Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  Ana turned her head from one to the other. “The middens, their shapes—they match the curves of the shining walls. Like ripples on a pond.”

  “Yes,” Arga said, excited. “All with the same center where you threw your stone.”

  “And that’s not all.” Dreamer grabbed Ana’s tunic and lifted it, exposing her belly. And there, above the cloth she wore over her loins, was Ana’s blood-tide tattoo. Dreamer traced it with a trembling finger. “Can you see? Three circles, cut to their common center by this tail. You have this symbol scrawled over your bodies, your tools and weapons, your clothes, your houses. And look!” She gestured at the earthwork. “Three circles . . .”

  Arga and Ana jabbered to each other in their own rapid tongue, barely comprehensible to Dreamer. “The Door to the Mothers’ House! This is it! She must be right.”

  There was a dull roar in Dreamer’s ears. The heat, the exhaustion, were draining her. She clung to Novu’s arm, determined not to faint.

  Novu looked out to sea. “Can you hear something?”

  “Only the blood pounding in my head.”

  “Something else. A rumbling.”

  The girls jumped, excited. Dreamer, growing dizzier, was losing her ability to translate the girls’ words, and their prattle blurred in her mind as they repeated their name for the earthwork, over and over. “The Door to the Mothers’ House. Door, mothers, house . . . Ate, l’ami, nt’etxe . . . Att-lann-tiss . . .”

  There was a scream, from far away. Shouting voices.

  Novu pointed north. “What’s that?”

  Dreamer peered, and saw a band of blue-black, flecked with white, racing over the exposed mud. The sea, returning.

  Ana cried, “Run!”

  The four of them scrambled down the dune slope, slithering, half-sliding to the bottom. But Arga landed awkwardly on her ankle, and cried out.

  Down on the plain, Dreamer, gasping for breath, couldn’t run. She couldn’t even lift her feet out of the mud. “I can’t—I can’t—”

  “You have to.” Novu held her arm, urging her on.

  “Let me take the baby,” Ana said. Dreamer felt hands working at the sling on her back. “I can carry her, and run faster than you.”

  Dreamer made an instant decision. “Go, then.”

  Ana held the baby in one arm, and grabbed Arga’s hand with her free hand. “Come on, Arga!” She began to run to the shore, but Arga limped badly, crying out.

  Novu said, “You too, Dreamer. Come on.” He pulled at Dreamer, his arm around her shoulders.

  They began hobbling toward a shore that seemed a terribly long way away. Ahead she saw people fleeing, abandoning the fish they had gathered, running from the advancing sea.

  Novu, trying to support her, tripped and fell heavily in the mud. They had gone only a few paces. He rose, filthy, cursing loudly in his own tongue. And he shucked the bag of stones off his back and dropped it in the mud. “There will be other treasures.” He leaned over, got his shoulder under Dreamer’s belly and hoisted her up, holding her legs.

  Her head and upper body flopped over his back. It was shocking, suddenly to be carried like a child.

  He began running. His back was drenched with sweat where it had been under the pack. His strides jarred and winded her.

  She strained to lift her head. That wall of returning ocean looked terribly close. She looked for Ana—and there she was, cradling the baby, and trying to drag Arga. But the younger girl was crying and stumbling, her ankle obviously damaged. No matter how hard Ana pulled her hand, Arga could run no faster than a hobble.

  Ana seemed to be calling to Dreamer, but her voice was drowned by the water’s gathering roar. Then Ana stood still, panting hard. She looked at the baby in her arms, and the limping, weeping Arga. It might only have been a heartbeat. It seemed an eternity to the watching Dreamer.

  And then Ana ran, with the baby, abandoning Arga. The girl in the mud screamed in terror. But Ana ran on, fast and sure over the mud, cradling the baby in her arms. Dreamer whimpered her relief.

  But now the water was close. The new wave was a wall flecked with foam and laden with debris—with whole trees, drowned and ancient and now ripped out of the earth. The very ground shook under the water’s tremendous tread.

