It was time. He heard the clear voice of Annid Xree calling out final instructions. ‘Be ready to cut the banner ropes. .’
Crimm leaned over the rail. All over the Wall face people came forward to the balcony rails, ordinary folk, clerks and cleaners and barkeeps, looking down nervously at the approaching horde, whose angry cries could already be heard. They held their places, their knives and axes poised.
Xree called, ‘On my three. One — two. .’
A hundred arms, raising axes and blades.
‘Three!’
With a roar the volunteers chopped at the ropes before them. The banners fell away, billowing, some trailing from stray threads. The sunlight struck the Wall, struck shining surfaces exposed for the first time in centuries — tremendous concave mirrors — and was thrown back at the advancing mob, in tight, precise splashes that glared brilliantly from the white of the ice. Those caught in the light threw up their hands to shield their eyes, and cried out in pain. Steam rose from the melting ice, itself brightly lit.
Crimm, dazzled, tried to see. ‘Some are fallen, burned. A lot more are running from the light. Scared out of their wits!’
Ayto shook his head. ‘Never believed this old gear would work.’
‘Those Greeks were clever. It’s said they used mirrors to fry enemy ships in battle.’
‘Yes, but I’ve been to Greece, and the mothers know the sun is a lot stronger down there than it is here. But still, I bow to the scholars. Has it made any difference to the battle, though? I mean it’s not as if we can aim this thing. We can only fry those who kindly wander into the hot spots.’
‘Yes. Others are coming on.’
‘We’ve a fight before us yet.’ Ayto drew his sword from its scabbard, an unfamiliar weapon for a fisherman despite their hasty citizens’ training by the guard.
Now more voices started calling up and down the face of the Wall. ‘Be ready! Here they come!’
Crimm leaned over the rail again. He saw that advance parties of the invaders had reached the tumbled rubble at the base of the Wall. It took them more effort to clamber over the heaped, ice-slippery stuff, and the hungry fighters were already exhausted. And they were greeted by chunks of rubble, frost-smashed thousand-year-old growstone thrown from the balconies higher up and the roof of the Wall, and a sparse hail of arrows.
Yet they came on. Now the leaders were clambering up the face of the Wall itself. Slick with ice it might be, but the ancient growstone was so rough and frost-damaged that it offered plenty of handholds. Crimm saw a man climbing up directly towards him, knife in mouth, arms and legs bare, ruined boots on his feet, so thin he looked like an animated skeleton. Yet he climbed with purpose and strength. His eyes met Crimm’s.
The Annid of Annids was right beside Crimm, looking down as he was. He took her arm. ‘Please, Ywa — get back into shelter. It’s not safe.’
She shook him off. ‘I must be seen, in the Armour of Raka. I must be seen!’
Ayto hefted his sword. ‘Forget about her. Be ready-’
There was a yell from above. ‘Look out!’
Crimm twisted and looked up. Heavy stone blocks were hailing down from the roof, meant for the invader, bouncing down the face of the Wall. Ayto grabbed him and pulled him back.
But Ywa hesitated. And one falling block, carved basalt from some smashed sculpture, caught her neatly on the back of her head, smashing her skull like an egg. Her body slumped over the rail.
‘No!’
Still Ayto held Crimm back.
That skeletal man came over the rail with a roar and hurled himself forward. Crimm raised his sword to parry the man’s lunge, pushed him back, then swept the weapon at knee level, making a satisfying contact with ropy flesh and muscle. The man fell, blood spilling vivid on the growstone surface. Crimm finished him with a swipe that cut his throat.
But before he was still, another came over the rail. And then another.
Crimm charged forward, and beside Ayto fought for his life.
44
The note was brought to Rina by Thuth, in the room they shared in Barmocar’s servants’ house. The big Libyan barged the door open with her hip, in Carthage there were no locks or latches on servants’ doors, and spun the note through the air. ‘For you.’
Rina sat up, clutching the blanket over the ragged remains of the undergarment from Northland that she used as a nightshirt. ‘A note? Who’s it from?’ They spoke in the patois of the servants’ quarters, a clumsy amalgamation of Carthaginian, Greek, Libyan — no Northlander in the mix, for Rina was the only one of her kind in the house.
Thuth said heavily, ‘Who’s it from, I don’t know, I’m not the Face of Baal.’ Her tongue could be sharper than her chopping knives. ‘I do know I need to get to work, and so do you.’ She hooked the door closed with her foot on her way out.
Rina sighed and tousled her short hair. She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all. She shared her bed with one of Anterastilis’ night-duty maids, a spiteful young Libyan. Until the maid left for her shift Rina had to try to sleep on the floor. But the night was already over, the light was bright through the muslin stretched over the empty window frame. There would be no more sleep; Rina faced another day’s work.
In the meantime here was this note. She turned it over in her hands. It was a simple folded page sealed with a blob of wax; she didn’t recognise the pressing.
A note! She didn’t get notes. Servants of Barmocar and Anterastilis didn’t get notes, or rarely. And the seal, of course, was already broken. Anything written down that came into the household that was not marked for the attention of the owners was routinely scrutinised by the head of house. In these increasingly difficult times Barmocar was concerned about security.
Rina opened up the note, shedding fragments of wax from the cracked seal. It was written in the Carthaginians’ angular alphabet, in a neat hand in a dark blue ink, presumably by a scribe. But Rina saw, intrigued, that a few hasty amendments to the text had been made, crossings-out and additions, in the swirling script of Northland — as if the note had been dictated to a Carthaginian scribe, and then the author had marked up corrections in Northlander on the copy. She scanned down to the signature. It was from Jexami! It was signed with a looping scrawl, beside an envoi in Carthaginian: ‘Your ever-loyal cousin.’
Jexami had not written to her before, nor had he made any attempt to contact her since the few days he had put her up in the late summer. Nor would she have expected him to. Jexami’s survival strategy was to pose as a Carthaginian gentleman. It was hard to believe he would risk all that with a note to a servant, especially one with an embarrassing Northlander past, and a relationship to Jexami himself.
She went back to the top and began picking out the Carthaginian letters. Her understanding of the tongue was still poor. It didn’t help that the blocky Carthaginian alphabet, in which you broke up the words into letter-particles and wrote them down, was so unlike the ancient Etxelur script she had grown up with, in which each word was represented by a single symbol of concentric arcs and bars — a written language that, according to scholars like Pyxeas, had more in common with the languages of Cathay than the bitty scrawls of the Continent’s farmers. But she made out the words, and read them to herself one by one: ‘Greetings to my cousin Rina, Annid of Etxelur! I send you news of home. Recently I received a long missive from my much-loved cousin Ywa Annid of Annids. .’
But Rina had heard a rumour, passed on spitefully by one of Barmocar’s men, that Ywa was dead, killed in a revolt.
She saw, reading on, that the ‘news’ in the note was a lot of jumbled nonsense. Of a Giving feast in the late summer, but Givings were always held precisely on midsummer day. Of the good health of Rina’s own husband Ontin, the priest, but Ontin was a doctor, and her husband was Thaxa. This was a clumsy fake! But good enough to have fooled a Carthage-born-and-bred head of household who knew nothing of such a remote land, or of her personal business.