Stone Spring Part 14

Root glared at the priest. 'What did he say? Tell me, priest.'

Jurgi, exasperated and alarmed, twisted his hands together. 'He said - it doesn't matter what he said-'

But then the arguments began again, everybody shouting, Jaku, Knuckle, the Root, Zesi, their followers waving fists and spears and knives, and the priest crying out for order, a three-way fight conducted in four languages, if you counted the traders' tongue.

Ana pulled out of the angry ma.s.s, dismayed. She looked up at the whale's huge eye. She was so close to it she could smell the sea on it, see the barnacles that peppered its flesh. The eye rolled, and she thought it looked down on her.

And somebody was clapping, above the fighting. Clap, clap, clap, steady as a heartbeat.

'The priest's right,' came a voice in the traders' tongue. 'Who said what, it doesn't matter. You're all so busy squabbling you forget what's important - the whale, whose life is being given up for you.'

The clapping was having a quieting effect; the squabbling groups shut up and turned to see. The voice was coming from above her - on top of the whale.

'And besides,' came the voice, 'if a whale is driven ash.o.r.e, as this one was, the owners.h.i.+p goes to the one who did the driving. Isn't that the custom, priest? Sorry we've been away so long. But you have to admit we brought home a decent present for the Giving.'

Ana stepped back until she could see two men standing on top of the whale, one taller, the other heavier, the latter apparently winded by the effort of climbing up there. They were silhouetted against the sky, but she knew who they were immediately.

She couldn't move. She could barely think.

Zesi's shriek broke the silence. 'Father!' She ran forward and pressed her hands against the whale's damp flank.

Kirike knelt and reached down to Zesi; the whale was so big that, reaching up on her tiptoes, she could only just touch his fingers. He looked around until he saw Ana, and smiled at her.

Somebody started applauding, one of the Etxelur folk. One by one others joined in. The rest, the snailheads and the Pretani, just stared, bemused.

The priest was shaking his head. 'Trust Kirike and Heni to make such a show of coming home. But it's the will of the little mothers that they should show up on the very day the Root and his boys arrive . . .'

Ana still couldn't move. None of this seemed real.

A woman approached her, walking around the head of the whale. She was tall, with rich dark hair tied back in a knot. She wore skins that were stained by salt water, and she carried a baby, a lump no more than weeks old. She looked tired, but oddly resilient. 'You must be Zesi, or-'

'Ana.'

'Your father told me all about you.' Her language was the Etxelur tongue, spoken slowly but clearly enough. The woman staggered, and tucked the baby closer to her chest, and smiled. 'Forgive me. We have been at sea for moons.'

'Months.'

'Months. Yes . . . I have forgotten the land, how to stand. I am Ice Dreamer. I hope we will be friends.'

A dog yapped. It was Lightning, racing across the sand, come to greet his long-lost master.

25.

Ana lay back in the crook of her father's arm. He was drinking a nettle tea she had made him. Lightning lay on Kirike's other side, contentedly curled up against his leg.

They were in their home. The afternoon had grown ferociously hot. There was plenty going on outside - she could hear the shouts of the people beginning the long process of butchering the whale, and even from here she could smell the sharp stink of blood and blubber and brine - but she was grateful for some time in the shade. And after so long in his boat, Kirike said, so was he.

He didn't smell like her father, not yet. There was too much of the sea on him. And she thought he had lost weight, grown greyer - grown old in the nine months he had been away. Grown that bit stranger. But she didn't care. It was him, solid and alive, as if back from the dead; she had him back, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be but here with him.

But the stranger was here too, the woman he had brought back with her baby. She was sitting with the priest, talking quietly. Even her name was odd: Ice Dreamer.

They were trying to work out where she had come from, how far away was the land where Kirike had picked her up. They had lifted the mats from the floor, and the priest scrawled a map in the dirt, showing the familiar countries, Albia, Gaira, and Northland between, and a vaguer sketch of what lay to the west, mostly picked up from traders' tales: a warm sea to the south, a cold, icebound ocean to the north, and beyond a greater ocean to the west a vast continent. Dreamer spoke of her land, which was evidently a big, complicated place of lakes and forests and ice. But she was even vaguer than the priest, for as a child she had grown up far from any sea, believing she lived on an endless plain - just land, going on for ever. She hadn't even known the ocean existed.

