Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  Ana, hesitant, hugged her back. “What for?”

  “I don’t know. For all I’ve done, and for all the horrible things I’ll do in the future, that will hurt you one way or another. For that’s what I’m like, you know.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Ana said dryly, making Zesi laugh. “But we’ll always be sisters. No matter what we do we can’t wipe that away.”

  “I wish I had your wisdom.”

  “And I wish I had your eyebrows. Now go, and keep safe.”

  Arga came running up, followed by a bouncing Lightning. Arga was crying. “I slept late! I nearly missed you!” She grabbed Zesi’s waist, and Lightning jumped up at them. “If you’d gone before I could say good-bye—”

  “It’s only a couple of months.” But Arga looked up, her round face streaked with tears, and Zesi saw that two months was a long time in such a young life. “I’ll be back before the summer is done.” Gently she pushed Arga away. “I’ll teach you dolphin riding.”

  “Ha! Or I’ll teach you, more like . . .”

  The Root rumbled in his own tongue, “Are we done? It would be good to get past those sand dunes yonder before the sun goes down . . .”

  So they set off, the Root and his son leading the hunters, and Zesi and the priest following. The Etxelur folk waved and clapped, and for a while Arga and an excited Lightning ran alongside the little column.

  Zesi glanced back at Ana and her father. It struck Zesi that Kirike hadn’t spoken to her all morning, hadn’t embraced or kissed her—hadn’t said good-bye. Even now he didn’t so much as wave.

  She turned and walked up toward the dunes.

  They marched steadily south.

  The coastal plain gave way to rolling hills, and for the first few days they followed faintly defined trails through banks of heather and bracken. The high moorland was thick with billows of gorse, prickly green and yellow, and with broom, a subtly gentler shade. The thorn bushes bore white blossoms, and buttercups with big, heavy, bright yellow heads dotted the grasslands. Ground-nesting birds rose at their approach, piping their indignation.

  Once, on a ridge, Jurgi pointed out vast herds far away, cattle or deer, like the shadows of clouds on the earth. The priest said, “The Pretani are ferocious hunters, but if there were a hundred times a hundred more of them they could never empty the world of game.”

  As they walked, Zesi was aware of Shade all the time—all the time—as if he was the center of the world, and the brightest thing in it. And in the night, when he lay just paces away from her, she ached for him deep in her belly. But she dared not speak to him, even come close to him. If he was drawn to her in the same way she saw no sign of it. Perhaps the murder of his brother, all because of her, had burned out whatever he felt for her.

  The Pretani, men of the forest, were uncomfortable in open country, and they eyed the world around them suspiciously. Each night when they made camp it always had to be under trees, even if they stopped at some copse long before the sun was down, and wasted traveling time.

  It was only when they rounded the vast salt marshes at the eastern neck of the Moon Sea, and walked west into a landscape coated more thickly with forest, that the Pretani started to look happier. Still, this wasn’t like the oak wildwood of their home; here birch dominated a more open forest, with groves of juniper and alder and rowan and cherry. Occasional pines grew tall, with lichen clinging thickly to their branches. Zesi knew that forest like this cloaked much of the southern reaches of Northland, all the way to the south coast where the snailheads came from. The going was easy, the forest open enough to let in plenty of light, and the Root led them confidently through an undergrowth of fern and bracken and vivid moss carpets.

  That first evening in the forest, when they camped in comforting gloom under the trees, Zesi sat with the priest, preparing a meal of salted meat with mushrooms fried on a hot rock in the fire. The Pretani had picked the mushrooms for them, knowing what was safe to eat here and what was not. The scent of the burning birch logs was strong and resinous, and the flames licked bright orange.

  Zesi heard the drumming of a woodpecker, loud and regular.

  Jurgi got up, took a stick, and hammered on a tree trunk. The woodpecker stopped drumming and came fluttering into sight in the high branches of the tree, a big bird, black and white with a splash of red on its underbelly. “It drums to attract the females. Thinks I’m a rival.” Jurgi dropped the stick and waved his fingers. “Fly away, little man. I’m no threat. Unlike these Pretani.” He sat with Zesi again.

