Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

Ana followed, with Mama Sunta and Zesi. Which was all wrong, of course. Ana should have been walking with her parents, not Sunta and Zesi. But only a year before, her mother had died in childbirth, and her father, some said half-mad with grief, had gone sailing off and never returned. And Sunta was so weak that Zesi and Ana had to walk to either side of her, holding her up in her great sealskin coat.

  “I feel stupid,” Ana murmured to Zesi over Mama Sunta’s lolling head.

  Zesi replied, “Everybody feels that way. Tonight is about you and the moon. If you want to find the right Other, then you must concentrate.”

  Ana said bitterly, “It was easy for you. A good Other chose you, the crossbill. Father was here. And Mother.”

  “Easy, was it?” Zesi snapped. “Well, I’m not your mother, and I don’t have to listen to you moaning.”

  They trudged on in sullen silence.

  They crossed the causeway to the island, a stripe of dry land that, when the tide was low, separated bay water from the open sea. Ana looked back over the bay, across the water to the southern beaches. Fires burned all along the shore, the tanners and knappers and fisherfolk working, brilliant human sparks in the drab darkness of the night. The moon’s cold white light glimmered from stretches of open water, on the ocean, in the bay of Etxelur, and across the boggy landscape. At times, Ana thought, Etxelur seemed more water than land.

  Once over the causeway they headed north toward the islands, following a trail through low, rounded hills that, under sparse snow, were coated with dry, brown, fallen bracken, lying like lank hair, with here and there the stubborn green of grass. As they broke out at the shore the wind hit them, a hard steady gust coming off the sea, and white-capped waves growled. They clambered down the last line of dunes to the beach. Their boots crunched over gravel eroding from the dunes, fringing the level sand. On the beach itself the tide was low, and rock formations glistened, exposed to the air, dark with clinging weed and barnacles. There was much wrack gathered up in bands, strips and tubes of seaweed, bits of driftwood pushed high up the beach, relics of a winter storm. Ana’s footstep stirred the blanched, disarticulated remnants of a crab.

  They came to the middens. These were heaps of mollusk shells and fishbone and other detritus, tall and long, each curving gracefully like the crescent moon, as if embracing the sea. Windblown snow was piled up in the lee of the middens. The boats that would carry Ana to North Island were waiting here, cupped by the middens.

  But first the priest carried his charm bag to the crest of one of the middens. Here he set out his branding irons, bits of the hard, rusty stuff that, it was said, had fallen from the sky—unimaginably rare pieces, more valued even than the priest’s scraps of gold. These pieces were used for nothing but marking the people with the symbols of their Others, be they otter, fox, snow hare, pine marten—most precious of all the seal, most unwelcome the owl. One of these would be chosen to mark Ana that evening, in a flash of fire and pain, after it became clear what her Other must be.

  Jurgi seemed to hesitate. Then he beckoned to Ana. She made her way after him up the midden. Loose shells slid and cracked under her feet, and there was a rich, cloying smell of salt and rot.

  The priest had laid out the equipment for the fire, bits of false gold and flint to make a spark, scraps of dried moss for kindling, blocks of peat for fuel. He took out the wolf jaw that filled his upper mouth. “The fire must be built,” he said gravely, his toothless speech slurred. She understood; the brand had to be heated in a new fire, started from scratch, not from an ember of some old blaze. “This is a role for a man from your house. Your father, your brother . . .”

  “I have no brother. My father is—”

  “I know. Still the fire must be started.”

  “I will do it!” The call came from the Pretani boy Shade. Without waiting for permission he scrambled up the midden, slipping on the unfamiliar surface. His brother hooted and laughed, and called out insults in his own tongue. “I will do it,” Shade repeated breathlessly, as he reached the crest of the mound.

  Ana glared at him. “Why must you push your way in like this? You aren’t my brother or my father. You aren’t even from Etxelur.”

  “But I am living in your house. And I am good at starting fires.”

  Ana frowned. “There must be another way. Custom decrees—”

  The priest tried to look grave, then laughed. “Custom decrees that we are allowed a little imagination. Trust me. But can I trust you, Pretani?”

  “Oh, yes.” But Shade was distracted. “This place is so strange, this hill. I don’t know the word.”

