Iron Winter (Northland 3) by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

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