‘He’s to address the Water Council about the weather changes he thinks are coming.’

‘For the foreigners the issue at this Giving is dried fish, not maunderings about the weather. Oh, stop fussing and fidgeting, Thaxa! There’s nothing we can do about the Daidu caravan, or my uncle. When there is nothing to do but wait, then you wait.’

‘I do my best to support you, you know,’ he said with only the mildest exasperation at her ill temper.

This was the reality of their relationship, as, at the age of fifty years and nearly thirty years of marriage, they both understood very well. Rina knew she could not have functioned nearly so well as an Annid without her husband’s patient, fussy, competent assistance, and his tolerance of her bossiness. She allowed herself a smile. ‘I do know. How are the twins getting on?’

Thaxa looked through the crowd atop the Wall. ‘Nelo is with the Hatti party, and he’s doing a good job of not laughing at their incessant praying to Jesus. Alxa is still with the Carthaginians. Hmm. See the way that young princeling of theirs is looking at her? She’s only fifteen.’

Rina didn’t worry about the twins – or rather, she didn’t allow herself to. Rina and her husband were both from families of the House of the Owl, the Annids, the ancient guild of rulers and diplomats, which had long practice in inducting its children into the subtle arts of compromise, negotiation and flattery. Besides, fifteen was seen as a pretty mature age in most parts of the world; if she were Frankish or German Alxa would probably already be married off, already worn down by childbirth and never-ending work in the fields. The twins could look after themselves – at least, Rina thought, they could in normal times. But at the back of her mind there was a niggling awareness that there was little normal about this particular solstice.

This was Northland’s midsummer Giving, the heart of the year at the heart of the world, and a ceremony of great age – older than the pyramids of Egypt, far older than the upstart empires of Carthage and New Hattusa. In the great library of the Wall Archive, documentation existed to prove that antiquity. The world flocked here at midsummer as seabirds flocked to their nesting cliffs in the spring; it always had and always would, for this was Great Etxelur, Navel of the World, and the central and oldest of the Wall’s many evenly spaced Districts.