Bronze Summer

11

They were to be supervised by a senior of the House of the Vole, the water engineers, who unrolled a complicated map drawn in red and black on a sheet of bark. The canal system had been dammed and diverted at some point upstream from this stretch, which was a branch of the main canal called the Sky. The duct here had been left to drain and dry out for the best part of a month, ready for the family to take it on.

So, with Ximm and the others cheerfully calling out orders, the adults and older children grabbed their shovels and buckets and clambered over the banks of hardened mud and earth down into the empty channel. Though it had been drying out for some time the mud at the bottom was wet and deep and clinging and cold. Milaqa, up to her calves in it, wondered how long it had taken this thickness of muck to build up — how long since this particular stretch had been dredged, five years or fifty?

The people got their bearings quickly. They formed up into rough lines, the adults and older kids in the deeper mud of the bottom, the smallest children and nursing mothers and old folk walking along the banks, looking down and calling encouragement. They began to dig away at the mud with shovels of bronze and bone, passing it up by a bucket chain. The glistening stuff was dumped to add another bit of height to the banks that lined the canal — and indeed, it was this endless digging-out that had created the banks in the first place.

There were a few surprises. They turned up broken pots, what might have been a child’s doll of wood and bone — even a broken bronze sword. Offerings to the gods, to the little mother of the sky, to Ana and Prokyid. You were supposed to make such offerings by one of the five great canals, but people driven by sufficient hope or despair would make their small prayers wherever they could. Ximm always made sure that such finds were pressed back into the deeper mud, to be covered over and lost again. Then some of the children got excited at the sight of a sunken boat, a few hundred paces further down the channel. They ran off to investigate, followed by cries of exasperation or envy from the toiling adults.

Milaqa had Hadhe and Teel to either side of her, Ximm just ahead, and Voro hanging around somewhere just behind her. She threw herself into the work. There was no real choice; this was what Family Day was all about. And she didn’t want any comments about how hard she worked, or not. Besides, though the mud was heavy and sticky, she found the simple repetitious work warmed her muscles up. Somebody began singing, a rhythmic comic song about the only ice giant who didn’t like fighting. People joined in, up and down the stretch of the canal, as they dug and lugged their way through the mud, growing steadily filthier.

‘This is the life,’ Teel said, working beside Milaqa.

She eyed him sceptically.

‘Good honest work. Building the world, spadeful by spadeful. The way it’s been since Ana’s time. It’s the Etxelur way. When our family came here from Kirike’s Land, this work was all we could do, all we could understand. But we were welcomed into the House of the Beetle, and we worked hard, and did it better and better. And look at us now!’

‘What, still up to our knees in muck?’

He grinned, his face a muddy mask. ‘I felt the same way when I was your age. Younger, probably.’

‘What way?’

‘Like I didn’t fit. Our world here, the Northland way — it’s fine, and it works, but it is rigid. It’s a world where you are expected to find deep spiritual joy mucking out a canal.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘You know what I did. I gave up my chance of ever becoming a father, for the sake of a greater ambition. And it was all the fault of Prokyid the Second, the nearest to a king we ever had here in Etxelur, about a thousand years ago. Did you know that? He did just what all these other petty kings and princes do on the Continent — strutting and posing, picking fights with others of his kind, starving his people to wage war on others. And for a generation the important stuff, the engineering, was neglected. When he was toppled, the Annids decreed that no man could ever again join their number, for generally it’s men who cause trouble of that sort. And so now-’

‘It’s women only, or eunuchs.’

He shrugged. ‘I made my choice years ago. It’s as if a different person made it for me. I jumped off a cliff. I had no way back, and I have none now.’ He glanced at the children playing on the bank. ‘Like you, I wanted more.’

‘And was it worth it?’

‘Oh, yes. I got what I wanted, which was to see how Northland works from the inside. But that’s what worries me now. Northland is ponderous and slow-moving — frankly, the Houses are usually too busy infighting to look outside. And yet there are new things in this world. Things that need to be looked at. An arrowhead that can pierce bronze. The nestspills who come trickling into our country from their failing drought-ridden farms-’

‘I’ve seen some of them.’

‘In the east people are starving, dying, marching. Ancient kingdoms are collapsing. Even the Hatti are in trouble. The world is changing. And if it’s to survive Northland must change too. Change and adapt.’

‘How? You just said the Houses are too busy fighting each other.’

‘But the Houses you know about aren’t all there is.’

‘Now I really don’t follow you,’ she grumbled, pecking at another patch of hardened canal mud. ‘What other House is there?’

He dug under his shirt and pulled out an amulet — a crow’s foot, dried and suspended from a loop of leather.

She stared.

‘Keep digging,’ he murmured.

She bent over her spade. ‘I never heard of a House of the Crow. Besides, you’re an Owl. You sacrificed your balls to become one! How can you be in two Houses at once?’

‘It just evolved that way… Milaqa, like most things in Northland, the House of the Crow is very old. Somebody far back in our history realised that we have this basic problem of getting stuck in our ways. And that every so often the world changes, something new happens, and we have to be able to cope with it. So the Crows emerged. Like the other Houses, you can only join if you’re invited. And you’re only invited if you have the right kind of mind.’

‘What kind?’

‘The kind that doesn’t fit anywhere else. The whole point of the Crows is to be the ones who deal with the new, the unexpected, the challenging.’

She felt her heart beat faster. ‘The exciting.’

‘The dangerous,’ he warned. ‘Look, Milaqa, I’m just offering this to you as a way forward. I already showed you something unexpected. Something strange.’

‘You mean the arrowhead.’ She pulled it out from under her tunic, as he had his crow’s foot.

‘What have you done about it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said slowly. ‘I…’ She had felt reluctant to face the fact that her mother must have been murdered. Somehow asking questions about it would make her seem even more dead. It was easier to dive into the clamour of the Scambles and forget everything.

‘I know it’s complicated,’ Teel said. ‘But that arrowhead isn’t just lethal, it’s new. Maybe if you can find out where it came from, what’s different about it-’

‘Nice pendant.’ Ximm was only a pace behind them. Teel hastily tucked away his crow’s foot. Ximm reached out to cradle the arrow in his palm. ‘I know a bit about iron.’ He frowned. ‘An arrowhead? Funny sort of ornament.’

Milaqa took a breath. ‘It’s not just an ornament. This works. It’s been fired.’

‘You saw that, did you?’

She stayed silent, hoping she wouldn’t have to lie.

Ximm turned. ‘Here, Voro, take a look at this.’

Voro straightened up from the mud and strode over. ‘Iron?’

‘Not just iron. Hard and true iron, good enough for the bow, according to the lady here.’ He tapped the head on the shaft of his shovel. ‘How come? Iron falls from the sky, doesn’t it? No use for anything but showing off,’ and he cackled.

‘I heard rumours,’ Voro said. ‘About the Hatti. You know how it is — we send them potato and maize mash, and tin for their bronze. We get iron goods back from them in exchange, among other stuff, and so we know something of their techniques. I heard they have a way of working iron that makes it harder. Better than bronze, so they say. I may be meeting some Hatti myself. Some of their high-ups are coming to the Giving in midsummer. I’m supposed to go with Bren to meet them in Gaira and escort them here.’

Teel pulled Milaqa away, and murmured, ‘Maybe this is your way forward.’

‘To do what?’

‘Follow the thread, Milaqa. If you can find out where this arrowhead was made and how it got to Northland, maybe you can find out who pulled the bowstring. If there’s some connection with the Hatti-’

‘I don’t know any Hatti. I don’t know anything about them.’

‘What, you don’t bump into any in the Scambles? Then it’s time you found out, isn’t it?’