The Northland Way

This short fiction in the universe of ‘Northland Book 2: Bronze Summer’ is exclusive to this website. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2011.

Once the ice had sprawled in sheets that covered continents. The silence of the world had been profound. Eventually, grudgingly, the ice retreated to its fastnesses in the mountains and at the poles. Across the world humans spread northward, colonising the recovering land. They lived sparsely, their lives brief. Soon the ice was remembered only in myth.

Yet the world around them continued to endure significant changes. As the ice melted the land rose and flexed as it was relieved of the burden of its weight, and meltwater flowed into the oceans and pooled in hollows on the land. Rising seas bit at the coastlines of Northland, the great neck of land that still connected the peninsula called Albia, Britain, to the Continent, Europe. Perhaps that neck would have been severed altogether - if not for the defiance of Northland’s people, who, tentatively at first, with crude flood-resistant mounds, drainage ditches scratched in the ground, and heaped-up dykes of stone and earth, resisted the ocean’s slow assaults.

Meanwhile, far to the east, other new ideas were emerging. People had long tracked wild sheep and goats and encouraged the more nutritious cereal plants. Now, as people sought more reliable food supplies, that practice intensified. Herds were corralled, fields planted. Populations bloomed.

The ice was not done with mankind. A remnant ice cap over the western continent collapsed, and chill waters poured down the river valleys to the ocean. Sea levels rose in a great pulse. Northland survived this too, its already ancient network of sea walls and dykes and drainage channels and soakaways able to withstand the shock.

But the drastic injection of chill meltwater caused ocean currents to fail, and the world suffered a cold snap that lasted centuries. The eastern farmers, driven out of their homes by climate collapse and over-exploitation, spread west along the river valleys and ocean coasts, taking their animals and seeds with them. In a slow wave that unrolled across the Continent, forest was cleared, and threads of smoke rose from new farming communities.

After two thousand years the farmers’ culture reached the shore of the Atlantic, the Western Ocean - but here the wave broke. If the Northlanders had not existed, perhaps the farmers and their culture would have colonised the shore lands and islands of the ocean fringe. But Northland, still a culture living off the produce of the wild earth, was literate, technically advanced, strong, self-confident. The Northlanders traded and learned, but farming held no interest for them.

Again the climate shifted, with a spasm of drought heralding a new age of warm, dry conditions; again humanity’s fragile cultures flowed and changed in response. In the east the farming communities coalesced into a new phenomenon: towns and cities, major gatherings of population, centrally controlled, dedicated to the great task of maintaining complex nets of irrigation channels in increasingly dry landscapes. Empires bloomed like fungi on a log. Soon trading routes spanned the Continent, carrying amber from the north, silver from the south, timber from the west, tin and lapis lazuli from the east. Bronze was everywhere, in cups and ornaments and statuary, in the body armour and swords of the new warrior kings. The trading, warring empires of east and south probed west and north. But again the old Northlander culture stood strong, and older ways were preserved.

The dance of sea and air went on. Over an ocean on the far side of the world, elaborate cycles of heat and moisture collapsed, resumed - changed. The consequences rippled around the world, in more waves of flood and drought, famine and disaster.





They were heading for a branch of one of the five great canals that dominated the landscape, named for the three little mothers and for Ana and Prokyid. These canals fed into subsidiary channels which in turn fed lesser gullies and drains. This vast network had evolved across the generations by trial and error, punctuated by massive redesigns and rebuilds. Its purpose was to divert all of Northland’s excess water away to the great river valleys that bounded it to east and west, or into the natural sinks of the wetlands, or to stations where it could be pumped over walls and dykes to higher ground and ultimately allowed to run off into the sea. These works framed the human landscape - but much of the land that was still essentially wild, with wide stretches of marsh, open water and ancient forest. There were no farms in Northland, unlike the Continent, unlike even Albia; the people lived off the fruit of forest and stream and marsh as they had always done, and they preserved the wild places as carefully as a farmer would his grain store.

But as they walked to the canal, that spring day, Milaqa saw signs of change. They passed an area of wetland, where a party of ragged-looking men and women were struggling to assemble eel traps from willow cuts. Milaqa recognised none of them - and Northland was not a place of crowds; you had a good chance of getting to recognise, if not to know, everybody living within a few days’ walk of your home. A man of the House of the Vole was helping the strangers; he was recognisable by the otter-fur hat he wore. Staring curiously, Milaqa saw that the strangers were living in shabby huts of piled-up reed, they had scrawny children picking desultorily at the water - and, leaning against one of their shacks, was a machine of poles with a stone blade at the end. A plough. These were refugees, probably, immigrants from the lands of the farmers off to the east where - it was whispered by the likes of the Dumnoes, in dark tones over a glass or two of mead - years of drought and failing crops was driving people to starvation, flight and warfare, among other horrors. Well, perhaps it was true, if a band like this had made it all the way to the heart of Northland. But she knew very well that Northland, its population kept purposefully small, could accommodate few strangers.

One woman caught her looking, and stared back defiantly. The woman was small, her back bent, and when she stood she seemed to hobble. Milaqa looked away, embarrassed, and hurried on.





Qirum jumped off the cart before it had stopped moving.

The party had drawn up at the centre of the hearthspace. Qirum stalked around, staring at the houses around the space, and the countryside around as revealed by the broad open tracks, the neat patches of forest, a glimmer of open water.

