Nobody moving. He was tempted to back out immediately, just shut the door. But there was an Ayto mark on the far wall; this was the way he had come, and evidently out through a door on the far side.
Crimm forced himself to follow, crossing the floor, trying not to touch the dead, their filthy blankets and clothes. Everything was covered with dried-up shit and vomit. Somebody had had the same idea he and Ayto had, to ride out the winter in the belly of the Wall. But one or more of them had come in here sick, and it had spread between the people, and got onto their clothes and their blankets and spread even more. It would have been much worse in here, he thought, if not for the cold, the lack of flies to attack the bodies.
The room itself was smarter than Thaxa’s cistern — smaller, the walls better cut, presumably older. Halfway along the wall there was a kind of shrine, cut into the growstone, supporting two urns, side by side. Writing was neatly etched into plaster around the alcove with the urns, and Crimm, despite the bodies all around him, lifted his candle to see. These were the remains of Milaqa and Qirum, he read. Doomed by love and ambition. . Milaqa was a heroine as great as Ana or Prokyid, but none must ever know the truth of their story. . Milaqa. He remembered something about that name. The Black Crime. Oddly, in a room full of corpses, the etched words made him shiver. The Wall was very big and very old and none knew all its secrets. He hurried on.
Beyond the far door was a corridor, then another door marked with Ayto’s sign, and still another corridor. He was heading almost directly away from the Wall’s landward face, as far as he could tell. Ayto had been unimaginative and dogged in his choice of directions. But this corridor ended in a rectangle of blue light, pale, cold, clearly daylight. Crimm hurried on. The air grew increasingly cold, and there was slick ice on the growstone under his feet.
He reached the exit. A door, heavy, very ancient, its outer surface crusted with long-dead barnacles, lay open, revealing brilliant light that dazzled his dark-adapted eyes. He stepped forward cautiously, under a pale blue sky. He was outside the Wall, in its shadow. He was standing on a rough ledge of growstone, matted with green-brown fronds of dead seaweed, coated with ice. The Wall towered above him, a rough-finished surface deeply pitted and shining with rime. The sea lapped at the growstone ledge, covered with sheet ice that spread to a knife-sharp horizon, crisp and white. There were ice blocks piled up at the sea’s edge, perhaps a relic of the tides.
Somebody sat on the ice, cross-legged, beside a disc of dark blue, a hole in the ice. There was an animal beside him, inert, the head blood-splashed: a seal.
Crimm stepped forward carefully, and found himself standing on sea ice that creaked, a little ominously, reminding him of the end of the Sabet. He saw a place where the ice looked a little darker, a little bluer — older. He stepped that way. Rope sections had been fixed to the soles of his boots, and he could walk without slipping, if he didn’t rush.
He stepped out of the shadow and into direct sunlight, the first sunlight on his face for many days. He turned, hand raised. The Wall was silhouetted. He saw complex sculptures cut into the upper surface — docks, he realised, quays and piers cut into the growstone and now stranded far above the water level. And above that the light towers stood proud, blind, and the great heads of dead Annids looked out at a frozen sea. The cold was bitter. Crimm pulled the flimsy blanket tighter around his body.
The man on the ice was, of course, Ayto. He held a hand up when Crimm’s creaking footsteps got too close. He didn’t move, didn’t so much as look around. Crimm waited obediently.
A pale shadow passed through the water.
When it had gone, Ayto relaxed. ‘Ah, you scared him off.’
‘You might have come back. We’re choking in there.’
Ayto glanced around. ‘And you might have put a coat on, you’ll freeze.’
‘This is the ocean side of the Wall.’
‘Obviously.’
‘It’s all exposed. The sea can’t be much higher than the level of the land on the other side.’ Crimm found it hard to think that through; the fresh air was making him groggy. ‘How did the sea get so low? Ah. Because all the water is heaped up as ice on the land.’
‘Just think, these are stretches of the Wall’s face nobody’s seen for generations.’
‘What do you think we should do? With everybody in the cistern, I mean. The vents are blocked. We can’t really stay there if that’s going to happen.’
