Iron Winter (Northland 3) (33 page)

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.

Well, then, what was its purpose?

She turned to the ‘amendments’. The Northlander script would have been utterly incomprehensible to the head of household. He must have judged that the additions were minor enough not
to pose a problem. But his judgement had been wrong, for the message they picked out had nothing to do with the nonsensical ‘news’ from Etxelur:

‘Mother. Go to the back wall now. Alxa.’

Rina was scarcely able to breathe. She had not seen her daughter for months.

She did not hesitate. She got out of bed, used the room’s communal piss-pot, washed quickly with what was left of the jug of water on the nightstand, and changed into her day clothes, the
cleanest of the two sets of the uniform-like tunic and skirt Anterastilis ordered her to wear. She ripped up the note and fed the pieces to a small lantern that burned high on the wall.

Then she pulled her cloak over her shoulders and slipped out of the room.

She knew a way to the compound’s back wall that she could take without being seen. Every servant in the household knew of such routes. You learned to live like a rat, in
such circumstances as these. The house’s servants, staff and slaves had a covert life of their own that went entirely unnoticed by Barmocar and Anterastilis and their circle – and no
doubt the same had been true of her own household in Etxelur, she ruefully realised.

She did check the time on one of the big Greek water clocks. She had a couple of hours free. Today Barmocar and Anterastilis were hosting members of the overlapping assemblies that governed
Carthage, the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four and the Council of Elders, no doubt debating such crises as the rationing, the plague, and the growing rumours of a vast Hatti horde on the way. These
sessions, crowded with drunken young men, were always raucous affairs lubricated by generous helpings of Barmocar’s wine. A greater contrast with the grave councils of Northland, which tended
to be dominated by older women like herself, could scarcely be imagined. Rina would not be needed during the session, but afterwards Anterastilis would no doubt require her ‘special
comforting’. All that for later.

The estate’s back wall was a crude affair, just heaped-up blocks, hastily improvised in the early autumn. Hurrying along it, Rina soon found a gap that even an old woman like herself could
easily step through.

Waiting on the other side was a young man she faintly recognised, dressed in a tunic and trousers that might once have been smart. He grinned and beckoned. ‘This way, lady.’ He spoke
in crude Northlander.

She stepped through the wall, taking his hand for support – but she caught her fingernail on a jagged stone and snapped it painfully. Biting it to neatness, she hurried after him as he
made his way along a narrow street down the slope of the Byrsa. The way was lined by the homeless, ragged bundles slumped in doorways, outstretched skeletal hands. Troops would come through later
in the day and clear the track, but the people would return later, or others of their kind would, filling up the empty spaces like mercury settling in a cracked bowl; you could move them around but
you could never get rid of them.

Meanwhile the rising sun caught the fronts of the grand buildings of the Byrsa, and from his column at the summit Hannibal hero of Latium stood proud, surveying his decaying city.

Rina remembered who this man was. ‘You’re Jexami’s servant. That’s how you know Northlander.’

He shrugged, grinning easily. ‘Easier for me to learn the master’s tongue than for him to learn mine, though he would beat me if he heard me saying it.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t remember your name.’ Nobody remembered servants’ names – nobody of the class to which Jexami belonged, and herself, once.

‘Himil. My name is Himil.’

‘Thank you for coming to get me, Himil. How do you know Alxa?’

‘Who, sorry?’

‘My daughter. I suppose you remember her from our arrival in Carthage.’

‘Not so much. She helped me. The master threw me out.’

‘He did? Why?’

‘Heard there was blood plague in my family.’ The Carthaginians were terrified that the awful infection they called the ‘blood plague’, which had left scars in their
history before, was on its way back to the city, brought by the endless nestspill flows.

‘He threw you out just for that? And was there plague? In your family, I mean?’

‘No. Father died. Not plague. Just died. Hungry, got sick. I had nowhere to stay. Got work cleaning sewers, and bought food for the family, little brothers and sisters, but still nowhere
to stay. Sleeping in streets, like these folk. Then I heard a rumour about the Ana.’

‘Who?’

‘Your daughter, mistress. The Ana was helping people find places to live. I went looking, I asked and I asked, found the Ana and she remembered me, said I’d been kind when she came
to the master’s house. But I think she’d have helped me anyway. Got me a bed in a house, outside the walls, but that’s all right.’

‘Alxa did all that? How?’

‘Ask her yourself.’

They had come to a tavern, an open door, a counter fronting the street, a dingy interior behind. The wall bore a hand-scrawled sign in chalk:

‘Hello, Mother.’ Alxa came forward from the shadows of the tavern.

Rina rushed to her, and hugged her daughter. Through layers of much-patched clothing, she could feel Alxa’s shoulder blades.

