Bronze Summer

21

‘Tibo. Tibo!’

Hands at his shoulders, shaking him. The air hot. More heat coming from the hard ground under his back. A roaring sound like a wave on the shore. The ground shuddering. He tried to open his mouth. His lips were gummed up, dry, and when he tried to lick them his tongue rasped on a kind of grit, sharp-tasting. Ash.

‘Tibo!’

He opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, on a slope, his head lower than his feet. Shreds of white mist fled across the sky. He remembered the wall of ash and smoke coming at him, the hot air that had hurled him back with a casual flick.

Caxa’s face loomed over him, streaked with ash and dirt. Her right cheek was blistered, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose, dripping from the jade bead stuck in there. She pulled at his shoulder. ‘Hurt? You can walk?’

His spine had been bent backward over his pack. When he tried to rise his head pounded, with a sharp ache at the back of his skull from the blow from the rock or tree stump that had knocked him out. But he was able to sit up.

And he saw the ridge-summit of the Hood, only paces away. Steam and smoke thrust up into the air all along the ridge, studded with flecks glowing white-hot. That angry chuffing rock-breath noise had gone now, to be replaced by a continuing, deafening roar. He could feel the dry blistering heat on his face and hands, and when he took a breath it seared his throat. Ash washed down, falling like grey snowflakes. He watched, bemused, as the flakes drifted in the air, almost beautiful.

‘Tibo, come!’

‘Yes.’ He struggled to his feet and tried to think. Down, down — they had to get away from this summit — down was the way to go. Down to the sea. He imagined immersing himself in the sea’s cool, clear saltiness, washing away this searing dust. And his father would be there, waiting with his boat. He would take Caxa to the sea.

But there was something missing. A gap in his head. Somebody else. Medoc.

He looked around. Further down the slope old Medoc was lying on his front like a beached dolphin, groaning with pain. Tibo grabbed Caxa’s hand. ‘Come on.’

Medoc had fallen over a shattered tree stump, and an ash-coated splinter had neatly run through the fleshy part of his upper thigh. Tibo could see the point sticking out. Blood dripped onto the ash-covered ground, brilliant red against the grey.

Medoc waved them away, wincing with pain. ‘No! Get away. Leave me here. Look, you can see what I’ve done to my leg…’

Caxa knelt over him and inspected his injury. ‘Not bad,’ she said to Tibo.

‘You know how to treat injuries?’ he asked, surprised.

‘Sculptors — always big rocks falling over, sharp flakes flying — injuries all the time. Father helped me learn.’

‘So what do we do?’

Caxa slipped her hands under Medoc’s injured thigh, to either side of the tree splinter. ‘You get foot.’ Tibo moved around and cupped his hands under Medoc’s ankle. ‘We lift together.’

Tibo nodded.

Medoc raged, his face a mask of grey ash streaked with blood. ‘You don’t owe me anything — I’m the fool who brought you up here, all the way to the gates of the underworld, and now look what’s happening-’

‘On three. One, two — three!’

They both lifted, jerking the leg up and away from the splinter, with a rip of flesh as the leg caught on some barb, and Medoc screamed. But the leg was free, and he rolled on his back. Caxa took a stone blade from the belt at her waist, hacked a strip of ash-grimed linen from her tunic, and wrapped it around the wound. The cloth instantly stained dark crimson, but there was no life-threatening flow; this was not the wound that would kill Medoc. The bit of wood that had done so much damage stuck out of the ground, mute. As Tibo watched, swirling ash settled on it, covering it over, flake by grey flake, the ash sticking to the drying blood.

Somehow Caxa got Medoc up off the ground. He was leaning on her, his arm over her shoulders, his good leg planted firmly on the ground.

Tibo wrapped his arm around Medoc’s waist. ‘Down. We have to go down to the sea.’

Caxa grunted, nodded. Together they stumbled down the slope, helping Medoc.

The ash thickened, becoming a kind of blizzard of burning flakes. They wrapped their cloaks around their heads, leaving only slits for their eyes. Tibo’s lungs strained at air that was hot and smoky and stinking of sulphur. He could barely see his footing.

And again the ground shuddered, and there was a deep rocky groan, as if the mountain itself were struggling to wake from some nightmare.

In the little community called The Black, Vala was in her house — or rather Okea’s house. As the sister of Medoc’s dead wife Bel, Okea was Medoc’s oldest surviving female relative, and that was the way property was owned and inherited here, as in Northland. It was a warm day, midsummer’s day, not long after noon. The house’s hide door was thrown open to the southern light, and while everybody else was out at the Giving, Vala was taking the chance to get some work done. She used a mortar and pestle to grind up meat and boiled potato to make the soft stew that Puli liked, her second son with Medoc and her youngest child, two years old and a fussy eater since he’d been teething. It was a stew that old Okea sucked up by the bowlful too, cursing her broken teeth. Puli himself lay peacefully sleeping in his wrap on the floor at her side.

As the booms came from the fire mountain, Puli barely stirred, but Vala was increasingly uneasy.