A handful of children came running out to see the newcomers. And a flock of wheatears rose up, disturbed, very beautiful little birds with pale brown chests and distinctive black masks over their eyes. Milaqa’s gaze followed them up into the sky.

But she was soon drawn back to Qirum. His every move was physical, muscular, tense, as if he wanted to pick a fight with the very earth. He was out of place here in Northland, in the air and the open spaces, his bronze chest plate glittering in the brilliant midsummer light; he was like a slab of some darker eastern rock dropped out of the sky onto the sandy earth.

‘What is this place?’ He stalked about the hearthspace, kicking up dust. A gaggle of the children followed him, fascinated but warily keeping out of his reach.

A few adults were watching now, from the shade of their houses. The locals seemed amused by Qirum’s noisy posturing, rather than alarmed.

Bren said gently, ‘This is one of our larger communities. This is called the Place of the Chaffinch, for the priests of the people here traditionally choose that bird as their other.’ He paused. ‘A chaffinch is a small bird with an orange breast, which -’

‘One of your larger communities? What community?’ The Trojan turned around, arms extended. ‘This? A few houses, a mound, a barren patch of land? In the east we wouldn’t call this a "community". It’s not a city. Why, I’d ride through it not even noticing it was here!’

Kilushepa climbed down from the cart where she had been sitting; she elegantly stretched her arms, twisting her long neck. Voro saw to the horses, whose tenders were loosing their harnesses so they could be taken to water.

‘But this is how we live,’ Milaqa said, stepping down to join Qirum. ‘All the way across Northland we’ve been trying to show you. And all the way you’ve been complaining about it. It’s not sinking in, is it?’

He grunted. ‘I apologise for my Trojan stupidity. Perhaps I’ve been hit on the head once too often. But what is there to understand? There’s nothing here!’

Kilushepa murmured to Qirum in her own tongue, then, softly, perhaps thinking that the others would not hear, or if they did they would not understand. But Milaqa understood.

‘Perhaps it would pay you to be more patient, Trojan. Think like a soldier. What if you wished to take this place, to hold it? It is not like a citadel of stone walls to storm; your siege engines and ladders would be of little use here. These people are few, but I have the impression they are a sturdy lot, and they are not fools. You might call them to battle - they might not respond. They might let hunger defeat you first. If you wished to be king of the Chaffinch folk, how would you manage it?’

The thought evidently intrigued him.

‘And,’ Bren said, drawing the two of them aside so they faced the broad track heading north, ‘look that way.’

The landscape opened up before them, revealed by the track, a typical Northland vista of woodland clumps, green swards, marshland and open water. The sun was low to the west, and cast long shadows from the land’s gentle folds through a layer of light mist. And on the very northern horizon there was a thin band of white, dead straight, almost like ice, Milaqa thought, incongruously gleaming on this midsummer day. It was the Wall. Here and there she saw a splash of colour that must be a Giving-day banner, already in place.

Bren smiled at Kilushepa and Qirum. ‘And that, Trojan, Tawananna, is the centre of our culture and our greatest historic achievement: the Wall of the north.’

Kilushepa said nothing; if she was impressed, she didn’t show it.

But Qirum seemed exhilarated. He whooped and punched the air, as if he owned the Wall itself. ‘At last. Something real, in this land of dreams and shadows! Come. Let’s have done with this journey.’ He stalked towards the carts. ‘You. Voro. Get those horses harnessed up. We’re moving out. There’s no point staying here in this, this blank place.’

Voro protested mildly, ‘But the horses need a break. The heat -’

‘This isn’t heat. I’ve been to Egypt. I’ve fought with the pharaoh’s armies there, and against them. That is heat, and you, my friend, would melt. Do as I say. We aren’t going to waste any more time here.’

Voro glanced at Bren, who shrugged. Voro went to the men tending the horses.

They returned to their carts, and soon they were rolling forward toward the great track north.





It was several days after Deri’s party had landed at the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm before Medoc was able to convince Vala that Xivu and Caxa were ready for a walk to some of the sights of the island - and then inland, to a special feast laid on by his friends the Ice Folk. He had Mi to run ahead to have the Ice Folk prepare; Mi was growing up to be a fast runner and a good archer, her stepfather boasted. Tibo and Deri were to come along too.

The party formed up early in the morning, all the men save Xivu bearing heavy packs. Xivu and Caxa had been loaned suitable clothes: thick cloth tunics, leather leggings, heavy cloaks, boots stuffed with the feathers of baby gulls, hats filled with straw.

Xivu looked deeply uncomfortable. Spring on Kirike’s Land was evidently harsher than the worst winter in the land of the Jaguar; Tibo had learned that the Jaguar folk had no words for ‘snow’ or ‘hail’ or even ‘frost’, and the only ice they ever encountered was high in the mountains. The winter was going to be a shock then, even in Northland.

Caxa seemed to like the outfit. She actually smiled as she turned around before Tibo, and the low sun of Kirike’s Land glinted from the jade bead in her nose.

They began with a walk east along the coast, where seabirds nested all along the cliff faces. Tibo pointed out kittiwakes and gulls, and puffins on an offshore island, and cormorants diving into the ocean. Children clambered over the cliff faces, thoughtlessly risking their little lives in search of eggs.

