with a casual flick.
Caxa’s face loomed over him, streaked with ash and dirt. Her right cheek was blistered, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose, dripping from the jade bead stuck in there. She pulled at his shoulder. ‘Hurt? You can walk?’
His spine had been bent backward over his pack. When he tried to rise his head pounded, with a sharp ache at the back of his skull from the blow from the rock or tree stump that had knocked him out. But he was able to sit up.
And he saw the ridge-summit of the Hood, only paces away. Steam and smoke thrust up into the air all along the ridge, studded with flecks glowing white-hot. That angry chuffing rock-breath noise had gone now, to be replaced by a continuing, deafening roar. He could feel the dry blistering heat on his face and hands, and when he took a breath it seared his throat. Ash washed down, falling like grey snowflakes. He watched, bemused, as the flakes drifted in the air, almost beautiful.
‘Tibo, come!’
‘Yes.’ He struggled to his feet and tried to think. Down, down — they had to get away from this summit — down was the way to go. Down to the sea. He imagined immersing himself in the sea’s cool, clear saltiness, washing away this searing dust. And his father would be there, waiting with his boat. He would take Caxa to the sea.
But there was something missing. A gap in his head. Somebody else. Medoc.
He looked around. Further down the slope old Medoc was lying on his front like a beached dolphin, groaning with pain. Tibo grabbed Caxa’s hand. ‘Come on.’
Medoc had fallen over a shattered tree stump, and an ash-coated splinter had neatly run through the fleshy part of his upper thigh. Tibo could see the point sticking out. Blood dripped onto the ash-covered ground, brilliant red against the grey.
Medoc waved them away, wincing with pain. ‘No! Get away. Leave me here. Look, you can see what I’ve done to my leg…’
Caxa knelt over him and inspected his injury. ‘Not bad,’ she said to Tibo.
‘You know how to treat injuries?’ he asked, surprised.
‘Sculptors — always big rocks falling over, sharp flakes flying — injuries all the time. Father helped me learn.’
‘So what do we do?’
Caxa slipped her hands under Medoc’s injured thigh, to either side of the tree splinter. ‘You get foot.’ Tibo moved around and cupped his hands under Medoc’s ankle. ‘We lift together.’
Tibo nodded.
Medoc raged, his face a mask of grey ash streaked with blood. ‘You don’t owe me anything — I’m the fool who brought you up here, all the way to the gates of the underworld, and now look what’s happening-’
‘On three. One, two — three!’
They both lifted, jerking the leg up and away from the splinter, with a rip of flesh as the leg caught on some barb, and Medoc screamed. But the leg was free, and he rolled on his back. Caxa took a stone blade from the belt at her waist, hacked a strip of ash-grimed linen from her tunic, and wrapped it around the wound. The cloth instantly stained dark crimson, but there was no life-threatening flow; this was not the wound that would kill Medoc. The bit of wood that had done so much damage stuck out of the ground, mute. As Tibo watched, swirling ash settled on it, covering it over, flake by grey flake, the ash sticking to the drying blood.
Somehow Caxa got Medoc up off the ground. He was leaning on her, his arm over her shoulders, his good leg planted firmly on the ground.
Tibo wrapped his arm around Medoc’s waist. ‘Down. We have to go down to the sea.’
Caxa grunted, nodded. Together they stumbled down the slope, helping Medoc.
The ash thickened, becoming a kind of blizzard of burning flakes. They wrapped their cloaks around their heads, leaving only slits for their eyes. Tibo’s lungs strained at air that was hot and smoky and stinking of sulphur. He could barely see his footing.
And again the ground shuddered, and there was a deep rocky groan, as if the mountain itself were struggling to wake from some nightmare.
In the little community called The Black, Vala was in her house — or rather Okea’s house. As the sister of Medoc’s dead wife Bel, Okea was Medoc’s oldest surviving female relative, and that was the way property was owned and inherited here, as in Northland. It was a warm day, midsummer’s day, not long after noon. The house’s hide door was thrown open to the southern light, and while everybody else was out at the Giving, Vala was taking the chance to get some work done. She used a mortar and pestle to grind up meat and boiled potato to make the soft stew that Puli liked, her second son with Medoc and her youngest child, two years old and a fussy eater since he’d been teething. It was a stew that old Okea sucked up by the bowlful too, cursing her broken teeth. Puli himself lay peacefully sleeping in his wrap on the floor at her side.
As the booms came from the fire mountain, Puli barely stirred, but Vala was increasingly uneasy.
Okea’s house had been one of the first to be built in this little settlement, and so it was in a favoured position on a stretch of high ground just before the great platform of black rock that had given the place its name. Sitting cross-legged just inside the house’s south-facing door, Vala could see a long way, over a swathe of landscape, with its clumps of birch forest and scattered farmsteads, the fires of the fisher folk smoking their catch down by the small harbour, and then the sea beyond, bright and blue and glittering. But today there was a haze over the sea, and a kind of orange tinge to the sky.
And now that big boom earlier, the more or less continuous rumbling since. What did it mean?
Mi and Liff came bustling up the slope. Mi held a rough rubber ball in her hand, a gift from the Jaguar people, a sacred token that always ended up in the hands of the kids. Liff was complaining noisily. ‘Mother, she took it off me, she took the ball.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t come home otherwise-’
‘We were playing round-the-houses! I was winning, and she just grabbed it and came in. Mother, tell her-’ He grabbed at the ball. Mi held it up, out of his reach.
Liff, ten years old, was Vala’s first child with Medoc. And Mi, twelve, was Vala’s daughter by her dead husband back in Northland. She was nearly as tall as Vala herself now, on the cusp of womanhood, but she was still enough of a kid to play. Both of them looked hot, over-excited maybe by all the fun of midsummer day, with the Giving and the bladder feast to come. But Mi looked concerned, her small, pretty face pinched.
With a sigh Vala put down her mortar and pestle. ‘So what’s this all about?’
‘She was cheating.’
‘I wasn’t. I had to make him come in. Vala, you should come out and see. Pithi and her family, and Adhao and all those nephews and nieces of his-’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re going.’
‘Going where? What do you mean, going?’
‘They’re just packing up their stuff and walking away. Down towards the coast. That’s why I stopped playing with you, stupid!’
‘All right, Mi.’
‘I thought we should come back here.’
‘That sounds sensible,’ came a voice from the gloomy house. Old Okea came shuffling forward, leaning heavily on the stick of Albian oak Medoc had carved for her. She looked oddly caved in, Vala thought, with her white-streaked hair around a weather-beaten face, her empty dugs, her knees and hips ruined by a life of hard labour. She was forty-eight years old. ‘And I’ll take the ball.’ She took it in one claw of a hand and dropped it into one of the voluminous leather bags hanging from her waist. ‘That way nobody’s cheating, yes?’
Vala looked at the older woman. ‘Everybody’s leaving, she says.’
‘Not everybody,’ said Mi.
‘Let’s take a look for ourselves.’ Okea shuffled towards the light. She glanced down at Puli as she passed, dismissive. ‘He’ll keep for a moment.’
Vala pushed down her resentment. It galled her to be subservient to an old woman who probably wouldn’t be alive if not for the support Vala gave her. But she was her husband’s sister, and this was Okea’s house, and this was the Northland way. She checked on her child for herself, then stepped out of the house after the others.
