Bronze Summer Read Online Free Page A

galleries.
    ‘Hello, Milaqa.’ Her cousin Hadhe came out along the passage, carrying a double armful of bowls of soil. One was full of vomit.
    ‘Let me help you with that.’ Milaqa took the vomit-filled bowl. ‘Little Blane, is it?’
    ‘Poor mite’s not been right all winter. The priests can’t do anything for him. Coughing all night, and he keeps Jaro and Keli awake too, and what he does eat he throws back up. I’m surprised we’ve not had to put him up on the roof already . . .’ Side by side the cousins tipped the bowls of soil into the waste gullies cut into the Wall face. ‘As for Jaro, a right pest he’s turning out to be, and as randy as his father, from what I remember of him, even if he doesn’t know what to do with his little man yet. He shows it to me the whole time, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got to a mother.’ Hadhe sighed, and brushed a lank of dirty hair back from her face.
    Milaqa saw how tired her cousin looked, how ill, her face slack and grey, her shoulders stooped, her breasts heavy with milk. She was fifteen, a year younger than Milaqa. ‘It was good of you to take in Jaro. You already had your hands full after you lost Jac.’
    Jac, Hadhe’s husband, had been a fisherman, whose first wife had died when Jaro was small. Then Jac had got himself caught in a storm and killed just after getting Hadhe pregnant with little Blane, her own second child.
    Hadhe shrugged. ‘Everybody has kids. Half the kids die, or if they don’t their parents do, and you have to take in the orphans. This is the way we live our lives, isn’t it? Except you , up to now, anyway. Even you’ll have to settle down sometime.’
    ‘And be like you?’ Milaqa snapped. Hadhe recoiled, and Milaqa reached out her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’
    ‘Yes, you did. Oh, forget it. You’re not yourself; I’ve seen that since your mother died. Speaking of which – when is her interment? Oh, it’s today, isn’t it? So why are you here?’
    ‘I . . .’ Milaqa didn’t really know.
    From along the gallery, a child started crying.
    Hadhe sighed. ‘That’s Blane. He needs me. And your mother needs you. Go, Milaqa.’ And she picked up her bowls and turned away.

 
    5
     
    Outside Troy’s broken walls, the land under a harsh noon sun was dusty, rocky, bare, marked by a few abandoned dust-bowl fields. Roads radiated away from this place, roads that had once carried the seaborne produce of Mycenae and the other Greek cities overland to much of Anatolia – roads now becoming invisible beneath the drift of the dust, the product of decades of drought. Qirum felt his mouth dry, his skin desiccating, and he pulled a soft felt hat from his belt to shield his brow from the spring sun.
    Qirum and Praxo were not alone in coming out of Troy to greet the train. Alerted by the war trumpets, vendors drifted up to offer the troops water, food, trinkets, whores, and slavers came out to take a first look at the fresh merchandise.
    And Qirum heard a deep rumble of thousands of voices. Here came the march.
    They climbed a ridge to see better. The caravan was revealed as a tremendous column stretching back along the road from the east as far as Qirum could see, thousands of feet raising a long yellow dust cloud. Somewhere behind the column itself must come the baggage train, ox carts bearing the senior officers and a Hatti prince or two in command, and heaps of booty, gold and silver and defeated gods, and the tremendous quantities of food and water required to keep this shuffling crowd alive. There would even be cattle and sheep, stolen herds driven along the trail.
    But the people came by first. The Hatti infantry walked in files alongside the main column, their officers on horseback. They were Hatti warriors, each with a loose shin-length robe tied around by a leather belt, and a conical helmet, spear and sword, and that oddly shaped shield of theirs, a slab of wood and leather with rounded corners and indents to