Iron Winter

45

Her punishment was delivered by the head of house: ten strokes of the whip. She had suffered three the time before, delivered by a former soldier who seemed to enjoy punishing non-compliant women. She forced herself not to cry out, not to weep — not to beg.

Later Thuth, the Libyan cook, rubbed in a solution of salt and unguents that she said would help the healing and maybe reduce the scarring, all the while berating Rina for her stupidity in fouling up such an easy job.

She had the evening to recover.

But when she showed up for work with Anterastilis the next day, the head of house sent her away. Instead she was put to menial work, sweeping floors, clearing the courtyard of the debris of yet another dust storm. It was harder than her work for Anterastilis, but not so degrading. And the steady labour might or might not help her back heal.

She slept little, those first nights after the whipping. She had to lie on her front, or try to sleep sitting up. The lack of sleep gave her time to think. You had very little time to think as a servant of the Carthaginians; your workload was heavy, your sleep and rest times short, the patterns of your days chaotic. Now she had time to reflect back on her brief meeting with Alxa, those unimaginably precious moments, worth ten times the whipping she’d suffered as a consequence. And time to puzzle out again exactly why it was Alxa had chosen to contact her mother at just the moment she had.

It was when she overheard grim reports delivered to Barmocar of authenticated cases of the blood plague not far from the city that she began to suspect the truth. Alxa had wanted to see her because she knew, from her own network of informants, that the plague was coming. And Alxa, following her own self-appointed mission, was not going to stay away from the afflicted.

It was a month since her meeting with Alxa. One night, while her bed was still occupied by the snoring night maid, Alxa once more pulled on her cloak, and her Northlander boots, about the only worthwhile possession from home she had left, picked up a small purse with a few treasured Carthaginian coins, and slipped out through the grounds. That gap in the external wall had been roughly patched up, but the dry stonework was loose — mortar was in short supply like everything else this dismal winter — and she easily pulled a few stones loose, clambered over the wall, and slipped away into the dark. There was an abandoned property not far away, a small warehouse, used by some of the younger staff for love-making. Tonight it was empty save for the scuffling of rats.

She sat, favouring her back, wrapped herself in her cloak, and waited for dawn. It wouldn’t be long until her absence was discovered. The night maid who shared her bed might tell on her; she was the kind who liked to win favours that way. One way or another Rina would be in for another whipping, or maybe this time just a chucking-out 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 quiet. There was nothing like the noise you would have expected from such a crowd. But flies buzzed everywhere, and carts moved along the rough tracks that threaded between the hovels, carts towed by skinny men with their faces masked and bearing heaped-up bodies.

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. .’