“They must have been dead,” Novu said. “The woman and her deer. Who would sit there all day until the roof fell in on them? Maybe she was stuffed. I heard of people doing that, keeping corpses by taking out the innards and filling them with sand and spices. The deer too.”
“Ugh,” Heni said.
“Stuffed and painted. What a sight it must have been! So, Arga, did you see—”
“Hush,” Dreamer said. One-handed, she gently took the broth bowl out of Arga’s hands. The girl had fallen asleep, just like that, and was slumping on Ana’s shoulder.
“She’s worn-out, poor thing,” Heni said. “For all she’s brave, the cold does take it out of her, I think.”
“I told you,” said Zesi. “You’re risking her neck with these stunts. If her father was alive—”
“But he’s not, so that’s enough about that.”
Zesi poked at the fire and stirred the broth, her ill temper evident in her every movement. She hissed at Ana, “We need to talk.”
Ana put her fingers to her lips, and mouthed, Not now. She sat with the sleeping Arga, letting the girl’s head fall to her lap, rocking her gently.
52
When Arga was deeply asleep on a pallet beside the dog, Ana, needing air, pushed her way out of the house.
She waited just outside the house for a while, letting her eyes adapt to the dark. She was surprised by the deep cold outside. Since Heni had brought Arga home the weather had changed, the murky air and cloud cover clearing away. Now the sky was a blanket of stars, frost coated the ground, and a sliver of moon offered a little light. Her breath steamed before her mouth, catching the colorless moonlight, and she pulled her skin wrap tighter around her shoulders. She could really have done with a thicker layer, but she didn’t want to go back into the house to face more of Zesi’s glares.
A spiderweb stretched from the center pole of the house down its flank; it was heavy with dew that had frozen in the cold snap, so that its threads were thick with ice crystals. But she could not see the spider that had built the web. Perhaps the cold had driven it away. Cold brought beauty and death in equal measures.
She walked away from the house, and climbed the bank of dunes just to the north. These had been wrecked by the Great Sea, and the going was harder than it had once been. But tonight there was a crust of frozen sand that crunched under her feet, making the way a little easier.
When she reached the ragged ridge of the dunes she walked west. A thousand moons reflected from the ripples of the bay, to her right, and she could see the hulking forms of boats, upturned on the beach above the high-water mark. In the very early days after the Great Sea, people had been forced to sleep under their boats, for lack of any other shelter. Tonight, she knew, as on every calm night, a few boats would be out, for no fishing weather could be wasted this hard winter, day or night. Meanwhile, to her left the land lay sleeping under a fine blanket of frost. The new houses of the people were shapeless heaps, shadows in the dark. And she could see the mounds she had ordered to be built, rising up from the plain. For now they were just heaps of earth, but they would show their worth when the next flood came.
The more she walked, the more the world seemed to open up around her, the stillness of the sky and the land, the calmness of the sea. She concentrated on the soft crunch of the frosty grass and sand under her feet, and the different texture of the light at night, the moon shadows that made dips and gullies seem deeper, the lack of color that changed her sense of distance. It was as if she was walking in a different world altogether, a world separated from the clutter of the day.
Something rustled in a patch of long grass.
She stood still. She made out a round, pale body, long ears, a single black eye looking warily at her. It was a snow hare, already in its winter coat. She felt unreasonably glad to see it, for the Great Sea had left the land depopulated of its animals, even its birds—even the owl, her own Other, whose hooting calls were rarely heard this winter. But the hare was a great survivor.
After an instant of sublime shared stillness, something startled the animal. It bounded away in a spray of loose sand and frost. She glimpsed it once more, zigzagging across a meadow, compact and strangely graceful.
“I’m glad it didn’t find my trap.” The soft whisper came from Matu, bundled up in thick furs; he clambered awkwardly up the dune face. “Wouldn’t have enjoyed killing a snow hare.”
Ana was disappointed that she was no longer alone, but she smiled. “You’re out late.”