Neither recognised what the other drew, and there seemed no way of connecting them up, save for a dim impression of Kirike and Heni's westward journey, hopping between rocky islands and ice floes, and then a similar step-by-step journey back.

'It is as if we inhabit different worlds,' the priest said, doodling with his stick. 'Ours to the east, yours to the west. Connected only by an accidental journey that might never be made again . . .'

Dreamer was sitting cross-legged with her baby on her lap. Out of her heavy skins, she wore a light tunic over her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her face was well defined, the bones of her cheeks high, her brow proud, her nose thin and straight. She was beautiful, Ana thought, watching her. Strange, beautiful.

Dreamer s.h.i.+fted to see what Jurgi was sketching now. He had drawn three concentric circles, a line piercing to the centre. Unthinking, he'd drawn it over Etxelur in his map. Dreamer asked, 'What is this? I see that sign everywhere here, on your houses, carved into the rocks. Even on people's faces. I have seen it in my own country.'

'You have?'

'We saw it carved in the rocks,' Kirike called over. 'Over the beach where we picked her up.'

'The sign is very old,' the priest said. 'It means many things. For one thing, we use it to remember the better world of the past.'

Kirike grunted. 'When Etxelur was strong, and did not have to take insults from a bull-man like the Root.'

'But I think it means other things too,' Jurgi said. 'Circles come back to where they started. As the moon and sun cycle in the sky, as the seasons give way one to another, always returning.' He glanced at Dreamer's baby. 'As a baby girl is born, who grows to be a woman, and gives birth in turn.'

'Maybe he has drawn sharks and dolphins swimming around a boat,' Kirike said.

Ice Dreamer flashed him a smile, bright in the dark.

Ana didn't know what they meant. They shared memories, experiences she didn't. She felt an odd, unworthy pang. Resentment. Jealousy. Ugly emotions she didn't like to recognise in herself.

Ice Dreamer said to Jurgi, 'Much separates us. Your language is like none I ever heard.'

'That isn't so much,' said the priest. 'The traders who cross the Continent by the valleys of the great rivers say that everywhere languages are spoken that are as different from mine as mine is from yours.'

'But she did not speak the traders' tongue, even,' Kirike said.

'Even so, Ice Dreamer, much more unites us than divides us. You are human. Two arms, two legs-'

'Half a belly, or at least that's how it feels.'

'I can tell you,' Kirike said now, 'she's the same inside as we are. If not, she wouldn't be here now.'

The priest said, 'Nothing here seems so very strange to you, does it? Nothing about the way we live.'

'No. We too have houses. Spears. Fires, hearths. Only the small things are different.'

'But what of the greater things - the greatest of all?'

'You mean the G.o.ds.'

'The stories of the past, of those who made the world, and destroyed it,' said the priest. They looked at each other, suddenly curious.

As they spoke of ice giants and wolves in the sky, Kirike hugged Ana closer and kissed the top of her head. 'I'm sorry I missed your blood tide.'

'It was fine. Mama Sunta was there, and the priest, and Zesi . . . They helped me. But my Other is an owl.'

'So Jurgi told me. Your Other can represent many things,' he said gently. 'I'm sure the priest has told you that. And everything has its place. The night needs the owl as a summer's day needs the swallow.'

'Am I the night, then? Am I death?'

'No. But you're a much more serious girl than the one I left behind, and I'm sorry about that. And I'm sorry about your sister too.' He looked towards the open flap of the tent, as if hoping Zesi would suddenly appear, or fearing it. 'She's hardly spoken a word to me since I came back.'

'I love you,' Ana said. 'I missed you. She loves you. But she's angry.'

'Why? Because I went away?'

Ana said carefully, not wanting to be disloyal, 'She liked having all the responsibility. As Giver, as senior woman of the house . . . Even though she complained about it all the time. What people say isn't always what they mean, is it?'

