yesterday, and we thank the mothers for their deliverance.
‘There are other nestspills here too, members of the family. Where are you, Barra?’ A man stood up, short, stooped, smiling.
Tibo found he didn’t like being called a ‘nestspill’, and lumped in with all these others.
‘So here we are,’ Teel said. ‘We’re family, we’re here to help each other, in these hard times. We will find homes for you all. Ways for you to live. So — who has the first question?’
Deri stood up. ‘Where is everybody? I never saw so few people on the land, working the waterways and wetlands. Even half the houses seem empty.’
Hadhe stood up in turn. ‘It’s the weather. We’ve had no sunlight.’
‘Yes,’ somebody said, a gruff man’s voice. ‘Not since your fire mountain spewed up all that cloud into the air.’
Your fire mountain. The phrase made Tibo flinch. It wasn’t his mountain. It had killed his grandfather. But nobody else reacted, and the moment was lost.
Teel answered calmly, talking about the weather. After the fire mountain it had been cold, bitterly so for the summer, and hail and rain had lashed the land. Plants had been battered flat, trees had lost their leaves early and had brought forth wizened nuts and fruit, and animals had become skinny or had starved altogether as they had nibbled at the sparse grass.
‘This is why we came to Northland,’ called the man, Barra. ‘We had a farm on the north coast of Kirike’s Land. We weren’t badly affected by the fire mountain itself, but the early hail flattened our crops, which weren’t growing anyhow. We could have starved over the winter.’ He had a weather-beaten face, and looked like a practical man, a man of common sense. ‘Crops must be failing all over, if the cloud extends right across the Continent, and I haven’t heard anybody say that it doesn’t. The Greeks, the Hatti, the Egyptians — what about them? They already had drought and famine, so I hear. I can’t imagine what it will be like if their summer is as bad as ours.’
A priest stood up, in a loose cloak of wolfskin. It was Riban, the cousin who had treated Tibo’s burns. ‘He’s right. The Swallows and Jackdaws have brought back reports to confirm it.’
‘And you Wolves,’ called out a man, ‘ought to be in your houses smoking your strange weeds and praying to the little mother of the sky to spare us.’
‘Believe me,’ the priest said, ‘we are.’
Teel stood. ‘To answer your question, Deri, this is why there are so few people around in Etxelur. People are out in the country, fishing, hunting, trawling the rivers for eel, looking for decent stands of hazelnut and acorns…’
This was how people lived here. They didn’t farm; they didn’t raise crops or livestock. They lived off the land, off Northland itself, and there were few enough of them to be able to do that. And when hard times came they just journeyed a little further into their bountiful country, dug a little deeper into its wealth of resources. At least they had a chance to survive a few bad seasons, where farmers would have none when their reserves were gone.
Soon the discussion turned to the future of the nestspills. Listening, Tibo got the impression that everybody was saying: ‘You are welcome but…’ But we have to feed our own children first. But you can’t have my job, as a Beaver or a Vole or a Swallow or a Jackdaw. But the fire mountain was on your island, on Kirike’s Land, and maybe you should have stayed there and dealt with the consequences rather than come here and take up our space.
‘Our grandmothers started out as Beetles, the whole lot of them,’ one woman said earnestly. ‘There’s always work there. Scraping the canals…’
Tibo had had enough. He muttered an apology to Milaqa and Deri, stood, and walked out.
He found his way out through gloomy corridors to a gallery cut into the Wall’s face, looking out on a fading day. Was this the gallery he’d been in before? Had they come from left or right? He wasn’t used to this kind of vertical landscape. But he could surely find his way down — or, indeed, up. Impulsively he set off, picking a direction at random. He came to an up stair, then went along another gallery carved into the growstone and curtained over with skin door flaps, and then a down stair that he ignored, and another going up..
He emerged from the last stair onto the roof of the Wall itself. The western sky flared red, a sunset gathering despite the invisibility of the sun itself. This upper surface was empty save for a line of monuments — and one man some paces away, stocky, gesturing, exercising with a sword.
To the south, Tibo’s left, Northland stretched away, the ground maybe fifty paces straight down. And to the north there was the restless ocean, its surface only a few paces beneath him. Standing on this Wall that divided two elements, the mass of the ocean looming over the peaceful land, the world seemed unbalanced to Tibo. Suddenly he felt as if the whole Wall was tipping, and he staggered.
‘Careful.’
Tibo looked around. It was the man who had been exercising; his sword was a long blade of beaten bronze.
‘What?’
‘ Careful. Is that word not right? My Etxelur-speak is still poor. Don’t fall off the Wall. One way, you drown. Other way, you crack your skull like an egg.’ He laughed.
He was older than Tibo, perhaps in his twenties. He wore a tunic under a bronze breastplate. His accent was thick, his words barely understandable. Tibo had never met anybody like this man in his life. ‘What are you, a Greek?’
The man looked at him long and hard. Then he spat into the sea, over the rim of the Wall. ‘I like you. That’s why I won’t cut off your ears for that insult. I am no ugly Greek. Can’t you tell? I am Trojan. And you? Northlander?’
‘I was born on Kirike’s Land.’
‘Where? Oh, the fire mountain island.’ He eyed Tibo gravely. ‘Was it bad?’
‘I am alive. My name is Tibo. I have come to be with my family here.’
The Trojan nodded. ‘I am Qirum. I have come to do business with the Annids. How is my Etxelur talk?’
‘Better than my Trojan.’
Qirum boomed laughter. ‘You don’t seem happy to be with your family. Why?’
‘They keep calling me a nestspill.’ He had to explain the word to the Trojan.
‘What’s wrong with that? You are a nestspill.’
‘In our Etxelur tongue the word is also used for a baby bird that has fallen from its nest.’
‘Ah,’ said Qirum. ‘Something helpless that you would pity — or crush under your heel.’
‘Yes. And I’m not helpless,’ Tibo said.
Qirum looked him over. ‘I can see that. So what do you want, nestspill?’
He said fiercely, ‘Not to scrape the muck out of canals, that’s for sure.’
‘Ha! Nor would I. Good for you.’ He returned to his exercising. He struck a pose, legs apart, worked the sword in a slash and vertical chop — then spun around and faced imaginary assailants coming from behind.
‘So why are you here?’ Tibo said.
‘I told you. Business.’
‘What business?’
‘Not sure yet. Everybody’s waiting. It’s all been changed by the fire mountain.’ He looked up at the grey sky. ‘No sun, you see. If it’s the same at home, then there will be trouble, even worse than before. Famine. People moving, whole populations. Towns emptying, cities being sacked. Maybe even Hattusa, Troy — what’s left of it. Difficult times for trade. Northland will be affected too,’ Qirum mused. ‘But Northland was divided anyway.’
‘Divided?’
‘Somebody killed the Annid of Annids.’
‘She was my relative. My aunt. I think.’
‘Was she?’ The Trojan shrugged. ‘The man who got her killed was exposed. Now he’s disgraced. Gone. But the woman he put in to replace your aunt — she’s still there! And nothing’s happening. No decisions being made. Everybody’s just waiting under the cold sky. So I don’t know what my business will be. But,’ he said, eyeing Tibo, ‘this is a time of opportunity, for a strong man, a clever man. When cities are falling at one end of the world, and the great power at the other end is locked in a struggle with itself.’
Tibo found these obscure words tremendously exciting. ‘What kind of opportunity?’
Qirum grinned easily. Then the sunset flared brighter, and he turned west to face it.
The sky had cleared a little, and was full of colours. Above a yellowish band around the position of the sun
