Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

‘And the journey?’

‘As you’d expect.’ He was thin, bearded, tense. ‘We rowed out of there with nothing. We drifted, landed where we could. Begging for food, water.’

Milaqa thought about who wasn’t here. ‘Grandfather Medoc? And Okea-’

‘Lost,’ Deri said. ‘Both of them. Come on. The sooner we get away from the sea the better.’

Vala was already leading the party up the staircase to the top of the Wall. They all moved slowly, carefully. But then, Milaqa thought, most of them had probably never climbed stairs before. ‘You’ll be safe here,’ she said.

Deri shivered in the chill breeze, and glanced up at the grey lid of sky. ‘I hope you’re right.’

Medoc’s family welcomed the latest nestspills. Deri went to the house of his wife’s family, and he took Vala with him. The others were taken in by distant aunts, uncles, cousins. When they realised who Caxa was, a boy was sent running, and he brought back a woman in a great cape of owl feathers — an Annid, Tibo was told, one of those who made the decisions in this place. She greeted Caxa in what Tibo could by now recognise as a broken version of Caxa’s own tongue. The Annid went off in search of the other Jaguar, Xivu, who had arrived on a much earlier boat. Caxa was reluctant; she had never wanted to come here at all. But in the end the fire mountain had taken away her choices, as it had for so many others.

Tibo himself was taken in by a cousin of Milaqa, called Hadhe, a kindly woman no older than Milaqa herself but with three children of her own. The kids were curious at first, and picked over his filthy clothes, before Hadhe got them off him and threw them on the fire. Hadhe’s mother, whose house this was, loaned Tibo a cloak and took him to a freshwater stream where he bathed all over, cleaning off the salt and the blood and a crust of ash he’d carried all the way from Kirike’s Land. They even got a priest to come out, a junior one, another cousin called Riban. The priest checked over his collection of burns, gave him salves made of herbs ground up in goose fat, and listened to his rattly breath. He was given more pungent herbs that made him cough, but Riban said it would clear the ash from his lungs.

Tibo, who hadn’t come to Northland for years, was impressed by the family’s houses, big sturdy constructions that sat on sculpted mounds of earth. And he was staggered by the Wall. It had looked impressive enough from the seaward side, a white line that terminated the ocean itself, topped with glaring human faces. But from the land side it loomed high over your head, even over the houses on their mounds, a smooth face like a cliff but scarred by ramps and ladders and chambers. People lived up there, on and in the Wall. If you looked up you could see them coming and going. And yet at the foot of this enormous structure grass grew and freshwater streams ran and wild birds gathered, and children ran and played with their dogs, as if it was perfectly natural to be living on the bed of the sea.

Hadhe took time to talk to Tibo. She said her own house was in a community called Sunflower to the south of here. The family had come up to live close to the Wall, like many others, to wait for loved ones from Kirike’s Land. They were generous, Hadhe and her family. But when they woke him for the evening meal he saw how carefully they portioned out the dried fish and hazelnuts they offered him. Food was short here too, then, just as on the boat.

Tibo slept through much of the next day. Hadhe let him be, and he saw nobody from the boat.

Then, late in the afternoon, Milaqa called for him.

‘We’re having a gathering,’ she said. ‘The family.’

‘What family?’

She spread her hands. ‘The whole lot, all who have heard about you. Cousins, uncles, aunts.’

The thought appalled Tibo. ‘What do I say to them?’

‘You don’t have to say anything. Just come and meet them. After all, you’re going to be stuck here in Northland for a good while.’

So he pulled on boots and a cloak and followed her. The air outside Hadhe’s house was sharp enough to make his breath steam.

Milaqa led him away from the houses and along the raised bank of a broad dyke, directly towards the foot of the Wall. There was nobody around. Smoke rose from some of the houses on their smoothly worked mounds, but many houses looked empty, dark, without smoke. The sun was starting to set, though the only way he could tell was by looking west to a patch of grey sky that was marginally brighter than the rest.

They came to the Wall itself. Milaqa led him up a staircase cut into the face. As they climbed, Northland opened up to his right, looking south, a landscape of canals and house mounds and sparse smoke, spreading to a misty horizon. Not a single shadow was cast anywhere, so obscured was the sun.

They cut left, into the body of the Wall, and Tibo found himself following a narrow corridor lit only by oil lamps. Milaqa led him along a gallery, then up another staircase, then through a more enclosed corridor, then down more steps. At last she brought him to a broad chamber cut deep inside the body of the Wall. It was already crowded with people, who mostly sat or knelt on the floor, though there were a few wooden benches. By the light of oil lamps in notches and alcoves Tibo saw that the walls were covered in a kind of scrawl, the concentric circles and swooping lines of Etxelur writing. One man, dressed in the same owl-feather cloak as the Annid who had come to meet Caxa, sat on a raised chair by the back wall.

‘That’s your uncle Teel,’ Milaqa murmured. ‘Your father’s brother. The only male Annid, of this generation anyway. And look, there’s your father…’

Deri was sitting with Vala and her baby. Seeing Tibo, Deri patted the floor beside him.

Tibo joined him, and Milaqa squeezed in with them. There was a murmur of conversation, and the air was smoky from the lamps. Tibo wasn’t comfortable here, with all these people jammed in. But at least the place didn’t smell of ash. He leaned over to Milaqa. ‘What’s written on the walls?’

‘Holy stuff. Praise for the little mothers who built the world. We’re in a chamber on the border of the Holies, the temple District. Your cousin Riban arranged for us to have it for the day. Can’t you read?’

Deri said, ‘He can tally a cargo of fish faster than anybody I know. But there’s not much call for reading scripture on Kirike’s Land.’

‘I read what I need to read,’ Tibo said defensively.

Milaqa held up her hands. ‘Fine by me.’

He saw Vala’s other kids playing in a corner, some complicated game to do with passing a bouncing ball. A part of him longed to run over and join in.

Now the man in the owl-feather cloak stood up. The conversation hushed.

‘If you don’t know me, my name’s Teel. I must be your uncle or cousin, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here. And I’m an Annid, as you can see from the cloak. The only Annid in the family, now that Kuma is dead.’ He glanced around at the children. ‘You should always remember that Kuma became the most senior Annid of all — the Annid of Annids, and she came from our family, a bunch of Beetles from Kirike’s Land. I know how proud Medoc was of that. And Okea…’ He listed more names of family members lost to the fire mountain, mostly old folk, and a sad litany of children’s names. ‘I think we’ll miss Medoc most of all. If he was here, he’d be standing where I am, wouldn’t he? In his smelly walrus skin, cracking his awful jokes. But we welcome Deri’s party, who arrived just yesterday, and we thank the mothers for their deliverance.

‘There are other nestspills here too, members of the family. Where are you, Barra?’ A man stood up, short, stooped, smiling.

Tibo found he didn’t like being called a ‘nestspill’, and lumped in with all these others.