There was a bit of comedy when Heni decided he needed a shit. The men bickered, Kirike evidently complaining about losing heat, Heni twisting with agitation as the pressure in his bowels built up. They were like husband and wife, stuck together and too used to each other. In the end Heni got his way and stuck his bare ass out of the boat. Cold air swirled. He strained and was mercifully quick, letting the shit just drop over the side, but when he pulled his backside into the boat Kirike mockingly picked icicles off the thick black hairs coating his buttocks.
After that the men dug themselves down into heaps of furs. Arguing mildly, coughing, farting, blowing their noses into their hands, the men settled down to sleep.
Dreamer closed her eyes and listened to the boat creak, and settled her hands on her belly. The baby was asleep. It seemed content. She thought she could feel its heart beat, feel the heaviness of the blood it drew from her body. As she slid into sleep herself she was troubled, for the baby was very large, and she knew its time must be near, and she had no idea how she could cope. Yet sleep she did.
In the days that followed she came to learn the routine of the men’s strange lives, here in their boat-home.
Whenever they could they paddled, always heading east. Often they would sleep in the boat, as they had that first night, but other times they would push the boat in toward an ice floe, or sometimes even a scrap of rocky land. At one extraordinary shore she saw a huge dome of ice squatting over the land. It thinned toward the coast and she saw dark mountains sticking up out of the ice, their peaks sculpted like a flint core, and rivers of dirty ice flowed between the mountains toward the water. Nothing lived here but birds, and creatures that flopped up onto the ice out of the sea. They did not land here.
When they did find a place to land, the men would drag the boat out of the water, with Dreamer still riding inside, and then help her out. The first time they landed she had trouble standing; her legs felt weak as a child’s, and it felt odd to stand on a surface that wasn’t pitching and rocking. But Kirike supported her and, holding her arm, encouraging her with a flow of words in his strange language, he made her take one step, two, three. Her heart pumped, and a kind of mist cleared from her head, and she was a little more herself again.
Whenever they managed to get out of the boat the three of them would walk away from each other, sometimes until they became dark specks on a sheet of white. She would squat on the ice and leave runny turds steaming in the cold air, and watch with dismay as urine laden with blood pooled around her feet.
Sometimes they would stay two nights, three, on the land. The men would make minor repairs to the boat, and gather food. They would take the boat out for a morning or afternoon, empty of everything but their fishing kit, leaving Dreamer with the heaps of spare gear. Alone with her unborn child, she waited in a world reduced to abstractions, plain white below, clear empty blue above, and wondered what might become of her if they never returned. But the men always did return, hauling their catch, and they would all bundle up into the little houseboat for another night.
Sometimes, out on the sea, she saw creatures like fish, but much greater than fish, accompanying the boat. They would even leap out of the water, their gray sleek bodies massive and heavy, and she flinched. But Kirike laughed at her, and threw fish scraps. These strange companions were just playing, and her spirits came to lift when their graceful bodies broke the surface, with their strange smiling faces and rattling cries.
And then there were the even stranger fish-animals the men hunted, whenever they spotted one. She had never seen their like before. These creatures that could be bigger than a man had bodies like a fish’s but faces like a dog’s, and they seemed to spend as long sitting out on the ice or rocks as they did in the water. Kirike and Heni hunted them enthusiastically, but with respect, and their butchery was quick and efficient.
Dreamer soon learned that the broth that had kept her alive during her illness was made from boiled meat from the fish-animal. In the process she learned her first word of Kirike’s language, through his pointing. “Seal.”
“Seal.”
More pointing. “Dolphin. Fish. Spear. Net. Harpoon . . .”
The journey went on and on, until she had long lost track of the days.
Sometimes the weather would close in, and they would be stuck in their tiny shelter for days, and their mood inevitably turned inward, souring. There was always a tension between the men, she realized, as she learned to read their moods. Kirike was more welcoming; maybe it was Kirike who had wanted to save her in the first place. Heni was much more grudging. She saw something in Kirike’s eyes. He was injured within. Somehow helping her helped him. She fretted that it was a pretty tenuous reason to be kept alive. Dreamer always tried to stay out of the way of any arguments.
