Iron Winter

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.’

‘Yes. Though I have not been able to see him myself. He made it to Cathay and back! He got here just before the equinox, he and that Coldlander boy of his. He had to talk his way through the Hatti siege to get into the city. How did you know?’

Jexami’s face twitched; perhaps he was trying to smile. ‘His was an epic journey, though I never saw the point of it myself. News of it travelled — something to admire, an achievement to light up a time of blackness.’

The maid returned with the water. Rina wet a cloth, and sponged drops into Jexami’s mouth.

‘You wonder why I summoned you,’ he whispered.

Summoned. Even now, that haughty term.

‘Listen to me.’ His hand closed on hers, the last of his strength. ‘I don’t want to die and finish up as these Carthaginians do. Oiled up and stuck in a hole in the ground. And nor will I be thrown into a pit with the poor people. .’

He wasn’t alone in obsessing how he would die; she had seen it a hundred times. And, she saw, he was to remain a snob even beyond his death. ‘What, then?’

‘I want to die a good Northlander, as I believe I’ve lived like one, for all I have been seduced at times by the ways of the city folk. Take me home, Rina. Don’t leave me here. Take me home and bury me in the Wall, facing the sea, like all our ancestors back to the age of Ana and Prokyid. One day this weather will relent, or even if it does not there may be a way. . Say you will do this for me.’

‘Of course,’ she murmured. ‘Rest now. You will sleep for ever in the Wall, with your mother, your father, all your family, under the care of the little mothers. .’

His eyes fluttered closed. Perhaps he slept.

She stayed with him until the daylight started to fade.

She emerged from the house into a soft, early evening light. For once the sky was clear, and the sunset was spectacular. The remarkable skies had, for the last year, been a small consolation for the disruption the world had suffered, a bit of beauty amid the misery. But she suspected that Pyxeas would say that even this was merely a symptom of the world’s agony; she was looking at the sun’s light reflecting off the dust that had once been all the farmland in North Africa, now dried out and blown high in the air.

The maid said that when the master died she would have the corpse cremated, send the ashes to Rina, shut up the house. Rina nodded, thanked the woman — wondering vaguely what would become of her when Jexami was gone — and set off back across the city to Barmocar’s household.

Where Barmocar himself was waiting anxiously for her. For a second time that day she had been summoned.