Okea’s house had been one of the first to be built in this little settlement, and so it was in a favoured position on a stretch of high ground just before the great platform of black rock that had given the place its name. Sitting cross-legged just inside the house’s south-facing door, Vala could see a long way, over a swathe of landscape, with its clumps of birch forest and scattered farmsteads, the fires of the fisher folk smoking their catch down by the small harbour, and then the sea beyond, bright and blue and glittering. But today there was a haze over the sea, and a kind of orange tinge to the sky.

And now that big boom earlier, the more or less continuous rumbling since. What did it mean?

Mi and Liff came bustling up the slope. Mi held a rough rubber ball in her hand, a gift from the Jaguar people, a sacred token that always ended up in the hands of the kids. Liff was complaining noisily. ‘Mother, she took it off me, she took the ball.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t come home otherwise-’

‘We were playing round-the-houses! I was winning, and she just grabbed it and came in. Mother, tell her-’ He grabbed at the ball. Mi held it up, out of his reach.

Liff, ten years old, was Vala’s first child with Medoc. And Mi, twelve, was Vala’s daughter by her dead husband back in Northland. She was nearly as tall as Vala herself now, on the cusp of womanhood, but she was still enough of a kid to play. Both of them looked hot, over-excited maybe by all the fun of midsummer day, with the Giving and the bladder feast to come. But Mi looked concerned, her small, pretty face pinched.

With a sigh Vala put down her mortar and pestle. ‘So what’s this all about?’

‘She was cheating.’

‘I wasn’t. I had to make him come in. Vala, you should come out and see. Pithi and her family, and Adhao and all those nephews and nieces of his-’

‘What about them?’

‘They’re going.’

‘Going where? What do you mean, going?’

‘They’re just packing up their stuff and walking away. Down towards the coast. That’s why I stopped playing with you, stupid!’

‘All right, Mi.’

‘I thought we should come back here.’

‘That sounds sensible,’ came a voice from the gloomy house. Old Okea came shuffling forward, leaning heavily on the stick of Albian oak Medoc had carved for her. She looked oddly caved in, Vala thought, with her white-streaked hair around a weather-beaten face, her empty dugs, her knees and hips ruined by a life of hard labour. She was forty-eight years old. ‘And I’ll take the ball.’ She took it in one claw of a hand and dropped it into one of the voluminous leather bags hanging from her waist. ‘That way nobody’s cheating, yes?’

Vala looked at the older woman. ‘Everybody’s leaving, she says.’

‘Not everybody,’ said Mi.

‘Let’s take a look for ourselves.’ Okea shuffled towards the light. She glanced down at Puli as she passed, dismissive. ‘He’ll keep for a moment.’

Vala pushed down her resentment. It galled her to be subservient to an old woman who probably wouldn’t be alive if not for the support Vala gave her. But she was her husband’s sister, and this was Okea’s house, and this was the Northland way. She checked on her child for herself, then stepped out of the house after the others.

Despite the smoke and ash in the air the day was brilliant, and she blinked in the light. The community of The Black was just a dozen houses around a hearthspace of trodden earth, characteristic Northland, though the farmers’ small fields of potatoes and the penned cattle nearby were not. Today timber and turf had been heaped up at the centre of the hearthspace, in anticipation of the evening’s bonfire. And, as Mi had said, people were moving, coming out of the houses carrying children and food and bundles of clothes and tools. One man was loading up a cart to be hauled by an ox. Others, evidently meaning to stay put, hung around outside their houses or in their doorways, watching the rest, and staring at the sky to the north.

Liff turned that way and pointed. ‘ Look, mother.’

Vala turned and saw a pillar of smoke, rising to the sky. It was dark at its base, where it billowed and bubbled like the boiling mud of a hot spring. Further up, she had to tilt back her head to see, it became paler, fading almost to white, as it spread out across the sky like the branches of a tree. The cloud loomed over the mountain, the settlement, perhaps the whole island. It seemed much taller than before.

What did it mean?

‘I can see fire,’ Liff said. ‘Bits of red and white shooting up.’

‘I suppose you thought it was a thunderstorm,’ Okea said to Vala.

Vala bit back a quick response. Okea never missed a chance to get in a dig at Medoc’s new wife, a woman from what she saw as the soft country of Northland, which didn’t have any mountains at all. ‘No, Okea. I’ve been here eleven years, you know.’ Since Medoc had met her, newly widowed, at an equinoctial gathering in Etxelur. ‘And I’ve spent those years listening to that mountain grumble and burp. No, I knew it wasn’t a storm. The question is what to do about it.’ She didn’t know the behaviour of fire mountains well enough to be sure. She looked again at the adults with bundles of goods, and the children and dogs running at their feet, excited in this break in the routine.

