Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  “I’ll say good-bye to him—”

  “Sometimes I think it’s because of me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You remember that night, the night of my blood tide, in the midwinter? When the owl became my Other. Since then Sunta died and Gall and father, and Rute and Jaku and so many others—”

  “No. Hush.”

  “I am the owl. I am death.”

  It was alarming to hear her say such things; she was only fifteen years old. Zesi stopped walking and hugged her again. “You’re my kid sister,” she said, trying to tease her gently. “What makes you think you’re so important, that the mothers should send down a Great Sea to batter us all?” But that seemed to be the wrong thing to say. “Look, things are never going to be as they were. But I’m home now, and I’ll look after you.”

  Still Ana didn’t respond. Zesi became aware that the others, following at a distance, were watching them, Novu and Matu and Arga and even Heni. No, they weren’t watching them. They were watching Ana, waiting for her to speak.

  Ana turned away from Zesi and glanced at the racing sky. “The storm’s coming,” she said. “Let’s get these boats above the tide line. Novu, you’d better see if the causeway is still safe to cross. If not we’ll have to make shelter here . . .”

  To Zesi’s blank astonishment, the people hurried to follow Ana’s orders.

  50

  They made it back across the causeway, but the storm closed in before dark.

  Zesi was welcomed into the rough hut that had been built on the site of their old house, the house she had grown up in with Ana and their parents and grandparents. Now there were only Ana and Arga and Zesi. The house, such as it was, was cramped, and as the wind picked up it creaked noisily, and rainwater leaked through the makeshift roof. It wasn’t cold, at least; there was no need to try to build a fire in the rough hearth.

  After eating some dried fish Ana, clearly exhausted, curled up on a pallet, her face to the wall, having said little to Zesi.

  Zesi had thought Arga at least might be more curious. In her head during the long walk home she had rehearsed the kinds of stories she might tell Arga about Albia—exciting anecdotes for a seven-year-old, rather than the full truth of death and vengeance and twisted honor. But to Zesi’s disappointment all Arga wanted to do was play fingerbones, a complicated game where you moved knucklebones and fancy shells around a board scraped in the dirt. Arga had lost her parents, and most of her playmates of her own age; this was all she wanted. So, by the light of a lamp of whale oil in a stone bowl, Zesi played one game after another, almost always getting beaten.

  At least playing a kid’s game was better than facing the dark thoughts swirling around in her own head. It was the end of a long day when she had discovered her home was smashed and her father dead, along with around half of all the people she had ever known. And yet she found her thoughts turning to Ana, and the way everybody had deferred to her, out on the beach. Even Heni! Zesi had always been the leader, the strong one, the bright exciting one who everybody applauded. Now she had come back from a near-lethal adventure—she had come back with a baby—and nobody wanted to know, and it was her skinny, dull kid sister who got all the attention and respect.

  Was she jealous? Was she so mean, so shallow, that she was jealous of Ana, even on such a terrible night—the night she had learned they had lost their father? She didn’t want to feel like this. She tried not to hate Ana for making her feel this way. Tried not to hate herself for these unwelcome emotions.

  The door flap was pushed back, letting in the wind and a shower of raindrops. It was Matu. “Ana, I’m sorry.” He didn’t even look at Zesi.

  Ana rolled on her back, instantly awake. “What is it?”

  “The Milk. The storm has caused a surge on the river. It’s looking like it’s going to flood again. Some of us are heading for the higher ground.”

  “I’ll come.” Ana rolled out of bed, pulled on boots and a skin cloak, and pushed out of the hut. Arga followed.

  Zesi was left sitting by the abandoned game. She had been utterly ignored in the whole exchange. But water was soaking in under the bottom of the walls, and pooling on the floor, in the shallow dip of the hearth. She grabbed her cloak and pushed her way out of the shelter.

  The storm was wild, the wind howling, and the rain came at you flat and hard. Zesi was soaked in an instant. The ground was pooled with water, and she could hear the rush of the river. It was still not yet dark, with light coming from the horizon, a deep twilight that rendered everything blue or black or gray.

