Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

Caxa just listened to all this, expressionless. There was a rumble, like distant thunder, and Tibo thought the drizzle of ash fell a bit more heavily.

Medoc hitched his own pack on his broad shoulders, turned, and began the walk up the steep path out of the village. ‘Keep up, you youngsters. You’ll soon warm up.’

Tibo followed, grumbling, with Caxa at his side. ‘We’re hardly cold, grandfather. And we’re walking up a fire mountain…’

That column of smoke towered before them, black at the base and feathering in the air. Birds swooped around the column, distant specks of darkness themselves.

‘Ravens,’ Medoc said. ‘The Ice Folk believe they are the souls of the dead, guarding an entrance to the underworld. Whatever you do don’t kill one, or you’ll spend the rest of your life apologising to the gods for it. Step out, you two!’ He strode boldly on.

They breasted a shallow rise, and the Hood was revealed before them. It was a bleak, ridged formation that loomed above the greener lowlands, streaked with flows of black rock — a lifeless thing, Tibo thought, like a skull emerging from the living earth. And after a few more paces, it seemed to Tibo that the ground was growing warm beneath his feet.

Milaqa’s party of Northlanders, Hatti and one Trojan reached Etxelur and the Wall in the early morning of the midsummer solstice itself. Their journey had been long and arduous, and to make it here for the special day they had had to finish the journey overnight, hurrying along the last few tracks in the eerie light of a night that was never quite dark.

Bren brought them to his own home, one of the famous Seven Houses of Etxelur, an ancient neighbourhood of properties demolished and rebuilt many times, that overlooked the Bay Land itself. Inside they dumped their packs, drank nettle tea, and hastily smartened up for the day. Bren and Voro donned their ceremonial cloaks of jackdaw feathers, cheerfully complaining about how heavy and hot they would be to wear. Qirum polished his bronze armour clean of dust with a corner of his tunic.

Kilushepa meanwhile borrowed some garments and a bolster of cloth from Bren’s wife and used Qirum’s knife to make some brisk modifications. The result, when she emerged into the light of day, startled Milaqa. The Tawananna wore a sweeping gown that left her arms bare but covered her legs to the floor. Her growing hair was brushed back into a tight bun, and she wore a necklace of iron pieces borrowed from the traders. Picking at a stray thread, she noticed Milaqa watching her. ‘How do I look?’ she asked in her own tongue.

‘Like a queen of Hattusa,’ Milaqa replied honestly.

Kilushepa snorted. ‘Well, since you’ve never been near Hattusa I won’t take that remark too seriously. But your words are meant kindly, so I thank you.’

Now Qirum emerged from the house, alongside Bren. Strutting, Qirum had his armour on and his horned helmet jammed on his head. As usual he looked as if he was spoiling for a fight. He saw Milaqa and winked at her. Then he sniffed the air. ‘Can I smell something? Like smoke, ash?’

‘Some of the Swallows, the travellers, say there’s a mountain spewing fire on Kirike’s Land.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Across the Western Ocean — a long way from here. But it’s not unknown for ash and dust to be carried far across the sea. Anyhow I think it’s more likely you’re smelling meat cooking up on the Wall.’ She gestured. ‘Take a look.’

The party turned, and Qirum and Kilushepa looked upon the Wall, at close hand and in full daylight, for the first time.

They were only a few hundred paces from its base, where its tremendous growstone flank met the Wall Way, the rough roadway that ran along its length from east to west. Towering over the houses that clustered at its feet, the exposed face shone brilliantly in the sun, but today great cloth panels hug over wide sections of the face, alive with colour, many of them adorned with the concentric-circle design that was the root of the symbolism of Northland. The huge scaffolding structures for the endless repair work were abandoned today; nobody worked at midsummer. But the staircases and galleries chipped into the sheer face swarmed with people walking and eating, leaning on balconies to look out over the country, and children ran along the corridors. For the Giving, people travelled from across Northland — from across the world, indeed — and on first arriving almost all of them made straight for Great Etxelur, the ancient heart of the Wall. If you listened closely you could hear a merged rumble of voices, the calls and shouts and laughter of the tremendous vertical crowd.

Qirum took off his helmet and scratched his scalp. ‘It just deepens the mystery for me. Why, if you people can conceive of a tremendous monument like this, you would choose to live in wooden barns, like animals.’

Bren said portentously, ‘We are all, perhaps, a mystery to each other. It will soon be midday, and before then we must find our way to the Chamber of the Solstice Noon. I am not as agile a climber of the staircases as I once was…’

As they formed up into a little procession behind the trader, Qirum looked blank. ‘What chamber is that?’

Milaqa murmured, ‘There will be beer.’

He grinned. ‘Whatever tongue you use, Milaqa, you always speak my language, and for that I’m grateful!’

Medoc had led them high up the flank of the mountain, high above the last of the green, and Tibo walked on a carpet of ash like fallen snow, studded with the stumps of burned-down trees. The ground was hot enough now to feel uncomfortable through the thick soles of his boots, and they passed pools of mud that bubbled and steamed, the stink of sulphur strong. Nothing lived as far as he could see, no creatures walked here save Medoc, Tibo and Caxa — even the belching mud pools lacked the green mosses that usually grew there, even the ravens wheeling overhead did not land. It was a dead country, a place of rock and fire and ash, a place for the little mother of the earth, perhaps, and her alone. It was too hot, the air was thick and increasingly hard to breathe, and there was a continuous rushing roar, like falling water.

And now, it seemed to Tibo, the land actually bulged under their feet.

They passed a dead goat, on its back, its limbs sticking up into the air.

‘This isn’t a place for us,’ Tibo muttered.

‘What?’ Medoc did not break his stride. ‘What did you say, boy? Keep up, keep up.’

‘I said,’ he called, shouting over the noise, ‘we shouldn’t be up here. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Nonsense. Though I can’t remember the mountain being quite as restive as this before. Maybe nobody in the world has seen what we’re seeing! We are explorers, like Kirike the ancient who found this island, and then crossed the ocean to be the first to the Land of the Sky Wolf.’

‘We’re not explorers.’

‘Nonsense! Anyhow it’s just a little further to the summit. We can’t turn back now…’

Tibo slowed, and walked alongside Caxa. ‘Are you all right?’

The Jaguar girl walked on doggedly, keeping up the pace, coated with ash, grey as a corpse. ‘My people too live in the shadow of fire mountains. We run from the heat, not towards it.’

‘So do we — most of us — most of the time…’ He saw that she was staring at flickers of flame that emerged from the rocks. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘About fire. Keeps you warm. But too close, you burn. Yes? And even as it warms, cold on your back. The unending cold, just beyond.’ She shivered.

‘You are…’ He had no idea how to say what he wanted to say, in words she might understand. ‘You have many layers.’

‘Layers?’

‘I see a fire. You see life and death. All in the same thing. Maybe that’s why you’re a sculptor. You think strange thoughts, with layers.’