Tibo enjoyed Caxa’s shy efforts to pronounce Northlander names. But she flinched at the seals she saw basking on the rocks beneath the puffin nests. Tibo saw why; with their bodies like fish and faces like dogs, the seals were like the half-human monsters with whom she had had to share the holy house on the Altar of the Jaguar.

And they saw the fishing industry that went on here in the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm. Cod, haddock, redfish, herring and shrimp were gathered in huge quantities from the chill but fecund seas, far more than the islanders could eat. They used the surplus as trade goods, or ground it up and scattered it on their fields to help their crops grow.

Xivu, a man deeply involved in the running of a complicated society, was interested in numbers, how much was caught, what it was bartered for. Medoc tried to describe the whaling that went on, from a harbour along the south coast beneath a community called The Black - a place at present overwhelmed by the ash cloud from the Hood.

One crew brought in a dolphin. Caxa stared wide-eyed at its glistening grey flanks. ‘If I know - sea - if I -’

Xivu had to translate for her. ‘If she had known the sea contained such monsters, she never would have got into Deri’s fragile boat.’

They cut away from the coast and set off inland. Away from the ocean breeze the distant stink of sulphur and ash grew stronger, and when Tibo looked to the east he saw that the big column of smoke and ash was still rising.

For a while they followed a river valley, that cut through a broad plain where a low leafy plant grew thickly.

Xivu was astonished. ‘Potatoes!’

‘The very same.’

‘I thought you people didn’t farm. And - why potatoes?’

Medoc said, ‘Well, I’m told they grow well in the heavy soil just here. And we do farm, but only to keep the other farmers away.’ And he told a complicated story about how the produce of farms like these, and in Albia and Gaira, was mashed up and sold to the starving countries of the eastern Continent, the true farmers, to keep them at bay. ‘But none of those eastern fellows is ever likely to come to Kirike’s Land, and never likely to see how the mash he feeds his babies is grown!’

‘And so Northland retains its power,’ Xivu murmured, thoughtful.

They walked up from the valley bottom and out onto higher, more open country, moorland studded with clumps of birch forest. White-streaked mountain peaks stood in the distance. Swans sailed on broad lagoons, whiter than the snow on the distant peaks, and birds of prey hung in the air. There was a kind of falcon found only here, Medoc said, and much prized when captured.

And then he stopped and pointed. Off in the distance a herd of horses ran, a distant, noiseless cloud. ‘There are reindeer here too. Brought from Northland long ago, you understand.’ At his feet, he pointed out the droppings of a fox. ‘The fox is said to have been the only animal here when Kirike found the place. People brought everything else.’

Xivu looked less than impressed, Tibo thought, to be presented with a turd to inspect. Medoc marched on regardless, in search of the next spectacle.

The afternoon seemed to rush upon them. Medoc led them all to a glade of birch trees to find shelter for the night.

Xivu seemed oddly surprised. ‘But the sun never rose high in the sky - a part of me thought it was still the morning, even though we had walked so long.’

‘You are very far north,’ Deri reminded him, dumping his pack to the ground.

While Medoc and Deri went foraging for wood, Tibo tentatively showed the others how to set up a shelter. He hauled fallen branches over to make a lean-to against a tree trunk, then took waterproof leathers from the packs and spread them over the frame. He encouraged Xivu and Caxa to help him spread more foliage over the top. ‘There,’ he said. ‘It will be warm and will keep out the water, if it rains. Now we must prepare a hearth -’

Xivu snorted. ‘These are not skills a Leftmost ever requires.’

But Caxa seemed to enjoy the work, to be building something. She crawled in and out of the little shelter with a kind of shy delight.

Medoc and Deri returned with arms full of dry wood. Soon a fire was blazing, and they ate dried fish and horsemeat soaked with a tasty herb sauce prepared by Vala, and a flavourless mash that turned out to be potato.

The night was reasonably clear, despite the smoke cloud. Xivu was fascinated by the stars. ‘They are so different from the sky I knew at home! As if the heavens have been tipped over.’

Deri smiled. ‘I am in the House of Swallows, to which all long-distance seafarers and navigators belong. There is a kind of romance about the sky, if you understand how it works. You have come to the tipped-over summit of the world. And at the peak of the summer here, the night can be as short as one tenth part of the full cycle of the day - that is, when the sun is below the horizon.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. And in the winter the day is only one tenth part of the whole daily cycle. And that’s not all. There is a place on this island, on the very north side, when for a few days in winter, the sun never rises; there is merely a glow like the dawn, that soon fades.’

Xivu tried to imagine this, and evidently failed.

As they spoke of stars and sun and moon, and as old Medoc slumped back into a contented sleep, Tibo sat by Caxa. She was staring at the fire, her eyes wide.

The breeze shifted, and he heard Xivu complain as smoke from the plume to the east covered over the stars.

In the morning they packed up quickly. Medoc promised to take them to much more exotic landscapes yet.

They climbed higher, heading steadily inland, until they were walking on open moorland, too high for trees. Here the ground was broken by huge craters, scoops in the soil, revealing dark rock.

And Medoc led them forward boldly over ground that was so warm it steamed, soft, muddy, damp. No grass grew, or trees, but vivid green moss clung to the mud. The stink of sulphur was strong. Caxa dug her hand into the warm mud, drew out a handful, and began to work it with her fingers.

‘Extraordinary,’ Xivu said. Carefully he immersed his hand in a shallow puddle. ‘Almost scalding!’

