Stone Spring (56 page)

‘Remarkable,’ he said now. ‘It all started at Etxelur. But now it’s spread across the whole country, like, like—’

‘Like a pox,’ Resin grunted, standing beside him. ‘More to the point, look down there. There’s a house, right in the middle of our trail.’

So it was, a slim cone that stood on a ledge of flat ground, halfway down the slope. Its walls were leather, unlike the kelp houses Kirike remembered from Etxelur - a tent meant for a summer’s hunting inland, perhaps. A couple of hare, skinned, hung on a rack outside the house, and a hearth barely smoked, choked with ashes.

As they waited, a young man, bare to the waist, emerged from the house. When he saw the Pretani party on their ridge he waved and called into the house.

Acorn said, ‘Did you see the marking on his belly? Rings and tail.’

It was a mark Kirike wore tattooed on his own body, a mark he hadn’t otherwise seen in years. The mark of Etxelur. His breath caught; he was thrilled.

A young woman came out of the house, not much more than a girl, perhaps fifteen years old. She looked up at the Pretani. With a murmur to the boy she walked up the slope. Wearing a simple green smock, she was barefoot, and wore her strawberry blonde hair swept back - red and green, light and airy.

And when she got close enough for him to make out her features Kirike gasped. The small, rather serious face, the compact frame - the resemblance was unmistakable. ‘You’re Ana’s daughter,’ he said. She frowned, and he realised he had used the Pretani tongue. He made a mental effort to switch to the Etxelur language of his boyhood, and repeated what he had said.

‘Yes. My name is Sunta, named for my mother’s grandmother. And you are Kirike. My mother described you well.’

He grunted. ‘I’m surprised, since I haven’t seen her since she was pregnant with you.’

She laughed, and Kirike saw a row of wooden teeth in her open mouth. ‘Your mother was my mother’s sister,’ she said, precisely, as if figuring it out. ‘So we are cousins.’ She glanced at his companions.

Kirike said, ‘This is Resin our priest, closest companion of my father, Shade. This is Acorn, my father’s daughter - my half-sister. And now the Root of the Pretani.’

Acorn smiled. ‘We share no blood, Sunta. But I would like to think we are cousins of a sort.’

Sunta’s grin widened. ‘You speak the Etxelur tongue!’

‘Kirike taught me. I hope you can forgive my slips.’

‘It is all so different from how it was when your father’s father was the Root, and he came to Etxelur.’

‘All that was long ago. In the end my father Shade paid the price for those times.’ Kirike hefted the sack. ‘I think that is why he wanted his bones to rest among you. To close a too-long story.’

She nodded. ‘Today is all about honour, I hope. You, Acorn, honour us by speaking our tongue. Shade honours Etxelur with his final wish. And my mother urged me to honour you by coming out here to meet you at this junction between Albia and Northland. For we knew you would come this way.’

Acorn nodded. ‘And she sent her priest. I noticed your teeth. Do the priests of Etxelur still wear the teeth of wolves in their ceremonies?’

‘Oh, they do,’ Sunta said lightly. ‘And, yes, that was why I was conceived, for my mother wanted me to be both Giver and priest. My father Jurgi took out my adult teeth when they started to grow, and he started my training. But it didn’t take with me, and before he died Jurgi persuaded my mother to pick somebody else. You can imagine what a row that caused.’

Acorn glanced at Kirike. ‘I can. Similarly, I think our father always intended Kirike to become the Root.’

‘But Acorn is much better at the job than me,’ Kirike said with a smile.

Resin growled, ‘Kids never turn out the way you hope they will. It’s the blight of humanity, and why nothing ever gets done.’

Sunta laughed. ‘I never wore the wolf’s jaw. Still, I’m my mother’s daughter and here I am.’ She gestured. ‘Please, come and join us. We have food, you can see, and water, and fruit juice.’

‘All I want is a bit of leafy shade,’ Resin muttered, and he limped forward.

Sunta skipped forward and took his arm. Next to Resin she was like ivy wrapped around an old tree trunk. ‘Then come into the house. Shall we rest for the remainder of the day, and begin our walk to Etxelur tomorrow?’

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‘Dreamer? Are you there?’

Dolphin went to Ana’s pallet, set aside the piss-pots she had filled during the night, and helped Ana swivel her legs off the pallet and grab onto her stick. Ana, nearly forty-eight, was the oldest living person in Etxelur. Her eyes were filmed over with cataracts, and she could barely walk for the pain in swollen joints. And at this time of year, in the summer heat, it was extra hard work to care for her because Ana insisted on keeping a fire banked up in her stuffy house day and night, convinced that cold made her aches worse.

