Stone Spring (35 page)

‘Not me, by the little mother’s hairy left tit.’

Zesi swung around at the gruff, familiar voice. It was Heni, striding towards her from his beached boat. He bore a big basket of shellfish he’d been using for bait.

‘Oh, Heni—’ She ran to him, and he dropped his basket and enfolded her. He was a squat man but powerful, and he smelled of fish and salt and sweat, of the sea. He was the nearest to her father she would ever see again. Yet even now the tears would not come.

Stroking her hair, he murmured, ‘I was with him, you know. Kirike. On the day he died. We were out at sea. I was a coward. I wanted to paddle away from shore, where we would be safe. He wanted to come home, to be with his family. We fought. He jumped over the side and tried to swim in. I—There was nothing I could do to stop him. You know your father. We found his body. He’s on the middens if you want to see him. I was a coward,’ he said, desolate.

‘You’re alive,’ the priest said grimly. ‘You made the right choice. Kirike was a brave man, a very brave man. But sometimes it takes more courage to do nothing.’

Heni seemed to notice the priest for the first time. ‘You! You poppy-squeezing faker.’ To Zeni’s amazement Heni raised a fist.

Matu immediately got between the two men, and Novu wrapped an arm across Heni’s chest, pulling him away. ‘No more,’ Novu said, pointing at Arga, who was starting to cry. ‘We’ve had enough upset without that.’

Heni made a visible effort to calm down. ‘All right, I won’t do anything stupid. But you, priest, you let us down. Where were you when the Great Sea came? Where were you when we tended the sick? Where were you when we gathered up the dead? Where were you when poor Ana tried to find words to say over the bodies, all those bodies, up on the holy middens? Where were you? ’

‘It’s not his fault,’ Zesi snapped. ‘He didn’t cause the Great Sea. He couldn’t have stopped it—’

‘It’s all right, Zesi,’ Jurgi said. ‘He’s right. I’m the priest. I wasn’t here, at the one time in my whole life, probably, I was needed the most. He’s right to blame me, for I wasn’t here to help him blame the gods.’ He glanced at the middens. ‘And I wasn’t here to spare Ana. I will always regret that.’

‘Oh, I survived.’

Ana was walking up from the sea. Like the others she looked too thin to Zesi, her clothes filthy with fish blood and crusted with salt, her hair tied back from a sweat-streaked forehead. Her face was expressionless. ‘Hello, Zesi.’

‘Oh, Ana—’ Zesi wrapped her sister in her arms. She felt Ana respond, putting her own arms behind Zesi’s back, but stiffly. She stepped back and faced Ana, the two sisters dry-eyed. ‘Come. Let’s walk.’

They set off together along the beach.

‘You survived Albia, then,’ Ana said.

‘Only just . . . It’s not the time to tell you about that. One thing you should know, though.’

‘What?’

‘I’m pregnant.’

That made Ana stop. ‘The father is Shade?’

‘Yes.’

Ana shrugged, and walked on, slowly. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever see Shade again, or the Root.’

‘The Root’s dead. It got complicated. Even more complicated.’

Ana said gravely, ‘We need babies. We are few, now. Less than half left alive. There are snailheads here. They help. But we will have to work hard to live, Zesi. Work for the rest of our lives.’

Unless, Zesi thought dismally, we leave this desperate, half-drowned place and go south to the rich lands beyond this layer of white death, beyond the reach of another Great Sea, lands she’d walked through only days ago. She took a breath. ‘Heni told me about father.’

Ana nodded. ‘We have his body. It’s on the midden still. Even the gulls are few this autumn, and slow in their work.’

‘I’ll say goodbye to him—’

‘Sometimes I think it’s because of me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember that night, the night of my blood tide, in the midwinter? When the owl became my Other. Since then Sunta died and Gall and father, and Rute and Jaku and so many others—’

‘No. Hush.’

‘I am the owl. I am death.’

It was alarming to hear her say such things; she was only fifteen years old. Zesi stopped walking and hugged her again. ‘You’re my kid sister,’ she said, trying to tease her gently. ‘What makes you think you’re so important, that the mothers should send down a Great Sea to batter us all?’ But that seemed to be the wrong thing to say. ‘Look, things are never going to be as they were. But I’m home now, and I’ll look after you.’

Still Ana didn’t respond. Zesi became aware that the others, following at a distance, were watching them, Novu and Matu and Arga and even Heni. No, they weren’t watching them. They were watching Ana, waiting for her to speak.