As the days passed, it was the sheer endlessness of the journey that wore her down. How large could this briny lake be? Maybe, she thought, brooding, the lake was not of this world at all. She feared she was the last of the True People. If everybody else was dead, maybe she was dead too. What if these strange men weren’t human, but were agents of the Sky Wolf whose rage had destroyed the world?
One day, as the men paddled, with the setting sun bright and pointlessly beautiful in her eyes, she folded her hands on her swollen belly and repeated the ancient priest’s words to her child. “′The world is dead. We are dead, already dead; this is the afterlife, of which even the priests know nothing. Even our totems are dead . . .’ ” She folded over and began to weep, deep heaving sobs, though her tears would not flow.
Kirike stopped paddling. He worked his way down the boat to her, and folded her in his arms. But his thick furs were frost-coated and there was no hint of warmth from him, as if he was dead too, the dead embracing the dead.
Heni snorted his contempt. He stayed where he was, paddling gently.
Thus the days and nights wore away. Until the night she woke up screaming in agony.
22
“You’re mad,” Heni insisted. “You can’t cut the baby out. Even the priests hesitate to do that. And we’re not priests. We’re just two idiots in a boat who can’t even find their way home.”
“There’s no choice. Her waters broke. The baby’s coming.” Kirike, more desperate than he wanted to admit, looked down at Dreamer, where they had laid her down in the shelter of the boat tent. Mercifully the sea was calm. It was the first time in many days the two of them had had to handle the woman like this, but after the contractions had started she had soon lost consciousness. He put his hands under her tunic, over the top of her swollen belly. “But the contractions have stopped. Or they’re so weak I can’t feel them. And even if she woke up to push . . .” He glanced down at the marks of an obvious and brutal rape. “She’d be torn apart.”
Heni put his hand on his shoulder. “Look—you’ve done wonders. She was nearly as dead as that kid when we found her. You brought her back to life. You gave her these days on the boat. She’s even laughed, at times. You gave her that. You can’t do any more for her.”
“I’ve seen this done twice,” Kirike insisted. “The cutting-out. The first time I helped the priest.”
“How long ago was that? You were a boy! Watching a priest do it isn’t the same as doing it yourself, believe me. And the second time—”
“It was Sabet. And, yes, it failed; we lost mother and baby. But don’t you think I paid close attention? Anyhow what do you suggest we do? Tip her over the side?”
“Yes. Let the little mother of the sea embrace her, and her baby. It’s out of your hands now.”
“Not yet.” He felt his heart hammer. He stripped off his tunic so he was bare from the waist up. “Give me my best blade, Heni. The big one of the old Etxelur flint. Get an ember from the fire. And the sleeping moss.”
Heni hesitated for a long moment. Then he began to unpack the fold with their few remaining medicines, put together for them by Jurgi the priest before they left Etxelur, for what should have been a few days’ fishing
and had become a journey of months.
The sleeping moss had been soaked in sap taken from a poppy’s seed pod. Kirike lifted Dreamer’s chin to tip her head back.
“Just a drip in each nostril,” Heni said. “Too little, it won’t take the pain away. Too much and it will poison her—”
“I know! Shut up, man.” Carefully Kirike squeezed the moss over her nose, delivering the droplets. Then he held his hand over her mouth, forcing her to breathe through her nose. She shifted, stirred, moaned.
He leaned over, pushed his arms out through the tent’s flap and dunked his hands in cold seawater. This part he was sure of; the priests at home always used salt water to clean their hands.
He came back into the tent. He lifted Dreamer’s tunic up over her breasts, and shifted around until he was kneeling on the woman’s shoulders, pinning her. “You hold her ankles.”
“We need more people. You always have a whole pack of helpers.”
“We’ll have to make do.” Sweat was running into his eyes. He took his big, familiar blade in his right hand.
