known that, under her dismissal and contempt. Was she ready now to accept Voro’s calm, loyal patience?
But what did she have to offer him? She was a burned-out shell. Kilushepa’s surgeons had warned her gravely that survivors of the coughing plague often had difficulty carrying children. And she could never tell him her secret. Never tell him of the black crime.
She was distracted by clouds thickening the sun, a fresh bite in the freshening wind.
‘I need time,’ she blurted, then instantly regretted it.
Once that would have driven him away. Now he just held her hands. ‘I know.’
Beside them, Mi smiled.
Together they turned to face the Wall’s new stone heads.
Riban climbed a platform and, arms outstretched, his face distorted, began gabbling words from a language more ancient, it was said, than the age of Ana herself, who had founded the Wall and saved Northland. But everyone knew what Riban was saying. He celebrated the visages of Raka and Kuma, who had joined the row of those who glared at the ocean that the Wall had defied for hundreds of generations already, and would defy for much longer yet.
Through the long winter Milaqa had watched Caxa and her assistants labour at the heads. They were made not of the local sandstone but of a harder rock, said to originate from dead fire mountains in the north of Albia. Caxa had insisted on using only the techniques traditional among her people; she had roughed out the faces from the ferociously resistant rock with stone hammers, and then had used drills and abrasives, polishing and scraping with ever finer materials, to complete the details. There were markings in the Etxelur script, rings and tails, with the names of the Annids and a brief declaration of their achievement. There was a time stamp too, a string of numbers, a mark of when they had lived and died, recorded in the long calendar of Etxelur. The resulting heads were huge, each as tall as a human being. The faces were stylised in the way of the Jaguar folk, with flattened noses, broad lips, large eyes — yet they were recognisably Kuma and Raka.
And beneath Kuma’s head lay a single iron arrowhead, placed there by Milaqa — the thing that had killed her mother, buried for ever beneath this symbol of her eternal triumph.
Riban’s peroration was almost done. He raised his hands to the sky, and called in plain language on the little mothers of sea, earth and sky to welcome the Annids to their undying hearths.
And in that instant snow blew in, a sharp, thick flurry that came flying on the wind from the north, off the sea. People murmured in confusion and shock. The snow soon began to gather on the huge profiles of the stone heads, in their eyes, their nostrils.
Snow, at midsummer. Milaqa remembered a soldier’s curse. May your own gods, the mothers of sea and sky and earth, desert you. She turned away, sheltering her face from the sting of the snowflakes.
66
The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice was remembered only in myth.
But the ice remembered.
And now the long retreat was over.
Afterword
The historical reality of land reclamation from the ocean is almost as remarkable as depicted in this fiction. In the Fenlands of eastern England there is evidence of large-scale water management projects dating back to Roman times (see Fenland: Its Ancient Past and Uncertain Future by Sir Harry Godwin, Cambridge University Press, 1978). Using earth dykes, water-pumping windmills and other technologies, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the Dutch increased their available farmland with reclaimed seabed by a third. However, the management of water by mankind has, of course, a much deeper history. Ancient civilisations including Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Indus Valley cultures were capable of tremendous feats of hydraulic engineering (see Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilisation by Steven Solomon, HarperCollins, 2010).
I have allowed the Northlanders to develop some technologies and techniques precociously. The Egyptians built the first recorded masonry dam some fifteen metres high at Memphis c. 2900 BC (see Solomon, 2010). To build their Wall the Northlanders used concrete (which they call ‘growstone’, a word cooked up in a discussion with Adam Roberts on the Latin roots of ‘concrete’, acknowledged with thanks). We associate the use of concrete with the Romans, but in fact forms of concrete seem to have been in use as early as c. 3000 BC in Uruk in Mesopotamia (see Reese Palley’s Concrete: A Seven-Thousand-Year History, Quantuck Lane Press, 2010).
Writing emerged in Mesopotamia in c. 3000 BC, but in our timeline Britain did not become literate until the arrival of the Romans. The Northlanders make their own independent invention of a form of writing based on the raw materials of their culture, such as rock art (see British Prehistoric Rock Art by Stan Beckensall, Tempus, 1999).
Our conception of cities as dense masses of buildings of stone and masonry is another relic of our civilisation’s origin in the arid Near East. The Northlanders’ communities, intricate hierarchical networks of communities embedded in a ‘green’ landscape, are based in part on archaeologists’ studies of similar communities in the pre-Columbian Amazon forest. Michael Heckenberger, (see The Ecology of Power, Routledge, 2005) interestingly notes that the temperate forests of medieval Europe were studded with towns and villages of similar sizes to those he studied in the Amazon.
Most importantly, my Northlanders are not farmers. All our civilisations have been built by farmers. Modern hunter-gatherer groups surviving in marginal territories are probably not a perfect model of the richness of their lives in the past; given time and a rich environment, hunter-gatherer populations could achieve huge feats, and develop complex societies. The Native American communities of the north-west coast, with towns, aristocracies, slavery, land ownership and patronage of the arts, were arguably the most elaborate hunter-gatherer societies in human history (see Prehistory of the Americas, S. Fiedel, Cambridge, 1992). This series imagines a sophisticated, complex, even literate culture developed by a people without farming.
Names used here are intended primarily for clarity.
My place names for pre-literate Britain and Gaul (Gaira) are derived in part from mentions in ancient writings such as those of the first century AD scholar Pliny the Elder, which in turn may be based on the reports of such adventurers as the fourth-century BC explorer Pytheas (see The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe, Allen Lane, 2001). I have used the anachronistic term ‘Greeks’ to describe the contemporary inhabitants of the Greek mainland, known to historians since the nineteenth century as the Mycenaeans. I have used ‘Anatolian’ for the inhabitants of modern mainland Turkey. The names ‘Ilium’ and ‘Troy’ derive from Homer, but according to analyses of Hittite records these appear to be based on the names of territories in the region of Troy: ‘Wilusa’ which was corrupted to become ‘Ilium’ and ‘Taruwisa’ which became ‘Troy’ (see J. Lacatz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, Oxford University Press, 2004 (English translation), and chapter 14 of Trevor Bryce’s The Kingdom of the Hittites, Oxford University Press, 2005). The people of the great Anatolian Bronze Age kingdom we know as the Hittites — because of a link to their nineteenth-century discovery to the ‘Children of Heth’ of the Bible — seem to have called themselves ‘the people of the Land of Hatti’. I have called them ‘Hatti’ here. In our timeline, by 1159 BC the central Hittite empire had already collapsed. For recent surveys see Bryce (2005) and his Life and Society in the Hittite World, Oxford University Press, 2002. I have generally followed Bryce in spelling Hittite personal and place names and other terms.
The old idea that the Hittites maintained their empire through a monopoly on iron-working (see The Coming of Age of Iron, ed. Theodore Westime and James Muhly, Yale University Press, 1980) seems to be discredited through a lack of archaeological proof. The Hittites may not have mass-produced iron, but scholars such as Muhly (‘The Bronze Age Setting’, in Westime and Muhly, 1980) have argued for evidence of carburisation, that is making steel by heating iron in contact with carbon, in the Hittite period. The Hittites certainly manufactured high-quality iron goods, as attested by letters referring to prestigious iron tribute items — most famously given to Tutankhamun,
