Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  She touched the bark of the silent oak, then crouched down by its roots. A few acorns floated in a puddle, and she collected a handful absently. Then she dipped a finger in the water and tasted it.

  “Salt?” the priest asked.

  “Salt, yes. I think I remember this place. We are still at least a day from home, from the coast and the sea. How can salt water be poisoning these trees, this far inland?” She looked north, troubled; she sensed a great silence. “Something has happened, priest.”

  “Yes. Though I can’t imagine what.”

  It got worse the next day. They saw more dead trees, more standing puddles of water that always proved to be brackish. In one place the river opened out to a marsh, where at this time of year the wading birds should have been flocking, preparing for their flights to their winter homes, and the reeds turning from green to brilliant gold. But there were no birds, and the reeds were wilted and the willows bare. The place stank of salt and rot and death, and Zesi and Jurgi made a detour to avoid it.

  Then they started to notice a strange covering over the land, a pale, whitish, sandy mud. It had clearly been there for some time, many days or even months, for it had been worked on by the rain and was washing away into rivulets and streams. But in places it stood thick, banked up like snow. Zesi bent to explore this strange stuff; it was gritty and full of stones and broken shells from the sea, and very salty on the tongue.

  As they walked on, the blanket of pale mud grew thicker, until it covered whole swathes of land. In places it included big blocks of peat, torn from the ground. Sometimes it obscured familiar features in the landscape, making tracks hard to spot. There were no raspberries to pluck now, nothing to eat, even fresh water rare.

  But then they came to a place where somebody had taken a stick and scrawled in the mud, making the symbol of Etxelur, the three concentric rings and the radial slash. They both stood over this, oddly reluctant to go on.

  “Hello! Hello!” A man stood by a copse, carrying a wicker basket. He was waving vigorously. His call had been in the Etxelur tongue. “By moon and sun, I’m glad to see you, Zesi, Jurgi; we all will be!”

  He was Matu, a friend of Zesi’s father. They sat together, and shared dried meat and water.

  His skin tunic was filthy, his legs were coated with the white dirt, and his basket was less than half-full of acorns. He had been out since dawn, he said. They were half a day from home. “But you have to come further south every day to find acorns, to find a tree that’s not been poisoned by the Great Sea. I’ve never known an autumn like it. Well, none of us have. We’re trying to get ready for the winter, we all are. But I sometimes wonder if I’m working off more fat than I’ll get back from my share of the acorns. But what can you do?”

  Zesi and Jurgi glanced at each other. The Great Sea?

  “Tell us what happened,” Jurgi said gently.

  So Matu told his story. He mostly spoke to the priest. Jurgi seemed to have a knack of listening, of keeping the man’s anxious gabble flowing. But neither of them knew what to make of Matu’s account, of how the ocean had risen up and smashed Etxelur, drenched the land with salt water and mud, and poisoned every stream and well.

  This wasn’t the Matu Zesi had known, this gaunt, anxious man with the hollow eyes, and gabbling speech. She’d never been much interested in him. He was a decade or so older than her, quiet, not particularly competent, short, squat, balding, with watery eyes. He was never a leader, never the sort of man who could challenge or excite Zesi. She supposed that without people like Matu no community like Etxelur could exist—there would be no stage for the more exciting exploits of people like herself. But now this uninteresting, unprepossessing man lived on where so many others had died.

  And there was something crucial he wasn’t telling them.

  She broke into Matu’s descriptions and grabbed his arm. “My family,” she snapped. “You say many are dead. What became of my family?”

  Matu was frightened, she saw, intimidated by her. Yet he faced her, and spoke clearly.

  And so she learned that she and Ana and Arga were alone now; Kirike was dead, and Arga’s parents, her uncle and aunt.

  She grabbed her pack and spear and stood up. “Let’s go home.”

  49

  They walked down the valley of the Little Mother’s Milk, and at last came home to Etxelur.