  She closed her eyes and tucked her head against Novu’s sweating back.

  41

  The second wave had upended the boat.

  Kirike swam up into sunlight. He coughed, spewing water from deep in his throat. After too long underwater his limbs were shaking, his chest aching, his heart hammering. His head was full of fear, for himself, for his daughters and his family, even for Heni.

  But, exhausted, for now he could do nothing but roll onto his back, floating in the water, the hot sunlight beating on his face.

  Something touched his hand. It was a frond of seaweed. The sea was silty and full of debris, the weed and plants that usually clung to the rocks of the seabed. And a cod floated on its side, a big one, apparently perfect, stone dead.

  “Grab hold.”

  The familiar voice came from behind his head. He glanced back, shielding his eyes. He saw a hand, strong, streaked with blood, reaching out to him. Heni’s. He took it.

  He was hauled backward out of the water and landed on his back in the boat, like a huge fish, lying in water that pooled in the bilge. He sat up. He had lost his boots, he realized, a strange detail. But the boat was intact, though it rode deep in the water.

  Heni was working, lashing their nets and harpoons to the boat’s frame with lengths of line. He was as soaked as Kirike, he had lost his battered old hat, and blood spilled from a deep cut on his arm. “Nice swim? Well, there’s work to be done.”

  “What work?”

  “A bit of bailing might help.”

  Kirike found a wooden bowl and started scooping out the water. He was ferociously thirsty, his mouth and throat burning from the salt water, but their water skins had vanished.

  He glanced around. There was no sign of land. “We’ve gone further out to sea.”

  “Good thing too. The further out we are, the safer we are.”

  “From what?”

  “From the next wave.” He glanced at Kirike. “There’s been two so far. Why not a third?”

  “Right.” Kirike bailed harder. “So we paddle south until we hit the coast—”

  “North,” Heni said bluntly. “I told you. The further out we are, the safer we are.”

  “We’re going to have to talk about that.”

  “Maybe. For now, bail.”

  So Kirike bailed, throwing water over the side of the listing boat, into a sea littered by the corpses of fish, lethally shocked by the passage of the huge wave.

  The huge wave crashed down right on top of Arga, knocking all the air out of her lungs.

  Suddenly she was tumbling in dark water, and her head was full of a deep roaring noise. She let the sea take her. She knew she couldn’t fight the water, which rushed and churned, not like any sea she’d swum in before.

  And she knew not to breathe in. She could hold her breath as long as anybody. She had won the deep-diving at the Giving. If she had beaten everybody that day she could beat this strange sea now. It was just the sea. She had swum in the sea since before she could remember.

  She tried not to think about Dreamer and Novu and Ana, who had run off leaving her behind when the wave came. Ana had had to take the baby. It wasn’t her fault. She’d had no choice. Arga thought of the sunlight, her parents, Jaku and Rute, who would be snug in their house, safe from the raging sea.

  At last the water calmed. She settled to the bottom, onto a layer of rocks. There wasn’t much light. The water was full of sand and broken seaweed fronds, and bits of fishnet and smashed wood. A shoe floated by her face, small, sewn from a bit of doeskin for a very young child.

  And a man drifted past her, eyes wide, mouth open, bubbles streaming from the nostrils.

  Now the panic came, the struggle for air.

  The
current turned. It felt as if a huge invisible hand grabbed her. She knew all about currents in the ocean and their dangers. But she’d never felt an undertow like this. She was dragged backward, scraping painfully over the rocks, dragged further away from land, and her mother.

  When the second wave hit, smashing into her back with a thunderous roar, Ana kept running. She had the baby in her arms, and she couldn’t afford to fall over. It was futile to fight the huge strength of the wave, but she could run with it, struggling to stay upright in its grasp, feet paddling at the sand and rocks, the baby clutched to her chest.

  All over the beach people ran, or fell and thrashed in the water. Some got tangled up in the fishing nets that were still draped over the beach. They would die if they could not free themselves. She knew all these people. She knew their names. She couldn’t help them. All she could do was try to keep the baby out of the water.

