Bronze Summer Read Online Free

snuggled up safe in your bed at night deep inside the Wall, to think that the sea level was far above your head.
    The day was growing lighter while she stood here. The time of her mother’s interment, at noon, was not far away. She ought to go to the great meeting chamber known as the Vestibule, the entrance to the deeper warrens that led to the Hall of Interment. She ought to be talking gravely about her dead mother to aunts and nieces, to her mother’s colleagues in the House of the Owl.
    Or she could run off and see if Hadhe was up yet. Hadhe, Milaqa’s cousin, had children, two of her own and one adopted, and her little one was ill, which was why she was spending the winter in the shelter of the Wall, on the outskirts of the neighbouring District, the Scambles. Her own home, a house in a place called Sunflower down by the Brother River, would have been too damp for a sickly little boy.
    The kids would have got Hadhe up by now.
    Impulsively Milaqa turned to her left, to the east, away from the Vestibule, and began to run lightly along the galleries, the roughened growstone secure under her feet. She greeted people she knew, and nodded to strangers, and grinned at the children who were already swarming everywhere, even so early on a cold day. On the big scaffolding platform the workers stirred their huge ceramic pots of growstone, pouring in crushed rock and lime and water. These members of the House of the Beaver, mostly men, called out to her as she passed, every word obscene, and she made fist-pumping gestures back at them.
    She ducked inwards, into the body of the Wall. She climbed staircases and hurried along torchlit corridors cut through the growstone itself. As she ran on the nature of the galleries and passages subtly changed. Here, for instance, marigolds from the marshland, early bloomers, had been gathered and stuck in pots cut into the walls. The Wall was not the same everywhere, and nor were the people living in it, its Districts as different as the villages of the plain, each unique if only in small ways. And the further you went, the more different the people became, even in the way they dressed and spoke. Milaqa, who had a talent for languages as much as for anything, knew that a Wall-dweller from the western end, near the Albia coast, could not communicate with an inhabitant from the eastern end, near the estuary of the World River. And yet they all inhabited the same Wall, the one immense building; and they all worked together to maintain the Wall and the lands it depended on.
    She loved this place, the crowded communities, the corridors and galleries, the taverns – even the graffiti on the walls, layers of it, the sharp-cut recent additions obliterating the older marks beneath, some in forgotten languages. It was probably the nearest she was ever going to come to the cities of the east that the traders and travellers told of, where people lived in great heaped-up stone piles. Northland, her homeland, with its canals and landscapes and its smattering of people, with its emptiness and austerity and duty, wasn’t enough for her. But the Wall itself was something else.
    She soon came to where Hadhe was staying, in a chalet in the growstone loaned her by a fisher family who were wintering on Kirike’s Land. Milaqa was greeted by the sight of a ten-year-old boy calmly standing by a waste duct with his tunic pulled up, urinating into the air. His young bladder was strong, and the pale liquid arced far out into the void.
    ‘Jaro, stop that,’ she said, stalking up. ‘Use the gutters like everybody else. How would you like it if you woke up to find somebody pissing on your head?’
    He turned to face her, his penis in his hand still dribbling. ‘Are you looking at my cock, Aunt Milaqa?’
    ‘Looking for it, maybe, little boy. Put it away before I throw you over too.’
    ‘All right, all right.’ He tied up his loincloth, dropped his tunic and ran off, disappearing into the maze of