Kirike was closer to the shore when the third wave came. He swam, making his steady crawling strokes, ignoring the fatigue, trying not to track the time.
And he saw the wave coming. Suddenly it towered over him, a cliff of water, its face flecked with debris, and the air was filled with a rushing, stormy noise. He stopped, just for a heartbeat, looking up, unbelieving.
Then he swam. He made his strokes desperately now, working the water with his feet and arms. In the last moment, in the shade of the wave, he took a final gulp of air.
The wave slammed down and he was immersed, surrounded by rubbish, dead fish, seaweed, silt, bits of floating wood. He fought to stay upright, to kick toward the surface. But then a current grabbed him, incredibly strong, and he and the fish went plummeting down into the darker deep, incredibly fast and far. The water squeezed his chest and he lost his air, his last precious lungful bubbling before his face.
He slammed into the floor of the ocean. His leg twisted in mud and his head smashed against a rock. Through churned-up silt he saw his own blood, deep crimson red, clouding the water. He fought on, but his leg was a mass of pain when he tried to kick.
Now another current picked him up and hurled him away like a leaf in a breeze. Still he struggled.
But he had to breathe. The water forced its way into his throat and lungs, an agonizing intrusion, and he convulsed.
It wasn’t death that he feared but the thought of all he had left undone. He had to get to the shore, to Ana.
But the darkness closed around him. Still struggling, he sank into the welcoming mud.
43
When Ana, Novu and Dreamer staggered to Arga’s parents’ house, Rute and Jaku were both inside. Lightning had followed them back from the beach, and when the three of them came in he jumped up at Ana, tail wagging in pleasure.
Jaku was stunned to see them. Their presence pushed back the nameless fears in his head, just a little.
But Rute continued preparing a fire in the hearth. She barely looked up. Since they had watched the sea take Josu, Jaku didn’t know what was going on in his wife’s mind.
Now Jaku took in the state of the three of them, Ice Dreamer draped over Novu, Ana clutching Dreamer’s baby. They were panting, soaked, battered, all of them smeared with blood and sea-bottom mud. Novu was all but naked, as if the clothes had been ripped off his back.
And his daughter was missing. Somehow he hadn’t seen it immediately. “Where’s Arga? Wasn’t she with you? You were going down to the sea—”
“We got caught by the second wave,” Ana said. “We hung on . . .”
Novu insisted, “We have to go on. All of us. Get to the high ground. As high as possible above the next wave.”
“What next wave? Where’s Arga?” Jaku faced Ana. He wanted to shake her, but she held the baby close.
“I’m sorry,” Ana said, desolate. “She hurt her leg. I had the baby. I couldn’t carry Arga too—”
Rute, still working the fire as if this was a normal day, just a friendly visit, actually smiled. “Arga’s a strong swimmer. She’ll be all right in the sea.”
Ana said, “Rute. Aunt—you have to come with us. It might not be safe here.”
“No, no, I’ve got this fire to build. Arga’s going to be cold and wet when she gets in. And hungry, mark my words. She takes a lot of feeding, that girl!” She kept heaping up peat blocks, and she inspected a bowl of broth hanging on a rope from a house post.
Jaku touched Ana’s arm. “She’s been this way since the beach. At first she was all right—she reacted quicker than I did. But then the first wave came and took poor Josu, just like that. Since then she’s been like this.”
“You have to come,” Novu said grimly. “If the next wave is bigger than the second, as the second was bigger than the first—”
Jaku looked back at his wife, despairing, his head full of a formless anxiety over Arga. “It’s no use. Even if I tried to drag her we’d be too slow. We’re going to have to take our chances here. Who knows? Maybe there won’t be another wave.”
Ana’s eyes brimmed. “Oh, Jaku—”
“Go.” Go, he thought, before I begin to hate you for abandoning my daughter. “Take her, Novu.”
Novu nodded curtly. Still supporting Dreamer, he took firm hold of Ana’s arm and dragged her out of the house.
