‘But you must find your place. ‘‘Everyone in Etxelur is a hunter and a scholar.’’ You know that’s the rule, Milaqa. You know it’s your duty, you must find your place. And if you haven’t made your House choice by the appropriate Family Day, which I remind you is the spring equinox of your sixteenth year and will be here soon, the choice will be made for you.’
He was right, of course. Northlanders were comparatively few, and their very land survived only through continued and dedicated maintenance. Everybody had to play a part. ‘You sound like my mother.’
‘Good. My sister was a great Annid of Annids.’
A priest stepped forward now, murmuring a prayer to the little mothers, and the babble of conversation hushed. The priest scattered a salty incense over Kuma’s shrunken corpse. Then, gently, he lifted the damaged breastplate away from her chest, and handed it to a member of the House of the Owl. The plate would be passed on to the next Annid of Annids, when she (or, just possibly, he) was chosen. Now the priest reverently wrapped up Kuma’s bones in a cloth blanket and lifted her up. Milaqa saw her mother’s head loll, the fleshless jaw gaping. Carrying the corpse the priest made for the door. There he was met by a senior Annid, a severe older woman called Noli, and a procession began to form up behind them.
‘Walk with me,’ Teel murmured to Milaqa.
The two of them took their places at the rear of the group of Annids, who in turn led the priests and the wayfinders and the others, with the humble Beetles bringing up the rear. Then, to the soft beat of a drum, they shuffled forward, along a candlelit passage that led deeper into the Wall. They turned corners, and soon the last of the daylight was excluded. The corridor was musty and dry. When Milaqa glanced back she noticed the Beavers looking around, sniffing the air for damp, instinctively checking the walls for crumbling and mould. One of them carried a pot in which liquid growstone sloshed.
‘We’re walking very slowly,’ she whispered to Teel. ‘I wish we could get this over with.’
‘Have you not been to one of these ceremonies before?’
‘Not since my father died, and I was very small then.’
‘Not even for the family?’
‘I always chose not to come. I suppose you’ll say that’s me running away from my responsibilities again.’
‘There are men and women younger than you who are already in their Houses of choice, training as wayfarers or builders — even as priests and Annids.’
‘I have no skill.’
‘Your languages are good. Everybody says that.’
‘I only learned them because of getting drunk with traders and sailors in the taverns in the Scambles, and nobody approves of that.’
‘It doesn’t matter how you learn. What matters is ability. With a skill like that you could become a Jackdaw.’
She sniffed. ‘Like Voro? Haggling over tokens of clay? Travelling to mines in Albia, or stinking farms on the Continent? I don’t think so.’
‘Nevertheless you must do something. Actually I have an idea,’ Teel said. ‘Something that might help you decide.’
‘I’m wary of your ideas.’
‘You’re probably right to be. Call it an assignment.’
‘What assignment?’
But he had no time to reply, for they had reached the Hall of Interment.
In the weak glow of smoky lamps this long, shallow room extended out of sight to left and right. The wall opposite was a smooth growstone surface with small alcoves cut into it in rows. Milaqa was reminded of a sandy river bank, the burrows of sand martins above the water. All the alcoves nearby were open, those further away blocked off, their shapes clearly visible in the discolouring of the growstone. There was a soft breeze. Somehow air reached this place, feeding the lamps, and the people who quietly spread out into the room.
The priest stepped forward, lifted the slight bundle in his arms, and slid it into an alcove at chest height. He chanted a series of numbers: ‘One. One. Five. Four. Four. Two. Four. Two. Three. Five. Two.’
A mason, clad in a cloak of beaver fur, armed with a shaped chisel, stepped forward. Briskly he stamped the priest’s number into the wall below Kuma’s alcove, using the ancient concentric-circle number symbols of Etxelur. The priest began to chant, in a language so old it was unknown even to Milaqa.
Teel murmured, ‘Do you remember this place from your father’s ceremony?’
‘I remember the holes in the wall. They scared me.’
‘Yes… The priest has recited the number of the day. Do you know about that? We began the counting from the very day Prokyid saved us from the Second Great Sea. Prokyid left us a system of cycles, based on the number five.’ He spread his hand in the gloom. ‘For five fingers. The last of the priest’s eleven numbers was two; we are in the second day of the current eleventh cycle of five days. The second last number was five. We are in the fifth element of the current tenth cycle of five fives, which is twenty-five days. The third last number was three. We are in the third-’
‘The traders talk with a system based on tens. Hundreds, thousands.’
‘Well, so do the common folk, mostly. I’m told the priests’ count of days has reached somewhere over five thousand years.’
It was an incomprehensible number. ‘We’ve been counting the days that long?’
‘Oh, yes. But our history goes back even before that, and we plan for a future stretching far ahead, and our calendar accommodates that. Remember, we have eleven cycles. The first cycle is five fives of fives of-’
‘What language is the priest using?’
‘It is said to be the language spoken even before Prokyid, perhaps in the time of Ana, who built Etxelur.’
‘Ana is a little mother. So is Prokyid.’
‘Yes, but they were both human too. Gods made incarnate. Don’t you know any of this? You aren’t cut out for the House of the Wolf, are you? The priest is consigning your mother to the endless sleep of the little mothers. The Wall is built not just of rock and growstone but of the bones of all our ancestors, back to the days of Prokyid, even the mythical time of Ana, who defied the First Great Sea. All our ancestors sleep in the stone that defies the sea.
‘The priest is reminding your mother that the Wall is not still. As the sea wears the Wall away at its front, we build it up at the back. Thus the Wall itself is like a slow tide, that marches slowly back across the land. And Kuma is learning that the day will come when the alcove of stone in which she lies will be opened by the sea, and then she will have a new flesh of stone, and muscles of air, and she too will join the endless war against the sea…’
Another mason came forward with his bucket of growstone. With a shining bronze spoon he began to ladle it into the hole, sealing in Kuma until her liberation by the sea, in the far future.
Milaqa thought about Teel. She had lost her father when she was very small, and her uncles, Teel and Deri, loomed huge in her memories of her childhood, these brothers of her mother, then young men with faces like her own. While Deri had taken her sailing in his fishing boat, Teel had played elaborate games with her, testing her mind, making her think. Now that her mother was gone, she reflexively looked to Teel for guidance. Yet there had always been something opaque about Teel. She had grown up not quite knowing if she understood him, or if she could trust him. She wished Deri was here. Or better yet her mother.
She whispered, ‘What assignment were you talking about?’
He pressed something into her hand. In the uncertain light of the wall lamps, she saw it was the iron arrowhead.
‘Find out who killed your mother, and why.’
7
Qirum decided that a queen should not enter Troy by climbing through a generations-old hole in city walls smashed by marauding Greeks. No, she would enter by the gates, like royalty. So he walked her around the walls. He’d had Praxo cut the shackles on her ankles, but at Praxo’s dogged insistence they kept the ropes on her wrists.
