Stone Spring (44 page)

Zesi watched him, her face a mask of wrinkles and scars. ‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’ve changed so much. I can’t even count the kill scars on your brow.’

He grunted. ‘Haven’t aged well, have we?’

‘You’ve survived here, Shade. But you’ve achieved nothing. You’ve just held onto what your father had.’

‘Wait until the Giving,’ he said angrily. ‘See how many come to kneel at my feet.’

‘Oh, they fear you. But they’d be rid of you if they could.’

‘And you’ve achieved so much more, have you?’

She shrugged. ‘Once I was a woman alone. Now I command the bandits, and the Leafy Boys. Think how much damage I could do with that.

‘And think what we could do together, your hunters with my killers! We could take all of Albia and its patchwork tribes.’ She gestured at the clearing. ‘You could build your circles of wood up and down the length of the peninsula. From north to south, east to west, all would know your name, and all would bow to you.’ She eyed him. ‘You would be safe. You and your children. None would dare to challenge you.’

He felt uncomfortably that she knew him too well. He was not like his father and never had been. He craved safety and security for his family, his people, more than he desired war or loot, or to control others. But aggression seemed to be the only way to achieve that. ‘Is that what you’ve come to propose, Zesi, a war? And what would you get out of it? What do you want?’

‘Only one thing. Etxelur. If all of Albia is to bow to you, Etxelur will bow to me.’

‘Etxelur has changed. It is rich now. Everybody knows that. Its flint is the best you’ll find anywhere, and is prized.’

‘You can have the flint - have it all. All I want is my sister’s head under my heel.’ She leaned forward and grabbed his hand. The unexpected touch sent a jolt through him; his body remembered her, even if his mind refused to accept her. ‘And there’s more. There’s something else you want in Etxelur, Shade, even if you don’t know it. Something we made together.’

He drew back from her touch, his head swimming. The priest murmured in his stupefied sleep. Shade asked with dread, ‘And what is that?’

‘Your son. Our son. Your only son, in fact - yes? I know how important sons are to you Pretani. You and I could never have built a life together. But maybe, together, we can build a world—’

There was another raw, guttural cry, shouting.

Shade said to Zesi, ‘Everywhere you go, must you be accompanied by screams of pain and fear?’ He pushed out of his house.

The Leafy female had got away. One man lay on the ground, his tunic hitched up around his waist, a wooden stake protruding from his thigh. Another Leafy lay dead on the ground - a third, another boy, his neck snapped.

‘Incredible,’ Bark said as Shade came up. ‘Six men around her. This fellow about to stick his cock in her, it seems. Then this Leafy Boy comes charging out of the forest. Stabs the fellow with a stake, and drags the girl away. The lads caught him, and they did for him as you can see, but the girl escaped. Look at the state of him.’ Bark lifted up the boy’s right arm, which was clearly broken. ‘A busted arm, and he still beat off six Pretani!’

‘Just as I told you,’ Zesi murmured in Shade’s ear. ‘All this wildness, all this strength. Imagine if we can control it, together. It will be a Great Sea of violence. Do you want to hear my plan?’

Deeply uneasy, he asked, ‘How does it start?’

‘With stone.’

65

The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice.

‘Then it’s agreed,’ said Novu to the elders of the Bone People. Sitting on the dusty deck of the raft, in the shade of a cloth canopy, he showed them the basket in front of him. ‘You get forty nodules of the best Etxelur flint. In return, you send forty of your strongest young people to labour on our dykes next year.’ He spoke fast, fluent traders’ tongue, and he smiled, keen to close the deal.

Ana sat beside him, raised above the rest on a heap of skins, themselves valuable commodities. ‘They should be healthy, mind,’ Ana warned. ‘The people you send. Good workers. No ill, no lame, nobody too young or too old . . .’

Dolphin, watching, thought that if Novu’s face was open and trustworthy, a natural trader’s, Ana’s face, in the shade of the awning, was stern, hard to read.

The leaders of the Bone People, in a line before Novu, Ana and Jurgi, stared back. They were greedy for the flint; they could barely keep their eyes off the creamy, pale brown stone. Yet they were wary of the transaction Novu was trying to conduct.

