Stone Spring (18 page)

‘Yes. Let the little mother of the sea embrace her, and her baby. It’s out of your hands now.’

‘Not yet.’ He felt his heart hammer. He stripped off his tunic so he was bare from the waist up. ‘Give me my best blade, Heni. The big one of the old Etxelur flint. Get an ember from the fire. And the sleeping moss.’

Heni hesitated for a long moment. Then he began to unpack the fold with their few remaining medicines, put together for them by Jurgi the priest before they left Etxelur, for what should have been a few days’ fishing and had become a journey of months.

The sleeping moss had been soaked in sap taken from a poppy’s seed pod. Kirike lifted Dreamer’s chin to tip her head back.

‘Just a drip in each nostril,’ Heni said. ‘Too little, it won’t take the pain away. Too much and it will poison her—’

‘I know! Shut up, man.’ Carefully Kirike squeezed the moss over her nose, delivering the droplets. Then he held his hand over her mouth, forcing her to breathe through her nose. She shifted, stirred, moaned.

He leaned over, pushed his arms out through the tent’s flap and dunked his hands in cold sea water. This part he was sure of; the priests at home always used salt water to clean their hands.

He came back into the tent. He lifted Dreamer’s tunic up over her breasts, and shifted around until he was kneeling on the woman’s shoulders, pinning her. ‘You hold her ankles.’

‘We need more people. You always have a whole pack of helpers.’

‘We’ll have to make do.’ Sweat was running into his eyes. He took his big, familiar blade in his right hand.

‘This is about Sabet,’ Heni said abruptly.

Kirike halted, his knife poised. ‘What about Sabet?’

‘You couldn’t save her. The priest couldn’t; nobody could. We’re here on the wrong side of the ocean because of Sabet. Now you do this because of Sabet. Even if you save this woman it won’t help Sabet, or your baby. And if you kill her—’

‘Shut up!’ He wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Just hold her.’

Heni grunted, but held the woman’s ankles.

Kirike muttered a prayer to his Other, the clever pine marten. He hefted his blade again, and, trying to be as sure and confident as if he were butchering a seal, he pushed his blade into her flesh, just above the pubic hair, and rapidly made a slit up to her navel. He knew it had to be deep enough to sever the skin, muscle and womb wall, yet he must not harm the baby.

Amniotic fluid spilled, its stink strong, and Dreamer stirred in her drugged sleep. Where the bleeding was heaviest Heni touched the spot with a glowing ember, held between two splinters of seal bone.

‘Now the baby,’ Kirike said. ‘Let’s be quick.’

Heni put down the ember, hooked his fingers into the wound, and pulled the stomach walls apart. Kirike quickly widened the cut in the womb and dug out the child. He cupped it in his hand, a greasy creature with shut, swollen eyes that seemed barely human. With a swipe of Etxelur flint he cut the cord and, keeping one hand inside the abdominal wall so it wouldn’t spring back, handed the baby to Heni.

Heni cradled the child, tied off its cord with a bit of twine, and wrapped it in skin cleansed in sea water. Now they were in the midst of the operation they worked together quickly and well, as Kirike had known they would.

But Kirike’s job was not over; even if the baby survived the mother was yet to be saved. In his mind’s eye he imagined what the priests had done, how they had worked to save Sabet. He had to fix the womb. Reaching in he scooped out clots, and felt for the placenta. It was extraordinary to look down and see his own bloody hand thrust into the belly of this woman, who he had never met a month ago, whose very language he couldn’t speak.

He removed the placenta and dumped it in a bowl, but a loop of intestine escaped through the wound. ‘Help me . . .’ Heni, holding the child, reached over with one hand and pushed the pink-grey worm back into the hole. Kirike kept pressing the womb, which he knew had to be held firmly as it contracted. Had he compressed it enough? He had no idea.

Dreamer stirred again.

‘We have to turn her over to drain her. Hold the wound . . .’

Heni put the baby down and grabbed hold of Dreamer’s flesh at either end of the wound, by her navel and her crotch. He kept hold as Kirike pushed the woman over on her side, and the fluid in her abdominal cavity drained out. Then they rolled her back.

‘Now the pins . . .’ These were splinters of bone that he pushed into the flesh to either side of the wound. He looped thread around each pair of pins, and pulled them tight. Thus the wound was closed, one stitch at a time. Heni held the ends of the wound firmly until the stitching was done. Then Heni smeared a poultice over the wound, made of herbs given them by Jurgi the priest.