Lightning followed, wagging his tail, but then looked back at Jaku, obviously confused. Jaku made a sweeping gesture after Ana. “Go with Ana, you stupid dog! Ana, call him.”
“Lightning! Come on, boy!” Lightning, thinking he was going to play, ran after her, yapping.
Jaku went back to his wife, who was continuing to build her fire. He knelt beside her. “You’re doing a good job.”
She smiled. “You know me. The most important skill in the world, Mama Sunta used to say, knowing how to make a good fire. Could you pass me more kindling? There’s a new heap in the corner.”
So they worked in silence. Jaku deliberately thought of nothing else but the fire, the fine art of layering the fuel over the kindling so there were plenty of gaps for the air to flow through. At length it was time for Jaku to unwrap the ember from last night. He placed it reverently in the middle of the fire. Rute took some bits of dried moss and dropped them on the ember, blowing on them as they started to smoke.
But then she sat back and looked at the floor. “Oh. That will make a mess of things.”
Cold, muddy seawater was seeping over the floor. It was coming in from the door, which faced north like all the houses in Etxelur, a steady flow that soon became a gush. They stood up, suddenly ankle deep in cold seawater.
There was a roaring, like some huge gruff animal approaching, and the sky seemed to darken.
Jaku held his wife and hugged her close. “It would have been a good fire,” he murmured.
“Yes. Shame it’s going to waste.”
The ground shook. He felt his heart expand with a huge love, for his wife, his daughter, for this place where he’d lived such a happy life. He longed for Arga, but it was better that she wasn’t here—that there was a chance she was alive somewhere else. “You know, Rute—”
The third wave was like a slap from a giant, smashing the house and ending their lives in an instant.
Ana, Novu and Dreamer reached the summit of Flint Island’s single low hill, which had long ago been cut open to reveal its precious flint lode. They flung themselves down, exhausted.
Ana handed Dreamer her baby. Dreamer hugged Dolphin close, murmuring, “Thank you, thank you,” in her own tongue and Ana’s, over and over.
More people came struggling up the hill, children, adults carrying infants, some burdened with bags of tools or clothes. Ana knew everybody by name. Nobody spoke, for there was little to say.
Only Lightning was full of energy. He ran around, sniffing the baby’s wrap and tugging at the adults’ tunics, wagging his tail in his demands to play. Eventually he saw a pair of pine martens, driven to this high ground as the people had been, and ran off, barking.
There was an interval when the sea looked calm, as if it had returned to normal, settling back to its usual tide line. Then Ana saw the third wave. Rushing in from the horizon, it was a wall of gray water that would have towered even over its predecessors.
The beach, littered with corpses and struggling people still tangled in the fishing nets, was covered over, erased.
Then the wave broke over the dunes, and the great curving middens, already eroded, were broken open. Ana saw the pale glint of exposed bone, the work of uncounted generations undone in an eye blink. The water pushed through the dune line and into the lower land beyond, pooling across meadows, tearing whole trees out by their roots, crushing houses. It did not stop until it poured into the calmer waters of the bay behind the island, and had covered all of Etxelur.
44
The sky was huge. Arga had never seen so many stars. But her mother had always said that with the stars the more you looked the more you saw, and it was tru
e.
She tried not to think of her mother, however. If she did, she remembered how far away she was from home. After all, if she lifted her head and looked around, she could see nothing but stars all the way down to a pitch-black horizon. No line of fires, no sign of the shore.
She thought she slept a bit.
When she woke, she found her unconscious body had snuggled down to find a more comfortable position, enfolded by the tree. Lying here like this, even her sprained ankle didn’t hurt anymore, and she seemed to forget how hungry she was, how thirsty. The tree didn’t even roll that much as it rose up over the waves, which were gentler now. It was as if the tree was embracing her, holding her safe. Well, it was as far from home as she was, its very roots ripped out of the ground.
The tree was all that was real. The only sound she heard outside her own head was the soft lapping of the water against the branches and trunk. Maybe she ought to be afraid of the huge expanse of sea beyond, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it.
She slept again.
