Bronze Summer

9

With their packs on their backs, their swords in their hands, they pressed into the jungle, the way the girl had gone. Soon they came to a narrow track through the dense green, so faint and meandering it might have been made by animals rather than people. To his relief, Tibo saw that the jungle was clearing, the land rising, and the tree cover above began to break up to reveal a sky sparsely littered with clouds.

They came to a ridge of earth, grassed over but clear of trees that stretched away through the green to left and right, a dead straight line.

Deri snorted in triumph. ‘The work of the Jaguar folk!’ He strode forward boldly and clambered up onto the ridge.

Tibo followed, and found himself standing on the bank of a dyke, a tremendous drainage gully that cut through the forest. Paths were laid out on both banks, tracks of wood pressed into the earth.

Deri stepped out along the path.

‘This is big,’ Tibo said, hurrying after him. ‘Bigger than anything I’ve seen at home.’

‘The great works in Northland dwarf anything on Kirike’s Land, which is after all a small island. And they’d dwarf this too, but this is respectable. We’re approaching their heartland now…’

They reached the edge of the forest and broke out into the open air, still following the spine of the dyke. It wasn’t as hot here as at the coast; a wind blew from the north, chill and faintly damp. Tibo saw they were crossing the flood plain of a mighty river, sparsely scattered with stands of trees. In the far distance loomed mountains, the angular blue hills he had glimpsed from the sea. And at the feet of the mountains the land rose up into a plateau, edged by ridges and gullies, like a tremendous sculpture.

The whole of this landscape swarmed with people. Smoke rose everywhere, especially from that dominating plateau, and houses sat squat on the plain. Deri said the plateau was called the Altar of the Jaguar.

They came upon a party of people waiting for them, gathered around a kind of wheeled cart. Tibo recognised the girl from the river; she grinned, excited and happy, still holding the basket containing the little animal. Others stood with her, a handful of adults, dressed like her in practical-looking loincloths and with bright feathers in their hair. Her family, perhaps, her people. They smiled, evidently proud.

Two people stood on the cart’s platform. One man was tall, slim, bare to the waist, his lower legs wrapped in an intricately woven cloth. He wore a mirror of bronze from a strap around his neck, and Tibo was disconcerted to see his own face looking back at him. The other was a child, standing on a kind of box and holding leather straps — no, Tibo saw, looking closely, not a child, a man, a dwarf, with a wrinkled face and an oddly misshapen skull and a vestment as expensive-looking as the other man’s. The straps he held led to the heads of the two horses that drew the cart…

Not horses. Tibo stared, astonished. These were four-legged beasts with thick woollen coats, their legs were slim, and their necks were long, long and flexible and mounted by small heads. One turned to look at Tibo. It had large eyes, a kind of topknot of hair, and an oddly disapproving expression on its face.

The taller man stepped forward. He made the seeing-hand gesture to both the newcomers, and spoke in clear Etxelur-speak. ‘My name is Xivu.’ Shi-voo. ‘My rank is the Leftmost Claw on the Front Right Paw of the Jaguar King.’

Deri and Tibo hastily went through the ritual with their palms. Deri said clearly, ‘We are honoured you have come to meet us. We are honoured you speak our tongue.’

Xivu gestured. ‘This girl who found you ran like the wind to bring me your message… It is my honour to be the one to greet you. It was my predecessor who greeted the last party from Northland. I regret the death of your Annid of Annids. Kuma’s name and her heroic exploits rang across the ocean.’

Deri thanked him. ‘Then you know what we have come to ask of you.’

Xivu inclined his head. ‘Alas, it may be difficult to help you. But you are our guests.’ He produced a small bag and pressed it into the hands of the hunter girl. She opened it, and gasped at the sparkling stones that fell out into her palm. ‘Thus, her reward, and we need consider her no more. Please.’ He gestured at the cart.

Deri jumped up onto the cart. Tibo, bemused, followed.

