Bronze Summer

TWO
25

The Year of the Fire Mountain: Late Summer

Every day at least one of the family went up to the Wall roof to watch for Deri. Even months after midsummer there were always others up there too, friends and strangers waiting, staring out into the Northern Ocean. And all through that cold, dismal summer the nestspills had come in a trickle, sometimes just a single boat, sometimes little flotillas, packed with men, women, hungry children, sometimes even a few animals, drifting across a listless ocean and then drawing cautiously into the docks cut into the seaward face of the Wall.

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.’

Medoc’s family welcomed the latest nestspills. Deri went to the house of his wife’s family, and he took Vala with him. The others were taken in by distant aunts, uncles, cousins. When they realised who Caxa was, a boy was sent running, and he brought back a woman in a great cape of owl feathers — an Annid, Tibo was told, one of those who made the decisions in this place. She greeted Caxa in what Tibo could by now recognise as a broken version of Caxa’s own tongue. The Annid went off in search of the other Jaguar, Xivu, who had arrived on a much earlier boat. Caxa was reluctant; she had never wanted to come here at all. But in the end the fire mountain had taken away her choices, as it had for so many others.

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.

Tibo slept through much of the next day. Hadhe let him be, and he saw nobody from 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?’

Deri stood up. ‘Where is everybody? I never saw so few people on the land, working the waterways and wetlands. Even half the houses seem empty.’

Hadhe stood up in turn. ‘It’s the weather. We’ve had no sunlight.’

‘Yes,’ somebody said, a gruff man’s voice. ‘Not since your fire mountain spewed up all that cloud into the air.’

Your fire mountain. The phrase made Tibo flinch. It wasn’t his mountain. It had killed his grandfather. But nobody else reacted, and the moment was lost.

Teel answered calmly, talking about the weather. After the fire mountain it had been cold, bitterly so for the summer, and hail and rain had lashed the land. Plants had been battered flat, trees had lost their leaves early and had brought forth wizened nuts and fruit, and animals had become skinny or had starved altogether as they had nibbled at the sparse grass.

‘This is why we came to Northland,’ called the man, Barra. ‘We had a farm on the north coast of Kirike’s Land. We weren’t badly affected by the fire mountain itself, but the early hail flattened our crops, which weren’t growing anyhow. We could have starved over the winter.’ He had a weather-beaten face, and looked like a practical man, a man of common sense. ‘Crops must be failing all over, if the cloud extends right across the Continent, and I haven’t heard anybody say that it doesn’t. The Greeks, the Hatti, the Egyptians — what about them? They already had drought and famine, so I hear. I can’t imagine what it will be like if their summer is as bad as ours.’

A priest stood up, in a loose cloak of wolfskin. It was Riban, the cousin who had treated Tibo’s burns. ‘He’s right. The Swallows and Jackdaws have brought back reports to confirm it.’

‘And you Wolves,’ called out a man, ‘ought to be in your houses smoking your strange weeds and praying to the little mother of the sky to spare us.’

‘Believe me,’ the priest said, ‘we are.’

Teel stood. ‘To answer your question, Deri, this is why there are so few people around in Etxelur. People are out in the country, fishing, hunting, trawling the rivers for eel, looking for decent stands of hazelnut and acorns…’

This was how people lived here. They didn’t farm; they didn’t raise crops or livestock. They lived off the land, off Northland itself, and there were few enough of them to be able to do that. And when hard times came they just journeyed a little further into their bountiful country, dug a little deeper into its wealth of resources. At least they had a chance to survive a few bad seasons, where farmers would have none when their reserves were gone.

Soon the discussion turned to the future of the nestspills. Listening, Tibo got the impression that everybody was saying: ‘You are welcome but…’ But we have to feed our own children first. But you can’t have my job, as a Beaver or a Vole or a Swallow or a Jackdaw. But the fire mountain was on your island, on Kirike’s Land, and maybe you should have stayed there and dealt with the consequences rather than come here and take up our space.

‘Our grandmothers started out as Beetles, the whole lot of them,’ one woman said earnestly. ‘There’s always work there. Scraping the canals…’

Tibo had had enough. He muttered an apology to Milaqa and Deri, stood, and walked out.

He found his way out through gloomy corridors to a gallery cut into the Wall’s face, looking out on a fading day. Was this the gallery he’d been in before? Had they come from left or right? He wasn’t used to this kind of vertical landscape. But he could surely find his way down — or, indeed, up. Impulsively he set off, picking a direction at random. He came to an up stair, then went along another gallery carved into the growstone and curtained over with skin door flaps, and then a down stair that he ignored, and another going up..

He emerged from the last stair onto the roof of the Wall itself. The western sky flared red, a sunset gathering despite the invisibility of the sun itself. This upper surface was empty save for a line of monuments — and one man some paces away, stocky, gesturing, exercising with a sword.

