Bronze Summer

8

The men hauled the skin boat safely up the beach from the rushing surf.

Tibo, exhausted by the rowing and the sun, got his father’s permission to take a break. Stiffly, unused to the land after so long at sea, he walked away from the boat, up to the softer sand above the waterline. It was morning still but the sun beat down from high in a cloudless sky, and his skin prickled with sweat and sand and salt, slick with the oily unguent the men had given him to keep from burning. He climbed a shallow dune and flung himself down, panting.

He had crossed the mighty Western Ocean. He was far from home. He was fifteen years old.

From here he could see more of the landscape of this distant continent, a bank of sandy hills, a forest like a wall, remote mountains. The forest was dense and mysterious, and he saw rustlings in the green — heard a cry like a distressed child. Soon he would have to penetrate that strangeness. To his left, to the south, he saw a stream of clear-looking fresh water, gushing down a gully in the open, sandy earth and to the sea. Beyond it he saw more such streams, and further out the ocean itself was discoloured. This, his father Deri had told him, was an estuary, the outflow of a tremendous river that drained the heart of this strange country.

It was no accident the boat had landed here. Traders from Northland had been coming to this remote shore since time beyond memory, voyages recorded in graceful swirls and loops in the Archive in the Wall. With Deri’s detailed periplus and the knowledge and experience worn deep in the heads of the older sailors, they had made their way here without any difficulty, hopping down the long and convoluted coasts of these western continents, foraging and trading for provisions. But it was all extraordinary to Tibo, even though he had spent much of his young life travelling with his father between Northland and his father’s family home on Kirike’s Land, an island in the middle of the Western Ocean.

Looking back, he saw the sailors were getting on with the chore of unloading the boat. They dumped out the oars and leather sail and mast, their packs of clothing, dried food, water sacks and fishing gear. Then they turned over the boat itself to allow it to dry out, exposing a hull of tanned ox-hide crusted with barnacles. Most of the men had stripped down to their loincloths. They looked like winter animals, bears perhaps, muscular and hairy, out of place on the hot sand of the beach. A cousin of Tibo’s father’s called Nago, comparatively skinny, of few words but a leader when the oars came out, ran down to the sea, pissed noisily, and hurled himself into the water.

His father Deri walked up. He carried two light packs, and bronze swords in their scabbards. He sat on the dune crest, and handed his son a flask. ‘We’ll fill these up in the stream. You look thoughtful.’

‘Look at the lads on the beach. We’re a long way from home.’

‘I know it’s all strange,’ Deri murmured. ‘But we of Kirike’s Land are at home here, we know our way around. You’ll see.’

Deri was not yet thirty. He wore his red hair long and tied back from his face; his skin was paler than his son’s and burned easily, but in the months of the journey it had weathered to a leathery texture, the creases around his eyes prominent where he had been squinting against the sun. He looked strong, at ease. Tibo couldn’t believe he would ever be so effortlessly confident. And yet Deri had been younger than Tibo was now when he had become a father.

‘So,’ Deri said. He held out one of the packs to Tibo. ‘You ready to go?’

‘Go where?’

‘To find the Jaguar people, of course.’ He stood in a single, supple movement. ‘We’ll just follow the estuary inland, and into the green. You won’t believe their country until you see it. And there we will beg the services of their king’s sculptor.’

Tibo stood unwillingly. ‘Now? We only just arrived.’

‘But this is why we came.’ He helped Tibo hitch the pack on his back; it was cloth and leather sturdily sewn, and it sat comfortably on a frame of willow. ‘Let me tell you something. I was born on Kirike’s Land but grew up in Northland, because my mother, your grandmother, came from there, and then I went back to Kirike’s Land to raise my own family. And in Northland we are forever looked down on by those leathery old snobs in their great Houses, the Annids, the Wolves. We’re just boatmen from some rock in the middle of the ocean, and that’s all Kuma was to them. If you’re low-born, you stay low-born. But now everybody agrees your aunt Kuma was one of the best Annids who ever lived.

‘ That’s why we came here — we, the family of Kuma herself — you and me. We will find the sculptor who will create the greatest honour of all for Kuma, by which she will be remembered for all time.’ He ruffled Tibo’s hair. ‘Nothing to it. Just watch where you step. Oh, and keep away from the water.’ He led the way down the beach to the stream, where he bent to fill a water flask.

Tibo had no choice but to follow.

The estuary was fringed by a muddy plain, itself bordered by walls of forest. Working their way inland, father and son followed roughly defined paths that followed the edge of the forest, or cut in among the trees. Out on the mud birds worked in great flocks, exotic types that Tibo didn’t recognise and Deri couldn’t name. In the deeper water Tibo saw fish swim, bronze and gold, unfamiliar, and what looked like eels, and stranger shapes, long and sleek with crusty backs. Once he saw a long, flat head that seemed to be all jaw, opening and yawning, revealing rows of teeth. These beasts were why, Deri said, you had to be careful of going in the water, or even near it.

