Stone Spring Part 7

'Do we have any walnuts?'

'We finished those days ago.'

Reacher put a worm in her mouth. 'I'd like meat.'

'I know.'

'Hare would do. Deer, or a steak from a bison.'

They might get hare or gopher or vole, but there would be no deer or bison. She forced a smile. 'Imagine it's deer. Remember the way Elk Tracker used to make her stew?' This old woman had had a way of boiling the meat in a big bowl chipped from stone, with dried herbs she collected, and the juice squeezed from the gall bladder of a young horse, an addition that brought out the flavour like no other. Reacher looked at the worm curling on her palm. 'Close your eyes and imagine. Mmm. Thank you, Elk Tracker.'

'Thank you,' whispered Reacher.

That was that for the food. Reacher didn't even finish what she'd been given.

'Come on,' Dreamer said. 'Let's take a look at your leg, and then we'll sleep.' She put a wooden cup of water over the fire to heat up, and s.h.i.+fted so she could get to Reacher's injury.

'How is the baby?'

'I felt her kick today. She kicks hard. I think she likes to play.'

A ghost of a smile touched Reacher's face. They had somehow decided between them that the baby would be a girl; Reacher would be disappointed if it wasn't. 'Does she laugh?'

'I-Yes, she laughs. I can feel it . . .'

Dreamer lifted back the hide wrap from the wounded leg and sc.r.a.ped away the sphagnum moss she had applied that morning, now a b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.s. The flesh around the wound was black, greenish in places. Away from the wound itself the leg was swollen from hip to ankle, the skin a bruised purple.

Dreamer went to work cleaning the wound, with a bit of cloth dipped in the hot water.

She remembered how, when she had been small, younger than Reacher now, there had been a hunter with a wound like this; he had been alone in the forest for days. The priest, grim-faced, hadn't tried to treat the wound at all. He had made the women hold the hunter down, and he had used a special long saw, a deer s.h.i.+nbone studded with many tiny flint blades, to cut away the leg altogether, from a little below the hip. Would that save Reacher's life? Could Dreamer, alone, make such a cut - and how would she treat the wound afterwards?

Reacher was sleeping again. Her breathing was scratchy and shallow, and a thin sheen of sweat stood on her brow.

Dreamer slept lightly, as always.

Once she heard something come by the shelter. A deep rumble, a heavy tread, a brush against the shelter as if a huge man had walked by. Perhaps it was a bear. It did not return, and she slept again, fitfully.

When the dawn light poked through the gaps in the shelter roof, without disturbing Reacher, she clambered out to make water. She always tried to do this out of sight of Reacher so the girl wouldn't see the blood in her p.i.s.s.

It was a bright morning, with a bit of warmth already in the low sun. There was a slight rise, only a few paces further on; she vaguely remembered it from the night before. She walked to the ridge and climbed it, the long gra.s.s sweeping over her bare legs.

And the country opened up before her, to reveal a lake, wider and deeper than any she had ever seen in her life, glittering blue water that reached the horizon and spanned the world from north to south. She had gone as far east as she could; there was nowhere left for her to walk.

13.

It was the middle of the day before Heni returned from his latest walk down this strange sh.o.r.e to visit the Hairy Folk.

Kirike, sitting by their upturned boat, saw him coming from the south, walking along the s.h.i.+ngle just above the tidal wrack. Heni was carrying his boots slung around his neck, and his big bare feet made the stones crunch. In one hand he carried a folded skin, heavy with gifts from the Hairy Folk. He looked dark and solid in the brightness of the day, the light of the sea.

Kirike had kept the fire going with logs from the dense pine forest just above the beach. Now he threw on a couple more of the big clams that were so common here. He had a little bowl of mashed acorn, gathered from the oak groves further south; he sprinkled some of this on the flesh of the opening clams for flavouring. The clams were huge oceanic beasts like nothing at home. He was collecting the sh.e.l.ls, a heap of them on a string to take home, to make Ana and Zesi marvel.

Heni rolled up, panting hard, and dumped his pack by the fire. He stripped off his coat, cut from the fur of a bear. The lighter skin tunic he wore underneath was soaked with sweat.

'Urgh! By the moon's s.h.i.+ning b.u.t.tocks you stink,' Kirike protested.

'There's heat in that sun. It will be a hot summer, I tell you. At least it will be here, wherever we are.' Heni threw himself down. He gulped fresh water from a skin, took a sh.e.l.l and scooped up a big mouthful of clam flesh.

Heni was Kirike's cousin, a little older than Kirike at thirty-four. His head was a ma.s.s of thick black hair and beard, and his nose was misshapen from multiple breaks - he was an enthusiastic fighter but not an effective one. They had grown up together, playing and mock-hunting on the beaches of Etxelur. At first Heni had been the leader, the guide, at times the bully who forced Kirike to learn fast. As Kirike had grown he had eventually overtaken Heni in maturity, and now Kirike, as Giver, relied on Heni as his closest ally. Kirike couldn't pick a better companion to have got lost at sea with. But today he did stink, and Kirike pulled a face.

