Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

Then the pebbles started to fall from the sky.

At first it was a novelty. The little stones fell in a sparse rain, coming down through the ash, pattering to the ground. The children, amazed, ran around trying to catch them.

Vala picked one up, a disc shape the size of her palm. It was pale, full of broken bubbles, remarkably light.

‘Fire-mountain rock,’ Okea said, at her elbow. ‘We collect it. It’s the stuff you use for scraping dead skin off your heels.’

Vala had never known where that useful rock had come from. The sky!

The fall grew harder, and began to cover the ground. Soon the rock was ankle deep, and it fell with a steady hiss. Vala began to grow uncomfortable at the hail of impacts on her head and shoulders. The children, still excited, kicked and scooped the heaps of the stuff that started to gather. Then a child cried out as a heavier piece knocked her to the ground, leaving a splash of blood on her forehead. Her mother swept her up and hurried into her house.

Vala snapped, ‘Mi. Puli. In the house, now.’

The children came running as best they could, pushing through the layer of warm pebbles.

Inside the house Vala picked up little Puli in his swaddling, and they gathered around the hearth, the fire not yet lit. Okea lit lamps, and handed out dried fish to the older children. She moved calmly, as if determined not to frighten the children. Vala felt a surge of gratitude. The woman had been a mother herself, after all.

And all the time the rock poured from the sky, hammering on the sloping thatch roof.

Out at sea the bits of rock fell all afternoon. Deri and Nago pulled their tunics over their heads, but the rock pounded their bare shoulders and legs, and it gathered on the water, rock floating like ice, forming floes that scraped against the boat’s hull as they tried to row. The sun was hidden, the sky black save at the horizon. It was a nightmarish journey, without end.

They had to stop again to bail the boat, not of water, but of rock fragments that had gathered in the bilge. The larger ones were warm to the touch. As he shovelled, Deri looked over his shoulder. While they were rowing he had to turn his back on Kirike’s Land. Now he was shocked by its transformation. The island was almost entirely obscured by the monstrous, blooming cloud. Deri thought he could see flame shooting up from the ground as if from a tremendous bonfire. And lightning flared in the cloud itself, sparking, filling it with a purplish light.

‘Ouch.’ Nago, his tunic wrapped neatly around his head, picked a bit of black rock from a crater burned into his skin, and regarded it between thumb and forefinger with curiosity, before flicking it over the side. ‘That’s new. That one burned me. If this rock fall continues we might end up walking all the way back.’

Deri laughed. ‘You’re one of the strangest men I ever met, cousin. But I think I could be stuck out here with worse companions.’

‘I wish I could say the same about you.’

Another red-hot pellet fell, and embedded itself in the boat hull. Deri beat it out with his hand.

But another fell. And another. The men had to use bilge water cupped in their hands to douse the red-hot cinders before they could set fire to the boat, and shook scorching fragments off their bare skin.

Wood cracked. From outside the house came a crumpling noise, a cry of pain.

Liff rushed to the doorway, peering out through the continuing rock hail. ‘It’s Pithi’s house! It’s fallen down!’

Vala came to see. The disaster was only dimly visible through the rock fall, people pushing out of the debris with their arms over their heads, sheltering infants under their bodies.

Okea was at her side. ‘We can’t sit here until this house falls in too.’

‘No.’

‘We must go to the harbour. Maybe we can find a boat — Deri might be there.’

‘But Medoc and the others-’

‘There’s nothing we can do for them,’ Okea said.

‘We could have done this half a day ago,’ Vala said, anger and fear turning to resentment. ‘When the mountain first shouted.’

Okea was not perturbed. ‘We can argue about whose fault it was later. I will try to help you with the children. But you can see how it is with me. If you choose to go without me-’

‘No,’ Vala said. ‘We all go. But the falling rock — we’ll need some kind of cover.’

‘My ox-hide,’ said Okea. ‘If we hold it over us — you, me, the girl — perhaps that will be enough.’

So they got ready. Vala had the children don their best leather leggings, and they all strapped water bottles to their waists. Mi took her favourite bow, made of good Kirike’s Land ash, and slung it over her shoulder. Vala picked up a whining Puli, and tied him to her chest inside a spare tunic knotted behind her back.

Then they formed up into a tight group, Vala in the lead, Mi at the back, Okea and Liff between them, with the ox-hide spread over their heads, and they pushed out into the unnatural dark. The rock fell on the thick leather with a roar, and its weight made them stagger. But it was not the fresh-falling rock that was the worst problem but the layer of it on the ground. It was already over Vala’s knees, almost up to poor Liff’s waist. It was all they could do to wade forward through the heavy, rasping stuff, each step an exhausting shove. Okea seemed barely able to walk at all. They couldn’t speak, the roar of the rock on their ox-hide was too great for that, and there was nobody around to help. Soon Liff was weeping steadily.

And from the north came yet another tremendous boom.

The three of them came stumbling into The Black, Caxa and Tibo to either side of Medoc, their tunics over their heads, battered, exhausted.

The village was scarcely recognisable. The thick rock fall and the grey ash had changed everything, the colours, the very shape of the land. The houses looked as if they had been stamped on by some tremendous booted heel, the thatch roofs imploded, the big support beams sticking up into the air like snapped bones through flesh. They found the wreck of Okea’s house, smashed and flattened like the rest. Of the people there was not a sign.

They huddled together, like three ghosts, Tibo thought, grey from the ash, even their ears, their noses, even their lips around pink mouths.

‘They aren’t here,’ Medoc shouted over the clatter of the falling rock.

Caxa pointed to the ruined house. ‘We could search it.’

‘No,’ Medoc gasped. ‘There’s nothing for us here. Come, come.’ He grabbed their shoulders, urging the two of them on.

They had no choice but to go on, stumbling through the heavy fallen rock along the trail that led from the village down to the sea. But Tibo saw Medoc’s face, ash-covered, twisted with pain, and he saw how hard this choice had been for him. Surely his instinct had been to fall on the ruin of the house and dig, dig until he was sure that nobody lived. Medoc was saving them, Caxa and Tibo, or trying to. Was this how it was to be an adult?

They didn’t try to speak. Tibo could see little in darkness broken only by a faint glow from the horizon, the occasional glow of fire or a burning rock. As they struggled on he utterly lost track of time, of where he was.

And then they came upon the bodies.

The three of them stood together, wheezing for breath. At first Tibo thought they were just lumps on the path, shapeless mounds of ash or rock. Then he saw a hand, small and open, sticking up into the air, with a bracelet of broken shell around the wrist.

‘Look,’ Caxa said, pointing. ‘Two adults. Children beneath. Cradled. Your family?’

‘No,’ Medoc said, grim. ‘I recognise the little girl’s bracelet. Okea made it for her. These are some of Adhao’s family. People from the village. Come on.’ The three of them stumbled on into the burning dark, heading downhill.