We tried to keep the cattle off it, but you can’t stop them eating the grass. They came down with a kind of murrain. Within a day they couldn’t walk, and in a few days they died. Nothing we could do.’
Caxa, breathing hard, lay on her back, her arms and legs splayed. That seemed a good idea to Tibo. He sat down and lay on his back, his head swimming. He felt as if he had not properly woken up since the first shout at the summit had knocked him unconscious. As if the whole day was a nightmare.
‘We said we’d always remember,’ Medoc was saying now, in his droning old man’s voice. ‘The priests wrote it down. Remember what to do with the cattle when the ash falls… No! Get up!’ Medoc limped over to Tibo and began shaking him. ‘Tibo, son! Get up! You’ll die if you lie there.’
Tibo pushed him away, annoyed. ‘Get off me.’
‘Help me with her. The girl.’ Medoc crawled over, slithering over the ground like a slug, his bad leg leaving a trail of blood in the ash. ‘Come on, Tibo!’
So Tibo sat up, and his chest ached, his head swam some more. He leaned over Caxa, dug his hands under her armpits, and with what was left of his strength hauled her to her feet. The girl coughed and shuddered, looking around blearily, her face drained of blood under her mask of ash.
‘I saw it before,’ Medoc said. ‘The last time. Especially on the lower ground, in hollows. The cattle lie down in there and just die. Maybe something comes out of the ground.’
Tibo said, ‘Well, we’re not dead yet-’
There was a scream, coming out of the sky, like the cry of some bird of prey. They ducked instinctively. Tibo glimpsed something falling, trailing smoke. A rock smashed to the ground only a few paces away, shattering, spilling red-hot fragments.
Caxa stared, and said something in her own tongue.
More unearthly shrieks. Tibo looked up through layers of billowing smoke to see more glowing rocks flying in the air, each a red-hot mass within a black crust. They landed at random, making the ground shudder with each impact.
‘We must go,’ he said. He got his arm around Medoc’s waist, and Caxa took his other side. They hurried on down the mountainside, slithering and stumbling.
‘Faster,’ Medoc urged them. ‘Faster!’
As the afternoon wore on the column of smoke and ash climbed and broadened until it covered the sky over the village, blocking out the light altogether, and darkness closed in.
People came out of their houses, those who had remained. Some carried torches of burning reed and lamps. The sun itself was only faintly visible, dropping down the sky to the southwest, a pale disc intermittently visible through scudding clouds of smoke, but there was light around the horizon, an eerie yellow-green. It was an extraordinary sight, on what was the longest day of the year — it was oddly exciting, a world transformed. The big bonfire was lit early. The kids ran around in the ash fall, chased by the dogs. From Adhao’s house, one man produced a flute of carved bone that he began to play, and the children danced around the bonfire. There was talk of starting the roast for the Giving. Half the village had fled, but there would be that much more for those who remained.
Then the pebbles started to fall from the sky.
At first it was a novelty. The little stones fell in a sparse rain, coming down through the ash, pattering to the ground. The children, amazed, ran around trying to catch them.
Vala picked one up, a disc shape the size of her palm. It was pale, full of broken bubbles, remarkably light.
‘Fire-mountain rock,’ Okea said, at her elbow. ‘We collect it. It’s the stuff you use for scraping dead skin off your heels.’
Vala had never known where that useful rock had come from. The sky!
The fall grew harder, and began to cover the ground. Soon the rock was ankle deep, and it fell with a steady hiss. Vala began to grow uncomfortable at the hail of impacts on her head and shoulders. The children, still excited, kicked and scooped the heaps of the stuff that started to gather. Then a child cried out as a heavier piece knocked her to the ground, leaving a splash of blood on her forehead. Her mother swept her up and hurried into her house.
Vala snapped, ‘Mi. Puli. In the house, now.’
The children came running as best they could, pushing through the layer of warm pebbles.
Inside the house Vala picked up little Puli in his swaddling, and they gathered around the hearth, the fire not yet lit. Okea lit lamps, and handed out dried fish to the older children. She moved calmly, as if determined not to frighten the children. Vala felt a surge of gratitude. The woman had been a mother herself, after all.
And all the time the rock poured from the sky, hammering on the sloping thatch roof.
Out at sea the bits of rock fell all afternoon. Deri and Nago pulled their tunics over their heads, but the rock pounded their bare shoulders and legs, and it gathered on the water, rock floating like ice, forming floes that scraped against the boat’s hull as they tried to row. The sun was hidden, the sky black save at the horizon. It was a nightmarish journey, without end.
They had to stop again to bail the boat, not of water, but of rock fragments that had gathered in the bilge. The larger ones were warm to the touch. As he shovelled, Deri looked over his shoulder. While they were rowing he had to turn his back on Kirike’s Land. Now he was shocked by its transformation. The island was almost entirely obscured by the monstrous, blooming cloud. Deri thought he could see flame shooting up from the ground as if from a tremendous bonfire. And lightning flared in the cloud itself, sparking, filling it with a purplish light.
‘Ouch.’ Nago, his tunic wrapped neatly around his head, picked a bit of black rock from a crater burned into his skin, and regarded it between thumb and forefinger with curiosity, before flicking it over the side. ‘That’s new. That one burned me. If this rock fall continues we might end up walking all the way back.’
Deri laughed. ‘You’re one of the strangest men I ever met, cousin. But I think I could be stuck out here with worse companions.’
‘I wish I could say the same about you.’
Another red-hot pellet fell, and embedded itself in the boat hull. Deri beat it out with his hand.
But another fell. And another. The men had to use bilge water cupped in their hands to douse the red-hot cinders before they could set fire to the boat, and shook scorching fragments off their bare skin.
Wood cracked. From outside the house came a crumpling noise, a cry of pain.
Liff rushed to the doorway, peering out through the continuing rock hail. ‘It’s Pithi’s house! It’s fallen down!’
Vala came to see. The disaster was only dimly visible through the rock fall, people pushing out of the debris with their arms over their heads, sheltering infants under their bodies.
Okea was at her side. ‘We can’t sit here until this house falls in too.’
‘No.’
‘We must go to the harbour. Maybe we can find a boat — Deri might be there.’
‘But Medoc and the others-’
‘There’s nothing we can do for them,’ Okea said.
‘We could have done this half a day ago,’ Vala said, anger and fear turning to resentment. ‘When the mountain first shouted.’
Okea was not perturbed. ‘We can argue about whose fault it was later. I will try to help you with the children. But you can see how it is with me. If you choose to go without me-’
‘No,’ Vala said. ‘We all go. But the falling rock — we’ll need some kind of cover.’
‘My ox-hide,’ said Okea. ‘If we hold it over us — you, me, the girl — perhaps that will be enough.’
So they got ready. Vala had the children don their best leather leggings, and they all strapped water bottles to their waists. Mi took her favourite bow, made of good Kirike’s Land ash, and slung it over her shoulder. Vala picked up a whining Puli, and tied him to her chest inside a spare tunic knotted behind her back.
Then they formed up into a tight group, Vala in the lead, Mi at the back, Okea and Liff between them, with the ox-hide spread over their heads, and they pushed out into the unnatural dark. The rock fell on the thick leather with a roar, and its weight made them stagger. But it was not the fresh-falling rock that was the worst problem but the layer of it on the ground. It was already over Vala’s knees, almost up to poor Liff’s waist. It was all they could do to wade forward through the heavy, rasping stuff, each step an exhausting shove. Okea seemed barely able to walk at all. They couldn’t speak, the roar of the rock on their ox-hide was too great for that, and there was nobody
