Stone Spring Part 43

'What?'

He gestured at the rocks. 'Pretani don't feed us meat any more. Too many of us. We have fruits of sea. But we are hungry - we work hard - children growing. Sh.e.l.lfish not-' He tapped his belly, running out of words. 'They leave you hungry. We must gather many, many sh.e.l.ls. Soon the tide will turn, rocks covered-' 'We know.'

He s.h.i.+fted the pack on his shoulder; she saw the leather strap was rubbing his bare skin raw. 'Know what?'

'What you intend.' She glanced over her shoulder at his family, who continued to work in silence. 'In Pretani there is a man called True. One of the Eel folk, like you. Perhaps you know him.'

'Many called True.'

'Just listen. The Pretani have a plan. They will come here in numbers, and attack us. This will be soon. And the Eel folk will be involved.' She stepped forward, hand on hips, glaring at him, summoning all the authority she could muster. 'You will rise up, all over Etxelur, and attack us. And when we turn to face you, the Pretani will fall on us like wolves on a lame calf. This is what True says has been planned. He says every adult of the Eel folk is prepared for it.'

'How do you know?'

'We take stone and slaves from the Pretani, in return for flints. You know this. To make the trade the Pretani come here, and some of us go to their settlements in the forest. One day True spoke to a man from Etxelur. He told him about the Pretani's plan.'

'Why would this True do that? Never been here.'

'He knows nothing of Etxelur, and cares nothing. He only knows that Etxelur is an enemy of the Pretani. And he asked our trader for favours.'

'What favours?'

'His freedom, and his family's, when the Pretani are beaten.'

Wise studied her. His face was weather-beaten, burned; many of the Eel folk, used to the milder sun of their inland lakes, had broiled in the intense light of the coast, especially the children. The darkening and tightening of Wise's skin gave him an alien, hardened look. 'Why tell me?'

'Ana is having your leaders brought to her. We're trying to do this out of sight of the Pretani. We don't want them to know what we know. Soon they will come for you. But I came first.'

'Why?'

'Because I want to understand.' Deeply hurt, betrayed, she clung to her anger. 'You aren't denying it, are you?'

He sighed. 'Why deny?'

'Even though the Pretani beat your children and rape your women, you are prepared to work for them - to kill us to further their goals?'

He shrugged. 'No choice. And besides, when the attack comes, great chaos. Perhaps we slip away.'

'But you would turn on us? What have we ever done to you? We don't beat you.'

'No. You let Pretani do that.'

'Would you have harmed me?' She grabbed his forearm; covered with dense grey hair, it was slick with sweat and sea spray. 'Look at me, Wise. Would you have hurt me?'

'If I had to.'

She stepped back, shocked. 'But I cared for you - your family. I brought you medicine for your sick child.'

'I depend on your kindness for life of child.' He studied her, staring at her face. 'Understand, little girl? Don't want your power over me, for good or ill.' She was horrified to see something like pity in his eyes.

She turned away and ran back up the beach.

80.

At the end of the day, with the setting sun striping long shadows along the Etxelur beaches, Ana called her closest people to the holy middens. As Jurgi waited with her they arrived in ones and twos, Novu, Ice Dreamer, Arga, Kirike. They had to wait for Dolphin.

Jurgi thought he had never known Ana so agitated, so obviously distressed. She paced by the middens and peered out to sea, and at the great new d.y.k.es reaching out towards the drowned Mothers' Door - huge structures yet unfinished, with heaps of stone and sand at their abutments.

Arga stood by Jurgi. 'She's very worried.'

'She needs to be calm,' Jurgi said. 'To think clearly.'

'You're the priest. It's your job to soothe her, isn't it?'

'She's a troubled spirit,' he said grimly. 'But . . . I saw her grow up. She respected me, then. Now she's the woman who took me from my partner, and she is the mother of my unborn child, and she is the beating heart of the new Etxelur. How am I supposed to deal with such a being?'

Dolphin arrived, at last. And she had brought a slave with her, one of the Eel folk. A few years older than Dolphin, he was muscular but slim to the point of scrawny. His wrap of faded cloth was filthy and torn, and he stank of the sea, at whose edge he had probably been working most of the day. As the group stared, he simply stood before them, showing no sign of fear. He was oddly impressive.

Dolphin said the slave's name was Wise. Jurgi had never learned any of the slaves' names. Not knowing their names made it easier for him to bear their presence.

Novu turned on Dolphin. 'I don't care what his name is. Why have you brought him here? He and his kind mean to kill us all.' With age he had become a small, angry man, plump in body and face, his dark brown eyes red-rimmed with anger. He was eaten up by his obsessions, scarred by a long-gone childhood. Jurgi believed he still loved Novu, but he had never seen him look more unappealing.

Dolphin spoke up for herself, young, angry, beautiful in her mother's striking way with her strong nose and dark hair. 'Why do you think I brought him? Because the Eel folk are at the centre of all this. If we don't hear what they have to say we're fools.'