The next time she woke she saw light. A pink-gray sheen was seeping into one side of the sky, reflecting from flat layers of cloud. The other way, to the west, the stars still shone, though more palely. Above her head the sky was a deep blue dome, with only the brightest stars left visible. She felt a vast reluctance to be dragged into the day, from the safety of the dreamlike night.
And she heard something, a small splashing, a creak like a branch in the wind.
She sat up, making the tree rock, and looked east. She saw a shape silhouetted against the light, cutting through the water, and for an instant she thought it was a shark. Then she made out the clean profile of a boat, and the shadow of a man, alone, working two paddles. Smooth slow ripples spread from the prow.
She waved, and tried to call. “Hello?” But her throat was sore and dry, her voice no more than a whisper, dwarfed by the sea. “Hello! Hello! I’m here!”
45
Through the night they huddled on top of the hill, Ana, Dreamer and Novu, with Dreamer’s baby cupped between their bodies. Other refugees crowded the slopes.
In the starlit dark, Ana slept only fitfully. All night Lightning cuddled up against Ana’s back, his head tucked in against her tunic, with occasional twitches, snuffles and yipped barks as he chased pine martens in his sleep. Once, the baby stirred, hungry, and mewled; Dreamer held her close and fed her, murmuring soft words in her own transoceanic language.
Ana longed to be the one cuddling in, to be sleeping between her mother and her father as she used to when she was very small. But that wasn’t going to happen, not ever again.
They began to stir not long after dawn. Oddly Ana had just fallen into her deepest slumber, and she had trouble waking up.
Novu walked away and stepped behind a rock to make water; she could hear him groan from stiffness and bruises. Dreamer sat cross-legged, rocking her baby and murmuring to her, for a brief moment lost in the bond between them, but when Ana sat up Dreamer smiled warmly at her. Ana understood. Without Ana, Dreamer’s baby might not even be alive to see this morning. But with that thought came the memory of how she had been forced to abandon Arga.
Ana moved over to a broken heap of rocks, took off her loin wrap, and squatted to piss. The hill’s small summit, the flint lode, the sandstone tufted with grass and sparse heather, looked deceptively normal. After all, even the great third wave had not climbed as high as this. All around her people were moving, children and adults waking, and picking their way down the slopes.
Lightning came sniffing at Ana’s bare rump, wagging his tail, and she pushed him back. “Oh, get away, you silly dog . . .” The dog roamed around, marking stones and patches of turf with sprinkles of urine, and he licked at the light dew on the blades of grass.
“He’s thirsty,” Novu observed, hitching his trousers. “Well, so am I. There’s no spring up here, is there? We’ve no food either.”
“We’ll find water easily enough when we climb down,” Dreamer said.
Ana asked, “Is it safe to go down?”
“The sea’s gone back,” Novu said, pointing north. “It looks normal to me. Lapping away as it always has. It’s what it’s done to the land that’s going to be interesting. Are you ready? There’s no point staying here.”
“Help me with the baby,” Dreamer said.
With Novu’s help Dreamer fixed Dolphin in her sling on her back. Ana pulled on her boots.
Then the three of them stood together, looking at each other. Ana flexed her arms and legs, spreading her hands; she was stiff, sore, but everything worked. “We’re all whole, at least. No broken limbs, no cracked heads.”
Novu was bare to the waist, his tunic ripped apart. Like the others he was covered in minor cuts, and bruises that were beginning to yellow. He said, “Today’s going to be difficult. Just remember—one footstep at a time. I learned that on the road. That’s how to get through the tough times.”
A bubble of fear and resentment burst inside Ana. “Brave words from the thief who hides away in a hole in the ground.”
Novu flinched.
Dreamer said, “That was yesterday, Ana. Today the world is different, and we are different people in it. I have a feeling we’re going to need each other.”
This was very adult, but Ana didn’t much want to be an adult right now. “Enough talking. Let’s go.” She turned away, ignoring the others.
The dog ran around and barked, mouth open, tail wagging; he thought it was time for a walk.
