Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  Kirike looked out to sea. As always when they spoke of going home he felt a deep dread stealing over him. “Maybe a few more days,” he said. “Collect a bit more meat. Work on the boat some more while we’ve got the chance. Put some more flesh on our bones before we face the ice again . . .”

  “There’s no reason not to leave now,” Heni said bluntly. “Look. I understand. Or I think I do. Remember, it was me who went out in the boat with you in those first days after Sabet died.”

  Sabet, Kirike’s wife, had died as she labored to give birth to a dead baby the previous summer. The baby wasn’t expected; he had thought that Sabet had put the dangers of childbirth behind her years before, when Zesi and Ana were born, and they were safe. The shock, the sudden end of his long marriage, had broken his heart.

  “You weren’t much use then, I’ll tell you that,” Heni said.

  “I know. But I didn’t want to be anywhere but in the boat. All those people, the women, Sabet’s sister, her mother, the girls . . . If I thought I could have got by in the boat without you I would have done.”

  “Well, I was there. And I was there when that storm pushed us west. That gave you an excuse to stay out for a few more days, didn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t help the storm.”

  “No. But then you said we had to sail north.”

  The storm had caused them two days and nights of nonstop bailing: no paddling, no sleeping, no eating, you pissed where you sat and drank and ate one-handed, and with the other hand you bailed. When the storm had blown over they had no idea where they were. They were out of water, had lost their food, their catch and their fishing gear, and the boat leaked in a dozen places. It was obvious they’d been driven west, for that was the way the storm had blown them. South: that was the way to go. If they’d headed south they would have hit the shore of Northland, or maybe somewhere on the Albia coast. Then, even if they didn’t recognize where they were, they could rest up, fix the boat, and shore-hop east until they reached home.

  Instead Kirike had insisted they sail north. “We went over it and over it,” he said now. “I just had this feeling we were closer to land to the north than the south.”

  “Pig scut.”

  “I thought I saw a gull flying that way.”

  “Pig scut! There was no gull, except maybe in your head. But I let you talk me into it.”

  “We found land, didn’t we?”

  So they had, a cold shore littered with strange black rocks, where the ice had almost come down to the sea. There had been no people there. No wood either, no trees growing, though they found some driftwood on the strand. But there were seals who had evidently never seen people, for each of them was trusting and friendly right up until the moment the club, delivered with respect, hit the back of its head. They had rested up in a shelter built of snow blocks, ate the seals’ flesh, fixed the boat as best they could with sealskin and caulked it with the animals’ fat, and then paddled off.

  And they headed west, not east.

  “The current ran that way.”

  “Some of the time.”

  “We might have found land. People to trade with.”

  “We found ice! We slept on floating ice, and fished through holes in the ice. My piss turned to ice.”

  “Nobody ever went so far west before! We were strong, we were healthy. Who could have known what we’d find?”

  “All we found was ice . . .”

  Over weeks of westward sailing, they had hopped from ice floe to ice floe across the roof of the world. Then the land curved south, and they had passed the mouth of a wide and deep river estuary, icebound in the winter. At last they had settled on this shore with the big clams.

  Kirike said, “Maybe this is Albia, but if it is it’s like no bit of Albia I ever heard of, even from the traders. If they had clams like these we’d have known about it.”

  “We’re nowhere,” Heni said. “A land with no name on the ass of the world. Where the funny-looking people don’t speak a shred even of the traders’ tongue. Well, we have to go home sometime. If we can make it back. And what about Zesi? What about Ana? Your daughters don’t know if you’re dead or alive—or me, come to that.”

  Kirike blurted, “Every time I see them I will think of Sabet.”

  Heni nodded gravely. “Yes. That is true. But do you think your daughters won’t be missing their mother too?”

  “Sun and moon, it’s like talking to a priest.”

  “So are we going home?”

  “All right! Tonight we’ll turn the boat over. In the morning, as soon as it’s stocked, if it’s not actually storming—”

  “Well, about time.”

