Even of the day they were to die.

It was a spring morning, though it was so cold you’d have thought it was winter. Old snow still lay on the silent fields, and on the ramparts of New Hattusa on the horizon, and in ugly soot-stained heaps in the yard of the master, Kassu the soldier, where it had been scraped up by the slaves. But the problem in the last few days had been not the snow, but the rain. By night Pimpira and his family had been forced to huddle in corners to avoid the freezing-cold water leaking into their shabby hut, and outside the rain pooled on ground that was still frozen just under the surface if you pushed your finger into it, and froze hard in great sheets. Pimpira’s father said it was an extraordinary sight, something he’d never seen in all his years. Every year, every month, every day, brought a new sight, something that nobody had ever experienced before in the history of the world, he said. Pimpira’s father was thirty-one years old.

Despite the freeze, this morning, as every other morning at this time of year, the slaves were sent out into the fields for another day of struggling to plough the hard earth, goading the surviving oxen. As the morning wore on they would be joined by more workers, paid free folk coming out from the city, desperate for work and food. Pimpira, fourteen years old, knew little about crops, about wheat and rye and barley – with his deformed foot he was rarely sent out into the fields – but he couldn’t see how the seeds were going to take in ground frozen hard as rock. But they all went through the routines of the season anyhow, and the master seemed to see that they didn’t need whipping to do it. For what choice was there, if they were to have any chance of food later in the year?

As usual, Pimpira was sent away from the rest. The boss told him to dig out an old storage pit under the floor of a demolished barn. It was the kind of job that suited him; he was strong in his upper body, but he wasn’t too mobile because of his foot. It was tough labour, smashing the frozen earth into chunks that he could pitch out of the hole, but as he hacked away with his rusted iron shovel, he soon started to warm up.