food stores proved unfounded; scouts and nestspills fleeing his advance reported that he marched north with shocking speed. The Trojan knew Northland, and was well prepared.
And soon Qirum was building what was rumoured to be a city in the very heart of Northland: ‘New Troy’, only days to the south of the Wall itself.
All this came in the course of another difficult summer without sunlight, another summer of hard scavenging on land and sea — a summer soon terminated by early frosts. The Trojan was feared by all, understood by nobody. Many believed he was the embodiment of the little mothers’ abandonment of the world. Nobody but a few hotheads wanted to fight him.
Then Qirum offered to talk.
The emissary from New Troy was a tough-looking Hatti soldier called Erishum. In a smoky chamber deep within the Wall, he and his two companions addressed the Annids in their conclave. Milaqa was summoned to attend, with Deri and Teel.
Milaqa thought the three men from New Troy looked utterly out of place here. Fully armoured, bristling with weapons, heavily muscled, they were like lions among young deer. Yet Raka faced the men bravely, though she was dwarfed by them, and spoke well and clearly.
Teel murmured, ‘An embassy from a king! The newest king in the whole world, I imagine.’
Deri was disgusted. ‘Just another brute from a pack of brutes — but a tough one.’
‘Yet he appears to have come here offering peace between us.’
‘Peace, brother! There can no more be peace between us and the cattle-folk than between fire and water.’
‘But he is not talking of peace,’ Milaqa murmured. ‘Maybe my Trojan is better than yours, uncle…’ The priest who was translating Erishum’s Trojan and Raka’s Etxelur tongue spoke clearly enough for all to hear. ‘I think the word the priest gave as “peace” was not quite that. Not “treaty” either.’
Teel eyed her. ‘You spent more time than any of us with Qirum; you should know what he means to say if anybody does. Then what is the man offering?’
‘The word is more like “challenge”.’
The Annids who surrounded Raka didn’t really know what the warriors wanted. None of them understood a warrior-prince like Qirum, Milaqa realised. But any opportunity to avoid further bloodshed should be taken.
An agreement was reached. A party would be sent to New Troy to hear Qirum out. And as Raka pondered who would travel, Teel wormed his way forward and whispered urgently in her ear, pointing back at Deri and Milaqa.
It was quickly decided that the elder Annid Noli, representing Raka, would lead just three people back to New Troy, with Qirum’s warriors, drawn from the group who had earlier travelled to Hattusa: Teel himself, Deri who since his defiant fighting on the day of the Midsummer Invasion had proven himself a symbol of Northland’s robust defiance — and Milaqa. Milaqa who had been able to translate Erishum’s phrasing more accurately than Raka’s own
