Stone Spring Part 6

But maybe Gall saw something darker in her, under her bl.u.s.ter. He winked. 'Fun, though, isn't it?'

She turned to Shade. 'Go and get the priest. The deer is his Other.'

Shade ran.

Zesi got to her knees beside the frightened doe. She stroked its neck and held its head. 'There, there. I am sorry. It will be over soon. Soon, soon.' The deer seemed to calm, its eyes wide.

Gall scoffed. 'I think we're more alike than you want to admit - what a beauty you are when you are b.l.o.o.d.y-' 'Out of my sight, you Pretani savage.'

He held his place for one more heartbeat. Then, growling obscenities in his own tongue, he walked away.

11.

They climbed out of the valley of the Milk, and crossed higher, hilly land.

It took days to cross the First Mother's Ribs. But by the fifth afternoon you could smell the salt in the air, and hear the cry of the gulls. The children clambered up ridges and climbed trees, competing to be the first to spot the water.

The sun was low in the sky when the group broke through the last line of trees, and the Moon Sea lay open before them. Here the rocky ground tumbled down to a shallow beach. The tide was low, the beach of this inland sea wide and glistening. Far off to the west Zesi saw movement - probably a seal colony. And even from the treeline you could see the oysters like pebbles on the beach, the promised gift of the moon.

The day had been unseasonably hot, and adults and children alike, worn down by days in the forested hills, dumped their packs, threw off their heavy cloaks and ran down the slope towards the water. Some folk made their way along the coast to an area of salt marsh, a place of thick, sloppy, grey clay, cut through by a complicated network of creeks and channels and small islands, all washed regularly by the tide. Here they spread out, inspecting sea aster, golden samphire, gla.s.swort: plants that liked salt and fed on what they trapped from the tidal flows.

Shade stood uncertainly with Zesi at the head of this beach. 'We have walked from sea to sea,' he said.

'The people who live hereabouts have legends of when this wasn't a sea at all, but a lake. Fresh water. Then the salt G.o.ds p.i.s.sed in it, and everything died, until the fish swam in from the sea . . .

Shade was only half-listening. A boy of the forest stranded out in the open, once more he looked out of place. Zesi felt she had warmed to him after the incident of Gall's deer. 'Come. Take off your boots. I'll show you what to do.'

She took his hand, and pulled him across the beach.

They reached wet, muddy sand that sucked at their bare feet, slowing them. Shade stared at the exposed seabed, where worm casts glistened, and the sh.e.l.ls of oysters jostled. 'You timed this walk,' he said. 'You wanted us to get here when the tide is low.'

'Not just low but at its lowest, as it is at the equinoxes, in spring and autumn.'

'This is your victory over the moon.'

'In the end she will take us all to her cold bosom. But today, just today, we can steal her treasures . . . Here. What a beauty!' She picked up an oyster, wider than her outspread fingers. 'Look. It's easy when you get the knack. You place it on a rock, like this. Flat side up. Then you take your knife and work it into the hinge, and just prise it open. Careful! You don't want to lose any juices.'

He stared at the animal exposed inside the opened sh.e.l.l. 'Then what?'

'You eat it!' She picked up the oyster and sucked it into her mouth, letting the salty juices flow after. 'Here. Find another one, and try yourself.'

He was good at the manual art of opening the sh.e.l.ls, but the first he tried to eat made him gag, and the juices ran down his face. The second he swallowed, but pulled a face. By the third he was smiling. 'It's salty. It's strange - it's good. The first splash of salt, and then the flesh, it bursts in your mouth, it's almost sweet.'

'It's best not to eat them much later than this, not until the autumn. They sp.a.w.n in the summer, and the flesh can be white and tasteless . . . Oh, look! Your brother is trying one.'

Jurgi the priest had taken it on himself to teach Gall. With bold gestures Gall tipped up his sh.e.l.l and sucked down the meat, only to spit it out on the ground. 'Urgh! Are you feeding me your snot, man?' Gathering up his blade he stomped off up the beach.

'Don't laugh,' Shade murmured to Zesi.

'I wouldn't dream of it. You really aren't much like your brother, are you?'

'Do you think that's good or bad?'

'What do you think?'

He sighed. 'Well, you're right. I'm not like him. That won't do me any good at home. Gall is stronger, a better hunter. Smarter in some ways. More cunning. More decisive.' He grinned, and stood up. 'I never ate an oyster before, but I have been swimming. I can hold my breath like a seal. Watch me.' He ran off into a sea that was soon lapping over his legs, and then he dived forward and began swimming with strong strokes.

The priest came over, sand clinging to his bare torso, his blue hair wild. 'He likes you.'

She shrugged. 'I'm just not as hard on him as his brother is. Or Ana, come to that, who I think he likes.'

'Ana has her problems. Perhaps now your grandmother is safely in the midden - we will see. The day has gone well. The weather is mild, and we arrived at the time of the low tide.'

'The G.o.ds have been kind to us.'