‘Heat,’ Medoc said boastfully. ‘The special gift of this island, where the little mother of the earth comes to sleep. Vala will take you to mud pools that bubble with heat - she swears by it for aches and pains and disorders of the skin. And there is a place where a jet of hot water gushes out of the ground, shooting up many times higher than a man! And if you wait for a hundred breaths it does it all again.’

Xivu looked east, to where the smoke tower billowed. ‘And your mountains spew ash and smoke.’

Medoc looked that way. ‘There’s no danger now. The last time that mountain did anything dramatic was when my father was a boy. It’s just the little mother of the earth turning over in her bed.’

But a thunderous, complaining rumble came from deep within the belly of the earth. Xivu was uneasy, Tibo thought.

Caxa was concentrating on the lump of mud, which was soft and pliable, working it with her fingers, digging in her thumbs. He saw that she was making a head, with the same blocky proportions as the monuments on the Altar of the Jaguar. But it was a child’s face, you could see immediately, round, crying.

Medoc wanted to walk on. But Caxa would not be moved until she had finished. So they sat by the bubbling mud, and ate their dried fish and drank water, while Caxa worked on the face of the weeping child.

By the evening Medoc had brought them to the summer camp of his friends the Ice Folk, at the head of a high valley.

The Ice Folk lived in a small tent of skin over a frame of birch saplings, set up over a pit dug into the ground, that you climbed into down a sloping tunnel. Medoc told his visitors they should come in the winter, and see the houses of ice blocks the Folk made up on the glaciers, or even out on the frozen sea, where they trapped the seals that came up through the ice for air.

Inside the house lived a single family, stocky round people wrapped up warmly in seal fur, though the day was not very cold. Knowing that Medoc and his friends were coming, they had prepared a feast, a special meal. Over a blazing fire they roasted a seal on a spit, whole. With knives of bone set with tiny stone blades, they sliced open the seal’s belly, and roasted sea birds fell out, having been stuffed within the animal.

When she saw the carcasses of the birds fall from the stomach of the seal, Caxa began to scream.

And in the south of the island, under a shuddering mountain, molten rock surged restlessly, seeking escape.





Watching from the long grass above the beach, Milaqa and Mi saw Nago fall. In an instant his body was lost as the fighting closed over him like a bloody tide. Since the landing and the resistance to it, slaughter that now filled the bay, a press of squirming meat and blood and metal.

And still the ships further out crowded in, trying to land.

‘No.’ Mi covered her mouth. ‘Uncle Nago!’

Milaqa, feeling she might rush forward, put her arm around her cousin and held her close. ‘It’s all right. He died well. He killed two, three, four. He died quickly.’

‘It was Qirum.’

Qirum, yes, Milaqa thought, Qirum fighting for his own life - Qirum who had now cut away another piece of her family, another bit of her heart - Qirum who had come to this land to destroy her country, and replace it with a vision of his own. Qirum, the spearhead of an invasion ultimately fuelled by the detonation of the fire mountain on far Kirike’s Land. Qirum whose whirling, dancing savagery in the bloody foam captivated her as no other.

‘The day is lost,’ Mi whispered. ‘There are too many of them.’

Milaqa tried to think like Deri, like Teel, tried to see the wider picture. ‘We have fewer fighters, but we have advantages. Thanks to Bren’s treachery few of the enemy ships were lost to our underwater traps. But they are all being forced to try to land here. All the Trojans are having to push through the neck of a flask, just here. We can’t hold them for long, but we can kill a good number of them before they break through.’

‘And they will break through -’

‘Weakened. And we who survive will fall back.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then we will harass them as they try to advance, and we will see their chariots bog down in the marshlands, and we will starve them when they seek food. They are far from home and they are few -’

‘But we are few too.’

‘Every one that falls cannot be replaced. And if each of us takes three of them with him, as uncle Nago did, Northland will not fall. Come on.’ She tugged at Mi’s sleeve. ‘Deri told us to pull back and report on what we saw, the ships we counted. That’s our job now.’

Mi looked at her bleakly. Then she took her quiver of arrows, and her finely made Kirike’s-Land bow, and she fired off her arrows one by one, sending them high into the air so they fell among the incoming ships, and were sure to kill only an enemy. Only when all their arrows were gone would she follow her cousin away from the beach, and the continuing battle.





They stopped a night in a little community called Mother’s Fingernail, after a distinctively shaped arc of sandstone that dominated its hearthspace. Deri had a friend here called Boucca, widow of an old companion from the fishing boats. The place was not far from My Sun, and had suffered from Trojan raids. Now the people lived in lean-tos and shacks amid the ruins of their houses, rings of burned-out stumps in the ground. But it was surviving, and the travellers were shown hospitality. That night Deri and Milaqa huddled under borrowed blankets in Boucca’s lean-to, windproof and warm.

And the Trojans came at dawn.

Milaqa was woken by the cries of the scouts.

In the dark, Boucca was already stirring. She had her cloak around her shoulders, her boots on, her youngest, a nursing infant, in her sturdy arms. Squatting, she glanced around the lean-to. ‘That’ll do. Nothing left for the Trojans. Come on, you two.’ She shuffled out of the lean-to’s low entrance.