  Novu was here, holding onto Ice Dreamer, who had her baby in a sling before her, and Heni, the priest, a number of others. Arga started crying over her acorn pit, which was brimming with water, ruined.

  Zesi saw terror in the eyes of the survivors of the Great Sea, of which this storm must be a terrible reminder.

  “We should go,” Matu shouted. He had his family clutched close to him, his sons, his wife. He pointed south. “If we climb up into the hills, we’ll get wet but—”

  “No,” Ana said.

  “What?”

  “We won’t run any more.” She glanced around, and Zesi saw a cold determination in that young, pinched face. “Matu, make sure your children are safe. Dreamer, take your baby. Zesi, maybe you and Arga should go. The rest of you—”

  “We can’t defy the river,” the priest shouted.

  “But we can,” she snapped back at him. “You go if you want to, priest. The rest of you, help me.” And she got to her knees and began to scrape at the muddy ground, making a mound. “Get the shovels. We can’t stop the river flood. But we can rise up above it.”

  The others stood frozen, for a single heartbeat.

  Then Matu pushed his wife away. “Go, take the boys. Hurry, hurry. I’ll be fine . . .”

  Novu ran off, and quickly returned with shovels, shoulder blades of deer and cattle strapped to stout poles. Matu took a shovel, and so did the priest. Soon there were six, eight, ten of them, all digging as Zesi watched. Some of the shovels were meant for clearing snow in the winter, but they did a good enough job in the sticky mud.

  Soon a mound began to rise up above the sodden ground. Still the storm lashed down, and now water surged from the broken banks of the river. Even as the water ponded around them the diggers pushed their blades into the mud and heaped it up.

  There was something about the whole situation that Zesi couldn’t bear—Ana’s strange doggedness in the face of the danger of the rising river, the way the others followed her unflinchingly. Even the priest, she saw, even the priest, who was as new to this as she was.

  She pushed her way through to Ana. “This is mad. You’ll get somebody drowned.”

  Ana didn’t look up. “You weren’t here when the Great Sea came. I was. Dig, or go. Look after Arga.”

  Zesi hesitated, torn. Arga had gone with Matu’s family. Soaked to the skin, her hair flattened against her skull, Zesi ran after her.

  When she returned in the morning, coming down from the low hills to the south of the settlement, Zesi found a low dome of black, glistening earth, and a dozen diggers sitting exhausted on top of it. The river had subsided, but water pooled around the mound. The storm had long blown out, and the sun had broken through, and the diggers smiled up into its light, filthy and soaked but safely above the water.

  If Ana saw Zesi coming, she showed no signs of it. “This is the future,” she said gravely. She held her own shovel over her head like a hunter’s spear. “The future.”

  51

  The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice

  Heni lifted the door flap and brought Arga into Ana’s house, his arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. Arga had been on a great adventure. Wrapped in a blanket of thick aurochs skin and with goose fat smeared on her bare arms, she looked as if she had been very, very cold; but she was beaming, that big moon smile.

  Lightning, asleep by the fire, stirred and grumbled at the draft. When he saw Arga
his tail gave a fluttering wag, and then he subsided into sleep once again.

  Through the door flap Ana glimpsed the day, and was surprised to see how low the light was already. But it was only a few days from midwinter. She had sat in here all day with Zesi and Novu and Ice Dreamer and her baby, talking by the smoky light of the whale oil lamps, with others coming and going with bits of business. These deep-winter days without sunlight, brief and dim, felt like they were no days at all.

  “Come sit with me, by the fire.” She made a space for Arga between herself and Ice Dreamer, and got a dry cloth and began to rub Arga’s wet hair.

  “And shut that flap, curse your bones, old man,” Zesi snapped. “You’re letting all the heat out.” Zesi, big with her child now, was grumpy, restless, frustrated by the way her pregnancy slowed her down, habitually ill-tempered.

  “All right, all right.” Heni shuffled in, huge in the cramped house, and he shucked off his big fur jacket, wet and smelling of sea salt. “Is that Kirike’s fish stew?”

