brushed his hand over the children’s pallets with their litter of toys, dolls, wooden swords. With his own sword in its scabbard on his back and his bronze breastplate on his chest, he looked as out of place in this domestic litter as if a wild aurochs had walked in. He watched her as she packed up her final bits: her bag, her tool belt with her sewing kit of bone needles and thread, her best bronze knife, dried meat, net for trapping birds, fire-making gear — flint, dried lichen and grass. He picked up a pad of sphagnum moss from the kit. ‘For treating cuts?’
‘Or wiping my backside.’
Scraps of fungus. ‘And these?’
‘From birch bark. For dressing wounds.’ She took the stuff from him, packed it into her belt and picked up her cloak.
‘You’ll rattle as you walk,’ he said.
‘Sooner that than go short,’ she snapped back. ‘Whereas you don’t need to carry anything but your sword, I suppose.’
‘That and my air of command.’ He laughed at his own joke, and pushed his way out into the light.
Raka gathered her party beneath the Wall, at the head of the great axial track called the Etxelur Way that ran dead south past Flint Island.
This was Raka’s big idea for the spring, that as many of the senior folk as possible from Etxelur should go see for themselves what was becoming of the country, in what the priests were already calling ‘the year betrayed by summer’. The sight of the Annids might reassure people, and would help inform the decision-making that had to follow. So, in this party, as well as other Annids there were senior members of most of the great Houses of Northland, the priests, the builders, the water workers. Many of the senior folk looked unhappy to be up and out on such a morning. It was near the equinox, but the sky was like a murky bowl, and there had been a sharp frost. Indeed, winter snow still lingered at the foot of the Wall, mounds of it hard as rock and covered with grime. Spring, but it felt like winter. Still, here they were, and even the highest of the high in Northland liked to keep her family close, and so the core of senior folk was surrounded by a gaggle of children, bundled up in their furs, who ran and played and chased yapping dogs, excited by the prospect of the walk ahead. Their noise lightened the mood.
Kilushepa was here, standing with the party around Raka. The regime of walks and other exercises she had undergone since the end of her pregnancy seemed to have done her good; she would always be tall, thin as a willow sapling, but she looked strong, determined. As Milaqa approached with Qirum, Trojan princeling and Hatti queen exchanged glances. Qirum and Kilushepa had barely spoken since that cold day with Milaqa on the Wall, they were evidently not lovers at present, but they remained bound by common interests.
Voro was here too. He was gaining seniority among the Jackdaws now that Bren was gone. But he wouldn’t meet Milaqa’s eye. Ever since Bren’s part in Kuma’s death had been revealed Voro had seemed consumed by guilt, even though it had not been him who had drawn the bow, even though he had nothing to do with Bren’s scheming. Milaqa treated this with contempt. Frosty relationships everywhere, she thought, on a frosty day.
A priest sounded a bronze trumpet.
Raka herself strode out along the track, and the rest followed, the seniors of the Houses murmuring gravely to each other, then a looser gang of family members, children and dogs. Their first destination would be a village by a marsh called the Houses of the Pine Martens.
In the lingering wintry weather, the world was struggling to come alive. There had been no swallows yet, and over the grasslands the male lapwings were still swooping and diving, desperately seeking the attention of mates. When the track cut through a patch of dense oak woodland Milaqa spotted the mouths of badger setts, littered with fresh spoil, as the animals cleaned out their underground homes and brought in fresh bedding in readiness for this year’s cubs. And in the lee of a fallen trunk a carpet of bluebells was growing, glowing with a strange underwater light. Milaqa was entranced. She had no idea how the flowers had managed to blossom in the sunless cold.
Teel came to walk beside her. ‘Quite a turn-out. All the great Houses represented.’
‘Including us Crows,’ she murmured.
He smiled. ‘Don’t try to fly out of the nest just yet, fledgling. It’s a big day for Raka. This expedition was her idea. She’s growing into the role. In the end the big loser of all Bren’s manipulations was Bren himself. Banished to Kirike’s Land… How he would long to be here!’
