Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

She grabbed his arm. Her grip, through his sleeve, was surprisingly strong, the grip of a sculptor, belying the slenderness of her body, her thin face. ‘Let me stay.’

‘What?’

‘Not go with Xivu. Not back to land of Jaguar.’

He was bewildered, a rush of emotions flooding him — fear of the consequences of this, a kind of tenderness that this girl should ask him for help. ‘They need you there, don’t they? Who else can carve the King’s face? And before that you have to go to Northland, for the Annid.’

Caxa said softly, ‘Sculpture finished, Caxa finished, I die.’ She shivered, despite the heat of the fire mountain.

He didn’t know what to say. He had no idea how he could help her.

‘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 turned around so he 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 backwards.

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 armour 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 favoured 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 moulded 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 centre 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 centre 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 centred 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?’