  “Here.” Novu handed Heni a wooden bowl of the stew, which had been simmering for days, with extra fish, stock, roots, nuts, oil and spices steadily added until the flavor became deep and enriching. It had been Kirike’s favorite winter dish; he had been able to keep a single pot going for days.

  “Ah.” Heni raised the bowl and drank deeply of the stock, and he belched, rubbing his belly. “That’s going to get me warm through.” He glanced at the chunks of fish in his bowl. “There were more bodies down on the beach.”

  Ana asked, “Anybody you recognized?”

  “One was a snailhead, I think. You could only tell from the funny shape of the skull. Face chewed off. Other kinds of people I didn’t know at all. One had a necklace of tiny skulls, otters maybe. Chucked it back in the sea.” Heni inspected a lump of cod. “But we have to eat.”

  Ana nodded. They had been through these arguments. The folk of Etxelur had become uncomfortable eating the fish that had so evidently been feeding on the bodies in the ocean. But they had lost all their summer store to the Great Sea, and the autumn hunts had been disastrous on the shattered, salt-poisoned land. This autumn and winter, it was only the sea that kept them alive—the murderous sea turned provider. “We have to eat.” She deliberately scooped up a cup of the broth, gathering bits of fish, and took a mouthful, chewing deliberately, though she was not hungry. “With respect.”

  Heni put the cod in his mouth and chewed carefully. “With respect.”

  Zesi snorted. She tended to scorn such rituals.

  “So,” Ice Dreamer said, and she hugged Arga. “You’ve been diving again, down to the Door.”

  “She has,” Heni said proudly. “That little one can hold her breath. I counted it this time, a full hundred and fifty of my heartbeats. And I’ve got a big old heart that beats pretty slow, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything like it, like you’re half-dolphin, girl. I’m always relieved when she comes up for air, because I couldn’t fetch her if she didn’t.”

  Arga smiled shyly. “I like it. It’s easy.”

  “It’s ridiculous that you sent her out diving today, Ana,” Zesi said. “It’s midwinter!”

  Arga said, “It’s not that cold when you’re in the water, even if it’s snowing up in the air. And as long as you keep moving you’re all right. Anyhow the goose fat keeps you warm.”

  Zesi pressed, “And if you got stuck? If you caught your foot?”

  “I wouldn’t catch my foot. I’m not a baby.”

  Novu leaned forward, fascinated. “Never mind all that. Tell us what you saw this time.”

  Arga’s smiled broadened. “I went to the house on the hill, in the middle, North Island. I went inside!”

  Since the day of the Great Sea, and despite the hardships they had suffered, Ana and the others hadn’t been able to put aside the memories of what they had glimpsed when the sea had rolled back. She and Novu and Dreamer had talked endlessly of the circular banks they called the Door to the Mothers’ House, for Ana believed it truly to be the drowned heart of old Etxelur. They had even made sketches with bits of charcoal on skin of what they had seen.

  Zesi had mocked all this, as she mocked much of what Ana got up to with Dreamer and Novu, “your cabal of strangers” as she called them. Ana ignored her, though this infuriated Zesi even more. For she knew, deep in her gut, that this was important, for herself, for Etxelur, for the future.

  Of course the Door was submerged once more, as it had been for generations before that one strange day. It had begun to seem that those brief glimpses were all Ana would ever be allowed.

  But then in the late autumn Arga, the best diver in Etxelur, had come up with the idea of swimming down to see if she could see any more. Once Ana and the rest were convinced she could do it they had leapt on the idea.

  So Heni had started to take Arga out on his fishing trips. He had been wary at first, and she had scornfully refused his offer of tying her to a length of fishing line so she could be hauled up if she got into trouble. She kept insisting she wasn’t a baby. But as Heni had watched her dive he soon grew confident in her abilities, and trusted to her own native sense to keep her out of trouble.

  Her first dives had been scouting trips to establish just where the Door was. It wasn’t difficult if you knew where to look. The central mound really was North Island, and from there you could sometimes see the rest, Heni said, huge shadows beneath the water, unnaturally perfect arcs.

