Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416)

by Baxter, Stephen

  “She’s given you a hard-on, that’s all. Well, that’s my advice, and you can take it or ignore it, I’m past caring. Now I’m going to get some sleep before the wind dies.” He handed Qirum the wine flask and slumped down with arms folded over his belly, his old felt cap pulled down over his eyes.

  If Kilushepa had heard any of this conversation, she showed no sign of it.

  13

  In another boat, crossing another ocean, it was Caxa who was the first to glimpse Kirike’s Land.

  “Smoke!” she cried.

  Tibo, buried in a heap of furs, thought he was dreaming. “Hmm? What?”

  The Jaguar girl nudged his ribs.

  They were side by side in the stern of the boat, like two fat seals in their layers of furs, under a sky that was deep blue but streaked with pink clouds to the east, the sign of the coming dawn. There was the usual morning stink of greasy human flesh, farts, fish guts, and the stale brine of the bilgewater. Around them the men were waking, more bundles of fur from which peered human faces, thick with beards and smeared with fat to keep out the night cold. On Caxa’s other side the priest Xivu lay curled up, still asleep. Caxa was the only female in the boat, and these men had been away from home for a long time; Deri had made sure that whenever they slept the girl was walled in by Xivu on one side, Tibo on the other.

  Tibo was falling asleep again. She nudged him. “Smoke. Smoke!”

  He struggled to sit up. “No. Not smoke.” In the course of the long voyage he had been trying to teach her the rudiments of the Etxelur tongue. She was a slow learner, or an incurious one. “We didn’t light the boat’s fire last night, remember? It was raining.” Another night of salted fish, wet furs and cold. “There can’t be any smoke. Do you mean ‘clouds’?”

  “Not clouds.” This time the nudge was hard enough to hurt, despite the thickness of the furs. “Know clouds, know smoke. Smoke!” She thrust out an arm and pointed beyond the boat’s prow.

  He peered to see in the dim light. And he made out a black column that rose up from the northeast horizon, billowing, spreading into a layer at the top, flat and tenuous. He thought he saw a flicker of light in the column—like lightning, like a storm.

  The men saw it; they stirred and muttered. Deri was already awake, sitting up, one hand loosely holding a rope rowlock. He was watching the smoke too.

  “What is it, father?”

  “Home. That’s Kirike’s Land. We’re due to come on it today, tomorrow at latest.”

  “And what’s that smoke? Fires?”

  “Not that. A different kind of smoke. I saw it once before, years ago—before you were born. It might mean nothing. And, see the way it’s climbing straight up? Not a breath of wind. No point unfurling the sail this morning. Come on, lads, time to get moving, this boat won’t row itself.”

  The men, seven of them plus Tibo and Deri, stirred, grumbling. The boat rocked gently as one after another knelt up to piss over the side, or to bare his arse and dump his soil. Deri got to work dragging up the sea anchor.

  And a noise like thunder came rumbling over the sea, from the northeast, from the direction of Kirike’s Land.

  “Told you,” Caxa said, her thin face almost ghostly in the dawn light.

  They came upon Kirike’s Land after noon, approaching from the south. Snow-capped mountains and glaciers, bone white, showed first above the horizon, and then the green of the lower lands, the meadows and birch woods. The men grew animated at the sight of home, and they pointed out landmarks to each other, massifs, cliffs and headlands.

  The southern coast was long and with few harbors, and as soon as Deri got his bearings he directed the crew to row west, toward the big bay called the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm. There was a touch of breeze now, blessedly coming from the east, and the men gratefully hoisted their leather sail and let the little mother of the sky guide them home through these last stages. They passed through the usual fleet of fishing boats, and were greeted with hails and waves and obscene cries. One fast little boat raced ahead of them to the Cupped Palm, so a welcome would be made ready for them. Caxa stared out curiously as the island’s shore slid past—gaunt, rocky, yet with birch forest lapping down almost to the sea in some places, and the flanks of mountains beyond striped with ice. It was late spring. The winter always lay heavily on this land.

  And that smoke pillar towered over the island. When the wind shifted it brought a smell of ash and sulphur. Deri said it seemed to be coming from a mountain called the Hood, in the south of the island.

