Stone Spring (36 page)

Zesi snorted. She tended to scorn such rituals.

‘So,’ Ice Dreamer said, and she hugged Arga. ‘You’ve been diving again, down to the Door.’

‘She has,’ Heni said proudly. ‘That little one can hold her breath, I counted it this time, a full hundred and fifty of my heartbeats. And I’ve got a big old heart that beats pretty slow, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything like it, like you’re half-dolphin, girl. I’m always relieved when she comes up for air, because I couldn’t fetch her if she didn’t.’

Arga smiled shyly. ‘I like it. It’s easy.’

‘It’s ridiculous that you sent her out diving today, Ana,’ Zesi said. ‘It’s midwinter!’

Arga said, ‘It’s not that cold when you’re in the water, even if it’s snowing up in the air. And as long as you keep moving you’re all right. Anyhow the goose fat keeps you warm.’

Zesi pressed, ‘And if you got stuck? If you caught your foot?’

‘I wouldn’t catch my foot. I’m not a baby.’

Novu leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Never mind all that. Tell us what you saw this time.’

Arga’s smiled broadened. ‘I went to the house on the hill, in the middle, North Island. I went inside!’

Since the day of the Great Sea, and despite the hardships they had suffered, Ana and the others hadn’t been able to put aside the memories of what they had glimpsed when the sea had rolled back. She and Novu and Dreamer had talked endlessly of the circular banks they called the Door to the Mothers’ House, for Ana believed it truly to be the drowned heart of old Etxelur. They had even made sketches with bits of charcoal on skin of what they had seen.

Zesi had mocked all this, as she mocked much of what Ana got up to with Dreamer and Novu, ‘your cabal of strangers’ as she called them. Ana ignored her, though this infuriated Zesi even more. For she knew, deep in her gut, that this was important, for herself, for Etxelur, for the future.

Of course the Door was submerged once more, as it had been for generations before that one strange day. It had begun to seem that those brief glimpses were all Ana would ever be allowed.

But then in the late autumn Arga, the best diver in Etxelur, had come up with the idea of swimming down to see if she could see any more. Once Ana and the rest were convinced she could do it they had leapt on the idea.

So Heni had started to take Arga out on his fishing trips. He had been wary at first, and she had scornfully refused his offer of tying her to a length of fishing line so she could be hauled up if she got into trouble. She kept insisting she wasn’t a baby. But as Heni had watched her dive he soon grew confident in her abilities, and trusted to her own native sense to keep her out of trouble.

Her first dives had been scouting trips to establish just where the Door was. It wasn’t difficult if you knew where to look. The central mound really was North Island, and from there you could sometimes see the rest, Heni said, huge shadows beneath the water, unnaturally perfect arcs.

And then Arga had begun to inspect the Door. She would make two, three, four dives a day, until Heni judged she was getting too tired. She only dived on good days, when the sea was calm and clear and she was able to see what she was exploring. As the winter had begun to close in there had been talk of stopping the dives. But Heni pointed out he was going to have to go out fishing every day anyhow, and Arga was keen to carry on. Ana suspected it was good for Arga, better than sitting around in a hut all winter brooding on how she had lost her parents.

And, gradually, they were coming to map the Door, the strange structures lost beneath the sea.

Surrounding the central island were three circular ridges, which Novu called ‘walls’, sharing a common centre, nested one inside the next. Between the ridges were ditches, dug deep and full of sea-bottom mud. Arga said she saw the wreck of a boat in one of the ditches - a big boat, bigger than anything Etxelur had, similar to the giant wreck that had been exposed on the day of the Great Sea. The ditches had evidently been dug big enough to allow such boats to pass. Arga had found a straight ditch cutting through this complex of rings to the centre. This was surely another passage for boats. This discovery thrilled Dreamer, for it was another similarity to the rings-and-tail tattoos worn throughout Etxelur.

The walls themselves were tall, taller than Etxelur’s middens, several times an adult’s height if you measured them from the bottom of the ditches. Once Arga had dived down to the outermost wall. Under a layer of silt and seaweed and barnacles she had found a harder surface, too tough for her to pick apart with her hands. It was gloomy down there, but she said this surface gleamed in the murky light with bright colours, red and white and black, the colours of shells and stones embedded in some denser material.

In recent days Arga had been exploring the very centre of the complex.