'No, child, it isn't.'

'Did you know she told the Root she would take the wildwood challenge?'

'No.' His muscles hardened, his grip on her tightening. 'I won't allow that. I'd rather go myself. Those Pretani animals don't go into their wildwood to play, but to earn their killing scars.'

She snuggled in closer. 'You'd better tell her that yourself.'

The priest and Ice Dreamer seemed to have finished telling each other their stories.

'Different stories, but the same elements,' the priest said. 'The birth of the world in ice and fire, the coming of death . . .' He ma.s.saged his temples. 'I think these stories are not lies. I think our first mother was real, and your Sky Wolf was real. It is a consolation of humanity that we aren't born with the memories of ten thousand generations of misery. Each new mind is as bright as a celandine in spring, and as empty of thought. But the bad thing is we forget the past - what to do when the rainstorm comes, how the world was made. This is why we need grandmothers, and priests. To remember for us.'

'Yes. My people believe the world was different, before. Better. Then it was ruined, by ice and cold. Now lesser people own the world, and we are the last of those who went before. In fact I may be the last of all - or my baby is.' The baby woke up coughing, and cried. Dreamer held her on her lap and looked down at her, concerned. 'Oh, child, what's wrong?' She murmured something in her own unknown tongue.

Kirike took his arm from around his daughter's shoulders, and crossed to the woman and huddled with her over the baby, his back to Ana. Lightning followed him, curious, wagging his tail. Ana was left alone.

26.

Novu could hear Etxelur long before he saw it. It was the drumming that carried furthest inland, and occasional s.n.a.t.c.hes of song.

Loga led his party down a broadening river valley towards a marshy estuary. It was a bright, clear morning, the sun still low in the east. Novu was laden with trade goods, as was Loga, and indeed so were his two wives and their children. The ground was thick with green bracken that clawed at their legs and towered over the smaller children, and it was hard going.

But on this warm midsummer day the world was dense with life, birds singing vigorously, the birch trees heavy with leaves, flowers like foxgloves and irises cl.u.s.tering in open s.p.a.ces, dragonflies humming over open water. All of this was still alien to Novu, who didn't even have names for many of the living things he came across in this strange, damp, green, western country. But he was impressed with the abundance of life. This place made Jericho with its fields of grain look barren.

Now Loga led his party up an animal track over a softly eroded ridge, and the view opened up to the north, and Novu saw Etxelur at last.

Trails ran down from this ridge to a bank of gra.s.sy dunes that fringed a beach of yellow sand. Seven houses, squat and purposeful, a vivid green, stood behind the dunes, and smoke threads rose into the still air. The beach was at the outlet of a bay, much of which was fringed by flat, marshy land where water glimmered, blue-green. To the north the bay was closed by a causeway that led to an island, a lump of sandstone fringed by beaches of s.h.i.+ngle and sand. And beyond that lay only the sea, stretching to the horizon, flat and perfect. There were more houses everywhere, on the beaches and the dunes and in the marshes, houses that were cones and half-b.a.l.l.s, all of them the brown of reeds or the green of seaweed. You had to look closely to see them; aside from the rising smoke, they looked natural, like something washed up by the sea, not human at all.

Novu took a breath of fresh, salty air. A place more unlike Jericho, its harsh landscape and walls of brick and stone, was hard to imagine. Yet he sensed this was a good place. And he heard that drumming again.

Loga was looking at him suspiciously.

'What?'

'Smiling. You. Why?'

'I don't know.' He held out his arms. 'Beautiful day. Beautiful place. People happy; I can hear them. And I'm young and fit and unusually good-looking.' He did a few steps of a hopping dance, which made the younger wife giggle as she cradled her infant. 'Why not smile?'

'Suit yourself,' Loga grunted. 'We go that way.' He pointed west. 'They're all on the island, the far side. We cut around the bay and take that causeway. Sea rises up soon. Walk quick or we swim,' he snapped at the women and children, and strode off down a fresh trail.

