Stone Spring (32 page)

She thought she slept a bit.

When she woke, she found her unconscious body had snuggled down to find a more comfortable position, enfolded by the tree. Lying here like this, even her sprained ankle didn’t hurt any more, and she seemed to forget how hungry she was, how thirsty. The tree didn’t even roll that much as it rose up over the waves, which were gentler now. It was as if the tree was embracing her, holding her safe. Well, it was as far from home as she was, its very roots ripped out of the ground.

The tree was all that was real. The only sound she heard outside her own head was the soft lapping of the water against the branches and trunk. Maybe she ought to be afraid of the huge expanse of sea beyond, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it.

She slept again.

The next time she woke she saw light. A pink-grey sheen was seeping into one side of the sky, reflecting from flat layers of cloud. The other way, to the west, the stars still shone, though more palely. Above her head the sky was a deep blue dome, with only the brightest stars left visible. She felt a vast reluctance to be dragged into the day, from the safety of the dreamlike night.

And she heard something, a small splashing, a creak like a branch in the wind.

She sat up, making the tree rock, and looked east. She saw a shape silhouetted against the light, cutting through the water, and for an instant she thought it was a shark. Then she made out the clean profile of a boat, and the shadow of a man, alone, working two paddles. Smooth slow ripples spread from the prow.

She waved, and tried to call. ‘Hello?’ But her throat was sore and dry, her voice no more than a whisper, dwarfed by the sea. ‘Hello! Hello! I’m here!’

45

Through the night they huddled on top of the hill, Ana, Dreamer and Novu, with Dreamer’s baby cupped between their bodies. Other refugees crowded the slopes.

In the starlit dark, Ana slept only fitfully. All night Lightning cuddled up against Ana’s back, his head tucked in against her tunic, with occasional twitches, snuffles and yipped barks as he chased pine martens in his sleep. Once the baby stirred, hungry, and mewled; Dreamer held her close and fed her, murmuring soft words in her own transoceanic language.

Ana longed to be the one cuddling in, to be sleeping between her mother and her father as she used to when she was very small. But that wasn’t going to happen, not ever again.

They began to stir not long after dawn. Oddly Ana had just fallen into her deepest slumber, and she had trouble waking up.

Novu walked away and stepped behind a rock to make water; she could hear him groan from stiffness and bruises. Dreamer sat cross-legged, rocking her baby and murmuring to her, for a brief moment lost in the bond between them, but when Ana sat up Dreamer smiled warmly at her. Ana understood. Without Ana, Dreamer’s baby might not even be alive to see this morning. But with that thought came the memory of how she had been forced to abandon Arga.

Ana moved over to a broken heap of rocks, took off her loin wrap, and squatted to piss. The hill’s small summit, the flint lode, the sandstone tufted with grass and sparse heather, looked deceptively normal. After all, even the great third wave had not climbed as high as this. All around her people were moving, children and adults waking, and picking their way down the slopes.

Lightning came sniffing at Ana’s bare rump, wagging his tail, and she pushed him back. ‘Oh, get away, you silly dog . . .’ The dog roamed around, marking stones and patches of turf with sprinkles of urine, and he licked at the light dew on the blades of grass.

‘He’s thirsty,’ Novu observed, hitching his trousers. ‘Well, so am I. There’s no spring up here, is there? We’ve no food either.’

‘We’ll find water easily enough when we climb down,’ Dreamer said.

Ana asked, ‘Is it safe to go down?’

‘The sea’s gone back,’ Novu said, pointing north. ‘It looks normal to me. Lapping away as it always has. It’s what it’s done to the land that’s going to be interesting. Are you ready? There’s no point staying here.’

‘Help me with the baby,’ Dreamer said.

With Novu’s help Dreamer fixed Dolphin in her sling on her back. Ana pulled on her boots.

Then the three of them stood together, looking at each other. Ana flexed her arms and legs, spreading her hands; she was stiff, sore, but everything worked. ‘We’re all whole, at least. No broken limbs, no cracked heads.’

Novu was bare to the waist, his tunic ripped apart. Like the others he was covered in minor cuts, and bruises that were beginning to yellow. He said, ‘Today’s going to be difficult. Just remember - one footstep at a time. I learned that on the road. That’s how to get through the tough times.’