He grunted. 'Kind with the weather. The timing is thanks to you and your planning. The G.o.ds offer us gifts all the time. It's up to us whether we are capable of taking them or not. Look over there.' He pointed along the beach, to the west.

The sun was low, there was heat haze, and it was difficult to see. She made out movement. She had noticed it before; she thought it was a seal colony. It wasn't. 'Oh,' she said. 'People.'

'Yes.'

'I never heard of us meeting people on this beach before, at this time.'

'I asked Kano the knapper to go and have a look. You know he's a fast runner. He says they're friendly enough, and speak the traders' tongue.'

'Who are they?'

'Snailheads. From the south. Many of them.'

'Snailheads! Why aren't they at their own beaches?'

'I don't know. There are snailheads coming to the Giving feast in the summer. Maybe we can ask them about it . . .' He sounded distracted; he was staring out to sea.

'What are you looking for?'

'Shade. I saw him thras.h.i.+ng around before. He went a long way out. Now I can't see him at all.'

She frowned. Save for a few children playing at the water's edge, the sea looked empty. 'He said he could swim well. He could hold his breath.'

'He's a forest boy. Do you believe him? Perhaps he was trying to impress you.'

'Oh, for the love of the mothers . . .' She stood and quickly shucked off the rest of her clothes. 'You'd better go find his brother, priest. Men! There's always something.'

And, without looking back, she ran down to the sea.

The beach sloped shallowly, even beyond the water's edge, and she had to cross perhaps fifty paces of clinging, tiring, muddy sand before the water was past her knees. Then she threw herself forward into water that shocked with its chill, and began to swim, heading out the way she had seen the Pretani boy go.

At first the water invigorated her, but she was fighting the current of the incoming tide and soon tired. She stopped and trod water, and wiped the salt water from her eyes and mouth, her hair clinging to her neck. The sea around her glimmered in the low sunlight, and the sh.o.r.e seemed a long way away. 'Shade! Shade, you Pretani idiot!'

'Yes?'

The voice was so close behind her ear that it startled her and she lost her tread. She fell back in the water and got a mouthful of brine that made her cough.

Shade took hold of her under her armpits and steadied her, laughing. 'Are you all right?'

'No thanks to you. You worried me.'

'I told you I was a good swimmer.'

'Well, I didn't believe you.'

'And I can hold my breath. Look-'

'Don't bother.' They were holding hands now, circling. 'How does a boy from the wildwood of Albia get to be a good swimmer?'

'It's a joke of the G.o.ds.' He was smiling, his face and beard clean of dirt, his smooth skin marked only by the hunting scar on his cheek. 'A swimmer in the forest. You may as well give a salmon legs. But I don't mind. I suppose I'll never be able to hunt like my brother, or lead men in battle, or boss women around. But at least I can swim.'

His hands were warm in hers, his eyes bright. Their legs tangled, and they moved closer together. She could feel the warmth of his thigh between hers, and then she felt his erection poking at her stomach.

He pulled back. 'I'm sorry-'

'Don't be.' She pulled him to her. His face filled her vision, shutting out sea and sh.o.r.e and people. The world seemed to recede, taking with it all her responsibilities, her mixed-up sister, her fretting over her father, the workload she guiltily enjoyed. All that existed was the water, and this boy.

She took his shoulders and lifted upwards, clamping her legs around his waist. With a gasp he entered her, and their lips locked.

12.

'Hungry,' Moon Reacher whimpered. 'Hungry!'

'I know, child,' said Ice Dreamer. 'So am I. We will stop soon.'

Soon. For now, they walked.

They walked east away from the setting sun, which this late in the day cast a pink glow the colour of Dreamer's p.i.s.s when she squatted. To the south, their right, was the forest's scrubby fringe, birch and pine and a dense undergrowth now shot through with spring green. And to their left, the north, stretched a plain of gra.s.s and scrub and isolated stands of trees, where racc.o.o.ns and voles ran, and sometimes you would see deer or bison or horse in distant herds. Some days it almost looked pretty, with scatters of early spring flowers.

And there were people, fast-moving, elusive hunters on the gra.s.s, and enigmatic shadowy foragers in the green depths of the forest. These weren't Cowards. Dreamer and Reacher had walked far from the Cowards' range. But they weren't True People either. They were other sorts of strangers, folk Dreamer had never seen or heard of.

Dreamer kept them heading east, following the boundary between the southern forest and the northern plain, looking for a place where there were no people at all, n.o.body to drive them away. They walked as they had for uncounted days, while the world washed through its cycle of the seasons, and winter slowly relented. The child with a wounded leg that had now stiffened and smelled of rot, so she had to lean on the woman to make every step. And the woman with burdens of her own, the baby growing l.u.s.tily in her belly, the pack on her back that weighed her down, the enduring ache in her torn thighs and her lower belly. They walked, for there was nothing else for them to do.