“Just checking the catch. Anyway it’s not that late. Fishers know how to track the passage of the night by the stars.” He looked around the sky and pointed. “See the Bear?” This was a distinctive pattern of seven stars that resembled a bear in a crouch. “When his body is pointing that way, the night is still young, and morning’s far away. That’s how it is tonight. Of course tomorrow night the positions will be a little different, and the night after that, different again. We experienced fisherfolk know the sky’s secrets.” He smiled, gently mocking himself, for she knew that, like her, he had never been out fishing before the Great Sea forced him to.
She said, “Ice Dreamer comes from a land far from here. But her people, too, call those stars the Bear.”
“Do they?”
“So she says. Perhaps it really is a bear, thrown against the stars in some long-gone age.”
He squinted up at the stars. “It doesn’t really look much like a bear, does it? You could think it looks like something else, a dog or a deer, and call it that. Perhaps our people and Ice Dreamer’s knew each other before. Maybe we were once the same people, who have separated, carrying the same stories over the world.”
“And maybe everybody talks too much about stupid things that don’t matter.” This was Zesi’s harsh voice. She came walking along the dune ridge, following her sister’s footsteps.
Ana’s heart sank. So much for her quiet walk in the night. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. I said we needed to talk. Besides, Arga woke and asked for you. Poor little kid depends on us now, you know.”
“I know.” Ana refused to be made to feel guilty. “She knows I never go far—”
“No. You stand around out here and talk, talk, talk . . .” Zesi was wearing only a tunic, not even a coat, so her belly showed, prominent. The hairs on her bare arms were stiff with the cold. “What are you talking about now—star patterns? People who wandered around in the deep past?”
Ana said, “Ice Dreamer’s legends are all of a different kind of past, where—”
Zesi put her hands over her ears. “I don’t—care—what that woman says. I’ve had enough of her. And Novu, that other stranger you spend all your time with. What a waste of time it all is! Stars and legends! Mounds of earth! Bones under the sea! The people should be fishing. Hunting. Gathering the last acorns and hazelnuts—oh, I’ve heard enough. Tonight has driven me to a decision. This is what I want to tell you. In the morning I will speak to the priest, and some of the others, and talk about what we must do to get through the winter—and who must lead.”
“You’re going to challenge me?” Ana, astonished, laughed.
Matu was not a man who grew angry. But now he faced Zesi and said sternly, “In those first days after the Great Sea, when those who survived envied the dead, Ana made us want to live, by not giving in, by keeping going. Perhaps others could have taken that first step. Her father if he had lived. Perhaps you, if you had been here, Zesi. But it was Ana. We remember that. And you should show her respect.”
Zesi snorted, the breath streaming from her nostrils. “Respect? For her? Don’t make me laugh.” And she turned on her heel and walked away, along the ridge of the dune.
Ana sighed. “Come on, Matu. Let’s get back in the warm.”
53
The next day dawned clear and frosty, and at noon there was just a hint of warmth in the sunlight.
“A promise of the spring to come,” Ice Dreamer said. “Or a memory of
the summer past.” She sat on a bundle of furs heaped up on the dunes over Ana’s house, lifting her face to the light.
From here Ana, sitting with her, could see much of the bay, and the gray outline of Flint Island. Dreamer’s baby sat up on her lap, gurgling and smiling. They gathered around Dreamer, Ana and Arga and Novu, sitting on the ground in the brief warmth of the sun. They worked as they talked; they had a heap of hazelnuts to shell.
Dreamer’s face was strongly shadowed by the sun, and age showed in the lines around her eyes and mouth, and in the gray streaks in her tied-back hair. Yet she was still beautiful, Ana thought, strong and beautiful. No wonder her father hadn’t been able to abandon this woman when he found her on that distant shore. Kirike’s and Dreamer’s was one story among many cut short by the Great Sea.
Dreamer said now, “What a night we had. What an extraordinary thing you have found, under the sea, Arga. More than earth and bones—you have found the story of your people. A story of times long gone, when huge boats must have sailed through those great ditches, and must have—must have—sailed across the western ocean to bring your mark to my far country. A story lost for generations, and now found again.”