Deri pulled on his own boots, reaching for his weapons. ‘We have to get to the flood mound. That’s where the people will make their stand -’

Milaqa, sleepy, her hair in her eyes, fumbled for her clothes, more irritated than afraid. Outside the air was chill, but not freezing; a thick dew lay on the churned-up ground of the hearthspace. The sky was all but pitch dark, covered by the layer of clouds that had kept the frost away. The big communal fire still burned, huge logs glowing bright red, but men were kicking dirt over it.

By the fire’s dim light, men, women, children, old folk, were all abandoning the shacks and lean-tos and hurrying in to the big old mound at the centre of the hearthspace. Milaqa could hear people muttering prayers to Ana and the other mothers, as they clambered up rope ladders dangling down the mound’s steepened sides. The mound had been built to save lives in the event of a flood, a tradition that dated back to the mother goddess Ana. Now the mound had been rebuilt and reinforced to keep out another sort of peril.

A scout came running into the clearing. ‘They’re coming! Men and horses -’ He was just a boy, maybe eleven years old, wearing only a light tunic, kilt, sturdy boots. He hunched over, panting from his run, his breath steaming in the chill air. A woman, perhaps his mother, wrapped a cloak around him and led him off towards the mound.

And now Milaqa could hear the Trojan raiders in the distance - the war cries, the heavy rumble of hooves on the hard, half-frozen earth, even the singing of swords being drawn from their scabbards. It was like a storm brought down to the earth, a thrilling sound despite the danger it threatened.

She was slow to move. Her uncle grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the mound.

The mound’s walls had been steepened and coated with slippery pitch, to make them harder to climb, and the ladders that draped down its sides were just knotted rope. Milaqa pulled herself up easily enough, from one knot to the next. To either side she saw people helping each other, an arthritic old man being carried on a younger man’s back, a baby being passed from hand to hand. There was urgency, but no panic.

On top of the mound a curtain of untreated hide had been set up around the big communal house, a barrier two or three times as tall as a man. Men and women were hurling buckets of water over the hide curtain, and some of the men were pissing up it, hosing great steaming streams from night-full bladders. The purpose of the hide screen was to keep out fire arrows. One man’s fountain splashed through a slit window cut in the barrier. There was a cry of protest from inside, and a ripple of laughter.

Once inside the hide curtain Milaqa followed the rest through a narrow doorway into the big house. This too had been extensively rebuilt, with a tent of stitched, soaked hide hung over the thatch roof, and panels of sandstone set up over the old external walls. The sandstone slabs had been cut from the stone outcrop in the hearthspace that gave the place its name. Inside, a low fire burned, and smoke curled under the thatch roof. People were huddling amid heaps of stores, buckets and sacks of water and fruit juices, and salted meat, dried fish, fruit, herbs, nuts, mushrooms, stored in boxes and pits cut into the floor.

Boucca waved. She had saved a place on the floor near the back wall, away from the main door, and she had her little boy asleep on her lap. Milaqa and Deri went over to join her.

People were settling down all around the house, the old folk and nursing mothers and children huddled on the floor, everybody else manning the defences. Some children cried at having been woken too early, but others laughed at the antics of the dogs who had been brought into the house, and ran around yapping. It was hard to pick out family groups, for widows, widowers and orphans, survivors of previous raids, helped each other with the burden of survival. There were even old wounds, mutilations, burns, easy to see as the people pressed into this small space. There was an air of urgency, but no sense of fear.

All these measures - the flood mound turned into a fortress, the hide curtain to keep out fire arrows, the rope ladders, the central store - had had to be worked out through painful experience in the months since My Sun, and at the cost of many lives. The lessons learned were spread across the country by travelling priests, and Hatti veterans and warriors. This was how you dealt with the Trojans; this was how you survived - by thinking, learning, talking, and making preparations with utter ruthlessness.

Deri was impressed. ‘People have become hardened - Let’s hope we can all become un-hard again when the Trojans are gone -’

The cry went up: ‘They’re here! They’re here!’

A sound like thunder burst over the settlement - hooves on the ground, deep male voices roaring. Despite all their preparations, now that the crux was here the people in the house cowered back, mothers clinging to their children.

And there was a whoosh of fire.

Boucca shouted over the din, ‘They’re torching the lean-tos. Using embers from our own fire probably. Let them. It only takes a day to build another.’ She cradled her baby, and yawned elaborately. But Milaqa suspected she was more afraid than she showed.

Now arrows hissed. Through the door space and window slits Milaqa glimpsed droplets of fire arcing, landing on the hide screens, and there was a smell of scorching leather. Men, women and older children ran out of the door with buckets of earth and water

. ‘Fire arrows,’ Milaqa breathed.

‘Yes,’ Deri said grimly. ‘Dipped in pitch. But you saw the soaked hides -’

‘The Trojans will just keep trying. All they need is one lucky shot -’

‘Which the mothers will push away, I have no doubt,’ said Boucca calmly. ‘Mother Ana always taught us that the mothers will help you if you help yourself. And besides, we’re getting to know the Trojans. If they don’t have quick successes they give up easily. After all there’s nothing for them to eat out there. We will suffer this for a day, two days. And then they will give up and slink away like wolves.’

Deri said grimly, ‘But we must survive those two days.’

Now cries were going up from the raiders in the hearthplace outside. The Northlanders screamed abuse back down at them.

Milaqa listened. ‘I can hear their orders. The Trojans. They are trying to climb the mound.’ She glanced at Deri. ‘I’m going out.’

