Bronze Summer

2

The Year of the Fire Mountain: Early Spring

Milaqa climbed the staircase cut into the face of the Wall. She took big deliberate strides, reluctant to think about her dead mother, whose rotting corpse lay out in the open on the roof.

The growstone surface by the staircase was covered in scratched graffiti, swirls of circles and arcs in flowing Etxelur script: ‘HARA LOVES MEK.’ ‘GAGO OF THE HOUSE OF THE VOLE OWES ME A DEER HAUNCH. DO NOT TRUST HIM…’ Here, she was intrigued to see, was a line scraped in the angular alphabet of the Greeks. She knew the language and picked out the words with ease: ‘I PALLAS CLIMBED THIS WALL AND DEFIED THE NORTHERN SEA, IN THE NINTH YEAR AFTER THE STORM.’

A sightseeing trader or princeling, she supposed, and boastful like all of his kind.

Her steps were slowing, her attention too easily snagged by these scribbles. She forced herself on.

As she reached the roof, under a grey sky, her view of Old Etxelur opened up, the earthworks and flood mounds, the houses clustered over the lump of Flint Island. Beyond, the flat, misty expanse of Northland stretched to the southern horizon, the grey-green landscape cut into a neat patchwork by the tremendous straight lines of tracks, canals, dykes, holloways and gullies. A cloud of birds, redwings perhaps, descended on a distant swathe of grassland. When she looked to the north the Wall’s own sharp horizon hid the sea from her sight. The Wall, it was said, was as tall as thirty adults standing one on top of the other, and about half as thick. But she heard the growl of the sea, and felt cold spray on her brow.

The wind shifted, and there was a reek of rot, of decay, of death. She wrapped her cloak closer around her body. She longed to run back to the warmth and light of the galleries of the Scambles, the bright chatter of her friends. But she could not.

She walked along the spine of the Wall, following the sparse line of monuments that dominated this tremendous roof. The oldest were slim monoliths, slabs of granite and basalt, gifts from the austere sky-watching communities of Gaira. And then there were the more recent Annid heads, images of Etxelur’s leaders carved by sculptors from across the Western Ocean: blocky faces as tall as Milaqa defiantly facing the rage of the waters, just as the Wall itself had for hundreds of generations. Her own mother’s face would soon be joining that row of bleak, sightless watchers. A memory surfaced like an air bubble from a still pond: a summer’s day when Kuma had lifted her up, Milaqa had been only five or six, and whirled her in the summer sunlight. Milaqa was now sixteen years old. She pushed the memory away.

And she approached her mother’s lying-out platform. It was a simple wooden frame surrounded by busy, swooping gulls that scattered, cawing their irritation. Her mother’s corpse was just one of a row of prone bodies on the frame, many of them small, the crop of children taken by the recent winter, just as every year. The bodies lay under worn-out thatch nets that kept their bones from being scattered by the birds. Kuma, Milaqa’s mother, still wore her bronze breastplate, gleaming in the watery daylight, the ceremonial armour of the Annid of Annids yet to be removed, to be given to her successor. The breastplate was damaged, Milaqa noticed, with a neat slit punched in its front.

And a man stood beyond the lying-out frame. Bulky, wrapped in a featureless cloak, silhouetted against the northern sky, this was her uncle Teel — come to make her face her mother’s death, and, she supposed, other unwelcome realities.

Milaqa walked forward. The Northern Ocean was revealed to her now, big muscular waves flecked with foam. The grey water was only a few paces below the lip of the Wall; the level of the sea was higher than the dry land behind her. Sea birds rode the ocean swell, and further out she saw a litter of fishing boats.

‘An eagle,’ Teel said.

‘What?’

‘I saw an eagle — a sea eagle, I think — wheeling away over there.’ He pointed out to sea. Teel was not a tall man but he was bulky, given to fat, and he habitually shaved his head to the scalp. Milaqa knew he was around thirty years old, but he looked younger, his face oddly round, like a baby’s.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ she said. ‘The eagles nest in crevices in the Wall’s outer face. Lots of birds do. And on the inner face too.’

‘Wearing away the Wall bit by bit, with each peck of a curious chick, each streak of guano on the growstone. Well. We can leave it to the Beavers to fret about that.’ His blue eyes were running in the cold breeze. ‘Thank you for coming up.’

‘Did I have a choice?’

‘Well, I didn’t drag you here, so yes, you had a choice. I know how difficult this is for you. To lose your mother in your sixteenth year, the year of your House choice — you’ll have to face the whole family at the equinox gathering-’

‘Don’t give me advice about my feelings, you ball-less old man.’