  Everything had changed. Much of the land was blanketed by the white muddy sand, which this close to the coast lay waist deep in places. The old houses were gone, smashed and ruined, just as Matu had described. Even the sheltering dunes had been swept away, leaving heaps of sand and ragged clumps of marram grass.

  All that Zesi recognized of her own home, the site of the Seven Houses, as they walked quietly up, was the basic shape of the land, its relation to the river valley to the east. Debris lay scattered on the ground—torn clothes, a necklace of pierced shells tied tight to suit a little girl’s neck. There was only one structure here now, on the site of Zesi’s own old house, a single pole thrust into the ground with a kind of lean-to of posts and kelp and skins heaped up around it.

  And there was only one person here, a girl. She had her back to the newcomers. Dirty, sweating, she was working at a pit dug into the ground. She had a heap of gravel, and with her hands she shoveled this into the pit. Zesi recognized what she was doing. This was a winter store, designed to keep acorns safe from rot and rodents. You sealed the walls with wet clay, and laid down a layer of pebbles and chopped-up reeds, then poured in your acorns, then another layer of rock and reeds, then more acorns. When the acorns were dug out in the leanest times of the winter, they would have lost their bitterness. But Zesi could see the pit was all but empty—a third full, maybe a quarter.

  “It’s going to be a hard winter,” she murmured.

  The girl spun around. It was Arga. Like Matu, she had lost so much weight she was barely recognizable. But a smile as wide as the moon spread across her face. “Zesi! Oh, Zesi!” She got up and hurled herself at her cousin. Zesi felt the girl’s shuddering sobs. “Zesi, Zesi—you’ve been gone so long.”

  “Only a couple of months—”

  “I thought you were dead!”

  Zesi stroked her hair. “Now why would you think that?”

  “Because everybody else is. My mother and my father and Kirike and—” She stopped, and her hand flew to her mouth. “You didn’t know.”

  “Matu told me. I knew. It’s all right . . .” But despite her soothing Arga was crying again, desolately.

  “Poor kid,” Matu murmured. “She’s lost so much. In fact, she’s lucky to be alive, and that’s a story in itself. But at least she’s got you home now, Zesi—and Ana.”

  “Where is Ana?”

  Arga said, “Out fishing, with Heni.”

  Zesi gaped. “Fishing? Timid little Ana, fishing?” And she laughed, something in the shock of the day and the absurdity of the idea forcing the bubble of humor out of her.

  But Arga looked confused, Matu disapproving.

  Matu said, “Yes, she’s out on the ocean, fishing. Things aren’t as they were when you went away, Zesi. We’ve all had to do things we weren’t used to—things we find difficult, or even that scare us to death. We do them anyhow, to stay alive.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just—this is hard for me.”

  He relented. “I know. This is the day you learned your father died. Well.” He glanced at the sky, where the lowering sun was covered by a thin skim of fast-moving cloud. “Weather’s turning, and it’s getting late. The boats will probably be coming in soon. Why don’t you go and meet them?”

  “Oh, yes,” Arga said, eager now. She tugged at Zesi’s hand. “We’ll go to the island. Ana will be so glad to see you, it’s been so long . . . Come on.”

  Zesi slipped off her pack and her spear, and the priest added his pack to the pile. As they followed Arga and Matu she said to Jurgi, “You know, I expected to be the center of attention. Home from our adventures in Albia.” She patted her st
omach. “With news of my own. Instead—”

  “I know. Whatever happened here, these folk have lived through something we’ll probably never understand. But these are still our people, Zesi. And we are theirs. Just hang onto that.”

  Arga and Matu led them around the bay toward the causeway to Flint Island.

  Nature was following its course, Zesi saw. The gray seals, plump after the summer’s riches, were arriving for their breeding season on the offshore rocks. They always returned to the same places, as if coming home.

  But the seals were an exception, life going on amid the destruction. The beaches and marshes and tidal flats all showed signs of the ruin that the Great Sea had wrought: the dunes smashed, houses flattened, even the mud churned up and studded with dead trees and whole clumps of peaty earth. That awful layer of pale sand and mud lay over everything, thick with stones and smashed shells. There was a stink of death, and of rotting fish.

