Stone Spring (9 page)

After half a year of making decisions on behalf of her vanished father, Zesi sometimes felt exhausted - wrung out, chased. But she admitted to herself she was having fun playing this dual role, of man and woman. Sometimes, when a boat was sighted coming in from over the horizon, a flurry of excitement would whirl around the settlements: could it be Kirike returning at last? The look of painful hope on poor Ana’s face on such occasions was distressing. But Zesi was beginning to think her own feelings about her father’s return were much more complicated - and when she felt that way guilt stabbed at her.

She kept her patience as everybody fussed, but the sun was higher than she would have liked before they were ready to go. At last she nodded to Jurgi. The priest stood high on a dune with his bull roarer, a bit of bone on a rope he whirled around his head to make a tremendous screaming noise that had the smaller children running to their mothers and the adults cheering.

And then they were off, with Zesi in the lead and Jurgi walking in his place just behind her, both of them singing the ancient songs of the land ways - and each quietly reminding the other which way to go where the path wasn’t clear. The people chattered loudly, and some of the children sang a song in praise of the little mother of the land. The two Pretani boys, who wouldn’t let themselves be excluded, whooped and hollered aggressive hunting songs of their own.

Zesi thought she could feel everybody’s relief to be off on this adventure after the long winter. Even the dogs ran and yapped in excitement, even Lightning who had spent the winter pining for his owner, Kirike.

They headed south, making for the valley of the river they called the Little Mother’s Milk. Away from the coast the land rose and became a sandstone fell, bleaker and more exposed. In places huge layered rocks lay tumbled, as if dropped by giants.

The sun was bright, but a spring mist hung in the air, glowing with light, masking the plains of the far horizon. To either side of the trail, littered with loose, pale sand worn free of the soft underlying rock by footsteps human and animal, the heather had begun to grow, thick and short and green. Zesi found some hawthorn as she walked along, and absently plucked the buds, still early, bright green. They had a rich, nutty flavour when she chewed them. And the first pileworts were out, a bright and early flower with shining yellow petals. She pointed this out to the priest, for it was a good treatment for piles, and worth collecting.

But the country was troubling her, as she sang her songs with the priest. It had been some years since the last walk, and while the trail was easy to find it seemed to Zesi that in some places the ancient songs of the land, with their lists of landmarks and directions, did not match what she saw before her eyes.

The ground was boggier than it used to be, and new ponds pooled in hollows. Here was a stand of trees she remembered playing in as a child. Now the birch were leafless and dead, though a couple of alders survived, and where she remembered fern and grass there now grew samphire and cordgrass. When she dipped her finger in the muddy water that pooled around the surviving alders, she tasted salt. Very strange.

At last the path led them down into the valley of the Milk, steep-sided and cloaked with wood. The pace slowed as people spread out to look for water or to hunt, or bled the birch trees of their sap for resin for rope-making, or inspected fallen trees for flint nodules dragged up out of the earth by the roots.

Zesi was relieved when Gall ran off into the first dense bit of forest they came to, stabbing spear in his hand.

The younger Pretani, Shade, however, stayed close by, walking with her. He was taken with the holloways they followed, paths close to the river that had been worn into the earth. They were channels choked with debris, plant growth, tree roots, last year’s leaves, and pools of brackish water. The people kicked them clear as they walked.

As the sun started to go down they stopped to make shelter for the night, close to the river. People worked busily, collecting wood for lean-tos and for the fires.

Zesi sat at the edge of a pond and set to work using a flint knife to dig out a stand of bulrushes. Later she would char their thick stems on the fire, and they would suck out the starchy interior.

Shade was still close by, as he had been all day. He had an endearing awkwardness, as if he was never quite sure what he should be doing.

They spotted hares chasing each other through the long grass. Two big animals faced each other, their long black-tipped ears bristling, a male and female, and they stood up on their back legs and boxed with their front paws - mad with lust, Zesi thought, for it was that time of year.

Watching the hares, Shade spoke to her shyly. ‘This land is very old,’ he said. ‘So old your feet have worn tracks into the earth.’

‘We follow the tracks our ancestors made when they first walked here, following the little mothers as they made the world. Where’s that brother of yours? He’s been gone a long time.’

‘He is a great hunter. Sometimes, at home, he is away for days, alone. He won’t come back without a kill. You’ll see . . . The walk is useful.’

That word made her laugh. ‘Useful? How?’

‘The children are learning how to live on the move. In the forest. As your ancestors might once have lived. They are learning old skills, that might be needed again.’

She grunted. ‘You sound like our priest. He likes to say how useful things are. You sound like an old man, not a kid.’

His cheeks burned under his sparse beard. ‘I am older than your sister!’

She tried hard not to laugh. ‘Does Ana treat you like a kid?’

‘She treats me badly. I don’t know why. I—’

‘I can tell you why.’ The voice was Gall’s. Suddenly he was here, a massive presence silhouetted by the low sun. Zesi saw that he had something heavy and limp draped over his shoulders. He was breathing hard, his tunic bloodied. ‘Because you’re a skinny runt. Here, little boy, I bought you a present.’ And he threw his burden to the ground.

It was a deer, a young female, and pregnant.

‘Be a man,’ Gall said. ‘Finish it off. This is your chance to show cold-faced Ana you’ve got balls - and I don’t mean those shrivelled-up nuts she sees you washing every morning, hah!’

Zesi could see the swelling of the doe’s belly clearly against its slim form. Panting, salivating, exhausted, obviously terrified, it tried to stand. But the backs of its legs were matted with blood, and every time it rose it fell back to the ground.

There was something fascinating in the deer’s agony, Zesi found herself thinking. And the power Gall had over it.

Gall was watching her, amused.

‘This is not how we hunt, Pretani. A quick kill, an apology to the beast’s spirit - that’s our way. Not this, not a half day of agony for a creature like this, all to play a kind of joke on your brother.’

But maybe Gall saw something darker in her, under her bluster. 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 bloody—’ ‘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, glasswort: 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 gods pissed 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 shells 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 shell. ‘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 shells, 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 spawn 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 shell 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 gods have been kind to us.’

He grunted. ‘Kind with the weather. The timing is thanks to you and your planning. The gods 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 thrashing 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 shore seemed a long way away. ‘Shade! Shade, you Pretani idiot!’