Above the mask his eyes narrowed, suspicious. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I am her mother. Please, if she is here — tell her I have come.’
He hesitated. ‘Wait here.’ He hurried off to one of the huts. Not running, nobody living outside the city walls seemed capable of running any more.
Here came a slight woman, walking stiffly, with mask and gloves and heavy brown clothing that covered most of her skin, her neck and arms and legs, her face. It was Alxa. Rina would have run across the boundary, taken her in her arms.
But Alxa stepped back. ‘Don’t, Mother. We don’t know how it passes from one person to the next. It may be by touch, or by fluids, blood and spit and snot. .’
‘The plague. You’re talking about the blood plague. That’s what you’re doing here.’ Rina had guessed as much but the thought still filled her with horror. ‘Tending to the victims of the blood plague.’
‘Tending. . Yes. We serve a double purpose,’ Alxa said wearily. ‘We take in the afflicted. At the city walls they are simply cut down, you know. Here we allow families to die together.’ She seemed to stagger slightly. ‘And we keep the city that bit safer. For it is a terrible illness, Mother. There are two manifestations. The first is a fever, and a spitting of blood. That can kill in less than a day. The second is less vicious, but it kills just as certainly in a few days. If you catch this plague you die, either of the first manifestation or the second. Your only hope of survival is not to catch it in the first place. If it got loose in the city-’
‘So here you are protecting Carthage. A city that wouldn’t give you a gutter to lie in.’
‘This is where I am, Mother. Perhaps that is part of the mothers’ plan.’
‘And is it part of their plan that you should sacrifice your own life so eagerly?’
‘I knew the risk. We hope to bring doctors here. Scholars. From Carthage, Egypt, even Hatti. Have them study the disease. Find what spreads it. Find how to cure it. Why not? For this thing is surely the common enemy of all mankind, whatever our political differences, or religious. .’ Again her voice tailed off.
A heavy dread pooled deep in Rina’s stomach. ‘Alxa — let me help you.’
‘Mother, stay back.’
‘I will not-’
‘It’s too late!’ Alxa pulled open her tunic, slipped it off her right shoulder, and raised her arm. There was some kind of swelling in the armpit, purple-black.
‘What is that?’
She whispered, ‘The second manifestation.’ She lowered her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’
‘Oh, my child-’ And though Alxa stumbled back again, Rina crossed the space between them in a few strides and took her daughter in her arms. ‘If only we could have stayed at home — if only you had had a chance to grow into this woman I see before me in Northland — what might you have done, what an Annid you might have become! Oh, child, I’m the one who’s sorry, so sorry. .’
46
The Second Year of the Longwinter: Midwinter Solstice
This hour it was Thaxa’s turn to make the piss run.
He rose from the corner of the huge old cistern, where he’d been reading a scroll by the dim light that came down the air shaft at midday. It was the only light in the room save for the increasingly rare intervals when they lit the lamps. He stood and pulled on his outer clothes, his heavy hooded coat and his waterproof leather trousers and his boots.
Then, carefully avoiding the prone bodies on the floor, he made for the door leading to the passages out to his house at the face of the Wall. It was the time of day when the small children were laid down together to nap. ‘Time to sleep now,’ the mothers were whispering all across the chamber. ‘Time to sleep.’ Some of the adults slept too, if they could, in the muggy air. Sleep was the best way, the only way really, to use up the empty, pointless hours in this growstone box. There was the usual stink of fish, their staple food, on their breath and in their farts, though you would think he would have got used to that by now. In the dimness he recognised Crimm the fisherman, a few other faces.
The people here were not exactly friends; the jealousy over food and floor space was too strong for that. But they were his guests, that was how he thought of them. He had been astonished to learn from Crimm and Ayto that this huge abandoned cistern buried deep within the Wall behind his own house was, in theory, his property. He hoped that if they survived this dreadful winter they would remember his contribution, the last gesture of hospitality from a hospitable man.
At the door he picked up the latest slop buckets. Aranx, the young fisherman who had lost an arm to the frost, was on guard this hour. He offered Thaxa a weapon, a stabbing spear with a rope sling, but Thaxa had never used a weapon in his life and he saw no point in pretending he could now. Aranx shrugged, opened the door, let him pass through, and closed it after him.
After the human fug of the cistern, the corridors and empty rooms he passed through were dark and bleakly cold. In the circle of light cast by his candle, Thaxa walked softly. Crimm and Ayto had endlessly stressed to those who they had brought into this refuge that as the Wall burned itself up this winter their best hope was to stay concealed — not to be discovered at all, because that way they wouldn’t have to fight again, for their food, their lives, as they had had to already.
Ayto himself was waiting for him at the exit from the growstone: another guard on duty, heavily armed with sword and spear and stabbing knife. ‘Go carefully,’ he whispered to Thaxa. ‘And look out for Xree.’
‘Xree? What about her?’
‘She didn’t come back from a piss tour yesterday.’
‘I didn’t notice.’ It was shameful but it was true.
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do for her. But if she’s been made to talk about where we are-’
Lurid rumours were always running through the little group about what might be going on in the world outside the sanctuary of their fortress. Ayto and some of the others had been out there, dealing with whatever was going on in the rest of the Wall. Sometimes Ayto returned splashed with blood, and he would not say what he had seen, what he had done. There was nothing to do, Ayto always said, but to sit here and try to survive, while what he called ‘the big sorting-out’ ran to its conclusion elsewhere. But if Xree, a gentle scholar and good Annid, had fallen into the wrong hands. .
‘Perhaps she got lost.’
Ayto raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes. Maybe she got lost. Just take care, all right?’ He opened the door to Thaxa’s old house, beyond the Wall.
Thaxa hurried through with his buckets.
Suddenly he was in his old courtyard, in dirty, knee-deep snow. The sky above was a slab of blue, and he breathed deep of the fresh air, but the cold felt like a blade in his lungs. The winter had done its damage to his home, of course. The snow had smashed in the roof of the big hall, the very walls were cracked by the frost, the ice had got in through broken windows and coated every surface in the parlours and reception rooms, on the abandoned furniture. But still, this was home, and it was odd to be back out here, after all that had happened. It was not long, he realised, only a few months, since he had sat in these chambers with Ywa and others and discussed the darkness to come, as if it were all a game, a story.
He put these thoughts aside and hurried across the courtyard, where the snow never piled deeply even though no servant swept it any more: an odd effect of the shelter of the surrounding buildings. When he returned he would have to kick the lying snow around to mask his traces; he knew the routine by now, rigorously imposed by Crimm and Ayto.
He came to his linen shop. The light was dim, silvery, for the accumulated snow was piled high against the panes of the shop’s glass front, higher than he was tall, leaving only a strip of blue daylight visible at the very top. The shop was mostly untouched, though his guests in the warehouse had robbed some of his cloth swathes for clothing and bedding — and, he had discovered, some of it had been nibbled by desperate rats or mice. The shop had a privy, with a drain beneath that you could reach by lifting a tile. Here he dumped the contents of the buckets. The drain was surely blocked and frozen, but they hadn’t managed to fill it yet, and this was a better solution for disposing of their waste than any other they had found — at least it couldn’t be detected by any others still surviving in the Wall.