to join the starving in the streets. Well, what came next didn’t matter. She had to see Alxa again; she had to know.
When the light of the African morning was strong in the sky, she slipped out of the warehouse and walked down the narrow street.
She soon came to Myrcan’s tavern. He was just opening up, throwing open the doors, sweeping half-dried vomit into the street, setting out his chalkboard of exclusion and welcome.
‘The Ana,’ she said to him in Carthaginian.
He eyed her cautiously. ‘What did you say?’
‘Forgive me. My speaking is poor. I am her mother. . I was here. You remember? You gave us wine, a month ago.’
He nodded, still cautious. He probably thought her accent was oddly upper crust, since she’d learned it from Barmocar and Anterastilis. Was she a spy, here to check up on black markets in food rations? ‘Why do you want her?’
‘I am her mother.’ She longed to shake him, to make him understand. ‘Is she here?’
‘Not for days.’
‘Then where, where?’
He shrugged. ‘Out of town, maybe.’
‘Outside the walls?’
‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. You look.’
The western gate. Alxa had said there was a big community of the excluded outside the western gate.
She nodded her thanks and hurried on down the hill, following one of the main drags that ran radially away down the Byrsa, and headed straight for the western gate.
It wasn’t hard to get out past the guards and through the gate. It might be harder to get back in. Well, she would use her bit of money.
She was shocked by what lay beyond the city wall. Once again this was something she had known about intellectually from Alxa’s descriptions, from complaints from Barmocar’s guests about the grubby crowds they had to pass through on their way into the city. The reality of it was astounding. It was another city, she saw, grown up out of nothing, a ramshackle metropolis built from spare stone and sagging bits of canvas and piled-up turf blocks — no wood, for that had all long gone to the hearths. Smoke rose up from desultory fires of peat or dung. Everywhere she looked she saw men moving listlessly, mothers holding silent infants, children playing in odd, aimless ways. Gaunt faces and stick limbs and swollen bellies. It was
She felt a stab of anxious fear. But she must find Alxa.
She strode forward boldly, asking everybody she met if they knew about the Ana, the Northlander, Alxa. She got a few replies, listlessly given. They all pointed her away from the city, away, further out. The shanty town stretched out along the main road out of the city — the result of beggars competing to be first for the cash of arriving visitors, perhaps. She followed the road until the shacks and hovels began to thin out.
She came to a kind of compound, set aside from the road, marked by a loose ring of stones, a scratched mark in the earth. A handful of huts stood here, and smoke curled up from a central open fire. She saw men in masks and heavy gloves digging a pit.
As she was about to cross the line into the compound, a man limped over. ‘You don’t want to come closer,’ he called, his accent a thick country brogue, obscured by his mask. ‘Not unless you’re ill yourself.’
‘I’m looking for somebody,’ she said as clearly as she could. ‘The Ana, they call her. The Northlander.’
Above the mask his eyes narrowed, suspicious. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I am her mother. Please, if she is here — tell her I have come.’
He hesitated. ‘Wait here.’ He hurried off to one of the huts. Not running, nobody living outside the city walls seemed capable of running any more.
Here came a slight woman, walking stiffly, with mask and gloves and heavy brown clothing that covered most of her skin, her neck and arms and legs, her face. It was Alxa. Rina would have run across the boundary, taken her in her arms.
But Alxa stepped back. ‘Don’t, Mother. We don’t know how it passes from one person to the next. It may be by touch, or by fluids, blood and spit and snot. .’
‘The plague. You’re talking about the blood plague. That’s what you’re doing here.’ Rina had guessed as much but the thought still filled her with horror. ‘Tending to the victims of the blood plague.’
‘Tending. . Yes. We serve a double purpose,’ Alxa said wearily. ‘We take in the afflicted. At the city walls they are simply cut down, you know. Here we allow families to die together.’ She seemed to stagger slightly. ‘And we keep the city that bit safer. For it is a terrible illness, Mother. There are two manifestations. The first is a fever, and a spitting of blood. That can kill in less than a day. The second is less vicious, but it kills just as certainly in a few days. If you catch this plague you die, either of the first manifestation or the second. Your only hope of survival is not to catch it in the first place. If it got loose in the city-’
‘So here you are protecting Carthage. A city that wouldn’t give you a gutter to lie in.’
‘This is where I am, Mother. Perhaps that is part of the mothers’ plan.’
‘And is it part of their plan that you should sacrifice your own life so eagerly?’
‘I knew the risk. We hope to bring doctors here. Scholars. From Carthage, Egypt, even Hatti. Have them study the disease. Find what spreads it. Find how to cure it. Why not? For this thing is surely the common enemy of all mankind, whatever our political differences, or religious. .’ Again her voice tailed off.
A heavy dread pooled deep in Rina’s stomach. ‘Alxa — let me help you.’
‘Mother, stay back.’
‘I will not-’
‘It’s too late!’ Alxa pulled open her tunic, slipped it off her right shoulder, and raised her arm. There was some kind of swelling in the armpit, purple-black.
‘What is that?’
She whispered, ‘The second manifestation.’ She lowered her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’
‘Oh, my child-’ And though Alxa stumbled back again, Rina crossed the space between them in a few strides and took her daughter in her arms. ‘If only we could have stayed at home — if only you had had a chance to grow into this woman I see before me in Northland — what might you have done, what an Annid you might have become! Oh, child, I’m the one who’s sorry, so sorry. .’
46
This hour it was Thaxa’s turn to make the piss run.
He rose from the corner of the huge old cistern, where he’d been reading a scroll by the dim light that came down the air shaft at midday. It was the only light in the room save for the increasingly rare intervals when they lit the lamps. He stood and pulled on his outer clothes, his heavy hooded coat and his waterproof leather trousers and his boots.
Then, carefully avoiding the prone bodies on the floor, he made for the door leading to the passages out to his house at the face of the Wall. It was the time of day when the small children were laid down together to nap. ‘Time to sleep now,’ the mothers were whispering all across the chamber. ‘Time to sleep.’ Some of the adults slept too, if they could, in the muggy air. Sleep was the best way, the only way really, to use up the empty, pointless hours in this growstone box. There was the usual stink of fish, their staple food, on their breath and in their farts, though you would think he would have got used to that by now. In the dimness he recognised Crimm the fisherman, a few other faces.
The people here were not exactly friends; the jealousy over food and floor space was too strong for that. But they were his guests, that was how he thought of them. He had been astonished to learn from Crimm and Ayto that
