Iron Winter n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  And, built into the fabric of the Wall, the searching scholars had uncovered weapons, a relic of a later generation than those who long ago had defied the Trojan Invasion.

  When the scouts reported that a large force appeared to be massing to the south, the Annids ordered banners to be draped down the Wall’s face. The banners, meant for days of celebration, for the midsummer Giving, were incongruous splashes of colour in an ice-bound world, brilliant red and green and purple against the grey-white of the frozen growstone — and in this bleak winter they would surely attract the dispossessed and desperate. The banners, though, had a second concealed purpose, and as he glanced down now Crimm saw engineers and volunteers crawling behind the banners, making frantic final adjustments to the ancient, little-understood weaponry built into the face of the Wall and hidden by the banners. The whole District had become a trap.

  ‘It should work,’ Ywa murmured. ‘It has to work. I could not bear a war as the farmers wage, not Northlander against Northlander, hand to hand.’

  Ayto, still leaning casually on the rail, glanced back at her. ‘Annid, I’d be a lot more sure of success if you’d let us use the fire-drug eruptors.’

  ‘I told you,’ Ywa said coldly. ‘That’s not acceptable.’

  ‘I know how you feel about this,’ Ayto said. ‘But — look at them all! If they break through today they will swarm through the Wall like maggots through a corpse and eat all there is to eat-’

  Crimm touched his arm. ‘Leave it. It’s the mirrors or nothing.’ Crimm shared many of Ayto’s doubts about the wisdom of the Annids’ strategy. Who wouldn’t? But even if all was lost today, as Ayto knew very well, the two of them, and their families, had their bolthole, in the abandoned cistern deep inside the Wall. Though Crimm still had not decided how he would deal with his relationship with Ywa, if that dire choice had to be made.

  ‘They’re getting close!’ somebody called, higher up the Wall face.

  They all stared out, shielding their eyes against the glare.

  The mob was making slow progress, struggling in drifts that could be waist deep. The fresh-fallen snow had been purposely left uncleared before the Wall for many days now — another line of defence. The attackers were just bundles of filthy cloth and fur, armed with hunting knives and clubs and spears, breathing hard as Crimm could tell from the misting of their breaths. There was no sign of any military discipline, any formation. But there were an awful lot of them. Folk the colour of mud against the snow.

  Crimm turned to the Annid. ‘Ywa, it may not be safe here much longer.’

  ‘I will not leave. Whatever the outcome, Crimm, something of old Northland dies today. Never before have we turned on each other on such a scale. And I must be here to witness it. . I cannot believe it has come to this so quickly. But then, I suppose, each of us, however grand, has only ever been a few missed meals from the animal.’

  Crimm glanced up at the sun, at the position of the advancing crowd. ‘Time for the scholars’ weapon, I think. We’re lucky with the sun being so bright.’

  Ayto snorted his contempt. ‘We’ll be lucky if this stunt makes any difference at all. Typical scholars! Strike at a distance and hope you never have to close with the enemy at all.’

  Crimm understood his cynicism. Yet he hoped in his heart that the scheme worked, and the horror of a close fight could be averted.

  It was time. He heard the clear voice of Annid Xree calling out final instructions. ‘Be ready to cut the banner ropes. .’

  Crimm leaned over the rail. All over the Wall face people came forward to the balcony rails, ordinary folk, clerks and cleaners and barkeeps, looking down nervously at the approaching horde, whose angry cries could already be heard. They held their places, their knives and axes poised.

  Xree called, ‘On my three. One — two. .’

  A hundred arms, raising axes and blades.

  ‘Three!’

  With a roar the volunteers chopped at the ropes before them. The banners fell away, billowing, some trailing from stray threads. The sunlight struck the Wall, struck shining surfaces exposed for the first time in centuries — tremendous concave mirrors — and was thrown back at the advancing mob, in tight, precise splashes that glared brilliantly from the white of the ice. Those caught in the light threw up their hands to shield their eyes, and cried out in pain. Steam rose from the melting ice, itself brightly lit.

  Crimm, dazzled, tried to see. ‘Some are fallen, burned. A lot more are running from the light. Scared out of their wits!’