Ayto looked around and sniffed the cold air. Crimm saw there was frost on his roughly cut beard. ‘Bring them out here. Or at least, find somewhere in the Wall closer to the ocean face.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we can find food here.’ He patted his dead seal. ‘Seal, fish. Maybe other animals.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Spring’s coming, it must be, but the winter’s not done with us yet. Maybe it never will be. If the ice doesn’t clear, we won’t be able to use the wetlands, the forests. But out here. .’
‘The Coldlanders survive, and it’s always winter where they live.’
‘That it is. Maybe folk from the other Districts will find a way out too, if any of them live through the sorting-out. Let them. But they can stay away from here; this is our bit of coast.’ He looked around, at sea, ice, sky. ‘Different way of living, this will be. Makes you feel different just to think about it, doesn’t it?’ He glanced up at the Wall. ‘That’s all gone now.’
‘Civilisation?’
‘Yes. We’ve gone back to an older time, before Ana and the Wall. Back to the ice. That’s how it is here in the north, and soon it will be the same everywhere else. Maybe we’ll have older thoughts. Ice thoughts.’ He poked at his own ribs. ‘Maybe we’ll all start to change shape. We’ll look like Pyxeas’ Coldlander runt. What was he called?’
Crimm couldn’t remember. He found himself thinking of Ywa, months dead now, and he wondered what she would make of this conversation. Of what Ayto was becoming.
He remembered the others, with sharp urgency. ‘We’ve got to get back and sort out that air vent.’
‘Agreed. Come on.’
Arguing, bickering, speculating, they worked their way back into the deep shadow of the Wall.
THREE
48
The Third Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox
The ice spilled off the growing continental caps, and gathered in sheets over the open sea. From the mountains too the ice descended, the glaciers flowing down valleys gouged out by their predecessors millennia before. When they reached the lowland the glaciers spread out and flowed together, merging into sheets of ice that covered the ground, covering the traces of forests, farms, cities.
Across swathes of the northern continents, there were few people left to mark the latest equinox.
49
The woman was waiting for Sabela under the Gate of the God of Light.
Situated next to the Exaltation of the Sky Waters, a square-cut pyramid that was the greatest monument in Tiwanaku, the Gate was only nominally an entry to the city. Not attached to any wall, the Gate was the frame of a door that led nowhere. Yet this was traditionally where supplicants came to ask for residence in this holy city, the highest city in all the world, enclosed by its finely cut stone walls and surrounded by raised, carefully irrigated fields of maize.
This was the High Country. The day was bright, the lake, a day’s walk away, was a plane of brilliant blue under the sky, and the snow-capped mountains beyond gleamed. The city was a jewel set in the great mountain chain that stretched down the spine of this southern continent.
And here was this woman, round-shouldered, her clothes layers of grubby rags, a clutch of children around her, the oldest a boy who might have been fourteen, a couple of little girls, an infant in arms, all of them staring at Sabela. One of the girls was labouring, having trouble breathing. Sabela had no idea how old the woman was. Younger than she was, probably. Broken down from toil, child-rearing, and maybe years as a nestspill.
Sabela held out the note she ha
d been sent, written on reed paper, scrawled in a soldier’s hasty hand. It had found her eventually at her mother’s home on the other side of the city, where she had been visiting with the twins. ‘You sent me this? Your name is — C’merr.’ The click in the back of the throat, characteristic of lowlander tongues, was alien to Sabela’s own language.
‘C’merr — yes. And you are Sabela, wife of Deraj.’
‘You claim we offered to take you in.’
The woman frowned, perhaps puzzling at her speech. ‘Yes. Not you. Husband, Deraj.’
Sabela found that hard to believe; Deraj, busy running a wool business that spanned swathes of the highlands and thousands of llamas and alpacas, was not given to making sentimental gestures to unfortunates like this nestspill. Especially not to a grubby, unprepossessing — ugly — woman like this one. Deraj, for better or worse, had always had an eye for beauty. ‘You understand that the city is crowded.’