When it was done Kirike gently lifted Dreamer up at the shoulders, and she moaned again. Heni got a bandage of sealskin under her lower back, and pulled it around her body.

Kirike thrust his head out of the shelter. He tipped the placenta out of the bowl into the sea, and let his hands trail in the water until they were clean. Then he stopped, breathing in, relishing the air’s freshness after the stink of blood. He was shuddering, but not from the cold, though it was a clear starlit night. He started weeping, whether for Dreamer, the baby, Sabet, himself, even Heni, he didn’t know. He touched his face and felt the tears frosting.

And he saw pale rings of light in the water, two of them, concentric around the boat.

He reached down and dangled his fingers. The disturbed water glowed, purple, orange, yellow and grey-white. He knew that if he looked closely enough he would see the myriad living things in every droplet, burning up their little lives for the sake of this gentle light. Looking away from the boat he saw sleek, pale bodies swimming around and around the boat, stirring up the water and making it glow in the inner ring. And a fin, more ominous, circled in the outer ring.

Sharks would be drawn to Dreamer’s blood, the placenta, even to the scent of it from the woman and baby inside the boat. But the dolphins in the inner ring were circling the boat, keeping the sharks away. He muttered a silent prayer, thanking the dolphins.

When he ducked back inside, Dreamer was already conscious, her eyes huge, and she held the scrap of baby to her breast.

Heni was grinning as if he had fathered it himself. ‘I told you we could do it!’

23

The Year of the Great Sea: Summer Solstice.

A sound like a stampede, or like thunder, came rolling across the ocean from the north.

In her house Ana looked up, distracted from her work on the paint. Lightning had been sleeping on one of Zesi’s old skins. He opened his eyes and lifted his ears. It was probably nothing, probably just a storm, just weather. Ana murmured to soothe the dog. Lightning closed his eyes, soon asleep again.

Ana tried to concentrate on what she was doing. Sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, she had lumps of red and yellow ochre, brought by a trader from mines far away in Gaira. She ground these lumps against a sandstone block, making piles of powder that she collected on the scapula of a deer. She also had charcoal powder set aside, and a pot of grease from deer fat, and another of pig’s urine. She mixed these ingredients together in different proportions to make paints in shades of red, orange, yellow, that she ladled carefully into the hollows of bird bones. On the day of the midsummer Giving the priest would use these to mark faces and bodies, and to stain the tattoos of the hunters and racers and swimmers and wrestlers.

It was slow and careful work, and she had to get on with it. The solstice, only days away, wouldn’t wait for her.

It was also quite a responsibility. In years past she’d helped her mother prepare the paint, and before that her grandmother, Mama Sunta, but now the job was hers alone. It was delicate work, you could easily waste a whole batch of the precious ochre, and getting the colours just right was important for the priest’s ceremonies.

Thunder, though. Odd. Distracted, she put down the ochre lumps.

She was alone in the house, and had the door flap shut against draughts, though bright midsummer daylight seeped around its loosely fixed seams. The house was tidy, orderly. Neither of the Pretani boys had come back from the disastrous summer camp, Gall having run off after the murder of the snailhead, and Shade having headed home. Ana and Zesi had thrown out their abandoned gear, their skins and their weapons and their piss-pots, and they had practically taken the house apart to get rid of the boys’ male stink. Yet the house wasn’t the way it had been before, in the old days before their mother had died and their father disappeared. It had become a lifeless place, where the tension between the sisters crackled . . .

Summer storms were unusual. Earlier the day had been bright and clear, the sky the colour of eggshells. Not a stormy day at all.

She heard a commotion outside, raised voices. Glad of the excuse, she stood up. Lightning lifted his head. ‘You stay,’ she said. ‘Good boy.’

She pushed her way out of the house. As she emerged, blinking in the bright noon light, she saw people streaming over the bank of dunes towards the Seven Houses. Nobody was smiling.

Arga dashed up to her. ‘Ana, I came to tell you!’

‘What is it - a storm?’

‘No, silly. It’s Shade. He’s back! The Pretani are back!’

And Ana understood the grim expressions on the faces of the adults. She hurried after the crowd.