Should they leave? She thought about her little family, Mi and Liff, two squabbling, resentful children, her infant asleep in the house, an old woman who could barely walk. It was a typical family on Kirike’s Land, or in Northland, widows and orphans, grandmothers and grandchildren, bits of broken families welded together as you might make a new sword from scraps of bronze. Now she was responsible for them all. She tried to make a mental list of all they’d have to carry for them to last two, three nights on foot or in a boat — the food, the clothes. And then there would be the walk itself, everybody weary, squabbling, the baby crying, the old lady hobbling… If only Medoc was here! But of course he was gone, off up the mountain itself, and Deri, Medoc’s son, was out on his boat somewhere, no doubt chewing the fat with his fishing companions, and laying bets on how tall the cloud would grow.

Okea was gazing at her, waiting for a decision.

She swallowed her pride. ‘Okea — I’ve never seen the mountain this bad. What do you think? Should we walk, or should we stay?’

There was a flash of triumph in Okea’s rheumy eyes. But the old woman turned away, looked at the cloud, sniffed the air. ‘Hard to say. I was only a little girl the last time it was really bad. Not much older than Puli in his swaddling. Such a fuss, walking. I would be a burden to you, I know that. The kids too. And Medoc wouldn’t know where we were.’ She started to shuffle back to the house. ‘Maybe it will blow over. It always has before. Let’s wait for Medoc. Besides, I’ve got my sewing to finish, and you have that cooking, you don’t want it to spoil.’

‘What about Xivu, the Jaguar man?’

‘Oh, he went off with the first families to leave,’ Mi said. ‘He didn’t wait to be asked!’

Vala glanced south again, at the calm sea, the litter of fishing boats. Everything seemed normal, if you looked away from the mountain. ‘All right,’ she said to Okea. ‘Come on into the house, kids — you can keep Puli amused while I finish the stew.’

Mi came willingly enough, but Liff hung back. He was holding out his hands. Small flakes of grey were settling on his palms.

When she looked up, Vala saw ash raining down, thickening all the time.

From Deri’s boat, the cloud rising from the Hood was an extraordinary sight. With the island itself a stripe of grey-brown on the horizon, you could easily see the sheer scale of the cloud, like an immense tree of steam and smoke that had taken root in Kirike’s Land. And after the noon blast, which from here had sounded like drawn-out thunder, the cloud had grown bigger yet, and it had spread out sideways, feathering.

Deri and Nago were out on the ocean to the south of Kirike’s Land, just the two of them in a hide boat big enough for eight rowers. They had set off at dawn, loaded up with nets and wicker baskets and bait for the fishing. It was midsummer, the weather was calm, the seas should have been jumping with cod, and Deri had been looking forward to a long, fruitful day, just him and Nago out on the boat. And as Nago, a distant cousin of Deri’s, kept his mouth shut most of the time, it would be a quiet one too, a break from the noisy chaos of his father’s household, the kids and dogs everywhere — not to mention the midsummer celebrations.

But the catch had been poor. Maybe it was because of the booms from the mountain, the faint whiff of sulphur you could smell even out here, the tremors that made the sea itself shiver and froth. Maybe the fish had been scared away. And now that cloud just grew and grew.

‘So,’ Deri said, at some point long after noon. ‘Do you think we should go back in?’

Nago sat at his end of the boat. He was thin, with a cadaverous face with sunken cheeks and a nose like a crow’s beak. His habit of staying motionless for long periods of time made you wonder if he was awake at all, or even still alive. Deri had never known such an incurious man. But Nago had lived all his days on the island, and he ought to know its mountains and their fiery moods better than Deri. At last, having thought hard about Deri’s question, he shrugged. ‘Why should we?’

Deri found it hard to say. Because the tide and winds might be wrong, on such a strange day as this. Because he had a vision of Medoc and Okea and Vala and the kids, and Tibo, all watching the cloud, waiting for him.

Perhaps for once Nago understood Deri’s mood. ‘They’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The family. I mean, your father went up the mountain yesterday with Tibo and that Jaguar girl, didn’t he? Medoc’s older than you and me put together. If he thinks it’s safe, then it’s safe.’ Nago glanced at their meagre catch in the bilge. ‘Anyway we haven’t got enough fish yet.’ He slid back until he was lying on a heap of netting in the prow of the boat, and closed his eyes.

He was probably right. Deri determined to stop fretting.

But that cloud spread higher and wider across the sky. It was feathering to the west now. Soon it drifted across the face of the sun, which dimmed to a silvery disc. The whole sky began to take on a strange, glowing green tinge.

Then ash began to fall, a gentle rainfall of fine dust and a few heavier flakes. It settled on the boat and gathered in scummy swirls on the sea itself. This kept up until everything, the boat itself, the fish in the bilge, the bare skin of the sleeping Nago, was stained pale grey, the colour leaching out.

And then, in mid-afternoon, the mountain gave a second shout, even louder than the one at noon. Deri thought he felt a kind of concussion in his chest. An even greater volume of black smoke began pouring from the mouth of the tortured mountain, feeding the huge spreading cloud above. And it seemed to him that even as it mushroomed higher, its lower layers were beginning to descend, to fall back to the island.

Nago grumbled in his sleep, and spat ash out of his open mouth.