Heni grunted and took another oyster. 'Well, you'd be rank if you had to sit through another blubber feast with those Hairy Folk.' You always had to eat with the strange dark hunters down the beach before they'd consider a trade. 'Mind you, the turtle soup was good, in those big upturned sh.e.l.ls.' He winked at Kirike. 'And that little woman with the big a.r.s.e caught my eye again.'

'Oh, yes?'

'This time she submitted to a little tenderness from old Heni. We snuck off into one of those funny little shacks they have.' Houses made of skin stretched over the ribs of some huge sea beast. 'We didn't get to threading the spear through the shaft-straightener, if you know what I mean, but-'

'You sure which hole was which under all that hair? You sure it's even a woman? I'll swear she's got a better beard than I have.'

'Yes, but you've got bigger t.i.ts as well. She's not that hairy. They just wear it long, that's all. Gives you something to grip onto.' Heni lumbered to his feet, stood over their boat, rummaged in his leggings, and with a sigh of satisfaction p.i.s.sed over the skin of the hull. When he was done he lifted the boat by its prow so that his urine ran in streaks. The boat was a frame of wood and stretched skin. You could clearly see where they had patched it during the winter months here on this beach, with new expanses of deer hide, sc.r.a.ped and soaked in their own p.i.s.s. 'Look at that,' Heni said. 'Not a leak.' He eyed Kirike. 'So if the boat's ready . . . time to go home? You've been saying all winter that you'd try to be back for the Giving.'

Kirike looked out to sea. As always when they spoke of going home he felt a deep dread stealing over him. 'Maybe a few more days,' he said. 'Collect a bit more meat. Work on the boat some more while we've got the chance. Put some more flesh on our bones before we face the ice again . . .'

'There's no reason not to leave now,' Heni said bluntly. 'Look. I understand. Or I think I do. Remember, it was me who went out in the boat with you in those first days after Sabet died.'

Sabet, Kirike's wife, had died as she laboured to give birth to a dead baby the previous summer. The baby wasn't expected; he had thought that Sabet had put the dangers of childbirth behind her years before, when Zesi and Ana were born, and they were safe. The shock, the sudden end of his long marriage, had broken his heart.

'You weren't much use then, I'll tell you that,' Heni said.

'I know. But I didn't want to be anywhere but in the boat. All those people, the women, Sabet's sister, her mother, the girls . . . If I thought I could have got by in the boat without you I would have done.'

'Well, I was there. And I was there when that storm pushed us west. That gave you an excuse to stay out for a few more days, didn't it?'

'I couldn't help the storm.'

'No. But then you said we had to sail north.'

The storm had caused them two days and nights of non-stop bailing: no paddling, no sleeping, no eating, you p.i.s.sed where you sat and drank and ate one-handed, and with the other hand you bailed. When the storm had blown over they had no idea where they were. They were out of water, had lost their food, their catch and their fis.h.i.+ng gear, and the boat leaked in a dozen places. It was obvious they'd been driven west, for that was the way the storm had blown them. South: that was the way to go. If they'd headed south they would have hit the sh.o.r.e of Northland, or maybe somewhere on the Albia coast. Then, even if they didn't recognise where they were, they could rest up, fix the boat, and sh.o.r.e-hop east until they reached home.

Instead Kirike had insisted they sail north. 'We went over it and over it,' he said now. 'I just had this feeling we were closer to land to the north than the south.'

'Pig scut.'

'I thought I saw a gull flying that way.'

'Pig scut! There was no gull, except maybe in your head. But I let you talk me into it.'

'We found land, didn't we?'

So they had, a cold sh.o.r.e littered with strange black rocks, where the ice had almost come down to the sea. There had been no people there. No wood either, no trees growing, though they found some driftwood on the strand. But there were seals who had evidently never seen people, for each of them was trusting and friendly right up until the moment the club, delivered with respect, hit the back of its head. They had rested up in a shelter built of snow blocks, ate the seals' flesh, fixed the boat as best they could with sealskin and caulked it with the animals' fat, and then paddled off.

And they headed west, not east.

'The current ran that way.'

'Some of the time.'

'We might have found land. People to trade with.'

'We found ice! We slept on floating ice, and fished through holes in the ice. My p.i.s.s turned to ice.'

'n.o.body ever went so far west before! We were strong, we were healthy. Who could have known what we'd find?'

'All we found was ice . . .'

Over weeks of westward sailing, they had hopped from ice floe to ice floe across the roof of the world. Then the land curved south, and they had pa.s.sed the mouth of a wide and deep river estuary, ice-bound in the winter. At last they had settled on this sh.o.r.e with the big clams.