It got even worse when Novu produced his counting tokens, little clay figurines with circles on their bellies.

Dolphin was sitting with Kirike and others of Etxelur’s senior families on this borrowed raft in the background of the talks. They had no real part to play in these discussions. They were just here to add some weight to the Etxelur party. It was midsummer day, and they were in the estuary of the World River. Even in the canopy’s shade it was intensely hot and humid, out here on the breast of the river. Midges hummed in the air. Occasionally, as a wave rolled down the languid water, the floor lifted and the wooden structure groaned like a great, relaxed sigh.

The Bone People elders were all men, for that was the way of these people from far inland, far up the river valley. They went naked, with their penises painted bright red with ochre, and each man wore a cap made of the upper skull of an honoured ancestor, and had a finger-bone from another grandparent shoved through the fleshy part of his nose. Their priest was just a boy, aged about fourteen. He had a whole tower of skulls on his head, threaded together through holes drilled in their crowns. He looked baffled, still a child, out of place in this meeting of adults.

Dolphin, distracted, saw a dragonfly that had somehow got under the awning, flitting about, confused. One of the Bone People snatched it neatly out of the air in his fist, inspected it, then crushed it and popped it into his mouth.

Kirike plucked her elbow. ‘I’m bored,’ he whispered.

‘Me too . . .’

‘There’s some old man over there watching us.’

Dolphin peered past the Bone People into the gloom, and she saw a man in heavy furs, dark, strong-looking, with scars striped across his forehead, like a Pretani. He was maybe thirty. There were a few people from other groups here, though the meeting was dominated by Etxelur folk and Bone People. When he saw Dolphin looking at him the stranger smiled; she looked away.

Kirike said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Wait until they’re not watching.’

Kirike was restless, but sat still, as Novu continued his patient setting out of the counting tokens.

The Bone People were intrigued by the trading, but they were disturbed too, faintly troubled. And well might they be, for so were many of the Etxelur folk. Too many traditions were being defied. All Dolphin’s life the midsummer Giving, presided over by Ana, had been the most significant event of the year, as well as the most fun. People came to it from all across Northland. Some trade had always gone on - indeed traders like the one who had brought Novu himself to Etxelur could travel all the way across the Continent to such fairs, carrying their precious bits of iron and gold and obsidian and carved bone. But the point of the event wasn’t the trade; the point was the Giving, the sharing.

That was how it used to be, anyhow.

The trouble was, Etxelur’s huge projects, the dykes and drainage schemes, were always hungry for labour. But people still had to spend most of their time gathering food and building houses and making clothes and chasing children - the business of staying alive. And in Etxelur, it had soon become apparent, there just weren’t enough people to fulfil Novu’s grand schemes.

So Etxelur had started to buy labour from its neighbours.

Its treasure was the flint mined from Flint Island, and from the lode freshly exposed in the Bay Land. A rough exchange had soon been established: one nodule of high-quality flint in return for the labour of one healthy youngster for a summer. Many of these transactions were conducted at the Givings, and gradually the nature of the ceremony had changed, as Novu and the priest, watched over by a hawk-eyed Ana, spent much of their time conducting elaborate negotiations.

And now, this year, Ana had decreed a new departure. It was a year since Heni’s death, and Qili’s journey all the way from the estuary last year had given her the idea. This year, Etxelur’s Giving wouldn’t even be held in Etxelur at all. Instead, much of the population had made the long walk along the north coast of Northland to the World River estuary, and here Ana had built her Giving platform and set up a dreamers’ house and organised the games, and Novu set out his trade goods. For, Ana argued, the estuary was the richest single site in all of Northland - and rich with people whose labour she could buy.

The heart had gone out of the Giving, complained old folk like Arga. It was as if the rebuilding of Etxelur had become a madness that was eating all their lives, and turning them away from the wisdom of the mothers. Some had gone to the priest, asking him to speak to Ana, but Jurgi had always been an ally of Ana. Ana and her core team didn’t seem to care.

And so here they were, on midsummer day, far from home, doing business.

Novu’s tokens, made of soft clay, were crudely shaped into human figures, each with a shapeless blob for a head, and limbs divided from the body by grooves. And each had a pattern of circles and bars inscribed into its belly.

