Bronze Summer : The Northland Trilogy (9781101615416)

by Baxter, Stephen

  “Aha!” Medoc had reached the summit. He stood silhouetted against a wall of rising steam, hands on hips, panting hard.

  Tibo clambered up the last few paces, with Caxa at his side—and faced a bowl of fire. It was a wound in the summit of the mountain, deep walled. A kind of liquid pooled in it, red hot and crusted over with a black scum that crackled and creaked as it flowed. Plumes of fire rose up, and sprays of hot rock, cooling as they fell. Steam rose from cracks in the rock at the rim of the containing bowl. The noise was different now, like huge, fast exhalations—chuff, chuff, chuff. There was a sense of huge energies, as if they stood on the shoulder of some immense, angry animal.

  Medoc laughed, exhilarated. “I’ve never seen the like—never seen it before, or heard of it. It’s one for the grandchildren, Tibo.”

  Tibo looked down the flank of the mountain, to the lower land below with its pockets of forest and farmland, and then the line of the coast, the impossible blue of the sea beyond. “We should go back.”

  Medoc shook his head. “Sometimes you sound like your grandmother.”

  The ground shuddered. Caxa grabbed Tibo’s arm.

  There was a tremendous bang, and a rush of boiling-hot air hurled Tibo backward.

  20

  The party led by Noli and Bren was not alone in being late to get to the Chamber of the Solstice Noon.

  As they clambered up the staircases scratched into the face of the Wall, people crowded with a kind of stiff dignity, all trying to get to the ceremonial hall before the crucial moment of midday arrived. And it was an exotic crush, Milaqa thought. In among the robed seniors of the Houses of Etxelur there were representatives of many of the Wall’s own Districts, and country folk from Northland in simpler shifts, and foreigners, men from the Albia forests in their bearskins and bull’s-head caps, and women from the World River estuary in seal skin, and men dressed much like Qirum, as warriors or princes of the eastern empires, with armor and helmets adorned with horns and plumes and bones. Milaqa wondered if there were more of them than usual; maybe the drought had driven them here in hope of a dole of Kirike-fish or potato for their starving peoples. Some of the more elderly or overweight nobles, having trouble with the stairs, were carried in litters, and the big structures with their teams of sweating, stumbling bearers only added to the crowding and confusion.

  Milaqa was relieved when they finally got to the Chamber. This was a wide, shallow room, entirely contained within the structure of the Wall. The room was already crowded, and above a murmur of conversation in a dozen tongues Milaqa heard the sing-song chanting of a priest, and the rhythmic rattle of a shaker. The place was lit by whale-oil lamps burning in brackets, and daylight admitted by a single shaft that pierced the smooth-faced growstone wall, high above all their heads.

  Bren and Noli were senior enough that they had a right to a place at the front of the crowd, a favored position, and they led the rest through. Kilushepa looked around with amused contempt. At the front Voro was already here. He greeted Bren, his superior, and nodded at Milaqa.

  At the heart of the Chamber, surrounded by the crowd, was a growstone plinth, seamlessly molded to the floor, with its tilted upper surface carefully placed, Milaqa knew, so that it faced the south. The surface bore the Etxelur concentric-rings symbol, carved growstone plated with a gleaming bronze sheen. The sunlight from the shaft cast a spot on the wall just above and to one side of the plinth, the beam easily visible in the dusty air, sloping down from the shaft straight as an arrow shot.

  The ceremony had already begun. The new Annid of Annids, Raka, stood by the head priest, looking nervous and self-conscious, weighed down by Kuma’s big bronze breastplate. More priests stood by, chanting in unison through mouths distorted by wolves’ jaws. Young Riban stood with them, working the shaker; it was the skull of a deer, its eyes stopped up, containing rattling scraps of creamy Etxelur flint, a very ancient treasure.

  And here was Teel. Wearing his own robe as a member of the House of the Owl, he sidled up to Milaqa. “Hello, little Crow.”

  “Don’t call me that … I don’t feel as clever as a crow at all.”

  “Tell me what you’ve found out.”

  She quickly outlined what she had heard of Bren’s history of plotting with the Hatti. “And that’s why my mother had to die. Just as we suspected. She was in the way of his scheme to sell our secrets to the Hatti. I don’t think Kilushepa or any of the Hatti had anything to do with it directly. But Bren used the advantage of the iron his allies gave him.”