To the south, Tibo’s left, Northland stretched away, the ground maybe fifty paces straight down. And to the north there was the restless ocean, its surface only a few paces beneath him. Standing on this Wall that divided two elements, the mass of the ocean looming over the peaceful land, the world seemed unbalanced to Tibo. Suddenly he felt as if the whole Wall was tipping, and he staggered.

‘Careful.’

Tibo looked around. It was the man who had been exercising; his sword was a long blade of beaten bronze.

‘What?’

‘ Careful. Is that word not right? My Etxelur-speak is still poor. Don’t fall off the Wall. One way, you drown. Other way, you crack your skull like an egg.’ He laughed.

He was older than Tibo, perhaps in his twenties. He wore a tunic under a bronze breastplate. His accent was thick, his words barely understandable. Tibo had never met anybody like this man in his life. ‘What are you, a Greek?’

The man looked at him long and hard. Then he spat into the sea, over the rim of the Wall. ‘I like you. That’s why I won’t cut off your ears for that insult. I am no ugly Greek. Can’t you tell? I am Trojan. And you? Northlander?’

‘I was born on Kirike’s Land.’

‘Where? Oh, the fire mountain island.’ He eyed Tibo gravely. ‘Was it bad?’

‘I am alive. My name is Tibo. I have come to be with my family here.’

The Trojan nodded. ‘I am Qirum. I have come to do business with the Annids. How is my Etxelur talk?’

‘Better than my Trojan.’

Qirum boomed laughter. ‘You don’t seem happy to be with your family. Why?’

‘They keep calling me a nestspill.’ He had to explain the word to the Trojan.

‘What’s wrong with that? You are a nestspill.’

‘In our Etxelur tongue the word is also used for a baby bird that has fallen from its nest.’

‘Ah,’ said Qirum. ‘Something helpless that you would pity — or crush under your heel.’

‘Yes. And I’m not helpless,’ Tibo said.

Qirum looked him over. ‘I can see that. So what do you want, nestspill?’

He said fiercely, ‘Not to scrape the muck out of canals, that’s for sure.’

‘Ha! Nor would I. Good for you.’ He returned to his exercising. He struck a pose, legs apart, worked the sword in a slash and vertical chop — then spun around and faced imaginary assailants coming from behind.

‘So why are you here?’ Tibo said.

‘I told you. Business.’

‘What business?’

‘Not sure yet. Everybody’s waiting. It’s all been changed by the fire mountain.’ He looked up at the grey sky. ‘No sun, you see. If it’s the same at home, then there will be trouble, even worse than before. Famine. People moving, whole populations. Towns emptying, cities being sacked. Maybe even Hattusa, Troy — what’s left of it. Difficult times for trade. Northland will be affected too,’ Qirum mused. ‘But Northland was divided anyway.’

‘Divided?’

‘Somebody killed the Annid of Annids.’

‘She was my relative. My aunt. I think.’

‘Was she?’ The Trojan shrugged. ‘The man who got her killed was exposed. Now he’s disgraced. Gone. But the woman he put in to replace your aunt — she’s still there! And nothing’s happening. No decisions being made. Everybody’s just waiting under the cold sky. So I don’t know what my business will be. But,’ he said, eyeing Tibo, ‘this is a time of opportunity, for a strong man, a clever man. When cities are falling at one end of the world, and the great power at the other end is locked in a struggle with itself.’

Tibo found these obscure words tremendously exciting. ‘What kind of opportunity?’

Qirum grinned easily. Then the sunset flared brighter, and he turned west to face it.

The sky had cleared a little, and was full of colours. Above a yellowish band around the position of the sun itself, a green curtain smeared high into the sky, fluted and textured, like a tremendous swathe of dyed cloth. The green faded eventually into red, which towered ever further into the sky as the sun descended, deepening to a bruised purple.

‘It changes as you watch it,’ Qirum said, the exotic light glaring from his polished breastplate. ‘Every night different. It’s why I come up here at this time. The gods are angry, my friend, but even their anger is beautiful. Do you know, the other night I saw a moon, glimpsed through the clouds, that was as blue as a midsummer sky? Think of that.’ He eyed Tibo. ‘Have you ever fought?’

‘Only with fists.’

‘Maybe it’s time you learned. Here.’ He tossed him his sword, making it spin in the air, coming at Tibo hilt first.

Tibo astonished himself by grabbing the handle without slicing his fingers off.

‘Come at me,’ Qirum said. Tibo saw he was armed only with a short stabbing dagger. ‘Come on. Don’t be afraid.’

‘I’ll cut your head off.’

Qirum grinned again. ‘I’ll take the risk. Come. And when I’ve got the blade off you I’ll teach you to wrestle. Always my favourite when I was your age, wrestling.’

Tibo considered, and raised the blade, and charged.

So it began.