Kirike said, 'Maybe this is Albia, but if it is it's like no bit of Albia I ever heard of, even from the traders. If they had clams like these we'd have known about it.'

'We're nowhere,' Heni said. 'A land with no name on the a.r.s.e of the world. Where the funny-looking people don't speak a shred even of the traders' tongue. Well, we have to go home some time. If we can make it back. And what about Zesi? What about Ana? Your daughters don't know if you're dead or alive - or me, come to that.'

Kirike blurted, 'Every time I see them I will think of Sabet.'

Heni nodded gravely. 'Yes. That is true. But do you think your daughters won't be missing their mother too?'

'Sun and moon, it's like talking to a priest.'

'So are we going home?'

'All right! Tonight we'll turn the boat over. In the morning, as soon as it's stocked, if it's not actually storming-'

'Well, about time.'

'So what did you get from the Hairy Folk? Apart from a t.i.t-grab from your bearded lover.'

Heni opened up his pack, to reveal bone and polished stone. 'I traded our last bits of obsidian for this stuff.' He pulled out a fine slate knife. 'Look at the edge on that.'

Kirike picked up an awl made from what felt like a tooth. 'I wonder what animal this came from.'

'They told me. We don't have a name for it. Like a big fat seal, with long teeth that stick down.' He mimed with two pointing fingers. 'And look at this harpoon. See the toggle? Look, you pa.s.s a rope through here, it runs out when you throw the spear, and then you can just pull the weapon back.'

Kirike rummaged through the gifts. 'But no food. No dried meat, none of those acorn biscuits they make-'

'Who needs food? Kirike, it's spring, we'll be sitting on an ocean full of fish.' The tooth harpoon was on a loop of cord; he slipped it around his neck. 'Imagine the show we'll make when we paddle into Etxelur with this lot!'

But Kirike, looking over Heni's shoulder, was distracted. To the north, beyond the sandstone bluff that stuck out to sea at the end of this bay, a thread of smoke rose. He stood up. 'Fire.'

'What?' Heni turned to see. 'That's not the Hairy Folk. They're down south, the band we've been trading with anyhow. '

'Then who?'

'I don't know. Makes no difference. Not if we're leaving tomorrow, or the day after.'

'Unless they jump us in the night, burn the boat and steal our stuff.'

Heni frowned. 'Another distraction, Kirike?'

Kirike grinned. 'Call it a precaution. Let's go see.'

Heni grumbled, but he had to give in. They packed Heni's booty and their other gear under the boat, and they each slid a knife of good Etxelur flint into their tunics.

Then Heni pulled on his boots, and they walked north along the beach towards the bluff.

14.

'In the beginning the father spirit gave birth to mother earth and father sky. A mud diver made the world from the body of the mother, and set it on the back of a turtle. But another diver dug the anti-world, a wolf thing, out of the body of the father. The father, disgusted, flung the wolf thing away into the sky . . .'

Dreamer lay back against the strange rock panel she had found at the head of the beach, with loops and lines carved into it, an oddly comforting design, brisk and complete. She had banked up the fire early today. Moon Reacher was very cold, and she hadn't stirred, even when Ice Dreamer had poured fresh water from the spring into her mouth, and doused her wound with salt water from the great eastern lake of brine, trying to drown the squirming maggots. Reacher had been just the same yesterday, the face like snow, the purple, bruised lips, the cold limbs. Walking had been impossible for days.

Dreamer cradled Reacher in her arms over her own swollen belly, the two of them, the last of the True People, on the beach before this strange poisonous lake, and she told Reacher the story of the world.

'In those days the world was rich and teemed with game. People crawled out of the sea to populate the land. The People hunted and grew wise and lived long. Even when they died they were born again into this world, for this was the most perfect world there could be. Their most powerful totems were the mammoth, which was like a hairy boulder walking the earth, and the horse, which was a swift runner.

'But then the Sky Wolf, jealous of his banishment from the earth, decided to smash the world.

'When the clouds and frost and the ash had cleared, the great animals had gone, and nothing stirred but stunted creatures barely worthy of the hunt. There was only a handful of True People left, but the earth swarmed with a new race of sub-men who evolved from the cowardly things that burrowed in the ground.

'Now the True People still make their fluted blades, but there is nothing left to hunt. Even when we die we can't return to the hunting ground of the past. The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, the anti-world. Even our totems are dead . . .'

She thought she heard Reacher murmur. She held her closer, looking into her hooded eyes. 'You must listen,' she said. 'Listen to the story. For you, Reacher, must tell it to me when I am in labour, and you, child in my womb, must speak it over my bed as I lie dying, for there is n.o.body else . . .'

Two men were watching her.