A bubble of fear and resentment burst inside Ana. ‘Brave words from the thief who hides away in a hole in the ground.’

Novu flinched.

Dreamer said, ‘That was yesterday, Ana. Today the world is different, and we are different people in it. I have a feeling we’re going to need each other.’

This was very adult, but Ana didn’t much want to be an adult right now. ‘Enough talking. Let’s go.’ She turned away, ignoring the others.

The dog ran around and barked, mouth open, tail wagging; he thought it was time for a walk.

She led the way down the path they had climbed in such haste yesterday, with Lightning running at her heels. It was a well-worn track that led down from the flint lodes, a track she had walked many times.

It was a calm morning. She heard gulls calling somewhere, the distant sigh of breaking waves. Everything felt normal. That dismal flight yesterday was like something from a nightmare, not connected to the mundane reality of the morning at all.

Then, on the hill’s lower slope, she first came to the pale sand. She stepped forward onto it cautiously. White, full of stones and shells, it crunched under her feet.

From this ragged edge onwards the sand covered the ground like a layer of snow.

‘Look at this.’ Novu walked to a stand of trees, alder and lime. Most of the trees still stood, though one had been knocked flat, its trunk snapped. Novu kicked at the trees’ roots. ‘There’s no soil . . .’ Ana saw that the surviving trees were rooted to a reef of gravel. Only scraps of peat and topsoil and grass clung to the roots. ‘I never saw anything like it,’ Novu said. ‘It looks as if the trees grew out of the gravel bank.’

‘The waves,’ Dreamer said slowly. ‘If they sucked people out to sea, so they sucked away the earth itself.’

The dog was digging at the roots of one of the larger of the surviving trees. He pushed his small face forward and lapped. Ana remembered there had been a spring here where she had sometimes drunk herself. But Lightning backed off, staring at the water as if puzzled.

Novu bent down, cupped some of the water in his hand and sipped it. ‘Salty. Like the sea.’

‘It can’t be,’ Ana said. ‘There’s a spring here. Springs are fresh water.’

He shrugged and backed away. ‘Check for yourself. There’s nothing for us here.’

‘Let’s go on,’ Ana said.

She led them towards the beach. This was the way they had walked yesterday morning, but now everything had changed. Water stood in pools, briny and lifeless. Even the path they followed, trodden by generations of feet, had vanished under the strange all-covering layer of pale new sand.

The beach itself was littered with debris, with great banks of seaweed and driftwood, even whole trees, and sheets of turf, the skin of the land ripped off and dumped here. All the works of people had vanished, the drying racks for the fish, the boats. There was no sign of the fishing nets and tangled-up bodies. Maybe they had been swept to sea, or deposited somewhere else. But there was a reef at the high water mark of other sorts of corpses: fat seals, glistening fish, and many, many birds, their fragile wings broken and twisted.

A few people were here, looking dazed, poking among the beach’s litter. The dog nosed around seaweed heaps, curious. There was a gathering stink of rot, and scavenger birds circled. Novu climbed over the sea wrack, and Ana wondered spitefully if he was searching for his bag of stolen stones.

Dreamer pointed. ‘The dunes have gone - or they’re changed, at least.’ So they had; the neat line of dunes, bound together by marram grass, had been broken and smashed, and sand lay heaped up in disorderly piles. ‘And the middens.’

Novu said, ‘It’s as if those who made your world - the little mothers? - returned to smash up what they built.’

That swelling of fearful anger threatened to rise up again in Ana. ‘Whatever caused this was nothing to do with the mothers.’

Dreamer touched her shoulder, trying to soothe her. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Your father told me of your gods, in those long days and nights in the boat. The mothers built the world; perhaps now they will return to help you build again.’

‘Come on,’ Novu said, clearly shaken by Ana’s flare of anger, growing uneasy. ‘We need to get back to the mainland. That’s where we’ll find food and water, and people, and we can start sorting out this mess. Do you think the tide is low enough for us to cross the causeway?’ And he led the way west along the shore.

Dreamer followed, then Ana, and then the dog, frisky, anxious, his tongue lolling from his thirst.

46

It was approaching low tide. The causeway should have been crossable, a strip of muddy ground gleaming above the surface of the sea. But the causeway too had been wrecked by the waves, erased as a child might tread over a line drawn in the sand.

