Stone Spring (45 page)

This was why this place was such a valuable resource for Ana and Novu, why they had come here. All these people, all these communities stretching inland as far as anybody had travelled, all connected to each other by the river - and all available as a source of labour to be mined like Etxelur’s own flint lode.

And yet even here there were signs of the long, slow battle being waged between sea and land. The river folk spoke of islands far out in the delta once occupied by their grandparents and now abandoned, drowned by the rising ocean. And in patches along the forest-clad bank, even after sixteen years, you could still see heaps of the pale salty sea-bottom mud that had been hurled far inland by the mindless energies of the Great Sea - the Gods’ Shout.

They arrived at a raft where cages of wicker, weighted with stones, were suspended over the raft’s side, just below the surface of the water. Inside each cage was a body. Bone showed through fish-chewed flesh, pale in the sunlight that dappled through the water. Even when they died, the people of the river were dominated by its tremendous presence; whereas in Etxelur you were laid out to be cleansed by sky, here it was left to the sharp teeth of the waters to strip your bones.

‘I’ll tell you what I heard today,’ Kirike said. ‘There are people here who spend their whole lives on the rafts - they never set foot on the dry land, not once in their lives.’

‘I heard that too,’ came a voice.

It was the dark man they had glimpsed watching them during Ana’s meeting. He walked confidently across a gangway, carrying a bulky pack. Dolphin saw that Qili, Heni’s grandson, was following him, looking faintly embarrassed. The stranger was smiling. Dolphin didn’t smile back.

The man kept talking as he approached, in a fluent, lightly accented Etxelur tongue. ‘In fact, to be a priest you have to be one of the water-dwellers, you can never be sullied by contact with the ground, for they believe that all their gods live in the river and that the land is dead. There have been a few scandals in the past when some roguish priest was found to be slipping ashore for his own purposes - you know what those fellows are like! And they had a crisis after the Great Sea when all their rafts got smashed, and those who survived had to clamber out on the shore.’

Kirike was interested. ‘Ah. And that’s why their priest back there is only fourteen or so.’

‘Yes. The very first boy born safely on the rafts after the Great Sea, and he immediately got that tower of skulls stuck on his unfortunate head. This is a place where a single footprint in the mud can stop you being as a priest! But I suppose we all must look strange, from the outside.’

‘And you look like a Pretani,’ Dolphin said. ‘Yet you speak the Etxelur tongue like a native.’

He just laughed. Tall, solid, heavy, the muscles prominent on his bare arms and legs, his face all but concealed by a thick black beard and two prominent kill scars, he looked out of place among the paler, more delicate river folk. ‘Well, not quite a native, though you’re kind to say so. But which of us is native anyhow? I know about you, Dolphin Gift, whose every drop of blood, like your mother’s, comes from across the western ocean. I’ve travelled all over Albia and Northland and even into Gaira, and I never heard of anybody like that. What an extraordinary thing.’ He turned to Kirike with interest. ‘And you, Kirike. Black hair, solid build. Look at us, we’re like brothers! I’m told you’re half Pretani, and it shows.’

Kirike frowned. ‘How do you know so much about us?’

He shrugged. ‘Here we are at the mouth of the World River, yet everything revolves around faraway Etxelur. Everybody knows you, the names of Ana and her closest people. But you don’t know my name - I apologise. I am Hollow.’ He held out his two hands in the Pretani way of greeting.

Dolphin folded her arms and turned to Qili. ‘Who is this character?’

Qili was clearly embarrassed. ‘He came to the estuary and found me,’ he said in his halting Etxelur tongue. ‘That’s all I know. He knew I went to Etxelur last year, and he asked questions about you—’

‘I only asked Qili to introduce us,’ Hollow said. ‘No harm done, surely.’

‘You were watching us,’ Dolphin said accusingly. ‘You followed us here.’

Kirike protested, ‘Dolphin—’

‘Everybody knows that whenever Pretani are around there’s trouble.’

‘That may have been true in the past. But must the bad feeling last for ever?’ He glanced at Kirike. ‘I’m not here for trouble. I’m here to trade. Pretani folk always came to Etxelur Givings, in the old days, and Etxelur folk came on our wildwood hunts.’

‘Those days are gone,’ Dolphin snapped.

Kirike, more circumspect, asked, ‘So what do you have to trade?’