He laughed, unperturbed. ‘Ball-less, yes, I grant you. But not that old, surely.’

‘Let’s get this over.’ She walked deliberately to the sky burial platform. A couple of gulls had landed again; they fled into the air. Milaqa lifted her cloak so it covered her mouth. Teel had a linen scarf, grimy from use, that he pulled over his mouth and nose. And Milaqa looked closely at her mother’s body for the first time.

It had only been a month since Kuma had been brought home from the Albian forest where she had met her death. A fall from her horse had killed her, her companions had told the family, an aurochs chase that went wrong, the back of her skull smashed on a rock — an accident, it happened all the time, there would be no point hunting the great cattle in their tall forests if it wasn’t dangerous. Only a month. Yet Kuma’s head had already been emptied of its eyes, her gaping mouth cleansed of tongue and palate. Scraps of flesh and wisps of hair still clung, but enough bone had been exposed for Milaqa to be able to see the crater-like indentation in the back of the skull, the result of that fatal fall. This is my mother. Milaqa probed for feeling, deep in her heart. She had not cried when she had heard her mother was dead. Now all she seemed to feel was a deep and savage relief that it wasn’t her lying on this platform, her flesh rotting from her broken frame. Did everybody feel this way?

‘It works so quickly,’ Teel said, marvelling. ‘The processes of death. Look, of the body’s soft parts there’s not much left save the big core muscles.’ He pointed to masses of dull red meat beneath Kuma’s ribs. ‘The birds and the insects and the rats, all those little mouths pecking and chewing-’

‘Is this some kind of test? I know what you’re like. I grew up with you setting me tricky challenges, uncle.’

‘All for your own good. I wanted to show you something.’ He pointed to the flaw in the bronze breastplate. ‘Look at that.’

The breastplate, supposedly a gift from the tin miners of Albia to some Annid many generations back, was finely worked, incised with the rings and cup marks of the old Etxelur script. The damage was obvious close to. She inspected the rough slit, the flanges of metal folded back to either side. ‘What of it? When the next Annid takes the plate, this will be easily fixed.’

‘Perhaps so. But how do you imagine it got there?’

Milaqa shrugged. ‘During the accident. She fell from her horse, when it bucked before the charging aurochs.’

He nodded, and mimed a fall, tipping forward. ‘So she landed hard, and — what? A bit of rock punctured her breastplate?’

‘It’s possible.’ But she doubted it even as she spoke.

‘ But she fell backward. That’s what we were told — that’s how she got her skull stove in. You can see the wound, at the back of the head. So how, then, was the plate on her chest punctured?’

‘Come on, uncle. You never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer.’

He lifted his cloak back over his shoulder, revealing a mittened hand holding a bronze knife, and he began sawing at the net strands over Kuma’s torso. ‘Actually I don’t know the answer — not for sure. But I have a theory.’

He quickly cut enough strands to be able to peel back the netting, itself sticky, from Kuma’s chest. Then he reached under the breastplate to cut into its leather ties. Carefully, respectfully, he lifted the plate off Kuma’s body. It came away with a sucking sound, to reveal a grimy linen tunic. He slit through the rotting cloth and peeled that back to reveal Kuma’s chest, scraps of flesh and fat and muscle over ribs that gleamed white. Flies buzzed into the air, and there was a fresh stench, sharp and rotten.

Teel pulled off his deerskin mittens and handed them to Milaqa. ‘Hold these for me. This is going to be messy.’

And he dug his fingers into Kuma’s chest, in the gap between the racks of her ribs. Bone cracked. He pushed and probed, spreading his fingers into the soft mass beneath. He was looking for something. His expression was grim; Milaqa knew he had his squeamish side. Then his hand closed. He looked at Milaqa. He withdrew his hand, and held out his fist; black fluid and bits of flesh clung to his skin. He opened his hand to reveal a small object, flat, three-sided, evidently heavy and sharp, coated in ichor. He rubbed it on his cloak, and held the object up to his eye.

‘It’s an arrowhead,’ Milaqa said slowly.

He nodded. ‘ Somebody shot your mother — right in the heart. That’s how she died. The head injury surely happened as she fell from her horse, or was maybe faked later.’

‘But it must have gone right through her armour, her breastplate.’ Milaqa seemed to be thinking slowly, plodding from one conclusion to the next. ‘What arrowhead can pierce bronze?’

‘One like this,’ he said, holding out the point to her. ‘Iron.’