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

had a wife, they had had a child who had died of an infant sickness despite all the ministrations of the surgeons and the priests, and they wanted to try again. And Kassu had come of
age in the years when the great drought had clamped down, and the farmers had abandoned their land. He had seen the reasoning when King Hattusili had set up his scheme to have soldiers made Men of
the Weapons, to be given farmland and tax breaks instead of a regular salary. Somebody had to work the land. It wasn’t just the shortage of food; when the farmlands were abandoned tax
revenues imploded.
    But Kassu was a city boy He had not anticipated the impact of the drought, and now the cold that worsened year on year. In the spring the plants would not grow and the trees would not bud; in
warmer, moister intervals later in the year you might get a surge of growth, but then the early frost would ruin your crops, and anything that did grow the rabbits would take. They even chewed the
bark off your fruit trees. In the very worst months your soil would dry out and blow away, just dust.
    And now snow: snow, on Judas Day! In New Hattusa! He had thought last winter was as bad as it could get. What was to come this year?
    Zida watched the snow fall suspiciously. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t lie. Don’t want to leave tracks. They say Old Hattusa is cut off already. Snow in the passes.’
    Kassu shrugged. ‘It always snows on Old Hattusa, up on that plateau. No wonder the kings moved out.’
    ‘You’ll be warm enough with that plump wife of yours.’
    ‘Not if you keep dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night.’
    Zida laughed. ‘Who’s Palla, by the way?’
    ‘How do you know about Palla?’
    ‘You asked me if I was Palla before I had your dagger at your throat.’
    ‘A priest. Cousin of Henti. Quite high up; he works in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Arinna. Knows Angulli, I think, the Father of the Churches.’
    ‘So why’s he sleeping in your hovel?’
    ‘He’s close to Henti. Has been since they were kids. He came out a while back to bless the potato fields, when we heard the blight was in the neighbourhood. He’s come out to
stay a few times since.’
    Zida looked at Kassu. ‘That’s good of him,’ he said neutrally. ‘Can’t be much of a priest, though. Didn’t save your potatoes, did he?’
    Kassu shrugged. As Zida seemed to be guessing in his own crudely insightful way, Palla had actually caused a lot of arguments between Kassu and his wife. Kassu resented the priest’s
frequent visits, resented having to feed the man. ‘The will of Teshub Yahweh is not ours to question.’
    Zida laughed again. ‘That’s for sure.’ But he spoke softly, for they were heading into empty country now, away from the city. He put his right hand on the hilt of his
scabbarded sword, and Kassu found that he’d unconsciously done the same thing.
    They moved without a light, but by now their eyes were fully open to the dark. The land, much of it disused farmland, was mostly empty. Once they saw an animal, like a big dog. It could have
been a wolf; animals like deer and wolves had been spotted much closer to the city than they used to come. The abandoned countryside was reverting to the wild, some said, even so close to New
Hattusa.
    Kassu pictured the landscape. New Hattusa sat by the shore of a bay that opened up to the north; to the west a spit of land separated the bay from the Middle Sea. The city was protected by
layers of defences, some inherited from the deeper past, some planned by the Hatti kings when they first moved the capital of their empire here. There were rivers to north and south, and to the
east a tremendous New Wall, a mass of Northlander growstone and hard facing stone, that ran from the valley of the Scaramander in the south all the way to the Simoeis in the north. To the west,
along the coast, there were sea walls and heavily defended harbours. The bay itself, where dredgers worked constantly to clear away