Stone Spring Part 10

It was while she was in this pleasant, dreamy, late-morning mood that the party from the snailhead camp approached.

Three came, two men and a woman. None of them looked much older than Zesi. They had no weapons. One man carried something wrapped in a bit of skin that dripped with blood, and a sack heavy with some liquid. The woman carried a bundle that squirmed, feebly - a baby, Ana saw. One man had blond hair; the other man and woman had brown hair, darker eyes.

They looked ordinary, Ana thought, just like the folk of Etxelur. Ordinary save for their elongated skulls, which stuck out behind their heads, and the bone plugs in their tongues that showed when they opened their mouths. Beyond them, the smoke from their camp beyond the river's bend snaked into the sky.

Gall dumped his bit of liver and marched up to the newcomers, fists clenched. 'What do you want?' He spoke in the tongue of Etxelur.

The man holding the b.l.o.o.d.y parcel faced him. 'Trader tongue,' he said bluntly.

Zesi, followed by Jurgi, came bustling past Gall. 'Trader tongue,' she agreed. 'I speak for these people, not this man.'

'We have gifts,' the man said. He held out his b.l.o.o.d.y bundle. It was the heart of a deer.

Gall laughed at it. 'What did that come from, an unborn? My left b.o.l.l.o.c.k is bigger.'

The snailheads evidently didn't understand all his words, but they caught his tone. The blond man's expression darkened, and Ana saw muscles bunch in his arm. With his heavy frown and his strange, bony, tubular skull, he looked strange, unearthly, frightening.

The priest stepped forward hastily. 'We didn't come here to fight.' He continued in his own tongue, 'And we don't know how many of them there are. Zesi, take the gifts.'

Zesi hesitated. Then she took the heart from the snailhead, bowing her thanks.

The priest took the sack, removed a bone pin from its neck, and drank. 'Blackcurrant juice! Saved through winter!'

The blond snailhead grinned. 'Good?'

'Good!' Jurgi laughed, a bit too loudly. 'Come, sit, have some of my dock tea . . .'

They sat around the embers of the fire, the three snailheads, the priest, Zesi, Ana, Shade, others. Big flat stones and wooden bowls were set on the fire, to cook meat and prepare broths from the deer's entrails. Gall sat a short way away, gnawing on his liver, studiously ignoring the newcomers, yet clearly hearing every word.

Arga and the other children stood by, staring at the newcomers' big heads. Lightning wouldn't be kept away; he came sniffing around the strangers, b.u.t.ting their knees until they rewarded him with attention.

The priest began to make his tea. He took a precious relic from his charm bag: a bowl made from the skull of a bear, brown with handling and polished with age. The visitors looked suitably impressed. Jurgi scooped up water from a wooden bowl and set it on the edge of the fire. Then he took dock and sage leaves, crumbled them in his fingers, and dropped them in the skull bowl.

The blond snailhead man pointed to himself, and his companions. 'Knuckle. Gut. Eyelid.' Their own name for themselves wasn't, of course, 'snailhead', but something like 'the One People'.

The woman called Eyelid smiled and opened up her bundle of soft skin. The baby was sleeping, a thumb in her mouth. Her head from the brow up was tightly bound by plaited rope. She didn't seem to be in any discomfort as her head grew within these bonds, shaped and elongated.

Knuckle pointed at Eyelid's baby. 'Cheek. We camp.' He pointed down the river. 'There.'

Zesi asked, 'How many?'

The traders' tongue was rich in words for numbers. There were over fifty snailheads, men, women and children, just out of sight of the Etxelur summer camp.

This was shocking for the Etxelur folk to hear. The world was big, so big that you never had to share your favourite s.p.a.ces with anybody else, save for happy meetings like the Giving. It was genuinely disconcerting to find fifty snailheads here, as if they had shown up in the heart of Etxelur itself.

'We come here every year or two years,' Zesi said pointedly. 'Our parents before us, and their parents before them.' Her meaning was clear. This is our place. 'You?'

Gut shrugged. 'Never been here before. Plenty of room. Plenty of deer for you, for me.' He grinned. Ana saw that his tongue was pierced by a stone plug as fat as her thumb. 'Don't stay here long. Rest, feed, repair kit. Then move on.'

Zesi asked, 'Which way?'

'North.'

'That's where we live,' the priest said. 'Already we saw some of your people. A few moons ago. At a beach. It was strange to see snailheads except at a solstice gathering.'

Knuckle shrugged.

'Why are you here?'

'Need somewhere new to live. We lived south. Beach. Far south . . . Many months of walking. A winter of walking.'