  And then Arga had begun to inspect the Door. She would make two, three, four dives a day, until Heni judged she was getting too tired. She dived only on good days, when the sea was calm and clear and she was able to see what she was exploring. As the winter had begun to close in there had been talk of stopping the dives. But Heni pointed out he was going to have to go out fishing every day anyhow, and Arga was keen to carry on. Ana suspected it was good for Arga, better than sitting around in a hut all winter brooding on how she had lost her parents.

  And, gradually, they were coming to map the Door, the strange structures lost beneath the sea.

  Surrounding the central island were three circular ridges, which Novu called “walls,” sharing a common center, nested one inside the next. Between the ridges were ditches, dug deep and full of sea-bottom mud. Arga said she saw the wreck of a boat in one of the ditches—a big boat, bigger than anything Etxelur had, similar to the giant wreck that had been exposed on the day of the Great Sea. The ditches had evidently been dug big enough to allow such boats to pass. Arga had found a straight ditch cutting through this complex of rings to the center. This was surely another passage for boats. This discovery thrilled Dreamer, for it was another similarity to the rings-and-tail tattoos worn throughout Etxelur.

  The walls themselves were tall, taller than Etxelur’s middens, several times an adult’s height if you measured them from the bottom of the ditches. Once, Arga had dived down to the outermost wall. Under a layer of silt and seaweed and barnacles she had found a harder surface, too tough for her to pick apart with her hands. It was gloomy down there, but she said this surface gleamed in the murky light with bright colors, red and white and black, the colors of shells and stones embedded in some denser material.

  In recent days Arga had been exploring the very center of the complex.

  “It’s not an island; it’s a mound, like the ones you build, Ana. You can tell by the shape. Somebody built it. And just under the very top of this mound is a house.” Every adult in the shelter was rapt as the girl spoke, her eyes bright with intelligence, the remnant of the goose fat on her cheeks and neck shining in the light of the oil lamps. “But it’s not a house like this one, wood and skin and seaweed. It’s stones, carved into shapes and heaped up.”

  “Like Jericho,” Novu murmured, “or some of it.”

  “There might have been a roof once, but it’s open now—you can swim down inside and there is a heap of stone blocks on the floor. And on top of that—”

  “Yes?” Novu asked.

  “Bones.
”

  “Bones?”

  “It was confusing. I’ll tell you what I think I saw. I’ll probably have to go back to be really sure. On the top was a woman.”

  “A woman,” Ana said.

  “Well, a person. There was nothing left but the bones; all the rest had been eaten by the fish. She’s all sprawled out on top of a deer. I know a deer’s bones! But this was a big deer, bigger than I ever saw.” She reached up with her hands, indicating height. “Big antlers.”

  Novu frowned. “Loga told me traders’ tales of how giant deer live up in the northern lands, the north of the Continent, where it is always cold. They are hunted for their huge antlers and their big bones, which make deep-throated flutes. They are never seen as far south as this.”

  “Nevertheless,” Dreamer said, “such animals exist?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Arga went on, “There was something under the deer too. I only saw it dimly, and the woman and her deer were in the way. It was skulls. Cattle skulls, bulls with horns. There were lots of them, all lined up together and heaped up in big layers. It was difficult to see. There was kelp everywhere, fronds waving in the sea, like a forest.”

  Jurgi nodded. “The bulls, then the deer, then the woman, all sitting on top of the stone heap.”

  “That’s what I saw. All in this stone house. That’s all.” She sat back, and drank some more broth.

  Ice Dreamer, suckling Dolphin Gift, gave Arga a playful pinch. “You know how to spin out a story, don’t you?”

  “It’s all true!”

  “I know, I know. But you tell it well.”

  Novu shook his head. “What does it mean?”

  “Think of how it would have looked,” Ana said. “The mound was above the level of the ridges. From anywhere in the Door, if you were on the ridges or in a boat, you could look up and see the mound, and the house of stone, and the woman inside, riding her deer.”