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 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?