translator. Milaqa who, as everybody seemed to have heard by now, knew Qirum himself more closely than anyone in Northland. She wasn’t given the chance to refuse.
As the meeting broke up Milaqa felt a swirl of emotions. She was still just eighteen years old. Here she was about to walk into the very heart of an epochal conflict. And once again she would be dealing with Qirum, the most exciting, terrifying, disturbing element in her life.
Mostly she was resentful. ‘You’re using me,’ she accused Teel. ‘Again. Because you think I have a connection to Qirum.’
‘Well, you do.’ He grinned at her anger. ‘You always did. And you helped him escape in Hattusa. I could say this is all your fault.’
She flared. ‘I’ll never apologise for saving a life. Kilushepa plotted to have him killed — his reputation destroyed — it was all lies, and you know it.’
‘Fine. But what did you think would follow?’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, little Crow. You’re right, an impulse to save a friend can never be wrong, whatever that friend chooses to do with the life you give him back. And, yes, I’m using you. I have no choice. In such times one must use every available resource. But I haven’t forgotten I’m your uncle. I know I’m supposed to protect you, not lead you into danger. Forgive me.’
‘Forgive you for what?’
‘For the next time I do it. You should get ready; Erishum wants to leave tomorrow.’
Milaqa went straight to the Scambles and got comprehensively drunk.
50
The party would walk to New Troy, Noli ordained. Traditionally Northland folk did not ride — horses were beasts of the cattle-folk — though many had started to learn since acquiring horses from New Troy, or the Hatti. So it would be now.
As the four of them gathered before the Wall, Noli, Teel, Deri, Milaqa, in stout walking boots with light packs on their backs, Erishum laughed at their stubbornness. But he sent his two warriors ahead on horseback, taking his own mount with them, while he walked with the Northlanders. He would be one man, alone among four. Milaqa imagined the minds of both Deri and Erishum turning back to the bloody day of the Midsummer Invasion. But with Noli sternly watching both men as if they were wilful children, no words were spoken, and their swords stayed sheathed.
New Troy was two days’ ride south of the Wall. The journey on foot, down the ancient Etxelur Way, would probably take four or five days. Erishum claimed that Qirum, King of New Troy, had purposely planted his city no closer to the Wall as evidence of good intentions, Erishum said, a peaceful gesture. If he was ever minded to do it, it would take more than a day for him to march on Etxelur, by which time the Wall folk would have plenty of warning. He had deliberately left a thick barrier of space and time between them, hoping for peace, said Erishum.
Noli merely grunted. ‘If he were so eager for peace, the Trojan would not have come to our country at all.’
To begin with the walk south was easy, even pleasant, if Milaqa didn’t pay too much attention to the company she was keeping. It was close to the autumn equinox now, and though there had been precocious frosts the weather was fine, a watery sun for once showing through the usual high cloud. For all she liked to bury herself in smoky Scambles taverns deep within the carcass of the Wall, Milaqa was enough of a Northlander to feel her spirit expanding as they crossed the tremendous flat expanse of the country, the green land crossed by the dead- straight lines of tracks and dykes, the communities like knots in a weave. But the poor summer had left its mark in marshland choked with dead reeds, trees already shedding stunted leaves, a land that was strangely quiet in the absence of many familiar birds. The fungi were flourishing this cold autumn, especially colonising the dead tree trunks, from little bright white dots to huge powdery puffballs, and the most common sort, bright red caps flecked with white. Deri, only half-joking, urged Erishum to sample these Northland fruits. The Hatti was wary enough to refuse the poisonous gifts.
Erishum, in fact, barely noticed the country at all. Milaqa knew that to the Hatti and the Trojans and Greeks this landscape was unbuilt, unmade, unfarmed, an un-world. To them, Northland was worse than incomprehensible. It was invisible.
They spoke little during the walk. And Milaqa had too much time to think about the Trojan.
Qirum! He had long been the most vivid character in Milaqa’s own life. Now, three months after his Midsummer Invasion and his planting of a city in the very heart of Northland, he was by far the most vivid personality in the country, perhaps the whole world. But to Milaqa he was not Qirum the warrior, Qirum the ruler — he was not King Qirum. To her he was Qirum the man, savage, magnificent, murderous, laughing, and when she thought of him she felt hot inside, as if her heart was melting like a bit of Zidanza’s iron in the forge, ready to be hammered into some new shape.
Did she love him? Did she lust for him? She could not tell. You might as well lust after the sun. She had always sensed that if she got too close to him she would be burned up. Yet he shone so much more brightly than other men! Maybe that was why, at the comparatively elderly age of eighteen, though she was no virgin and had had a string of brief, furtive relationships, most of them forged and finished in the Scambles, she was still effectively alone, still had no children — unlike cousin Hadhe, say, with her new husband and growing children, and pregnant again too. Qirum was distorting Milaqa’s life with his powerful enigmatic fascination, just as he was distorting everything about the way life was lived in Northland. But his actions had already caused people to die — including a member of her own family, Nago. And now Milaqa had to deal with him again.
After a couple of days they started to see evidence of Qirum’s presence. The country looked abandoned. The ancient track ran through empty settlements, past broken houses and cold hearths, empty fish racks, eel traps left unset. The managed country itself showed signs of a lack of maintenance, reeds clogging weirs, dykes choked by weeds. In one settlement they disturbed deer grazing on wild flowers that carpeted a hearthspace evidently untrodden by human feet for months.
‘This can’t go on,’ Noli muttered. ‘Leave it too long and things will start to break down, and once that starts it will be difficult to recover. Northland needs constant tending.’
A half-day further on they came to a wall. It was just a low rampart crudely dug out of the ground, backed up by the ditch from which the dirt had been taken. But it cut right across the venerable Northland track.
Noli paced before the barrier, fuming at this latest insult to her land’s tradition. Speaking through Milaqa she challenged Erishum. ‘I suppose this land is now “owned” by Qirum.’
Erishum grinned easily. ‘Oh, no. This is one of the estates the King has granted to the Lord Protis. We’ve yet to come to the King’s own lands.’
He led them west, following a rough track along the line of the rampart. Beyond the rampart, looking south, Milaqa glimpsed horses, cattle, sheep: farmers’ livestock brought to Northland. They soon came to a gate, and a track that led south into the estate, running off to the flat horizon. Like the rampart itself, the track had nothing to do with the older layout of Northland. Two warriors waited by the gate, huddled in cloaks against the cold, a small fire burning before a crude shelter of poles and deerskin. They were wary as the party approached, but relaxed when they recognised Erishum. The Hatti spoke to them softly in an Anatolian language Milaqa did not recognise. In response, one of them took to his horse and galloped off south.
‘We can wait here in the warm,’ Erishum said, indicating the shelter, the fire. ‘Qirum will send a chariot-’
‘We will walk,’ Noli said through Milaqa.
Erishum shrugged. He said something in his own tongue to the remaining soldier, who looked Noli up and down and laughed.
The party walked on through the scruffy gate, and Milaqa felt an odd shiver that she had suddenly walked into a land where, perhaps, the will of the little mothers of sky, sea and land no longer held sway. They came to more ramparts and low walls, some little more than scratches in the ground. These were not defensive but markers, field boundaries. People were working with spades and picks, and oxen dragged ards to turn the soil. In some places, crops were already growing.
