But Xivu was not reassured. He was deeply reluctant to be here in the first place. Tibo didn’t know how it had been finally decided that Xivu would be the one to accompany Caxa on this long trip across the ocean. Perhaps he was the best speaker of the Etxelur tongue; perhaps he knew Caxa the best — or perhaps it was just that he was the least skilful at avoiding an unpleasant chore. Anyhow here he was, and he had been complaining since his first bout of seasickness, and the strange smoke column wasn’t helping his mood.
They sailed into the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm, and for their final approach into harbour the men folded their sail and wielded their oars. Tibo felt a surge of relief to be home, as he looked around at the houses, the rising smoke, the boats littering the water, and the looming ice-striped mountain in the background. But the smoke column from the Hood cast a kind of pall over the sky, staining it a faint orange, and that smell of sulphurous burning lingered.
When the boat pulled into the shore, Tibo leapt out with the rest to haul it above the high-water mark. There was a party waiting, cheerful wives who threw themselves at their husbands, a few traders hoping for trinkets from the Land of the Jaguar. Children came swarming, as children always did, great mobs of them outnumbering the adults. Xivu and Caxa looked taken aback. Luckily the children seemed to find these exotic folk strange rather than interesting, and they were as wary as the Jaguar folk themselves.
And here came Medoc, Tibo’s grandfather, huge in his furs, striding along the strand towards them. ‘Deri! So you managed not to sink the boat, son. And Tibo! I swear you grow a bit more every time I see you.’ He held Tibo’s shoulders and shook him hard enough to make his head rattle on his shoulders. Medoc’s tremendous grey-flecked beard was studded with fish bones, and his walrus fur stank of smoke. ‘Look at you now, arms like tree trunks, neck as thick as an ice giant’s cock! Well, I’m just back from Etxelur myself, and I’ll tell you all about it.’ He turned on Caxa, who flinched. ‘Oh, and who’s your lover?’
Deri took his father’s arm. ‘This is our sculptor.’
Medoc’s eyes widened. ‘What — bound for Northland, for the Annid’s carving? The last master sculptor I saw was a fat old man.’
Xivu said precisely, ‘Vixixix was the master a decade ago. The last to visit Northland, for your Annids are blessedly long-lived.’ He stepped forward. He had shucked off his loaned furs, despite the relative chill of the afternoon, and he stood proud in his kilt of exotically coloured linen, his torso and arms bare, his mirror of bronze hanging from his neck. ‘This is Caxa. The granddaughter of Vixixix. She is the current master sculptor.’
‘And she is not,’ Tibo said, ‘my lover.’
‘Well, you’re welcome here, Xivu, whatever the reason you’ve come
…’ Medoc was distracted by his own reflection in the mirror on the priest’s chest. He plucked half a fish-head from the depths of his beard and popped it into his mouth. ‘Wondered where that got to. Well! Come with me.’ Crunching bone, he led the way from the shore towards the houses.
They walked past tremendous racks of drying fish, set up so that the prevailing breeze carried the stink away from the houses.
Caxa seemed curious. ‘Sacrifice?’
‘Not a sacrifice,’ Tibo said. ‘Well, we apologise to the fish when we catch them… We dry the fish. And then we send it home.’
She looked puzzled. ‘Home?’
‘I mean to Northland. I was born here. This is my home. But everybody calls Northland home.’
‘Fish would stink on boat. Go rotten.’
‘That’s the secret. If you dry them out the right way, the fish keep for months. We trade them in Northland. They call it Kirike-fish.’
Medoc’s house, one of half a dozen arranged around a rough hearthspace, was set on a grassed-over mound of earth. Children swarmed around, and Deri and Tibo bent to greet nieces and nephews and cousins.
Vala, Medoc’s wife, came pushing out of the house through the door flap. She carried a pot of meat and herbs she was mixing with a wooden spoon. Her face was sturdy but pleasant, and she wore her greying dark hair tied back. She smiled at Xivu, and managed to give the wide-eyed Caxa a gentle embrace without the girl recoiling. Not yet forty, she was Medoc’s second wife, a cousin of his first, long dead; she was stepmother to Deri, step-grandmother to Tibo. She greeted Deri and Tibo with kisses and brief hugs, and she called out her own children, a lively boy called Liff and a toddler girl called Puli, both of whom Deri swept up for a huge embrace. A willowy twelve-year-old called Mi, daughter of Vala’s by a previous marriage, stood back more shyly.
Medoc grinned expansively at this family scene. ‘We share the island, you know,’ he said to Xivu and Caxa, ‘with neighbours of yours. From across the ocean. Well, originally, that’s where their fathers came from, and it’s said that Kirike himself brought them here. We call them the Ice Folk. Maybe you’ll know some of them.’
‘Father,’ Deri said patiently, ‘they’re hardly likely to know one another. The Ice Folk come from the Land of the Sky Wolf, which is many days’ sailing north of the Jaguar country. These are whole continents we’re talking about.’
‘Oh, pick, pick, pick, you’re just like Vala. I’ll take you up country,’ Medoc said to Xivu. ‘Before you have to go on to Etxelur. I’ll show you the Ice Folk — our forests of birch and pine — it is a beautiful island, surprisingly rich. We could set off right now, if you like-’
‘Oh, no, you couldn’t,’ Vala snapped. Still cradling her bowl of spiced meat, she put her free arm around Caxa. ‘You come with me. I’m sure you’d like to change those brine-stained clothes; I know just what salty leather against your skin feels like. Mi! Come and see if you’ve got some clothes this little one can borrow. Would you like something to eat? Other than fish, I mean…’
Deri followed, then Xivu, and at last Tibo.
‘Tomorrow for the walk, then,’ boomed Medoc, oblivious to the fact that everybody was ignoring him, and he trailed into the house after the others.
14
It took only a few days’ sailing before Qirum’s boat reached the mouth of a river called the Na by the local people, and thus recorded in his periplus. This was the southern shore of the western country called Gaira. They arrived on the afternoon of a warm early summer day.
They came to a fishing village sprawled untidily along a rocky strand. The shore above the waterline was cluttered with overturned boats, and small squat wooden houses, racks of drying fish, a big open-air hearth that smoked languidly. Beyond the beach, forest rose up, dense. More boats were out on the deeper ocean, to the south.
A child playing in the surf at the water’s edge was the first to spot their sail. Naked, no more than four or five years old, she ran up the beach to the houses, calling out. Soon adults emerged to watch Praxo’s crew furl their sail and row in towards the shore. One man came down to the water where they would land, but others hung back.
‘Take care,’ Praxo said to the rowers. ‘Let me do the talking. I can speak the local jabber, a bit of it anyway. See how they’re hanging back from the shore? See that mother gathering in her children? We’ve come a long way west, and these parts aren’t as infested by sea raiders as back east, but they have their problems, and they’re wary. By the way, this isn’t Troy. You can’t assume that every woman you meet is a whore. You’ll get your share in time, have no fear, lads. But not yet.’
The ship pulled into the shore, and they all jumped out at Qirum’s command, Kilushepa included, splashing in knee-deep surf. The men lined up and hauled the ship until its flat base scraped over the beach. Then they relaxed, panting, and reached for their water flasks.
The man who’d come to meet them stood before Qirum and Praxo. He was young, under twenty, and he wore a tunic of coarsely spun linen, a short cow-hide cloak, and boots covered in fish scales. He was dark, his face round, his hair black. He tapped his chest. ‘Vertix,’ he said. ‘Vertix.’ He spoke on in his own coarse tongue, but there was Greek, Egyptian and even Hatti in the mix, Qirum could tell. ‘Show? Show way? Food, water? Guide?’