Iron Winter

heat. Meanwhile more ice tumbled into the northern ocean from growing, unstable glaciers, and bergs marched steadily south. The sudden injection of so much cold, fresh water disrupted the great, warm ocean streams, cooling the land further. All this during the summer months, the warmest.

Now summer was over, for better or worse, and the world’s relentless orbital dance took the northern lands through the autumn equinox. Even as humans around the planet gathered to celebrate this latest moment of astronomical symmetry, the cold closed its grip once more.

10

Kassu was woken by a kick in the ribs, in the dark, in his house.

‘Henti?’ It was cold for an Anatolian autumn night. Under a heap of furs, with his wife beside him, he had been sleeping deeply, and it was taking him time to surface. Had he slept late? Today was the day of the nuntarriyashas, New Hattusa’s equinox festival, and his wife wouldn’t want to be late for that. .

A kick in the ribs, though? Henti was asleep; she hadn’t delivered that.

He rolled on his back. There was a mass in the dark, looming over him. ‘Palla?’ But through the thin partition walls he could hear the priest, Henti’s cousin, the house’s only other inhabitant, snoring. Who, then?

A stranger in his house. His heart lurched. The land swarmed with raiders, bandits, the starving. This farm was within the circuit of the city’s New Wall, but that was no safety at all, not if you let your guard down. He kept a steel dagger under his pillow. He reached for it. It was gone.

And he felt cold metal on his bare chest. ‘Looking for this?’

‘Zida. You’re a dog’s arsehole.’ He said this softly to avoid waking his wife.

Zida cackled, and he pricked Kassu’s chest with the dagger’s tip before he set it down, just to make the point. ‘You’re getting slow, old man.’

‘I’m younger than you.’

‘Get your finger out of your wife’s honeypot and put your boots on. We’ve got a job. A bit of scouting. Assignment from General Himuili himself.’

Grumbling inwardly, longing for sleep, Kassu rolled out of bed and searched in the dark for the night-soil pot. Henti’s breath was even, undisturbed. She hadn’t noticed a thing. And in the next room the priest snored on, oblivious.

When he emerged from the house a little light had seeped into the sky, which was a lid of cloud. He glanced around at his farm, silent and dark, the main house, the meaner shacks of the slaves and itinerant workers, the pens that contained his few scrawny cattle. To the south he saw the great mass of the city within the ancient Old Wall, the central mound of the Pergamos on which the tremendous dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom was picked out by lantern light. The carpet of suburbs outside the Wall glowed with night fires. This was New Hattusa to kings and administrators, but the city was still Troy to the bulk of its inhabitants, a thousand years after the Hatti kings had made it their new capital.

He could see Zida standing at the edge of one of Kassu’s potato fields, stirring dry muck with his toe. Kassu walked that way, pulling his woollen cloak around him. A few flakes of snow swirled out of nowhere, heavy and moist, settling on his cloak and on the ground.

Zida looked him over. Kassu wore his scale armour over his tunic, greaves on his legs, helmet jammed on his head, and he carried his short stabbing spear, curved sword, dagger. Zida, similarly equipped, grinned. ‘Expecting trouble, are we?’

‘I don’t imagine the Chief of the Chariot Warriors of the Left got me out of bed to dance for Judas.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s Judas Day, isn’t it? Well, we’ve some scouting to do before we join in the hunt for the Missing God.’

‘All right. Which way?’

‘North.’ Which was beyond the potato field, and away from the city. ‘I don’t want to trample your precious crop of Northlander apples with my big feet. Which way to walk around?’

Kassu shrugged and set off across the field. ‘Doesn’t make much difference.’ More snowflakes fell on the churned ground, where the potato crop was a mess, with furry growths on leaves that looked black in the low light. A couple of rows had been dug up from the dry earth to expose tubers that were nothing but a pulpy mush. ‘The blight got them,’ Kassu said simply.

Zida grunted. ‘I once met a Northlander who said you should plant different sorts of potato, because then one kind of blight can’t get them all.’

‘Northlanders are full of shit.’

‘Well, they’re full of something, for you rarely see them starve.’

‘I thought we’d get away with it this year. It hits overnight, you know. The blight. One day you think you’re fine, the next your potatoes are rotting in the ground.’

Zida laughed, striding out. ‘Your choice, my friend. You decided to become a Man of the Weapons. I prefer my pay in silver, not in dusty land.’

‘But somebody has to work the land. If nobody grows any food, what will there be to buy with your silver?’

‘Whores,’ Zida cackled.

Kassu said no more, for he knew there was no more to say. Zida, a few years older than Kassu at thirty, was a solid man with a face left battered by years of warfare, of pitched battles against the enemies of the Hatti King, and in more recent years smaller-scale actions against packs of hungry wanderers and bandits. Zida really did think no further ahead than the next pay purse, the next whore. He was a soldier, he expected to die in battle sooner rather than later, so why worry about the future?

But Kassu had a wife, they had had a child who had died of an infant sickness despite all the ministrations of the surgeons and the priests, and they wanted to try again. And Kassu had come of age in the years when the great drought had clamped down, and the farmers had abandoned their land. He had seen the reasoning when King Hattusili had set up his scheme to have soldiers made Men of the Weapons, to be given farmland and tax breaks instead of a regular salary. Somebody had to work the land. It wasn’t just the shortage of food; when the farmlands were abandoned tax revenues imploded.

But Kassu was a city boy He had not anticipated the impact of the drought, and now the cold that worsened year on year. In the spring the plants would not grow and the trees would not bud; in warmer, moister intervals later in the year you might get a surge of growth, but then the early frost would ruin your crops, and anything that did grow the rabbits would take. They even chewed the bark off your fruit trees. In the very worst months your soil would dry out and blow away, just dust.

And now snow: snow, on Judas Day! In New Hattusa! He had thought last winter was as bad as it could get. What was to come this year?

Zida watched the snow fall suspiciously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t lie. Don’t want to leave tracks. They say Old Hattusa is cut off already. Snow in the passes.’

Kassu shrugged. ‘It always snows on Old Hattusa, up on that plateau. No wonder the kings moved out.’

‘You’ll be warm enough with that plump wife of yours.’

‘Not if you keep dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night.’

Zida laughed. ‘Who’s Palla, by the way?’

‘How do you know about Palla?’

‘You asked me if I was Palla before I had your dagger at your throat.’

‘A priest. Cousin of Henti. Quite high up; he works in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Arinna. Knows Angulli, I think, the Father of the Churches.’

‘So why’s he sleeping in your hovel?’

‘He’s close to Henti. Has been since they were kids. He came out a while back to bless the potato fields, when we heard the blight was in the neighbourhood. He’s come out to stay a few times since.’

Zida looked at Kassu. ‘That’s good of him,’ he said neutrally. ‘Can’t be much of a priest, though. Didn’t save your potatoes, did he?’