Jurgi spoke up hastily. 'She's right. Let's not bicker. We've got some hard thinking to do, some tough decisions to make. For a start I've been trying to make sure the Pretani in Etxelur don't know that we know about their plan.'

Ice Dreamer asked, 'And how are you doing that?'

'Their big men are all in the dreamers' house, working their way through my store of poppies.'

Dreamer laughed throatily.

Ana spoke, for the first time. 'And what about this plan of theirs?' She glanced at Jurgi, an unusual uncertainty showing on her small, solemn face. 'Do we believe all we've been told?'

'I think we must,' Jurgi said. 'There's nothing for this man True to gain by lying. He deliberately sought out our trader to tell him about it. And the Eel folk here have admitted it.' He glanced uneasily at Wise. 'Though some of them had to be pressed.'

'Maybe it's all a bluff,' Kirike said. 'Maybe the Eel folk have been told to spin us this tale to frighten us.'

Jurgi hadn't thought of that, and he considered. 'I doubt it. We had no idea the Pretani were planning to fall on us at all. They wouldn't give away the advantage of surprise just for the sake of stirring up a bit of confusion.'

'Besides,' Dreamer said, 'as you should know, Kirike, you've got their blood in your veins, the Pretani aren't the subtlest of folk. This scheme of planting warriors among us is pretty smart, but is probably the limit of their ingenuity. More likely, they just weren't clever enough to imagine that one of their slaves would betray them.'

Ana said, 'So the threat is real. The question is what we do about it.'

'We fight,' Novu said immediately. 'We can't let them take our wealth, our flint. And we can't let them destroy what we've made of Etxelur.'

Jurgi glanced at Dolphin and Kirike, the young folk standing together, their hands gently touching. On impulse he asked, 'Do you two want to fight?'

Kirike considered. 'It depends what we're fighting for. Once, if the sea flooded your house, you just moved away and built another one. That was how you did things in the days before the Great Sea - that's what you tell me.'

'You didn't have slaves either,' Dolphin said now, flaring. Jurgi knew she had been helping the slaves, for she had come to him for medicines. 'You were a different people then, with different ways of thinking. Better ways, maybe. It's all changed because of you, Novu.'

'You weren't even born in the times you speak of,' Novu sneered. 'You are an outsider. Like your mother.'

'As are you-'

'What would you have us do? Run like whipped dogs?'

Kirike took a step towards him, fists clenched. 'You old people hate us, don't you? I think you wish your precious Great Sea had just washed everybody away, so you would have been spared raising ungrateful runts like us-'

'This isn't helping,' Ana said softly. 'Kirike, you're right. Once just walking way from problems was what people did. But we can't do that any more, because the sea has eaten away so much of the land. The snailheads walked away, and ended up here. There's nowhere left to go.' She glared at Kirike and Novu. 'But I won't have division among us. Things are bad enough without that. Whatever we decide to do, we do it together.'

Novu turned on her, all but shouting. ' "Together." Who are you to say "together"? You who have brought this horror down on us.'

Jurgi heard gasps. He was alarmed, fearing where this direct challenge to Ana might lead. 'Novu, be careful what you say.'

'What is there to be careful about? How much more peril could we be in? Think about it. Why is the Root so determined to bring us down, determined enough to plot and scheme over months, to whip up his entire people into a war party? Because before he was the Root he was called Shade. And for Shade it's personal. It's because of her - Ana - her and her sister, the disaster they caused that ended up with Shade's brother and father both dead, at his own hands. Now he's the Root, and when he looks over Northland, what does he see? Ana. Ana the survivor, the Giver, the big woman of Etxelur. This is why the Pretani are coming. Shade is coming for Ana.'

Jurgi knew Novu had a point. Jurgi had been talking to Eel-folk slaves all day about their planned revolt, and had heard other rumours, spread at second or third hand from the travelling camps of the Pretani. Rumours about another presence at the camps, a woman who stayed close to Shade - a woman with hair once a vivid red but now shot through with grey, a woman once beautiful but now grown old with bitterness. He'd said nothing of this yet to Ana, unsure how to broach it. But if all this was true, if this woman was who she sounded like, the matter was indeed personal, and it really was all about Ana.

But they couldn't afford for Novu to attack Ana. Ana was all that held Etxelur together. Resented she might be at times, but she was like the knotted leather rope at the crown of a house that strapped together its timber supports. Novu was sawing away at that rope - and if Ana failed, everything might come cras.h.i.+ng down even before the Pretani got here.

But Ana herself seemed calm. She linked her hands under her belly. 'It's always personal. Everything is. Novu, you've had it in for me since I took Jurgi away from you. Oh, don't try to deny it; our relations.h.i.+p soured from that day. And besides, what if it is personal, the whole Pretani attack targeted at me? What would you have me do? Would you truss me up like a pig for the spit and hand me over?'

