Soon the track was fixed, the caravan reloaded, and they were off again. They reached a broad, rich valley that they followed east. Pyxeas, earnestly sketching maps, told Avatak that this was the north of a large peninsula called Greater Greece. They reached another sea coast, and at last they were a mere few hours from their destination, where they would spend much of the winter.

Hantilios! The name seemed to be on everybody’s lips, up and down the caravan, and people poked their heads out of the felt-laden carriages to look around and swap bits of gossip. Even old Pyxeas stirred with interest, putting aside his obsessive note-taking. Avatak, who barely understood where he was, felt excitement build.

But Rina merely sighed. ‘Hantilios! I can smell it already.’ She retreated to the back of the yurt.

13

Hantilios was not like Northland, not like Parisa. It was something new again, to Avatak’s wide-open mind.

It was a city built on islands scattered over a lagoon, crowded, cramped, untidy and nowhere level. The only clear area in the whole city surrounded the palace of the Watchman, an ancient title for the city’s ruler. The islands were joined by bridges of wood and stone, some more sound than others. Alleyways ran between the houses and shops, connecting marketplace to temple to granary to dock, but only foot traffic and the occasional horse used the alleyways, for they were too narrow for anything else – and besides the true roads of Hantilios were the waterways, the natural streams between the islands supplemented by the bold straight lines of artificial canals. Just as the alleys were crowded day and night with people and goods, so the waterways were constantly packed with vessels, some no larger than the simple kayaks used by Avatak’s people, some elegant shallow-draught barges that were driven by poles pushed into the murky water, and a few larger ships that looked as if they could brave the open ocean, so close to each other in the lanes that their hulls rubbed.

Rina warned Avatak not to fall into the water, or to drink it unboiled, for the common belief in Northland was that the Hantilians used their waterways not just as roads but as sewers too, and the place was one big fetid swamp. Well, it wasn’t without its aromas, and the water didn’t look too clean, but it was not as bad as Rina seemed to believe, Avatak quickly learned. Hantilios had once been a Hatti city, endowed as a trading centre by the Hatti King who had allowed the city to be named after himself – ‘Watchman’ was a relic of a Hatti title for a local governor – and even now, though it was fiercely independent, the city had retained more than a trace of the Hatti’s famous obsession with cleanliness.

And in this age, clean or not, the city was busier than it had ever been. Hantilios was ‘the hub of the world’s trade’, as Pyxeas called it, connected to all points by good routes on the water and overland. Now the long drought and the cold winters were stirring people up all across the Continent and beyond, and they all seemed to be flowing through Hantilios. There were parties of Germans from the north seeking passage to Greater Greece or Africa, and Carthaginians from the west trying to secure grain imports from Islamic Egypt, and Hatti and Muslim traders from the east looking for new western trading links as those to the east were increasingly disrupted, and so on. The city was a mosaic of skin tones and costume styles and languages, and in the teeming markets Avatak glimpsed goods from all over the world: spices, drugs, fabrics, weapons, gems, minerals from iron to gold and silver, ivory and wool and ostrich feathers – and slaves, many, many slaves, desolate-looking folk, some whole families together, brought from who knew where.