  And the wave drove past her and on up the beach, higher than any tide, pounding into the bank of dunes that fringed the beach, causing landslips like huge bites. To her left she saw the middens where only months ago she had buried her grandmother. The sea swept over their smooth curving faces as if the ancient structures were no more than ripples in the sand. Still the sea drove on, pushing even beyond the dunes and into the grassy meadow beyond. Before the rushing water, laden with detritus, houses folded like toys.

  Ana saw one woman swept off her feet and driven headlong into a stout alder trunk. She bent backward like a twig. It was another image that Ana knew she would never forget, if she survived this day.

  But the water’s strength was fading, at last. She could feel the surge weaken.

  She stood still, panting as the water drained around her legs. She had come fifty, a hundred paces beyond the old shoreline, but she was still standing in waist-deep water, from which protruded trees and the leaning remains of fishermen’s huts. Above her head gulls wheeled and cried. Her arms aching, her legs battered and sore, soaked and gasping for breath, she longed to fly up with the gulls and be safe. She wondered how the world looked from up there.

  “Ana! Ana!”

  She saw Novu waving, from a bank of alder not twenty paces ahead of her. He was clinging to a tree. Ice Dreamer was beside him, slumped against the trunk. It was very strange to see trees in full leaf sticking out of seawater.

  Clutching Dolphin, Ana splashed that way. She almost fell, tripping over a tangle hidden under the water. “Dreamer, here, I have Dolphin. I saved her . . .”

  Dreamer, her hair a soaked tangle, lifted her head. Blood ran from a cut on her brow. She seemed barely conscious. But she smiled, reaching for the baby.

  Novu took Ana’s arm. “Listen. Grab a branch, or a trunk. Help me hold onto Dreamer.”

  “Have you seen Arga? I had to leave her—”

  “Ana!” He all but yelled in her face, his eyes so wide she could see white all around, his mouth gaping open, blood and snot running from his nose. “Listen to me. It isn’t over. When this wave goes back it will pull just as hard out to sea, and will try to take us with it. So grab a branch!” He helped her hastily. “Like this. Get behind the trunk and hook your arm over.” He wrapped his own arm around her, and held onto Dreamer with the other arm, and braced himself against the tree trunk. “Here it comes. Get ready . . .” The tug grew smoothly, pulling at her feet and legs, almost seductively. She heard people scream, and the water roared once more. “Hang on!” Novu yelled, the spray splashing over his back. “We can get through this. Just hang on!”

  42

  “I tell you that we want to go out into the open sea, as far as we can. When the next wave comes, the deeper the better.”

  “And I’m telling you we’re going home. I’ve got family, Heni. Daughters. A niece—”

  “Oh, and I can’t see straight because my sons are grown and gone—is that what you’re saying?”

  “I didn’t mean that—”

  “You’re not thinking, man. If we go back now, if we’re in shallow water when the next wave comes, we’ll be killed.”

  “How do you know there will be another wave? I never heard of anything like this. Nor have you.”

  “Look. I’ll do you a deal. Just help me paddle out to the deeper water and wait a bit. If no wave comes, fine, we’ll do it your way.”

  “I’m not waiting at all.” Kirike looked for a paddle.

  But Heni held both paddles in his hands. He sat in the stern of the boat, on the hearth board, looking back calmly at Kirike.

  Kirike stood, and the boat rocked. “Give me a paddle.”

  “I’d sooner break them and chuck them over the side. You know I’d do it.”

  “And you know what my family means to me.”

  “Enough that you paddled across an ocean rather than be with them?”

  “Why, you—” Kirike stood over him and pulled back his fist.

  Heni didn’t flinch. “I’m just telling you the truth, man. I know you love your daughters. But when it comes to your family you just run, one way or another. So let me do the thinking.”

  Kirike dropped his arm. “I can’t fight you. I don’t even want to. You’d probably win anyhow; you always were stronger. Sorry, my friend.”