  Xivu was uneasy. “We have such mountains at home,” he said in his stilted Northlander.

  “Here, the land often stirs,” Deri said evenly. “We believe the little mother of the earth comes to this island to sleep beneath the ground when she flushes with heat, as many old women do. There is rarely any harm in it.”

  But Xivu was not reassured. He was deeply reluctant to be here in the first place. Tibo didn’t know how it had been finally decided that Xivu would be the one to accompany Caxa on this long trip across the ocean. Perhaps he was the best speaker of the Etxelur tongue; perhaps he knew Caxa the best—or perhaps it was just that he was the least skillful at avoiding an unpleasant chore. Anyhow here he was, and he had been complaining since his first bout of seasickness, and the strange smoke column wasn’t helping his mood.

  They sailed into the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm, and for their final approach into harbor the men folded their sail and wielded their oars. Tibo felt a surge of relief to be home, as he looked around at the houses, the rising smoke, the boats littering the water, and the looming ice-striped mountain in the background. But the smoke column from the Hood cast a kind of pall over the sky, staining it a faint orange, and that smell of sulphurous burning lingered.

  When the boat pulled into the shore, Tibo leapt out with the rest to haul it above the high-water mark. There was a party waiting, cheerful wives who threw themselves at their husbands, a few traders hoping for trinkets from the Land of the Jaguar. Children came swarming, as children always did, great mobs of them outnumbering the adults. Xivu and Caxa looked taken aback. Luckily the children seemed to find these exotic folk strange rather than interesting, and they were as wary as the Jaguar folk themselves.

  And here came Medoc, Tibo’s grandfather, huge in his furs, striding along the strand toward them. “Deri! So you managed not to sink the boat, son. And Tibo! I swear you grow a bit more every time I see you.” He held Tibo’s shoulders and shook him hard enough to make his head rattle on his shoulders. Medoc’s tremendous gray-flecked beard was studded with fish bones, and his walrus fur stank of smoke. “Look at you now, arms like tree trunks, neck as thick as an ice giant’s cock! Well, I’m just back from Etxelur myself, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He turned on Caxa, who flinched. “Oh, and who’s your lover?”

  Deri took his father’s arm. “This is our sculptor.”

  Medoc’s eyes widened. “What—bound for Northland, for the Annid’s carving? The last master sculptor I saw was a fat old man.”

  Xivu said precisely, “Vixixix was the master a decade ago. The last to visit Northland, for your Annids are blessedly long lived.” He stepped forward. He had shucked off his loaned furs, despite the relative chill of the afternoon, and he stood proud in his kilt of exotically colored linen, his torso and arms bare, his mirror of bronze hanging from his neck. “This is Caxa. The granddaughter of Vixixix. She is the current master sculptor.”

  “And she is not,” Tibo said, “my lover.”

  “Well, you’re welcome here, Xivu, whatever the reason you’ve come …” Medoc was distracted by his own reflection in the mirror on the priest’s chest. He plucked half a fish head from the depths of his beard and popped it into his mouth. “Wondered where that got to. Well! Come with me.” Crunching bone, he led the way from the shore toward the houses.

  They walked past tremendous racks of drying fish, set up so that the prevailing breeze carried the stink away from the houses.

  Caxa s
eemed curious. “Sacrifice?”

  “Not a sacrifice,” Tibo said. “Well, we apologize to the fish when we catch them … We dry the fish. And then we send it home.”

  She looked puzzled. “Home?”

  “I mean to Northland. I was born here. This is my home. But everybody calls Northland home.”

  “Fish would stink on boat. Go rotten.”

  “That’s the secret. If you dry them out the right way, the fish keep for months. We trade them in Northland. They call it Kirike-fish.”

  Medoc’s house, one of half a dozen arranged around a rough hearthspace, was set on a grassed-over mound of earth. Children swarmed around, and Deri and Tibo bent to greet nieces and nephews and cousins.