“Yes,” Ana said. “And it’s all thanks to you, Arga.”
Arga submitted to a hug, but she seemed to have had enough praise, and soon wriggled free. “The question is, what do we do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Mothers’ Door is our treasure. So we can’t leave here. Can we? We can never leave this place—”
Ana said slowly, “You’re right. We would forget. Living somewhere in the south or in Pretani, mixed up with the snailheads and all the others, we would forget the Door—forget who we are.”
Novu said gently, “But when the ocean rises, if another Great Sea comes—”
“We will build more mounds,” Ana said. “As we have since the night of the storm when Zesi returned. So high the sea can never cover them and drive us away.” Maybe this was why the little mothers had given her the determination to stay and dig that night. Maybe it had been the seed of something much greater in the future.
“Yes,” said Dreamer reasonably, “mounds will save you from an occasional flood. But what if the sea doesn’t retreat again?” She waved a hand at the bay to the north. “How long could you survive, on the highest mound, sticking out of the ocean?”
“We’d swim a lot,” Arga said seriously, and she looked hurt when they laughed.
“Perhaps there is more we could do,” Novu said thoughtfully. “My people once built a wall around Jericho, to keep out floods from the hills. Even here we built the causeway to the island after the Great Sea destroyed it. Perhaps there is more we could build.”
“Like what?” Ana asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” He got to his feet and surveyed the coast. “Shall we walk around the bay? The tide is low and the causeway should be passable. We might get some ideas.”
Ana and Arga stood up, eager.
Dreamer said, “Before you go, don’t forget about Zesi. She spoke to the priest earlier. She said she would call her meeting about now. About who should lead, and what we should do.”
Somehow Ana had forgotten all about her sister. “Oh, I haven’t got time for that. Come on, Novu, Arga.”
So they set off, the three of them, talking and laughing in the sunshine.
They walked all the way out to Flint Island, around its eastern promontory to the south shore, then back to the causeway. They talked and planned and dreamed all the way around.
By the time they got back to the house the sun was dipping to the western horizon, and the day’s brief warmth had long bled from the air. They were all hungry.
But Zesi, rubbing goose fat into her boots in a corner of the house, looked furious.
They found that Zesi had held her meeting—so Ana heard from Ice Dreamer, who had gotten the story from the priest. Even Jurgi had been there reluctantly. Only a few people had bothered to turn up, and fewer yet had stayed as Zesi started talking about Ana’s flaws, and the mistakes she had been making.
The last to stay had been Lightning the dog, who only wanted Zesi to throw a stick for him. Everybody laughed at this. Zesi stalked away, seething.
But, Ana reminded herself, a few people had come to listen to what Zesi had to say. Ana could never take for granted the goodwill of the people.
And Zesi’s challenge had lodged a seed of doubt in her own mind. What if Zesi was right? What if she had been driven mad by the horrors of the Great Sea? She was still only fifteen years old, after all. Sometimes she still had nightmares of the man with no face, her father’s corpse washed up by the sea. Who was she to shape the future? What if this nascent scheme to save Etxelur from the sea was just a fever dream?
If she was mad, how could she ever know?
54
The First Year After the Great Sea: Late Winter
Cheek, the snailhead toddler, ran ahead of Ana’s group along the new causeway. Her mother, Eyelid, walking behind Knuckle, watched Cheek cautiously, but didn’t try to stop her. Lightning ran after the child, wagging his tail and barking.
The causeway, rebuilt, cut across the ocean to Flint Island, a smooth arc. The way was solid underfoot on an upper surface of wood, logs pressed into mud. Gentle waves lapped to either side. To the left lay the open sea, and to the right the bay, where a couple of boats worked this morning searching for eels. And on the bay’s southern shore Ana could see new houses sitting on their flood-defying mounds of dark earth. Half a year after the Great Sea, Etxelur was recovering.
