Iron Winter (Northland 3) (51 page)

‘Mother?’

She whirled. She had not heard that voice in months. ‘
Nelo?
’

It was him, her son, a soldier in his tunic and mail and helmet, standing beside the Roman. He was armed with nothing more lethal than a crayon and his sketch paper. For a heartbeat they stared
at each other, both disbelieving. Then they broke and ran to each other, regardless of the rest of the world, the two foreign armies before and behind them.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he stammered out at last.

‘Nor I you. I spent an awful lot of money paying for news of your progress.’ She laughed, but it was as much a sob. ‘I tried to save you, to get you out of there. It was part
of the deal – I thought Barmocar had cheated me—’

Nelo glanced at Fabius. ‘His man came for me. I refused to leave. I could not leave him, Mother. The general. This is history.’

Fabius heard all this. He growled, ‘There won’t be much more history for you if you aren’t back by my side this instant, boy.’

Rina clung to him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said frantically. ‘For what happened in the beginning – it was Barmocar, again. We could not have survived here in Carthage if I had
not let the army take you. Forgive me!’

Nelo shrugged. ‘I thought it had to be something like that. It wasn’t your job to protect me, I was old enough. If you’d just asked, I’d have gone anyway, to save you and
Alxa.’

‘Oh, Nelo—’

He broke away. ‘Later, Mother.’

There was no more time. For now, in the middle of the field, the enemy commanders met.

The Hatti prince dismounted. With the general and the young priest, and trailed by aides and wary soldiers, he walked boldly towards Fabius.

‘Roman,’ Arnuwanda said. ‘We meet again.’

Fabius bowed. ‘I am honoured to be in your presence again, sir, My Sun, whose integrity is known to all the world.’

They both spoke Hatti and Carthaginian, and aides murmured translations.

Arnuwanda grunted. ‘I don’t deserve that title, and Crown Prince Uhhaziti won’t have it, not until this day is won. Why are we speaking? Why are we not fighting? And what is
that grisly contraption? What are you going to do, pelt us with skulls?’ He was rewarded with a ripple of laughter from his own men.

Fabius waited patiently until they were quiet. ‘I am a Roman. But I work within the traditions of my adopted city. And these poor bones represent one of those traditions. It is the
molk
, the sacrifice. In this lore the gods’ favour is won by the sacrifice of children.’

Arnuwanda paced. ‘What barbarism is this?’

Some of his men were disturbed, and they muttered prayers, and made the symbol of Jesus Sharruma, the crossed arms over the chest. Every eye was fixed on the heap of skulls, which, Rina knew,
was its true purpose, to distract.

‘Not barbarism, Prince,’ said Fabius evenly. ‘If I had a son myself I would have given him up willingly, to the gods of the city.’

‘Well,
our
gods will have something to say about how effectual that has been. What else, Roman?’ He peered at the huge covered casket on the wagon, on which the skull
heap stood. ‘I yield to curiosity. What is in the box?’

Fabius smiled. ‘Another tradition of the Carthaginians, sir. A gift. They are a trading people, remember; they would always rather trade than fight. So here is this offer – a gift
for you, after the receipt of which, they hope, your will to fight this day will be eliminated.’

‘Are you trying to buy us off? Is it gold, silver, jewellery? Is it so banal? My men can’t eat gold. And besides, every coffer in Carthage will be open to me by the end of the
day.’

‘Not that.’

The Roman seemed to be enjoying the game, Rina thought uneasily, and she prayed he wouldn’t push his luck too far. Already some of the men behind Arnuwanda looked suspicious.

Now one tough-looking soldier stepped forward and grabbed Arnuwanda’s arm. ‘There’s something wrong here. Sir, step back—’

‘Oh, be still, Kassu—’

Fabius roared, ‘Now, Gisco!’

In an instant Carthaginian soldiers leapt at the cart and hauled aside the drapes, scattering the skulls carelessly on the dusty ground, to reveal the wooden crate. With a few tugs on rope loops
the walls of the crate fell away – and the eruptor was exposed to the air. It was a great bulb of cast iron, reinforced with bound hoops, and with a gaping mouth pointing straight at the
Hatti lines. Men huddled around the eruptor, blinking in the sudden daylight; they too had been hidden with the weapon inside the crate. One of them was a young man called Thux, a Northlander
engineer who had once worked the pumps on the Wall. The rest were Carthaginian soldiers.

