‘If they haven’t eaten their ponies already,’ Angulli said, and he giggled. This was the Father of the Churches, Brother of Jesus; he sounded slightly drunk to Kassu.
Himuili rolled his eyes. ‘We’ve ways of dealing with nomads, sir. The Turks are more persistent nuisances, especially now they’ve captured so much territory in eastern Anatolia. Gives them a base to fight from, you see.’
Arnuwanda nodded. ‘But at least, again, we know what we’re dealing with. The problem will be, as always, raising the manpower. And feeding the men.’ Another swirl of snow came down, thicker than before. Arnuwanda pulled his expensive-looking purple cloak tight around him.
‘Not the Turks,’ came a booming voice, immediately recognised by Kassu. ‘And not the Franks either.’
There was a commotion among the outer layers of the guard. Zida, for it was he, strode boldly towards the group of dignitaries. He had taken off his cloak and had wrapped it around some kind of trophy that dripped deep-red blood as he walked.
‘Let him through,’ Himuili snapped. ‘Let him through, I say!’
Zida, standing before his general, panted hard. Even the King, Kassu noticed, peered out of his linen tent to see what the fuss was about.
‘You’ve been running,’ Kassu murmured.
‘Faster than you, farm boy.’
‘A dozen lashes for your failure to prostrate,’ Himuili snapped.
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Tell me what you have.’
‘The identity of our attackers.’ Zida held up his bloody bundle and pulled away the cloak — to reveal a human head, roughly severed at a neck from which blood still dripped, a face pale with a heavy moustache. Zida held it up by a hank of red hair. There was a collective gasp, a wave of shock that spread out through the crowd of onlookers. Even the hooded supplicants were distracted, even the King. Reflexively the guards clustered closer around their master.
Kassu spotted his wife Henti, on the edge of the crowd, dressed in her nuntarriyashas finery, the robe shabby, faded, old, as everything was in New Hattusa these days, but still she looked radiant in his eyes. But she had come with her cousin Palla, the priest, who probably had business with Angulli. Side by side the cousins looked very alike. Kassu saw that Henti held the priest’s arm firmly as she stared at the head.
Himuili stepped forward. With his thumb, he opened one of the relic’s closed eyelids, to reveal an eye as blue as the sea in summer. ‘Rus, ’he growled.
‘In fact he found me before I found him,’ Zida admitted. ‘He crept up behind me. Lucky I got him first. Otherwise-’
‘Otherwise you would have died uselessly,’ Himuili murmured, gazing at the head. ‘And all that expensive training wasted. Careless, that. Make that two dozen lashes.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘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.