‘Milaqa -’

She was already moving. She got up, grabbed her knife and short spear, and crossed the floor of the house, stepping over old folk and babies. Deri, with a growl, stood and followed after her.

In the space between the hide and the house wall the defenders were loosing arrows down through the window slits. At their feet were heaps of swords, stabbing spears, bows and quivers of arrows - and coils of rope, evidently the ladders pulled up beyond the reach of the Trojans. Buckets stood on the floor, water and piss ready to keep the walls soaked. The only light came from the slowly brightening dawn sky, the flickering fires of the burning settlement, the arrows’ shifting glow. Milaqa saw all this in glimpses and shards, like a scene from a nightmare.

The priest, a man called Van, walked steadily around the circular space. His hair was a shock of sky blue, and the circle-and-slash mark of Etxelur was bright on his cheek. ‘Don’t fire until you have a clear shot. Make every arrow count - By the mercy of the little mother of the sky, make these arrows fly like thunderbolts! And, mother, send rain, rain to soak our hides and to turn the mound walls into heaps of mud to drown those who have come here to harm us -’

There was a roar, and the hide wall bulged. A huge Trojan, presumably having made it up the slope by sheer momentum, had slammed into the screen, and Milaqa saw his outline in the distorted hide.

Deri took a single stride forward and slid his sword blade through the hide and into the man’s carcass. He was rewarded by a liquid, crunching impact, a frothy gurgle. The man fell back, and Deri had to brace himself to keep hold of his sword without pulling the screen down. He looked at Milaqa and grinned. ‘You get to know where these fellows have gaps in their armour.’

‘Here they come again!’ somebody yelled.

Milaqa grabbed a bow and quiver from the heaps by the house wall. The bow was heavy, a big hunting bow, difficult to manage in the narrow space, but it would do. She notched an arrow and peered out through a window slit.

She saw Trojans scrambling to scale the sheer walls of the mound. They were heavy with armour and weapons, the mud gave beneath their booted feet, and they faced a barrage of arrows and stones. Yet still they came on. Milaqa fired an arrow at the nearest Trojan. It bounced off his chest plate. She fired another, and this one grazed his arm. He glanced at the wound, ignored it, and kept climbing.

Van, the priest, had to shout at her over the din of roared challenges. ‘You’ve only made him mad. And you’ve wasted a couple of arrows. Remember -’

‘Every arrow counts. I know. I’m doing my best.’

‘Use this.’ He pointed at a bucket at her feet; it contained a smear of brownish paste.

‘What is it?’

‘Snake venom. Just dip your arrow-head. And don’t let it touch you -’

Cautiously Milaqa lowered her next arrow into the venom, notched it, and grinned as she aimed it at the bleeding warrior who approached her.

And now a new cry went up. ‘They’re bringing ladders! Fetch the oil, the pitch, the torches! -’

In the end it took three days before the frustrated Trojans withdrew.

When they’d gone, the people moved out of the house on the mound and worked gingerly through the wreckage of the hearthspace, picking over the remains of the lean-tos. Even the central hearth had been kicked apart and pissed on. But it would not take long to fix any of this. Just as in settlements across Northland now, the only serious investment in structures was in the citadel-like houses on their fortified flood mounds.

The most urgent task was to deal with the corpses. The bodies of any Northlanders killed had been mutilated and cast into the river in an effort to poison the water. It was a sad duty, led by the priest, to gather up these rent and damaged corpses and take them to improvised sky burials high in oak trees; the Trojans burned burial platforms when they got the chance.

The Trojans had taken away their own dead - but one man had been left behind. He had died of a poisoned wound in his belly that oozed blue sticky-black fluid. Evidently his companions had not wished to touch the body. The priest knew the poison, its effects and its antidotes, and he knew how to handle such bodies. He led a small party that took the corpse away before the children and dogs could get anywhere near it. The Northlanders did not believe in dishonouring the enemy dead, but this man’s bones would not be placed in the great tombs in the Wall, for it was believed that the bones of enemies would work to sabotage that great barrier.

And while this work of recovery continued the scouts and sentries went out into the country once more, for it had been learned from hard experience that the Trojans had an unpleasant habit of feigning withdrawals, and would return to finish the job. But this time the Trojans showed no signs of coming back.

Milaqa and Deri stayed for half a day to help. By then the clean-up was much advanced - the dead cleared, the sick tended to, the big communal hearth blazing with a new fire. Then they said their goodbyes to Boucca and the rest, and continued their own journey south.

Milaqa was not as brave as she pretended to be, she admitted to herself in the silence of the night. She could keep functioning in the middle of a battle. She could even fight back. But she was always too aware that she could be struck down at any moment, even by accident, by a clumsily wielded sword, a misdirected arrow - crippled, maimed, killed. She wondered how it would feel when death at last came to her - when, finally, it was her turn. Would others mourn for her, as she seemed unable to mourn for others?

Was she as alone as she sometimes felt? Would the world end with her?

Perhaps death by some random act would seem a fitting end to her stay in a world that always seemed random to her, for in the chaos and brutality of life and death she had never perceived the guidance of the little mothers or the Storm God, or any other deities, as others seemed to.





The people walked silently, the carts rattling, the oxen grunting, as the party approached the burning ditches that ringed New Troy. The fires had burned all winter, fed by oil and pitch brought from across Northland, and a pall of greasy yellowish smoke hung over the town. And under that pall the town itself was slumped, blackened, silent and still, only a few smoky fires burning.