  “So what did you get from the Hairy Folk? Apart from a tit-grab from your bearded lover.”

  Heni opened up his pack, to reveal bone and polished stone. “I traded our last bits of obsidian for this stuff.” He pulled out a fine slate knife. “Look at the edge on that.”

  Kirike picked up an awl made from what felt like a tooth. “I wonder what animal this came from.”

  “They told me. We don’t have a name for it. Like a big fat seal, with long teeth that stick down.” He mimed with two pointing fingers. “And look at this harpoon. See the toggle? Look, you pass a rope through here, it runs out when you throw the spear, and then you can just pull the weapon back.”

  Kirike rummaged through the gifts. “But no food. No dried meat, none of those acorn biscuits they make—”

  “Who needs food? Kirike, it’s spring; we’ll be sitting on an ocean full of fish.” The tooth harpoon was on a loop of cord; he slipped it around his neck. “Imagine the show we’ll make when we paddle into Etxelur with this lot!”

  But Kirike, looking over Heni’s shoulder, was distracted. To the north, beyond the sandstone bluff that stuck out to sea at the end of this bay, a thread of smoke rose. He stood up. “Fire.”

  “What?” Heni turned to see. “That’s not the Hairy Folk. They’re down south, the band we’ve been trading with anyhow.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know. Makes no difference. Not if we’re leaving tomorrow, or the day after.”

  “Unless they jump us in the night, burn the boat and steal our stuff.”

  Heni frowned. “Another distraction, Kirike?”

  Kirike grinned. “Call it a precaution. Let’s go see.”

  Heni grumbled, but he had to give in. They packed Heni’s booty and their other gear under the boat, and they each slid a knife of good Etxelur flint into their tunics.

  Then Heni pulled on his boots, and they walked north along the beach toward the bluff.

  14

  “In the beginning the father spirit gave birth to mother earth and father sky. A mud diver made the world from the body of the mother, and set it on the back of a turtle. But another diver dug the anti-world, a wolf thing, out of the body of the father. The father, disgusted, flung the wolf thing away into the sky . . .”

  Dreamer lay back against the strange rock panel she had found at the head of the beach, with loops and lines carved into it, an oddly comforting design, brisk and complete. She had banked up the fire early today. Moon Reacher was very cold, and she hadn’t stirred, even when Ice Dreamer had poured fresh water from the spring into her mouth, and doused her wound with salt water from the great eastern lake of brine, trying to drown the squirming maggots. Reacher had been just the same yesterday, the face like snow, the purple, bruised lips, the cold limbs. Walking had been impossible for days.

  Dreamer cradled Reacher in her arms over her own swollen belly, the two of them, the last of the True People, on the beach before this strange poisonous lake, and she told Reacher the story of the world.

  “In those days the world was rich and teemed with game. People crawled out of the sea to populate the land. The People hunted and grew wise and lived long. Even when they died they were born again into this world, for this was the most perfect world there could be. Their most powerful totems were the mammoth, which was lik
e a hairy boulder walking the earth, and the horse, which was a swift runner.

  “But then the Sky Wolf, jealous of his banishment from the earth, decided to smash the world.

  “When the clouds and frost and the ash had cleared, the great animals had gone, and nothing stirred but stunted creatures barely worthy of the hunt. There was only a handful of True People left, but the earth swarmed with a new race of sub-men who evolved from the cowardly things that burrowed in the ground.

  “Now the True People still make their fluted blades, but there is nothing left to hunt. Even when we die we can’t return to the hunting ground of the past. The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, the anti-world. Even our totems are dead . . .”

  She thought she heard Reacher murmur. She held her closer, looking into her hooded eyes. “You must listen,” she said. “Listen to the story. For you, Reacher, must tell it to me when I am in labor, and you, child in my womb, must speak it over my bed as I lie dying, for there is nobody else . . .”

  Two men were watching her.