So they walked further along the island’s beach until they found a boat, stranded high above the normal water line. Just stretched skin over a wooden frame, it was light enough for the three of them to carry down to the water. There were no paddles or bailing buckets.

They crossed close to the line of the causeway, where the water was shallowest, and launched the boat. They had to paddle with their hands, while water gradually seeped in through the skin seams. Lightning jumped onto Ana’s lap to escape the bilge water, whining, the fur on his legs drenched. The crossing became a grim race between their slow passage and the boat’s sinking.

Once on land they walked around the curve of Etxelur Bay, skirting the boggy tidal flats. Even here there was damage, the ancient wooden walkways broken and submerged, the dipping willow trees uprooted, and that blanket of pale mud and sand lying over everything. Ana saw no sign of the birds that normally inhabited the marshes, the buntings and lapwings and curlews. They had either fled inland or were dead. The only birds that moved here today were gulls, pecking curiously at the churned-up mud.

Suddenly Novu ran forward, clapping his hands. ‘Get away! Get away, you monsters!’ Gulls flapped into the air before him, big heavy birds, grey and white and black, squawking in protest.

Ana was startled. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘They were working on his face. His eyes.’

The corpse lay twisted, half-buried in the mud and the pale new sand. One hand stuck up in the air, fingers clenched. The mouth was open, and a bloody fluid leaked from the eye sockets. Lightning ran forward, curious, but Novu held him back by the scruff.

Ana felt Dreamer take her hand. ‘Do you know who this is?’

‘I think so,’ Ana said slowly. The face was muddy and squashed up. ‘I think this is Lene. Used to play with Arga, though she’s a few years older. A her, not a him, Novu. There are words we say for the dead. And the body - there’s no midden to place the bones.’

Dreamer murmured, ‘We’ll have time enough for that. Come, child. Let’s see all of it first.’

So Ana let herself be led on around the bay, towards the Seven Houses.

They started to see more bodies. They found more people drowned in mud, hands and questing faces thrust up into the air, adults and children blanketed by the white sea-bottom sand. Ana did not have the stomach to dig out their faces to see who they were. A child had been thrown against a rock wall, her head crushed like a hazelnut shell. A man’s face had been scraped away entirely, leaving eyes that gleamed like oysters in bloody bone.

‘People are fragile,’ Ana said.

‘All life is fragile,’ murmured Dreamer. Her baby on her back, she held Ana’s hand firmly.

They were approaching Ana’s own house now. The dog could smell home, and he bounded forward, tail wagging, barking.

Novu came to walk on Ana’s other side, offering silent support. ‘I envy the dog,’ Novu said. ‘He lives in the present.’

Ana said, ‘I don’t envy him what he’s soon to find.’

The Seven Houses had been flattened, as if kicked over and stamped down, and then covered by a dumped layer of the pale sea-bottom sand. A few broken support posts stuck out of the mud blanket, scraps of ripped seaweed thatch. The big communal open-air hearth was barely visible, a scatter of stones and scorched earth under the sand. Ana could see from the pattern of the mud flow that the water had come from the east, forcing its way from the sea up the narrow estuary of the river they called the Little Mother’s Milk.

Dreamer pointed. ‘That was your house, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. There should have been nobody home . . .’ She found what looked like the door flap. She shook it clear of the clinging white sand, and pulled it back. The ground beneath was wet and smelled of salt. Her heart hammered. She knew it was unlikely, but she had half-hoped, half-feared, to find some trace of her father.

Dreamer found something of her own: one of the big spear points she had worked so hard to complete. It was still attached to its short, stout pole to make a stabbing spear. Dreamer hefted this now, brushing pale mud from it, staring at it as if she’d never seen it before.

‘Ana - Ana! Oh, it is you, thank the mothers . . .’

They all spun around. A man came running towards Ana from the direction of the houses that had stood further west along the coast. He was barefoot, and the left side of his face was a mass of bruises. Ana knew him. A little younger than her father, he had fished with Kirike many times.

She ran to meet him, and embraced him. ‘Matu!’

‘Thank the mothers,’ Matu said again, panting, speaking too quickly. ‘We thought we were the only ones left!’