He emerged from the last stair onto the roof of the Wall itself. The western sky flared red, a sunset gathering despite the invisibility of the sun itself. This upper surface was empty save for a line of monuments—and one man some paces away, stocky, gesturing, exercising with a sword.
To the south, Tibo’s left, Northland stretched away, the ground maybe fifty paces straight down. And to the north there was the restless ocean, its surface only a few paces beneath him. Standing on this Wall that divided two elements, the mass of the ocean looming over the peaceful land, the world seemed unbalanced to Tibo. Suddenly he felt as if the whole Wall was tipping, and he staggered.
“Careful.”
Tibo looked around. It was the man who had been exercising; his sword was a long blade of beaten bronze.
“What?”
“Careful. Is that word not right? My Etxelur-speak is still poor. Don’t fall off the Wall. One way, you drown. Other way, you crack your skull like an egg.” He laughed.
He was older than Tibo, perhaps in his twenties. He wore a tunic under a bronze breastplate. His accent was thick, his words barely understandable. Tibo had never met anybody like this man in his life. “What are you, a Greek?”
The man looked at him long and hard. Then he spat into the sea, over the rim of the Wall. “I like you. That’s why I won’t cut off your ears for that insult. I am no ugly Greek. Can’t you tell? I am Trojan. And you? Northlander?”
“I was born on Kirike’s Land.”
“Where? Oh, the fire mountain island.” He eyed Tibo gravely. “Was it bad?”
“I am alive. My name is Tibo. I have come to be with my family here.”
The Trojan nodded. “I am Qirum. I have come to do business with the Annids. How is my Etxelur talk?”
“Better than my Trojan.”
Qirum boomed laughter. “You don’t seem happy to be with your family. Why?”
“They keep calling me a nestspill.” He had to explain the word to the Trojan.
“What’s wrong with that? You are a nestspill.”
“In our Etxelur tongue the word is also used for a baby bird that has fallen from its nest.”
“Ah,” said Qirum. “Something helpless that you would pity—or crush under your heel.”
“Yes. And I’m not helpless,” Tibo said.
Qirum looked him over. “I can see that. So what do you want, nestspill?”
He said fiercely, “Not to scrape the muck out of canals, that’s for sure.”
“Ha! Nor would I. Good for you.” He returned to his exercising. He struck a pose, legs apart, worked the sword in a slash and vertical chop—then spun around and faced imaginary assailants coming from behind.
“So why are you here?” Tibo said.
“I told you. Business.”
“What business?”
“Not sure yet. Everybody’s waiting. It’s all been changed by the fire mountain.” He looked up at the gray sky. “No sun, you see. If it’s the same at home, then there will be trouble, even worse than before. Famine. People moving, whole populations. Towns emptying, cities being sacked. Maybe even Hattusa, Troy—what’s left of it. Difficult times for trade. Northland will be affected too,” Qirum mused. “But Northland was divided anyway.”
“Divided?”
“Somebody killed the Annid of Annids.”
“She was my relative. My aunt. I think.”
“Was she?” The Trojan shrugged. “The man who got her killed was exposed. Now he’s disgraced. Gone. But the woman he put in to replace your aunt—she’s still there! And nothing’s happening. No decisions being made. Everybody’s just waiting under the cold sky. So I don’t know what my business will be. But,” he said, eyeing Tibo, “this is a time of opportunity, for a strong man, a clever man. When cities are falling at one end of the world, and the great power at the other end is locked in a struggle with itself.”
Tibo found these obscure words tremendously exciting. “What kind of opportunity?”
Qirum grinned easily. Then the sunset flared brighter, and he turned west to face it.
The sky had cleared a little, and was full of colors. Above a yellowish band around the position of the sun itself, a green curtain smeared high into the sky, fluted and textured, like a tremendous swath of dyed cloth. The green faded eventually into red, which towered ever further into the sky as the sun descended, deepening to a bruised purple.
