Iron Winter

‘Take it,’ Avatak said, his voice a mumble.

‘What? What’s that?’

‘It’s all we have-’

The pirate slapped Avatak. ‘All? Where’s the rest of it? An old man like this, a ship like this — where’s the rest of his treasure, boy? Up your arse? Because if it is I’ll slit you open to get it.’

‘Not rich. He’s a scholar.’ He had used the Northlander word. He tried again, in Cathay, Mongol. He didn’t know the Persian. Maybe he could make them understand. Make them spare the old man, even if only through pity. ‘Not rich. His treasure is what he knows.’

The pirate slapped him again, almost routinely. ‘What treasure?’

‘Inside. It’s inside him-’

But the pirate grinned, and threw him down, and Avatak realised he had made a horrible mistake. ‘Ha! That old trick.’ The pirate called over his shoulder. Avatak recognised the words ‘tamarind’ and ‘brine’.

A third man came, carrying a filthy, heavy sack. Avatak’s captor threw this over to the man with Pyxeas.

The scholar lay unmoving on a heap of bloodied manuscripts. The pirate cradled Pyxeas’ neck and raised his shoulders, so that his head was tipped backward. Then he forced open the scholar’s injured mouth with his fingers, making Pyxeas moan with renewed pain, and held Pyxeas’ nose, and he poured a thick crimson liquid from the sack into the scholar’s mouth. Pyxeas gagged, choked and struggled feebly, but the pirate held him firmly — almost skilfully, Avatak saw, wondering, almost like a mother in a winter house with a wilful infant — and Pyxeas had no choice but to swallow, to take in great mouthfuls of the stuff. Then he convulsed and doubled over. With a bark he vomited out a mass of crimson fluid laced with half-chewed ship’s biscuits, a foul-smelling pool that spread out over the mess of papers under him. The pirate laughed and stood back from the pool, making a show of trying to keep his feet dry. Now there was a fouler smell, and the pirates laughed again. The man dragged at the old man’s breeches, pulling them down with a casual rip, and Avatak saw shit dribbling from between the scholar’s skinny buttocks. Soon both men were rummaging in the vomit and shit with their bare hands — looking for Pyxeas’ treasure, which they thought he had swallowed because of Avatak’s own foolish words. And, he saw, they would keep on doing this in their frustration until they had squeezed the old man dry of every drop of fluid in his body, and perhaps finish the job by slitting him open. All because of Avatak’s mistake.

He had one pouch the pirates hadn’t found, sewn into his shirt, under an armpit. In here he kept one of Uzzia’s gems — just one. When both pirates were distracted, their backs turned contemptuously to him, he dug his fingers into the pouch, pulled out the jewel and swallowed it. Then he called out, ‘Me. Not him. In me. He made me swallow it.’

Immediately the pirates were on him. One of them punched him again, as if in greeting. ‘Swallow what?’

‘His gem,’ Avatak gasped. ‘The family treasure. He made me swear-’

But he got no further. While one man held him down, the other forced the sack of liquid to his mouth, pinching his nose hard. He could taste Pyxeas’ vomit on the bag. Now the fluid was coursing down his throat, thick and fibrous and rank-tasting. He was gagging almost before he’d swallowed.

They found the jewel easily, but they kept on until he was spewing and shitting as helplessly as the old man.

At last they decided he had no more to give. On the way out one of them kicked him in the head, almost casually.

He woke with a kind of tunnel of pain passing through his body from throat to arse, and a foul taste in his mouth, and a fouler stench in his nostrils. He was lying face down with his cheek resting in some cooling liquid. His own vomit, probably. He rolled on his back, to more pain from his tortured gut. Pyxeas’ work was scattered around the cabin, soaked in blood and vomit and shit. But the quilted coat still hung from the door, apparently undisturbed.

And he saw Pyxeas, on hands and knees, crawling towards him. His mouth was a ruin, his lower front teeth smashed out. But, unaccountably, he was smiling. His speech a slur, he whispered, ‘I have it, Avatak. The secret — the link — the mechanism of the world. I have it!’

At that moment Avatak knew that Pyxeas was mad, that his quest for learning had made him so. Though Avatak would always cherish the old man for that deep wound of grief in his heart, a grief that encompassed the whole suffering world, he would have no more to do with the scholar’s numbers.

That was how it was for the remainder of the voyage, all the way to Carthage.

66

The Third Year of the Longwinter: Autumn Equinox

In his last days Jexami summoned Rina.

In the tiny servant’s room Rina read the note he had sent, over and over. It was a simple request for her to visit. The note was written out, evidently in his own hand, in an elegant but wavering Etxelur script, though he had signed it in both Northland and Carthaginian styles. No pretence now, no more hiding his origins. And no subtlety about the pleas he made with the desperation of a dying man.

The note filled her with contradictory emotions. She had not seen Jexami since he had first expelled her and her children. To know he was dying gave her a kind of vindication. Jexami had been the man who had turned her away in her darkest hour, her and her children. Now the blood plague had come for him: let him die. Yet such pettiness seemed meaningless in the context of the plague. It was said that in Carthage perhaps half had died — Jexami, walking with the dead, would soon have more company than among the living. What did past slights matter in such circumstances? And he was family. Of course she had to respond.

She begged time away, from Barmocar himself. She rarely saw Anterastilis these days; there were rumours in the household that she was ill. Barmocar consented with a curt nod, not speaking to her.

It was not far to walk to Jexami’s town house. He, like Barmocar, like the rest of Carthage’s privileged and wealthy, had abandoned his country property and flown to the safety of the city at the approach of the Hatti horde. The house, smaller than she had expected, seemed shut up, empty. This was a plague house, of course. Rina pulled on gloves, and a mask that covered all her face but the eyes, before she knocked on the door.

An elderly maid answered. There seemed to be nobody here but the maid, and her master.

In a small room, alone, Jexami lay on a thick pallet. The stench was terrible, and Rina went to push open a window. There was a water jug by his bed, empty. Rina summoned the maid to get it refilled. She knelt by the bed and took Jexami’s hand. She would not have recognised the burly, confident Northlander. His eyes were closed. He looked as if he had been drained, leaving only a sack of flesh. Only the swellings at his neck, thick and purple-black, looked healthy, ironically.

He stirred, his eyes fluttering open. When he tried to speak, his voice was a rustle like a moth’s wing. ‘Who is it?’ He spoke in Carthaginian.

‘It is me. Rina of Etxelur.’ She spoke in their own tongue, but she would not lift the mask to show her face. She squeezed his hand. ‘Your note reached me.’

‘Ah.’ His dry mouth opened with a pop. ‘Water-’

‘Coming.’

‘That villain Drubal did that for me, at least. My head of house. Brought me water. While robbing me of everything else. Now you have come, although I turned you out when you needed help. I regret — regret-’

‘What’s done is done. And I might have done the same. I, too, was arrogant and complacent in the days I lived in Etxelur.’

‘Your children? Twins?’

‘Alxa is dead,’ she said bluntly. ‘The plague. Nelo is at the war. I’ve heard nothing of him for months.’ Strange to think, when she summed it up like that, that she had come here in the first place to protect her children.

‘Alxa,’ he whispered. ‘I heard of her. The work she did to support the dying — remarkable. And you are untouched.’

‘Some are spared, for no reason that any can see.’

‘I thought that of myself. . I had lasted so long. But then it came for me, it came. I heard Pyxeas is alive. That he is here, in Carthage.’