Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

He was waiting for her reply, she realised.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Here.’ Hadhe returned with a small leather pouch, stopped with a bit of bone. ‘Riban got it from a trader from the east.’

Milaqa took the pouch, opened it, sniffed and recoiled.

Hadhe said, ‘It’s made from the bile of a-’

‘Never mind,’ said Teel sternly. ‘Just drink it.’

Milaqa braced herself, lifted the pouch, and poured the thick liquid into her mouth in a single swill. It burned her throat as it went down, and she coughed, her stomach heaving as if she would throw up after all. But then a warmth started spreading through her belly.

Ximm had gone back to the centre of the hearthspace, and people were forming up around him, bearing tools of wood, stone and bronze, buckets of leather, water bottles, food packs. Any children old enough to walk had to carry their own little burdens; the older kids, above eight or nine, would be expected to work with the adults.

‘Well, we’re starting late,’ Voro said to Milaqa. ‘But we can still put in a few hours. Can I walk with you? If you’re not feeling well. Look, I even brought you a shovel.’ It was slung on his back, a willow shaft with a blade shaped from a reindeer scapula.

She wanted to laugh at him. ‘Let’s go dredge that canal.’ She set off after Ximm, tailed by Voro.

Teel followed her, while Hadhe called for her children.

They were heading for a branch of one of the five great canals that dominated the landscape, named for the three little mothers and for Ana and Prokyid. The day was bright and warm, though an edge of coolness in the shadows was a reminder of the winter just over. As she walked, her arms and legs working, her lungs pumping, Milaqa began to feel better, though whether because of the air and sunlight or Riban’s potion she couldn’t have said.

And today the butterflies were showing, she saw, yellow-green, or spectacular black and orange. In open water frogs croaked greedily as they mated. Early flowers like celandine and dead nettle peppered the grasslands, vivid yellow and red, and bees buzzed, preparing for their own long work season. This was the point of Northland’s grand design. Within the network of the roads and canals, a frame had been necessary to save this landscape from the sea, the wild was allowed to flourish.

A hare bounded across the track, and children scampered after it noisily.

Voro walked beside her. He said abruptly, ‘You could do worse than be a Jackdaw.’

‘Oh, what now, Voro?’

‘I know you’re having trouble with your House choice. Come into the Jackdaws. I’ve suggested it before. Look, we’re traders. We travel far. You’d enjoy that. I’ve drunk mead with tin miners too, but I went to Dumno itself to do it. A bit further than the Scambles!.. Maybe you’re like me, Milaqa.’

‘I do not think so.’

‘A wanderer, I mean. Restless. As I always was.’

That surprised her. ‘You? I never thought of you as restless.’

‘Then you got me wrong,’ he said mildly. ‘And I’m not doing so badly at it either. Ask anybody. I’ve even made a trip to Gaira with Bren himself.’ Bren was among the most senior in his House. ‘Look, Milaqa, I know you think I’m some kind of idiot. But when we were kids, when we were growing up — you were a bit younger than me-’

‘Nothing was ever going to happen between us,’ she snapped. Then she regretted it; her hangover kept making her say things she shouldn’t. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s not what I’m trying to say. I always thought we had a lot in common. I thought we might be allies. If something deeper had developed — well, fine. But you were always too…’

‘Arrogant?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

But he didn’t need to. Had she really misjudged him so badly, over the years? After all — look at him now. He had made his life choice, and evidently a good one.

He said, ‘I think you genuinely don’t know what you want, do you?’

She sighed. ‘No. I just know I don’t want this.’ And she opened her arms to indicate the carpet-like landscape of Northland, the people marching with their shovels, the laughing children. ‘I keep thinking there must be more to life. Even getting drunk with some greasy Dumno miner with wandering hands is different.’

‘Then be a trader,’ he said. ‘See the world. See Hattusa and Mycenae, see Egypt…’

Ximm looked back. ‘Serious talk’s for tomorrow,’ he said briskly. ‘Today we’ve got a canal to fix — and here we are.’

Before them, the people were spreading out along the bank of a drained canal, dropping their packs of food and water, taking their shovels from their backs.

Irritated, Milaqa snapped, ‘Oh, give me that shovel, Voro, and show me where to dig.’

They were to be supervised by a senior of the House of the Vole, the water engineers, who unrolled a complicated map drawn in red and black on a sheet of bark. The canal system had been dammed and diverted at some point upstream from this stretch, which was a branch of the main canal called the Sky. The duct here had been left to drain and dry out for the best part of a month, ready for the family to take it on.

So, with Ximm and the others cheerfully calling out orders, the adults and older children grabbed their shovels and buckets and clambered over the banks of hardened mud and earth down into the empty channel. Though it had been drying out for some time the mud at the bottom was wet and deep and clinging and cold. Milaqa, up to her calves in it, wondered how long it had taken this thickness of muck to build up — how long since this particular stretch had been dredged, five years or fifty?

The people got their bearings quickly. They formed up into rough lines, the adults and older kids in the deeper mud of the bottom, the smallest children and nursing mothers and old folk walking along the banks, looking down and calling encouragement. They began to dig away at the mud with shovels of bronze and bone, passing it up by a bucket chain. The glistening stuff was dumped to add another bit of height to the banks that lined the canal — and indeed, it was this endless digging-out that had created the banks in the first place.

There were a few surprises. They turned up broken pots, what might have been a child’s doll of wood and bone — even a broken bronze sword. Offerings to the gods, to the little mother of the sky, to Ana and Prokyid. You were supposed to make such offerings by one of the five great canals, but people driven by sufficient hope or despair would make their small prayers wherever they could. Ximm always made sure that such finds were pressed back into the deeper mud, to be covered over and lost again. Then some of the children got excited at the sight of a sunken boat, a few hundred paces further down the channel. They ran off to investigate, followed by cries of exasperation or envy from the toiling adults.

Milaqa had Hadhe and Teel to either side of her, Ximm just ahead, and Voro hanging around somewhere just behind her. She threw herself into the work. There was no real choice; this was what Family Day was all about. And she didn’t want any comments about how hard she worked, or not. Besides, though the mud was heavy and sticky, she found the simple repetitious work warmed her muscles up. Somebody began singing, a rhythmic comic song about the only ice giant who didn’t like fighting. People joined in, up and down the stretch of the canal, as they dug and lugged their way through the mud, growing steadily filthier.

‘This is the life,’ Teel said, working beside Milaqa.

She eyed him sceptically.

‘Good honest work. Building the world, spadeful by spadeful. The way it’s been since Ana’s time. It’s the Etxelur way. When our family came here from Kirike’s Land, this work was all we could do, all we could understand. But we were welcomed into the House of the Beetle, and we worked hard, and did it better and better. And look at us now!’