Bronze Summer (20 page)

‘I suppose we would have to flee.’

‘I imagine so.’

‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I just found out I’m pregnant.’

He turned to her, astonished. For a heartbeat he wondered if it could be his – but no, they had always been careful about that, she had taken him in her mouth or her anus, or they had used her protective calfskin sheathes. A brat forced on her by some faceless Hatti soldier, then. And she was the Tawananna!

He laughed.

She glared out to sea.

The breeze shifted, coming from the west, and he thought he could smell burning.

25

The Year of the Fire Mountain: Late Summer

On the day her uncle Deri came home, it happened to be Milaqa who was on watch. She was sheltering from the sharp breeze coming off the sea, unseasonably cold, and was wrapped up in a thick cloak she would normally not have dug out until the autumn. But this was a particularly cold spot, for she stood in a gap between one monolith and the next: the space where the monumental sculpture of her mother’s head would one day sit, Kuma Annid of Annids. Any boatload of her family would know to pull up to the small dock at this point.

When the boat came in, alone, a dark smudge against the grey sea, she recognised it long before it reached the Wall, its unusually slender form, the slight kink in the prow. No two boats were identical. Each boat in Northland was made by the people who would sail it, and their family and friends. The process of building itself was a happy event, shared. This was Deri’s boat, built before Milaqa was born, and her uncle had always taken her out to sea in it. The boat was like a memory from childhood, of sunlit days on the sea.

As she waited, her arms wrapped around her torso, the cloud seemed to grow thicker, the day a little colder. It had been this way all summer, since the fire mountain. When the haze of smoke and sulphur stink had cleared away the high cloud remained, a solid roof of grey over the world. Sometimes you could see the sun as a pale disc, silver-white, with shadowy wisps passing over its face, but more often than not even that was invisible. And in the night no star shone, and barely a glimmer of moonlight, though at full moon the queen of death made the sky glow silver-grey, as if in triumph. If the sunlight was shut out, so was its warmth. The first frost had come not a month after the midsummer. Everybody had stood about amazed at the sight, frost on thick summer grass, and on the green reeds in the marshlands. Milaqa thought she had never seen so many owls out in the twilight – and the swallows and swifts had already gone, fled south in search of warmth.

The boat came closer, resolving out of the mist that lay over the sea. Now she could see a handful of adults, one a woman with an infant strapped to her chest. Some of them worked at the oars, fairly coordinated but listlessly. She heard a man’s calm voice calling the strokes: Deri himself.

Milaqa picked up the sack of water skins she had carried up here on every watch, and climbed down the narrow staircase cut into the Wall’s sea face, down to the dock. The dock itself was just a notch in the growstone, crusted with barnacles and drying seaweed, but deep enough to take a boat like Deri’s. The crew saw Milaqa coming. Deri waved, and forced a smile. They all looked thin, dressed in ragged clothes stained grey or black.

The rowers shipped their oars, and used them to guide the boat into the little dock, pushing at the growstone. Milaqa threw a rope from a growstone bollard, and Deri tied it to the prow. Milaqa recognised Nago, a cousin of Deri’s who was his workmate out on the sea. The woman with the infant must be Vala, the younger woman who had married Medoc, her grandfather. There was one exotic-looking girl, dark. Perhaps this was the sculptor from the Land of the Jaguars, fetched at last by Deri from across the Western Ocean.

Deri himself was first off the boat. He staggered a little as he stood on dry land. He embraced Milaqa. ‘Thanks for waiting for us.’ His voice was a scratch, and he smelled of the sea.

‘Here. Water.’ She handed him her sack, and he pulled out a skin gratefully. She saw that his bare left lower arm had been burned badly, the skin wrinkled and livid.

Milaqa turned and helped the others off the boat. They moved cautiously, stiffly, even the children, their skin sallow, the bones prominent in their faces, as if they had been turned into little old people. One girl picked up a big, powerful-looking bow from the bilge. Vala followed the children, then the dark girl, and finally Nago, who managed a grin. ‘Nice to see a friendly face, cousin.’ Milaqa helped Deri tie up the boat. He introduced his son, Tibo, who was fixing knots clumsily. They had brought nothing with them save the clothes they wore, and a litter of water skins and fishing gear in the boat. From a debris of bones Milaqa saw they had been relying on fish to feed themselves on the journey, presumably eaten raw.

Deri bent to stroke the boat’s scorched and patched hull, as if she were alive. ‘She’ll be fine here for now. No weather coming. I’ll wait a day, then I’ll fix her up. She deserves that.’

‘And the journey?’

‘As you’d expect.’ He was thin, bearded, tense. ‘We rowed out of there with nothing. We drifted, landed where we could. Begging for food, water.’

Milaqa thought about who wasn’t here. ‘Grandfather Medoc? And Okea—’

‘Lost,’ Deri said. ‘Both of them. Come on. The sooner we get away from the sea the better.’

Vala was already leading the party up the staircase to the top of the Wall. They all moved slowly, carefully. But then, Milaqa thought, most of them had probably never climbed stairs before. ‘You’ll be safe here,’ she said.

Deri shivered in the chill breeze, and glanced up at the grey lid of sky. ‘I hope you’re right.’