  Ayto shook his head. ‘Never believed this old gear would work.’

  ‘Those Greeks were clever. It’s said they used mirrors to fry enemy ships in battle.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been to Greece, and the mothers know the sun is a lot stronger down there than it is here. But still, I bow to the scholars. Has it made any difference to the battle, though? I mean it’s not as if we can aim this thing. We can only fry those who kindly wander into the hot spots.’

  ‘Yes. Others are coming on.’

  ‘We’ve a fight before us yet.’ Ayto drew his sword from its scabbard, an unfamiliar weapon for a fisherman despite their hasty citizens’ training by the guard.

  Now more voices started calling up and down the face of the Wall. ‘Be ready! Here they come!’

  Crimm leaned over the rail again. He saw that advance parties of the invaders had reached the tumbled rubble at the base of the Wall. It took them more effort to clamber over the heaped, ice-slippery stuff, and the hungry fighters were already exhausted. And they were greeted by chunks of rubble, frost-smashed thousand-year-old growstone thrown from the balconies higher up and the roof of the Wall, and a sparse hail of arrows.

  Yet they came on. Now the leaders were clambering up the face of the Wall itself. Slick with ice it might be, but the ancient growstone was so rough and frost-damaged that it offered plenty of handholds. Crimm saw a man climbing up directly towards him, knife in mouth, arms and legs bare, ruined boots on his feet, so thin he looked like an animated skeleton. Yet he climbed with purpose and strength. His eyes met Crimm’s.

  The Annid of Annids was right beside Crimm, looking down as he was. He took her arm. ‘Please, Ywa — get back into shelter. It’s not safe.’

  She shook him off. ‘I must be seen, in the Armour of Raka. I must be seen!’

  Ayto hefted his sword. ‘Forget about her. Be ready-’

  There was a yell from above. ‘Look out!’

  Crimm twisted and looked up. Heavy stone blocks were hailing down from the roof, meant for the invader, bouncing down the face of the Wall. Ayto grabbed him and pulled him back.

  But Ywa hesitated. And one falling block, carved basalt from some smashed sculpture, caught her neatly on the back of her head, smashing her skull like an egg. Her body slumped over the rail.

  ‘No!’

  Still Ayto held Crimm back.

  That skeletal man came over the rail with a roar and hurled himself forward. Crimm raised his sword to parry the man’s lunge, pushed him back, then swept the weapon at knee level, making a satisfying contact with ropy flesh and muscle. The man fell, blood spilling vivid on the growstone surface. Crimm finished him with a swipe that cut his throat.

  But before he was still, another came over the rail. And then another.

  Crimm charged forward, and beside Ayto fought for his life.

  44

  The note was brought to Rina by Thuth, in the room they shared in Barmocar’s servants’ house. The big Libyan barged the door open with her hip, in Carthage there were no locks or latches on servants’ doors, and spun the note through the air. ‘For you.’

  Rina sat up, clutching the blanket over the ragged remains of the undergarment from Northland that she used as a nightshirt. ‘A note? Who’s it from?’ They spoke in the patois of the servants’ quarters, a clumsy amalgamation of Carthaginian, Greek, Libyan — no Northlander in the mix, for Rina was the only one of her kind in the house.

  Thuth said heavily, ‘Who�
��s it from, I don’t know, I’m not the Face of Baal.’ Her tongue could be sharper than her chopping knives. ‘I do know I need to get to work, and so do you.’ She hooked the door closed with her foot on her way out.

  Rina sighed and tousled her short hair. She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all. She shared her bed with one of Anterastilis’ night-duty maids, a spiteful young Libyan. Until the maid left for her shift Rina had to try to sleep on the floor. But the night was already over, the light was bright through the muslin stretched over the empty window frame. There would be no more sleep; Rina faced another day’s work.

  In the meantime here was this note. She turned it over in her hands. It was a simple folded page sealed with a blob of wax; she didn’t recognise the pressing.

  A note! She didn’t get notes. Servants of Barmocar and Anterastilis didn’t get notes, or rarely. And the seal, of course, was already broken. Anything written down that came into the household that was not marked for the attention of the owners was routinely scrutinised by the head of house. In these increasingly difficult times Barmocar was concerned about security.

