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.
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:
NO ALE. NO WINE. NO WATER. NO FOOD.
NO OUT-OF-TOWNERS.
NO SEWAGE WORKERS.
NO DOCTORS.
‘ALWAYS A FRIENDLY WELCOME AT MYRCAN’S!’
‘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.
It was only then that it occurred to Rina to wonder why Alxa had arranged to see her now, and not before.
Rina returned to the Barmocar property without being spotted. She presented herself on time at Anterastilis’ bathroom, where a maid had already filled the mistress’ deep sunken bath with hot water sprinkled with salts and balm. Anterastilis herself was not yet present. Rina took the time to change into the sheer shift she used for this work, and to wash her face and neck.
Anterastilis bustled in, staggering slightly, evidently drunk. ‘By Melqart’s left ball, that rabble on the council go on and on. And the way they drink! Oh, help me with this, you dozy woman.’
Rina clapped her hands to dismiss the maid, who closed the door behind her, and helped her mistress loosen her robes, held in place by pins and buttons. Soon the folds of hugely expensive purple-dyed cloth slipped to the floor, and Anterastilis stood revealed in the girdle of bone and linen that held her figure in something like the shape it had been when she was younger, Rina thought cattily, with a prominent bosom and tight waist. Now this garment was unlaced from the back and discarded. Anterastilis, who was a little over forty and perhaps ten years younger than Rina, was full-breasted but flabby, with folds of flesh rolling from her belly, and sagging buttocks and thighs dimpled with fat. Not for her the privations suffered by the rest of Carthage, Rina observed, not for the first time.
Anterastilis stretched, yawned, belched, and allowed Rina to lead her by the hand to her bath, where she climbed down the steps into the hot water, sighed and settled back. Rina took sponge and pumice stone and rubbed at her flesh. Rina could smell spiced meat on her breath, and wondered what the meat could possibly be. Dog, perhaps?
‘That rabble on the council,’ Anterastilis murmured sleepily. ‘Only come here for my husband’s cellar, I’m sure of it. And because he lets them fight. .’
The way the young dominated life in Carthage had been among the most profound shocks for Rina on arriving here. Back in Northland she’d known the theory, of course. Farmers routinely died young. The women died of backbreaking toil and relentless child-bearing, the men died in the course of hazardous sports like hunting, or of fighting in wars, and everybody just died of famine or the diseases they caught from their animals. Even in the cities, even in the long-gone good times, more had died than were born, and the population depended on immigrants from the countryside. The result was a city that felt to fifty-one-year-old Rina like a playpen full of squabbling children. Even their councils fizzed with youthful aggression. Barmocar, in fact, was among the most elderly still serving-
‘Ow!’ Anterastilis slapped her face with a wet palm, hard enough to sting. ‘You pinched me, you useless sow!’
‘I am sorry, sorry,’ Rina mumbled, head lowered. Concentrate, Rina — concentrate! For if you earn enough disfavour you will be banished from here, and then how will you live?
With the bathing done, Rina helped Anterastilis out of the bath. Rina took special care, wary of the woman’s drunkenness; a fall would be disastrous, for Rina. She walked Anterastilis to the massage table. This was a slab of marble heated from beneath by a system of furnaces and pipes that circulated hot steam — a primitive contraption by Northland’s standards, but effective enough. Anterastilis lay on her back, a pillow under her head, naked, and closed her eyes.
Rina warmed her hands on the slab, and took oil jars down from the shelf. These were exotic products from the mysterious countries of the east, and even now Rina had no real idea what most of them were, but she had quickly learned which her mistress preferred, and how they were to be applied. She began with handfuls of a gelatinous oil applied to Anterastilis’ heavy stomach, Rina’s strong hands kneading the flesh. Then another handful for Anterastilis’ collarbones, and then the breasts themselves, which sagged to either side as if deflated.
This was the moment when Anterastilis would let her know how she wanted the session to proceed.
Sure enough Anterastilis pushed Rina’s hands away, and as she massaged her own heavy breasts, Rina moved down to her thighs, which parted softly Rina worked the oil into the flesh of the thighs, teasingly, slowly moving up to the folds of her sex.
Rina had no idea if this was merely sexual, if Anterastilis was a woman unsatisfied by her husband who demanded such services from all her maids, or if it was the kind of power display Rina had endured from Barmocar. Anterastilis’ motives made no difference to Rina. She had to perform these hateful acts anyway, for it was that or the street. She was an Annid! But the sheer repetition of it had taken her to a numb space beyond degradation.
Anterastilis seemed tired, as well as drunk. The session was proceeding more quickly than usual, and maybe she wanted to get it done before she fell asleep. Rina was relieved. There were times when her mistress asked her to use a variety of aids, expensive items carved of ivory, applied to her vagina or anus. Now, as Rina pushed her fingers inside her, Anterastilis moaned, and reached up to grab Rina’s small breast, squeezing it painfully through her thin shift.
Then Anterastilis yelped, slapped Rina’s hands away and sat up, the oil glistening on her bare flesh. ‘You scratched me!’
Rina cringed. ‘Madam, I promise-’
Anterastilis pulled at her crotch, her legs akimbo. There was a slight red line on the inside of her right thigh. ‘Look at that! By Tanit’s mercy, I am bleeding.’
There was a stinging cleansing lotion on the shelf. Rina reached for that.
But Anterastilis grabbed her wrists so the bottle fell and spilled on the floor. ‘Show me your hands. Show me!’
It took her only a heartbeat to discover the nail Rina had broken on the wall.
‘Look at that claw! Look at it! How dare you bring that anywhere near my body? And these nails! They are filthy. What have you been doing, woman?’ She peered at Rina’s face, and abruptly grabbed her neck. She was surprisingly strong. Rina resisted for a heartbeat, she couldn’t help it, then suppressed her instincts and yielded. Anterastilis dragged Rina’s face to hers, and sniffed noisily. ‘Wine! I can smell it on your breath. Where does a woman like you get wine from? From whoring — is that it, Northlander?’ She released Rina.
‘Madam, please-’
‘Out.’ Anterastilis began throwing jars at Rina’s head. They were too solid to smash, and rolled noisily to the floor. ‘Out! You will be whipped for this. Wait until my husband hears of it. Flayed! Get out, woman, out!’
Rina fled, in no doubt that Anterastilis meant every word she said.