Towards the end of the day they cut away from the water and pushed into the jungle. The trees were impossibly tall and green and laden with vines and lichen, and the ground was choked with undergrowth so thick you had to slash your way through with your bronze blade. Deri knew the forest to some extent, having travelled here at the death of the last Annid of Annids a decade earlier, and he knew which fruit was safe to eat. You could find rabbits and deer here, he said, brought over the ocean in the deep past by Northlanders. And there were other sorts of animals to hunt, such as big clumsy creatures like huge rats that fled at their approach.

But there were other, still stranger forms lurking in the forest. Once Tibo heard a cry, almost human, and he saw a shadow flitting through the high branches, like a child, a thing that clambered and swung. And, late on as the light faded, he saw two yellow eyes peering out of the green gloom around them — a black face, a slim muscular form. But when he looked again it was gone.

He told Deri what he had seen. His father grinned, his teeth white in the gloom. ‘Perhaps it was a jaguar.’ The word was strange, not of the ancestral language of Northland. ‘The god-animal of the Jaguar folk. You are honoured; the jungle is welcoming you.’ But after that Deri kept his bronze sword drawn and in his hand, and stayed subtly closer to his son.

Deri called a halt for the night at the edge of a wide area of swampy land. They found a dry space away from the water, and spread out a cloth over the ground, and hung another from a tree branch to discourage the insects. While Deri gathered dry wood, Tibo started a fire using a flint and a striking-stone from his pack.

Then, before the light vanished completely, Deri beckoned to Tibo and led him to the edge of the water. Here an extraordinary tree grew right out of the water, a complex tangle of trunks and branches draped with vines. Deri took off his shoes and stepped carefully into the water, leaned down and dug in with his bare hands, scooping out crabs that he threw up the bank to Tibo. Then he took a knife and began prising off oysters and mussels that clung to the tree roots. ‘This strange waterlogged tree is the whole world to these creatures.’

Tibo, avoiding the crabs’ snapping claws, smashed their shells with rocks. They heated a stone slab over their fire, and cooked the crab meat in strips, and popped open the mussels and the oysters.

Night seemed to fall quickly here. Tibo was grateful for the light of the fire, which kept the looming forest shadows away.

When he woke the light of day was seeping through the seams of their thin tent. His father was still asleep. Tibo slipped on his boots and pushed his way out of the tent, naked save for his loincloth. The dawn was not far advanced, but the sky was already bright, the air already hot, and the jungle was full of birdsong and the distant cries of animals. He walked down towards the tree with the crabs and loosened his grubby loincloth. He disturbed birds that flapped away, huge and unreasonably colourful, squawking their protest.

And as he was pissing against a root he saw the girl. He jumped, and felt warm liquid splash against his leg. He had no weapons, not so much as a blunt knife.

The girl was standing on a low rise, watching him. She was naked save for a skirt of dyed cloth loosely tied around her waist. Her skin was brown, her bare breasts small. She was slender, shorter than he was. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Her hair was tightly tied up, and adorned with brightly coloured feathers. She was holding a bag of knotted string, within which a small creature was curled up, like an oversized rat.

She grinned. Her teeth were grooved, he saw, striped with some red-orange dye.

She didn’t offer any threat, Tibo told himself. He had just crossed an ocean to speak to these people. He smiled back. ‘Hello.’

But she flinched, spat something guttural, and from nowhere produced a stone knife that she held out, pointing its tip at him.

‘It’s all right.’ Deri stood beside him, as near-naked as Tibo was. ‘These people have their own ways of speaking. To her, you were being threatening, or rude. Or both.’

‘I didn’t mean to-’

‘Follow my lead.’ He smiled at the girl, covered his eyes with his fists, and bowed. Then he straightened up, opened his hands palms outward so that it was as if his hands were his eyes, Tibo saw. Then he carefully lowered his hands so his true eyes were revealed. ‘I saw her with my body, then my spirit. You aren’t real until you’re seen properly. To her, it was as if you were a corpse that just sat up and spoke.’

Tibo copied the hand-eye movements as best he could.

The girl seemed to relax. She tucked the knife into her leather belt, and made the eye gesture, first to Deri, then Tibo.

‘Try not to do anything else to alarm her. And put your cock away.’

Tibo hastily rearranged his loincloth.

The girl jabbered something in an alien tongue, full of clicks and stops.

Deri shook his head. ‘I don’t understand all that… Ki-xi wes-tar. Deri.’ He gestured. ‘Tibo. Ki-xotl t’xixi…’ The girl’s eyes widened, and she looked puzzled. Evidently the way he spoke wasn’t always clear, and he stumbled over the clicks with his tongue..

In the end she grinned again, showing those grooved teeth. ‘ K-xa!’ And she turned and ran off.

Tibo frowned. ‘Where has she gone? What did you say to her?’

‘The only thing I know how to say. That we’re from Northland, and the Annid is dead. If we’re lucky she’ll have gone off to tell somebody about it.’

‘And if we’re not lucky?’

He sighed. ‘I’ll just have to try again. Or you can try. I’ll teach you. All those tongue-clicks are hard work. Now come on, let’s get cleaned up here and get moving.’