  Teel thought this over. “Do you have the arrowhead?”

  She handed over the bit of iron, warm from her body heat. “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Leave it to me.” Her uncle slipped away.

  Noon approached, the unseen sun shifted in the sky, the beam of dust motes swept slowly through the air, the spot cast on the wall neared the plinth, and the priests continued their song.

  Bren leaned over to speak to Qirum and Kilushepa in his workmanlike Hatti. “We are privileged to be here, to witness this. Lucky that today is a cloudless day! The shaft has been carefully arranged so that at midsummer noon, and only at that moment, the sun’s light will shine down on this spot—this plinth, its very heart, the center of the circles. This marks a spot where, we believe, Ana herself once stood when the Wall was first built, long ago. You understand that we build the Wall continually, repairing the sea-facing surface as best we can, but continually building up the landward side. And as the Wall has thickened and grown, generations of master builders from the House of the Beaver have ensured that the shaft has been properly extended so that the miracle of the instant of solstice is always captured, this moment of exquisite symmetry, this point in space and in time on which the whole year pivots …”

  As the spot of sunlight neared the center of the circular ridges the priests’ chanting became more rapid, and Riban’s skull shaking more excited. Behind Milaqa, people leaned and muttered and strained to see.

  Qirum leaned over to Milaqa. “You promised me beer.”

  “So I lied. But you’re in for a show, I think …”

  There was a collective gasp. The priests’ chanting cut off in confusion.

  For, as Milaqa saw, the spot of solstice sunlight, now precisely centered in the growstone circles, picked out, not bronze, but iron—the arrowhead she had worn around her neck.

  Teel stepped forward. He stood before the plinth, so that the solstice light fell squarely on his face, as he surely intended. And he held up the arrowhead, on his palm.

  “Here!” he said. “Look on this. This is how Kuma, Annid of Annids, died. Not from some accident on the hunt, not from a fall—from an arrow driven into her chest.”

  Noli frowned. “What is this, Teel? What proof do you have?”

  “I dug it out of her chest with my own hands when she was lying out on the roof. And her daughter Milaqa saw me do it.”

  Faces turned to Milaqa. She was overwhelmed. She felt a hand on her shoulder: cousin Riban, the priest. She was glad of his silent support.

  Teel shouted, “An arrowhead of iron, hardened as only one people can make it—yours, queen of Hattusa.” Holding the arrow, he pointed at Kilushepa.

  Bren was frantically murmuring in the ear of the Tawananna, and Milaqa wondered how faithful his translation was. Kilushepa calmly looked back at Teel. Qirum was grinning at the fuss.

  “Hatti iron,” Teel said now, “but it was no Hatti who pulled the bowstring—there was no Hatti within a day’s ride when Kuma died. It was one of her own who did this—one of her own people, one of those close enough for her to trust them with her life, on the hunt. Which of you?” He glared at them all. “Do you dare lie, here and now, at the moment of solstice in this holiest of places? Will you lie before the spirit of Ana herself? Which of you?” Now he confronted Bren. “You, Jackdaw?”

  Fear and shock were evident in Bren’s eyes. But he was always quick thinking. He looked around at the faces of the people—the angry
priests, Noli and the furious Annids, the bemused foreign guests. Then he stepped forward. “Yes. All right, Teel, you pompous old woman. I got the arrows from a Hatti contact who was glad to help. It was not I who pulled the bowstring. You will never know who it was.” He glanced at Milaqa with a kind of cold cruelty. “But, yes, I planned it.”

  Riban gripped Milaqa’s shoulder hard, holding her back.

  But Voro gasped, “No.” He turned to Milaqa in horror. “I didn’t know. I was there—if I’d known, I would have stopped it—I didn’t know, I swear!”

  At Voro’s evident distress Bren’s expression flickered, as if guilt stabbed briefly. But he snapped, “There was no choice, boy!” He glared around at the rest. “No choice! Kuma was an obstacle to progress, in these times of universal change. As are you fusty Annids, all of you, as stuck in the dark as the owl you claim as your House’s Other. The world is changing, and Northland must change with it. If we do, if we work with allies like the Hatti rather than keep them at a distance, we may become the greatest power the world has seen. If we do not, we may be wiped from the face of the land. And if we do survive,” he said, growing in confidence and raising his voice, “if we survive, I, Bren, will be remembered by history, rightly, as the greatest hero since Prokyid himself!”

