Stone Spring (19 page)

The Root glared at Josu without speaking, and moved on. Further along a group of women had gathered the bones of a mature male deer, a big animal, specially hunted for the purpose. The skeleton had been roughly reassembled on the sandy ground, and the women were carefully working the bones. Jurgi, smiling at the women, picked up a flute made of a shin bone, a rattle made of a hip socket containing beach pebbles, a bull roarer carved from a bit of scapula, a rasper from a chipped rib. ‘You see, we like to turn the whole animal into music, even little drums and rattles for the children. Then at the solstice when we march to the Giving place we bring the spirit of the animal with us, and—’

The Root spat. ‘Cripples with lumps of flint. Whistles for children. Is this how the men of Etxelur spend their time, priest? No wonder you let your women chop your balls off.’

The priest tried to intervene again, but Zesi wouldn’t stay silent this time. ‘We live differently to you, Root,’ she said in passable Pretani - a skill she had probably picked up, Ana thought with an inward twist of pain, during the spring days she had spent, secretly, with Shade.

The Root said, with a kind of dangerous calm, ‘In Albia, no woman would dare speak to me at all - let alone this way.’

‘None but my mother,’ Shade said dryly.

‘Silence, boy.’ The Root leered at Zesi. ‘What else can you do with your tongue, little girl? Maybe that’s what drove my boys wild.’

Zesi’s face twisted into a snarl.

This time it was the priest who pulled her back. ‘You are our guests. We have food, drink - the fruits of the sea, which—’

‘Fish, you mean. You all stink of fish.’ Root put his hands on his hips and glared around. ‘What a pitiful display this is. Etxelur is dead, or all but. Twitching like a calf after its brains have been stove in. What kind of Giving will this be anyhow?’ He glared at Zesi again. ‘I heard your father is dead.’

‘Not dead. Missing.’

‘Since the autumn equinox - that’s what I heard. Dead - that’s what you call a man missing so long. But he was the Giver. Who will Give this year? His eldest son - that’s the custom, isn’t it, priest? Oh, but wait. He had no sons! How typical of a ball-less Etxelur hunter of little fish that he couldn’t even father a son.’

Jurgi said, ‘Zesi will Give, as the senior woman of Kirike’s house. It’s unusual but not without precedent—’

‘A woman, Giving!’ The Root bellowed laughter, and his men dutifully joined in, though Shade looked away. ‘That I’ve got to see. And what of the wildwood hunt? It’s the Giver, or his son, who stands for Etxelur on that too. Who will lead this year?’ He reached out to chuck Zesi under the chin. ‘You, tongue girl?’

She flinched, but snapped back, ‘Yes.’

The priest murmured, ‘Zesi, think about this—’

‘Yes, I will go on the wildwood hunt. And when I bring down a bull with bigger balls than yours, Root, you will apologise for your insults.’

The Root laughed again. ‘Then bring on the autumn! That I have to see.’ He turned to his men.

In her own tongue Ana murmured, ‘Zesi, oh Zesi - what have you done?’

‘I can hunt as well as any man,’ Zesi shot back.

‘That’s true,’ the priest said. ‘But it’s not the hunting that’s the danger. It’s the Pretani . . .’

‘I will fulfil my promise.’

‘Whale!’

24

The cry had come from a boy standing on the crest of the dunes that stood over the Seven Houses. He waved and pointed east, towards the mouth of the bay.

The Etxelur folk forgot about their visitors and ran that way, scrambling over the dunes.

The Root glanced at Shade and his hunters, and began to stride that way too. The priest walked with them, at times half-trotting to keep up with their long paces, and Zesi and Ana followed.

They soon crossed the dunes and clambered down to the beach, and walked towards the mouth of the bay, opposite Flint Island. The Pretani looked extraordinary as they marched along the strand, Ana thought, their hoof-like feet kicking up brown-yellow sand that clung to their furs and their bare, sweating legs. They were out of place, like aurochs driven along a beach.

And at the neck of the bay she saw the whale, huge and glistening, stranded on the stretch of tidal marsh land opposite the island. It must have lost its way in the open ocean and swum into the bay - or it might have been driven that way by Etxelur fisherfolk.

The whale still lived; its big tail fluke quivered, and its skin glistened wet. But its life was effectively over. Its own weight would crush it, if it wasn’t finished off by spears and knives.