Already they were in action. Rina had witnessed endless rehearsals with this team since the casting of the barrel, and she knew that the loading must already be complete, the powdery fire drug
itself shovelled into the barrel and rammed home, the muddy loam paste pushed in after it, and then the stone, a rock roughly chipped into shape. And the wick, a tube of paper filled with the drug,
would have been pushed into a hole drilled into the eruptor’s metal flank. Now Thux himself approached this wick with a lighted candle.

Arnuwanda and the Hatti stood and stared. ‘What is that?’

‘A thunderbolt from Jupiter,’ snarled Fabius in Latin. ‘Now, Northlander!’

As Thux lowered the candle to the powder tube, Rina screamed to her son. ‘Get down, Nelo! Oh, get down!’

Kassu saw the iron contraption, and the flame, and the scattering Carthaginians.
This was a weapon.
And he stood right before it. He was nowhere near the prince –
Himuili had already dragged Arnuwanda away – but Kassu stood beside Palla. He grabbed the priest and hurled him to the ground.

The eruptor exploded.

That was what it felt like, sounded like. He glimpsed a dark mass flash from its mouth in a plume of fire and smoke, with a noise like thunder – it seemed to brush his foot even as he fell
over Palla – and then it plummeted into the Hatti lines, and scattered the men, and he saw a kind of bursting of blood and bone.

When the roaring was over he found himself down on the ground, on top of the priest, Palla’s face below his. Smoke billowed around them. Men were screaming, but it felt as if his ears
had been stuffed with cloth. He looked around. The central phalanx had been scattered, men lying smashed and broken. The statue of Jesus was gone too, shattered, only a stump remaining. And high on
the walls of Carthage he saw dark mouths, more eruptors, aimed at the Hatti lines.

Then the pain hit him, a great wave from his right leg. He looked down. The leg was gone, from beneath the knee. Oddly no blood spurted. Perhaps the heat of the stone had cauterised it.

The priest beneath him grinned. ‘You’re crippled.’

‘Your god is dead.’ He had to shout to hear himself.

‘You should have killed me while you had the chance.’ And the priest drove a blade into Kassu’s side, under his mail coat.

More pain, exploding in him like the Carthaginian weapon. The priest twisted his blade, and Kassu could feel it pierce his muscle and pull his guts, feel it as it scraped on his backbone.

But Zida was here. He rolled Kassu aside. ‘This story ends now.’ He brought his axe chopping down on the priest’s neck.

Kassu, lying on his back, tried to speak. ‘Pimpira . . . I leave my estate to Pimpira, not to that whore of a wife. To Pimpira . . .’ But he saw no more, heard no more, save a rush
like thunder that rose up and enveloped him.

FOUR

The Fourth Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox

In the north the snow was still falling. The great ice sheets continued to spread across the continents, merging, pressing south. As so much water was locked up in the newly
formed ice, all around the world sea levels dropped, and the land grew arid. Even the tropical forests withered back.

One day new kinds of terrain would coalesce south of the ice sheets, belts of sparse tundra, grassy steppe, barren desert, stretching all around a colder, dryer planet. The chill oceans would
be fecund too. New ways of life, in the future.

One day. For now, there was only the death of the old.

Still this was only the beginning.

The Hatti negotiating party was to be met by Barmocar at the Byrsa gate.

Pyxeas and Rina had been invited to join the official Carthaginian response as representatives of Northland in exile, and as embodiments of the knowledge and power that had crushed the morale of
the Hatti siege forces. Rina insisted that Nelo should attend too, to see the end of the story that had had such an impact on his own young life.

So Nelo met his mother and great-uncle at the gate. Waiting for the Hatti, they were all wrapped in their winter cloaks for, despite the arrival of another spring, it was a cold, blustery
morning, with flakes of snow driven on a swirling wind. This was a part of Carthage Nelo rarely visited, much too grand for Northlander exiles, even now.

And Fabius still dangled from his cross high above the gate, bones and flesh and cartilage, wrapped in his cloak of Roman purple.

Carthalo of the suffetes was here too, waiting with Rina. He regarded Nelo blankly. ‘You are the soldier boy who scribbled at the whim of the Roman.’

Pyxeas flared. He was an old man, bent, weary from the long journey from which he would likely never recover, yet he straightened with dignity to face Carthalo. ‘A boy who was ready and
willing to fight in the army that defended this city. Perhaps he deserves a little respect, sir.’ He glanced up at Fabius. ‘And perhaps the Roman does too. I’m sorry if it
troubles you, Nelo, to see him abused like this.’