  “It occurs to me,” she said, “that I don’t know any of their names. The Pretani, aside from Shade and the Root. I know everybody’s name in Etxelur.”

  “They run things differently in Albia. The Root and his sons matter more than anybody else, save maybe their priests. What they say goes. Everybody else just has to obey—”

  “Like a child.”

  “No, not that. You may guide a child’s behavior, but you expect her to grow into an adult who will make her own decisions. No, the other Pretani are like dogs, like Lightning. Who must always do as they’re told, all their lives. I know it’s odd but it’s the way they are. And they’re not unique. You should talk to Novu.”

  “Who? Oh, the rock maker.”

  “Brick maker.” He used Novu’s own word. “I think it’s similar where he comes from.”

  “Why would anybody want to live like that?”

  “Because it works. The Pretani seem to control a lot of their country. And it suits the top men. Look how big the Root’s belly is.”

  That made her laugh.

  She watched Jurgi as he sat at ease, bare to the waist, cross-legged, picking bits of meat and mushroom from the hot rock. She thought back to how she had looked at Ana as she had set off from Etxelur—as if she had never seen her sister before. It occurred to her that she rarely looked at people. She was too busy blundering through life, in pursuit of something or other. People were a means for her to achieve her goals, or they got in the way. “You’re doing well,” she said now. “On the walk, I mean.”

  He grinned. “Thanks. I’m enjoying learning how to hunt from the masters. The range of signs they look for, the animals’ scent, piss, scut, saliva, signs of feeding, broken twigs . . . Even a bent blade of grass tells a story. And they don’t just track the animals, they seem to try to guess how it thinks, where it will go, the decisions it will make. Remarkable. No wonder the Pretani eat so well.”

  “I thought you’d turn back in a day, or I’d be carrying your pack after two.”

  He shrugged. “I’m a priest. Priests don’t have to do a lot of walking, or carrying. But I was a boy before I became a priest. I won a lot of the kids’ challenges at the Giving feasts—this was when you were small; I guess you wouldn’t remember. Once I was chosen I gave all that up. People don’t want to find themselves being beaten in some race by a priest—or, worse, to beat him. It complicates relationships.”

  “How were you chosen?”

  “Old Petru touched my shoulder one day. You remember him, the priest before me? He told me he saw I was more interested in people than in hunting or fishing.”

  “In people? Not in the spirits?”

  “Petru said the way to hear the spirits is to listen to other people. I think he was right. And listening is the point of having a priest in the first place.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, yes.” He studied her coolly. “Even when no words are spoken, there is always something to listen to.”

  That confused her, and she went on the offensive. “I still don’t understand why my father was so keen for you to come with me.”

  He glanced over at the Pretani. “A man of Etxelur beside you when you sleep will make you seem less available to our hosts.”

  “I don’t need some man to fight for me.”

  “I understand that. As does your father. But he doesn’t want you fighting at all. There has been enough fighting. That’s why he chose me. I am a man, but not a ma
n who fights. Now, are you going to eat the rest of that mushroom or not?”

  She took some more mushroom, but the flesh was heavy, tasteless. Suddenly it made her nauseous. She left the rest to him.

  The nausea didn’t go away. That night she slept badly, her stomach churning.

  And in the morning, in the dawn light before most of the Pretani woke to begin their ritual of comparing overnight erections and noisy pissing, she found her belly convulsing. She staggered to the root of a tree and threw up, expelling half-chewed lumps of fungus. Jurgi rubbed her back until the vomiting was over, then gave her a wooden cup of water. He wasn’t perturbed; oddly he seemed to have been expecting this.

  It had probably been the mushrooms.

  30

  The Root, following well-defined tracks, led them south until they broke out of the woodland and reached a coastal strip just north of an immense estuary. This was the mouth of a river pouring from the southwest, such an immense flow that the sea was discolored by freshwater far from the shore. The Pretani called this the Great River.

