Northland 2 - Bronze Summer by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780575089259
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2011-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

35

Nago, ten years older than Voro and far more experienced a hunter, pointed to a poorly concealed hearth, a scrap of linen clinging to bracken.

Voro nodded, grinning.

Deep in the folded hill country of the First Mother’s Ribs, Voro and Nago were tracking Caxa, as they would hunt a deer. Even after the clue Caxa herself had left them by etching her giant artwork on the hillside, it had taken them days to work their way up from the valley of the Brother River, following her trail. But now, at last, they had crossed a ridge coated with heather, and saw her smoke.

The men rested, snuggling into the heather and sipping water from their flasks, before closing in for what Nago insisted on calling ‘the kill’. They were reasonably well hidden, Voro thought, though even the heather was sparse this year, and everybody doubted it would put on its usual autumn display of brilliant purple. But the thistles and poppies grew thickly. From this high vantage Voro looked south over the country. He could see the winding ribbon that was the Brother River, and the communities cut into the green along its banks, the characteristic hearthspaces connected by arrow-straight trackways. Further away, off to the south, he could just make out the shining water of the Sister, the two rivers curling towards their shared estuary off to the east. And beyond the rivers the tremendous plain of Northland itself stretched away. Despite the dismal summer, though it was so unseasonably cold, there was plenty of green in the clumps of forest, the reeds in the marshland. Given the landscape was so different from her own remote country, Voro thought, Caxa had done well to hide from them – indeed to have survived so long, more than a month, by living off the land, entirely alone. But she was here. No doubt about that. Voro only had to glance down at the hillside below him.

From up here the pattern she had designed was foreshortened, but he had seen it from the villages of the valley of the Brother, from the lowland, as it had meant to be seen: a tremendous figure scrawled on the hill, a grotesque mashing together of a human baby with a fish’s body and a wolf’s head. It could only be Caxa, for, according to Xivu, this was characteristic of the art of her country. The markings had been made by scraping at the heather, by setting carefully controlled fires – it was a feat of ingenuity and persistence for one woman to have achieved all this alone. And she had completed it all in a single night. It had scared the life out of the people when they had woken the morning after to find this monstrosity glaring down from their hillside at them. But it had at last enabled Nago and Voro to track the girl down.

Nago glanced at the sky, and rubbed his beaky nose. ‘So hard to tell the time of day. That’s the worst of this god-baffling sunless sky.

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