‘Ah. I thought you would never ask.’ Hollow slipped off his pack, crouched down and unfolded a parcel of skin to expose a straight-edged block of stone: yellow-brown, carefully worked. Hollow stroked its surface. ‘Good Pretani sandstone. See how finely grained it is? Easily worked.’ He rapped it with his knuckle. ‘Yet heavy and hard-wearing. Look, you don’t have to know anything about stone to see its quality. If you have the best flints in the world in Etxelur, we Pretani surely have the best stone. If we can make a trade the bulk of it will be brought to Etxelur by boat, down the rivers and along the coast—’

Dolphin shook her head. ‘Why would we want stone?’

‘For your walls. Your dykes, your channels cut in the ground. Ask your genius from the east - Novu. Ask him about Jericho, where they face their great walls with stone, not bricks or mud. When he sees this stone he will hunger for it, believe me.’

‘So why are you showing us?’

He stood up. ‘Because it’s as you said. There is bad blood between Etxelur folk and Pretani. Those who make the decisions in Etxelur, especially Ana herself, won’t have anything to do with Pretani.’

‘So that’s it,’ Dolphin said. ‘Well, I won’t help you get to Ana. As far as I’m concerned you can shove this stupid stone up your hairy Pretani arse.’

He was unperturbed. ‘That’s disappointing.’ He looked at Kirike again. ‘I did know your father. It would be good to speak of him.’

Kirike blushed. To Dolphin’s disgust, she saw that this blatant appeal to blood ties, from a man who looked so much like him, was swaying Kirike, who had grown up knowing neither of his parents. Kirike said to Dolphin, ‘He’s right about Novu. He often talks about stone buildings in Jericho. And the bad blood between Etxelur and Pretani can’t last for ever. I can’t see what harm it would do, Dolphin. Just to get Ana and Novu to look.’

Dolphin glared at him. ‘Are you mad? Pretani aren’t traders. They are killers who take what they want. You - Hollow - you’ve come here, you’ve learned our language, you’ve found out our names - all for a few boatloads of stone? What is it you really want?’

His vaguely good-humoured expression didn’t falter, though she thought there was a greater lividity to the kill scars on his forehead. He murmured, too softly for the others to hear, ‘Even if there was some grand scheme, I wouldn’t tell you about it, would I? Remember, girl - you’re an outsider. Foreign blood, like your mother.’ He bent to pick up his stone block. ‘Kirike - maybe we could talk about when I could meet Ana?’

Dolphin stormed away, crossing the rafts, making for the dry land. She didn’t bother to check if Kirike was following her.

Qili hurried after her. ‘I’m sorry. He seemed harmless enough - and anyhow I couldn’t get rid of him. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble . . .’

But Dolphin was in no mood to listen.

67

‘What do you mean, we should be having more children?’ Arga was indignant, almost shouting. ‘Since when did you become a little mother, Ana?’

‘Maybe we should calm down,’ said Jurgi, glancing uneasily at the door flap of the stuffy raftborne house.

Ana just glared at Arga, apparently unmoved by her outburst.

It was dark in this house despite the brightness of the day, and they had lit some of the whale oil lamps they had brought from Etxelur; their smoky glow underlit Ana’s face, making her look even older than she was, severe.

It was the day before the Etxelur water council. This was another invention of Ana’s, a meeting she held every quarter around the time of the equinoxes and solstices, as a way of ensuring all the complicated activities in Etxelur were fitting together properly. They might have come all the way to the World River estuary but Ana wasn’t going to let the chance of a council go by. And as she customarily did, Ana had summoned Jurgi, Novu, Ice Dreamer and Arga in advance of the council to see if they could guess the concerns that might be brought up, and to practise their answers. They’d all done this before, and the arguments were typical.

But Jurgi was far from comfortable. They were guests in a house loaned them by estuary folk, on a raft that rode the body of the World River. This wasn’t Ana’s house, from which people kept a respectful distance; anybody might be listening to their arguments. He said now, ‘Let’s keep our voices down at least.’

Novu was sweating heavily, his face slick, irritable. ‘Maybe we should just go and sit out in the open and have done with it. Anything’s better than this stuffiness.’

Ana grunted unsympathetically. ‘I thought you and the priest enjoyed making each other sweat in the dark.’

Novu snapped back, ‘And I am getting sick of the way you speak to us.’

Ice Dreamer smiled. ‘I suspect she’s just jealous of the consolation you two have found together. She is alone, more alone than any of the rest of us.’

