look.’
The party turned, and Qirum and Kilushepa looked upon the Wall, at close hand and in full daylight, for the first time.
They were only a few hundred paces from its base, where its tremendous growstone flank met the Wall Way, the rough roadway that ran along its length from east to west. Towering over the houses that clustered at its feet, the exposed face shone brilliantly in the sun, but today great cloth panels hug over wide sections of the face, alive with colour, many of them adorned with the concentric-circle design that was the root of the symbolism of Northland. The huge scaffolding structures for the endless repair work were abandoned today; nobody worked at midsummer. But the staircases and galleries chipped into the sheer face swarmed with people walking and eating, leaning on balconies to look out over the country, and children ran along the corridors. For the Giving, people travelled from across Northland — from across the world, indeed — and on first arriving almost all of them made straight for Great Etxelur, the ancient heart of the Wall. If you listened closely you could hear a merged rumble of voices, the calls and shouts and laughter of the tremendous vertical crowd.
Qirum took off his helmet and scratched his scalp. ‘It just deepens the mystery for me. Why, if you people can conceive of a tremendous monument like this, you would choose to live in wooden barns, like animals.’
Bren said portentously, ‘We are all, perhaps, a mystery to each other. It will soon be midday, and before then we must find our way to the Chamber of the Solstice Noon. I am not as agile a climber of the staircases as I once was…’
As they formed up into a little procession behind the trader, Qirum looked blank. ‘What chamber is that?’
Milaqa murmured, ‘There will be beer.’
He grinned. ‘Whatever tongue you use, Milaqa, you always speak my language, and for that I’m grateful!’
Medoc had led them high up the flank of the mountain, high above the last of the green, and Tibo walked on a carpet of ash like fallen snow, studded with the stumps of burned-down trees. The ground was hot enough now to feel uncomfortable through the thick soles of his boots, and they passed pools of mud that bubbled and steamed, the stink of sulphur strong. Nothing lived as far as he could see, no creatures walked here save Medoc, Tibo and Caxa — even the belching mud pools lacked the green mosses that usually grew there, even the ravens wheeling overhead did not land. It was a dead country, a place of rock and fire and ash, a place for the little mother of the earth, perhaps, and her alone. It was too hot, the air was thick and increasingly hard to breathe, and there was a continuous rushing roar, like falling water.
And now, it seemed to Tibo, the land actually bulged under their feet.
They passed a dead goat, on its back, its limbs sticking up into the air.
‘This isn’t a place for us,’ Tibo muttered.
‘What?’ Medoc did not break his stride. ‘What did you say, boy? Keep up, keep up.’
‘I said,’ he called, shouting over the noise, ‘we shouldn’t be up here. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Nonsense. Though I can’t remember the mountain being quite as restive as this before. Maybe nobody in the world has seen what we’re seeing! We are explorers, like Kirike the ancient who found this island, and then crossed the ocean to be the first to the Land of the Sky Wolf.’
‘We’re not explorers.’
‘Nonsense! Anyhow it’s just a little further to the summit. We can’t turn back now…’
Tibo slowed, and walked alongside Caxa. ‘Are you all right?’
The Jaguar girl walked on doggedly, keeping up the pace, coated with ash, grey as a corpse. ‘My people too live in the shadow of fire mountains. We run from the heat, not towards it.’
‘So do we — most of us — most of the time…’ He saw that she was staring at flickers of flame that emerged from the rocks. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘About fire. Keeps you warm. But too close, you burn. Yes? And even as it warms, cold on your back. The unending cold, just beyond.’ She shivered.
‘You are…’ He had no idea how to say what he wanted to say, in words she might understand. ‘You have many layers.’
‘Layers?’
‘I see a fire. You see life and death. All in the same thing. Maybe that’s why you’re a sculptor. You think strange thoughts, with layers.’
She grabbed his arm. Her grip, through his sleeve, was surprisingly strong, the grip of a sculptor, belying the slenderness of her body, her thin face. ‘Let me stay.’
‘What?’
‘Not go with Xivu. Not back to land of Jaguar.’
He was bewildered, a rush of emotions flooding him — fear of the consequences of this, a kind of tenderness that this girl should ask him for help. ‘They need you there, don’t they? Who else can carve the King’s face? And before that you have to go to Northland, for the Annid.’
Caxa said softly, ‘Sculpture finished, Caxa finished, I die.’ She shivered, despite the heat of the fire mountain.
He didn’t know what to say. He had no idea how he could help her.
‘Aha!’ Medoc had reached the summit. He stood silhouetted against a wall of rising steam, hands on hips, panting hard.
Tibo clambered up the last few paces, with Caxa at his side — and faced a bowl of fire. It was a wound in the summit of the mountain, deep-walled. A kind of liquid pooled in it, red hot and crusted over with a black scum that crackled and creaked as it flowed. Plumes of fire rose up, and sprays of hot rock, cooling as they fell. Steam rose from cracks in the rock at the rim of the containing bowl. The noise was different now, like huge, fast exhalations — chuff, chuff, chuff. There was a sense of huge energies, as if they stood on the shoulder of some immense, angry animal.
Medoc laughed, exhilarated. ‘I’ve never seen the like — never seen it before, or heard of it. It’s one for the grandchildren, Tibo.’
Tibo turned around so he looked down the flank of the mountain, to the lower land below with its pockets of forest and farmland, and then the line of the coast, the impossible blue of the sea beyond. ‘We should go back.’
Medoc shook his head. ‘Sometimes you sound like your grandmother.’
The ground shuddered. Caxa grabbed Tibo’s arm.
There was a tremendous bang, and a rush of boiling-hot air hurled Tibo backwards.
20
The party led by Noli and Bren was not alone in being late to get to the Chamber of the Solstice Noon.
As they clambered up the staircases scratched into the face of the Wall, people crowded with a kind of stiff dignity, all trying to get to the ceremonial hall before the crucial moment of midday arrived. And it was an exotic crush, Milaqa thought. In among the robed seniors of the Houses of Etxelur there were representatives of many of the Wall’s own Districts, and country folk from Northland in simpler shifts, and foreigners, men from the Albia forests in their bearskins and bull’s-head caps, and women from the World River estuary in seal skin, and men dressed much like Qirum, as warriors or princes of the eastern empires, with armour and helmets adorned with horns and plumes and bones. Milaqa wondered if there were more of them than usual; maybe the drought had driven them here in hope of a dole of Kirike-fish or potato for their starving peoples. Some of the more elderly or overweight nobles, having trouble with the stairs, were carried in litters, and the big structures with their teams of sweating, stumbling bearers only added to the crowding and confusion.
Milaqa was relieved when they finally got to the Chamber. This was a wide, shallow room, entirely contained within the structure of the Wall. The room was already crowded, and above a murmur of conversation in a dozen tongues Milaqa heard the sing-song chanting of a priest, and the rhythmic rattle of a shaker. The place was lit by whale-oil lamps burning in brackets, and daylight admitted by a single shaft that pierced the smooth-faced
