Stone Spring (37 page)

‘You’re going to challenge me?’ Ana, astonished, laughed.

Matu was not a man who grew angry. But now he faced Zesi and said sternly, ‘In those first days after the Great Sea, when those who survived envied the dead, Ana made us want to live, by not giving in, by keeping going. Perhaps others could have taken that first step. Her father if he had lived. Perhaps you, if you had been here, Zesi. But it was Ana. We remember that. And you should show her respect.’

Zesi snorted, the breath streaming from her nostrils. ‘Respect? For her? Don’t make me laugh.’ And she turned on her heel and walked away, along the ridge of the dune.

Ana sighed. ‘Come on, Matu. Let’s get back in the warm.’

53

The next day dawned clear and frosty, and at noon there was just a hint of warmth in the sunlight.

‘A promise of the spring to come,’ Ice Dreamer said. ‘Or a memory of the summer past.’ She sat on a bundle of furs heaped up on the dunes over Ana’s house, lifting her face to the light.

From here Ana, sitting with her, could see much of the bay, and the grey outline of Flint Island. Dreamer’s baby sat up on her lap, gurgling and smiling. They gathered around Dreamer, Ana and Arga and Novu, sitting on the ground in the brief warmth of the sun. They worked as they talked; they had a heap of hazelnuts to shell.

Dreamer’s face was strongly shadowed by the sun, and age showed in the lines around her eyes and mouth, and in the grey streaks in her tied-back hair. Yet she was still beautiful, Ana thought, strong and beautiful. No wonder her father hadn’t been able to abandon this woman when he found her on that distant shore. Kirike’s and Dreamer’s was one story among many cut short by the Great Sea.

Dreamer said now, ‘What a night we had. What an extraordinary thing you have found, under the sea, Arga. More than earth and bones - you have found the story of your people. A story of times long gone, when huge boats must have sailed through those great ditches, and must have - must have - sailed across the western ocean to bring your mark to my far country. A story lost for generations, and now found again.’

‘Yes,’ Ana said. ‘And it’s all thanks to you, Arga.’

Arga submitted to a hug, but she seemed to have had enough praise, and soon wriggled free. ‘The question is, what do we do now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Mothers’ Door is our treasure. So we can’t leave here. Can we? We can never leave this place—’

Ana said slowly, ‘You’re right. We would forget. Living somewhere in the south or in Pretani, mixed up with the snailheads and all the others, we would forget the Door - forget who we are.’

Novu said gently, ‘But when the ocean rises, if another Great Sea comes—’

‘We will build more mounds,’ Ana said. ‘As we have since the night of the storm when Zesi returned. So high the sea can never cover them and drive us away.’ Maybe this was why the little mothers had given her the determination to stay and dig that night. Maybe it had been the seed of something much greater in the future.

‘Yes,’ said Dreamer reasonably, ‘mounds will save you from an occasional flood. But what if the sea doesn’t retreat again?’ She waved a hand at the bay to the north. ‘How long could you survive, on the highest mound, sticking out of the ocean?’

‘We’d swim a lot,’ Arga said seriously, and she looked hurt when they laughed.

‘Perhaps there is more we could do,’ Novu said thoughtfully. ‘My people once built a wall around Jericho, to keep out floods from the hills. Even here we built the causeway to the island after the Great Sea destroyed it. Perhaps there is more we could build.’

‘Like what?’ Ana asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.’ He got to his feet and surveyed the coast. ‘Shall we walk around the bay? The tide is low and the causeway should be passable. We might get some ideas.’

Ana and Arga stood up, eager.

Dreamer said, ‘Before you go, don’t forget about Zesi. She spoke to the priest earlier. She said she would call her meeting about now. About who should lead, and what we should do.’

Somehow Ana had forgotten all about her sister. ‘Oh, I haven’t got time for that. Come on, Novu, Arga.’

So they set off, the three of them, talking and laughing in the sunshine.

They walked all the way out to Flint Island, around its eastern promontory to the south shore, then back to the causeway. They talked and planned and dreamed all the way around.

By the time they got back to the house the sun was dipping to the western horizon, and the day’s brief warmth had long bled from the air. They were all hungry.

But Zesi, rubbing goose fat into her boots in a corner of the house, looked furious.

