Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416)

by Baxter, Stephen

  Bronze

  Summer

  Other Books by Stephen Baxter

  FROM ROC BOOKS

  Flood

  Ark

  Stone Spring

  FROM ACE BOOKS

  Time’s Tapestry

  Book One: Emperor

  Book Two: Conqueror

  Book Three: Navigator

  Book Four: Weaver

  Stephen Baxter

  Bronze

  Summer

  THE NORTHLAND TRILOGY

  A ROC BOOK

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Gollancz hardcover edition. For information contact Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St. Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA.

  First Roc Hardcover Printing, November 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Stephen Baxter, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Baxter, Stephen.

  Bronze summer/Stephen Baxter.

  p. cm.—(Northland trilogy; bk.2)

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61541-6

  1. Prehistoric peoples—Fiction. 2. Walls—Europe—Fiction. 3. Europe—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.A849B76 2012

  823’.914—dc23 2012026614

  Set in Meridien

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  For Brian Aldiss

  Table of Contents

  One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Two

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Three

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  Four

  65

  66

  Afterword

  One

  1

  Once the ice had covered continents. The silence of the world had been profound.

  Eventually, grudgingly, the ice retreated to its fastnesses in the mountains and at the poles. Humans spread northward, colonizing the recovering land. They lived sparsely, their lives brief. Soon the ice was remembered only in myth.

  Yet the world around them continued to endure significant changes. The land rose and flexed as it was relieved of the burden of the weight of the ice, and meltwater flowed into the oceans and pooled in hollows on the land. Rising seas bit at the coastlines of Northland, the great neck of land that still connected the peninsula called Albia to the Continent. Perhaps that neck would have been severed altogether—if not for the defiance of Northland’s people, who, tentatively at first, with crude flood-resistant mounds, drainage ditches scratched in the ground, and heaped-up dykes of stone and earth, resisted the ocean’s slow assaults.

  Meanwhile, far to the east, other new ideas were emerging. People had long tracked wild sheep and goats and encouraged the more nutritious cereal plants. Now, as people sought more reliable food supplies, that practice intensified. Herds were corralled, fields planted. Populations bloomed.

  But the ice was not done with mankind. A remnant ice cap over the western continent collapsed, and chill waters poured down the river valleys to the ocean. Sea levels rose in a great pulse. Northland survived this too, its already ancient network of sea walls and dykes and soakaways resilient. But the drastic injection of chill meltwater caused ocean currents to fail, and the world suffered a cold snap that lasted centuries. The eastern farmers, driven out of their homes by climate collapse and overexploitation, spread west along the river valleys and ocean coasts, taking their animals and seeds with them. In a slow wave that rolled across the Continent, forest was cleared, and threads of smoke rose from new farming communities.

  After two thousand years the farmers’ culture reached the shore of the Western Ocean—but here the wave broke. If the Northlanders had not existed, perhaps the farmers and their culture would have colonized the shore lands and islands of the ocean fringe. But Northland, though still a culture living off the produce of the wild earth, was literate, technically advanced, strong, self-confident. The Northlanders traded and learned, but farming held no interest for them.

  Again the climate shifted, with a spasm of drought heralding a new age of warm, dry conditions; again humanity’s fragile cultures flowed and changed in response. In the east the farming communities coalesced into a new phenomenon: towns and cities, major gatherings of population, centrally controlled, dedicated to the great task of maintaining complex nets of irrigation channels in increasingly dry landscapes. Empires bloomed like fungi on a log. Soon trading routes spanned the Continent, ca
rrying amber from the north, silver from the south, timber from the west, tin and lapis lazuli from the east. Bronze was everywhere, in cups and ornaments and statuary, in the body armor and swords of the new warrior kings. The traders and warriors probed west and north, seeking profit and conquest. But again the old Northlander culture stood strong, and older ways were preserved.

  And still the earth would not rest. Over an ocean on the far side of the world, elaborate cycles of heat and moisture collapsed, resumed—changed. The consequences rippled across the continents, in more waves of flood and drought, famine and disaster.

  And under a mountain on an island in the Western Ocean, molten rock surged, seeking escape.