“This is about Sabet,” Heni said abruptly.
Kirike halted, his knife poised. “What about Sabet?”
“You couldn’t save her. The priest couldn’t; nobody could. We’re here on the wrong side of the ocean because of Sabet. Now you do this because of Sabet. Even if you save this woman it won’t help Sabet, or your baby. And if you kill her—”
“Shut up!” He wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. “Just hold her.”
Heni grunted, but held the woman’s ankles.
Kirike muttered a prayer to his Other, the clever pine marten. He hefted his blade again, and, trying to be as sure and confident as if he were butchering a seal, he pushed his blade into her flesh, just above the pubic hair, and rapidly made a slit up to her navel. He knew it had to be deep enough to sever the skin, muscle and womb wall, yet he must not harm the baby.
Amniotic fluid spilled, its stink strong, and Dreamer stirred in her drugged sleep. Where the bleeding was heaviest Heni touched the spot with a glowing ember, held between two splinters of seal bone.
“Now the baby,” Kirike said. “Let’s be quick.”
Heni put down the ember, hooked his fingers into the wound, and pulled the stomach walls apart. Kirike quickly widened the cut in the womb and dug out the child. He cupped it in his hand, a greasy creature with shut, swollen eyes that seemed barely human. With a swipe of Etxelur flint he cut the cord and, keeping one hand inside the abdominal wall so it wouldn’t spring back, handed the baby to Heni.
Heni cradled the child, tied off its cord with a bit of twine, and wrapped it in skin cleansed in seawater. Now that they were in the midst of the operation they worked together quickly and well, as Kirike had known they would.
But Kirike’s job was not over; even if the baby survived the mother was yet to be saved. In his mind’s eye he imagined what the priests had done, how they had worked to save Sabet. He had to fix the womb. Reaching in he scooped out clots, and felt for the placenta. It was extraordinary to look down and see his own bloody hand thrust into the belly of this woman, who he had never met a month ago, whose very language he couldn’t speak.
He removed the placenta and dumped it in a bowl, but a loop of intestine escaped through the wound. “Help me . . .” Heni, holding the child, reached over with one hand and pushed the pink-gray worm back into the hole. Kirike kept pressing the womb, which he knew had to be held firmly as it contracted. Had he compressed it enough? He had no idea.
Dreamer stirred again.
“We have to turn her over to drain her. Hold the wound . . .”
Heni put the baby down and grabbed hold of Dreamer’s flesh at either end of the wound, by her navel and her crotch. He kept hold as Kirike pushed the woman over on her side, and the fluid in her abdominal cavity drained out. Then they rolled her back.
“Now the pins . . .” These were splinters of bone that he pushed into the flesh to either side of the wound. He looped thread around each pair of pins, and pulled them tight. Thus the wound was closed, one stitch at a time. Heni held the ends of the wound firmly until the stitching was done. Then Heni smeared a poultice over the wound, made of herbs given them by Jurgi the priest.
When it was done Kirike gently lifted Dreamer up at the shoulders, and she moaned again. Heni got a bandage of sealskin under her lower back, and pulled it around her body.
Kirike thrust his head out of the shelter. He tipped the placenta out of the bowl into the sea, and let his hands trail in the water until they were clean. Then he stopped, breathing in, relishing the air’s freshness after the stink of blood. He was shuddering, but not from the cold, though it was a clear starlit night. He started weeping, whether for Dreamer, the baby, Sabet, himself, even Heni, he didn’t know. He touched his face and felt the tears frosting.
And he saw pale rings of light in the water, two of them, concentric around the boat.
He reached down and dangled his fingers. The disturbed water glowed, purple, orange, yellow and gray-white. He knew that if he looked closely enough he would see the myriad living things in every droplet, burning up their little lives for the sake of this gentle light. Looking away from the boat he saw sleek, pale bodies swimming around and around the boat, stirring up the water and making it glow in the inner ring. And a fin, more ominous, circled in the outer ring.