  “Midden,” said Ana heavily. “It’s a midden.”

  “A heaping-up of shells . . . So high and so long—a hundred paces? I will measure it out. Many, many shells.”

  The priest nodded. “It has taken many generations to build these middens. They are holy places for us. We bury the bones of our dead here. But, can you see, the sea is taking back the land . . .”

  The ends of the midden arcs where they cut to the coast were eroded, worn down by the sea.

  Shade held out his arms along the line of the midden. “Still, they are two bits of circles. Like those on your belly, on the stone flat on the beach, and now here in the ocean. This is how you know yourself. Circles in circles.”

  Jurgi said dryly, “Maybe you should be a priest.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Ana said. She’d had enough; this was her night. She started to make her way down the midden. “Let him build his stupid fire. Come on, priest, let’s get to the boats before the tide turns.”

  A little fleet of boats pushed off from the island’s sandy shore, paddles lapping at the chill black water. The boats were frames of wood over which hide was stretched, dried and caulked with tallow.

  Ana traveled in one boat, which was paddled by the priest and by Zesi in the place of her father. Mama Sunta sat in another boat with her daughter Rute, Ana’s aunt, and Rute’s husband, Jaku. Ana’s eyes were used to the dark now, and she could see them all quite clearly in the misty moonlight. The paddlers all wore heavy fur mittens to protect their hands from the cold. Out on the water in the dark Ana felt small, terribly fragile, yet she had barely left the land. But her father, if he lived, was out on the breast of the wider ocean in a boat not much more substantial than this.

  Nobody spoke as the boats receded from the shore. Indeed it had been a long while since Sunta had said anything; she was just a heap of sealskin, with her crumpled white face barely visible beneath a hat of bear fur. Ana was glad of the silence, compared to the clamor and the foolishness that had plagued the day since the arrival of the Pretani boys.

  Lost in her thoughts, she was startled by a noise coming from the dark, beyond the waves’ lapping, a kind of shuffling, a snort of breath. The priest stopped paddling and put his finger to his lips. Then he pointed ahead.

  Suddenly Ana saw a black shape like a hole cut neatly out of the moonlit sky. This was North Island, a scrap of rock only exposed at low tide; already they had reached it.

  And on its tiny foreshore a bulky form stirred. It was a seal, a huge one, a bull.

  The priest dipped his paddle in the water and, almost noiselessly, swung the boat around to bring Ana alongside the seal. Only paces separated them. The seal, clearly visible now in the moonlight, was looking straight back at Ana, quite still, its eyes pools of blackness. She could make out no colors in its pelt.

  The priest smiled at her.

  She understood why. The seal was the best Other of all. The seal was a survivor of the days before death had come to the world, when humans had lived among the animals, and had shifted forms from one kind to another as easily as ice melts to water. That had ended when the little mothers made their lethal bargain with the moon, and so had saved the whole world from starvation as the undying animals ate all there was to eat. But just as humans and animals now had to die, so they could no longer share each other’s forms. A human was forever a human, a dog a dog. The seals, however, had be
en too busy playing to hear of the little mothers’ bargain. And so they had become stuck in a middle form, neither of the land nor the sea, with faces like dogs and bodies like fish, and there they had remained ever since, relics of a better time.

  Ana couldn’t look away from the seal’s deep, heavy gaze.

  But then, without warning, it slid off its rock, slipped into the water and vanished. The priest frowned, and Ana felt a stab of disappointment. Was the seal not to be her Other after all?

  The boats, quietly paddled, drifted toward the island.

  Jurgi nodded to Ana. “It is time.”

  She shucked off her cloak and opened up her tunic. Zesi helped her pull her boots off her feet. Then, uncertainly, the ring-symbol of Northland painted on her bare belly, she stood up in the boat and faced the island. The ice-cold air was sharp on her flesh.

  The priest turned to the second boat. “Mama Sunta . . .” Sunta, in the place of Ana’s mother, was to stand now, and drop into the ocean a rag stained with Ana’s first woman-blood, now dried and rust-brown. All this was to be performed in the light of the moon, the goddess of death, as a defiance of her dread legacy.