‘Crowd — yes.’
‘Many people come here for refuge.’ It had been a one-way flow from the lower lands for years. ‘We have no room.’
‘Deraj. He say.’
Sabela said coolly, ‘We never spoke of it.’
‘Deraj say.’
Sabela studied the woman. Her features were nondescript, the tone of her skin hidden by dust and the stains of sweat. ‘Where are you from? Were your family alpaca herders?’
‘No. Fisher folk.’
‘From the river valleys?’
‘Ocean.’
Sabela was shocked. If that was true, it was no surprise the little girl was having trouble breathing; not everybody born by the sea adapted well to the thin air up here. ‘You lost your living there.’
‘Fish died. Years ago. Only one baby then. We moved, and grew beans.’
That would have been in the river valleys, above the coast, marginally richer land where folk grew beans and squash and cotton, in farms irrigated by summer meltwater from the mountain glaciers. ‘And then?’
‘No water. No rain. No rivers in summer.’ Because the summers had got so cold the glaciers stayed frozen, and there was no meltwater. ‘Then more babies. We grew potatoes.’ In the mountain foothills, probably. ‘Not bad.’ She grinned, almost wistfully. ‘Grew fat, one summer. But then, no water. Then came here.’
‘Where’s your husband?’
‘Died. Fighting in war.’
Sabela had no idea which war she might be talking about; the whole region, the mountain country, the coastal strip, even the borders with the forest nations to the east, had been convulsed by raids and petty wars for years. So, after fleeing step by step from her home by the ocean, climbing gradually into the highlands, the woman had ended up here, at the summit of the world, the home of the gods, like so many others.
‘C’merr — I’m sorry for your troubles. But Deraj never said anything to me about you.’
‘Met him in. .’A name Sabela couldn’t make out, so thick was her accent. ‘He came to trade, wool for potatoes. Deraj say,’ said the woman stubbornly. The boy nudged her, whispered something. The woman dug into her grimy coat and pulled out another scrap of paper, handed it to Sabela.
Sabela took it reluctantly; the woman wore skin gloves from which blackened fingernails protruded. When she opened the paper she saw it was a note in Deraj’s handwriting. ‘Why didn’t you give me this straight away?’ C’merr had no reply. Perhaps she was not used to written notes, Sabela thought. It hadn’t occurred to her.
The note was scribbled on a bit of reed parchment that was stained in one corner by what looked like spilled wine. Sabela’s heart sank. Her husband got drunk a lot these days. Much of his export business was with the Sky Wolf nations, to the north, and times were hard there — tremendous forest fires, drought, whole cities buried by dust storms, so the travellers said. And he had a way of making deals when drunk that he later regretted. But the note was in Deraj’s hand, undoubtedly. And it promised C’merr and her family refuge in Tiwanaku as long as they needed it.
She studied the woman, the grimy, tired face, the fixed eyes. Why would he do this? How could a woman like C’merr have possibly bought refuge from a man like Deraj?
‘You’d better come with me,’ she said. ‘We’ll find Deraj and sort this out.’
The nestspills goggled as they walked through Tiwanaku.
Today the city was as busy as ever, with crowds of reed boats working the lake waters beyond the jetties, the streets jammed with street-sweepers and porters, bearers leading llamas laden with goods or drawing carts. A temple was being torn down, one of the grandest in the city. There was always building going on somewhere in Tiwanaku, a cycle of demolition and construction as the city endlessly renewed itself to attract the next season’s pilgrims, who came to worship the God of Light in his citadel in the sky. If anything the pace of life here had got more frantic in the last few years — and of course the place was ever more crowded with nestspills. Sabela sometimes thought it was like the frenzied last dances at the parties she used to go to when she was young, everybody working harder to squeeze out the last bit of enjoyment before the cold light of morning.
For every year the winter was harsher, the summer shorter. Today, this spring day, sheet ice still lay on the lake waters, and frost blighted the maize fields. And while the likes of C’merr and her family came washing up from the lowlands like a rising tide, so the ice on those beautiful mountains on the horizon was creeping down to the plain. It was as if Tiwanaku was being crushed between two great fists, from above and below. No wonder people danced.
