the man’s lunge, pushed him back, then swept the weapon at knee level, making a satisfying contact with ropy flesh and muscle. The man fell, blood spilling vivid on the growstone surface. Crimm finished him with a swipe that cut his throat.
But before he was still, another came over the rail. And then another.
Crimm charged forward, and beside Ayto fought for his life.
44
The note was brought to Rina by Thuth, in the room they shared in Barmocar’s servants’ house. The big Libyan barged the door open with her hip, in Carthage there were no locks or latches on servants’ doors, and spun the note through the air. ‘For you.’
Rina sat up, clutching the blanket over the ragged remains of the undergarment from Northland that she used as a nightshirt. ‘A note? Who’s it from?’ They spoke in the patois of the servants’ quarters, a clumsy amalgamation of Carthaginian, Greek, Libyan — no Northlander in the mix, for Rina was the only one of her kind in the house.
Thuth said heavily, ‘Who’s it from, I don’t know, I’m not the Face of Baal.’ Her tongue could be sharper than her chopping knives. ‘I do know I need to get to work, and so do you.’ She hooked the door closed with her foot on her way out.
Rina sighed and tousled her short hair. She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all. She shared her bed with one of Anterastilis’ night-duty maids, a spiteful young Libyan. Until the maid left for her shift Rina had to try to sleep on the floor. But the night was already over, the light was bright through the muslin stretched over the empty window frame. There would be no more sleep; Rina faced another day’s work.
In the meantime here was this note. She turned it over in her hands. It was a simple folded page sealed with a blob of wax; she didn’t recognise the pressing.
A note! She didn’t get notes. Servants of Barmocar and Anterastilis didn’t get notes, or rarely. And the seal, of course, was already broken. Anything written down that came into the household that was not marked for the attention of the owners was routinely scrutinised by the head of house. In these increasingly difficult times Barmocar was concerned about security.
Rina opened up the note, shedding fragments of wax from the cracked seal. It was written in the Carthaginians’ angular alphabet, in a neat hand in a dark blue ink, presumably by a scribe. But Rina saw, intrigued, that a few hasty amendments to the text had been made, crossings-out and additions, in the swirling script of Northland — as if the note had been dictated to a Carthaginian scribe, and then the author had marked up corrections in Northlander on the copy. She scanned down to the signature. It was from Jexami! It was signed with a looping scrawl, beside an envoi in Carthaginian: ‘Your ever-loyal cousin.’
Jexami had not written to her before, nor had he made any attempt to contact her since the few days he had put her up in the late summer. Nor would she have expected him to. Jexami’s survival strategy was to pose as a Carthaginian gentleman. It was hard to believe he would risk all that with a note to a servant, especially one with an embarrassing Northlander past, and a relationship to Jexami himself.
She went back to the top and began picking out the Carthaginian letters. Her understanding of the tongue was still poor. It didn’t help that the blocky Carthaginian alphabet, in which you broke up the words into letter- particles and wrote them down, was so unlike the ancient Etxelur script she had grown up with, in which each word was represented by a single symbol of concentric arcs and bars — a written language that, according to scholars like Pyxeas, had more in common with the languages of Cathay than the bitty scrawls of the Continent’s farmers. But she made out the words, and read them to herself one by one: ‘Greetings to my cousin Rina, Annid of Etxelur! I send you news of home. Recently I received a long missive from my much-loved cousin Ywa Annid of Annids. .’
But Rina had heard a rumour, passed on spitefully by one of Barmocar’s men, that Ywa was dead, killed in a revolt.
She saw, reading on, that the ‘news’ in the note was a lot of jumbled nonsense. Of a Giving feast in the late summer, but Givings were always held precisely on midsummer day. Of the good health of Rina’s own husband Ontin, the priest, but Ontin was a doctor, and her husband was Thaxa. This was a clumsy fake! But good enough to have fooled a Carthage-born-and-bred head of household who knew nothing of such a remote land, or of her personal business.
Well, then, what was its purpose?
She turned to the ‘amendments’. The Northlander script would have been utterly incomprehensible to the head of household. He must have judged that the additions were minor enough not to pose a problem. But his judgement had been wrong, for the message they picked out had nothing to do with the nonsensical ‘news’ from Etxelur:
‘Mother. Go to the back wall now. Alxa.’
Rina was scarcely able to breathe. She had not seen her daughter for months.
She did not hesitate. She got out of bed, used the room’s communal piss-pot, washed quickly with what was left of the jug of water on the nightstand, and changed into her day clothes, the cleanest of the two sets of the uniform-like tunic and skirt Anterastilis ordered her to wear. She ripped up the note and fed the pieces to a small lantern that burned high on the wall.
Then she pulled her cloak over her shoulders and slipped out of the room.
She knew a way to the compound’s back wall that she could take without being seen. Every servant in the household knew of such routes. You learned to live like a rat, in such circumstances as these. The house’s servants, staff and slaves had a covert life of their own that went entirely unnoticed by Barmocar and Anterastilis and their circle — and no doubt the same had been true of her own household in Etxelur, she ruefully realised.
She did check the time on one of the big Greek water clocks. She had a couple of hours free. Today Barmocar and Anterastilis were hosting members of the overlapping assemblies that governed Carthage, the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four and the Council of Elders, no doubt debating such crises as the rationing, the plague, and the growing rumours of a vast Hatti horde on the way. These sessions, crowded with drunken young men, were always raucous affairs lubricated by generous helpings of Barmocar’s wine. A greater contrast with the grave councils of Northland, which tended to be dominated by older women like herself, could scarcely be imagined. Rina would not be needed during the session, but afterwards Anterastilis would no doubt require her ‘special comforting’. All that for later.
The estate’s back wall was a crude affair, just heaped-up blocks, hastily improvised in the early autumn. Hurrying along it, Rina soon found a gap that even an old woman like herself could easily step through.
Waiting on the other side was a young man she faintly recognised, dressed in a tunic and trousers that might once have been smart. He grinned and beckoned. ‘This way, lady.’ He spoke in crude Northlander.
She stepped through the wall, taking his hand for support — but she caught her fingernail on a jagged stone and snapped it painfully. Biting it to neatness, she hurried after him as he made his way along a narrow street down the slope of the Byrsa. The way was lined by the homeless, ragged bundles slumped in doorways, outstretched skeletal hands. Troops would come through later in the day and clear the track, but the people would return later, or others of their kind would, filling up the empty spaces like mercury settling in a cracked bowl; you could move them around but you could never get rid of them.
Meanwhile the rising sun caught the fronts of the grand buildings of the Byrsa, and from his column at the summit Hannibal hero of Latium stood proud, surveying his decaying city.
Rina remembered who this man was. ‘You’re Jexami’s servant. That’s how you know Northlander.’
He shrugged, grinning easily. ‘Easier for me to learn the master’s tongue than for him to learn mine, though he would beat me if he heard me saying it.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.’ Nobody remembered servants’ names — nobody of the class to which Jexami belonged, and herself, once.
‘Himil. My name is Himil.’
‘Thank you for coming to get me, Himil. How do you know Alxa?’
‘Who, sorry?’
‘My daughter. I suppose you remember her from our arrival in Carthage.’
‘Not so much. She helped me. The master threw me out.’