Here they came - she counted - a dozen Pretani, clambering over the dunes. All male as far as she could see, all big men, they wore heavy brown cloaks and headdresses and thick fur boots; they must be hot on this summer day. Some of them were beating drums, wooden bowls over which fine hide was stretched, their leather-topped sticks making a cacophonous, threatening noise. But that wasn’t the thunder she had heard earlier, she was sure.

‘Moon and sun,’ muttered Zesi, who came to stand beside Ana. ‘That’s Shade.’ She pointed at one of the men in the lead.

‘You can tell from this distance? Well, I suppose you’d know. You saw more of him than me—’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘And the big man with him—’

‘His father, I guess. The Root. The big man of the Pretani.’

Now Ana looked more closely, she saw how the Root looked more like Gall than his younger son, the same stocky build, the same blunt face. ‘Better keep Lightning tied up, then. We don’t want to scare them to death.’

Zesi almost smiled. It had been a long time since either of them had laughed at the other’s jokes.

‘What’s the Root doing here? He hasn’t attended a Giving for years.’ So long ago Ana could not remember it; he had always sent brothers, sons, hunters.

‘Well, it might be to do with that business about Gall,’ Zesi said, sarcastic. She was tense, distracted; she pushed loose red hair from her eyes. ‘Did you hear that thunder?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not a cloud on the horizon. Strange storms. The Pretani arriving. It’s an ominous day.’

The Pretani reached the houses. To a gesture from the Root the drumming stopped abruptly, and the hunters stood still as tree trunks.

The people of Etxelur, in a loose knot, stood facing them, the wide-eyed children restless. The Root didn’t even look at them. His headdress was the almost intact head of a huge bull, lacking only its lower jaw, with twisting horns and black stones pressed into its eye sockets. The moment stretched. Arga giggled nervously. The Pretani’s sudden silence and stillness was frightening, Ana thought. As it was meant to be.

From the beach floated the sounds of laughter, of people working, the calls of gulls. Evidently the Pretani weren’t going to speak first.

Zesi stepped forward. ‘Shade. It is good to see you—’

The Root spoke, his voice loud, used to command. In his own language he snapped, ‘Speak to me, not him. And use the heroes’ tongue. You know how to speak, don’t you, woman?’

‘She does.’ Jurgi, the priest, came up now, panting; he must have run from the beach. ‘As do I.’ He bowed. ‘You are welcome, Root. It is many years since you graced the Giving in person—’

The Root sniffed the sea air, pawing at the sandy ground like a bull. ‘It’s only tradition that brings us back at all, priest. You know that. Tradition that dates back to the days when Etxelur was great, and everybody came here, from across Albia and Gaira as well as all Northland. A thread of tradition that’s fraying and close to breaking altogether, if you ask me. But this year, after I sent my sons into your country, I find one boy has gone rogue, and the other addled. All because of trouble with women, I hear - if you can call these scrawny bitches women at all.’

Ana grabbed Zesi’s arm; she felt her sister’s muscles bunch.

Jurgi spoke quickly. ‘Whatever the reason, we’re honoured you’re here. Please.’ He gestured at the Seven Houses. ‘If you would like to rest, to eat or drink—’

‘If I need a shit I won’t be asking your permission, priest.’

Jurgi said smoothly, ‘Then come see what we’re working on.’ He led them away from the houses. ‘You understand the Giving will be held on Flint Island as usual, on the north shore, facing the sea. But we’re busy preparing all over Etxelur. Josu, show us what you’re doing.’

The stoneworker, squatting over his hearth in the lee of the dunes, had been concentrating on preparing his flints. Now, startled as the Pretani approached, he tried to get up, and he almost fell over, betrayed by his damaged leg. ‘Sun and moon—’

‘It’s all right,’ the priest said. ‘Your flints. Can you tell us what you’re doing? Use the heroes’ tongue.’

Josu stumbled over his words. He showed the Pretani how he worked. In the centre of the hearth, with charcoal burning sullenly, he had dug out a sand bath. Here he placed lumps of flint, the high-quality stuff mined from Flint Island. Heat, if applied correctly, could change the quality of the stone and make it easier to shape. But you had to keep the heating slow and gradual, and at a temperature that Josu continually checked by sprinkling water on his sand baths. Too rapid a heat shock, for instance if you just threw a lump of flint onto a fire, and it would shatter uselessly . . .