But Qirum waved that way. ‘Oh, get him out of here,’ he snapped at Erishum. ‘Feed him, bathe him, give him a whore, whatever he wants. Oh, no, better not, after all his mother’s probably one of the whores. Ha! Don’t harm him though. Just get him out of my sight.’
Deri glanced at Milaqa.
‘Go,’ she said, in her own tongue. ‘I’m more at risk with you standing here silently provoking him. This is why we came, uncle.’
Reluctantly Deri nodded. He bowed sharply to Qirum, then let Erishum lead him out.
‘So we’re alone,’ Qirum said. ‘Beer?’
‘Why not?’
He snapped a finger. In a heartbeat a barefoot serving girl came running with a brimming pot. Milaqa drank it gratefully. Qirum sat on his couch and patted it. She sat beside him, though at the couch’s far end.
‘Just like old times in the Scambles,’ Qirum said. ‘Save for a few gibbering priests and the guards in the corners.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘And what smells like a bucket of shit.’
‘It is a bucket of shit. Taken from a dead man, his last gift to this world. Ha!’ He drank his beer. ‘It’s all because of some poison or other your uncle and his irritating friends like to smear on their arrows. My physician is trying to work out what it is from a dead man’s turds. Listen. What causes sneezing and blisters, and then vomiting and shitting, and then muscle cramps, convulsions, choking, a heart attack?’
‘I’m no priest. Our priests give out the poisons.’
‘My surgeon thinks it might be hellebore. Some of the symptoms are similar. They use hellebore in Gaira, I know that. Is it hellebore?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Well, if it is, our antidotes don’t work, or so my useless clown of a head physician tells me.’
She grinned. ‘Things aren’t going as you expected, are they, King Qirum?’
‘No, they aren’t, by the Storm God’s left testicle. If it isn’t the poison it’s the sickness rising up from the soggy ground, and I have the priests chanting to Iyarri about that from morning to night. And then there are these wretched winter days of yours — if you can call them days at all!’ He gestured at the window. ‘Look — the light’s going already, and I’ve barely woken up. A man needs the sun, as does a field of wheat. We are men from countries of light and heat — decent places to live, not like this gloomy bog of yours.’
‘Then go back there.’
‘And then there’s the hunger. Our crops struggle to grow in these drowning fields. Some of your warriors and their Hatti scum allies have been mounting raids on the granaries. Takes a lot of courage, I’m sure, to sneak up on a grain of wheat. You know, I have people out there foraging. Like rooting pigs! They bring back mushrooms. Birds. Even crows, toppled from their nests! They dig up hibernating animals, dormice… Pah! Yet it is all we have.’
You are hungry because you do not know how to live here, Milaqa thought. Northlanders live off the land; they can easily melt away into the country for a few days. While you Trojans and the Greeks, used to your great stone cities crowded with people and loot and food, are left baffled. You cannot see the riches all around you, even at this time of year, in the rivers, the seas. And evidently those you use as slaves will not tell you.
She said sharply, ‘I thought you were feeding yourselves by raiding our communities. Like your raid on My Sun.’
‘Where? Oh, that was the first one, wasn’t it? Ah, yes — Hadhe, your cousin. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?’ He called to a servant, and briskly ordered her to summon Hadhe. ‘What were we saying — My Sun?’
‘That was easy pickings for you. And my own family suffered.’
He scowled, as if she was being unfair. ‘I saved Hadhe, didn’t I? And I didn’t wield every sword personally.’
‘Well, we’ve learned to fight back since then.’
He grunted. ‘If you can call it fighting. You flood the ground — you cut your own roads, to stop us advancing. Sometimes when I attack a settlement, which is all but lost in the green in the first place, I find it empty! Abandoned! It is like fighting fog — like fighting the diseases that strike down my warriors. You won’t stand and fight like men!’
Because we would lose if we did, Milaqa thought. That was the prevailing wisdom of the Annids and the Hatti who advised them. She leaned forward. ‘This is why I am here — Deri and I — as well as for Hadhe. To make you see sense, Qirum. Your great adventure has not worked. You cannot defeat Northland, it is too big and ancient for that. Even the Wall is too big for you. And besides, we are prepared now. But nor can we defeat you, for we are too few. So this stalemate goes on, with pointless cruelty and suffering on both sides. Let us end this now.’
He laughed hollowly. ‘And then what? Shall I withdraw from Northland? My basileis would butcher me if I tried.’
‘Let’s just stop the fighting. That’s all the Annids want, for now.’
‘Ah, but I can’t, you see. There is a question of honour. And surely you know, little Milaqa, that all of this is only a step on the road to a greater goal.’
‘The day when you mould an army out of Northland clay, and march on Hattusa? This is all so you can get your revenge on Kilushepa, isn’t it?’
He grinned, and drank more beer. ‘More or less. We are all driven by personal goals, Milaqa. What else is there in life? And my goal is to destroy that bitch, and the country that spawned her.’
Yet there was more he did not know. ‘Qirum. I probably shouldn’t tell you this. Your plans against Kilushepa. She knows.’
‘Of course she does. She probably has spies in this very room.’ He glanced at his priests, who seemed to shiver slightly, no doubt hearing every word. ‘What of it?’
‘She is no fool. We have had a new embassy from Hattusa. Her position there is strong once more. She does not intend to let you become a significant threat. Not significant enough to damage her, in any case.’
He sat up. ‘What does that mean? Is she coming herself?’
‘She is sending more troops. Soon there will be a Hatti force here strong enough to-’
‘ Is she coming herself? She is, isn’t she? Well, well. My showdown with the bitch queen might not be as remote as I have feared.’ His eyes were alight with passion; he no longer seemed drunk at all.
‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘Your Annids will say you shouldn’t. But you and I know you have done the right thing, Milaqa, don’t we? You came here to bring forward the ending of this war. Well, I believe you have. Just not the way those dried-up old sticks on the Wall intended you to. Ha!’
‘Milaqa?’
Hadhe stood in the doorway. Her hair was tied up, her skin looked oiled, and she wore an expensive-looking gown that did not conceal the swelling of her pregnancy, now eight months advanced.
Milaqa ran forward, and the cousins embraced. ‘Your children are fine,’ Milaqa said quickly. ‘Keli and Blane. After My Sun, they both reached the safety of the Wall, and they live there still, with the family.’
Hadhe was trembling. Milaqa imagined having to wait so many months for such brief, vital pieces of news. ‘Thank you. And Jaro-’
‘There was no sign of him. He may have died in the fighting. The bodies were burned, we could not tell. And Hesh — lost too.’
She nodded. ‘But Hesh lives on through his unborn child. I will mourn them later. Thank you, Milaqa.’
Qirum was pacing now. ‘How touching. Say what you have to say to each other and get out. I have much thinking to do. You, guard — send for the basileis.’
Hadhe murmured in the Etxelur tongue, ‘I haven’t seen him as animated as this since winter closed in.’
‘I gave him some news — I fear I have made a terrible mistake.’
Hadhe shook her head. ‘Nothing we do or say is right or wrong in the presence of such men as this; all we can do is survive.’ Under the expensive facial oils she looked old, Milaqa thought, old and worn out, and there was something elusive in her eyes. She was not yet eighteen years old. ‘Things could have been worse for me, in My Sun, on that terrible day. I was lucky, comparatively. Your poor aunt Vala-’
‘I know. They found her body in the ruins of the mound house.’
‘She survived the fire mountain, but she could not survive the Trojans. I survived. I did not deserve to, for I had argued against defending ourselves against the Trojans. I could not believe it was true, that it could ever