Nelo shrugged. ‘I’ve seen worse on the battlefield. Fabius is gone. His people believe that when you die you cross a dark river to the next world.’ But you needed coins to pay
the ferryman, and Nelo knew that some of Fabius’ soldiers had sworn that when the body was finally cut down they would bury it with Roman honours, with coins on his eyeless sockets.
‘That’s not Fabius up there.’

‘No,’ came a wheezing voice. ‘Not Fabius, but a symbol of him. And that’s what counts, isn’t it?’

They turned, and saw that the party of Hatti dignitaries was approaching, processing up a cobbled street towards the gate. The party was small, just a handful of Hatti nobles in their brightly
coloured court robes, with one senior military officer, flanked by an escort of wary Hatti and Carthaginian soldiers. The street had been cleared for the day, to be sure that nobody got a chance to
have a swipe at the Hatti in revenge for the long siege.

The man who had spoken was old, stooped; he wore a long robe decorated with the crossed palm-leaves symbol of the Hatti god Jesus, and boots with toes upturned in the Hatti style. Everybody was
looking at him, and he smiled. ‘I seem to have spoken out of turn, before the introductions were done. Well, I don’t imagine we need rely on protocol overmuch today, do we? My name is
Angulli. I am a priest; my title is Father of the Churches.’ He gestured to the woman he accompanied. ‘And this is My Sun Hastayar the Tawananna.’

Carthalo stepped forward and gravely welcomed the queen. She looked magnificent, Nelo thought, her hair lustrous, her face painted white with vivid red spots on cheeks and forehead. Gold thread
shone bright in her robe of rich crimson, despite the clouded sky.

The senior Hatti officer, a general, stepped up to Nelo. ‘I know you.’

This was Himuili, who had commanded the Hatti forces in the field, under the prince, Arnuwanda. ‘Yes, sir, I—’

‘Shut up. You’re the Northlander who Fabius insisted on bringing to his parlays.’ He glanced up at the crucified Roman. ‘Much good it did him, eh? Standing here today
you’d never believe that
he
won and
I
lost. This is how Carthage treats its victorious generals, is it?’

‘Carthage is always suspicious of its generals, successful or not. And Fabius did take over the government.’

Himuili grunted. ‘Smartest thing he ever did. And so there he dangles with his guts hanging out. As a symbol, of course. The question is, a symbol meant for who? Other uppity
Carthaginian officers? Or us, the Hatti? “Look how strong we are, we Carthaginians. We can defeat you
and
afford to string up our winning general.” By Jesus’ armpit, I
hate diplomacy.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Shut up.’

Now the party were led through the gate into the Byrsa district. This was the first formal visit of the Hatti leaders to Carthage since the day of the aborted battle nearly half a year earlier.
As Angulli had suggested it didn’t seem to be a day for excessive formality, but a certain precedence emerged anyhow. The Tawananna walked flanked by the city’s two suffetes, while
Pyxeas and Nelo’s mother escorted Angulli the priest, and Himuili walked with senior Carthaginian officers. Nelo and the rest of the party followed on behind, with soldiers of both nations
flanking them. Interpreters hovered, murmuring into their masters’ ears like bees seeking pollen.

The Hatti were to be taken up to the formal buildings at the Byrsa’s summit where treaties between the nations would be outlined, to be formally written up by scribes on both sides and
sealed at a later date. Those Hatti who had not visited this place before visibly tried not to stare at the striking layout of the citadel, the radial avenues leading up to a summit crowned by
monumental buildings, and Hannibal’s column at the very apex.

Once there had been shops, offices, fine expensive residences, many buildings rising two, three, four storeys over the streets. Now the shops were closed, the offices empty. But several
buildings had been knocked through to make room for new functions. They were manufactories, here in the most secure quarter of the city. As they neared, Nelo could hear the shouts of the workmen,
and a hammering noise, metal struck by metal. The suffetes and their aides had been determined that the Hatti should see these workshops. And now through the open doors of one great building they
glimpsed the components of more fire-drug weapons being cast. There was a fully functioning forge where workers hammered at lumps of iron, and a carpentry shop where giant wooden formers were
constructed, and then a series of great benches where cast-iron strips, white-hot, were hammered flat to be fitted around the formers. Nelo could see the way the manufacture of the weapons went,
from one step to the next. And at the finish stood a complete eruptor, the bulbous belly with the stubby nozzle, just as had been unveiled on the plain of battle. The men who laboured in the forge
heat were stripped to their loincloths, but they wore gloves that stretched up to cover their forearms, saving their skin from red-hot splashes.