Gall called over, 'So what was wrong with it? Why aren't you still there now?'

'The sea. In the south, our beach. Sea s.h.i.+fts over land.' He mimed a sea's waves, chunks of land falling into it. 'Splash, splash, splash . . .'

'So you couldn't live there any more,' the priest said.

'We walk away. North, east, west.'

'Where will you live?'

'Where there isn't people.'

'Where will that be?'

'We haven't found that yet. We will,' said the man with a quiet confidence.

'They are so strange,' Shade murmured to Ana in the Etxelur tongue. 'Those heads . . . But you have met these people before.'

'A few usually come to the Givers' feast at midsummer. You know how it is. People travel a long way.'

'But not fifty of them.'

'Not fifty. And not to come to stay.'

'I think I know of their homeland. Where he means, the far south.' Shade sketched with a fingertip in the dusty ground. 'Albia here, Gaira here. Albia is nearly an island. But Albia and Gaira are joined by the Northland. A neck, like a bird's head to its body . . .'

She struggled to understand. 'Oh.' She pointed to the bottom of his sketch. 'This is north. This is where Etxelur is. The coast.'

'Yes. We are here, a little way inland. But the snailheads come from the other side of the neck.' He pointed to the top of his sketch, the south. Here he had drawn the sea making a deep cut into the land. 'There, a great river flows between cliffs of white chalk. The people live on the cliff tops. Maybe the sea is cutting away the cliffs.'

'Can the sea do that?'

He looked at her. 'The sea drowned the flint beds mined by your ancestors.'

'They can't go home.' The thought horrified her. 'But they can't stay here.'

Gut, the younger of the snailhead men, grinning, was watching them. 'I hear,' he said, in the Etxelur tongue. He held thumb and forefinger a sand grain's width apart. 'A bit. "Can't stay here."

The priest forced a smile. 'We didn't come here to argue. And nor did you. You have your camp, and we have ours. As to what the future holds, only our G.o.ds know that, and yours. But for today and tomorrow and the next day, yes, there is plenty of deer for all, and pig and aurochs, and fish in the river and birds in the air and reeds in the marshes.'

Knuckle nodded, evidently a man as much intent on peace as the priest. 'Yes. Well said. No need to fight, nothing to fight over.' Then a thought struck him. 'Ah! We can share. Hunt together? Catch more that way. The One People are good at hunting deer.'

Gall, looking over, his mouth still stained with blood, grinned dangerously. 'Yes. We'll hunt together. And I'll show you snailheads how to do it properly.'

Gut looked slyly at Ana and Zesi. 'When we live on your beach we will need wives. I will need a wife.' Mocking, he turned to Zesi and stuck out his pierced tongue. 'Will you be my wife? You look strong. Good babies-'

Gall lunged at him, but the priest saw it coming; he threw himself at Gall and blocked him. He said urgently in the Etxelur tongue, 'Beat him at hunting. That's how you win.'

Gall, breathing hard, eyes bulging, backed off. 'At the hunt, then.'

Gut showed his studded tongue again. He hadn't so much as flinched.

'Good,' said the priest. 'Now - who wants some dock tea?'

19.

The hunters were up early the next morning, before the glow of the night's fire had been conquered by the gathering light of dawn.

Ana pushed her head out of the lean-to she shared with Arga. She could make out hunters from the snailhead camp, already waiting by the bend of the river that separated the two camps. Closer by, Shade was pressing his spear point against the ground to test the rope-and-resin attachment of the head to its wooden shaft. Gall was by the urine pit, noisily emptying his bladder over the deer skin. And Zesi was at the edge of the hearth, scooping up grey ash and rubbing it over her face and arms, the better to hide in the shadows of the forest. The snailheads had been surprised that Etxelur women hunted.

When they were ready, bearing their day packs and their weapons, the Pretani, Zesi and a handful of Etxelur folk walked up the riverbank to join the snailheads. The hunters had a soft-voiced discussion about the day's strategy, and then they slipped into the shadows of the trees.

Ana could have gone along. She had chosen not to; a day without Gall, Shade or Zesi would be a relief. She went back to the warmth of her pallet of leaves and soft doe skin, to sleep a bit more.

She heard nothing more of the hunters until the sun was past its noon height.

'Look out!'

The single cry in the Etxelur tongue was all the warning they had.

The women from Etxelur had been burning off reeds from the marshy land around the river. A pall of smoke rose high into the air, and the smell of ash was strong. The fire flushed out hare and vole and wildfowl that the children chased with nets of woven bark, and the burning would stimulate new growth.