They trudged on, their faces drawn. They had been walking since dawn. Novu, feeling benevolent, reached down and lifted the pack off the back of the youngest walker, a six-year-old boy. He grinned his thanks and went running ahead, chasing b.u.t.terflies. Loga made no comment.

'So,' Novu asked, 'why the celebration?'

'Solstice.' Loga pointed at the rising sun. 'All people celebrate midsummer, different ways. Here, the Giving feast. Big event for all people around, people of the coast, of the land. People happy. Good trade.' He grinned, dreaming of profit.

'You're all heart, my friend.'

'What?'

'Never mind.'

It wasn't long before they had rounded the marshy land at the end of the bay, and then walked out along the causeway, a remarkable strip of land that cut the sea in two. The world was flat here, a panorama of mud flats and the brutal plain of the sea, fringed by lumpy sand dunes and the bulk of Flint Island. But the island was still so far away that the mist washed out its colours to a blue-grey, so that it looked unreal, a marking on a wall, not solid at all. The sea, at this time of the tide, was far away from their feet, and the causeway was a trail that led across a broad stretch of mud flats. Gra.s.s grew here, long, tough stuff. But you could tell the sea had been here recently. The gra.s.s was beaten down, there were standing pools of brackish water, and there was a tide line above the path they were following, marked by a litter of broken sh.e.l.ls and seaweed tangles. This was an odd, eerie place, suspended between two worlds - a place where gra.s.s grew, yet which was daily covered over by the sea.

A crowd of curlews dipped and swooped overhead, making their odd chuckling cry.

After the causeway, they rounded a last sandstone bluff and came to a long, broad beach facing north, fringed by a line of dunes. The beach was thronged with people, slim figures busy everywhere, silhouetted against the brilliant light reflecting off the sea. He heard laughing, shouting, singing, the shrieks of the children splas.h.i.+ng in the clean blue sea - many, many children, swarming around the adults. There must be hundreds of people here, he thought, not as many as in Jericho, but a larger gathering than any he had encountered since leaving home. Smoke rose up from scores of fires, and cooking smells reached Novu, even here at the western end of the beach, meat and salty fish.

Loga led his party along the beach, to a patch of dry sand between the shoulders of two dunes. 'This will do. Shelter from the wind if it picks up.' He glanced around. 'Bit far from centre, the middens. Better to be closer, for pa.s.sing trade. Arrive too late.' He glared at one of the children. 'If that one not sick, we'd have gained a day.' But he shrugged.

The women settled wearily to the sand.

Novu dropped his pack. 'I'll go take a look around.'

Loga grunted, indifferent, unfolding his skin packs.

Novu walked along the beach. After a while he slipped off his boots, slung them over his shoulder, and walked on the fringe of the sea where the sand was wet. His feet, hardened by months of steady walking, enjoyed the crisp coolness of the water, the softness of the sand.

There were many different communities here, he soon saw, gathered on this bright beach. Folk evidently from the estuaries had their flat-bottomed skin boats drawn up on the beach, and wooden trays of eels and strange-looking crustaceans set out on the sand. Ocean fishers had bigger, deeper boats and racks of fish, with some spectacular catches on display; one huge cod looked longer than Novu was tall. A group of goat herders had a dozen animals penned up inside a wicker fence, reinforced by posts thrust into the sand. Another group who evidently hailed from the forests inland had set up a pole, a tree trunk stripped of branches and bark and carved along its length with distorted faces, images of G.o.ds perhaps.

The people themselves were all different too. The men with the G.o.d-pole wore trousers cut away to leave their crotches exposed, and Novu, wincing, saw that their dangling c.o.c.ks had been sliced and st.i.tched and tattooed. He saw heads shaven bald, or with hair raised in sticky spikes, and skin adorned with tattoos in black, red and even green, and distortions of noses and ear lobes and necks and even heads stretched like great tubers. Another group of estuary folk wore skulls heaped upon their heads like hats. All these groups spoke in their own languages, all of them sounding different from anything even Novu the hardened traveller had heard before.