  Vala, Medoc’s wife, came pushing out of the house through the door flap. She carried a pot of meat and herbs she was mixing with a wooden spoon. Her face was sturdy but pleasant, and she wore her graying dark hair tied back. She smiled at Xivu, and managed to give the wide-eyed Caxa a gentle embrace without the girl recoiling. Not yet forty, she was Medoc’s second wife, a cousin of his first, long dead; she was stepmother to Deri, step-grandmother to Tibo. She greeted Deri and Tibo with kisses and brief hugs, and she called out her own children, a lively boy called Liff and a toddler girl called Puli, both of whom Deri swept up for a huge embrace. A willowy twelve-year-old called Mi, daughter of Vala’s by a previous marriage, stood back more shyly.

  Medoc grinned expansively at this family scene. “We share the island, you know,” he said to Xivu and Caxa, “with neighbors of yours. From across the ocean. Well, originally, that’s where their fathers came from, and it’s said that Kirike himself brought them here. We call them the Ice Folk. Maybe you’ll know some of them.”

  “Father,” Deri said patiently, “they’re hardly likely to know one another. The Ice Folk come from the Land of the Sky Wolf, which is many days’ sailing north of the Jaguar country. These are whole continents we’re talking about.”

  “Oh, pick, pick, pick, you’re just like Vala. I’ll take you up country,” Medoc said to Xivu. “Before you have to go on to Etxelur. I’ll show you the Ice Folk—our forests of birch and pine—it is a beautiful island, surprisingly rich. We could set off right now, if you like—”

  “Oh, no, you couldn’t,” Vala snapped. Still cradling her bowl of spiced meat, she put her free arm around Caxa. “You come with me. I’m sure you’d like to change those brine-stained clothes; I know just what salty leather against your skin feels like. Mi! Come and see if you’ve got some clothes this little one can borrow. Would you like something to eat? Other than fish, I mean …”

  Deri followed, then Xivu, and at last Tibo.

  “Tomorrow for the walk, then,” boomed Medoc, oblivious to the fact that everybody was ignoring him, and he trailed into the house after the others.

  14

  It took only a few days’ sailing before Qirum’s boat reached the mouth of a river called the Na by the local people, and thus recorded in his periplus. This was the southern shore of the western country called Gaira. They arrived on the afternoon of a warm early summer day.

  They came to a fishing village sprawled untidily along a rocky strand. The shore above the waterline was cluttered with overturned boats, and small squat wooden houses, racks of drying fish, a big open-air hearth that smoked languidly. Beyond the beach, forest rose up, dense. More boats were out on the deeper ocean, to the south.

  A child playing in the surf at the water’s edge was the first to spot their sail. Naked, no more than four or five years old, she ran up the beach to the houses, calling out. Soon adults emerged to watch Praxo’s crew furl their sail and row in toward the shore. One man came down to the water where they would land, but others hung back.

  “Take care,” Praxo said to the rowers. “Let me do the talking. I can speak the local jabber, a bit of it anyway. See how they’re hanging back from the shore? See that mother gathering in her children? We’ve come a long way west, and these parts aren’t as infested by sea raiders as back east, but they have their problems, and they’re wary. By the way, this isn’t Troy. You can’t assume that every woman you meet is a whore. You’ll get your share in time, have no fear, lads. But not yet.”

  The ship pulled into the shore, and they all jumped out at Qirum’s command, Kilushepa included, splashing in knee-deep surf. The men lined up and hauled the ship until its flat base scraped over the beach. Then they relaxed, panting, and reached for their water flasks.

  The man who’d come to meet them stood before Qirum and Praxo. He was young, under twenty, and he wore a tunic of coarsely spun linen, a short cowhide cloak, and boots covered in fish scales. He was dark, his face round, his hair black. He tapped his chest. “Vertix,” he said. “Vertix.” He spoke on in his own coarse tongue, but there was Greek, Egyptian and even Hatti in the mix, Qirum could tell. “Show? Show way? Food, water? Guide?”

  Praxo started to negotiate with the man. Kilushepa stood with Qirum. “What does this fellow want with us? Can you understand any of what he’s saying?”