  2

  The Year of the Fire Mountain:

  Early Spring

  Milaqa climbed the staircase cut into the face of the Wall. She took big deliberate strides, reluctant to think about her dead mother, whose rotting corpse lay out in the open on the roof.

  The growstone surface by the staircase was covered in scratched graffiti, swirls of circles and arcs in flowing Etxelur script: “HARA LOVES MEK.” “GAGO OF THE HOUSE OF THE VOLE OWES ME A DEER HAUNCH. DO NOT TRUST HIM …” Here, she was intrigued to see, was a line scraped in the angular alphabet of the Greeks. She knew the language and picked out the words with ease: “I PALLAS CLIMBED THIS WALL AND DEFIED THE NORTHERN SEA, IN THE NINTH YEAR AFTER THE STORM.” A sightseeing trader or princeling, she supposed, and boastful like all of his kind.

  Her steps were slowing, her attention too easily snagged by these scribbles. She forced herself on.

  As she reached the roof, under a gray sky, her view of Old Etxelur opened up, the earthworks and flood mounds, the houses clustered over the lump of Flint Island. Beyond, the flat, misty expanse of Northland stretched to the southern horizon, the gray-green landscape cut into a neat patchwork by the tremendous straight lines of tracks, canals, dykes, holloways and gullies. A cloud of birds, redwings perhaps, descended on a distant swathe of grassland. When she looked to the north the Wall’s own sharp horizon hid the sea from her sight. The Wall, it was said, was as tall as thirty adults standing one on top of the other, and about half as thick. But she heard the growl of the sea, and felt cold spray on her brow.

  The wind shifted, and there was a reek of rot, of decay, of death. She wrapped her cloak closer around her body. She longed to run back to the warmth and light of the galleries of the Scambles, the bright chatter of her friends. But she could not.

  She walked along the spine of the Wall, following the sparse line of monuments that dominated this tremendous roof. The oldest were slim monoliths, slabs of granite and basalt, gifts from the austere sky-watching communities of Gaira. And then there were the more recent Annid heads, images of Etxelur’s leaders carved by sculptors from across the Western Ocean: blocky faces as tall as Milaqa defiantly facing the rage of the waters, just as the Wall itself had for hundreds of generations. Her own mother’s face would soon be joining that row of bleak, sightless watchers. A memory surfaced like an air bubble from a still pond: a summer’s day when Kuma had lifted her up, Milaqa had been only five or six, and whirled her in the summer sunlight. Milaqa was now sixteen years old. She pushed the memory away.

  And she approached her mother’s lying-out platform. It was a simple wooden frame surrounded by busy, swooping gulls that scattered, cawing their irritation. Her mother’s corpse was just one of a row of prone bodies on the frame, many of them small, the crop of children taken by the recent winter, just as every year. The bodies lay under worn-out thatch nets that kept their bones from being scattered by the birds. Kuma, Milaqa’s mother, still wore her bronze breastplate, gleaming in the watery daylight, the ceremonial armor of the Annid of Annids yet to be removed, to be given to her successor. The breastplate was damaged, Milaqa noticed, with a neat slit punched in its front.

  And a man stood beyond the lying-out frame. Bulky, wrapped in a featureless cloak, silhouetted against the northern sky, this was her uncle Teel—come to make her face her mother’s death, and, she supposed, other unwelcome realities.

  Milaqa walked forward. The Northern Ocean was revealed to her now, big muscular waves flecked with foam. The gray water was only a few paces below the lip of the Wall; the level of the sea was higher than the dry land behind her. Seabirds rode the ocean swell, and further out she saw a litter of fishing boats.

  “An eagle,” Teel said.

  “What?”

  “I saw an eagle—a sea eagle, I think—wheeling away over there.” He pointed out to sea. Teel was not a tall man but he was bulky, given to fat, and he habitually shaved his head to the scalp. Milaqa knew he was around thirty years old, but he looked younger, his face oddly round, like a baby’s.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “The eagles nest in crevices in the Wall’s outer face. Lots of birds do. And on the inner face too.”

  “Wearing away the Wall bit by bit, with each peck of a curious chick, each streak of guano on the growstone. Well. We can leave it to the Beavers to fret about that.” His blue eyes were running in the cold breeze. “Thank you for coming up.”