Milaqa, walking beside Deri, was glad of the scented linen mask she had tied over her face. It was meant to keep out plague breath, but it kept the smoke out too. And Milaqa was perversely glad of the warmth of the fire in the ditches, though it was the first day of spring. They had woken to frost on their gear, to steaming breaths, and in the country there were patches of dirty winter snow that had not yet melted.

But overhead, up above the smoke, over a town that was now no more than a stain on Northland’s green, a deep blue spring sky stretched high - a sky bluer than she could remember for some while. Perhaps the fire-mountain haze was finally clearing, even if warmth had yet to return to the world.

Milaqa had a sharp stab of memory, of the spring days of childhood, blue skies like this. She had always been a restless kid, never content, always rebellious. But she had been happy then, she realised now, happier than she could ever have realised at the time, happier than she ever could be again, after the terrible journey of adulthood. Before she had somehow become, in Teel’s words, a monster.

Deri saw her looking up. As they walked, he took her hand and held it gently.

A deep, agonised groan came from one of the carts behind them, from one of the not-yet-dead. The party just carried on, ignoring this cry of distress.

They stopped short of the burning ditches. They had come to the only remaining way through to the city, an earthen ramp that spanned the ditches. A squad of Trojan soldiers squatted on the earth on the far side, their spears leaning against each other in frames like tents, a small fire burning desultorily. Milaqa knew that like the ditches the soldiers were there not to defend the city, but to stop the remaining city folk escaping to the outside world. Since the coughing plague, everything about the world had been inverted.

Deri called softly, a soldier’s greeting in Trojan.

One of the soldiers by the fire stood stiffly, took a spear, and came walking to the lip of the ditches, fixing his plumed helmet on his head. It was Protis, the last survivor of Qirum’s senior commanders. His pale, beautiful face unmarked even by the plague, he had been the most terrifying of Qirum’s soldiers, Milaqa had always thought, a man who killed without rage or malevolence - yet now this was the man who had assumed responsibility for New Troy and its inhabitants in its final days. He had even shown a remarkable mercy, early in this process, when he had delivered to the Northlanders a child he said was Hadhe’s, saved by Qirum despite Hadhe’s attempt on his life. The child, spared by Qirum’s impulsive mercy, was free of the plague, and was prospering with his mother’s family.

‘More meat, I see,’ Protis said in his native Greek. ‘But of what kind?’

Milaqa murmured a translation for Deri. Of all the roles she had played in this gruesome saga, as spy, warrior, and plague whore, in the end she reverted to the first of all, which was translator.

Deri replied, ‘Both kinds. A cart of veal and fish. And a cart of the dead and dying. But these are the last, we think.’

Protis nodded, and beckoned to another of the group by the fire. ‘Urhi, take a note.’ One of them stood - not a soldier, he was a scribe, handling tablets under his cloak. Milaqa recognised him; he was the weary-looking older man who had been forced to make notes at Qirum’s hectic, insane wedding party. Now he here was counting the dead and dying. She wondered where he had come from, what kind of life he had once led, how he had come to be with Qirum. The Trojan had made many lives into strange stories.

Protis said, ‘We will take them. But for us too the disease has run its course, we think. One in twenty of our people survive -’ He glanced at the scribe. ‘King Qirum had many faults, but he did set up an effective administration. We knew how many people once lived in New Troy, at its brief and glorious peak, and we know how many are left. But those who live carry the blight. We are going nowhere; we built this kingdom, and we die with it.’

‘That is noble,’ Deri said.

Protis shrugged. ‘Who has been chosen to live and who to die is as ever a matter for the gods alone. And as ever they have been perverse.’ He pointed a finger at Milaqa, who flinched as if he had notched an arrow. ‘They spared you, for example. The King’s lethal lover.’

‘We were never lovers,’ she said.

‘But you were lethal. I can see you have suffered. You are as thin as my spear-shaft, and your skin is mottled like the skin of a frog. You will never be beautiful again, will you? And you feel old - in your skin and bones, heart and lungs - you will never feel young again. And yet you live, you who brought the plague here in the first place, you who unleashed it into the world.’

‘It was not my intention. It was not I who planned this -’ Yet she knew such excuses were not enough. ‘I must live with the memory of this for the rest of my life.’

Protis nodded. ‘And that is why you have been spared. A rich joke of the gods, either yours or mine.’

They had spoken Greek. Deri could not follow their words, and Milaqa had not translated, but perhaps he understood the tone.

Protis turned to Deri now. ‘Of course there are some of you still in here, within the perimeter. Northlanders.’

Deri frowned at Milaqa’s translation. ‘I thought you released the prisoners and slaves, the healthy ones.’

‘So we did; you have them. But there were some who did not want to leave.’ He grinned. ‘Women who fell in love with Greeks, believe it or not. Men born to hunt little piglets in the forest, who found they preferred to live and die as a farmer, a warrior - as a man.’

‘And they choose to stay?’

‘All of them. Perhaps nobility is like a plague too, eh? But there is one man who begs to be released. Who neither fell in love with a Greek or lusted to wage war. All he wanted was to bring down your Annid -’

‘Bren,’ Milaqa breathed.

‘So he lives?’ Deri asked. ‘How perverse the gods are, indeed, that he should survive the plague while so many good people died. My own son. Raka. Even my brother Teel. Those two gave their lives rather than abandon Milaqa.’