“It changes as you watch it,” Qirum said, the exotic light glaring from his polished breastplate. “Every night different. It’s why I come up here at this time. The gods are angry, my friend, but even their anger is beautiful. Do you know, the other night I saw a moon, glimpsed through the clouds, that was as blue as a midsummer sky? Think of that.” He eyed Tibo. “Have you ever fought?”
“Only with fists.”
“Maybe it’s time you learned. Here.” He tossed him his sword, making it spin in the air, coming at Tibo hilt first.
Tibo astonished himself by grabbing the handle without slicing his fingers off.
“Come at me,” Qirum said. Tibo saw he was armed only with a short stabbing dagger. “Come on. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’ll cut your head off.”
Qirum grinned again. “I’ll take the risk. Come. And when I’ve got the blade off you I’ll teach you to wrestle. Always my favorite when I was your age, wrestling.”
Tibo considered, and raised the blade, and charged.
So it began.
26
The Year of the Fire Mountain:
Midwinter
Everything had changed at Etxelur after the Hood’s eruption, both for the Northlanders and for the dignitaries who had come from across continents and oceans for the Giving. As the cold clamped down and harvests faltered in the farming countries, travel became problematic—it was never wise to cross countrysides full of hungry, desperate people. Kilushepa and Qirum were not the only Giving guests to linger at the Wall, some of them keeping in touch with their homes by courier messages, talking, negotiating, as the world struggled to recover from the great shock it had suffered.
In the end, as an early autumn turned into a harsh winter, travel became impossible altogether.
Milaqa knew that Qirum, ever energetic and restless, had walked far, exploring Northland and the Wall and its Districts, sometimes in Milaqa’s company and sometimes not. He showed no interest in the countryside below the Wall. But Kilushepa, during her pregnancy, was content to stay in the relative luxury of Great Etxelur. Here she had met and talked, hosted parties and attended them, endlessly weaving nets of contacts and alliances. But when her baby was delivered she changed. She seemed restless for escape, even though by now it was the heart of the winter.
Since midsummer Teel had told Milaqa to stay close to Kilushepa and Qirum, to find out what they were thinking, what they were up to. And that included volunteering as an escort when Kilushepa asked for a walk along the Wall.
So this cold morning Milaqa, bundled in her cloak, pushed her way out of Hadhe’s house at the foot of the Wall. The door blanket crackled with frost, and the deep night cold had frozen over yesterday’s snow so that her feet crunched through a fine crust and into the compressed dry, powdery stuff underneath. For once the sun was visible, low in the sky to the southeast, and she cast a shadow. In the pale sunlight the snow drew all the color from the landscape save the occasional green splash of ivy, leaving only black and white and the blue of the long shadows, and it picked out details, crags on the hillsides and wrinkles and ridges on the uneven ground that were invisible in warmer times. By a watercourse she saw movement, fleet, furtive: an otter dragging the half-chewed carcass of a fish. The wintry land was beautiful, a consolation. But, only days away from the solstice itself, this was the coldest time of the hardest winter she could remember.
Cold or not the day’s work had to be done. A party of adults and older children was gathering, bundled up in fur cloaks and hats and boots, their breath steaming around their heads. They carr
ied knives and rope, and would soon be setting off inland to harvest the willow stands by the waterways. But Milaqa wouldn’t be joining them. She hitched the pack on her back; laden with food and water for the Tawananna, it already felt heavy.
“They look busy.” Qirum came up to her. He was wrapped up in a heavy leather coat and leggings and bearskin hat, borrowed from Deri and cut and shaped to fit, and he slapped hands encased in huge mittens. He had his sword in its scabbard on his back.
“Willow,” she said.
“What?”
“They’re off to cut willow trees. The people over there. This is the best time to do it, midwinter, to get the fine shoots we use to make baskets and backpacks.”
He grunted and turned away, bored already.
That was the reaction she’d expected. He irritated her as much as he fascinated her. “At least they’re doing something useful.”
“I thought you were the great rebel. The wild spirit who doesn’t fit into this stuffy place. Now you’re going on at me about useful work?”
“You’ve got absolutely no interest in people, have you? Nobody except the big folk, the decision makers. You care nothing for people who actually do things.”