  Noli stepped up to him, her nose a fraction from his. “Not if I can help it.” The Annid looked over to the priests. “Bind him.”

  There was uproar. The Annids present began to jostle with the Jackdaws, who tried to surround Bren. The foreigners, awed or amused, began their own pushing and shoving.

  Qirum laughed out loud. He said to Milaqa, “I’m sorry about your loss. Truly. But I had no idea your people are so divided …”

  “Quiet,” said Teel. When the din did not cease, he went back to the plinth. “Quiet!”

  At his commanding bellow, the commotion stilled. Noli and Bren, surrounded by their followers, turned to him uncertainly.

  “Listen,” said Teel. “Just listen.”

  And Milaqa heard a distant rumble, like thunder carrying across the sea, though the day had been still and cloudless—thunder audible even here, deep in the growstone heart of the Wall.

  21

  “Tibo. Tibo!”

  Hands at his shoulders, shaking him. The air hot. More heat coming from the hard ground under his back. A roaring sound like a wave on the shore. The ground shuddering. He tried to open his mouth. His lips were gummed up, dry, and when he tried to lick them his tongue rasped on a kind of grit, sharp tasting. Ash.

  “Tibo!”

  He opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, on a slope, his head lower than his feet. Shreds of white mist fled across the sky. He remembered the wall of ash and smoke coming at him, the hot air that had hurled him back with a casual flick.

  Caxa’s face loomed over him, streaked with ash and dirt. Her right cheek was blistered, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose, dripping from the jade bead stuck in there. She pulled at his shoulder. “Hurt? You can walk?”

  His spine had been bent backward over his pack. When he tried to rise his head pounded, with a sharp ache at the back of his skull from the blow from the rock or tree stump that had knocked him out. But he was able to sit up.

  And he saw the ridge summit of the Hood, only paces away. Steam and smoke thrust up into the air all along the ridge, studded with flecks glowing white-hot. That angry chuffing rock-breath noise had gone now, to be replaced by a continuing, deafening roar. He could feel the dry blistering heat on his face and hands, and when he took a breath it seared his throat. Ash washed down, falling like gray snowflakes. He watched, bemused, as the flakes drifted in the air, almost beautiful.

  “Tibo, come!”

  “Yes.” He struggled to his feet and tried to think. Down, down—they had to get away from this summit—down was the way to go. Down to the sea. He imagined immersing himself in the sea’s cool, clear saltiness, washing away this searing dust. And his father would be there, waiting with his boat. He would take Caxa to the sea.

  But there was something missing. A gap in his head. Somebody else. Medoc.

  He looked around. Further down the slope old Medoc was lying on his front like a beached dolphin, groaning with pain. Tibo grabbed Caxa’s hand. “Come on.”

  Medoc had fallen over a shattered tree stump, and an ash-coated splinter had neatly run through the fleshy part of his upper thigh. Tibo could see the point sticking out. Blood dripped onto the ash-covered ground, brilliant red against the gray.

  Medoc waved them away, wincing with pain. “No! Get away. Leave me here. Look, you can see what I’ve done to my leg …”

  Caxa knelt over him and inspected his injury. “Not bad,” she said to Tibo.

  “You know how to treat injuries?” he asked, surprised.

  “Sculptors—always big rocks falling over, sharp flakes flying—injuries all the time. Father helped me learn.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Caxa slipped her hands under Medoc’s injured thigh, to either side of the tree splinter. “You get foot.” Tibo moved around and cupped his hands under Medoc’s ankle. “We lift together.”

  Tibo nodded.

  Medoc raged, his face a mask of gray ash streaked with blood. “You don’t owe me anything—I’m the fool who brought you up here, all the way to the gates of the underworld, and now look what’s happening—”

  “On three. One, two—three!”