‘It’s not an island, it’s a mound, like the ones you build, Ana. You can tell by the shape. Somebody built it. And just under the very top of this mound is a house.’ Every adult in the shelter was rapt as the girl spoke, her eyes bright with intelligence, the remnant of the goose fat on her cheeks and neck shining in the light of the oil lamps. ‘But it’s not a house like this one, wood and skin and seaweed. It’s stones, carved into shapes and heaped up.’

‘Like Jericho,’ Novu murmured, ‘or some of it.’

‘There might have been a roof once, but it’s open now, you can swim down inside and there is a heap of stone blocks on the floor. And on top of that—’

‘Yes?’ Novu asked.

‘Bones.’

‘Bones?’

‘It was confusing. I’ll tell you what I think I saw. I’ll probably have to go back to be really sure. On the top was a woman.’

‘A woman,’ Ana said.

‘Well, a person. There was nothing left but the bones, all the rest had been eaten by the fish. She’s all sprawled out on top of a deer. I know a deer’s bones! But this was a big deer, bigger than I ever saw.’ She reached up with her hands, indicating height. ‘Big antlers.’

Novu frowned. ‘Loga told me traders’ tales of how giant deer live up in the northern lands, the north of the Continent, where it is always cold. They are hunted for their huge antlers and their big bones, which make deep-throated flutes. They are never seen as far south as this.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Dreamer said, ‘such animals exist?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Arga went on, ‘There was something under the deer too. I only saw it dimly, and the woman and her deer were in the way. It was skulls. Cattle skulls, bulls with horns. There were lots of them, all lined up together and heaped up in big layers. It was difficult to see. There was kelp everywhere, fronds waving in the sea, like a forest.’

Jurgi nodded. ‘The bulls, then the deer, then the woman, all sitting on top of the stone heap.’

‘That’s what I saw. All in this stone house. That’s all.’ She sat back, and drank some more broth.

Ice Dreamer, suckling Dolphin Gift, gave Arga a playful pinch. ‘You know how to spin out a story, don’t you?’

‘It’s all true!’

‘I know, I know. But you tell it well.’

Novu shook his head. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Think of how it would have looked,’ Ana said. ‘The mound was above the level of the ridges. From anywhere in the Door, if you were on the ridges or in a boat, you could look up and see the mound, and the house of stone, and the woman inside, riding her deer.’

‘They must have been dead,’ Novu said. ‘The woman and her deer. Who would sit there all day until the roof fell in on them? Maybe she was stuffed. I heard of people doing that, keeping corpses by taking out the innards and filling them with sand and spices. The deer too.’

‘Ugh,’ Heni said.

‘Stuffed and painted. What a sight it must have been! So, Arga, did you see—’

‘Hush,’ Dreamer said. One-handed, she gently took the broth bowl out of Arga’s hands. The girl had fallen asleep, just like that, and was slumping on Ana’s shoulder.

‘She’s worn out, poor thing,’ Heni said. ‘For all she’s brave the cold does take it out of her, I think.’

‘I told you,’ said Zesi. ‘You’re risking her neck with these stunts. If her father was alive—’

‘But he’s not, so that’s enough about that.’

Zesi poked at the fire and stirred the broth, her ill temper evident in her every movement. She hissed at Ana, ‘We need to talk.’

Ana put her fingers to her lips, and mouthed, Not now. She sat with the sleeping Arga, letting the girl’s head fall to her lap, rocking her gently.

52

When Arga was deeply asleep on a pallet beside the dog, Ana, needing air, pushed her way out of the house.

She waited just outside the house for a while, letting her eyes adapt to the dark. She was surprised by the deep cold outside. Since Heni had brought Arga home the weather had changed, the murky air and cloud cover clearing away. Now the sky was a blanket of stars, frost coated the ground, and a sliver of moon offered a little light. Her breath steamed before her mouth, catching the colourless moonlight, and she pulled her skin wrap tighter around her shoulders. She could really have done with a thicker layer, but she didn’t want to go back into the house to face more of Zesi’s glares.

A spiderweb stretched from the centre pole of the house down its flank; it was heavy with dew that had frozen in the cold snap, so that its threads were thick with ice crystals. But she could not see the spider that had built the web. Perhaps the cold had driven it away. Cold brought beauty and death in equal measures.