But here was Dolphin helping her out of her house and into the morning sunlight. Dolphin, over thirty herself and the mother of four boisterous sons, had plenty of other ways she could have used her time. But Ana, too proud even to use the second walking stick the priest had carved for her, wouldn’t have anyone but Dolphin.

And, though she grumbled, it warmed Dolphin deep inside to help her. To Dolphin Ana wasn’t just the visionary who had made Northland safe against the sea. Ana was the daughter of the man who had saved her own mother’s life and delivered Dolphin herself - and the woman who had done so much to help Dolphin in the difficult days after she had refused to accompany her mother on her return across the ocean. So Dolphin forgave Ana her complaints, and even her odd habit of calling her by her mother’s name.

With a sigh of relief Ana settled on the couch Dolphin’s sons had made for her. This was the trunk of a fat oak, laboriously carved and polished. Early this morning Dolphin had loaded it with cushions stuffed with goose down. Dolphin sat cross-legged beside her and resumed her work, mending a torn tunic for her youngest boy.

Ana’s latest dog, an ageing mutt called Hailstorm, was already asleep at the couch’s foot. He was the son of Thunder and grandson of Lightning, and she said he was the laziest of the lot.

Ana’s house still stood where it always had, when it had belonged to her long-dead grandmother Sunta, one of the Seven Houses that stood behind the line of dunes that still fringed the southern shore of Etxelur’s bay - even though the bay, long drained, was now greened and thick with willows. But old Sunta would surely not have recognised this place, for the house had been rebuilt on top of a mound, its faces covered with marram grass and its base fringed by a low wall of good Pretani stone. Today the mound’s slope was speckled with celandine, an early flower drawn out by the sunshine. When Dolphin absently plucked one she counted its eight perfect, spiky leaves. And, nestling in the celandine carpet, she saw the rich purple of dead-nettles, tiny, intricate flowers.

Once she was settled Ana leaned her stick against the chair where she could find it again, folded her hands in her lap, and turned her cataract-silvered eyes towards the sun. ‘Ah, the light.’ She rubbed her bare elbows with hands like claws. ‘It’s been such a long winter. Odd how the winters don’t get any shorter as you get older, though the summers fly by fast as swallows . . . The sun’s good for me.’

‘I know, Ana.’ So she did; Ana made the same sort of speech every day. But there were some who said that Ana craved the light as part of her life-long battle against her dread Other, the owl, a creature of the dark and the cold.

Noise came floating to them on the breeze - banging drums, excited cries, the squeals of children, merging into the cries of the gulls as they wheeled over the shore.

Ana turned her head. ‘What’s all the din?’

‘Well, I don’t know, sitting here, do I? But it’s surely to do with the Spring Walk.’

Ana nodded. ‘Just three days away.’ The sunlight was making Ana’s eyes water, and she wiped her face on a sleeve. ‘It’s all so long ago - the last time Pretani came on a Spring Walk. All that blood spilled. Hardly anybody remembers it now. The worse thing about growing old, you know, isn’t setting out your friends’ bodies for the sky burial, it is being the only one who remembers how it was, and why it was. The way we worked together - the way we fought. Novu, who died alone in his nest of bricks. Jurgi, dear Jurgi, the wisest man I ever met, who loved me, even if he never forgave me. And your mother, of course, Ice Dreamer, how I fought with her when my father brought her home! We all worked so closely together we were like the fingers of a single hand. Now they’re all gone, and me left here alone.’

‘You aren’t alone. People know your name from Gaira to Albia. You’re loved by everyone.’

Ana reached over and patted her shoulder with her bent fingers. ‘It should be quite a show when they bury me in the sea wall then, shouldn’t it?’

Somebody called, ‘As long as it doesn’t outshine what you’re planning for my father.’

Ana turned her head at the new voice, her blind eyes searching. ‘Who’s that?’

Four people were approaching the mound, two men and a woman in the heavy hide garb of the Pretani, and Ana’s daughter Sunta, barefoot in a skimpy smock. The younger Pretani man bore a heavy leather sack. Looking beyond them, Dolphin saw a few more Pretani, and a ragged bunch of Etxelur folk following. Most of them were curious children who had probably never seen a Pretani before, dancing around the warriors and pulling at their hide cloaks.

