Arnuwanda snorted.
Mago rolled on top of his opponent and got his arm across his throat. ‘I suppose the boy is more your sort.’
‘Yes. Sure. And I’d do to him what a Roman legionary would have done to your Carthaginian grandmother if we Hatti hadn’t saved the day. .’ And he flexed, flipped, and managed to roll Mago over so he had him pinned face down, if briefly.
Alxa murmured to her brother, ‘Romans?’
‘Some trading post in Greater Greece, I think.’ Nelo shrugged. He produced a block of paper and began to sketch the wrestling princes, in brisk, confident strokes.
Mago pushed his opponent off, jumped to his feet, and the two closed again with a shuddering crash. ‘So,’ Mago grunted as he worked, ‘what do you think of these Northlanders?’
‘What am I supposed to think? They have mountains of dried fish, culled from that ocean of theirs. We have famine. So here we are.’
‘They also have the bones of your god Jesus stuffed in their Wall. And His Mother.’
‘True,’ Arnuwanda said. ‘They pretend to a moral authority which- Get your finger out of my ear, African!’ The Hatti forced Mago’s arm away from his head by brute force. ‘They pretend to impose peace between warring religions. In fact they draw pilgrims to the relics they have stolen, and milk them of their cash. They are hypocrites.’
‘I agree.’ Mago whirled, tried to get the Hatti in an armlock, but Arnuwanda spun away and Mago ended up face down on the floor again. Spitting out dust, Mago twisted his head to speak. ‘And they claim to despise farmers. We’re all “cattle-folk” to them. Yet they hire soldiers from the farming lands, the Franks and the Germans and the others, to keep out the rest of the rabble.’
‘Hmm. Well, that might not help them much longer.’ Arnuwanda got one arm free, pinned Mago with the weight of his body, and slammed his forearm down on the Carthaginian’s head. ‘Had enough?’
‘Bugger yourself. What do you mean, not much longer?’ Mago twisted with a mighty heave, throwing the Hatti off.
‘The Germans and Franks have been hit by the droughts too.’ They came together again —
‘Yes.’ Mago snorted with laughter. ‘An empty country. A ghost of a place. The ghost that rules the Continent.’ He turned, dropped onto his back, flipped up his legs, locked them around the Hatti’s neck, and sent him flying.
‘Oof!’
Mago got to his feet, yelled, leapt cat-like into the air, and would have slammed down on the Hatti — had not Arnuwanda rolled out of the way at the crucial moment, so that Mago came down hard on the floor. ‘Oh, by the bones of Melqart. .’
‘Always a mistake to rely on mercenaries, I say,’ the Hatti said. He crawled over to the Carthaginian and drove his elbow into the small of Mago’s back. ‘Had enough
A horn sounded, distant, carrying.
Alxa glanced at her brother. ‘The eruptors?’
‘Yes. That’s the first call.’ Nelo tucked away his sketches. ‘Come on. Let’s put these two back on their leashes.’
They walked towards the princes, who broke and stood, panting, sweating, wiping dust and powder from their skins. Mago grinned at Alxa. He said in his own clipped Carthaginian tongue, ‘I saw you watching.’
She replied in crisp Greek, ‘I saw you lose.’
Arnuwanda frowned. ‘You understand Greek? You should have had the manners to tell us so.’
Nelo said, ‘And you should have had the manners not to insult your hosts.’
Arnuwanda faced Nelo, glaring. He wasn’t as showy as the Carthaginian, Alxa saw, his musculature wasn’t as impressive, or, come to that, his manhood, but the Hatti had a composure, an inner strength, his opponent evidently lacked. And here he was facing down her brother.
Alxa stepped between the two of them. ‘Let’s be friends,’ she said calmly. It wasn’t good for a student diplomat to get into fist fights with foreign guests.
Nelo was angry too, but he nodded and stepped back. With a sneer, the Hatti took a towel from his opponent and turned away.
‘So you heard it all,’ said Mago. ‘Well, what of it? Anything ring uncomfortably true? The charges of hypocrisy, of greed-’
‘Insults cast by the ignorant,’ Alxa said. ‘One thing you were wrong about, though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We don’t rely on mercenaries for our protection. Not entirely.’ That horn sounded again. ‘Get yourselves back up to the roof before the third sounding and you’ll see.’
She walked away, with Nelo, without looking back.
5
As the second horn sounded, and the evening of the long midsummer day approached, the three women from the Western Continents who had stood near Rina earlier met in a bar, set in the face of the Wall.
Walks In Mist had discovered this tavern. It was on the fringe of the Wall District called the Springs, a precise eight hundred paces from Etxelur, a place full of taverns, hostels and, Walks in Mist suspected, brothels. This place seemed respectable enough; built into a terrace in the face of the Wall, it gave onto a balcony overlooking Old Etxelur and the lowland.
Her friends joined her now, Sabela from the southern continent’s High Country in her robe of llama wool, and Xipuhl from the Land of the Jaguar with her fine steel mirror at her breast. Walks In Mist herself, from the Land of the Sky Wolf, wore her eagle feathers in her hair. Each of them proclaimed who they were in this baffling, crowded place — the centre of the world, if only for midsummer.
‘I know it isn’t much to look at,’ Walks In Mist said as the others settled. And she was right; the floor was rough, the walls unfinished growstone. ‘But that’s what I like about it. That and the view.’
They turned to look out over Northland, a tremendous plain that stretched to the horizon. The sun was low now, the sky a rich deep blue. The marshes and canals shone like ribbons of sky, the old flood mounds cast long shadows, and fires sparked everywhere. At the foot of the Wall itself were tremendous warehouses where even in the gathering dark a steady stream of traffic came and went, and rows of brightly lit shops provided their customers with food, drink, pilgrimage tokens and Giving-day souvenirs.
Walks In Mist leaned from her chair and ran a hand over the lip of the growstone balcony. ‘Think how
‘Cradled like an eagle chick in the palm of an old man’s hand,’ said Sabela.
Xipuhl laughed, and the dancing mirror on her chest cast reflections from the candle. ‘You are always the poet of our little gang,’ she said to Sabela. Xipuhl was a little older than the others, and was prone to be the one who did the teasing.
But Sabela was right, Walks In Mist thought. She did feel cradled here. She always felt safe in Northland, with its antiquity and stability and the obvious physical strength of its great Wall. Why, here they were, three women from across the lands Northlanders called the Western Continents, all of them comfortably speaking in the only tongue they shared — the liquid language of Northland, a tongue that had nothing in common with their own native speech at all.
The three of them had found each other during the long sea crossing on a huge Northlander ship. Every three years the elders of Etxelur sent a flotilla across the Western Ocean to the Land of the Jaguar to pick up a selection of especially honoured, or especially well-paying, guests from the Western Continents to come to the midsummer Giving. Walks In Mist herself was here for trade; she was one of a delegation from Sky Wolf seeking to expand