  But Sunta didn’t move. Rute, her daughter, reached over and touched her shoulder. The old woman seemed to start awake, but her eyes were unseeing. She clutched at her belly, at the thing growing inside her. Ana, standing in the cold air, smelled an acrid stink of piss and shit; Sunta’s bowels had emptied. Then she fell back, limp, and sighed like a receding tide. Rute shook her. “Mama Sunta!” But Sunta moved no more.

  And a clatter of wings came from the island. Ana, startled, would have fallen if Zesi had not helped her. She saw an owl, unmistakable, lift from a rocky ledge and make for the mainland, beating its great wings, its eerie flat face held before it.

  Ana sat, shivering, and Zesi put her arms around her. “The owl,” Ana said. “The owl that dared hunt only at night, in the domain of the moon, the goddess of death. The owl that had flown into the air just as Sunta had died, bringing death to this unique moment of life. The owl. My Other! No mother, no father, now this . . . Oh, Jurgi, can’t you help me?”

  The priest leaned forward. “I am sorry. The Other chooses you . . . Come, Zesi, put a cloak around her.”

  From the other boat, in the dark, came the sound of Rute sobbing.

  5

  Far around the curve of the world—to the west of Etxelur, beyond Albia’s forest-clad valleys, beyond an ocean flecked with ice and a handful of fragile skin boats—there was a land where the sun had not yet set. And a boy was crying.

  “Dreamer, what′s wrong with him?” Moon Reacher plucked at Ice Dreamer’s sleeve. “Stone Shaper. Why is he crying?”

  Ice Dreamer stopped walking and looked down at Moon Reacher, the girl’s red, windblown face, her tied-back nut-brown hair, her shapeless, grubby hide clothes scavenged from the bodies of the dead. Moon Reacher’s words seemed to come from another reality—perhaps from the Big House where your totem carried your spirit when you died. Words were human things. Ice Dreamer wasn’t in a human world, not anymore.

  This world, the land of the Sky Wolf, was a place of ground frozen hard as rock under her skin boots, and air so cold it was like a blade sliding in and out of her lungs, and, to the north, only ice, ice that shone with a pale, cruelly pointless beauty, ice as far as she could see. The only warmth in the whole world was in her belly, her own core, where her new baby lay dreaming dreams of the Big House she had so recently left. And Ice Dreamer didn’t even like to think about that, for when the baby came, who would there be to help her with the birth? All the women and girls were dead or lost, all save Moon Reacher, only eight years old. Maybe it would be better if the baby was never born at all, if she just stayed and grew old in the warmth and mindless safety of Dreamer’s womb.

  Yet here was Moon Reacher, still tugging at her sleeve. “Dreamer! Why is Stone Shaper crying?”

  Mammoth Talker loomed over them, massive in his furs, his pack huge on his back, his treasured spear in his fist.

  And beside him Stone Shaper was indeed crying again, shuddering silently, the tears frosting on his cheeks. His medicine bag hung around his neck. Even wrapped in his bearskin cloak Shaper looked skinny, weak; he was nineteen years old.

  They were all that was left. The four of them might be the last of the True People, anywhere.

  Mammoth Talker growled, “He cries because he is weak. Less than a priest. Less than a woman, than a child. That unborn thing in your belly, Dreamer. Shaper is less than that.” Talker was somewhere over thirty years old, perpetually angry, irritated to be stopped yet again.

  Dreamer shot back, “If he’s so weak, Talker, you should have taken the medicine bag when Wolf Dancer got himself killed. Reacher, I think he’s crying because he thinks this is his fault.” She gestured. “The cold. The winter. He thinks he isn’t saying the right words to make the spring come.”

  “That’s silly.” Reacher looked up at Shaper, and took his hand. “The winter’s bigger than you will ever be.”

  Shaper looked down at her, taking gulping breaths.

  “She’s right,” said Dreamer. “And you shouldn’t be wasting your strength on tears. Have you still got the fire safe?”

  “Of course I have.” He held up his medicine bag.

  “Then you’re doing the most important job you have.” She looked around. The world was a mouth of gray, the sky featureless, the tough grass on the ground frozen flat, the sun invisible. Trying to get some relief from the north wind, they had been heading roughly east, skirting a bluff of rocks, soft brown stone worn by the wind into fantastic shapes. She turned to Mammoth Talker. “How late do you think it is?”