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “Well, I didn’t drag you here, so yes, you had a choice. I know how difficult this is for you. To lose your mother in your sixteenth year, the year of your House choice—you’ll have to face the whole family at the equinox gathering—”

  “Don’t give me advice about my feelings, you ball-less old man.”

  He laughed, unperturbed. “Ball-less, yes, I grant you. But not that old, surely.”

  “Let’s get this over.” She walked deliberately to the sky burial platform. A couple of gulls had landed again; they fled into the air. Milaqa lifted her cloak so it covered her mouth. Teel had a linen scarf, grimy from use, that he pulled over his mouth and nose. And Milaqa looked closely at her mother’s body for the first time.

  It had only been a month since Kuma had been brought home from the Albian forest where she had met her death. A fall from her horse had killed her, her companions had told the family, an aurochs chase that went wrong, the back of her skull smashed on a rock—an accident, it happened all the time, there would be no point hunting the great cattle in their tall forests if it wasn’t dangerous. Only a month. Yet Kuma’s head had already been emptied of its eyes, her gaping mouth cleansed of tongue and palate. Scraps of flesh and wisps of hair still clung, but enough bone had been exposed for Milaqa to be able to see the craterlike indentation in the back of the skull, the result of that fatal fall. This is my mother. Milaqa probed for feeling, deep in her heart. She had not cried when she had heard her mother was dead. Now all she seemed to feel was a deep and savage relief that it wasn’t her lying on this platform, her flesh rotting from her broken frame. Did everybody feel this way?

  “It works so quickly,” Teel said, marveling. “The processes of death. Look, of the body’s soft parts there’s not much left save the big core muscles.” He pointed to masses of dull red meat beneath Kuma’s ribs. “The birds and the insects and the rats, all those little mouths pecking and chewing—”

  “Is this some kind of test? I know what you’re like. I grew up with you setting me tricky challenges, uncle.”

  “All for your own good. I wanted to show you something.” He pointed to the flaw in the bronze breastplate. “Look at that.”

  The breastplate, supposedly a gift from the tin miners of Albia to some Annid many generations back, was finely worked, incised with the rings and cup marks of the old Etxelur script. The damage was obvious close up. She inspected the rough slit, the flanges of metal folded back to either side. “What of it? When the next Annid takes the plate, this will be easily fixed.”

  “Perhaps so. But how do you imagine it got there?”

  Milaqa shrugged. “During the accident. She fell from her horse, when it bucked before the charging aurochs.”

  He nodded, and mimed a fall, tipping forward. “So she landed hard, and—what? A bit of rock punctured her breastpl
ate?”

  “It’s possible.” But she doubted it even as she spoke.

  “But she fell backward. That’s what we were told—that’s how she got her skull stove in. You can see the wound, at the back of the head. So how, then, was the plate on her chest punctured?”

  “Come on, uncle. You never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer.”

  He lifted his cloak back over his shoulder, revealing a mittened hand holding a bronze knife, and he began sawing at the net strands over Kuma’s torso. “Actually I don’t know the answer—not for sure. But I have a theory.”

  He quickly cut enough strands to be able to peel back the netting, itself sticky, from Kuma’s chest. Then he reached under the breastplate to cut into its leather ties. Carefully, respectfully, he lifted the plate off Kuma’s body. It came away with a sucking sound, to reveal a grimy linen tunic. He slit through the rotting cloth and peeled that back to reveal Kuma’s chest, scraps of flesh and fat and muscle over ribs that gleamed white. Flies buzzed into the air, and there was a fresh stench, sharp and rotten.

  Teel pulled off his deerskin mittens and handed them to Milaqa. “Hold these for me. This is going to be messy.”

  And he dug his fingers into Kuma’s chest, in the gap between the racks of her ribs. Bone cracked. He pushed and probed, spreading his fingers into the soft mass beneath. He was looking for something. His expression was grim; Milaqa knew he had his squeamish side. Then his hand closed. He looked at Milaqa. He withdrew his hand, and held out his fist; black fluid and bits of flesh clung to his skin. He opened his hand to reveal a small object, flat, three-sided, evidently heavy and sharp, coated in ichor. He rubbed it on his cloak, and held the object up to his eye.