‘He asks to be taken back. He asks you to let him live.’

‘He betrayed us all,’ Deri growled. ‘Who knows how many lives he cost? No - let him walk with you to the underworld, where he will answer to the little mothers.’

Protis grinned, wolf-like. ‘It will be my pleasure to accompany him. Let’s get this done. For the last time we will take your dead.’

‘Thank you,’ Deri said.

But Protis had already turned away. He snapped a command.

Two of his men got up reluctantly and came to the ditch. Meanwhile Deri and Milaqa stood back as two Northlanders goaded the oxen until the carts had been moved forward onto the narrow causeway over the ditch. The handover was efficient; it had been achieved a score of times before. The Northlanders never came near the Trojan soldiers to whom they passed on the carts.

But as the second cart, full of the dead and dying, came past Deri and Milaqa, there was a commotion inside. Under a cover of ox-hide to keep out the weather, the cart was a sealed cage of wooden bars. Now a man’s face was pressed to the bars, dark, wasted, and skeletal hands grasped the wood. ‘Milaqa? Deri? -’ The voice was hoarse, and he coughed, spraying blood. ‘I knew I heard your voice! Speak to me - oh, in the name of the old gods, speak to me!’

The men, startled, paused, and let the cart rattle to a halt.

Milaqa was as shocked as if one of the dead had come back to life. Most of those in the last stages of the illness were either too weak to speak, or consumed with their coughing and bloody vomiting - or, more rarely, were accepting of their lot; they did not resist when placed in the carts for New Troy. And though Milaqa understood his words, for a heartbeat, in her bewilderment, she could not remember which language he spoke. Since her own illness her thinking had been muddy.

Then she had it. ‘Xivu?’

‘Yes! Yes!’ He grabbed the bars with bloody hands, and tried to pull himself upright. ‘It is me, Xivu - the Leftmost Claw on the Front Right Paw of the -’ He coughed, doubling over, and almost fell back. ‘Of the Jaguar King - I learned some of your crude tongue, but such is the blight of this illness my head emptied entirely, and now I have nobody to speak to, nobody who understands me.’

‘Caxa -’

‘I have not seen her in months. Certainly not since I fell ill. You must get me out of here, Milaqa.’ He tried to pull at the bars, but had no strength. ‘I am not like these others. I am not meant to be in here, in this cart - I am not meant for the pit of this blackened city!’

She didn’t know what to say. ‘I am sorry. If you are here, the priests have said that you will not recover.’

‘Priests! You call those capering toothless idiots of yours priests? I crossed the ocean -’ Again he coughed. ‘I crossed the Western Ocean to ensure that Caxa fulfilled her role properly.’

‘Caxa is fine. She was spared the illness altogether. Now she lives among us, as one of us. She uses her talent, which is much prized by our people. She organised the Words on the Wall during the Trojan siege, with which the Annids were able to talk to the people.’

‘But that’s not why she’s here, you stupid girl!’

Milaqa flinched. ‘I know why she’s here. She came to carve the head of Kuma, my mother, the Annid of Annids. Through the winter she has made her sculpture - and she has carved a head for Raka, who also died. The sculptures are almost ready to be revealed.’

‘You know what must become of Caxa after the work is done. She must go back. She must lie down beneath her last sculpture, her life’s work, the head of the Jaguar King. This is our way, Milaqa. The work is not done without that final step. An obsidian blade must be used - Let me out of here, and I will ensure -’

‘No,’ Milaqa snapped. ‘I will not speak of this. Enough have died. Now let this die with you.’

‘But the gods -’

‘You may discuss it with them in the underworld.’ She looked at him, this wretched man, dying in a cart of the dead, anguished by doubt, and she felt an intense stab of pity. But there was nothing she could do for him. ‘Let it be, Xivu. Caxa will remember you, and in due course will send word to your family in the Land of the Jaguar - Go to your death in peace.’

Deri murmured to the men, and the cart pulled forward once more.

Xivu mewled like an injured dog, and continued to protest in a weakening voice interrupted by coughing spasms. ‘The gods will punish you for this! They will punish you! -’

When the carts were delivered, Protis ordered more men forward. With bronze shovels they dug out the causeway across the ditch, a way which would never be used again. Then Protis himself pitched in a barrel of oil, and stood over it until it was set alight.

The Northlanders were already walking away.

They made slow progress. It would be a long way back to the Wall for those of the party, including Milaqa, who had had their strength sapped by the plague.

As evening drew in they came to the camp site they had built last night, just off the road. Wearily they stepped off the track and prepared for the night, fixing the lean-tos, relighting the fires; the soldiers scooped up months-old snow in their helmets to melt.

Later, Milaqa sat by the fire, swaddled in her cloak, exhausted. Deri came to her, tapped her shoulder, and pointed south.

A strong red light gathered there, rising above the flat horizon, like a false dawn, streaked with towering flames and billowing smoke. Protis had performed his last duty; New Troy was burning. Milaqa knew that the priests had ordered that the site be left abandoned for a generation. Only then would Northlanders venture in, retrieve the bones of the many dead, and bring them at last to the Wall for the long sleep of interment. Milaqa watched the fires burn, and wondered if she would hear Bren’s screams.





The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; human minds were occupied with love and war. The ice was remembered only in myth.

But the ice remembered.

And already the long retreat was over.