They found that Zesi had held her meeting - so Ana heard from Ice Dreamer, who had got the story from the priest. Even Jurgi had been there reluctantly. Only a few people had bothered to turn up, and fewer yet had stayed as Zesi started talking about Ana’s flaws, and the mistakes she had been making.

The last to stay had been Lightning the dog, who only wanted Zesi to throw a stick for him. Everybody laughed at this. Zesi stalked away, seething.

But, Ana reminded herself, a few people had come to listen to what Zesi had to say. Ana could never take for granted the goodwill of the people.

And Zesi’s challenge had lodged a seed of doubt in her own mind. What if Zesi was right? What if she had been driven mad by the horrors of the Great Sea? She was still only fifteen years old, after all. Sometimes she still had nightmares of the man with no face, her father’s corpse washed up by the sea. Who was she to shape the future? What if this nascent scheme to save Etxelur from the sea was just a fever dream?

If she was mad, how could she ever know?

54

The First Year After the Great Sea: Late Winter.

Cheek, the snailhead toddler, ran ahead of Ana’s group along the new causeway. Her mother Eyelid, walking behind Knuckle, watched Cheek cautiously, but didn’t try to stop her. Lightning ran after the child, wagging his tail and barking.

The causeway, rebuilt, cut across the ocean to Flint Island, a smooth arc. The way was solid underfoot on an upper surface of wood, logs pressed into mud. Gentle waves lapped to either side. To the left lay the open sea, and to the right the bay, where a couple of boats worked this morning searching for eels. And on the bay’s southern shore Ana could see new houses sitting on their flood-defying mounds of dark earth. Half a year after the Great Sea, Etxelur was recovering.

It was a bright winter day, not yet a month after the midwinter solstice, and the weather was benign, the wind low, the sea calm, and the ocean water reflected a diffuse, cloudy sky: a world grey above, grey below, and bitterly cold, yet full of light. Ana offered up silent thanks to the little mothers for the weather, as she walked between the priest and Knuckle, with Novu stepping quietly behind them with the rest of the snailheads. Maybe the mildness of the day would soothe the snailheads’ mood - and make them more amenable to giving Ana what she wanted of them today.

Little Cheek was a bundle of furs, with hide bandages wrapped around her growing snailhead skull. But she was wide-eyed, fascinated by the water that lapped so close to her feet. Knuckle watched her indulgently. Eyelid was the wife of Knuckle’s dead brother Gut; Cheek was his niece. Knuckle had grown closer to Eyelid, since Ana had rejected his tentative advances. Ana was glad for them.

Not that she knew them all that well; they were still very odd by Etxelur’s standards. Walking now with Eyelid, she tried to think of something to say to her. But with the snailheads, as with the Pretani, the men decided everything of significance, while the women did the work - or anyhow that was how it seemed to Ana. Eyelid wouldn’t even speak to the Etxelur folk save through Knuckle.

‘Cheek can’t remember the ocean,’ Knuckle said now. ‘She was last here at midsummer. Long ago for a three-year-old.’

‘For all of us,’ said the priest. ‘Because of the Great Sea the world has changed since those days. But I don’t suppose the little girl will remember that either.’

‘No,’ said the snailhead grimly, ‘and she’s lucky for that.’

Ana nodded. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been possible to walk this way just a few months ago. It’s taken a lot of hard work to restore the causeway.’

Jurgi glanced at her with approval; she was learning subtlety, and was steering the conversation the way she wanted it to go. It had even been her idea to bring the snailheads out to the causeway, the nearest they had to a demonstration of the dream they wanted the snailheads to share.

Knuckle said now, testing his tread on the logs under his feet, ‘Better than I remember. I never trusted that muddy track.’

Novu stepped forward and said, ‘The old causeway was a gift of the gods. What we did this time was to start again from the beginning. Of course the natural track was the starting point. We pushed rocks and gravel and brush into the mud. And then we laid logs over the top, pressing them down. Now the causeway’s stronger than before and higher. And it’s sturdier. You can feel that. It’s already withstood a couple of winter storms. I don’t know if it could survive another Great Sea.’ He glanced out at the placid ocean. ‘I’d like to find out.’

‘Don’t challenge the gods,’ the priest murmured, ‘lest they take you up on it.’

Knuckle asked Ana, ‘So how is your sister? Produced her Pretani pup yet?’

