Bronze Summer by Stephen Baxter

all we could do, all we could understand. But we were welcomed into the House of the Beetle, and we worked hard, and did it better and better. And look at us now!’
    ‘What, still up to our knees in muck?’
    He grinned, his face a muddy mask. ‘I felt the same way when I was your age. Younger, probably.’
    ‘What way?’
    ‘Like I didn’t fit. Our world here, the Northland way – it’s fine, and it works, but it is rigid . It’s a world where you are expected to find deep spiritual joy mucking out a canal.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘You know what I did. I gave up my chance of ever becoming a father, for the sake of a greater ambition. And it was all the fault of Prokyid the Second, the nearest to a king we ever had here in Etxelur, about a thousand years ago. Did you know that? He did just what all these other petty kings and princes do on the Continent – strutting and posing, picking fights with others of his kind, starving his people to wage war on others. And for a generation the important stuff, the engineering, was neglected. When he was toppled, the Annids decreed that no man could ever again join their number, for generally it’s men who cause trouble of that sort. And so now—’
    ‘It’s women only, or eunuchs.’
    He shrugged. ‘I made my choice years ago. It’s as if a different person made it for me. I jumped off a cliff. I had no way back, and I have none now.’ He glanced at the children playing on the bank. ‘Like you, I wanted more.’
    ‘And was it worth it?’
    ‘Oh, yes. I got what I wanted, which was to see how Northland works from the inside. But that’s what worries me now. Northland is ponderous and slow-moving – frankly, the Houses are usually too busy infighting to look outside. And yet there are new things in this world. Things that need to be looked at. An arrowhead that can pierce bronze. The nestspills who come trickling into our country from their failing drought-ridden farms—’
    ‘I’ve seen some of them.’
    ‘In the east people are starving, dying, marching. Ancient kingdoms are collapsing. Even the Hatti are in trouble. The world is changing. And if it’s to survive Northland must change too. Change and adapt.’
    ‘How? You just said the Houses are too busy fighting each other.’
    ‘But the Houses you know about aren’t all there is.’
    ‘Now I really don’t follow you,’ she grumbled, pecking at another patch of hardened canal mud. ‘What other House is there?’
    He dug under his shirt and pulled out an amulet – a crow’s foot, dried and suspended from a loop of leather.
    She stared.
    ‘Keep digging,’ he murmured.
    She bent over her spade. ‘I never heard of a House of the Crow. Besides, you’re an Owl. You sacrificed your balls to become one! How can you be in two Houses at once?’
    ‘It just evolved that way . . . Milaqa, like most things in Northland, the House of the Crow is very old. Somebody far back in our history realised that we have this basic problem of getting stuck in our ways. And that every so often the world changes, something new happens, and we have to be able to cope with it. So the Crows emerged. Like the other Houses, you can only join if you’re invited. And you’re only invited if you have the right kind of mind.’
    ‘What kind?’
    ‘The kind that doesn’t fit anywhere else. The whole point of the Crows is to be the ones who deal with the new, the unexpected, the challenging.’
    She felt her heart beat faster. ‘The exciting.’
    ‘The dangerous,’ he warned. ‘Look, Milaqa, I’m just offering this to you as a way forward. I already showed you something unexpected. Something strange.’
    ‘You mean the arrowhead.’ She pulled it out from under her tunic, as he had his crow’s foot.
    ‘What have you done about it?’
    ‘Nothing,’ she said slowly. ‘I . . .’ She had felt reluctant to face the fact that her mother must have been murdered. Somehow asking questions about it would make her