Tibo himself was taken in by a cousin of Milaqa, called Hadhe, a kindly woman no older than Milaqa herself but with three children of her own. The kids were curious at first, and picked over his filthy clothes, before Hadhe got them off him and threw them on the fire. Hadhe’s mother, whose house this was, loaned Tibo a cloak and took him to a freshwater stream where he bathed all over, cleaning off the salt and the blood and a crust of ash he’d carried all the way from Kirike’s Land. They even got a priest to come out, a junior one, another cousin called Riban. The priest checked over his collection of burns, gave him salves made of herbs ground up in goose fat, and listened to his rattly breath. He was given more pungent herbs that made him cough, but Riban said it would clear the ash from his lungs.

Tibo, who hadn’t come to Northland for years, was impressed by the family’s houses, big sturdy constructions that sat on sculpted mounds of earth. And he was staggered by the Wall. It had looked impressive enough from the seaward side, a white line that terminated the ocean itself, topped with glaring human faces. But from the land side it loomed high over your head, even over the houses on their mounds, a smooth face like a cliff but scarred by ramps and ladders and chambers. People
lived
up there, on and in the Wall. If you looked up you could see them coming and going. And yet at the foot of this enormous structure grass grew and freshwater streams ran and wild birds gathered, and children ran and played with their dogs, as if it was perfectly natural to be living on the bed of the sea.

Hadhe took time to talk to Tibo. She said her own house was in a community called Sunflower to the south of here. The family had come up to live close to the Wall, like many others, to wait for loved ones from Kirike’s Land. They were generous, Hadhe and her family. But when they woke him for the evening meal he saw how carefully they portioned out the dried fish and hazelnuts they offered him. Food was short here too, then, just as on the boat.

Then, late in the afternoon, Milaqa called for him.

‘We’re having a gathering,’ she said. ‘The family.’

‘What family?’

She spread her hands. ‘The whole lot, all who have heard about you. Cousins, uncles, aunts.’

The thought appalled Tibo. ‘What do I say to them?’

‘You don’t have to say anything. Just come and meet them. After all, you’re going to be stuck here in Northland for a good while.’

So he pulled on boots and a cloak and followed her. The air outside Hadhe’s house was sharp enough to make his breath steam.

Milaqa led him away from the houses and along the raised bank of a broad dyke, directly towards the foot of the Wall. There was nobody around. Smoke rose from some of the houses on their smoothly worked mounds, but many houses looked empty, dark, without smoke. The sun was starting to set, though the only way he could tell was by looking west to a patch of grey sky that was marginally brighter than the rest.

They came to the Wall itself. Milaqa led him up a staircase cut into the face. As they climbed, Northland opened up to his right, looking south, a landscape of canals and house mounds and sparse smoke, spreading to a misty horizon. Not a single shadow was cast anywhere, so obscured was the sun.

They cut left, into the body of the Wall, and Tibo found himself following a narrow corridor lit only by oil lamps. Milaqa led him along a gallery, then up another staircase, then through a more enclosed corridor, then
down
more steps. At last she brought him to a broad chamber cut deep inside the body of the Wall. It was already crowded with people, who mostly sat or knelt on the floor, though there were a few wooden benches. By the light of oil lamps in notches and alcoves Tibo saw that the walls were covered in a kind of scrawl, the concentric circles and swooping lines of Etxelur writing. One man, dressed in the same owl-feather cloak as the Annid who had come to meet Caxa, sat on a raised chair by the back wall.

‘That’s your uncle Teel,’ Milaqa murmured. ‘Your father’s brother. The only male Annid, of this generation anyway. And look, there’s your father . . .’

Deri was sitting with Vala and her baby. Seeing Tibo, Deri patted the floor beside him.

Tibo joined him, and Milaqa squeezed in with them. There was a murmur of conversation, and the air was smoky from the lamps. Tibo wasn’t comfortable here, with all these people jammed in. But at least the place didn’t smell of ash. He leaned over to Milaqa. ‘What’s written on the walls?’

‘Holy stuff. Praise for the little mothers who built the world. We’re in a chamber on the border of the Holies, the temple District. Your cousin Riban arranged for us to have it for the day. Can’t you read?’

Deri said, ‘He can tally a cargo of fish faster than anybody I know. But there’s not much call for reading scripture on Kirike’s Land.’

‘I read what I need to read,’ Tibo said defensively.

Milaqa held up her hands. ‘Fine by me.’

He saw Vala’s other kids playing in a corner, some complicated game to do with passing a bouncing ball. A part of him longed to run over and join in.

Now the man in the owl-feather cloak stood up. The conversation hushed.

‘If you don’t know me, my name’s Teel. I must be your uncle or cousin, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here. And I’m an Annid, as you can see from the cloak. The only Annid in the family, now that Kuma is dead.’ He glanced around at the children. ‘You should always remember that Kuma became the most senior Annid of all – the Annid of Annids, and she came from
our
family, a bunch of Beetles from Kirike’s Land. I know how proud Medoc was of that. And Okea . . .’ He listed more names of family members lost to the fire mountain, mostly old folk, and a sad litany of children’s names. ‘I think we’ll miss Medoc most of all. If he was here, he’d be standing where I am, wouldn’t he? In his smelly walrus skin, cracking his awful jokes. But we welcome Deri’s party, who arrived just yesterday, and we thank the mothers for their deliverance.

‘There are other nestspills here too, members of the family. Where are you, Barra?’ A man stood up, short, stooped, smiling.

Tibo found he didn’t like being called a ‘nestspill’, and lumped in with all these others.

‘So here we are,’ Teel said. ‘We’re family, we’re here to help each other, in these hard times. We will find homes for you all. Ways for you to live. So – who has the first question?’