Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

She was even allowed into the King’s bedchamber, where he lay on a couch.

He was surrounded by soldiers, and by buckets full of blood and stool and piss; the stink was unbearable. She was not allowed to speak to Qirum, but she could not tell if he was conscious anyhow. From time to time he would cry out, as if in great pain. Scared-looking physicians came and went, desperately trying remedies. She heard them speaking of blood in the vomit and the urine, and of painful swellings in his groin and armpits. When they brushed past her, Milaqa saw they were spattered with the King’s blood.

She retreated to the King’s big reception room. By the shrine with the restored mother goddess figure, the priests intoned steadily, asking Apollo god of plague to put aside his bow. There was nobody else here but the guards, who looked at her with black expressions. Milaqa went back to her room.

That night she could not sleep. The house was full of people coming and going, and it rang with anxious talk, weeping, increasingly angry shouting. I did this, she thought. I brought this here.

In the end she got out of bed and dressed in the pitch dark, in the most practical clothes she could find, and sat on her bed and waited.

Just before dawn Erishum came to her room, bearing a lamp, oil burning in a shallow bowl. ‘I will take you back to your uncle.’

‘I must see Qirum.’

He grunted. ‘Why? To apologise? To finish him off?’

‘Erishum, please-’

‘You will never see him again. Get ready.’

She clambered off her bed. She glanced back once at the goods that had been brought with her, the Tawananna’s jewellery. It meant nothing to her.

He led her through corridors, making for the street door.

‘What is happening?’

‘Protis is to challenge for the crown. But others oppose him. It makes no difference. Too many others are ill, and the contest is futile until this plague has run its course.’

‘Why must I leave?’

‘Because there are those who blame you for bringing the plague here.’

‘If it’s true I did not know, Erishum. I did not know! I have been used. You have to tell him, Erishum.’

He did not answer.

They reached the street, deserted in the dawn light. Milaqa imagined she could feel the fear washing out across the town from the King’s house. Erishum hurried her along to the house where Teel and the rest had lodged.

When they reached the house she asked him directly, ‘If you think Qirum’s death is my fault, why release me?’

‘If you are innocent, it is just. If you are guilty, you will take your “gift” back to your own people. And, listen to me.’ He leaned towards her, his face hard, dark, grim. ‘I am but a soldier; I am no priest. But now I curse you. You and all your cowardly kind, you Northlanders. For what you have done here, your black crime, may our gods destroy you, and may your own gods, the mothers of sea and sky and earth, desert you. And as for you, I will wait for you in the underworld.’ And he turned and hurried away.

Milaqa, deeply shaken, ducked quickly inside.

By the light of a single lamp, Teel sat by a couch, on which Raka lay under a heap of blankets. The Annid was unconscious. Milaqa saw swellings on her neck, like those on Qirum’s body.

Teel, too, looked waxy, pale, and was breathing heavily. ‘This gift of Kilushepa’s travels quickly.’ He laughed, and coughed.

The world seemed to swivel around Milaqa. ‘Then it’s true. You sent me to kill Qirum, not to woo him.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Teel stood stiffly. ‘Oh, I am so tired… I’m sorry, child.’

Milaqa launched herself at him. He tried to hold her off, but she was stronger than he was, and he could not stop her blows. ‘How could you? You are my uncle! All my life you have used me. How could you betray me like this?’

‘We had to,’ he said. ‘Because only you could do it. Only you, child! You with your relationship with Qirum. You with your heart like an empty cup. Only you would go back to the man, knowing what he had done to your own family. In a way you’re as much of a monster as he is. So we used a monster to trap a monster! It had to be done. Can’t you see that?’ Coughing, he sat again, clutching his chest. ‘Well, remember me, Milaqa, even if you can’t forgive me. I’m a sort of anti-Qirum, you know. I don’t suppose you’ll ever understand that. If a warrior brute like Qirum is the kind his country needs, brave, impulsive, impressive, I am what Northland needs. Cold, manipulative, scheming. I can imagine which of us history will favour. But you must remember me, I am the man who gave Northland iron, and changed the world. Ah, but none of it matters. I did love you so much when you were small. I’m sorry that it has come to this.’

She wanted to kill him. She pulled back her fist.

And she coughed convulsively, and her blood sprayed over him.

The Fourth Year After the Fire Mountain: Midsummer Solstice

The day before the midsummer Giving was set aside for the blessing of the new monuments to the fallen Annids.

The procession formed up in the great Hall of the Annids, deep within the Wall. The grand folk in their fine robes and cloaks of office circulated, murmuring as they got into their rank order. Voro found Milaqa, and here was Mi, blushingly dressed up in a costume not unlike that Milaqa had worn when she had been sent to seduce Qirum’s heart, and poison his body.

A blast sounded, on a very ancient deer-bone horn.

Riban took the first steps on the flight up to the Wall’s surface, leading the procession. The young priest wore an ornate deer-skull head-dress over purple-dyed hair, with holy words in the circle-and-slash Etxelur calligraphy painted on his cheeks, and his mouth bulged with the ancient wolf’s jaw pushed in there in place of his own extracted teeth. He looked the part, Milaqa thought. Riban was head of the House of the Wolves now, somewhat to his own surprise, but he was the most senior priest to have survived the plague, and now here he was leading the holiest of all Etxelur’s ceremonial processions, the commemoration of the Annids.

Riban was not the only young Northlander to have stepped up in rank. Possibly thanks to Kilushepa’s stern advice about cleanliness and isolation, Hatti taboos imported to Northland, few in Northland beyond New Troy had died of the disease. But even deep within the Wall’s recesses some of the oldest and the very youngest, the highest to the lowest, had been taken by the plague. And so many of the great old Houses of Etxelur were led now by representatives of younger generations, and glancing around Milaqa saw that many of those wearing the ornate cloaks were no older than she was. The gathering had a youthful, refreshed feeling about it, she thought.

Even if she would never feel young herself again. Not with all these deaths, in Northland and in New Troy, all of them coming from the opening of the box she had carried to Qirum’s chambers: her ‘black crime’, as Erishum had called it. Few knew what she had done, even here among the senior folk of Etxelur. But she felt as if it must be obvious, as if one of Caxa’s great Words had been carved into her chest.

Amid these young people, however, the new Annid of Annids was older than her predecessor, Raka: Noli, who might have taken the post earlier if not for Bren’s manoeuvring, and who had now reluctantly accepted the responsibility. Today Kilushepa walked with her, the Tawananna as grandly dressed as Milaqa would have expected.

And Caxa the sculptress walked ahead even of the Annid of Annids, even ahead of Kilushepa, with the priest at the very head of the procession. A proud young woman of the Land of the Jaguar with her big polished mirror-stone hanging over her chest, she looked awed, even nervous. Milaqa knew she preferred to be alone, working steadily at her art. But she seemed to find the patient presence of Riban at her side reassuring. And at least, Caxa knew, she did not have to die today; the plague had taken Xivu, that fretful conscience of the Jaguar kings, and after her work in the war Noli had promised the sculptor her protection.