‘Hold the rail,’ Xivu said gently. Then he spoke softly to the dwarf.

The dwarf snapped at the draught beasts, who raised their heads and ran at a clip, and the cart lurched forward. When Tibo glanced back, he saw the hunter girl and her family waving at them. He waved back.

The cart followed the dyke for some distance, then cut away onto a broad, straight, clean road paved with stone that led straight to the plateau that dominated the landscape.

The country was laid out in a neat grid. People toiled, labouring at fields thick with crops. Tibo saw more of the long-necked animals, some herded in pens, some drawing carts with expressions of aloof disdain. In other pens Tibo saw what looked like tremendous rats, or huge fat dogs. A few children looked up as they went past, skinny, dark, and they ran after the cart, waving. In one place a group of young men were playing a fast, complicated-looking game with a ball that bounced high when they threw it.

‘Farmers,’ muttered Deri. ‘Just like the farmers on our continent — except, of course, not. They grow dogs for food as our farmers raise cattle and pigs. And see how the plants in the fields are all mixed up? Our farmers grow one sort in each field, and pluck out the rest as weeds.’

‘Which is the best way?’

‘How should I know? Farming is nothing but a short road to a bad back, bad teeth, and an early grave.’

‘I don’t know how this dwarf driving the cart can see where he’s going.’

Deri eyed him. ‘Don’t let Xivu hear you say that. Dwarfs are holy people in this country. It may seem odd to you and me, but our stories of little mothers and ice giants may seem odd to them.’

‘There are lots of them, and they are very powerful. I can see that. What did they ever want from us?’

‘Bronze for a start. When the first of our ships came here these people had no metal-working at all, save for a few lumps of iron that fell from the sky. And writing. They use our script to keep control of their country and its people. And we brought these long-necked animals, which they call “Northland horses”. They are neither horses-’

‘Nor from Northland.’

‘No. They come from mountainous country to the south of here. We have reached it with our ships; these people are cut off by barriers of land and sea.’

‘And in return we have taken their sculptors.’

‘Well, we borrow them. And a few precious items — jade, for example. But we got potatoes and maize, long ago, and that’s much more important. Actually potatoes came from the southern highlands, where the Northland horses came from.

‘Look, son, be careful what you say. We’re just two rascals from Kirike’s Land, but they don’t know that. To them we are Northland, you and I. Luckily there are only a handful like Xivu who understand what we say. Always remember you are talking to a people who believe they are in our debt.’

Now they were approaching the plateau. The cart turned onto a road cut into the shoulder of the slope, rising steadily as it wound around ridges and gullies. Below them the plain opened out, a quilt of farmland stretching to the bank of the great river and the edge of the forest. Even the plateau slope turned out to be populated, with farms crowded onto neatly shaped terraces. When they heard the rattle of Xivu’s cart the people came running out of houses of mud and daub, and hastily made the palm-seeing gesture to Xivu as he rolled past. Xivu was evidently a man of some importance.

Finally the cart rolled up onto the plateau itself. On this broad, open expanse, tremendous buildings stood on platforms of earth. One massive structure had pillars of rock holding up a heavy roof, and walls of packed clay. Tibo thought he could never walk into such a thing without fearing he was about to be crushed. Standing on the open ground around the buildings were monuments — ornately carved blocks of stone, pillars, sculptures of humans and animals and birds and fish, the parts mixed up as if in a fever dream — and tremendous heads, faces nearly as tall as Tibo was, glowering sternly over the plain. It was as if the toys of a giant baby had been dumped on a vast tabletop. The few people out in the open here all appeared lavishly dressed, all with great bronze discs at their necks, and they walked in a stately fashion among the monuments.

The great stone faces, of course, were the reason the men from Northland had come so far.

‘I was here once before,’ Deri muttered as the cart rolled on. ‘Not much more than your age. Never felt so frightened in my life.’

