Heading straight for Milaqa on the mound.
‘We can take it,’ Mi said suddenly. ‘That chariot coming.’
‘What? How?’
For answer Mi slithered down the slope, to the edge of the tide of battle, where broken corpses lay unmoving. She grabbed a sword and spear — but as she straightened up she staggered again, the bruise on her head purpling.
‘You are insane.’ But Milaqa saw there was no other choice than to follow her. She scrambled off the mound, found a spear, and stood by her cousin.
And the chariot charged towards them. The driver was dragging at his reins, trying to control the horses, and the warrior and shield man were looking up at the notables on the flood mound. None of them seemed to notice the young women standing before them.
Mi began running before the chariot reached them. Milaqa joined her, spear in hand. Mi jumped first, grabbed the chariot driver by the neck and fell back, pulling the astonished man off the chariot with her. Milaqa managed to leap up on the platform itself. Without thinking, she swung her spear and caught the warrior with its shaft. He fell from the chariot before he even saw her. But now the plummeting chariot, out of control, was tipping over. The last man, the shield bearer, yelling in fear and anger, swung his shield at Milaqa. She ducked, but the shield caught her on the back of the head, and she fell out of the chariot onto a mound of bodies, warm and slippery. She heard a splintering crash as the chariot went over — and then a huge weight fell on her back, knocking the air out of her.
She sank into a dream of stone and bronze and iron.
61
‘You idiot.’
The words were in Hatti. That was the first thing Milaqa was aware of, that the language was Hatti.
And then, that she was still alive. She opened her eyes. The daylight was fading from a clouded-over sky. Smoke billowed. She smelled grease, like meat burning. She tried to sit up, and pain banged in her skull.
An arm around her shoulder lifted her to a sitting position. She turned her head cautiously. Kilushepa sat with her. They were back on the flood mound, she saw, sitting on a blanket spread on the bare earth.
And on the plain before her, bodies lay strewn. People moved among them, some stripping the bodies of armour, clothes, boots, others hauling naked and broken corpses onto carts. Occasionally a wounded man would be found, and surgeons would be called. Many of the surgeons were Egyptian, brought in from that country by the Annids for their expertise, especially in the kinds of injuries to be expected in battle.
Away from the battlefield pyres burned. And to the south, far off, more pyres.
‘That’s the Trojans,’ Kilushepa said. ‘Honouring their own dead. Since the fighting stopped for the day, behaviour has been civilised. The living have been returned on either side; the dead are not being dishonoured. Not that I’ve seen anyhow, despite the precedent set by that animal the Spider, and may he rot in the underworld for it.’ She glanced at Milaqa. ‘I take it you can understand me. That you remember your Nesili. The knock on the head-’
‘I’m fine.’ Although she wasn’t. Her body was a mass of bruises, and her aching head wasn’t even the most painful spot. Yet she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, at least not much, nor was any bone broken. She stretched, gingerly. ‘I’ve been lucky.’
‘You have.’ Kilushepa pointed to the wreck of a chariot, just below the mound. ‘Only heroes take on chariots on foot. Heroes and idiots, like you.’
The memory returned sharply to Milaqa. ‘What about Mi?’
‘Worse off than you. She is back behind the lines. Your uncle Teel is caring for her. She will recover. She is with the rest of the soldiers, who are tending their wounds, eating their soldier-bread and drinking their wine, consuming the barley and goats’ cheese that they believe kills pain and restores strength. And you were left to my care.’
‘I’m grateful.’
The queen stroked Milaqa’s hair. ‘I do marvel at you, child. What a mixture of rebel, hero and genius you are! I never saw the like. But you only did it because your cousin went first, didn’t you? I understand, you know. There have always been plenty of people like you in the Hatti court. You don’t really know what other people are feeling. You can only guess. So you do what they do without ever quite understanding why. It’s a flaw in your heart, child. And your uncle Teel shares the same flaw, I sense — or it’s a strength, depending on how you look at it. Depending on how it is used.’
Milaqa, deeply disturbed, wasn’t sure she understood. ‘And the battle — is it over?’
‘No. The fighting just stopped, because of exhaustion. It may resume tomorrow. I have urged Raka to send an embassy to Qirum, to negotiate a truce.’
‘Our weapons. The iron arrows-’
‘They helped. The Trojan has the advantage in numbers, and without the iron, and without some good strategy from Muwa and his generals, the day would have been lost. But even with the iron we can never win a battle like this. Just as I have been telling Raka and any of your Annids who will listen. The trick is to pick a battle we can win.’
‘What kind of battle?’
Kilushepa hugged her close, an unexpectedly human gesture. ‘That will wait for tomorrow. You must wash away the dried blood, change your clothes. Look, they are lighting another pyre…’
The men lowered their torches to the dark tangle of bodies, and they threw on whale oil, and soon the flames were rising high in the gathering night. Out on the field, Milaqa saw birds coming down to feed, rooks and buzzards, and dogs loped. When the men gathered up another corpse, Milaqa watched, astonished, as a cloud of butterflies rose up from the disturbed body, flying into the fading daylight.
62
The Third Year After the Fire Mountain: Autumn Equinox
After three days of fighting the Battle of the Wall finished inconclusively. The Trojans withdrew to their siege lines.
Two months later the priests were still busy at their pits all along the roof of the Wall, and in the interment chambers deep within, storing the bones of the war dead within the growstone, readying them for the longer war against the sea.
And yet again Milaqa was to be sent to face the Trojan in his lair.
She was to be accompanied this time by her uncle Teel, Annid of Annids Raka, a gaggle of other Annids, priests and advisers — and by Kilushepa herself, with a squad of Hatti troops under the command of Muwa. Once again the bewildered, bloodied Northlanders were going to try to come to an accommodation with the monster in their midst.
Milaqa had her own special mission once more. Again she was to be used to try to reach Qirum, who had retired to New Troy once the campaigning season was done — to speak to his heart, and to put an end to the war.
She thought she understood what was really going on here, why such a formidable expedition had been formed around her. Milaqa knew enough of Qirum’s culture, she had seen it in Anatolia, to understand that marriages to seal unions between nations were common. Was that what was being planned here, with herself used as bait? After all as a daughter of an Annid of Annids she was the nearest Northland had to a princess, though it galled her to admit it. Well, Milaqa was now nineteen years old; she was nobody’s gift, nobody’s whore. Besides, every time she had been pushed at Qirum in this way before it had ended in disaster.
Or maybe there was some deeper scheme here, she wondered, which she had yet to glimpse. If there was,