Novu glared at her. 'If that's what it takes to save the work-'

Ice Dreamer said, 'I've always thought you were crazy, Jericho, but if you put your heaps of mud and stone ahead of the people they are supposed to protect then your mind really has gone soft.'

Ana held her hands up. 'Enough. We've worked together well in the past, Novu. When this incident is over we will work well again, I'm sure, for there is much to be done. I don't believe I will ever call you a friend again. But then, I'm not trying to make friends. I don't need friends. I need allies.'

She stepped away from Jurgi and Dreamer, away from the group, and she looked around, at the sweep of the midden, the great arms of the d.y.k.es reaching out to embrace the ocean. She was terribly lonely, Jurgi thought. Since being taken as her lover he had grown to understand that loneliness, if not to alleviate it.

She said now, 'I will always believe we had no choice but to try to save this land from the sea. It was that or run, and there was nowhere to run to. But we are doing something that has never been done before, so far as we know. And if you do something new, how can you know if you are doing it right?' She walked up to Wise. He was taller than she was, thinner; he looked down at her gravely. She switched to the traders' tongue. 'Can you understand me? Dolphin Gift is right. When I was a girl there was n.o.body like you in Etxelur. No slaves. There was only us, and our friends, and a few enemies. We were all the same. No wonder the Pretani were able to convince you to rise against us. I would rise up. Perhaps there's something of Novu in me. Perhaps I've been so intent on getting the work done I've lost sight of how we should be doing it. Well, here's a promise. If we push away the Pretani, we will continue to build our walls. But we will do things differently. Let them have slaves in Pretani and in Jericho. Not in Etxelur.'

Jurgi heard a murmur of support, a joyful clap from Dolphin.

Ana turned back to Wise. 'You, your people, will be welcome to stay. Not as slaves.' She waved a hand. 'As friends.'

He smiled down at her. 'I think about it.'

Jurgi was amazed. 'By the mothers, man, what is there to think about?'

'Don't like sea food.'

They all laughed, save a fuming Novu.

Ana regarded the Eel man. 'Well - stay or not, you have decisions to make of your own. Will you support the Pretani?'

'Pretani worse than you. We'll fight them with you.'

'Are you sure? How can we count on you?'

'I believe your promises more than I believe the Pretani.'

'Good,' Ice Dreamer said fervently. 'But we should be clever about this. Not a word to the Pretani. Pretend you continue to side with them. Turn their ruse back on them. It will double the shock when they come to destroy us.'

'Good idea,' Ana said. 'We have much to think about - much work to do if we are to survive this, even with the help of the Eel folk. We must talk to the snailheads too, and the estuary folk. But for now - are we agreed? Are you still with me?'

There was a murmur of support. Jurgi was heartened by relieved grins on the faces of Dolphin and Kirike. After all, it was the young who mattered most, in the end, no matter what the old folk agreed among themselves.

Only Novu was scowling. But he said, 'If it will get the work done, I don't care what you do. Now - are we done here?'

81.

The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox.

On the morning of the attack on Etxelur, the Leafies were kicked awake, as usual.

Me hunched over, protecting his face, his groin, the thick net heavy on his back. He had slept little. The strangeness of the place they had been brought to - the crisp, empty saltiness of the air, the sandy soil they had to lie on - had disturbed all the Leafy Boys profoundly.

When he opened his eyes he saw the stripe of the net, the huge shapes of the grounders standing over the Leafies. All this picked out in blue-black light. It was still dark, still long before the dawn - earlier than they normally woke. Me had learned to dread change. Change meant danger, and that somebody was going to die.

With a skill born of practice the men made a ring around the Leafies, and worked together to lift the net off. A little one got caught in the tangle, but with a couple of brisk shakes he fell down like an overripe fruit.

The Leafies moved stiffly, p.i.s.sing, licking leaves on the ground for their dew. Then the men moved in on the Leafies with their knives, knotted rope and clubs, and tested the tethers attached to the loops at their necks, getting ready to move them.

Soon the men started calling to each other, big gruff bellows like bull aurochs, and they formed up into their groups.

And then they started to run, heavy in their huge leather cloaks, their faces dark with blue and black paint, the scars over their brows vivid. The Leafies had to move too, only heartbeats after they had woken, driven ahead of their handlers on their leashes.

Me could barely see what he was running into. The light, such as it was, came from the dawn sky to his right, slightly paler than the rest. It felt like a nightmare, as if he had not yet fully woken up. But as he ran his muscles warmed up, and his nighttime aches started to fade, as they always did.

They came to a line of hills, low, gra.s.sy, sandy. Here the Leafy group was split in two. Some were kept back at the foot of the hills, and were taken off to the east. But Me and others were driven forward, to scramble over the soft dunes. He had no time to think about that - scarcely time to wonder if he would ever see the Leafies in that other party again.