  Everybody looked thin, hollow-eyed, overworked. They seemed pleased to see Zesi and the priest back. But they were few, terribly few. Not many of these survivors seemed to be seriously injured, but there were few young, few old, and many families with gaps, a husband or wife missing, a child or two. She couldn’t have imagined a greater contrast to the happy crowds of the day of the Giving.

  They came to the causeway to Flint Island. People were working out on the line of the causeway itself, doing some kind of repair work with timbers and baskets of gravel; boats stood in the shallow water alongside, laden with supplies. Arga called Novu’s name, and at the middle of the causeway the man from Jericho straightened up, waved, and came back along the causeway, picking his steps with care.

  Arga said, “The Great Sea made a mess of the causeway. Well, it made a mess of everything. You always have to ask Novu or one of the other builders to help you across, because it isn’t finished yet. That’s the rule.”

  “Whose rule?”

  “Ana’s rule,” Novu said as he approached, his strange accent thick. He too had changed since Zesi saw him last, the softness of his dark skin gone, his muscles prominent under a loose tunic. He didn’t look like a man of Etxelur, not quite, but he didn’t look like the creature who had arrived here with the trader either. He held out muddy hands to Zesi. “It’s good to see you back. Ana will be glad to know you’re here.”

  “So you’re building the causeway?” It was a strange thing for her to have to say; the people rarely “built” anything more elaborate than a house.

  “Ana asked me to take charge,” Novu said, with what appeared to be pride. “We build things in Jericho. The Great Sea smashed the causeway, so I’m building it back. We’re filling in the gaps with gravel embedded in mud, and then piling logs on the top until you get a surface that breaks the water at low tide.”

  The priest asked, “Where do you get the logs from?”

  “There are plenty. The Great Sea did a lot of damage far inland. You get whole tree trunks swimming down the river. Or you get trees washed up from the ocean as driftwood.” He grinned at Arga and ruffled her hair. “Like the one that saved Arga’s life.”

  Zesi raised an eyebrow at the priest. That was evidently a story worth hearing.

  “Come on,” Novu said. “I’ll take you across. It’s pretty secure at the center line, but a lot narrower than you were used to. Just tread where I tread.”

  So Zesi and the priest crossed the new causeway, treading in Novu’s footsteps, followed by their excited, tearful retinue. It wasn’t difficult, provided you knew where to put your feet.

  Arga held Zesi’s hand tightly, as if she might leave again.

  From the causeway Zesi got a good view of the ocean to the north, for the first time since returning to Etxelur. Something in her heart lifted at its gray hugeness. But she heard the people muttering curses at the little mother of the ocean, which you would never have heard a few months ago. As if in response a storm was gathering far out to sea, and rain fell in sheets that swept across the water.

  When they reached the island Novu and Matu led them along the northern beach. At least here the white sea-bottom mud had mostly washed away on the tide. But everything had changed here too—the line of dunes, even the very shape of the shallow bay. Was it really possible that all of this had happened in a single day, as Matu had described?

  The priest murmured, “Look at the middens.”

  By now it was no surprise to discover that the holy middens, too, had been wrecked. A few people were working up there even now, using broad-bladed shovels to heap up the debris, and Zesi saw the gleam of bone, pale on the middens’ upper surfaces.

  “The dead?” Jurgi murmured.

  “This is the best we can do,” Matu said. “Ana said we should lie them out on the ruins of the holy middens, and then build up the middens around them.”

  Jurgi nodded. “That was wise.”

  Zesi had never heard the word “wise” used about her kid sister before. Of all the strangeness she had encountered today, in some ways that was the strangest of all.

  She looked out to sea again. Many boats seemed to be out, but as that storm gathered the boats were coming in, and people were running down to meet them. “Everybody’s fishing.”