  Zesi knew where she was, roughly. All of Northland was like a great neck connecting Gaira and the eastern lands to the peninsula of Albia to the west. Just here that neck was close to its narrowest; only a few days’ walk south of here was another mighty estuary, fringed, so she had heard, with cliffs of dazzling white rock—the homeland of the snailheads.

  They walked on, skirting the mud flats of the river mouth, disturbing flocks of birds. On the salt marsh sea lavender grew, attracting buzzing bees, and redshank and curlews fed busily. In the distance Zesi often saw threads of smoke rising, and flat-bottomed boats sliding over the glimmering waters: folk of the marshes living off prawns and crabs and eels and birds’ eggs, as such folk did everywhere. She felt a flicker of curiosity. Would these isolated folk speak the same kind of language as the Pretani, or Northland folk, or another sort of tongue entirely? But the Pretani marched on without stopping, and she never found out.

  Now they followed trails that ran south and west, parallel with the river and pushing deep into the heart of Albia. Willow grew by the water’s edge, and where the river widened into a flood plain trees grew sparsely, mostly hazel and alder.

  But it was on the higher land away from the flood plain that the true forest started to take hold, dominated by oak and lime, with groves of hazel in their green shade. Some of the oaks grew huge, much larger than any tree Zesi had seen before, with massive wide trunks that towered up to dense tangles of branches. You had an overwhelming impression of age, of weight, of stern solidity. Zesi could see why the Pretani’s imaginative lives were so dominated by such trees.

  But she found the country difficult, claustrophobic. Away from the scraps of higher ground the great trees grew so thickly they formed a canopy that excluded the light, and at the oaks’ feet little grew save ferns and mushrooms amid a litter of dead, crisp-crunching leaves. Sometimes she would hear the rain hiss on the leaves far above, but barely a drop would reach the ground. The most attractive places were, oddly, places of death. When one of the great trees fell, perhaps struck by lightning, it could bring down its neighbors and open up a stretch of the canopy. In the brief gift of sunlight plants and saplings grew feverishly around the wreck, competing to reach the canopy before it sealed over again.

  It was always quiet here in the gloom, with the birdsong restricted to the canopy far above. She rarely saw animals or their signs—deer and wild boar, perhaps a squirrel scurrying in the higher branches, badger setts, mouse holes around tree roots. But the Pretani hunters were usually successful when they went on a raid.

  And the nights were strange, the forest full of the cries of birds and animals she didn’t recognize. Sometimes in the dark she heard shuffling, twigs cracking and leaves rustling. There were bears in these woods; the Pretani told her all about the size of their claws.

  The Pretani were at home here. In the forest shade, with their dark fur cloaks and massive frames, they were like figures carved of oak wood themselves. As they walked they looked out for the hives of wood ants, huge brown mounds that could be as tall as a person. The Pretani would shove their arms into these and bring out handfuls of big wriggling insects that they popped into their mouths and ate like berries.

  Jurgi said the hives reminded him of Novu’s rapt descriptions of Jericho.

  On their third day in the forest, with the sluggish river a few hundred paces away, they came to a particularly gnarled tree, obviously very old. It was not tall, but its branches were a tangle, its flank scarred by the stumps of fallen limbs. Its bark was cracked and punctured, and the trunk was pocked by deep holes.

  The Pretani seemed to recognize the tree. The hunters dumped their packs by the roots and dispersed to empty their bladders, set up lean-tos. The Root slapped the tree’s bark, and walked around it as if checking if it was healthy.

  Zesi murmured, “He treats that tree like an old friend.”

  “The very old trees are special,” Jurgi said. “The priests come to them for certain types of plants and fungi and insects that flourish nowhere else. And then there’s the very age of the thing. Look at it, bent like an old man—a witness to generation after generation. These Pretani aren’t altogether without sensitivity.” He sighed, and began to unfold his and Zesi’s packs.