The cart pulled up before a relatively modest house, of stone walls and wooden roof. A young man came hurrying out, hastily fixing a skirt in place around his bare waist. Xivu cuffed the man’s head hard enough to make him stagger, barked out orders, and the man hurried away into the larger structure.

‘Fool,’ said Xivu in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Lazy dolt! He was not expecting me back — he was sleeping, or fiddling with his genitalia as usual. There is no food prepared for you, no drink. No matter! I have sent him to fetch the girl for you. Then we will eat and drink, and if you need to sleep or bathe I have servants to assist you. This evening you will prostrate yourselves before the King’s youngest son. You are honoured visitors! Please, sit.’

He waved at a shady area under a broad veranda, littered with pallets of woven cloth. Tibo sat on one of these; it was stuffed with what felt like hair.

Deri asked, ‘ “Girl”? What girl do you mean?’

Xivu smiled, rueful. Now he was at rest, sitting in the shade, he didn’t look much older than Tibo was himself. ‘She is the one you have travelled so far to find — and she is the problem we must address between us… Ah, here she is!’

The girl, shadowed by Xivu’s cringing servant, stood before the veranda. She looked younger than Tibo — thirteen, fourteen. She was naked to the waist, her legs wrapped in an ornate skirt. On her breast she wore an immense mirror of some polished stone, not bronze like Xivu’s, and she had a bit of stone, like polished jade, pushed through the flesh between her nostrils. She just stood there. She seemed dull, incurious.

Deri asked, ‘And this is your sculptor?’

Xivu sighed. ‘Her name is Caxa.’ Ca-sha. ‘You can see the problem. She is young, so young! But this is our way. The master sculptors are a family line that goes back to the last creation, when the gods gave the sculptors their genius as a tool to separate the.. the categories of the world, of dead from living, human from animal. Each master sculptor selects from the next generation of his extended family the most gifted, the one through whom the gods speak most clearly. The priests have various tests to help establish this. The master must do this before completing the carving of a fallen king, of course.’

Tibo asked, ‘Why?’

Xivu looked at them blankly. ‘Forgive me. I forget how little you people can know. When the sculptor completes the head of the King, he is laid in a pit in the ground, and the monument is placed over the pit… It is obvious why this must be so. Hands that have carved the face of a king could never be used for other purposes. But it is clearly essential that the successor should be in place first. In this case, unfortunately, the orderly process was disrupted.’

‘Disrupted by what?’

‘Factions within the master’s family. Each pushing a favoured rival. Even poison was used, or so it was suggested. Murders!

‘Caxa was surely the most gifted of her generation. She has produced model heads, I have seen them, which… disturb. She was in fact the daughter of the master. But she was so young, and so difficult. However, by the time the infighting was done, none was left standing, or without blood on his hands. None save Caxa. Her mother had died some years before — she only had her father-’

‘Who she saw buried alive under a stone head,’ Deri said grimly. ‘A fate that will be hers, some day.’

‘After she returns from Northland, having performed her duty, and after she carves the face of the King. After a lifetime of duty and privilege. Let’s hope her children aren’t quite as cracked! You can see why we’re reluctant to let her travel to Northland.’

‘But she must come. It has been the custom for generations. Perhaps if her family came with her-’

‘She has no family left.’

‘Her guards then, her priests. You yourself, Leftmost!’

‘ Me? ’

While they argued, Tibo stepped forward, curious about this slim girl on whose shoulders rested the expectation of two cultures. She wasn’t pretty, her face was too narrow, too unhappy. She didn’t even seem to see him. Something fell to the ground, from her right wrist. A drop of liquid, bright red.

‘She’s bleeding.’ Without thinking Tibo grabbed her hand. There was a neat slash across the wrist. He searched the girl’s face. ‘Did you do this?’

She gave a small cry, pulled her hand away, and ran off.

Tibo found himself running after her, despite his father’s calls and Xivu’s protests.