It was a bright winter day, not yet a month after the midwinter solstice, and the weather was benign, the wind low, the sea calm, and the ocean water reflected a diffuse, cloudy sky: a world gray above, gray below, and bitterly cold, yet full of light. Ana offered up silent thanks to the little mothers for the weather, as she walked between the priest and Knuckle, with Novu stepping quietly behind them with the rest of the snailheads. Maybe the mildness of the day would soothe the snailheads’ mood—and make them more amenable to giving Ana what she wanted of them today.
Little Cheek was a bundle of furs, with hide bandages wrapped around her growing snailhead skull. But she was wide-eyed, fascinated by the water that lapped so close to her feet. Knuckle watched her indulgently. Eyelid was the wife of Knuckle’s dead brother, Gut; Cheek was his niece. Knuckle had grown closer to Eyelid, since Ana had rejected his tentative advances. Ana was glad for them.
Not that she knew them all that well; they were still very odd by Etxelur’s standards. Walking now with Eyelid, she tried to think of something to say to her. But with the snailheads, as with the Pretani, the men decided everything of significance, while the women did the work—or anyhow that was how it seemed to Ana. Eyelid wouldn’t even speak to the Etxelur folk save through Knuckle.
“Cheek can’t remember the ocean,” Knuckle said now. “She was last here at midsummer. Long ago for a three-year-old.”
“For all of us,” said the priest. “Because of the Great Sea the world has changed since those days. But I don’t suppose the little girl will remember that either.”
“No,” said the snailhead grimly, “and she’s lucky for that.”
Ana nodded. “Well, it wouldn’t have been possible to walk this way just a few months ago. It’s taken a lot of hard work to restore the causeway.”
Jurgi glanced at her with approval; she was learning subtlety, and was steering the conversation the way she wanted it to go. It had even been her idea to bring the snailheads out to the causeway, the nearest they had to a demonstration of the dream they wanted the snailheads to share.
Knuckle said now, testing his tread on the logs under his feet, “Better than I remember. I never trusted that muddy track.”
Novu stepped forward and said, “The old causeway was a gift of the gods. What we did this time was to start again from the beginning. Of course the natural track was the starting point. We p
ushed rocks and gravel and brush into the mud. And then we laid logs over the top, pressing them down. Now the causeway’s stronger than before and higher. And it’s sturdier. You can feel that. It’s already withstood a couple of winter storms. I don’t know if it could survive another Great Sea.” He glanced out at the placid ocean. “I’d like to find out.”
“Don’t challenge the gods,” the priest murmured, “lest they take you up on it.”
Knuckle asked Ana, “So how is your sister? Produced her Pretani pup yet?”
“No. Well, not the last time I saw her.” Which was another gift from the gods, as far as Ana was concerned. Zesi, fuming, frustrated, continued to oppose all Ana’s projects, and ranted at anybody who came within earshot about how their father wouldn’t have run things this way. She would have been particularly difficult this morning, for she had been central to the mess that had led to the death of Gut, Knuckle’s brother, at the hands of Gall the Pretani. But her long pregnancy was keeping her out of the way, and Ana was grateful to be able to get some work done.
They reached the island, and walked around its northern shore toward the holy middens, now half-rebuilt themselves. Cheek ran ahead along the sand, kicking at washed-up seaweed, and the dog ran after her.
Suddenly Ana saw oystercatchers, a pair of them flying low along the coast. They were big birds, black and white with distinctive orange beaks and a plaintive, repetitive cry. They were probably both males, this early in the year, preparing for their flight up the river valleys where they would stake out territory on a shingle bar, to build their ground nests. She felt her spirit expand, as if thawing out, at this latest sign of the turn of the season.
Knuckle watched the birds fly, his great head gleaming in the sun’s watery light. “We were coastal folk, like you, down in the south, before the sea drove us away. We live in the forest now. But the forest has its charms, even in the winter. You can see the squirrels run in the bare trees, and the nests of the rooks.”
Stone Spring Page 29