‘No. Well, not the last time I saw her.’ Which was another gift from the gods, as far as Ana was concerned. Zesi, fuming, frustrated, continued to oppose all Ana’s projects, and ranted at anybody who came within earshot about how their father wouldn’t have run things this way. She would have been particularly difficult this morning, for she had been central to the mess that had led to the death of Gut, Knuckle’s brother, at the hands of Gall the Pretani. But her long pregnancy was keeping her out of the way, and Ana was grateful to be able to get some work done.

They reached the island, and walked around its northern shore towards the holy middens, now half-rebuilt themselves. Cheek ran ahead along the sand, kicking at washed-up seaweed, and the dog ran after her.

Suddenly Ana saw oystercatchers, a pair of them flying low along the coast. They were big birds, black and white with distinctive orange beaks and a plaintive, repetitive cry. They were probably both males, this early in the year, preparing for their flight up the river valleys where they would stake out territory on a shingle bar, to build their ground nests. She felt her spirit expand, as if thawing out, at this latest sign of the turn of the season.

Knuckle watched the birds fly, his great head gleaming in the sun’s watery light. ‘We were coastal folk, like you, down in the south, before the sea drove us away. We live in the forest now. But the forest has its charms, even in the winter. You can see the squirrels run in the bare trees, and the nests of the rooks.’

The priest nodded. ‘It is said a rook always comes back to her old nest.’

Knuckle grunted. ‘Just as you have come back to yours - even though the ocean told you it didn’t want you any more.’

Ana said, ‘This is our home. Our ancestors’ bones are piled deep in the middens.’

The snailhead raised a shaved eyebrow. ‘That’s your choice. So why have you asked us here? I think you want something,’ he said bluntly.

‘I suppose that must be obvious,’ said the priest. ‘But you’re right. We have something to show you. Come. Just a little further.’

They walked away from the beach and cut south across the island, picking their way along a trail that led through sea-battered dunes, and then around the island’s central hillock.

They soon broke through to Flint Island’s south coast, where they had a clear view of the promontory just on the other side of the bay. On the narrow beach here logs had been heaped up, stripped of their bark. A couple of men were working on them, using heavy flint axes to sharpen one end of each log.

While child and dog ran off to play with another mound of seaweed, the adults shared skins of water, carried by the priest.

Knuckle looked around, sniffing the cold air. ‘Never came here.’

‘There’s no reason why you should,’ Novu said, stepping forward. ‘Yet it’s an important place.’ He waved a hand. ‘You can see we’re at the mouth of the bay. The narrowest point, where Flint Island comes closest to the mainland. When the tide rises the water rushes through here to fill up the bay. When the tide goes out the current is just as strong the other way. The kids like to swim here.’

‘Never much liked swimming myself. So what are those lads doing hacking away at logs?’

Novu took a deep breath, and Ana remembered how hesitant he had been when he had first described his grand scheme to her and the priest and Dreamer, in the confines of her house. It was all founded on Ana’s determination, but it was Novu’s vision, and now he had to describe it all over again.

‘We want to build a dyke across the bay. Just here, between this headland and that promontory, across the bay’s neck at its narrowest.’

Knuckle frowned. Ana wondered if he was familiar with Novu’s Jericho word ‘dyke’. ‘What? Another causeway?’

‘No. Well, you could walk across it, it will be wide enough, but it’s not just a causeway. It will be a kind of wall. Look around. Once this bay was dry land - that’s what the Etxelur folk say. Their grandparents mined flint here. But then it became marshy, and then salty, and the grass and the trees died, and the houses had to be moved up to the beach. Now it often floods high beyond the beach, even at a normal high tide. And if you get an exceptional tide or a storm—’

‘The sea has taken the land back. Just as in the south, our home under the cliffs of white rock. That’s what the sea does.’

‘Yes. But that’s what we want to fight against. We’ll build a dyke, right across the bay. It will rise up high above the water - above the high tide level. So then, you see, the ocean won’t be able to break into the bay again. The bay itself will be like a lagoon, isolated from the sea.’

‘No more flooding,’ Knuckle said.

‘No more flooding.’

‘If you can build this dyke.’ Knuckle stepped forward and peered at the sea, where it ran between headland and promontory. ‘How? You built the causeway where the old one ran. There is no causeway here.’