  And, without letting himself think about it, he slid over the side of the boat and back into the sea. The turbulent water embraced him again, horribly familiar.

  When he surfaced for his first breath, he glimpsed Heni standing in the boat, waving at him. “Come back, you idiot! You’ll kill yourself!”

  He turned away, dipping his head in the water, and concentrated on his strokes.

  He had always been a good swimmer, long in the arms, with big feet to kick at the water, and a good muscular trunk. He had swum out further than this as a boy, he was sure of it. But now he was no longer a boy, and he had already endured one immersion today. His body felt bruised and sore, and his lungs were strained. And what if Heni was right, what if another wave did come? Well, if it did, he would just ride it home.

  None of it mattered, his doubts, his weariness, the treachery of the sea. His decision was made, he was committed. He tried to clear his mind of everything but the smooth clean motion of the strokes. His whole was life reduced to this moment, the swim ahead of him, the next stroke.

  Don’t panic, he told himself. Just don’t panic.

  Don′t panic.

  Arga lay on her back, in the seawater. The sky was bright, and the sun was still high, she saw, amazed. Hardly any time had passed since she had been on the shore with Ana and the others. And now she was here in the middle of the ocean.

  People had died. They must have. She had seen dead bodies in the water. People had died, people she knew, just in that little bit of time.

  But she hadn’t died. When the current had relented, she had at last been able to swim up to the surface of the water, scrambling like an otter up into the air and the light, and she had taken a breath to beat all the breaths she would ever take, alive.

  She knew she was safe in the water. You could float in the seawater without taking a stroke. Uncle Kirike had taught her that, and he was the best swimmer she had ever seen. Just lie back and relax and let your body float.

  And don’t panic. That was the most important thing of all, Kirike had always said. It was as if the sea could smell your panic, and would use it to pull you down if you started thrashing around and screaming.

  But she’d never swum out of sight of the land before. To get home she needed to go south, but the sun was still too high in the sky for her to be sure of which way that was. What if she swam the wrong way, and wore herself out without reaching the shore? Or what if another of those big waves came and broke over her?

  Unsure what to do, she did nothing.

  The ankle she’d twisted still ached. It eased slightly if she twisted her foot in circles this way and that. She concentrated on the small pain of her ankle, and by doing so was able to ignore the fact that if she died, her aching ankle would die with her.

 
She saw a shadow, out of the corner of her eye.

  She twisted to see, lost her balance in the water, and splashed and got a mouthful of brine before she steadied herself, treading water. What had she seen? Was it the shore, a boat, another wave?

  It was a tree branch, complete with green leaves, sticking up in the air out of the sea.

  She took a couple of strokes to get closer. She found, not just a branch, but a tree, a whole tree, an alder, with branches and roots to which muddy soil still clung, floating in the sea. It was one of the strangest sights she had ever seen.

  She swam closer and grabbed a branch, and started to pull herself out of the water. A bird, some kind of finch, flew away with a flutter of wings. She hoped it would find somewhere else to settle. The climb was hard going, for the tree rolled as she hauled her weight into it. But soon she had pulled herself out and sat, dripping, on top of the branches, near the point where they were anchored to the trunk. The roots at the other end of the trunk were like gaunt fingers.

  She imagined the strength that had plucked this whole tree from the ground, as she would pull up a blade of grass.

  She shook out her hair and ran her fingers through it, pulling out bits of seaweed. In the sun’s heat her thin tunic soon dried on her body. Her ankle was showing a livid purple bruise. She was ferociously thirsty. She gathered green leaves and crushed them in her mouth. The sap moistened her tongue.

  What would she do when the sun went down? How long should she stay before trying to swim to shore? She had lots of questions, but her fuzzy head offered no answers.

  Sleep rose up, overwhelming, like another great wave. Lodged in the branches, she lay down so her head was on the trunk, cushioned from the bark by her hands.

  She barely stirred when the next wave came, and lifted the floating tree high in the air.