The people ran towards it, shouting their pleasure and excitement. Etxelur folk went whaling, but it was a dangerous venture to chase down such huge, powerful animals in skin boats with bone harpoons. To have such a beast delivered to their own shore without risking any lives was a gift of the little mother of the sea. Soon the process of turning the whale into a mountain of meat, oil, and bones would begin.

But even before she got there Ana heard shouting voices, and saw raised fists and shaken spears.

‘Snailheads,’ Zesi murmured. ‘That’s all we need.’

A group of the strangers were confronting the gathering Etxelur folk. The snailheads, here for the Giving, were led by Knuckle, the man Ana had met at the summer camp, who faced Jaku, uncle of Ana and Zesi. These two were screaming in each other’s faces. Etxelur folk and snailheads, gathered round, were joining in, backing their champions and yelling insults. All this was played out beneath the huge, sad eye of the dying whale.

The priest tried to get between the arguing men. ‘What’s this about?’

The snailhead, Knuckle, roared in his broken traders’ tongue, ‘Our find! Ours! Our fish!’

Jaku laughed. ‘It’s a whale, you fool. A whale, not a fish. Don’t you have whales where you come from? Maybe you don’t. Why don’t you snailheads just go home?’

The Root boomed laughter. ‘Like day-old calves butting heads.’

Knuckle stared at him, and switched to the traders’ tongue. ‘Pretani?’ And he saw Shade behind his father. ‘You.’ He marched towards Shade. The man’s extraordinary elongated skull, painted today with green spirals, had veins that throbbed at each temple. ‘You! Brother of the man who killed my brother. I told you at the camp - stay out of my sight.’

The Root growled, ‘You don’t tell a Pretani what to do.’

‘I see your ugly face. Father of killer?’

Root glared at the priest. ‘What did he say? Tell me, priest.’

Jurgi, exasperated and alarmed, twisted his hands together. ‘He said - it doesn’t matter what he said—’

But then the arguments began again, everybody shouting, Jaku, Knuckle, the Root, Zesi, their followers waving fists and spears and knives, and the priest crying out for order, a three-way fight conducted in four languages, if you counted the traders’ tongue.

Ana pulled out of the angry mass, dismayed. She looked up at the whale’s huge eye. She was so close to it she could smell the sea on it, see the barnacles that peppered its flesh. The eye rolled, and she thought it looked down on her.

And somebody was clapping, above the fighting. Clap, clap, clap, steady as a heartbeat.

‘The priest’s right,’ came a voice in the traders’ tongue. ‘Who said what, it doesn’t matter. You’re all so busy squabbling you forget what’s important - the whale, whose life is being given up for you.’

The clapping was having a quieting effect; the squabbling groups shut up and turned to see. The voice was coming from above her - on top of the whale.

‘And besides,’ came the voice, ‘if a whale is driven ashore, as this one was, the ownership goes to the one who did the driving. Isn’t that the custom, priest? Sorry we’ve been away so long. But you have to admit we brought home a decent present for the Giving.’

Ana stepped back until she could see two men standing on top of the whale, one taller, the other heavier, the latter apparently winded by the effort of climbing up there. They were silhouetted against the sky, but she knew who they were immediately.

She couldn’t move. She could barely think.

Zesi’s shriek broke the silence. ‘Father!’ She ran forward and pressed her hands against the whale’s damp flank.

Kirike knelt and reached down to Zesi; the whale was so big that, reaching up on her tiptoes, she could only just touch his fingers. He looked around until he saw Ana, and smiled at her.

Somebody started applauding, one of the Etxelur folk. One by one others joined in. The rest, the snailheads and the Pretani, just stared, bemused.

The priest was shaking his head. ‘Trust Kirike and Heni to make such a show of coming home. But it’s the will of the little mothers that they should show up on the very day the Root and his boys arrive . . .’

Ana still couldn’t move. None of this seemed real.

A woman approached her, walking around the head of the whale. She was tall, with rich dark hair tied back in a knot. She wore skins that were stained by salt water, and she carried a baby, a lump no more than weeks old. She looked tired, but oddly resilient. ‘You must be Zesi, or—’

‘Ana.’

‘Your father told me all about you.’ Her language was the Etxelur tongue, spoken slowly but clearly enough. The woman staggered, and tucked the baby closer to her chest, and smiled. ‘Forgive me. We have been at sea for moons.’

‘Months.’