  Zesi walked off into the forest, looking for wood for the fire. She came to a younger oak with a broken, dangling branch. It would come away with a hard tug, she decided, and would make a good mass to be dragged back to camp.

  She thought she heard something overhead, a rustle in the leaves. She glanced up but saw nothing but shadows.

  She got her hands over the branch and shoved it down. Its joint with the tree creaked.

  “No.” It was Shade. He came walking from the camp. “The branch isn’t dead.”

  “It’s broken.” She knew that the Pretani, obsessed with the spirit of the oak, would only use its wood on their fires if it was already fallen. “See? It’s nearly come away from the trunk.”

  “Yes, and it may fall soon, but for now it’s still alive.” He pointed at green leaves at the end of the branch. “If you bring that back to camp—”

  “The Root will shove it down my throat.”

  “Something like that.” They stood there, on either side of the dying branch, facing each other. It was the first time they had been alone since leaving Etxelur—the first time, in fact, since the day of the Giving, the day of Gall’s death.

  He turned away.

  “Wait.” She grabbed his arm, the bare flesh below his elbow. The feel of his skin was vivid, a shock, like a sudden spray of cold seawater here in the dense heart of the forest.

  He didn’t look back, but he didn’t pull away.

  “Please. It can’t be wrong for us to talk.”

  “But what we did was wrong.” He shrugged. “You were for Gall. It would have united our house with yours. That’s the way my father plans. He thinks of long times ahead, of his children and his grandchildren and how they will fare in the future. He thinks like a tree that will not die. We are young; we think with our bodies. You were not for me.”

  “Oh, yes, I was,” she said hotly.

  “No.” He turned. “Maybe it all drove me crazy, a shy forest animal. The way the light is in Etxelur. The sea, the huge sky. You. I forgot that I am Pretani.” Gently, he pulled his arm away. “You’ll see when you know us more. We aren’t as like beasts as you think.” He touched the damaged oak, laying his hand on its bark reverently. “The tree is the center of our world. We are named for its parts. It feeds and sustains us and holds up the sky. We believe that somewhere a mighty tree connects the deepest dark of the earth with the highest reach of the sky, where branch and root reach around and tangle up with each other, so that all is one.”

  She wished his hand lay on her as it lay on the trunk of the oak. “You sound like a priest.”

  He smiled. “Wait until you see our priest! He lives in a tree, I mean in it, in a chamber car
ved into the trunk . . .“ There was another rustle high in the trees. He glanced up, frowning.

  She didn’t want this fragile intimacy to end. “I wish we could run away. Just go.”

  He stared at her. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? We don’t need people. My father spent nearly a year on a boat, just him and Heni. We are young, healthy. We can hunt and build houses for ourselves. Let’s get away from here, find a land of strangers, trade with them. Anything is better than this—to be close to you but not able to touch you.”

  He shook his head, grinning. “But we have responsibilities. And—”

  “Look out!”

  Strong palms slammed into her back, and she was thrown facedown in the leaf mulch. She heard a creak of wood, a sharp crack. Something heavy smashed into the earth beside her.

  Winded, she raised herself up on her elbows.

  Jurgi the priest was on his back, unmoving. A rotten, lichen-choked branch lay across his belly, and there was an ugly gash on his forehead.

  “Priest? Priest!” Shade knelt down and inspected Jurgi, feeling at his neck for a pulse. Then he took Jurgi in his arms and stood, lifting him, groaning as he took the priest’s weight. He glanced back at Zesi. “Are you all right?”

  She stood up. She was winded, and her palms were bruised from breaking her fall, and there were leaves in her hair. “I’m fine. What happened?”

  Shade kicked the fallen branch. “He knocked you out of the way of this. Saved your life, possibly. Come on, let’s get him back to the camp.”

  One of the Pretani hunters, a man called Alder, turned out to have an instinct for medicine. Jurgi was put on his back on a bed of leaves. Alder checked his breathing, dug his fingers into Jurgi’s mouth to be sure there was no danger he would swallow his tongue, and dribbled sips of water into the priest’s mouth.