A kick in the ribs, though? Henti was asleep; she hadn’t delivered that.

He rolled on his back. There was a mass in the dark, looming over him. ‘Palla?’ But through the thin partition walls he could hear the priest, Henti’s cousin, the house’s only other inhabitant, snoring. Who, then?

A stranger in his house. His heart lurched. The land swarmed with raiders, bandits, the starving. This farm was within the circuit of the city’s New Wall, but that was no safety at all, not if you let your guard down. He kept a steel dagger under his pillow. He reached for it. It was gone.

And he felt cold metal on his bare chest. ‘Looking 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?’