Ana turned away from Zesi and glanced at the racing sky. ‘The storm’s coming,’ she said. ‘Let’s get these boats above the tide line. Novu, you’d better see if the causeway is still safe to cross. If not we’ll have to make shelter here . . .’

To Zesi’s blank astonishment, the people hurried to follow Ana’s orders.

50

They made it back across the causeway, but the storm closed in before dark.

Zesi was welcomed into the rough hut that had been built on the site of their old house, the house she had grown up in with Ana and their parents and grandparents. Now there were only Ana and Arga and Zesi. The house, such as it was, was cramped, and as the wind picked up it creaked noisily, and rainwater leaked through the makeshift roof. It wasn’t cold, at least; there was no need to try to build a fire in the rough hearth.

After eating some dried fish Ana, clearly exhausted, curled up on a pallet, her face to the wall, having said little to Zesi.

Zesi had thought Arga at least might be more curious. In her head during the long walk home she had rehearsed the kind of stories she might tell Arga about Pretani - exciting anecdotes for a seven-year-old, rather than the full truth of death and vengeance and twisted honour. But to Zesi’s disappointment all Arga wanted to do was play fingerbones, a complicated game where you moved knuckle bones and fancy shells around a board scraped in the dirt. Arga had lost her parents, and most of her playmates of her own age; this was all she wanted. So, by the light of a lamp of whale oil in a stone bowl, Zesi played one game after another, almost always getting beaten.

At least playing a kid’s game was better than facing the dark thoughts swirling around in her own head. It was the end of a long day when she had discovered her home was smashed and her father dead, along with around half of all the people she had ever known. And yet she found her thoughts turning to Ana, and the way everybody had deferred to her, out on the beach. Even Heni! Zesi had always been the leader, the strong one, the bright exciting one who everybody applauded. Now she had come back from a near-lethal adventure - she had come back with a baby - and nobody wanted to know, and it was her skinny, dull kid sister who got all the attention and respect.

Was she jealous? Was she so mean, so shallow, that she was jealous of Ana, even on such a terrible night - the night she had learned they had lost their father? She didn’t want to feel like this. She tried not to hate Ana for making her feel this way. Tried not to hate herself for these unwelcome emotions.

The door flap was pushed back, letting in the wind and a shower of raindrops. It was Matu. ‘Ana, I’m sorry.’ He didn’t even look at Zesi.

Ana rolled on her back, instantly awake. ‘What is it?’

‘The Milk. The storm has caused a surge on the river. It’s looking like it’s going to flood again. Some of us are heading for the higher ground.’

‘I’ll come.’ Ana rolled out of bed, pulled on boots and a skin cloak, and pushed out of the hut. Arga followed.

Zesi was left sitting by the abandoned game. She had been utterly ignored in the whole exchange. But water was soaking in under the bottom of the walls, and pooling on the floor, in the shallow dip of the hearth. She grabbed her cloak and pushed her way out of the shelter.

The storm was wild, the wind howling, and the rain came at you flat and hard. Zesi was soaked in an instant. The ground was pooled with water, and she could hear the rush of the river. It was still not yet dark, with light coming from the horizon, a deep twilight that rendered everything blue or black or grey.

Novu was here, holding onto Ice Dreamer who had her baby in a sling before her, and Heni, the priest, a number of others. Arga started crying over her acorn pit, which was brimming with water, ruined.

Zesi saw terror in the eyes of the survivors of the Great Sea, of which this storm must be a terrible reminder.

‘We should go,’ Matu shouted. He had his family clutched close to him, his sons, his wife. He pointed south. ‘If we climb up into the hills, we’ll get wet but—’

‘No,’ Ana said.

‘What?’

‘We won’t run any more.’ She glanced around, and Zesi saw a cold determination in that young, pinched face. ‘Matu, make sure your children are safe. Dreamer, take your baby. Zesi, maybe you and Arga should go. The rest of you—’

‘We can’t defy the river,’ the priest shouted.

‘But we can,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You go if you want to, priest. The rest of you, help me.’ And she got to her knees and began to scrape at the muddy ground, making a mound. ‘Get the shovels. We can’t stop the river flood. But we can rise up above it.’

The others stood frozen, for a single heartbeat.

Then Matu pushed his wife away. ‘Go, take the boys. Hurry, hurry. I’ll be fine . . .’