She led the way down the path they had climbed in such haste yesterday, with Lightning running at her heels. It was a well-worn track that led down from the flint lodes, a track she had walked many times.
It was a calm morning. She heard gulls calling somewhere, the distant sigh of breaking waves. Everything felt normal. That dismal flight yesterday was like something from a nightmare, not connected to the mundane reality of the morning at all.
Then, on the hill’s lower slope, she first came to the pale sand. She stepped forward onto it cautiously. White, full of stones and shells, it crunched under her feet.
From this ragged edge onward the sand covered the ground like a layer of snow.
“Look at this.” Novu walked to a stand of trees, alder and lime. Most of the trees still stood, though one had been knocked flat, its trunk snapped. Novu kicked at the trees’ roots. “There’s no soil . . .” Ana saw that the surviving trees were rooted to a reef of gravel. Only scraps of peat and topsoil and grass clung to the roots. “I never saw anything like it,” Novu said. “It looks as if the trees grew out of the gravel bank.”
“The waves,” Dreamer said slowly. “If they sucked people out to sea, so they sucked away the earth itself.”
The dog was digging at the roots of one of the larger of the surviving trees. He pushed his small face forward and lapped. Ana remembered there had been a spring here where she had sometimes drunk herself. But Lightning backed off, staring at the water as if puzzled.
Novu bent down, cupped some of the water in his hand and sipped it. “Salty. Like the sea.”
“It can’t be,” Ana said. “There’s a spring here. Springs are freshwater.”
He shrugged and backed away. “Check for yourself. There’s nothing for us here.”
“Let’s go on,” Ana said.
She led them toward the beach. This was the way they had walked yesterday morning, but now everything had changed. Water stood in pools, briny and lifeless. Even the path they followed, trodden by generations of feet, had vanished under the strange all-covering layer of pale new sand.
The beach itself was littered with debris, with great banks of seaweed and driftwood, even whole trees, and sheets of turf, the skin of the land ripped off and dumped here. All the works of people had vanished, the drying racks for the fish, the boats. There was no sign of the fishing nets and tangled-up bodies. Maybe they had been swept to sea, or deposited somewhere else. But there was a reef at the high-water mark of other sorts of cor
pses: fat seals, glistening fish, and many, many birds, their fragile wings broken and twisted.
A few people were here, looking dazed, poking among the beach’s litter. The dog nosed around seaweed heaps, curious. There was a gathering stink of rot, and scavenger birds circled. Novu climbed over the sea wrack, and Ana wondered spitefully if he was searching for his bag of stolen stones.
Dreamer pointed. “The dunes have gone—or they’re changed, at least.” So they had; the neat line of dunes, bound together by marram grass, had been broken and smashed, and sand lay heaped up in disorderly piles. “And the middens.”
Novu said, “It’s as if those who made your world—the little mothers?—returned to smash up what they built.”
That swelling of fearful anger threatened to rise up again in Ana. “Whatever caused this was nothing to do with the mothers.”
Dreamer touched her shoulder, trying to soothe her. “I’m sure you’re right. Your father told me of your gods, in those long days and nights in the boat. The mothers built the world; perhaps now they will return to help you build again.”
“Come on,” Novu said, clearly shaken by Ana’s flare of anger, growing uneasy. “We need to get back to the mainland. That’s where we’ll find food and water, and people, and we can start sorting out this mess. Do you think the tide is low enough for us to cross the causeway?” And he led the way west along the shore.
Dreamer followed, then Ana, and then the dog, frisky, anxious, his tongue lolling from his thirst.
46
It was approaching low tide. The causeway should have been cross-able, a strip of muddy ground gleaming above the surface of the sea. But the causeway too had been wrecked by the waves, erased as a child might tread over a line drawn in the sand.
So they walked further along the island’s beach until they found a boat, stranded high above the normal waterline. Just stretched skin over a wooden frame, it was light enough for the three of them to carry down to the water. There were no paddles or bailing buckets.
Stone Spring Page 25
