Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

‘What about Xivu, the Jaguar man?’

‘Oh, he went off with the first families to leave,’ Mi said. ‘He didn’t wait to be asked!’

Vala glanced south again, at the calm sea, the litter of fishing boats. Everything seemed normal, if you looked away from the mountain. ‘All right,’ she said to Okea. ‘Come on into the house, kids — you can keep Puli amused while I finish the stew.’

Mi came willingly enough, but Liff hung back. He was holding out his hands. Small flakes of grey were settling on his palms.

When she looked up, Vala saw ash raining down, thickening all the time.

From Deri’s boat, the cloud rising from the Hood was an extraordinary sight. With the island itself a stripe of grey-brown on the horizon, you could easily see the sheer scale of the cloud, like an immense tree of steam and smoke that had taken root in Kirike’s Land. And after the noon blast, which from here had sounded like drawn-out thunder, the cloud had grown bigger yet, and it had spread out sideways, feathering.

Deri and Nago were out on the ocean to the south of Kirike’s Land, just the two of them in a hide boat big enough for eight rowers. They had set off at dawn, loaded up with nets and wicker baskets and bait for the fishing. It was midsummer, the weather was calm, the seas should have been jumping with cod, and Deri had been looking forward to a long, fruitful day, just him and Nago out on the boat. And as Nago, a distant cousin of Deri’s, kept his mouth shut most of the time, it would be a quiet one too, a break from the noisy chaos of his father’s household, the kids and dogs everywhere — not to mention the midsummer celebrations.

But the catch had been poor. Maybe it was because of the booms from the mountain, the faint whiff of sulphur you could smell even out here, the tremors that made the sea itself shiver and froth. Maybe the fish had been scared away. And now that cloud just grew and grew.

‘So,’ Deri said, at some point long after noon. ‘Do you think we should go back in?’

Nago sat at his end of the boat. He was thin, with a cadaverous face with sunken cheeks and a nose like a crow’s beak. His habit of staying motionless for long periods of time made you wonder if he was awake at all, or even still alive. Deri had never known such an incurious man. But Nago had lived all his days on the island, and he ought to know its mountains and their fiery moods better than Deri. At last, having thought hard about Deri’s question, he shrugged. ‘Why should we?’

Deri found it hard to say. Because the tide and winds might be wrong, on such a strange day as this. Because he had a vision of Medoc and Okea and Vala and the kids, and Tibo, all watching the cloud, waiting for him.

Perhaps for once Nago understood Deri’s mood. ‘They’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The family. I mean, your father went up the mountain yesterday with Tibo and that Jaguar girl, didn’t he? Medoc’s older than you and me put together. If he thinks it’s safe, then it’s safe.’ Nago glanced at their meagre catch in the bilge. ‘Anyway we haven’t got enough fish yet.’ He slid back until he was lying on a heap of netting in the prow of the boat, and closed his eyes.

He was probably right. Deri determined to stop fretting.

But that cloud spread higher and wider across the sky. It was feathering to the west now. Soon it drifted across the face of the sun, which dimmed to a silvery disc. The whole sky began to take on a strange, glowing green tinge.

Then ash began to fall, a gentle rainfall of fine dust and a few heavier flakes. It settled on the boat and gathered in scummy swirls on the sea itself. This kept up until everything, the boat itself, the fish in the bilge, the bare skin of the sleeping Nago, was stained pale grey, the colour leaching out.

And then, in mid-afternoon, the mountain gave a second shout, even louder than the one at noon. Deri thought he felt a kind of concussion in his chest. An even greater volume of black smoke began pouring from the mouth of the tortured mountain, feeding the huge spreading cloud above. And it seemed to him that even as it mushroomed higher, its lower layers were beginning to descend, to fall back to the island.

Nago grumbled in his sleep, and spat ash out of his open mouth.

The mountain’s second shout hit Tibo like a punch in the back. He was knocked sprawling, on his face this time, and went slithering down the ash-strewn slope.

He looked back over his shoulder at Caxa and Medoc. Somehow they had stayed on their feet, Medoc leaning heavily on the Jaguar girl, the two of them stumbling clumsily down the slope. Tibo saw this in glimmers of daylight under a sky that was turning black as night, with the ash falling all around. When they reached Tibo they both slumped to the ground.

Medoc cried out as his wounded leg was twisted again. Then he pulled his pack around his neck in search of a water sack. ‘I remember the last time the Hood blew its top — I was a boy — the ash came down on the fields. We tried to keep the cattle off it, but you can’t stop them eating the grass. They came down with a kind of murrain. Within a day they couldn’t walk, and in a few days they died. Nothing we could do.’

Caxa, breathing hard, lay on her back, her arms and legs splayed. That seemed a good idea to Tibo. He sat down and lay on his back, his head swimming. He felt as if he had not properly woken up since the first shout at the summit had knocked him unconscious. As if the whole day was a nightmare.

‘We said we’d always remember,’ Medoc was saying now, in his droning old man’s voice. ‘The priests wrote it down. Remember what to do with the cattle when the ash falls… No! Get up!’ Medoc limped over to Tibo and began shaking him. ‘Tibo, son! Get up! You’ll die if you lie there.’

Tibo pushed him away, annoyed. ‘Get off me.’

‘Help me with her. The girl.’ Medoc crawled over, slithering over the ground like a slug, his bad leg leaving a trail of blood in the ash. ‘Come on, Tibo!’

So Tibo sat up, and his chest ached, his head swam some more. He leaned over Caxa, dug his hands under her armpits, and with what was left of his strength hauled her to her feet. The girl coughed and shuddered, looking around blearily, her face drained of blood under her mask of ash.

‘I saw it before,’ Medoc said. ‘The last time. Especially on the lower ground, in hollows. The cattle lie down in there and just die. Maybe something comes out of the ground.’

Tibo said, ‘Well, we’re not dead yet-’

There was a scream, coming out of the sky, like the cry of some bird of prey. They ducked instinctively. Tibo glimpsed something falling, trailing smoke. A rock smashed to the ground only a few paces away, shattering, spilling red-hot fragments.

Caxa stared, and said something in her own tongue.

More unearthly shrieks. Tibo looked up through layers of billowing smoke to see more glowing rocks flying in the air, each a red-hot mass within a black crust. They landed at random, making the ground shudder with each impact.

‘We must go,’ he said. He got his arm around Medoc’s waist, and Caxa took his other side. They hurried on down the mountainside, slithering and stumbling.

‘Faster,’ Medoc urged them. ‘Faster!’

As the afternoon wore on the column of smoke and ash climbed and broadened until it covered the sky over the village, blocking out the light altogether, and darkness closed in.

People came out of their houses, those who had remained. Some carried torches of burning reed and lamps. The sun itself was only faintly visible, dropping down the sky to the southwest, a pale disc intermittently visible through scudding clouds of smoke, but there was light around the horizon, an eerie yellow-green. It was an extraordinary sight, on what was the longest day of the year — it was oddly exciting, a world transformed. The big bonfire was lit early. The kids ran around in the ash fall, chased by the dogs. From Adhao’s house, one man produced a flute of carved bone that he began to play, and the children danced around the bonfire. There was talk of starting the roast for the Giving. Half the village had fled, but there would be that much more for those who remained.