Stone Spring (48 page)

To Ana’s left Jurgi and Novu sat together, close enough for their shoulders to touch.

Ice Dreamer sat to Ana’s right. When Dolphin and Kirike walked in through the door flap, defiantly hand in hand, Dreamer watched, hard and suspicious. With her proud nose and streaks of grey hair, Dolphin sometimes thought her mother was coming to look like a great and beautiful bird of prey.

Dolphin and Kirike sat together, beside Dreamer.

At last Arga pushed her way in. She looked faintly anxious, as she often did; Dolphin knew she was never truly happy away from her children. She smiled at Ana, and sat down in the gap between Dreamer and Novu. ‘Sorry I’m late—’

A bundle of hair and big paws came pushing through the door flap after her. It was Thunder. The dog was excited to find all these people here, as if they had gathered especially for him. He ran around the group, wagging his tail and submitting to pats and strokes. Finally he jumped up at Ana, resting his paws on her chest. She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re wet, dog! Look at the marks you’re making on my cloak. Oh, get away with you.’ Gently, Ana pushed the dog aside. He circled, found a comfortable patch close to the hearth, and slumped down, head on his front paws.

Arga said, ‘I’ll take him out if you like.’

‘Oh, leave him,’ Jurgi said. He looked up at Ana. ‘At least he’s broken the silence. Shall we get on with it, whatever it is you have to say?’

Ana looked back at him, stern. ‘Yes. Let’s get on.’ She turned to Dolphin. ‘You were out on the dykes today. The work isn’t going well, is it? Slower than it should. Anybody can see that.’

‘The quality of the work is poor too,’ Novu broke in before Dolphin could reply. ‘The way the stone is being cut, the fitting. I’ve said how we do it in Jericho, over and over—’

‘All right, Novu, we hear you.’ Ana turned to Dolphin. ‘Well?’

Dolphin shrugged. ‘There are too few of us and too much to do. Even with the snailheads and the folk from the World River and the rest. What with all the other work we have to do just to keep alive,’ she said heavily.

Ana said, ‘We always need more people. But that isn’t really the problem, is it?’

‘It isn’t?’

‘If people want to work at something it gets done. That’s one thing I’ve learned in life. It’s clear that people just don’t like working the stone. Why not?’

Dolphin shrugged. ‘You know why.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘Because they fear it, I think. Or they dread it. Stone is dead. It doesn’t grow like wood or reed. Flint is one thing, we have always worked flint. This Albia sandstone is the dead bones of the world. It isn’t right to use it as we do.’

Arga said cautiously, ‘There’s been muttering . . .’

‘What? Speak up, cousin.’

‘Some say we are defying the little mothers.’ She glanced at the priest. ‘Maybe the mothers want the sea to cover over Etxelur, for all we know.’

Ana asked, ‘And have they approached you about this, Jurgi?’

The priest nodded. ‘At times. I try to reassure them—’

‘This is one thing I want to address today. We’ve discussed this before. No matter how closely we work together, Jurgi and I, no matter what we say, the people always know that if they have doubts about me they can go to you. Maybe they think they can come between us, the way children can set one parent against another.’

Arga said, ‘But that’s the way of things. You’ve always had the priest on the one hand, the Giver on the other. It’s just the way things are.’

Ana didn’t reply.

Jurgi, watching her, said, ‘I think she has a plan. Some solution to this problem she sees. And I have a feeling I’m not going to like it.’

‘There’s another issue too.’ Ana raised her hand, and studied her own thirty-year-old flesh. ‘I don’t feel old. Yet I am old. There are only a handful of people on Etxelur older than me and still breathing - and several of them are in this house.’ She glanced at Kirike and Dolphin. ‘Our lives are so short. Even now there are people alive, adults having babies of their own, who don’t remember the Great Sea. How soon before it is forgotten completely, washed away by time as the sea-bottom mud was washed away by the rain? What will happen when I am gone? Will the people give up, will the dykes be left to crumble, until another storm comes to smash it all to rubble and drown Etxelur for good?’