So why, in such circumstances, would Deraj have promised a nestspill family refuge in their home?
The answer, when she got home, was immediately obvious.
The girl might have been fifteen, no more. She lay naked on the thick llama-wool carpet in the middle of the room, pale body limp, legs folded to one side, arms lying loose. She looked barely awake; perhaps she was drunk, or drugged. She was none too clean, but she had good breasts, wide hips, a full mouth. The type Deraj had always liked. She even looked a little like Sabela, at that age.
And here came her husband, naked too, his penis limp and glistening, a skin of wine in his hand. He started when he saw Sabela standing there, and the nestspill woman behind her — obviously C’merr was the girl’s mother. But he was too drunk to be guilty. ‘Shut the door, by the god’s shade, you’re letting all the heat out.’
Sabela pushed past the nestspill woman and stormed out.
Deraj came to the door, naked, the wine in his hand, and called after her. ‘Sabela, wait! Where are you going?’
To the twins, she thought, at her mother’s home. That was where she was going. And then away from this place. Where, though?
Far from here. To the friends she had made that had nothing to do with Deraj. To the River City to see Walks In Mist, or the Altar of the Jaguar where she would find Xipuhl. She would go all the way to Northland, perhaps. She would wait for the ships with her friends as they had promised, and go back to that little growstone bar in the Wall, at the heart of the greatest civilisation in the world, where she had drunk potato spirit from Asia. Where she had been happy. Where she would be safe again.
Deraj continued to call after her. Neighbours were laughing at his nudity and drunkenness. She broke into a run, to get away.
50
On the battlefield south of Carthage, Nelo was in the reserve. He and the rest of his unit were kept back while the main phalanxes stood firm against the last ragged charge of the Libyan rebels, and then when the Carthaginian cavalry was unleashed at the enemy.
It was the afternoon of what now passed for a spring day in North Africa, dry, dusty, cool. The battlefield had once been an extensive farm by the look of it, but after years of drought it was abandoned, the olive trees withered, the stubble of the last grain crops dry in the fields, the fences of the stockades robbed for their wood. It had taken the Carthaginian force half the day to ride out here. The scruffy Libyan rebels, numerous but disorga
nised, had showed rudimentary military thinking by clinging to a scrap of high ground in the hope of gaining some advantage. General Fabius had ignored this, had drawn up his army in the ruins of this farm, and had simply waited.
And as the Carthaginian command had evidently expected, the Libyans lost their nerve and attacked.
‘You see?’ Gisco had said, Nelo’s sergeant, always ready to draw a lesson to deliver to his ragtag troops of conscripts, levies and volunteers. ‘What have I told you? It is sometimes harder not to fight than to fight. Braver to wait than to charge in. You must pick your moment. Watch and learn, if you ever want to be a general like Fabius.’
Now it was only a question of time, as the Carthaginians steadily pressed. Nelo stood at the centre of his phalanx, with his sword and spear and the hand-me-down helmet that pinched his brow, hoping to be spared his first real action for one more day. Dreaming of the sketches he might make of the scenes before him if he got the chance.
At last the Libyan formation broke and the survivors started to run. The Carthaginians cheered. Fabius raised his sword, horns blasted, and a ripple of commands spread out through the Carthaginian army.
Sergeant Gisco grinned and raised his thrusting spear. ‘Our turn, lads! After them and finish them off!’ The men of Nelo’s phalanx surged forward after the fleeing Libyan survivors, running across a field already strewn with corpses.
But Nelo didn’t have a chance to move before a hefty shove in the back pitched him onto his face. Suniatus, of course. The big man peered down at him. ‘Too slow, aurochs!’ And he gave him a kick in the head for good measure, and ran on.
Naturally, in the midst of the advance, Gisco saw this and pointed his sword tip at Nelo. ‘Northlander! You’re on a charge! Get to your feet!’
Nelo struggled up, shook his head, hefted his sword and stabbing spear, and ran with the rest.
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