She walked away from the house, and climbed the bank of dunes just to the north. These had been wrecked by the Great Sea, and the going was harder than it had once been. But tonight there was a crust of frozen sand that crunched under her feet, making the way a little easier.

When she reached the ragged ridge of the dunes she walked west. A thousand moons reflected from the ripples of the bay, to her right, and she could see the hulking forms of boats, upturned on the beach above the high-water mark. In the very early days after the Great Sea people had been forced to sleep under their boats, for lack of any other shelter. Tonight, she knew, as on every calm night, a few boats would be out, for no fishing weather could be wasted this hard winter, day or night. Meanwhile, to her left the land lay sleeping under a fine blanket of frost. The new houses of the people were shapeless heaps, shadows in the dark. And she could see the mounds she had ordered to be built, rising up from the plain. For now they were just heaps of earth, but they would show their worth when the next flood came.

The more she walked, the more the world seemed to open up around her, the stillness of the sky and the land, the calmness of the sea. She concentrated on the soft crunch of the frosty grass and sand under her feet, and the different texture of the light at night, the moon shadows that made dips and gullies seem deeper, the lack of colour that changed her sense of distance. It was as if she was walking in a different world altogether, a world separated from the clutter of the day.

Something rustled in a patch of long grass.

She stood still. She made out a round, pale body, long ears, a single black eye looking warily at her. It was a snow hare, already in its winter coat. She felt unreasonably glad to see it, for the Great Sea had left the land depopulated of its animals, even its birds - even the owl, her own Other, whose hooting calls were rarely heard this winter. But the hare was a great survivor.

After an instant of sublime shared stillness, something startled the animal. It bounded away in a spray of loose sand and frost. She glimpsed it once more, zigzagging across a meadow, compact and strangely graceful.

‘I’m glad it didn’t find my trap.’ The soft whisper came from Matu, bundled up in thick furs; he clambered awkwardly up the dune face. ‘Wouldn’t have enjoyed killing a snow hare.’

Ana was disappointed that she was no longer alone, but she smiled. ‘You’re out late.’

‘Just checking the catch. Anyway it’s not that late. Fishers know how to track the passage of the night by the stars.’ He looked around the sky and pointed. ‘See the Bear?’ This was a distinctive pattern of seven stars that resembled a bear in a crouch. ‘When his body is pointing that way, the night is still young, and morning’s far away. That’s how it is tonight. Of course tomorrow night the positions will be a little different, and the night after that, different again. We experienced fisherfolk know the sky’s secrets.’ He smiled, gently mocking himself, for she knew that, like her, he had never been out fishing before the Great Sea forced him to.

She said, ‘Ice Dreamer comes from a land far from here. But her people, too, call those stars the Bear.’

‘Do they?’

‘So she says. Perhaps it really is a bear, thrown against the stars in some long-gone age.’

He squinted up at the stars. ‘It doesn’t really look much like a bear, does it? You could think it looks like something else, a dog or a deer, and call it that. Perhaps our people and Ice Dreamer’s knew each other before. Maybe we were once the same people, who have separated, carrying the same stories over the world.’

‘And maybe everybody talks too much about stupid things that don’t matter.’ This was Zesi’s harsh voice. She came walking along the dune ridge, following her sister’s footsteps.

Ana’s heart sank. So much for her quiet walk in the night. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you. I said we needed to talk. Besides, Arga woke and asked for you. Poor little kid depends on us now, you know.’

‘I know.’ Ana refused to be made to feel guilty. ‘She knows I never go far—’

‘No. You stand around out here and talk, talk, talk . . .’ Zesi was wearing only a tunic, not even a coat, so her belly showed, prominent. The hairs on her bare arms were stiff with the cold. ‘What are you talking about now - star patterns? People who wandered around in the deep past?’

Ana said, ‘Ice Dreamer’s legends are all of a different kind of past, where—’

Zesi put her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t - care - what that woman says. I’ve had enough of her. And Novu, that other stranger you spend all your time with. What a waste of time it all is! Stars and legends! Mounds of earth! Bones under the sea! The people should be fishing. Hunting. Gathering the last acorns and hazelnuts - oh, I’ve heard enough. Tonight has driven me to a decision. This is what I want to tell you. In the morning I will speak to the priest, and some of the others, and talk about what we must do to get through the winter - and who must lead.’