A faint breeze stirred from the east, lifting Dreamer from her numb self-absorption. She stopped, and Reacher stumbled against her, panting hard. Dreamer pushed back her deerskin hood and sniffed the air. For a moment she thought she tasted salt. Another lake ahead? But then the breeze s.h.i.+fted around to the north, to be replaced by the richer, dry, almost burned smell of the gra.s.sland.

Leaning heavily on Dreamer, Reacher tugged her sleeve. 'Hungry!'

'I know, child.' Dreamer glanced around. The light was fading and they needed to find shelter. They were on the fringe of a dense clump of forest. She could detect no sign of people, smell no smoke, see no markings on the bark. She decided to take the chance. 'Come on,' she said to Reacher. 'Just a little further.'

They limped together into the shade of the trees. They were mostly pine, tall old trees spa.r.s.ely spread. It had rained recently - that was going to make it harder to find dry wood for the fire - and there was a rich warm smell of green growth and the rot of the last of the autumn's leaves.

They came to a fallen tree that had ripped a disc of shallow roots out of the ground, leaving a rough hollow shaded by the root ma.s.s, a s.p.a.ce that might give a little shelter. A little way away she saw a glimmer of open water. This would do. She dropped her pack with relief.

She spread a skin over the damp ground and helped Reacher lie down, favouring her bad leg. Reacher curled up like a baby, knees tucked up to her chest, and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Dreamer longed to rest herself, but she knew that if she lay down she wouldn't be able to move again.

So she collected branches from the fallen tree, dragged them back to the root hollow, and leaned them against the roots to make a roof over Reacher's body. She shook out more of her skins and laid them over the branches, then piled up bracken and leaves and dirt. This crude shelter would keep out any rain, and seal in the warmth of the fire - if she could get it started. She tucked the rest of her kit inside the shelter to keep it dry, the bag with the nuts and dried meat, the remains of Stone Shaper's medicine bag.

Then she pulled out their traps and set them carefully around the forest floor, driving stakes of splintered bone into the ground. Maybe they would be lucky tonight. As she moved, she picked up bits of branch and bark, the older-looking the better; everything was wet, but last season's falls would at least be dry inside and might burn.

At last she took a skin sack and filled it with water from the brackish pond, and crawled inside the shelter.

Reacher slept, still and silent. Dreamer carefully took her ember from the medicine bag. She placed it on a strip of bark, and began to feed it with dried moss, blowing carefully.

While the fire was taking, she dug with her fingers into the dirt, looking for worms and grubs.

Every time she built the fire she remembered their first night, after Mammoth Talker had led them into the kill site of the Cowards.

When the men had done with her they had walked back to their meat and their fires. Dreamer, half-conscious, naked, her body a ma.s.s of pain, could barely move.

An unknown time later Reacher had joined her, as naked as she was, the blood streaming from that gash on her leg. Reacher had helped her up, and they had hobbled away. Later Dreamer found she had slung Stone Shaper's abandoned medicine bag around her neck. She didn't remember picking it up. She hadn't seen Stone Shaper since, and didn't imagine she ever would again.

Nor did she remember how they had got back to the shelter under the rock ledge, where the rest of their stuff waited, untouched. That first night they had been able to do no more than huddle together under a heap of skins.

The next morning Dreamer was woken by the baby kicking. She was flooded with a strange mixture of relief and fear. Her baby was alive, but could her ruined body stand the birth? And, when it came, who would help her? She had wept then, her tears mingling with the blood on her hands.

Reacher had stirred, and, waking, cried out with pain. When Dreamer pulled back the skins that covered her legs, the stink of her swollen wound made Dreamer recoil. Dreamer knew little medicine; that was the priest's job, and the senior women. But she should have cleaned the wound before they slept, maybe sucked out the poison. She would always regret that she had not tried to treat Reacher's wound on that first night.

The priest's ember had not survived the night. It had not been until the fourth night that she had finally succeeded in building a fire, with a roughly made thong bow. The ember she carried now was a relic of that first blaze. With its help, they had survived the long days and nights since.

Now, as the fire's warmth built, Reacher tried to get up. Dreamer handed her the water skin. Reacher drank only a little, looking as pale as the moon for which she had been named. 'I am hungry,' she said. 'Are you hungry?'

'Me and the baby.' Dreamer dug in her pack. Reacher rarely spoke about anything but food - food and pain. She never asked where they were. It didn't matter, Dreamer supposed. They were nowhere. 'I set the traps. Maybe we'll have squirrel tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the snails. Do you remember when we caught them?'

She set a couple of snails on a stone before Reacher. The girl watched them dubiously. The snails barely stirred in their sh.e.l.ls. Dreamer had carried them for three days; you had to starve a snail before eating it, to let any poisonous plants it might have eaten work through its system. Dreamer hammered them with a rock, and the sh.e.l.ls crunched. Reacher started pulling away smashed sh.e.l.l from moist, sluggishly squirming flesh.

'And worms,' Dreamer said. 'Fresh and warm, out of the ground.' She dropped the creatures on Reacher's stone.