She begged time away, from Barmocar himself. She rarely saw Anterastilis these days; there were rumours in the household that she was ill. Barmocar consented with a curt nod, not speaking to her.
It was not far to walk to Jexami’s town house. He, like Barmocar, like the rest of Carthage’s privileged and wealthy, had abandoned his country property and flown to the safety of the city at the approach of the Hatti horde. The house, smaller than she had expected, seemed shut up, empty. This was a plague house, of course. Rina pulled on gloves, and a mask that covered all her face but the eyes, before she knocked on the door.
An elderly maid answered. There seemed to be nobody here but the maid, and her master.
In a small room, alone, Jexami lay on a thick pallet. The stench was terrible, and Rina went to push open a window. There was a water jug by his bed, empty. Rina summoned the maid to get it refilled. She knelt by the bed and took Jexami’s hand. She would not have recognised the burly, confident Northlander. His eyes were closed. He looked as if he had been drained, leaving only a sack of flesh. Only the swellings at his neck, thick and purple-black, looked healthy, ironically.
He stirred, his eyes fluttering open. When he tried to speak, his voice was a rustle like a moth’s wing. ‘Who is it?’ He spoke in Carthaginian.
‘It is me. Rina of Etxelur.’ She spoke in their own tongue, but she would not lift the mask to show her face. She squeezed his hand. ‘Your note reached me.’
‘Ah.’ His dry mouth opened with a pop. ‘Water-’
‘Coming.’
‘That villain Drubal did that for me, at least. My head of house. Brought me water. While robbing me of everything else. Now you have come, although I turned you out when you needed help. I regret — regret-’
‘What’s done is done. And I might have done the same. I, too, was arrogant and complacent in the days I lived in Etxelur.’
‘Your children? Twins?’
‘Alxa is dead,’ she said bluntly. ‘The plague. Nelo is at the war. I’ve heard nothing of him for months.’ Strange to think, when she summed it up like that, that she had come here in the first place to protect her children.
‘Alxa,’ he whispered. ‘I heard of her. The work she did to support the dying — remarkable. And you are untouched.’
‘Some are spared, for no reason that any can see.’
‘I thought that of myself. . I had lasted so long. But then it came for me, it came. I heard Pyxeas is alive. That he is here, in Carthage.’
‘Yes. Though I have not been able to see him myself. He made it to Cathay and back! He got here just before the equinox, he and that Coldlander boy of his. He had to talk his way through the Hatti siege to get into the city. How did you know?’
Jexami’s face twitched; perhaps he was trying to smile. ‘His was an epic journey, though I never saw the point of it myself. News of it travelled — something to admire, an achievement to light up a time of blackness.’
The maid returned with the water. Rina wet a cloth, and sponged drops into Jexami’s mouth.
‘You wonder why I summoned you,’ he whispered.
Summoned. Even now, that haughty term.
‘Listen to me.’ His hand closed on hers, the last of his strength. ‘I don’t want to die and finish up as these Carthaginians do. Oiled up and stuck in a hole in the ground. And nor will I be thrown into a pit with the poor people. .’
He wasn’t alone in obsessing how he would die; she had seen it a hundred times. And, she saw, he was to remain a snob even beyond his death. ‘What, then?’
‘I want to die a good Northlander, as I believe I’ve lived like one, for all I have been seduced at times by the ways of the city folk. Take me home, Rina. Don’t leave me here. Take me home and bury me in the Wall, facing the sea, like all our ancestors back to the age of Ana and Prokyid. One day this weather will relent, or even if it does not there may be a way. . Say you will do this for me.’
‘Of course,’ she murmured. ‘Rest now. You will sleep for ever in the Wall, with your mother, your father, all your family, under the care of the little mothers. .’
His eyes fluttered closed. Perhaps he slept.
She stayed with him until the daylight started to fade.
She emerged from the house into a soft, early evening light. For once the sky was clear, and the sunset was spectacular. The remarkable skies had, for the last year, been a small consolation for the disruption the world had suffered, a bit of beauty amid the misery. But she suspected that Pyxeas would say that even this was merely a symptom of the world’s agony; she was looking at the sun’s light reflecting off the dust that had once been all the farmland in North Africa, now dried out and blown high in the air.
The maid said that when the master died she would have the corpse cremated, send the ashes to Rina, shut up the house. Rina nodded, thanked the woman — wondering vaguely what would become of her when Jexami was gone — and set off back across the city to Barmocar’s household.
Where Barmocar himself was waiting anxiously for her. For a second time that day she had been summoned.
67
Carthalo, one of the two suffetes, had asked to see her. They would meet at an expensive cemetery on the flank of the Byrsa.
‘I will accompany you,’ said Barmocar.
‘I am summoned by the suffetes,’ she said, unbelieving. ‘Me. A runaway servant. A middle-aged Northlander with whip burns on her back and my fingers worn out from working your wife’s slit-’
‘My wife is dead,’ he said bluntly. ‘Two days ago.’
‘The plague?’
‘Of course the plague. And now she lies out in the cemetery. You will see. That is why we are going there.’
‘Anterastilis was a foolish, indulgent woman, who used me, and others, cruelly. But nobody in this world deserves to die, certainly not of the blood plague. Still — she is gone. Why should I help you, who took advantage of my weakness and vulnerability?’
‘I brought you to Carthage,’ he snapped with a trace of his old anger. ‘I took you in when no other would. Times were already hard, or have you forgotten that?’ He made a visible effort to regain control; he seemed to be under huge stress. ‘It is not me who asks for your help. You and your uncle, actually.’
‘Pyxeas?’
‘He is to attend too. It is important, Rina. Will you attend or not?’
The next morning Pyxeas himself came to the house, with Avatak, his Coldlander companion. Rina was overjoyed; it was the first time she had seen her uncle since his arrival at Carthage. But Pyxeas was silent, withdrawn, and seemed much older than she remembered, drained by his journey. He had trouble talking too; there were bloody gaps in the teeth of his lower jaw. Yet he was gathering his strength for whatever was to come today, she saw.
The four of them, Barmocar, Rina, Pyxeas and his boy, together with a servant, were loaded onto a carriage drawn by a single elderly horse, and they crossed the city.
Carthage, these days, woke slowly. On the landward walls the sentries’ fires were sparks against a sunrise that towered pink, and carts bearing the dead rolled in doleful caravans, heading for the big, ever-burning pyres. Pyxeas stared at the slow carriages, and his lips moved slowly. He was counting, Rina realised, counting the carriages, perhaps hoping to estimate the number of the night’s dead. And, as they began to climb the Byrsa itself, a series of upright crosses was thrown into relief against the sky, the dangling bodies silhouetted. Thieves, looters, murderers and other criminals, punished in an ancient Carthaginian style. At least the crows didn’t go hungry any more, the Carthaginians bleakly joked.