Growing into the role. Milaqa looked over at the new Annid of Annids. Bren’s niece seemed very young, only a few years older than Milaqa herself. After the outrage about Bren, nobody had seemed to know quite what to do about Raka, his protege. While the Annids dithered Raka had quietly started getting on with the job. And today, here were all the senior folk of Etxelur following Raka’s lead. Milaqa felt oddly jealous. She seemed to be surrounded by people of her age doing far better in their chosen roles than she was — Raka, Voro, Riban — even Hadhe, she’d heard it said, was being groomed for a role as an Annid. Suppose she had been dropped into such a position. Would she have been able to handle it as well as Raka? Or would she have cracked on her first day, and gone running to a Scambles tavern?
The track emerged from the forest. Now they were approaching the marsh where the folk of the Pine Martens’ Houses made their living. The oak and ash gave way to more water-tolerant trees like alders and willows, all bare in the grey sunless light, before they came to the grey gleam of open water.
Milaqa stopped at the water’s edge. At this time of year the new growths of rushes, herbs and sedge should be showing, and in the deeper water white water lilies and bulrushes, all emerging to greet the coming summer. But today there was only detritus on the water, the litter of last year’s life. Some of the children came to the edge of the water, searching fruitlessly for frog spawn or even tadpoles. Milaqa did see the round face and brown back of a water vole, peering from a clump of reeds. She thought it looked ragged, hungry.
She heard a grim muttering, and turned to see. The Annids and the other seniors were heading across the marsh along a raised walkway, to the scrap of higher land where the village itself stood. Milaqa hurried to follow.
And, from the causeway, she saw that the community’s houses had been burned and smashed to the ground. Even the drying racks for fish and eel lay broken. There was nobody in sight.
The Northlanders stood on the edge of the hearthspace, shocked. But Qirum strode boldly forward. He used the tip of his sword to lift fallen thatch, splintered timbers. He exposed a small storage chamber dug into the floor of one house; even that had been broken open, the shellfish and snails stolen.
And he found a severed human head, a child’s, apparently staring up at the sky, the skin of the face burned and blackened and shrunken.
They would not go on, or return to the Wall that night.
During what remained of the day, Raka showed quick and decisive leadership. She organised the men to construct lean-tos from the debris. The women and older children were set to gathering food from the marshland and the forest. The younger children were distracted by play.
Meanwhile the Annids and priests poked around the charred ruins of the settlement. The priests carefully gathered what human remains they could find; back at the Wall, they would be interred with the bones of their ancestors. Kilushepa and Qirum walked together, inspecting the grisly remains, talking quietly now in their own tongue, their enmity forgotten in the face of a worse disaster. Milaqa worked with the men, throwing herself into the heavy work, until she was hot and coated with ash. Confronted by such horror, she felt ashamed of her own earlier self-obsession.
The women returned with eel and shellfish. A fire was quickly built, and stones laid over it to heat; the gutted eel and shelled oysters would be fried on the hot rocks. In the lean-tos, some of the younger children were already being laid down for sleep.
While the meal was being prepared, and as the day’s light began to fade, Raka gathered her advisers around her. They sat in a circle by the warmth of the fire and pulled their cloaks around them, like lumps of rock in the firelight. Milaqa sat near Kilushepa and Qirum so she could translate for them. After months in Northland the queen was deigning to learn a few words of her hosts’ and prospective allies’ language, but her grasp was weak.
Raka said now, ‘We will speak low enough that the children are not alarmed.’ There was a rumble of agreement. ‘I wanted us to come into the country to see for ourselves how the long winter is affecting our people. I did not expect so stark a lesson as this. These people were robbed for their food — as simple as that. Evidently the disaster was so complete there was nobody left to bring the news to the Wall.’
‘The raiders could have come from Gaira, or from Albia,’ said Voro.
‘Or,’ said Noli, the stern elder Annid who had so vigorously opposed Raka’s appointment, ‘they could have been us. Northlanders, turning on their own.’