He considered that. “Metalworkers, perhaps. I need to be able to rely on my sword. And barkeeps, and brewers. And whores. Ha! And you are the same. Admit it, little Milaqa. You could go off and harvest willow twigs or whatever it is they are doing—but you do not choose that, do you? Instead you walk with me and the Queen of the Hatti. Of course you are blessed with freedom, here in Northland. In my country, no woman is free, no woman owns property, save for princesses. There are no princesses in this strange country, yet you are free to choose, aren’t you? And because of that, like me, you too believe you are special, better than the rest. Perhaps it is simply having the courage to believe so, to think this way, that elevates our kind.”
“And if all the words you spouted were flakes of gold, Trojan,” said Kilushepa, walking stiffly toward them now, “you would be rich indeed.”
Qirum laughed, admiring. “There, Milaqa, what was I saying? As I believe I am better than your twig-cutting uncles over there, so this one believes she is better than me. Even though, strictly speaking, I own her.” He rubbed his mittened hands together. “So—are we to make this walk?”
Kilushepa wore a hat of white winter-fox fur on her head, and was shrouded in a thick cloak of black-dyed fur, given her by Raka, the new Annid of Annids, in whose house she was staying. But she shivered, a long, drawn-out shudder that afflicted her whole body. “By the Storm God’s mercy, your land is cold, Milaqa. And to think I used to complain about drafty palaces in Hattusa!”
It was only a few days since she had given birth, after a short, difficult pregnancy. Under her naturally dark skin Milaqa thought she saw a bloodless pallor. Milaqa plucked up the courage to speak. “Tawananna—you don’t look strong.”
Kilushepa looked down at her, surprised, perhaps amused. “Oh, you are an expert in medicine, are you, little girl?”
“No. But I’ve been there when my cousin Hadhe gave birth. I’ve seen how hard it is—”
“Lead us to the Wall, child, and hold your tongue,” Kilushepa said without emotion. She stalked away, heading north toward the looming face of the Wall.
Qirum’s grin widened as he fell into step beside Milaqa. “You got that about as wrong as you could.”
“I was speaking as one human being to another—”
“Kilushepa isn’t a human being! Haven’t you listened to anything I have said to you? Oh, she does have her frailties. Since the birth of the child she’s been obsessively cleaning herself. Did you know that? Bathing and scrubbing, and douches and enemas. The Hatti are a funny lot who believe that any form of sexual contact leaves you unclean, and unfit to be in the presence of the gods. So you can imagine how it was for her to fall into the hands of the soldiers who used her—and into my hands, come to that. Now that the baby’s out of her she’s washing and washing and washing, trying to make herself pure again … But none of that matters. She’s not weak, Milaqa. She’s a queen! She’s the Tawananna! Mark my words—we’ll be the ones who will have to hurry to keep up.”
Milaqa led her party to one of the Wall’s grander staircases. This was a sweeping flight cut into the growstone face, with broad treads and a facing wall inscribed with the names of Annids going back many generations.
Kilushepa and Qirum followed her up the stair. Kilushepa, lifting her robe to reveal booted feet, concentrated on each step. Qirum had been this way many times, but he looked around with interest as he always did, at the detail of the staircases, the growstone surface, the small doorways that led off to chambers cut deeper into the Wall’s fabric. Milaqa wondered what a warrior made of Northland and its Wall.
They climbed up a final set of shallow steps and emerged onto the Wall’s roof: gray ocean to the left, the black-and-white snow-covered landscape of Northland to their right, the Wall itself arrowing to infinity ahead and behind. The Northern Ocean was flecked with ice floes, and the dark shadows of boats, all the way to the horizon. In this winter of privation the Northlanders had fallen back on the generosity of the little mother of the sea, but fishing in deep midwinter was always a hazard.
Milaqa stepped forward cautiously. The surface was swept clear of snow daily, and the central track was ridged, for better footing. She led them along the Wall, heading east. The air was mercifully still, but bitterly cold, and they all pulled their cloaks tighter.