Alxa led her to a table at the back of the tavern. It was a dismal cave, Rina thought, which must have seen better days with a location this close to the Byrsa. But despite the chalked denials
outside, a barman produced a jug of wine and two pottery mugs. ‘Always we serve the Ana,’ he murmured, pouring the wine.

Rina sipped the wine. It was sour, the grape crops had evidently been awful for years, but it was the first mouthful she’d taken in months – servants in Barmocar’s home
didn’t drink wine. ‘Ah, that’s good. Thank you. So – “the Ana”?’

Alxa seemed much older than when she had come to Carthage, her face lined, her once-habitual smile gone. She was still just sixteen. ‘It’s a long story, Mother. But first, Nelo?
I’ve not heard a word since the army took him.’

‘Nor me. From what I can tell from overhearing Barmocar’s conversations, they’re anticipating a clash with the Hatti, but it’s not come to that yet.’

‘Maybe he lives,’ Alxa said grimly. ‘As long as disease, hunger, or the sheer stupidity of the military haven’t killed him yet.’

‘We have to hope.’

‘Here’s to hope.’ Alxa raised her mug, and touched her mother’s.

‘I’ve heard nothing from home either, incidentally,’ Rina said now. ‘From your father. Which is why the note you sent was such a shock.’

Alxa grinned wickedly, suddenly seeming more like her old self. ‘It evidently worked. My ruse, I mean. Maybe I’d make a good spy, do you think?’

‘You’ll earn me a whipping.’

That wiped away the smile. ‘They whip you?’

Only once . . .
She changed the subject quickly. ‘So now you’re the Ana, are you?’

Alxa shrugged. ‘Carthaginians have trouble pronouncing “Alxa”, believe it or not.’
All-sha.
‘They’ve only heard of one Northlander, most of them, who
is Ana, who they think lived a hundred years ago and built walls on the seabed by hand. So now I’m “the Ana”.’

‘What have you been up to, Daughter? The last time I saw you, you were doing translation for a member of the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four.’

‘That didn’t last long. I made a couple of mistakes . . . There are so many people flooding into Carthage, you can find whatever skills you want, if you just look. Lawyers, doctors,
even priests. It wasn’t hard for my boss to replace me with someone better and cheaper. And prettier,’ she said with a grimace.

‘You should have come to me.’

‘Oh, Mother, that’s ridiculous. What could you have possibly done? No, I found my own way.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Nothing too terrible, don’t worry.’ On impulse she took her mother’s hand. ‘I’m still a maiden of Etxelur. Still chaste.’

With great care, Rina showed no reaction.

‘But I got to know Carthage. I mean, the real city. Not as it exists in the imagination of the suffetes and the elders and the tribunes. Not even the priests know what’s going on, I
don’t think. Mother, the bread ration, such as it is, doesn’t reach half the people it’s supposed to. There’s a whole population who have been simply abandoned. Yet
they’re still there – many of them in a huge slum city outside the walls beyond the western gate. There is terrible corruption out there, terrible cruelty.

‘But most people are
decent
. I started to see the ways they help each other. One has room to take in an orphan, and does so. Another has a sort of food that her own child
can’t eat because it sickens her, so she gives it to the family next door. There’s no fresh water but for a couple of dried-up springs, and even they are polluted by sewage, but they
get organised, and dig latrines and sewage channels. Now we have doctors and nurses who can at least advise the sick. Of course it all depends on food, and there’s a dwindling supply of that,
and in the end . . . Well, I suppose it’s best not to think about the end.’

‘So this is what you’re doing. You’re in the middle of this network of – of helping.’

‘I’m educated, Mother. I can organise things on a bigger scale than most. Write things down, work out the numbers. And I’m a Northlander. I’m not in any of
Carthage’s factions or cliques. That helps, I think.’

She had become a woman Rina barely knew, so much had she grown just in the few months they’d been in Carthage. She was still not seventeen. ‘Oh, Alxa! The risks you must run, of
disease, of robbery . . .’

Alxa smiled. ‘Mother, there’s always a risk. But people know me. I’m the Ana. If anybody tried to hurt me there would be a hundred to step in and protect me.’ Alxa patted
Rina’s hand, as if she was the parent, Rina the child. ‘Besides, what choice is there?’

‘The family would be proud of you. But I wish I could spare you this!’

Alxa pulled back and stood up. ‘What would you do, hide me in a broom closet? I wanted to tell you – well, that I’m fine. Now you must go. Himil told me about your demanding
boss.’

Rina could barely bring herself to stand and leave her. ‘Give my love to Nelo if—’

‘If I hear from him, I will.’

They embraced again, and it was over. Rina let Himil lead her out of the tavern and back up the hill towards Barmocar’s residence.