  The woman sat by a poor, shoddy fire under a shelter made of a heap of driftwood. She was dressed in tattered skins. Her dark hair was a mat of filth and grease, her face streaked with old blood. Bits of kit lay on the ground around her, amid folds of dirty leather. Her belly was swollen, though she was terribly thin; her wrist looked so fine Kirike thought he could have closed his thumb and forefinger around it. She held a child in her arms, a girl, perhaps eight or ten—nothing but skin and bones, and not moving.

  The woman had been speaking, murmuring nonsense in an unknown tongue. Now she looked at Kirike with pale, blank eyes, and he suppressed a shudder.

  Heni hissed, “Can you smell that rot? Like spoiled meat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she’s mad?”

  “She’s beautiful,” Kirike said. “Or was. And she’s pregnant.”

  “Yes. Far gone with it. And look at the kid she’s holding. How stiff she is . . .”

  Kirike stepped forward cautiously. The woman, watching, didn’t move. He crouched and touched the dangling arm of the girl, the wrist. The skin was cold as stone, and he could find no pulse. He moved closer, deliberately smiling at the woman. There was an overpowering stink of filth, of shit and piss and sweat, of stale fish grease—and that dread rot stench. He worked his fingers under the matted hair at the girl’s neck, and felt the cold flesh.

  He drew back. “She’s dead.”

  “Dead for days, I’d say.” Heni leaned forward and cautiously unwrapped the skin around the girl’s leg. The limb was swollen to the size of a log, and an open wound swarmed with maggots. He fell back, his hand over his mouth. “Well, we know how she died.”

  “Try not to frighten the live one.” Still smiling, Kirike tried to slide his arms under the girl’s stiff body, to take her from the woman. But the woman grabbed the girl back. “I bet she won’t speak a word of any tongue we know. Nobody in this moonstruck land does. It’s going to take a while to persuade her to give up that corpse.”

  Heni said, “It’s going to take no time at all. We just walk away and leave her to the sea, or the wolves.”

  “She’s pregnant, man! And she’s half-starved. Who knows how long she’s been nursing this wretched child? No wonder it’s driven the sense from her head. I wonder what happened to her.”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. And if she’s pregnant, that’s another morsel for the wolves. She’s not our problem, Kirike. She’s not one of ours. This isn’t our country!”

  “If we can get the body away from her, get some food inside her, clean her up—”

  Heni stood over him, arms folded. “We’re going home. You agreed. We leave tomorrow, or the day after. As soon as we fill the boat—”

  “Fine. You fill the boat. We’ll leave as we said. And, unless she recovers and runs off, we take her with us.”

  For a long moment Heni didn’t move. “One day I’ll walk away from you, cousin. I’ll just walk away, and you’ll be dead in a month.”

  “But today’s not that day, is it? Look—you cover up that stinking leg, and try to lift the body . . .”

  The two of them moved toward the cowering woman. Kirike smiled, murmuring soft words in a tongue she could not know.

  And then he noticed the design on the rock face on which she was sitting: three circles with a common center, and a radial slash—the design that had been tattooed into his own wife’s belly, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House—the sign of Etxelur, carved into a rock on the wrong side of the ocean.

  15

  They walked every day, Novu and his owner, the trader Chona, at a steady, ground-eating pace, following water courses and well-worn tracks, generally following the river north from Jericho. Sometimes they even walked by night.

  Generally they walked in silence. In fact Novu got more slaps from Chona, stinging blows on the back of the head, than he did words, for every time he got something wrong, a slap. He quickly learned what was wrong and what was right.

  And for the first few days, as he shuffled along in the filthy old skins Chona had given him, a heavy pack on his back, Novu was hobbled by bark rope tied tightly around his ankles.

  Novu was a town boy. He had never walked far in his life. He had boots, but his soft feet blistered. Every joint seemed to ache as he shifted the mass of the pack, trying to favor one shoulder and then the other. The hobble made it much worse. He couldn’t make Chona’s big strides; he had to make two steps for every one of Chona’s, and he felt perpetually out of breath. He didn’t have a knife, but his hands were free, and he could unpick the knots—but they were tied expertly and he would need time, which Chona, ever vigilant, was never going to give him. But he longed to be free of the hobble, and to be able to stretch his legs.

