Deri shouted at Vala, ‘Okea? My father?’
Vala just shook her head, her lips tight. Deri turned away, and kept driving to the sea, through the crowd.
Soon they were in the water. It deepened quickly, and Tibo had to help Liff half-wade, half-swim. When they reached the boat it was surrounded by a loose crowd of people, a dozen or more, struggling to stand in the turbulent water. Nago, kneeling up in the boat, was wielding his oar, keeping them at bay. When he saw Deri and the others he leaned over and started hauling them out and into the boat, one by one. Vala flopped into the bilge like a landed cod, and she took her soaked child from Deri’s arms.
Deri grabbed Tibo’s shoulder, and hauled him in so he landed face down. ‘Oars,’ Deri said, taking his own place. ‘Go, Nago! You, Tibo — Caxa, Mi — you too, Liff, if you can handle an oar — take one, they’re in the bottom of the boat.’
Tibo quickly found a place between Vala and Mi. Nago, paddling furiously, had already got the boat turned so it faced away from the land. Tibo got his oar into the rowlock, and started pulling, with muscles already spent by the day’s exertions. At first their rowing was uncoordinated and they splashed more than they pulled, but to frantic commands from Deri and Nago they soon worked into a rhythm, and the boat pushed through a surface skim of rock, out towards the open sea.
Tibo, rowing hard, looked back at the land. That glowing cloud, now a wall of churning red-hot dust and rubble that spanned the world, was scouring down the hillside to the beach. People ran, making for the sea in a final panic, but the cloud swallowed them. Erased them. And soon it was rolling over the water.
He rowed and rowed and rowed.
24
It did not grow dark that midsummer night in Northland, though the light sank to a deep grey-blue. A phenomenon of this strange northern place, Qirum supposed. Yet to the west there was a deeper darkness, a smear of black as if a pot of pitch had been spilled. Qirum fancied he could see a spark of fire at the heart of it, right on the horizon, or beyond it.
He saw all this from the Wall, its roof, a walkway studded with huge stone slabs and the tremendous carved heads of dead Annids. Tonight beacons burned bright, all along the Wall’s length to left and right as far as he could see. Senior members of all Northland’s great Houses were up here, from the Annids to the lowly Beetles, still in their Giving finery. All of them anxiously looked west, watching the sea. And on the breast of that ocean were more lights, sparks on blue-black infinity. Boats with lanterns and beacons of their own.
‘You could not sleep.’
He turned. Kilushepa stood by him, dressed in a long, warm cloak, her hand on her belly. ‘Nor you, it seems,’ he said.
‘Too much commotion. Shouting, running, all along the Wall.’
‘It is the great event in the ocean.’ He pointed to the spreading black cloud. ‘The Annids think it is a mountain of fire, far off to the west. On an island called Kirike’s Land.’
‘If it is so far away, why are the Northlanders so alarmed?’
‘Because great events on land can cause similarly great calamities at sea,’ Qirum said. ‘This is as Milaqa explained it to me. There will be a ripple, if you will. But a ripple that might challenge all these people have built. Great Seas, they call them; there have been two, as far as I know. These events are embedded deep in their memories, their culture, their sense of who they are. And so they have their beacons, and the lightships out to sea. If the wave comes the distant ships will flash a warning back to the land.’
She frowned. ‘Will their Wall not keep out the wave?’
‘One would hope so. But even if not they have fallback plans. They open watercourses, abandon the lower ground — make ready to soak up the flood.’
‘I suppose we would have to flee.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I just found out I’m pregnant.’
He turned to her, astonished. For a heartbeat he wondered if it could be his — but no, they had always been careful about that, she had taken him in her mouth or her anus, or they had used her protective calfskin sheathes. A brat forced on her by some faceless Hatti soldier, then. And she was the Tawananna!
He laughed.
She glared out to sea.
The breeze shifted, coming from the west, and he thought he could smell burning.
TWO
25
The Year of the Fire Mountain: Late Summer
Every day at least one of the family went up to the Wall roof to watch for Deri. Even months after midsummer there were always others up there too, friends and strangers waiting, staring out into the Northern Ocean. And all through that cold, dismal summer the nestspills had come in a trickle, sometimes just a single boat, sometimes little flotillas, packed with men, women, hungry children, sometimes even a few animals, drifting across a listless ocean and then drawing cautiously into the docks cut into the seaward face of the Wall.
On the day her uncle Deri came home, it happened to be Milaqa who was on watch. She was sheltering from the sharp breeze coming off the sea, unseasonably cold, and was wrapped up in a thick cloak she would normally not have dug out until the autumn. But this was a particularly cold spot, for she stood in a gap between one monolith and the next: the space where the monumental sculpture of her mother’s head would one day sit, Kuma Annid of Annids. Any boatload of her family would know to pull up to the small dock at this point.
When the boat came in, alone, a dark smudge against the grey sea, she recognised it long before it reached the Wall, its unusually slender form, the slight kink in the prow. No two boats were identical. Each boat in Northland was made by the people who would sail it, and their family and friends. The process of building itself was a happy event, shared. This was Deri’s boat, built before Milaqa was born, and her uncle had always taken her out to sea in it. The boat was like a memory from childhood, of sunlit days on the sea.
As she waited, her arms wrapped around her torso, the cloud seemed to grow thicker, the day a little colder. It had been this way all summer, since the fire mountain. When the haze of smoke and sulphur stink had cleared away the high cloud remained, a solid roof of grey over the world. Sometimes you could see the sun as a pale disc, silver-white, with shadowy wisps passing over its face, but more often than not even that was invisible. And in the night no star shone, and barely a glimmer of moonlight, though at full moon the queen of death made the sky glow silver-grey, as if in triumph. If the sunlight was shut out, so was its warmth. The first frost had come not a month after the midsummer. Everybody had stood about amazed at the sight, frost on thick summer grass, and on the green reeds in the marshlands. Milaqa thought she had never seen so many owls out in the twilight — and the swallows and swifts had already gone, fled south in search of warmth.
The boat came closer, resolving out of the mist that lay over the sea. Now she could see a handful of adults, one a woman with an infant strapped to her chest. Some of them worked at the oars, fairly coordinated but listlessly. She heard a man’s calm voice calling the strokes: Deri himself.
Milaqa picked up the sack of water skins she had carried up here on every watch, and climbed down the narrow staircase cut into the Wall’s sea face, down to the dock. The dock itself was just a notch in the growstone, crusted with barnacles and drying seaweed, but deep enough to take a boat like Deri’s. The crew saw Milaqa coming. Deri waved, and forced a smile. They all looked thin, dressed in ragged clothes stained grey or black.
The rowers shipped their oars, and used them to guide the boat into the little dock, pushing at the growstone. Milaqa threw a rope from a growstone bollard, and Deri tied it to the prow. Milaqa recognised Nago, a