‘And you’re alone too,’ Ana shot back, ‘since my father spoiled your plan to crawl into his bed by getting himself killed.’

‘Shut up,’ Arga said. ‘Shut up. I can’t stand your bickering.’ She glared at them, one after another. ‘Didn’t you hear what Ana just said? She wants us to have more babies. Jurgi, you’re still the priest. Can’t you tell her why that’s so wrong?’

‘Yes, tell me, Jurgi.’

He bit back a sharp response. ‘Arga has a point. It may be different in Jericho. But all across Northland, and even in Albia and Gaira, I never heard of any people who didn’t space out their children.’

‘This is the wisdom of the little mothers,’ Arga protested. ‘You can’t have too many children, not too soon, not close together. It’s always been this way. For when the flood comes, or the famine, and you have to run—’

Ice Dreamer said, ‘It is the same in my country.’

Ana said dismissively, ‘Yes, yes. You can only carry one child, the others must be able to run - or die. But times are different now. We of Etxelur don’t have to run anywhere. And in the meantime we lost half our number to the Great Sea, and we haven’t recovered yet, nor will we for a generation or two at this rate. We need more people, more than ever before—’

Arga snapped, ‘More people to build your dykes and reservoirs!’

‘Exactly.’ Ana waved a hand. ‘Look where we are! We have come all this way just to beg the loan of a few lumps of muscle from the river folk. Imagine if every woman in Etxelur had a child, and then another, and another. In fifteen more years we’d have a strong cohort of workers. We could do our own work, fulfil our own dreams—’

‘Your dreams,’ murmured Arga.

‘And we wouldn’t have to use up our precious flint persuading somebody else to do it for us.’

‘They may not accept it,’ said the priest uneasily. ‘The people. They’ve followed you this far, Ana, but—’

‘If you back me up they’ll swallow it,’ she said, sounding uninterested. ‘Just say it’s the will of the mothers. That always works.’

Jurgi felt a spark of anger at her casual insults. ‘Take care, Ana. I am still a priest, your priest, and you should listen to what I say. You don’t see all. You don’t hear all. They come to me sometimes. They complain to me. Argue about whether the mothers really want us to do this, or that. I try to persuade them it’s so. I’m not sure if I always succeed.’

Ana became thoughtful. ‘So, even after all these years of us working together, they still come to you without telling me?’

The priest stiffened. ‘The people’s relationship with the little mothers has existed as long as the world. Long before you or I were ever born.’

‘But the fact is there are still two centres in Etxelur. Two sources of decision-making. Or at least that’s how the people see it, evidently.’ She stared at him. ‘I think I’m going to have to do something about that.’

He felt vaguely alarmed, having no idea what she might mean.

Arga was still angry at Ana. ‘I’m telling you the people won’t stand for it, this business of the babies. If the priest tells them they must, they’ll challenge him. That’s what I think.’

‘She may be right,’ said Ice Dreamer languidly.

Ana thought it over, and nodded. ‘All right. Maybe it’s too early to bring it up at this council. We’ll leave it until the autumn equinox, and give ourselves time to work out how to argue for it. But argue it we will, for I’m convinced this is the only way forward for Etxelur . . . Until next time. Now, Novu, what’s this rubbish I hear about stone from Albia?’

‘It’s far from rubbish,’ Novu said. He shifted stiffly, and from the pile of goods beside him he produced a heavy block of stone, wrapped in skin. Unwrapped, it seemed to glow in the soft, diffuse light of the lamps. ‘Look at this stuff. Now, Ana, yes, it’s Pretani, and I know we have had our problems with them. But Kirike brought me this, and he thinks they are sincere, they really do just want to trade. I think we have to consider it. Just think what we could do with this - our dykes covered in this fine stone rather than my clumsy mud bricks and plaster!’

Arga said, ‘Once again your dreams expand. Think how many more babies we will have to conceive to build everything out of stone!’

But Ana wasn’t listening. She leaned forward and ran her hand over the stone’s smoothly worked surface.

68

Me was prodded awake in the usual way, by a wooden spear shaft in the small of the back.

He sat up. He had barely slept. He was stiff from lying on the dew-soaked grass with the others. The tether was tight around his neck.

Above him the branches of a big spreading oak obscured the grey light of morning. But he was under the tree and not in it, for the grounders would not let the Leafy Boys climb. And this isolated tree stood in a clearing. It was agony for any Leafy Boy to be trapped down on open ground. Even when he started to move and got the stiffness out, the dread would linger.