Sharks would be drawn to Dreamer’s blood, the placenta, even to the scent of it from the woman and baby inside the boat. But the dolphins in the inner ring were circling the boat, keeping the sharks away. He muttered a silent prayer, thanking the dolphins.
When he ducked back inside, Dreamer was already conscious, her eyes huge, and she held the scrap of baby to her breast.
Heni was grinning as if he had fathered it himself. “I told you we could do it!”
23
The Year of the Great Sea: Summer Solstice
A sound like a stampede, or like thunder, came rolling across the ocean from the north.
In her house Ana looked up, distracted from her work on the paint. Lightning had been sleeping on one of Zesi’s old skins. He opened his eyes and lifted his ears. It was probably nothing, probably just a storm, just weather. Ana murmured to soothe the dog. Lightning closed his eyes, soon asleep again.
Ana tried to concentrate on what she was doing. Sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, she had lumps of red and yellow ochre, brought by a trader from mines far away in Gaira. She ground these lumps against a sandstone block, making piles of powder that she collected on the scapula of a deer. She also had charcoal powder set aside, and a pot of grease from deer fat, and another of pig’s urine. She mixed these ingredients together in different proportions to make paints in shades of red, orange, yellow, that she ladled carefully into the hollows of bird bones. On the day of the midsummer Giving the priest would use these to mark faces and bodies, and to stain the tattoos of the hunters and racers and swimmers and wrestlers.
It was slow and careful work, and she had to get on with it. The solstice, only days away, wouldn’t wait for her.
It was also quite a responsibility. In years past she’d helped her mother prepare the paint, and before that her grandmother, Mama Sunta, but now the job was hers alone. It was delicate work, you could easily waste a whole batch of the precious ochre, and getting the colors just right was important for the priest’s ceremonies.
Thunder, though. Odd. Distracted, she put down the ochre lumps.
She was alone in the house, and had the door flap shut against drafts, though bright midsummer daylight seeped around its loosely fixed seams. The house was tidy, orderly. Neither of the Pretani boys had come back from the disastrous summer camp, Gall having run off after the murder of the snailhead, and Shade having headed home. Ana and Zesi had thrown out their abandoned gear, their skins and their weapons and their piss-pots, and they had practically taken the house apart to get rid of the boys’ male stink. Yet the house wasn’t the way it ha
d been before, in the old days before their mother had died and their father disappeared. It had become a lifeless place, where the tension between the sisters crackled . . .
Summer storms were unusual. Earlier the day had been bright and clear, the sky the color of eggshells. Not a stormy day at all.
She heard a commotion outside, raised voices. Glad of the excuse, she stood up. Lightning lifted his head. “You stay,” she said. “Good boy.”
She pushed her way out of the house. As she emerged, blinking in the bright noon light, she saw people streaming over the bank of dunes toward the Seven Houses. Nobody was smiling.
Arga dashed up to her. “Ana, I came to tell you!”
“What is it—a storm?”
“No, silly. It’s Shade. He’s back! The Pretani are back!”
And Ana understood the grim expressions on the faces of the adults. She hurried after the crowd.
Here they came—she counted—a dozen Pretani, clambering over the dunes. All male as far as she could see, all big men, they wore heavy brown cloaks and headdresses and thick fur boots; they must be hot on this summer day. Some of them were beating drums, wooden bowls over which fine hide was stretched, their leather-topped sticks making a cacophonous, threatening noise. But that wasn’t the thunder she had heard earlier, she was sure.
“Moon and sun,” muttered Zesi, who came to stand beside Ana. “That’s Shade.” She pointed at one of the men in the lead.
“You can tell from this distance? Well, I suppose you’d know. You saw more of him than me—”
“Oh, shut up.”
“And the big man with him—”
“His father, I guess. The Root. The big man of the Pretani.”
Now Ana looked more closely, she saw how the Root looked more like Gall than his younger son, the same stocky build, the same blunt face. “Better keep Lightning tied up, then. We don’t want to scare them to death.”
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