‘Months. Yes . . . I have forgotten the land, how to stand. I am Ice Dreamer. I hope we will be friends.’

A dog yapped. It was Lightning, racing across the sand, come to greet his long-lost master.

25

Ana lay back in the crook of her father’s arm. He was drinking a nettle tea she had made him. Lightning lay on Kirike’s other side, contentedly curled up against his leg.

They were in their home. The afternoon had grown ferociously hot. There was plenty going on outside - she could hear the shouts of the people beginning the long process of butchering the whale, and even from here she could smell the sharp stink of blood and blubber and brine - but she was grateful for some time in the shade. And after so long in his boat, Kirike said, so was he.

He didn’t smell like her father, not yet. There was too much of the sea on him. And she thought he had lost weight, grown greyer - grown old in the nine months he had been away. Grown that bit stranger. But she didn’t care. It was him, solid and alive, as if back from the dead; she had him back, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be but here with him.

But the stranger was here too, the woman he had brought back with her baby. She was sitting with the priest, talking quietly. Even her name was odd: Ice Dreamer.

They were trying to work out where she had come from, how far away was the land where Kirike had picked her up. They had lifted the mats from the floor, and the priest scrawled a map in the dirt, showing the familiar countries, Albia, Gaira, and Northland between, and a vaguer sketch of what lay to the west, mostly picked up from traders’ tales: a warm sea to the south, a cold, icebound ocean to the north, and beyond a greater ocean to the west a vast continent. Dreamer spoke of her land, which was evidently a big, complicated place of lakes and forests and ice. But she was even vaguer than the priest, for as a child she had grown up far from any sea, believing she lived on an endless plain - just land, going on for ever. She hadn’t even known the ocean existed.

Neither recognised what the other drew, and there seemed no way of connecting them up, save for a dim impression of Kirike and Heni’s westward journey, hopping between rocky islands and ice floes, and then a similar step-by-step journey back.

‘It is as if we inhabit different worlds,’ the priest said, doodling with his stick. ‘Ours to the east, yours to the west. Connected only by an accidental journey that might never be made again . . .’

Dreamer was sitting cross-legged with her baby on her lap. Out of her heavy skins, she wore a light tunic over her heavy breasts. Her face was well defined, the bones of her cheeks high, her brow proud, her nose thin and straight. She was beautiful, Ana thought, watching her. Strange, beautiful.

Dreamer shifted to see what Jurgi was sketching now. He had drawn three concentric circles, a line piercing to the centre. Unthinking, he’d drawn it over Etxelur in his map. Dreamer asked, ‘What is this? I see that sign everywhere here, on your houses, carved into the rocks. Even on people’s faces. I have seen it in my own country.’

‘You have?’

‘We saw it carved in the rocks,’ Kirike called over. ‘Over the beach where we picked her up.’

‘The sign is very old,’ the priest said. ‘It means many things. For one thing, we use it to remember the better world of the past.’

Kirike grunted. ‘When Etxelur was strong, and did not have to take insults from a bull-man like the Root.’

‘But I think it means other things too,’ Jurgi said. ‘Circles come back to where they started. As the moon and sun cycle in the sky, as the seasons give way one to another, always returning.’ He glanced at Dreamer’s baby. ‘As a baby girl is born, who grows to be a woman, and gives birth in turn.’

‘Maybe he has drawn sharks and dolphins swimming around a boat,’ Kirike said.

Ice Dreamer flashed him a smile, bright in the dark.

Ana didn’t know what they meant. They shared memories, experiences she didn’t. She felt an odd, unworthy pang. Resentment. Jealousy. Ugly emotions she didn’t like to recognise in herself.

Ice Dreamer said to Jurgi, ‘Much separates us. Your language is like none I ever heard.’

‘That isn’t so much,’ said the priest. ‘The traders who cross the Continent by the valleys of the great rivers say that everywhere languages are spoken that are as different from mine as mine is from yours.’

‘But she did not speak the traders’ tongue, even,’ Kirike said.

‘Even so, Ice Dreamer, much more unites us than divides us. You are human. Two arms, two legs—’

‘Half a belly, or at least that’s how it feels.’

‘I can tell you,’ Kirike said now, ‘she’s the same inside as we are. If not, she wouldn’t be here now.’

The priest said, ‘Nothing here seems so very strange to you, does it? Nothing about the way we live.’