Iron Winter

‘But he is Rus. You established that?’

‘Yes, sir. He lived long enough to convince me. But they aren’t just Rus out there.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Scand.’

Another gasp of dismay.

‘While he was begging for his life, he said it wasn’t his fault.’

‘What isn’t?’ Himuili snapped.

‘Their emigration.’

‘You mean their invasion. The assault they’re mounting.’

‘No, sir. Emigration is the word he used. His Hatti was quite good. Well, it’s no surprise. He said he’s served in the armies of My Sun, a mercenary regiment. He said, emigration,’ Zida repeated. ‘And he said they’ve been driven to it by the drought and now the ice in their own lands, and by the wave of Scand that came down from their distant lands further north yet. The Scand sacked Kiev, it seems, before they all came to an arrangement.’

Himuili grunted. ‘That’s nice. An arrangement to attack us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Arnuwanda paced, fists clenched, the muscles in his bare arms bulging. ‘The Rus! Do you know any history, good Himuili?’

‘Not as much as I should, sir,’ the general said drily.

‘Throughout its existence the empire of the Hatti has been besieged by enemies, within and without. Well, we fought off the Kaskans and the Arzawans, and the Greeks and the Persians and the Carthaginians and the Arabs and the Mongols, and we’re holding off the Turks — but now this! The Rus have been our allies. We gave them our god, they rejected Thor and Odin for Jesus! And now they turn on us.’

Zida, eyes cast down respectfully, said, ‘But they’re starving, sir. And freezing. This fellow told me about his own family, before he died.’

Angulli laughed. ‘He must have taken a long time dying, soldier!’ said the Brother of Jesus.

‘That he did, sir. This isn’t an army; it’s a people on the move. They have made up their minds to come south — to come here, for there’s nowhere else for them to go. So they came down their rivers where their traders have sailed for centuries, and crossed the Asian Sea to our shores. Their Khagan is with them, and just now he is preparing to lay siege to our port of Byzantos.’

Arnuwanda grunted. ‘Which will cut our trade routes to the Asian Sea and the continent beyond, not that they aren’t withered already.’

‘Sir, I think-’

And at that moment the assassins struck.

Two ordinary-looking supplicants broke from the head of the line, pushed past guards who had been watching Zida rather than attending their duty, threw back their hoods to reveal shocks of red hair, and opened their cloaks to reveal single-bladed battleaxes. And they fell on the King.

Kassu saw it. Saw the first strike lay open the King’s chest, splaying ribs wide. Saw Hattusili the Sixteenth, still alive, looking down shocked at his own beating heart, his spilling organs, which looked like any other man’s, Kassu thought, battlefield memories flooding back.

Then the guards were on them, led by Himuili himself, then Zida, and there was a brutal struggle. Arnuwanda went to the aid of his uncle. Kassu would have followed, but an officer snapped an order for him to stay back and help round up the other supplicants, in case there were any more Rus assassins among them.

So it was that Kassu saw his wife in the churning crowd. Saw her, terrified, folded in the arms of the young priest beside her. And saw Palla lift her face and kiss her full on the lips, before wrapping his arms around her and leading her away.

12

It took until the equinox for Pyxeas to make the arrangements for his epic journey to far Cathay — and, Avatak suspected, to allow his old body to recover from the sea journey from Coldland only months before.

The family, led by Pyxeas’ niece Rina, were opposed to him going at all, and they pressured a doctor, a family friend called Ontin, to tell him he wasn’t strong enough. But Ontin was about as old as Pyxeas, and Avatak thought he secretly envied Pyxeas’ boldness, and he would not stand in the way. After that, Rina, with very bad grace, insisted on accompanying Pyxeas on the first leg of the journey, as far as an eastern city called Hantilios, where, maybe, the old man would see sense and come back home again.

So they got packed up, and there was a day of farewells. Alxa, Rina’s daughter, seemed particularly upset to see him go, as if she feared she wouldn’t see him again.

And then they were gone.

They headed south down the Etxelur Way, and the Wall slowly receded behind them. Then, by canal boat and on foot, they travelled the length of Northland, following tremendous avenues and crossing bridges over wide canals, and Avatak tried to absorb the scale of this tremendous, orderly, sparsely populated country. It was a long, slow journey in itself, and occasionally Rina muttered about alternative ways to cross Northland such as by steam caravan. But it seemed that the scholar wanted to see his country, to cross it on foot as his ancestors had for uncounted generations, one more time before his so-called ‘longwinter’ closed in. After a few days, however, he did relent a little, and allowed Rina to hire for him a horse-drawn carriage, though to use horses was thoroughly not the Northland way.

On the southern coast of Northland they came to a port on the estuary called the Cut, a great wound that ran between the southern shores of Northland and Albia and the northern beaches of Gaira, giving ultimately to the open seas of the Western Ocean. Here they boarded a small boat, booked ahead by Rina, and as part of a small flotilla crossed the estuary and made their way eastward along the Gairan coast to a wide river mouth. Waves broke on a nondescript beach, and marsh and wooded hills could be seen beyond. From here they would sail upriver towards the great city of Parisa.

Inland, the countryside was quite similar to southern Northland and Albia, rolling and green, though even this far south they still saw the odd white splash of remnant winter ice. Gaira was a quilt of ancient nations, mostly Frankish, immigrants a thousand years before, but some older stock. The empires of the Middle Sea with their cities of stone had never come this far north, and so the Gairans’ various cultures had been shaped by local influences, the Northlanders, the farmers to the south — even the other-worldly Albians of their great forest to the west. So Avatak saw a mix of neat farms surrounded by stretches of woodland, and then a swathe of lowland worked and managed as the Northlanders did, and then a town of stone where the natives sold lumber or minerals to merchants from the Middle Sea. But an older history survived; some of these communities were still centred on the circles of mighty stones bequeathed by distant ancestors.

At last they approached Parisa. A Frankish settlement, this was the westernmost city on the Continent, Pyxeas said, a trading conduit for Northland. Here they would board a steam caravan that would take them onwards east in comparative comfort. They had a couple of days and nights before they were to leave. While Pyxeas locked himself away in a rented room with his books and scrolls and calculations, and Rina organised the final details of their onward journey, Avatak wandered around Parisa.

He had never been to a city before, and he was overwhelmed by the size of it, the buildings of smartly cut stone or shabby wattle and daub crammed in side by side on both banks of a languid river, and jammed in even more tightly on a central island. He walked through alleyways walled by shops and stalls and taverns, stepped over open drains running through the cobbles, and climbed rickety bridges to the central island, which was dominated by sprawling temples dedicated to the gods of the peoples who traded here, from the ancient forest gods of the Albians to the enigmatic Jesus Sharruma of the east. People rushed everywhere, or laboured in open-to-the-street manufactories, or noisily sold wares in the many marketplaces. Pyxeas said the name of this place came from what the people who had founded it called themselves, in their own tribal tongue; they were ‘The People Who Worked’ or ‘The Busy People’, and looking around their city Avatak could well believe it. The place was nothing like the orderly, rigidly laid out, sparsely populated communities of lower Northland, or indeed like the tiny fishing villages of