Ice Dreamer said gently, ‘You’ll have to let go at some point. There’s a limit to how any mortal can shape the world.’

‘But I have to try,’ Ana said sternly, ‘or it’s all gone to waste. And that’s where you come in again, priest.’

Jurgi’s face was growing steadily more clouded, and he looked across at a confused Novu.

‘I never had a child,’ Ana said. ‘Not until now.’

That shocked them all to silence - all save Dolphin, who to her own horror found herself bursting out laughing.

Ana turned on her. ‘You think I am too old? This is another consequence of the Great Sea. It took away so many old people that kids like Dolphin here grew up not knowing about them. My own mother conceived a child when she was older than me.’

Jurgi said, ‘Do I have to remind you about the tragedy that followed? She died, and so did the baby.’

‘But it need not have been so. You know that, priest, as well as I do.’

Ice Dreamer studied her, fascinated. ‘You are always a swirl of schemes and ambitions. What do you intend to do, Ana?’

She laid her hand on the priest’s shoulder. Jurgi flinched back, as if her touch burned like a hot ember. ‘To take a husband. You, Jurgi. And we will have a child - at least one. There. That’s my plan.’

Arga, like the rest, looked astounded. ‘But no priest ever married before.’

Ana shrugged. ‘Nobody built a wall to keep out the sea before. But we did it anyway. I’m sure there are precedents in custom, if the priest thinks hard enough about it.’

For a heartbeat the priest seemed to consider the question as he would any other of its kind. ‘Yes . . . It’s happened before, so it’s said . . .’ He looked at Novu, who was stricken. ‘This isn’t about custom, Ana. You can do whatever you want - you know that. But why would you want to do this?’

‘Because it solves so many problems. If we are a couple, there can be no question of a division between us. If I could become the priest myself,’ she said harshly, ‘I’d probably do it. But I don’t think custom would bend that far, would it? Still, this is a decent second choice. And the problem disappears for ever when we have our child.’

‘It disappears? How?’

‘The child will be raised as the next priest. You’ll see to it from birth. And meanwhile I will teach her all I know of this place and how to run it. When she grows she will combine the two of us into one, your priestly authority reinforced by my blood, and she will carry on the work into the future. Then nothing will stand in the way of the vision being fulfilled, the walls being built, the bottom lands drained. Etxelur secured against the sea for ever.’ She smiled. ‘Two problems solved in one. Neat, isn’t it?’

‘You’re mad,’ Arga breathed.

‘Or a genius,’ Ice Dreamer said.

Novu wailed, ‘But what about me? What about us? Jurgi and I—’

Ana said coldly, ‘Well, that’s another problem solved, isn’t it?’

Jurgi sat still, his face expressionless. ‘And do I get a say in whether I abandon Novu, the consolation of my life - if I give you my own child to raise as your creature, driven by your dreams?’

‘Ask the little mothers for guidance,’ Ana said with a sneer. She stretched suddenly, her most vigorous movement since they had gathered here. ‘How late is it? I’m sleepy. And I need a piss.’ She got up and moved towards the door.

Suddenly Novu tumbled forward onto his knees, and plucked her cloak as she passed. ‘Don’t do this. I’ve given you everything - don’t take him away from me.’

She ignored him and made for the door flap. The dog woke and padded after her, hoping she would play.

72

The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox.

The scream of the child jolted True awake.

He rolled on his back. This Pretani-built house was dark, the only light the crimson of the banked-up hearth. There wasn’t the faintest glow from the seams around the door flap. It must still be the deepest night, long before the dawn.

The Pretani men were all around him, big powerful men who slept at night in the furs they wore all day, and the house stank of meat and sweat and damp, of farts and piss. One of them was snoring - Hollow, probably, but it could have been any of them.

Beyond the house walls there was silence. The Pretani often complained about the crying of the Eel children in the night, and they would go out and throw stones at the kids in their pits until they shut up. But there was no crying tonight.