Novu ran off, and quickly returned with shovels, shoulder-blades of deer and cattle strapped to stout poles. Matu took a shovel, and so did the priest. Soon there were six, eight, ten of them, all digging as Zesi watched. Some of the shovels were meant for clearing snow in the winter, but they did a good enough job in the sticky mud.

Soon a mound began to rise up above the sodden ground. Still the storm lashed down, and now water surged from the broken banks of the river. Even as the water ponded around them the diggers pushed their blades into the mud and heaped it up.

There was something about the whole situation that Zesi couldn’t bear - Ana’s strange doggedness in the face of the danger of the rising river, the way the others followed her unflinchingly. Even the priest, she saw, even the priest, who was as new to this as she was.

She pushed her way through to Ana. ‘This is mad. You’ll get somebody drowned.’

Ana didn’t look up. ‘You weren’t here when the Great Sea came. I was. Dig, or go. Look after Arga.’

Zesi hesitated, torn. Arga had gone with Matu’s family. Soaked to the skin, her hair flattened against her skull, Zesi ran after her.

When she returned in the morning, coming down from the low hills to the south of the settlement, Zesi found a low dome of black, glistening earth, and a dozen diggers sitting exhausted on top of it. The river had subsided, but water pooled around the mound. The storm had long blown out, and the sun had broken through, and the diggers smiled up into its light, filthy and soaked but safely above the water.

If Ana saw Zesi coming, she showed no signs of it. ‘This is the future,’ she said gravely. She held her own shovel over her head like a hunter’s spear. ‘The future.’

51

The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice.

Heni lifted the door flap and brought Arga into Ana’s house, his arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. Arga had been on a great adventure. Wrapped in a blanket of thick aurochs skin and with goose fat smeared on her bare arms, she looked as if she had been very, very cold; but she was beaming, that big moon smile.

Lightning, asleep by the fire, stirred and grumbled at the draught. When he saw Arga his tail gave a fluttering wag, and then he subsided into sleep once again.

Through the door flap Ana glimpsed the day, and was surprised to see how low the light was already. But it was only a few days from midwinter. She had sat in here all day with Zesi and Novu and Ice Dreamer and her baby, talking by the smoky light of the whale oil lamps, with others coming and going with bits of business. These deep-winter days without sunlight, brief and dim, felt like they were no days at all.

‘Come sit with me, by the fire.’ She made a space for Arga between herself and Ice Dreamer, and got a dry cloth and began to rub Arga’s wet hair.

‘And shut that flap, curse your bones, old man,’ Zesi snapped. ‘You’re letting all the heat out.’ Zesi, big with her child now, was grumpy, restless, frustrated by the way her pregnancy slowed her down, habitually ill-tempered.

‘All right, all right.’ Heni shuffled in, huge in the cramped house, and he shucked off his big fur jacket, wet and smelling of sea salt. ‘Is that Kirike’s fish stew?’

‘Here.’ Novu handed Heni a wooden bowl of the stew, which had been simmering for days, with extra fish, stock, roots, nuts, oil and spices steadily added until the flavour became deep and enriching. It had been Kirike’s favourite winter dish; he had been able to keep a single pot going for days.

‘Ah.’ Heni raised the bowl and drank deeply of the stock, and he belched, rubbing his belly. ‘That’s going to get me warm through.’ He glanced at the chunks of fish in his bowl. ‘There were more bodies down on the beach.’

Ana asked. ‘Anybody you recognised?’

‘One was a snailhead, I think. You could only tell from the funny shape of the skull. Face chewed off. Other kinds of people I didn’t know at all. One had a necklace of tiny skulls, otters maybe. Chucked it back in the sea.’ Heni inspected a lump of cod. ‘But we have to eat.’

Ana nodded. They had been through these arguments. The folk of Etxelur had become uncomfortable eating the fish which had so evidently been feeding on the bodies in the ocean. But they had lost all their summer store to the Great Sea, and the autumn hunts had been disastrous on the shattered, salt-poisoned land. This autumn and winter, it was only the sea that kept them alive - the murderous sea turned provider. ‘We have to eat.’ She deliberately scooped up a cup of the broth, gathering bits of fish, and took a mouthful, chewing deliberately, though she was not hungry. ‘With respect.’

Heni put the cod in his mouth and chewed carefully. ‘With respect.’