Qirum studied the ridges as he walked, his eye caught by that small detail. “It must have been the labor of years to carve all these fine lines in the stone, along the mighty length of this Wall.”
“Oh, no. You do it when the growstone is wet. You can just comb it in—literally, like combing your hair. When it’s wet you can shape growstone with your bare hands. And the furrows stay when the growstone hardens.”
“Remarkable,” the Trojan said. He knelt, took off his mittens, and rapped the surface with his knuckles. “A rock you can mold like clay!”
Soon they were over Old Etxelur itself. The circular ridges of the Mothers’ Door, the grand old earthwork, were coated by snow, the profile of Flint Mountain and the densely populated Bay Land gleamed with frost, and the great watercourses were frozen solid. In the misty distance she saw huge herds move across the land, like the shadows of clouds. Deer, perhaps, maybe even aurochs, the wild cattle that the farmer folk found so fascinating.
Kilushepa looked down on the Door, contemptuous. “How ugly. It reminds me of the palace of the Goddess of Death in the netherworld, which is surrounded by rings of walls in a desolate plain, just like this.”
“This is the very heart of Northland,” Milaqa said. “Old Etxelur itself, where the Wall, or the first part of it, was built to expel the sea.”
“And all of this was sea bed, you claim,” Kilushepa murmured. “I believe that’s a stand of oak down there. Everybody knows oak takes centuries to grow.”
“But the Wall is more than centuries old, Queen,” said Qirum gently. “Older even than the most ancient cities of the east, older than Ur and Uruk. This was around when they were nothing but collections of shepherds’ huts. You know the saying. ‘Everything comes from the west.’ And this is the heart of that west, Kilushepa.”
They moved on, walking past monoliths and monumental stone heads set up in their lines along the Wall roof. Milaqa tried to tell them something of the stories of the Annids commemorated here, but they weren’t interested in Northland history, and she gave up. She said, “We will walk until the middle of the afternoon, perhaps. We will arrive at a dock where my uncle Deri will meet us in his boat; we will be rowed back. We have food in the packs, and there are sheltered places. Or we can always duck down into the Wall; there are many places to eat.”
“And drink,” Qirum said loudly. “We’re walking due east. Aren’t we heading toward the Scambles?” Kilushepa looked quizzical. “A District within the Wall, Tawanan
na. It’s rather interesting. You’d think the Wall is one great uniform mass. But it isn’t. The character changes, quite markedly. I’ll tell you one pattern I’ve observed. These Districts, their miniature towns-in-a-town—the centers tend to be a half-day’s walk apart, or a little more. Just too far to walk there and back in a day, you see. So a natural separation grows up.”
Milaqa, faintly disturbed, realized that she’d never seen that pattern for herself.
“As for the Scambles—well, it’s quite unlike Etxelur, though often you’ll find the grand folk in the taverns and music houses and brothels—”
“We won’t be going there.” Milaqa said hastily.
“Then I hope you’re carrying beer on that back of yours, girl!”
They came to a place where a tremendous scaffolding of long Albian oak trunks and cut planks had been built up against the landward face of the Wall. On its platforms stood huge wooden vats full of ground-up rock, dust, and frozen-over water. Up on the roof, wooden panels had been set up to shelter those who supervised the work on the scaffolding below. Nobody was working today, though one man sat bundled up in furs, watchful, to ensure there were no accidental fires.
They paused in the lee of the supervisors’ shelter. Milaqa opened her packs and passed around dried meat and fish with hazelnut paste, and water and beer.
Qirum was fascinated by the scaffolding. “It is like a tremendous siege engine.”
“They are working on the Wall,” Milaqa replied. “The Beavers and their assistants. They make growstone from crushed limestone, fire-mountain ash and other ingredients in those great vats. But you can see the water is frozen, and the growstone itself would be too cold to mix properly. So the work is abandoned for now. They work on a given section for years at a time. People come for the work, and others to support those who work. They live here. The site becomes a community, a village. Children may be born and grow up on the scaffolding, before the time comes to move on to another section of Wall.”
Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416) Page 16