  Matu said, “You know how rich the autumn is. But everything’s been mixed up by the Great Sea. The cod are coming inshore, and we’re relying on them. The geese and the swans, they’re around. But the salmon have failed to come up the rivers this year. The eels haven’t come down either.” Just as the salmon came to the land and swam upriver to spawn every autumn, so eels would swim downriver to their own breeding grounds far out to sea. A failure of these tides of life was serious for the people of the coast. “Even inland the hunting is bad.” Autumn was a key time for hunting too, when the deer and the pigs and the wild cattle were fattest, ready for the winter, and their fur was in the best condition. “Either dead already or they’ve fled south. There are some who say we should do the same—”

  “Not me, by the little mother’s hairy left tit.”

  Zesi swung around at the gruff, familiar voice. It was Heni, striding toward her from his beached boat. He bore a big basket of shellfish he’d been using for bait.

  “Oh, Heni—” She ran to him, and he dropped his basket and enfolded her. He was a squat man but powerful, and he smelled of fish and salt and sweat, of the sea. He was the nearest to her father she would ever see again. Yet even now the tears would not come.

  Stroking her hair, he murmured, “I was with him, you know. Kirike. On the day he died. We were out at sea. I was a coward. I wanted to paddle away from shore, where we would be safe. He wanted to come home, to be with his family. We fought. He jumped over the side and tried to swim in. I—There was nothing I could do to stop him. You know your father. We found his body. He’s on the middens if you want to see him. I was a coward,” he said, desolate.

  “You’re alive,” the priest said grimly. “You made the right choice. Kirike was a brave man, a very brave man. But sometimes it takes more courage to do nothing.”

  Heni seemed to notice the priest for the first time. “You! You poppy-squeezing faker.” To Zeni’s amazement Heni raised a fist.

  Matu immediately got between the two men, and Novu wrapped an arm across Heni’s chest, pulling him away. “No more,” Novu said, pointing at Arga, who was starting to cry. “We’ve had enough upset without that.”

  Heni made a visible effort to calm down. “All right, I won’t do anything stupid. But you, priest, you let us down. Where were you when the Great Sea came? Where were you when we tended the sick? Where were you when we gathered up the dead? Where were you when poor Ana tried to find words to say over the bodies, all those bodies, up on the holy middens? Where were you?”

  “It’s not his fault,” Zesi snapped. “He didn’t cause the Great Sea. He couldn’t have stopped it—”

  “It’s all right, Zesi,” Jurgi said. “He’s right. I’m the priest. I wasn’t here, at the one time in my whole life, probably, I was ne
eded the most. He’s right to blame me, for I wasn’t here to help him blame the gods.” He glanced at the middens. “And I wasn’t here to spare Ana. I will always regret that.”

  “Oh, I survived.”

  Ana was walking up from the sea. Like the others she looked too thin to Zesi, her clothes filthy with fish blood and crusted with salt, her hair tied back from a sweat-streaked forehead. Her face was expressionless. “Hello, Zesi.”

  “Oh, Ana—” Zesi wrapped her sister in her arms. She felt Ana respond, putting her own arms behind Zesi’s back, but stiffly. She stepped back and faced Ana, the two sisters dry-eyed. “Come. Let’s walk.”

  They set off together along the beach.

  “You survived Albia, then,” Ana said.

  “Only just . . . It’s not the time to tell you about that. One thing you should know, though.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  That made Ana stop. “The father is Shade?”

  “Yes.”

  Ana shrugged, and walked on, slowly. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever see Shade again, or the Root.”

  “The Root’s dead. It got complicated. Even more complicated.”

  Ana said gravely, “We need babies. We are few, now. Less than half left alive. There are snailheads here. They help. But we will have to work hard to live, Zesi. Work for the rest of our lives.”

  Unless, Zesi thought dismally, we leave this desperate, half-drowned place and go south to the rich lands beyond this layer of white death, beyond the reach of another Great Sea, lands she’d walked through only days ago. She took a breath. “Heni told me about Father.”

  Ana nodded. “We have his body. It’s on the midden still. Even the gulls are few this autumn, and slow in their work.”