  “He’s asking to be taken on as a guide. A navigator.” He pointed up the river valley, which narrowed as you looked inland, cutting through a forested landscape. “We’re going across land. Otherwise we’d have to go out through the strait, out of this Middle Sea, and brave the Western Ocean—a much tougher journey, and a longer one. We’ll go northwest, that way, following the valley of this river as far as we can. We’ll have to walk as far as the watershed, I’m afraid.”

  “I did plenty of walking in the company of those Hatti soldiers, as you will recall. My soles are like leather.”

  “After the watershed we’ll follow another river further to the north and west, until we come to the land of the Burdi, as the people there call themselves—different from this lot by the way, and speaking a different tongue altogether, I’m told. We should be able to barter for a boat to take us down the lower reaches, and into a great estuary called the Cut. From there we’ll reach the southern coast of Northland. And there, I hope, we’ll meet the Hatti trading party you wrote to.”

  “Who will escort us the rest of the way to the midsummer Giving at Etxelur.”

  “We’ll be there in time, with a fair wind and a little help from this local fellow Vertix, who seems to know his business.”

  “And he knows his value,” Kilushepa said drily, as they watched the man pick over the goods Praxo had to offer as payment, bits of silver and bronze, carved bone and wood, shaped stone.

  Soon a deal was done. Praxo returned to Qirum. “We start at first light tomorrow. Come on, you men, you’ll be sleeping on dry land tonight, let’s get set up.”

  The men hauled the ship’s sails out on the beach to dry, and spread blankets and sacks on the ground. Two of them set off up the valley in search of firewood, and straw or grass to stuff sleeping pallets. Praxo went up the beach with Vertix to negotiate for some fish and meat and water.

  Kilushepa said, “Would you walk with me into the forest, Qirum? I’d be interested to see what herbs grow here. Perhaps we can flavor the fish supper we will soon be sharing.”

  The idea of exploring a forest glade with a queen appealed to Qirum greatly. They walked together up the beach to the edge of the forest, followed by Praxo’s baffled, irritated gaze.

  In the morning, at first light, Vertix came down the beach to meet them, laden with a heavy pack of his own.

  Praxo had picked two men to stay behind here and watch the boat. These two were going about their morning chores sleepily, banking down the big fire they’d built, kicking sand into the holes they’d dug as latrines. Nobody bothered saying good-bye. The rest of the crew were gathered beside the boat, all of them, save only for Kilushepa, wrapped in their cloaks with packs on their backs or heads.

  Vertix grinned at them all. “Nice day, nice forest, nice walk,” he said in broken Greek. “And then land of Burdi, and then—Northland! Now walk.” He turned and led the way up a narrow track that led along the eastern side of
the river valley.

  Praxo, laden by his own immense pack, marched ahead with him. The men shuffled after them. Kilushepa and Qirum brought up the rear, treading side by side along a path not much more than an animal track. Qirum listened to the men’s grumbles, amused. For days they had been complaining about their sore backsides on the ship’s rough benches, and their blistered hands; now, right from the start of the trek, they complained about their feet.

  Kilushepa murmured, “That man is my implacable opponent.”

  “Praxo? He’s a good man. He does his job—”

  “What hold does he have over you?”

  He turned his head in surprise. “He has no hold. I lead.”

  “Yet you defer to him.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I say it is. Tell me about him—how you know him.”

  He hoisted his pack more comfortably on his shoulders. “He’s a Trojan, as I am.”

  She said softly, “Though I suppose he would say you are merely half-Trojan.”

  “He was a child at the time of the Greek siege—only two years old, less perhaps. But his family had money. They bribed a Greek officer to let them escape before the final assault, the fire. I’m not sure where they ended up. From what he’s said I think it might have been Patara.” A city on the southern shore of Anatolia, in another Hatti dependency. “He doesn’t talk about that much. Anyhow he always seems to have been a tough kid.

  “As soon as he was old enough to steal one of his father’s horses, he rode out of there and made his way back to Troy. That’s where he’s been based ever since, as far as I can tell—making a living by trading, mercenary fighting, sailing—”

  “Piracy. Banditry.”

  “That’s the nature of the times.”

  “Tell me how he met you.”