Despite the smoke and ash in the air the day was brilliant, and she blinked in the light. The community of The Black was just a dozen houses around a hearthspace of trodden earth, characteristic Northland, though the farmers’ small fields of potatoes and the penned cattle nearby were not. Today timber and turf had been heaped up at the centre of the hearthspace, in anticipation of the evening’s bonfire. And, as Mi had said, people were moving, coming out of the houses carrying children and food and bundles of clothes and tools. One man was loading up a cart to be hauled by an ox. Others, evidently meaning to stay put, hung around outside their houses or in their doorways, watching the rest, and staring at the sky to the north.
Liff turned that way and pointed. ‘ Look, mother.’
Vala turned and saw a pillar of smoke, rising to the sky. It was dark at its base, where it billowed and bubbled like the boiling mud of a hot spring. Further up, she had to tilt back her head to see, it became paler, fading almost to white, as it spread out across the sky like the branches of a tree. The cloud loomed over the mountain, the settlement, perhaps the whole island. It seemed much taller than before.
What did it mean?
‘I can see fire,’ Liff said. ‘Bits of red and white shooting up.’
‘I suppose you thought it was a thunderstorm,’ Okea said to Vala.
Vala bit back a quick response. Okea never missed a chance to get in a dig at Medoc’s new wife, a woman from what she saw as the soft country of Northland, which didn’t have any mountains at all. ‘No, Okea. I’ve been here eleven years, you know.’ Since Medoc had met her, newly widowed, at an equinoctial gathering in Etxelur. ‘And I’ve spent those years listening to that mountain grumble and burp. No, I knew it wasn’t a storm. The question is what to do about it.’ She didn’t know the behaviour of fire mountains well enough to be sure. She looked again at the adults with bundles of goods, and the children and dogs running at their feet, excited in this break in the routine.
Should they leave? She thought about her little family, Mi and Liff, two squabbling, resentful children, her infant asleep in the house, an old woman who could barely walk. It was a typical family on Kirike’s Land, or in Northland, widows and orphans, grandmothers and grandchildren, bits of broken families welded together as you might make a new sword from scraps of bronze. Now she was responsible for them all. She tried to make a mental list of all they’d have to carry for them to last two, three nights on foot or in a boat — the food, the clothes. And then there would be the walk itself, everybody weary, squabbling, the baby crying, the old lady hobbling… If only Medoc was here! But of course he was gone, off up the mountain itself, and Deri, Medoc’s son, was out on his boat somewhere, no doubt chewing the fat with his fishing companions, and laying bets on how tall the cloud would grow.
Okea was gazing at her, waiting for a decision.
She swallowed her pride. ‘Okea — I’ve never seen the mountain this bad. What do you think? Should we walk, or should we stay?’
There was a flash of triumph in Okea’s rheumy eyes. But the old woman turned away, looked at the cloud, sniffed the air. ‘Hard to say. I was only a little girl the last time it was really bad. Not much older than Puli in his swaddling. Such a fuss, walking. I would be a burden to you, I know that. The kids too. And Medoc wouldn’t know where we were.’ She started to shuffle back to the house. ‘Maybe it will blow over. It always has before. Let’s wait for Medoc. Besides, I’ve got my sewing to finish, and you have that cooking, you don’t want it to spoil.’
‘What about Xivu, the Jaguar man?’
‘Oh, he went off with the first families to leave,’ Mi said. ‘He didn’t wait to be asked!’
Vala glanced south again, at the calm sea, the litter of fishing boats. Everything seemed normal, if you looked away from the mountain. ‘All right,’ she said to Okea. ‘Come on into the house, kids — you can keep Puli amused while I finish the stew.’
Mi came willingly enough, but Liff hung back. He was holding out his hands. Small flakes of grey were settling on his palms.
When she looked up, Vala saw ash raining down, thickening all the time.