  Sometimes Chona stayed the night with those he traded with. But Novu always had to stay outside, huddled under a skin or a lean-to. Such people didn’t live as Novu had in Jericho, but in communities of a few dozen people, in houses that might be shaped like bricks or like pears or like cowpats, maybe with a few herded goats and a scrap of cultivated wheat. They could be very strange, these isolated folks—people who went naked or with feathers sticking up from their topknots, or who tattooed themselves and their children red and black all over, or who stretched their necks or earlobes or their lower lips, or who wore bones through their cheeks and necks. Chona said it was possible that traders like himself were the only strangers these people ever saw. No wonder they were odd.

  It was worse when they stayed out in the country, away from people altogether. Chona carried skins in his backpack, remarkably light and supple, that he would use to make lean-tos in stands of trees. It wasn’t long before he had taught Novu how to make a dry and warm shelter.

  But when the dark came Novu always found himself curling up in the dirt like an animal in its den. It was not like being at home, snug in the belly of Jericho with the warm bodies of hundreds of people all around him. Here he was outside, and there was nothing around him but the wind, and the howls of distant wild dogs—and, occasionally, the snuffling and tread of some curious visitor in the dark. At times even the rope tether by which Chona attached Novu to himself at night was a comfort, of sorts.

  Every day he was taken further away from Jericho. But in a way he was glad of it, glad when after the first few days they got far enough from Jericho that there was no chance of encountering anybody who might know him, and laugh at his shame—or, worse, turn away in pity.

  After many days of walking they came to a lake. Chona had Novu make camp in a stand of willow, while he sat and bathed his bare feet in the stagnant water at the lake’s edge.

  “So,” Chona said at length. “Do you know where you are?” He spoke in Novu’s own tongue, his words lightly accented.

  Novu had tried to follow the route, with the vague idea of running back home if he got away. After the first couple of days he had run out of familiar landmarks, and sin
ce then he knew only that they had kept moving north. He admitted, “No.”

  “Good.” Chona, sitting on the ground, was a slim silhouette in the light of the low sun that reflected from the still water. He looked calm and strong. “Now, if you ever got away from me, you’d run south, trying to get back to Jericho.”

  Novu shrugged. That seemed obvious.

  “But if you did flee, I’d run you down easily. Even if you had a day’s head start. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I suppose—”

  “And when I did catch you, I’d hamstring you. Do you know what that means? Probably just one leg. You could walk with a crutch. You could still make bricks. But you’d never run anywhere ever again. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believe you.”

  Chona folded his legs under him, stood easily, and came over to where Novu was sitting. He dug a stone blade from a fold of his tunic. The boy flinched back, but Chona bent down, and held the blade to the rope hobble at Novu’s ankles. “Then we understand each other.” He cut the attaching rope with a single swipe of the blade. “Get those bands off your ankles, and bathe your feet. Then go catch some fish.” He coughed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and walked away.

  After that they walked on, still as master and slave, Novu still bearing the bulk of the load. But now at least they went side by side, for Novu, without the hobble, was able to keep up with Chona’s long stride, and Chona no longer bothered with the demeaning tether at night.

  Novu got fewer things wrong, and fewer slaps to the back of the head. Chona helped Novu repair his soft town boots when they started to wear out. He even taught him a few words in the traders’ tongue, which he said was spoken from one end of the Continent to the other.

  And he began to talk more openly to Novu.

  One night he sketched a kind of plan of his world in riverside mud. “Here is Jericho, at the eastern end of a great ocean that runs far to the west. There are lands to the north of the ocean, lands to the south, as you see. I know little of what lies south, but to the north there are many people, much trading to be done. A vast, vast area. This is the land we call the Continent.”