  Rina opened up the note, shedding fragments of wax from the cracked seal. It was written in the Carthaginians’ angular alphabet, in a neat hand in a dark blue ink, presumably by a scribe. But Rina saw, intrigued, that a few hasty amendments to the text had been made, crossings-out and additions, in the swirling script of Northland — as if the note had been dictated to a Carthaginian scribe, and then the author had marked up corrections in Northlander on the copy. She scanned down to the signature. It was from Jexami! It was signed with a looping scrawl, beside an envoi in Carthaginian: ‘Your ever-loyal cousin.’

  Jexami had not written to her before, nor had he made any attempt to contact her since the few days he had put her up in the late summer. Nor would she have expected him to. Jexami’s survival strategy was to pose as a Carthaginian gentleman. It was hard to believe he would risk all that with a note to a servant, especially one with an embarrassing Northlander past, and a relationship to Jexami himself.

  She went back to the top and began picking out the Carthaginian letters. Her understanding of the tongue was still poor. It didn’t help that the blocky Carthaginian alphabet, in which you broke up the words into letter-particles and wrote them down, was so unlike the ancient Etxelur script she had grown up with, in which each word was represented by a single symbol of concentric arcs and bars — a written language that, according to scholars like Pyxeas, had more in common with the languages of Cathay than the bitty scrawls of the Continent’s farmers. But she made out the words, and read them to herself one by one: ‘Greetings to my cousin Rina, Annid of Etxelur! I send you news of home. Recently I received a long missive from my much-loved cousin Ywa Annid of Annids. .’

  But Rina had heard a rumour, passed on spitefully by one of Barmocar’s men, that Ywa was dead, killed in a revolt.

  She saw, reading on, that the ‘news’ in the note was a lot of jumbled nonsense. Of a Giving feast in the late summer, but Givings were always held precisely on midsummer day. Of the good health of Rina’s own husband Ontin, the priest, but Ontin was a doctor, and her husband was Thaxa. This was a clumsy fake! But good enough to have fooled a Carthage-born-and-bred head of household who knew nothing of such a remote land, or of her personal business.

  Well, then, what was its purpose?

  She turned to the ‘amendments’. The Northlander script would have been utterly incomprehensible to the head of household. He must have judged that the additions were minor enough not to pose a problem. But his judgement had been wrong, for the message they picked out had nothing to do with the nonsensical ‘news’ from Etxelur:

  ‘Mother. Go to the back wall now. Alxa.’

  Rina was scarcely able to breathe. She had not seen her daughter for months.

  She did not hesitate. She got out of bed, used the room’s communal piss-pot, washed quickly with what was left of the jug of water on the nightstand, and changed into her day clothes, the cleanest of the two sets of the uniform-like tunic and skirt Anterastilis ordered her to wear. She ripped up the note and fed the pieces to a small lantern that burned high on the wall.

  Then she pulled her cloak over her shoulders and slipped out of the room.

  She knew a way to the compound’s back wall that she could take without being seen. Every servant in the household knew of such routes. You learned to live like a rat, in such circumstances as these. The house’s servants, staff and slaves had a covert life of their own that went entirely unnoticed by Barmocar and Anterastilis and their circle — and no doubt the same had been true of her own household in Etxelur, she ruefully realised.

  She did check the time on one of the big Greek water clocks. She had a couple of hours free. Today Barmocar and Anterastilis were hosting members of the overlapping assemblies that governed Carthage, the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four and the Council of Elders, no doubt debating such crises as the rationing, the plague, and the growing rumours of a vast Hatti horde on the way. These sessions, crowded with drunken young men, were always raucous affairs lubricated by generous helpings of Barmocar’s wine. A greater contrast with the grave councils of Northland, which tended to be dominated by older women like herself, could scarcely be imagined. Rina would not be needed during the session, but afterwards Anterastilis would no doubt require her ‘special comforting’. All that for later.

  The estate’s back wall was a crude affair, just heaped-up blocks, hastily improvised in the early autumn. Hurrying along it, Rina soon found a gap that even an old woman like herself could easily step through.