From Deri’s boat, the cloud rising from the Hood was an extraordinary sight. With the island itself a stripe of grey-brown on the horizon, you could easily see the sheer scale of the cloud, like an immense tree of steam and smoke that had taken root in Kirike’s Land. And after the noon blast, which from here had sounded like drawn-out thunder, the cloud had grown bigger yet, and it had spread out sideways, feathering.
Deri and Nago were out on the ocean to the south of Kirike’s Land, just the two of them in a hide boat big enough for eight rowers. They had set off at dawn, loaded up with nets and wicker baskets and bait for the fishing. It was midsummer, the weather was calm, the seas should have been jumping with cod, and Deri had been looking forward to a long, fruitful day, just him and Nago out on the boat. And as Nago, a distant cousin of Deri’s, kept his mouth shut most of the time, it would be a quiet one too, a break from the noisy chaos of his father’s household, the kids and dogs everywhere — not to mention the midsummer celebrations.
But the catch had been poor. Maybe it was because of the booms from the mountain, the faint whiff of sulphur you could smell even out here, the tremors that made the sea itself shiver and froth. Maybe the fish had been scared away. And now that cloud just grew and grew.
‘So,’ Deri said, at some point long after noon. ‘Do you think we should go back in?’
Nago sat at his end of the boat. He was thin, with a cadaverous face with sunken cheeks and a nose like a crow’s beak. His habit of staying motionless for long periods of time made you wonder if he was awake at all, or even still alive. Deri had never known such an incurious man. But Nago had lived all his days on the island, and he ought to know its mountains and their fiery moods better than Deri. At last, having thought hard about Deri’s question, he shrugged. ‘Why should we?’
Deri found it hard to say. Because the tide and winds might be wrong, on such a strange day as this. Because he had a vision of Medoc and Okea and Vala and the kids, and Tibo, all watching the cloud, waiting for him.
Perhaps for once Nago understood Deri’s mood. ‘They’ll be all right,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘The family. I mean, your father went up the mountain yesterday with Tibo and that Jaguar girl, didn’t he? Medoc’s older than you and me put together. If he thinks it’s safe, then it’s safe.’ Nago glanced at their meagre catch in the bilge. ‘Anyway we haven’t got enough fish yet.’ He slid back until he was lying on a heap of netting in the prow of the boat, and closed his eyes.
He was probably right. Deri determined to stop fretting.
But that cloud spread higher and wider across the sky. It was feathering to the west now. Soon it drifted across the face of the sun, which dimmed to a silvery disc. The whole sky began to take on a strange, glowing green tinge.
Then ash began to fall, a gentle rainfall of fine dust and a few heavier flakes. It settled on the boat and gathered in scummy swirls on the sea itself. This kept up until everything, the boat itself, the fish in the bilge, the bare skin of the sleeping Nago, was stained pale grey, the colour leaching out.
And then, in mid-afternoon, the mountain gave a second shout, even louder than the one at noon. Deri thought he felt a kind of concussion in his chest. An even greater volume of black smoke began pouring from the mouth of the tortured mountain, feeding the huge spreading cloud above. And it seemed to him that even as it mushroomed higher, its lower layers were beginning to descend, to fall back to the island.
Nago grumbled in his sleep, and spat ash out of his open mouth.
22
The mountain’s second shout hit Tibo like a punch in the back. He was knocked sprawling, on his face this time, and went slithering down the ash-strewn slope.
He looked back over his shoulder at Caxa and Medoc. Somehow they had stayed on their feet, Medoc leaning heavily on the Jaguar girl, the two of them stumbling clumsily down the slope. Tibo saw this in glimmers of daylight under a sky that was turning black as night, with the ash falling all around. When they reached Tibo they both slumped to the ground.
Medoc cried out as his wounded leg was twisted again. Then he pulled his pack around his neck in search of a water sack. ‘I remember the last time the Hood blew its top — I was a boy — the ash came down on the fields.