  They both lifted, jerking the leg up and away from the splinter, with a rip of flesh as the leg caught on some barb, and Medoc screamed. But the leg was free, and he rolled on his back. Caxa took a stone blade from the belt at her waist, hacked a strip of ash-grimed linen from her tunic, and wrapped it around the wound. The cloth instantly stained dark crimson, but there was no life-threatening flow; this was not the wound that would kill Medoc. The bit of wood that had done so much damage stuck out of the ground, mute. As Tibo watched, swirling ash settled on it, covering it over, flake by gray flake, the ash sticking to the drying blood.

  Somehow Caxa got Medoc up off the ground. He was leaning on her, his arm over her shoulders, his good leg planted firmly on the ground.

  Tibo wrapped his arm around Medoc’s waist. “Down. We have to go down to the sea.”

  Caxa grunted, nodded. Together they stumbled down the slope, helping Medoc.

  The ash thickened, becoming a kind of blizzard of burning flakes. They wrapped their cloaks around their heads, leaving only slits for their eyes. Tibo’s lungs strained at air that was hot and smoky and stinking of sulfur. He could barely see his footing.

  And again the ground shuddered, and there was a deep rocky groan, as if the mountain itself were struggling to wake from some nightmare.

  In the little community called The Black, Vala was in her house—or rather Okea’s house. As the sister of Medoc’s dead wife Bel, Okea was Medoc’s oldest surviving female relative, and that was the way property was owned and inherited here, as in Northland. It was a warm day, midsummer’s day, not long after noon. The house’s hide door was thrown open to the southern light, and while everybody else was out at the Giving, Vala was taking the chance to get some work done. She used a mortar and pestle to grind up meat and boiled potato to make the soft stew that Puli liked, her second son with Medoc and her youngest child, two years old and a fussy eater since he’d been teething. It was a stew that old Okea sucked up by the bowlful too, cursing her broken teeth. Puli himself lay peacefully sleeping in his wrap on the floor at her side.

  As the booms came from the fire mountain, Puli barely stirred, but Vala was increasingly uneasy.

  Okea’s house had been one of the first to be built in this little settlement, and so it was in a favored position on a stretch of high ground just before the great platform of black rock that had given the place its name. Sitting cross-legged just inside the house’s south-facing door, Vala could see a long way, over a swath of landscape, with its clumps of birch forest and scattered farmsteads, the fires of the fisher folk
smoking their catch down by the small harbor, and then the sea beyond, bright and blue and glittering. But today there was a haze over the sea, and a kind of orange tinge to the sky.

  And now that big boom earlier, the more or less continuous rumbling since. What did it mean?

  Mi and Liff came bustling up the slope. Mi held a rough rubber ball in her hand, a gift from the Jaguar people, a sacred token that always ended up in the hands of the kids. Liff was complaining noisily. “Mother, she took it off me, she took the ball.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t come home otherwise—”

  “We were playing round-the-houses! I was winning, and she just grabbed it and came in. Mother, tell her—” He grabbed at the ball. Mi held it up, out of his reach.

  Liff, ten years old, was Vala’s first child with Medoc. And Mi, twelve, was Vala’s daughter by her dead husband back in Northland. She was nearly as tall as Vala herself now, on the cusp of womanhood, but she was still enough of a kid to play. Both of them looked hot, overexcited maybe by all the fun of midsummer day, with the Giving and the bladder feast to come. But Mi looked concerned, her small, pretty face pinched.

  With a sigh Vala put down her mortar and pestle. “So what’s this all about?”

  “She was cheating.”

  “I wasn’t. I had to make him come in. Vala, you should come out and see. Pithi and her family, and Adhao and all those nephews and nieces of his—”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re going.”

  “Going where? What do you mean, going?”

  “They’re just packing up their stuff and walking away. Down toward the coast. That’s why I stopped playing with you, stupid!”

  “All right, Mi.”

  “I thought we should come back here.”

  “That sounds sensible,” came a voice from the gloomy house. Old Okea came shuffling forward, leaning heavily on the stick of Albian oak Medoc had carved for her. She looked oddly caved in, Vala thought, with her white-streaked hair around a weather-beaten face, her empty dugs, her knees and hips ruined by a life of hard labor. She was forty-eight years old. “And I’ll take the ball.” She took it in one claw of a hand and dropped it into one of the voluminous leather bags hanging from her waist. “That way nobody’s cheating, yes?”