  Waiting on the other side was a young man she faintly recognised, dressed in a tunic and trousers that might once have been smart. He grinned and beckoned. ‘This way, lady.’ He spoke in crude Northlander.

  She stepped through the wall, taking his hand for support — but she caught her fingernail on a jagged stone and snapped it painfully. Biting it to neatness, she hurried after him as he made his way along a narrow street down the slope of the Byrsa. The way was lined by the homeless, ragged bundles slumped in doorways, outstretched skeletal hands. Troops would come through later in the day and clear the track, but the people would return later, or others of their kind would, filling up the empty spaces like mercury settling in a cracked bowl; you could move them around but you could never get rid of them.

  Meanwhile the rising sun caught the fronts of the grand buildings of the Byrsa, and from his column at the summit Hannibal hero of Latium stood proud, surveying his decaying city.

  Rina remembered who this man was. ‘You’re Jexami’s servant. That’s how you know Northlander.’

  He shrugged, grinning easily. ‘Easier for me to learn the master’s tongue than for him to learn mine, though he would beat me if he heard me saying it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.’ Nobody remembered servants’ names — nobody of the class to which Jexami belonged, and herself, once.

  ‘Himil. My name is Himil.’

  ‘Thank you for coming to get me, Himil. How do you know Alxa?’

  ‘Who, sorry?’

  ‘My daughter. I suppose you remember her from our arrival in Carthage.’

  ‘Not so much. She helped me. The master threw me out.’

  ‘He did? Why?’

  ‘Heard there was blood plague in my family.’ The Carthaginians were terrified that the awful infection they called the ‘blood plague’, which had left scars in their history before, was on its way back to the city, brought by the endless nestspill flows.

  ‘He threw you out just for that? And was there plague? In your family, I mean?’

  ‘No. Father died. Not plague. Just died. Hungry, got sick. I had nowhere to stay. Got work cleaning sewers, and bought food for the family, little brothers and sisters, but still nowhere to stay. Sleeping in streets, like these folk. Then I heard a rumour about the Ana.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your daughter, mistress. The Ana was helping peop
le find places to live. I went looking, I asked and I asked, found the Ana and she remembered me, said I’d been kind when she came to the master’s house. But I think she’d have helped me anyway. Got me a bed in a house, outside the walls, but that’s all right.’

  ‘Alxa did all that? How?’

  ‘Ask her yourself.’

  They had come to a tavern, an open door, a counter fronting the street, a dingy interior behind. The wall bore a hand-scrawled sign in chalk:

  NO ALE. NO WINE. NO WATER. NO FOOD.

  NO OUT-OF-TOWNERS.

  NO SEWAGE WORKERS.

  NO DOCTORS.

  ‘ALWAYS A FRIENDLY WELCOME AT MYRCAN’S!’

  ‘Hello, Mother.’ Alxa came forward from the shadows of the tavern.

  Rina rushed to her, and hugged her daughter. Through layers of much-patched clothing, she could feel Alxa’s shoulder blades.

  Alxa led her to a table at the back of the tavern. It was a dismal cave, Rina thought, which must have seen better days with a location this close to the Byrsa. But despite the chalked denials outside, a barman produced a jug of wine and two pottery mugs. ‘Always we serve the Ana,’ he murmured, pouring the wine.

  Rina sipped the wine. It was sour, the grape crops had evidently been awful for years, but it was the first mouthful she’d taken in months — servants in Barmocar’s home didn’t drink wine. ‘Ah, that’s good. Thank you. So — “the Ana”?’

  Alxa seemed much older than when she had come to Carthage, her face lined, her once-habitual smile gone. She was still just sixteen. ‘It’s a long story, Mother. But first, Nelo? I’ve not heard a word since the army took him.’

  ‘Nor me. From what I can tell from overhearing Barmocar’s conversations, they’re anticipating a clash with the Hatti, but it’s not come to that yet.’

  ‘Maybe he lives,’ Alxa said grimly. ‘As long as disease, hunger, or the sheer stupidity of the military haven’t killed him yet.’