The younger Pretani was Kirike. Dolphin hadn’t seen him in years. She felt her heart race.

She was still holding her ripped tunic, her needle of antler. She put the stuff down hastily, feeling foolish, and stood. She hoped she wasn’t actually blushing.

Ana, leaning heavily on her stick, was trying to stand. ‘It’s the Pretani, is it? We’ll go down the mound and greet our guests.’

‘No need.’ The Pretani woman took charge. She walked up the steps cut into the side of the mound and stood before Ana. ‘Giver. My father told me all about you. It’s an honour to meet you.’

‘Acorn?’ Ana reached out with a bent finger, and stroked the woman’s cheek, the line of her brow. ‘You are Acorn. You have your father’s cheekbones. I remember Shade’s cheekbones . . . And now you’re the Root of the Pretani. A woman!’

‘Much has changed.’

‘And for the better,’ Ana said firmly. ‘Thank you for speaking to me in my own tongue. That’s respectful of you. And you’ve come a long way.’

‘We came for our father,’ said the younger man, stepping forward. He put down his bag, and Dolphin could hear a rattle of bones.

‘Kirike.’ Ana’s face twisted into a smile and she held out her arms. Kirike came forward and embraced his aunt; he was a stocky man, built like his Pretani father, and he overwhelmed the slight, hunched woman. Ana reached back for Dolphin. ‘Come to me, child. You two haven’t see each other for much too long.’

So Dolphin came face to face with Kirike, the boy she’d grown to love as they grew up together, the man she’d lost in the great falling-out after the Pretani war. She felt fifteen again as the two of them stood there on the mound. ‘You haven’t changed.’ She touched his bearded cheek. ‘And yet you have. Does that make sense?’

‘No.’ He smiled. There were lines around his eyes and on his forehead, under a single kill scar. ‘But you always did talk in riddles.’

‘When we were young I thought you looked like your mother Zesi. Now you look more of a Pretani, like your father.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘No. Because I can still see my Kirike in there, under all the years.’

He slapped his belly. ‘Under all the weight, you mean.’ He leaned forward, and said a few halting words in the tongue of Dolphin’s mother, the tongue of the True People from across the ocean. ‘You still smell of the sea.’

Dolphin laughed. ‘And you of the forest. You must meet my children. Four of them. All boys.’

He grinned. ‘I left my own litter at home. Three girls!’

She held his gaze for one more heartbeat. ‘What might have been?’

‘What indeed? But we must make the most of the world as we find it.’

‘Well,’ Ana barked, ‘that’s an attitude I’ve been arguing against my whole life, I must say.’ She hobbled forward to Kirike’s bag, poking it with her stick. ‘I take it this is the old man?’

‘Let me.’ Resin stepped forward, opened the bag, and picked out the Root’s skull to hand to Ana.

Ana took it carefully and touched one cheekbone with a bent fingertip. ‘Poor Shade! He was a good man, you know - better than the rest of you Pretani put together, and certainly better than his father and brother who were both little more than animals.’

Dolphin murmured, ‘Ana—’

‘No, it’s true, and it has to be said. If anybody deserved to be born into a better world it was him. I always thought, you know, that if he’d been born in Etxelur he’d have made a good priest. He had the right instinct about people.’ She glared at Sunta. ‘Shame you never met him, child. He might have taught you a few things.’ Carefully she handed the skull back to Kirike and turned her face to the sun, closing her streaming eyes. ‘It’s a beautiful day - best of the year so far. Why wait? Isn’t it a good enough day to lay poor old Shade down for his final sleep?’

Dolphin glanced at the Pretani. ‘It’s not the equinox yet, Ana. We haven’t arranged a proper ceremony, a procession—’

‘Well, I know that. But would Shade care?’ Ana turned to the Pretani. ‘From what I remember of your father—’

Acorn said, ‘You’re right, Ana. He was a warrior who longed for peace, a leader who longed for modesty. He wouldn’t want a great fuss.’

‘Yes.’ Ana reached out, and Acorn took her hands. ‘Just us, then, his family and those who knew him. Anyhow there’s time to change your mind; it will take me long enough to make my way to the Northern Barrage, curse these knees. And maybe our new earthworks will put on a show - they should be draining the barrages today.’ But Dolphin could see none of the Pretani knew what that meant. ‘Dolphin, child, are you still there?

Dolphin took her arm. ‘This way, Ana. The first step down’s just ahead of you.’

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