‘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.
‘So here we are,’ Teel said. ‘We’re family, we’re here to help each other, in these hard times. We will find homes for you all. Ways for you to live. So — who has the first question?’
Deri stood up. ‘Where is everybody? I never saw so few people on the land, working the waterways and wetlands. Even half the houses seem empty.’
Hadhe stood up in turn. ‘It’s the weather. We’ve had no sunlight.’
‘Yes,’ somebody said, a gruff man’s voice. ‘Not since your fire mountain spewed up all that cloud into the air.’
Your fire mountain. The phrase made Tibo flinch. It wasn’t his mountain. It had killed his grandfather. But nobody else reacted, and the moment was lost.
Teel answered calmly, talking about the weather. After the fire mountain it had been cold, bitterly so for the summer, and hail and rain had lashed the land. Plants had been battered flat, trees had lost their leaves early and had brought forth wizened nuts and fruit, and animals had become skinny or had starved altogether as they had nibbled at the sparse grass.
‘This is why we came to Northland,’ called the man, Barra. ‘We had a farm on the north coast of Kirike’s Land. We weren’t badly affected by the fire mountain itself, but the early hail flattened our crops, which weren’t growing anyhow. We could have starved over the winter.’ He had a weather-beaten face, and looked like a practical man, a man of common sense. ‘Crops must be failing all over, if the cloud extends right across the Continent, and I haven’t heard anybody say that it doesn’t. The Greeks, the Hatti, the Egyptians — what about them? They already had drought and famine, so I hear. I can’t imagine what it will be like if their summer is as bad as ours.’
A priest stood up, in a loose cloak of wolfskin. It was Riban, the cousin who had treated Tibo’s burns. ‘He’s right. The Swallows and Jackdaws have brought back reports to confirm it.’
‘And you Wolves,’ called out a man, ‘ought to be in your houses smoking your strange weeds and praying to the little mother of the sky to spare us.’
‘Believe me,’ the priest said, ‘we are.’
Teel stood. ‘To answer your question, Deri, this is why there are so few people around in Etxelur. People are out in the country, fishing, hunting, trawling the rivers for eel, looking for decent stands of hazelnut and acorns…’
This was how people lived here. They didn’t farm; they didn’t raise crops or livestock. They lived off the land, off Northland itself, and there were few enough of them to be able to do that. And when hard times came they just journeyed a little further into their bountiful country, dug a little deeper into its wealth of resources. At least they had a chance to survive a few bad seasons, where farmers would have none when their reserves were gone.
Soon the discussion turned to the future of the nestspills. Listening, Tibo got the impression that everybody was saying: ‘You are welcome but…’ But we have to feed our own children first. But you can’t have my job, as a Beaver or a Vole or a Swallow or a Jackdaw. But the fire mountain was on your island, on Kirike’s Land, and maybe you should have stayed there and dealt with the consequences rather than come here and take up our space.
‘Our grandmothers started out as Beetles, the whole lot of them,’ one woman said earnestly. ‘There’s always work there. Scraping the canals…’
Tibo had had enough. He muttered an apology to Milaqa and Deri, stood, and walked out.
He found his way out through gloomy corridors to a gallery cut into the Wall’s face, looking out on a fading day. Was this the gallery he’d been in before? Had they come from left or right? He wasn’t used to this kind of vertical landscape. But he could surely find his way down — or, indeed, up. Impulsively he set off, picking a direction at random. He came to an up stair, then went along another gallery carved into the growstone and curtained over with skin door flaps, and then a down stair that he ignored, and another going up..
He emerged from the last stair onto the roof of the Wall itself. The western sky flared red, a sunset gathering despite the invisibility of the sun itself. This upper surface was empty save for a line of monuments — and one man some paces away, stocky, gesturing, exercising with a sword.
To the south, Tibo’s left, Northland stretched away, the ground maybe fifty paces straight down. And to the north there was the restless ocean, its surface only a few paces beneath him. Standing on this Wall that divided two elements, the mass of the ocean looming over the peaceful land, the world seemed unbalanced to Tibo. Suddenly he felt as if the whole Wall was tipping, and he staggered.
‘Careful.’
Tibo looked around. It was the man who had been exercising; his sword was a long blade of beaten bronze.
‘What?’
‘ Careful. Is that word not right? My Etxelur-speak is still poor. Don’t fall off the Wall. One way, you drown. Other way, you crack your skull like an egg.’ He laughed.
He was older than Tibo, perhaps in his twenties. He wore a tunic under a bronze breastplate. His accent was thick, his words barely understandable. Tibo had never met anybody like this man in his life. ‘What are you, a Greek?’
The man looked at him long and hard. Then he spat into the sea, over the rim of the Wall. ‘I like you. That’s why I won’t cut off your ears for that insult. I am no ugly Greek. Can’t you tell? I am Trojan. And you? Northlander?’
‘I was born on Kirike’s Land.’
‘Where? Oh, the fire mountain island.’ He eyed Tibo gravely. ‘Was it bad?’