Novu, as he always did, went through the meaning of the tokens to make sure the Bone People elders understood. ‘This man has a single circle on his belly. That means one worker, for one summer.’ He held up a finger. ‘This little man has two circles, that’s two workers. Three, four, five. Now look.’ The next figure had a radial bar cutting to the centre of one small circle. ‘The bar stands for five, for one hand.’ He held up his open right hand to demonstrate. ‘And the circle is one more. Six.’ He held up his left forefinger. ‘And this next one, a bar with two circles, means seven. And eight, and nine . . .’ This system was continued up to the most complex inscription, of four bars and five circles, which stood for twenty-five.

The boy-priest picked up one of the little men. His skull-tower cap wobbled. The boy made the clay man walk up and down on his stumpy legs, humming a kind of tune. Novu waited patiently until the boy had finished playing, and restored the token to its place in the row before him.

Despite her restlessness to be away, Dolphin always enjoyed watching Novu go through this strange procedure, the cleverness of the little tokens. It had come about because of too many disputes about who had agreed to what, how many nodules had been promised for how many young workers or sacks of lime or boats laden with fish - disputes that were either the product of bad faith, or of deals done in the dreamers’ house where nobody could remember whether they’d agreed to anything at all. One or two such lapses you could live with, but the building of Etxelur required a lot of planning, and a better way was needed.

Using tokens to record a deal was an idea Novu remembered from his home in Jericho, and what he had heard of practices among neighbouring peoples. He and Jurgi had worked out this system between them, basing it on the ancient concentric-circles symbol of Etxelur. Thus, as Novu produced two tokens to record the deal for forty workers - one little man with a four-bar, five-ring ‘twenty-five’ symbol, and another with a two-bar, five-ring ‘fifteen’ - he was giving the Bone People a reminder not just of the deal but of the spirit of Etxelur itself.

‘Look, I will keep copies of the same tokens myself.’ He held them up. ‘Now we mark them so we know they record the truth.’ He spat on his thumb, and pressed it into the soft clay of the heads of each of the four tokens, depressing the right side. Then he gave the tokens to one of the elders who, with prompting from Novu, did the same, pressing his thumb down on the left side of each shapeless face.

When this was done, the elder held up the little men he had been given, curious and, Dolphin thought, afraid, as if it was a new kind of magic. So he should be, she sometimes thought. The tokens were just bits of clay, yet they remembered conversations and deals more reliably than any human memory. What was that if not magic?

Ana and the others relaxed a little before moving on to their next business, which was a deal for a load of dried, salted eel. Ana drank juice from a sack, and spoke to the priest. Some of the Bone People got up and stretched their stiff legs, pacing on the raft’s wooden floor.

Dolphin touched Kirike’s shoulder. ‘Now’s our chance.’

He grinned and nodded. ‘Just keep your head down.’

So they crawled away from the murmuring adults, making for the open side of the awning, and emerged into bright sunlight. Dazzled, Dolphin had to shield her eyes and look around to orient herself. The gangway to the next raft was a bridge of stout logs bound up with rope and lashed in place.

She grabbed Kirike’s hand, and they skipped away, laughing.

66

Dolphin and Kirike felt welcome here on the World River. They were allowed to walk where they liked, stepping from raft to raft, and people smiled as they passed, and children ran after them. They were even offered bits of food. The Etxelur Giving was still a time of generosity and friendship. Meanwhile the contests were continuing, as spears were thrown and hapless target animals run through, and races were fought out on land and in the river.

The rafts were too many to count, tethered to each other and to the western bank of the river. Far bigger than mere boats, or the petty platforms Etxelur folk built in the marshes to go eel-hunting, the rafts were stout structures of planks strapped to huge stripped tree trunks. Some of them were very old, as you could see by the weathering of the planks and the support beams. And people lived here, in houses of wooden frames and brush and skin set up on the back of the rafts. Fires burned, built on stone hearths, fires burning on the river.

The river itself was so wide here that you couldn’t see its eastern bank - it was a river with a horizon, like an ocean. Further downstream the river spread out into a tremendous delta, its water running between huge marshy islands where even more crowds of people lived.