Bronze Summer

35

Nago, ten years older than Voro and far more experienced a hunter, pointed to a poorly concealed hearth, a scrap of linen clinging to bracken.

Voro nodded, grinning.

Deep in the folded hill country of the First Mother’s Ribs, Voro and Nago were tracking Caxa, as they would hunt a deer. Even after the clue Caxa herself had left them by etching her giant artwork on the hillside, it had taken them days to work their way up from the valley of the Brother River, following her trail. But now, at last, they had crossed a ridge coated with heather, and saw her smoke.

The men rested, snuggling into the heather and sipping water from their flasks, before closing in for what Nago insisted on calling ‘the kill’. They were reasonably well hidden, Voro thought, though even the heather was sparse this year, and everybody doubted it would put on its usual autumn display of brilliant purple. But the thistles and poppies grew thickly. From this high vantage Voro looked south over the country. He could see the winding ribbon that was the Brother River, and the communities cut into the green along its banks, the characteristic hearthspaces connected by arrow-straight trackways. Further away, off to the south, he could just make out the shining water of the Sister, the two rivers curling towards their shared estuary off to the east. And beyond the rivers the tremendous plain of Northland itself stretched away. Despite the dismal summer, though it was so unseasonably cold, there was plenty of green in the clumps of forest, the reeds in the marshland. Given the landscape was so different from her own remote country, Voro thought, Caxa had done well to hide from them — indeed to have survived so long, more than a month, by living off the land, entirely alone. But she was here. No doubt about that. Voro only had to glance down at the hillside below him.

From up here the pattern she had designed was foreshortened, but he had seen it from the villages of the valley of the Brother, from the lowland, as it had meant to be seen: a tremendous figure scrawled on the hill, a grotesque mashing together of a human baby with a fish’s body and a wolf’s head. It could only be Caxa, for, according to Xivu, this was characteristic of the art of her country. The markings had been made by scraping at the heather, by setting carefully controlled fires — it was a feat of ingenuity and persistence for one woman to have achieved all this alone. And she had completed it all in a single night. It had scared the life out of the people when they had woken the morning after to find this monstrosity glaring down from their hillside at them. But it had at last enabled Nago and Voro to track the girl down.

Nago glanced at the sky, and rubbed his beaky nose. ‘So hard to tell the time of day. That’s the worst of this god-baffling sunless sky.’

‘That and the hunger.’

‘And the cold.’

‘Let’s see if we can get this done today-’

‘Yes, let’s.’

The voice was a hiss from just behind them.

Voro rolled on his back. He saw a blur rising from the heather, lithe, dark, coming at him. A human figure, face blackened, hand raised with a stone knife like a claw.

Before Voro could move Nago rolled over and lashed out with one boot. The shadow fell away with a grunt, and Nago was on his knees before it, bronze knife in his hand. Nago could move remarkably quickly for such an old man, at thirty. ‘Enough,’ he snapped.

Now they were still, the elusive shadow resolved. It was a girl, naked save for scraps of soft leather around her chest and loins, skin smeared with soil and leaf matter. Barefoot, lithe, no wonder she had been able to sneak up on them so easily.

‘Get away. Leave me alone.’

‘Put down the knife,’ Nago said. ‘Come on, child. It’s over. You don’t want to harm us.’

Voro rummaged for the words in the Jaguar tongue Xivu had carefully coached into him. ‘We come as friends. You remember Nago. In his boat he saved you from the Hood. My name is Voro. We only want you to come home.’

She hissed again, and crouched down. She had become more like an animal than a human, Voro thought. She replied in clumsy Etxelur tongue, ‘This is not my home. My home is far away, across the sea.’

‘Come back to my home, then,’ Voro said. ‘Please. You are welcome there.’

‘With Xivu?’

‘You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to. You can stay with Vala. You remember her-’

‘I must carve the head.’

He spread his hands. ‘Everybody is hungry this year. Nobody is thinking of carvings on the Wall.’

‘But that is why I was brought here. I had no choice. I have had no choice since the day I was born.’

Nago sighed. He tucked away his knife, and dug a flask of water out of his pack, offered it to her. She ignored him. Nago said, ‘If you put it like that, which of us has any choice, child? We just have to make the most of what we’re given.’

But she scowled at him.

Voro touched Nago’s shoulder. ‘Let me talk to her alone for a moment. We’re more the same age.’

Nago snorted. ‘If it were up to me I’d just truss her up and bring her home. All right, do it your way. But I will only be a dagger’s throw away if she gets those claws out again.’ He walked a few paces away and settled down to a meal of dried meat from his pack.

‘You say you have no choice,’ Voro said carefully to the girl in her own tongue. ‘Yet you have had choices that you have not taken. You could have just disappeared. Northland is huge, empty. You could have gone off to Albia or Gaira, or even further, and before long you’d have found people who had never heard of Northland at all — let alone of the Land of the Jaguar. You could have disappeared. Yet you did not. Instead you made this huge, terrifying mark on the hill. You chose to do that. Why?’

She looked at her hands. ‘It is in my blood. As in my father’s, and my grandfather’s… It is what I do. I make art. Big art, to provoke awe in people. Or fear. Or longing… I had no choice. I could not walk away and — catch eels.’

He nodded. ‘And you have to make the head of Kuma, for that is what you do.’

‘And the head of the Jaguar king,’ she said evenly, ‘which will kill me.’

He grinned. ‘I’ll help you. I promise. I won’t let this Xivu take you off to be killed.’ He had talked this through with Raka and Vala, neither of whom had much sympathy for the Jaguar priest. They would surely offend no gods of Northland if they let this girl live — only the strange, savage gods from across the ocean who ordained her wasteful death, and Northlanders had no fear of them.

And for Voro, perhaps saving a life would recompense for his part in the taking of a life.

She stared at him, struggling to believe. ‘Tibo said he would help me.’

‘He saved your life on the fire mountain,’ Voro said sternly. ‘Now it’s my turn. I’m a clever chap. I will find a way. Will you come?’