  “How am I supposed to know? Ask him. Maybe the answer lies in the track of his tears.”

  “Oh, shut up.” They were all tired, however early or late it was. Glancing across at the rock formation, she saw there was a kind of hollow under a ledge of stone, with a drift of soil underneath it. There was no source of water she could see, but there were old snowdrifts in shadowed crevices above that lower ledge, ice they could melt. “Look at that. Maybe we could make a shelter for the night.”

  For a heartbeat it seemed Talker might refuse. His huge fist opened and closed around his spear, with its precious point bequeathed by his father, a blade as long as a man’s head, finely shaped, elaborately fluted. In his eyes he was the only hunter left, a hunter trailed by a gaggle of a woman, a boy-priest, and a child. He always wanted to go on, go further. But they had nowhere to go. “All right. Make your shelter.” He shucked his pack off his shoulders and dropped it on the ground. “I’ll go find us something to eat. Take care of my spear points.” He hoisted his spear and stalked off toward the south.

  “Watch out for the Cowards. And bring back wood if you find it,” Dreamer called after him, but if he heard he showed no sign of it.

  “I’ll set the traps,” Moon Reacher said. She took off her pack and dug into it, looking for the snares, loops of bison-sinew rope with sharp bone stakes to stick into the ground. “I bet there are jackrabbits around these rocks.”

  “Look out for running water, a spring. And be careful.” Moving cautiously, trying not to strain the muscles of her belly, Dreamer lifted her own pack’s strap over her head, and let it fall to the ground beside Talker’s. “Come on, Shaper. Let’s see what we can make of this place.”

  Shaper unpicked Mammoth Talker’s heavy pack, which, aside from his carefully wrapped bundle of spear points, mostly consisted of skins, enough for a small house.

  Dreamer crawled under the ledge, exploring. At the front the space was high enough to kneel, but it narrowed at the back. Dry, dirty soil had been piled up here by the wind, along with dead grass and a handful of bones. There were animal scuts, small pellets, maybe gopher droppings—with any luck Moon Reacher would turn out to be right about the jackrabbits—and bigger turds, maybe from the scavenger that had brought the bones in here. She scraped the scuts and grass and bones into a hea
p. All of these would burn, but if Talker didn’t come back with wood it wouldn’t be enough.

  As she scraped up the dung her baby, some six months since conception, kicked her hard. She winced, and had to rest.

  She had a sudden, sharp memory of her own childhood, when she had been younger than Moon Reacher, and the houses, six, seven, eight of them, had stood by a lake where trees dipped into the water. That had been a place somewhere far to the south of here, south and east. She could surely never find it again, for the people had been walking away from it since before she had become a woman. All gone now, she supposed. Oh, the lake and the grassy plain would still be there. But now, if anybody lived there, it would be Cowards in their swarming numbers and shabby huts, and they would know nothing of the people who had gone before. And here she was burning turds, and melting snow to drink.

  Stone Shaper clumsily lifted a hide sheet over the mouth of the hollow, dropped it, and bent to try again. With a sigh Ice Dreamer crawled out of the cave to help him. They used loose rocks to hold the hide in place, and shut out the breeze from the little cave. Once back inside, Dreamer scraped a pit in the sandy ground to make the hearth, and lined it with flat stones gathered from the back of the hollow.

  Stone Shaper reverently unpacked his medicine bag. In with the precious stones, herbs and strange old bits of curved tooth was an ember of last night’s fire, wrapped in moss and soft leather. He made a bed of dry moss and bits of grass in the hearth, laid down the ember, and blew on it gently, adding shreds of moss one by one until a tiny flame caught. This he sheltered with his hands, and Ice Dreamer helped him, feeding the flame with dried grass from the cave. When the fire was burning they sat back. It gave off light but little heat; for that they would have to wait for Mammoth Talker’s return with some decent fuel.

  “Mammoth Talker is right,” said Stone Shaper. He loosened his tunic at the neck, and sat with his legs stretched out. “I am no priest. I am no man. I am shamed by my tears.”