Bronze Summer Read Free Page B

rooms. Such apartments, brand new, exclusive and very expensive, were owned by the House of the Owl, the Annids, and were really meant for clerks and other officers of the Annid order, or were used in a pinch by guests of the government of Northland. Milaqa had been loaned it as a favour by her mother, the Annid of Annids, and her stuff, her clothes, the little pouch with mementoes of her mother, sat in the alcoves chipped into the walls. Well, Kuma was dead now, and once the interment was done Milaqa would have to give up the apartment. But when the Annids came to throw her out, at least they would find the place tidy and clean, dignified. She let the door flap fall closed.
    She walked out along the passage towards its open end, and the gathering light of the spring sky. She passed other doors on the way, and heard human sounds, people softly moving about their morning business, a baby crying. The corridor gave onto a gallery cut into the Wall’s growstone face. She made her way a few paces along to a vertical gutter incised into the face, where she dumped her night soil. The ordure slithered down the gutter, heading for a heap at the Wall’s base, where it would be collected by workers of the House of the Beetle to be dug into the soil far from the Wall.
    The waking world below the Wall was a plain stretching off to the far distance, punctuated by sheets of water and soft low hills. From here you could make out the artifice of the whole world, from the flood mounds on which the big communal houses sat, to the dead-straight lines of the main tracks and the great diagonal canals, a framework which contained patches of forest and marsh in its tidy quilted pattern. Fires sparked everywhere, and smoke rose up through the morning mist. Already people were making their way towards the Wall along the main tracks, bringing fish, meat, eel, wildfowl – the fruit of the marshlands brought to feed the communities of the great growstone heap. Along the canal banks people were out too, throwing offerings of broken bronze tools or pottery or scraps of food into the water, praying for the beneficence of the little mothers.
    And over all this loomed the face of the Wall, within which she stood. It curved inwards, subtly, a tremendous concave flank to match the stout belly of its sea-facing side. Thanks to the curve Milaqa could make out much of the detail of its nearby face: the etching of the galleries where lamps flickered and people walked, the ladders and netting hanging from the balconies, and a huge, rickety scaffolding of wood where workers were already out fixing a deep crack in the face with fresh growstone. Up above, on the Wall’s roof, she could make out great frames with sails that turned languidly in the breeze; day and night the invisible muscles of the wind lifted pallets of excess water from the foot of the Wall and dumped it into the ocean. There were birds too, a few early arrivals already colonising cracks and crevices in this huge human-built cliff. Later in the year the boys would be climbing across the Wall’s face, clinging to crevices with fingers and bare toes – searching for eggs, just as she and Hadhe, her cousin and closest friend, used to when they were a few years younger.
    This was Great Etxelur, the District that was the very heart of the Wall, looming over the huddle of Old Etxelur below. But beyond the nearby clutter the Wall went on and on, to east and west, until it became a pale line in the misty air that stretched to the horizon, inhabited all along its length, the Districts strung out like shells on a bracelet. Children often grew up believing the Wall went on for ever. The truth was almost as staggering; the Wall had its limits, it did come to an end, but not until it had spanned the whole of the northern shore of Northland, a reach of very many days’ travel.
    And all along that length, and across hundreds of human generations, it kept the ocean at bay. It was deliciously scary, if you were