That scream, though. Had he dreamed it? His dreams had been disturbed recently, dreams of stone monsters rising up through rich, placid waters - dreams of Leafy Boys pouring through a forest canopy like monstrous birds . . .

There was a low rumble, like thunder rolling deep in the belly of the earth, and the house shook. The Pretani growled and mumbled in their own guttural tongue. True hadn’t dreamed that.

And now there were more screams.

He rolled off his pallet, grabbed his boots and made for the door flap.

The night was pitch-dark, moonless and starless, the spring sky a roof of cloud. The only light came from the glow of the big communal hearth. The air was sharp, it was still some days before the spring equinox, and his breath steamed before his face.

A heap of torches had been made up by the fire, reeds tied tightly around lengths of ash branch, to allow night working. True snatched one of these and lit it quickly.

Then he ran towards the quarry workings. He glimpsed others following, Pretani. The Eel women the Pretani used peered from their own house, and True saw their pale, scared faces. Soon his booted feet ran on bare rock, where the turf and peat had been stripped away for the quarry. The three great pits were pools of darkness ahead of him. He slowed deliberately; it would do nobody any good if he fell and smashed his head. But he saw dust rising from the furthest pit, heard more screams.

He hurried that way. The screaming grew louder, the cries of children piercing his head like a flint knife.

At the lip of the pit he knelt and held out his torch. He knew every grain of the walls beneath him, every pick mark, every blood splash; in the last few months he had seen these pits dug out by his own people. He could immediately see what had happened.

The rock here came in layers, some of it the smooth, rich sandstone the Pretani preferred, and the rest a harder limestone. When all the easy stuff had been extracted from the surface they had had to break through the limestone layers, and then they had widened the pits under the limestone, working out to left and right as they drew out the precious sandstone. Now, he could see, a big chunk of the limestone shelf had broken away, crumbled and fallen into the pit, and had taken masses of the upper layers with it.

The pits were always full of people, day and night. Most of the Eel folk slept down there, save for the senior ones like himself who supervised the rest and the women favoured by the Pretani - men, women and children huddled in pits with a bit of skin for protection from the cold. Every morning the children had to clamber up the knotted ropes to bring out the waste, the shit and the piss buckets.

He could see movement at the bottom of the pit, through the dust. Bodies moving like worms, splashed with blood, reaching for the knotted ropes. The screaming was unbearable.

‘By the great oak’s blight.’ It was Hollow, at his side, panting from the run. He was bare to the waist; he had come out without his hide tunic. True thought he saw concern in his broad face. There were worse than Hollow.

‘Here,’ True said in the heroes’ tongue. ‘Hold this.’ He handed Hollow his torch, and reached for a rope. ‘I’m going down. Get more people. Bring help.’ This was the only occasion True had ever dared give orders to a Pretani.

Hollow nodded, his face drawn. Holding up the torch, he turned and yelled for others to come.

True worked his way down the rope, clinging onto the knots with hands toughened by months of labour, his booted feet walking down the broken wall, his way lit only by the uncertain light of Hollow’s torch. He could taste the rock dust in the air. The screaming grew louder, and now he could smell blood and shit. He felt as if he was sinking into one of his own nightmares, but this was more vivid than any dream.

He reached the end of the rope, and dropped the last short distance to the bottom of the pit. One foot landed on somebody, a child, who yelped and got out of the way. There were more torches overhead now, and he could see a little better.

People huddled against the walls. Fallen boulders, big rocks, blocked the cave they had dug out, following the seam. Clearly there were people stuck back there, behind the boulders. He could hear their screams, the yells for help.

Blood seeped from under one of the boulders, a big one by his feet.

He was frozen, unable to act. He thought he saw a faint blue glow in the night sky over the pit mouth. Dawn soon. More people gathered around the pit, men and women, both Pretani and Eel folk. The screams of the children seemed to be bringing out a common humanity.