Meanwhile Ana was on the bank of the lagoon with Arga, collecting club rushes. These were particularly prized plants, for you could eat all of them, their stems and seeds and fat tubers, and would be useful to carry back to Etxelur. Lightning had been digging his nose into their work and running off with tubers, to scoldings from Arga.

When that shout came Lightning reacted immediately, turning to face the forest and barking madly.

And Ana heard a rumble, like thunder, coming from the forest.

Arga tugged her sleeve. 'I can feel it in my stomach. What is it?'

Ana saw shadows in the forest. Heard branches cracking. 'Run!' She dropped her flint blade and basket of rushes. She grabbed Lightning by the scruff of his neck, took Arga's hand, and ran downstream, along the eroded bank.

The animal came cras.h.i.+ng through the trees, hooves pounding on the peaty turf, gruffly bellowing its pain. Ana dared to glance back, and she saw it emerge into the sunlight, a huge aurochs bull, thick brown hair, flas.h.i.+ng horns, wild rolling eyes, frothing mouth. And she saw a spear dangling from its flanks. The question was, which genius had stampeded it towards the camp?

Then the animal reached the river - the lagoon, where she and Arga had been working only heartbeats before. It crashed forward and fell, landing so hard its head was twisted right around, with a crunch like breaking wood. It struggled and bellowed, but did not rise.

Now the hunters came boiling out of the trees after it, yelling, half-naked, some brandis.h.i.+ng spears, Etxelur, Pretani, snailhead together.

'Come on.' The priest was beside Ana. He handed her a spear; she took it by the shaft. 'We'll help them finish him off.'

She glanced around quickly. The children were out of harm's way here. 'Keep hold of Lightning,' she told Arga. The child nodded seriously. Then Ana ran with the priest to the lagoon. 'You'll have a lot of apologising to do today, Jurgi.'

'I'm good at that.'

The hunters and those who had come running from both camps gathered around the fallen bull. The animal, trapped, squirming, was a ma.s.s of muscle and fur, tossed horns and las.h.i.+ng hooves, anger and pain and mud and blood and flying water. Ana could smell how its bowels had loosened in terror, and there was a harder rust stink of blood. More spears were hurled at it, or thrust into its flesh.

Then one spear went flying over the lagoon, high in the air, following a smooth arc. Ana watched it curiously, absently. It was going to miss the bull by a long way. The spear seemed to hang.

Then it fell among the snailheads.

A man went down, the heavy spear in his neck. Few saw this, in the chaos of the slaughter. But those near the man reacted and ran that way.

Ana dropped her own spear and hurried over.

It was Gut, the snailhead who had enraged Gall. The spear had got him in the throat, thrown him back and pinned him to the ground. His mouth with that studded tongue gaped wide, full of blood. He was still alive, his fingers feebly thras.h.i.+ng at a spear big enough to penetrate to the heart of a bull aurochs. Alive, but already lost to the world of the living.

Knuckle stood over his brother, face contorted, veins throbbing along the flanks of his long temples. 'Where is Gall? Where is he?'

20.

Novu and Chona rounded a bluff and looked down on a valley. Under a grey lid of sky it was raining, and their cloaks and tunics were sodden through.

'There,' Chona gasped. The rain hissed on the gra.s.s and pattered on the river water, and Novu found it hard to hear what Chona was saying. 'There! By the river - that place. That's where we meet. That's where . . . Come on.' He limped forward, and Novu, laden with their packs, followed.

The river ran over a rocky bed, beside a broad flood plain walled by cliffs of limestone. They had followed the river upstream for so long, they had come so far west, that it was barely recognisable to Novu as the huge waterway they had followed from its estuary, through the Narrow of the fish-people, and across the Continent's rocky heart. Yet here it was, the same river.

And here, Novu knew, Chona had been hoping to find his early-summer gathering of traders, for this place was, uniquely, near the head of several of the great rivers that traversed the Continent, a meeting point of the traders' natural routes. 'Always at this time,' he would say, 'after the equinox, that's when the trading is good. Later, at midsummer, all over the Continent the hunters and fishers gather, doling out food and gifts to each other. So this is the time to catch their leaders, early summer, when the big men start panicking about what gifts they have to give. Oh, the aurochs too fast for you this year? The deer too cunning, the fish too slippery? Shame. Maybe your wife's brothers would be happy with my bits of coloured stone instead . . .' Even traders followed the seasons, Novu was learning, from Chona's increasingly broken talk.