Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  They walked forward, past willow trees and over gentle dune-like slopes.

  “Don’t mind her,” Dolphin murmured to Qili. “She’s like this with every visitor we get. She has to show off. Maybe it’s because she was there when it was first getting built.” She yawned elaborately. “Believe me, if you grew up with it, it doesn’t seem so special. You get used to it.”

  But as they neared the northern dyke’s landside the wall loomed high over Qili’s head, perhaps three times his height, smooth and strong, excluding the sea itself. Qili, cowering in its shadow, wondered how anybody could possibly get used to living in a place like this.

  61

  When Qili emerged from Arga’s house the next day, the weather was if anything even brighter, even more cheerful. He heard a melodic, bubbling cry, and looked up to see a pair of curlews flapping overhead in their usual leisurely way, with their pale bellies and distinctive curved beaks, perhaps on their way to the marshy ground to the west.

  Too beautiful a day for a funeral, he thought. But already people were emerging from the houses on the mounds and making their way toward the coast.

  Arga and Dolphin Gift followed Qili out of the house. They wore simple smocks and cloaks, their hair had been plaited into tight coils, and their cheeks were marked with the ubiquitous rings-and-slash symbol, painted on with a mixture of ochre and goose fat. The house belonged to Ana, he had come to understand, as the senior woman in her family. But last night Arga and Dolphin had stayed with Qili, and Arga’s children had stayed with a friend to make room for him. Meanwhile Ana, and Dolphin’s mother, Ice Dreamer, had visited Etxelur’s priest to discuss the ceremony for Heni.

  They walked together down the mound’s steep slope, and set off once more toward the beach. They joined a sparse crowd that converged at the abutment of the dyke that spanned the mouth of the bay, running north to Flint Island. Dolphin anxiously scanned the crowd, evidently looking for somebody.

  Close to, Qili was able to see the detail of the dyke’s construction. Rows of fat wooden piles contained a core of rock and sand and mud. Further out into the water this foundation was buried under rock, with a facing of mud bricks coated with white plaster. On its dry side the dyke was a wall three times the height of a person, brilliant white, smooth-faced—but on the other side the sea lapped not far below its edge. Arcing across the bay mouth, unnatural and intimidating, the dyke oddly made Qili think of death; pale as bone, it divided the living world in two.

  And he was going to have to walk across it, he realized now. The people were funneling toward the abutment and starting to stream onto the path across the top. Children ran ahead, shouting, chased by barking dogs.

  As they walked forward Arga said to Qili, “We always use the dyke on occasions like this, to get to the island. Saves getting your feet muddy on the Bay Land. Of course before the dyke was built you had to walk all the way around the bay . . .”

  Qili found it hard to listen, as he followed her steady pace.

  Soon he was out on the dyke itself, with a drop down to the Bay Land to his left, and the sea lapping not far below the lip of the wall to his right. It was an extraordinary experience, a little like walking a cliff edge, or as if the whole world was unbalanced and tilting over, and he had an odd fear of falling. Once, a child jostled him, rushing past; Qili, stumbling, was glad of Arga’s supporting hand.

  “Kirike! Kirike!” Suddenly Dolphin was jumping and waving.

  A man a few paces further along stopped and turned, waved back, and pushed back through the sparse line. When he met Dolphin they embraced. He was tall, strong-looking, darker than most of the Etxelur folk, many of whom were pale and red-haired or blond.

  Arga tutted loudly. “I suppose I was never going to keep them apart today.” She said in a lower, gossipy tone, “Kirike is Ana’s nephew. But he’s half-Pretani. And it wasn’t a happy chain of events that led to his birth. Ana’s sister—his mother—was called Zesi. Not here. Dead, probably. A long story—you don’t want to know.” Arga sighed. “But, look at them. I don’t know if Ice Dreamer is doing the right thing in keeping them apart. Nothing Dolphin does now with Kirike is going to change the past, all the feuding and the blood that was spilled. And look at the boy! As handsome as an aurochs bull and about as smart—I’ll swear he’s more Pretani than Etxelur. But what a piece of meat he is. Why, if I were a few years younger . . .” She had a dreamy look on her face.

  Qili was embarrassed by this display of elderly lust. Arga must have been twenty-one, twenty-two at least.

  To Qili’s relief they stepped out on the dry land of the island. They walked around the shore to the north beach, where two great middens, each curved like the crescent moon, stood on the dry ground above the tide mark. The one closest to the sea was smoothly faced and intact, but the other was damaged, eroded and breached, with shells and stones and mud spilled on the sand.

  “This is our holiest site,” Arga murmured to Qili as she led him through the throng. “Where your grandfather will be interred. But you can see that the Great Sea didn’t spare the holy middens, even. We kept one as the Sea left it, to remember. The young complain sometimes, for they can’t see the point of all the hard work we do. But this is the point, our most sacred place smashed to pieces, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

  Qili faced the sea, which stretched untamed to the horizon, and breathed deeply of the salty air. He saw a group of eiders gathered to nest on a heap of offshore rocks that protruded above the receding tide. They were picking at mollusks with their beaks, or resting in the sun, preening and sleeping. Qili had always rather admired eiders. They liked exposed places, and braved the rough seas around the rocky shores, places they didn’t have to share with anybody else.

  He was glad to be at the shore. He welcomed the openness and the lack of enclosure compared to the strange artificial bowl of the Bay Land. It felt more like home. But even here people were rearranging the world; two more dykes, both incomplete, pushed out to sea from the land, with heaps of logs and stones at their abutments.

  He was brought to Ana and her closest companions, who stood before the middens. He’d met them all yesterday at the flint lode. Ice Dreamer was here, an older, graying, more elegant version of her vivacious daughter Dolphin, and Novu, the peculiar, dark, squat man from the Continent, and the priest, Jurgi, bare save for a strip of leather around his loins, his tattoos bright, his hair dyed blue, and his wooden teeth gleaming in his mouth. Today he had the upper jaw of a wolf dangling on a thread around his neck. Novu and Jurgi stood close together, Qili saw, their arms brushing, their fingers loosely cupped. They were old, Novu in his thirties, Jurgi even older in his forties.

  Ana herself was a short, compact woman, her red hair shot through with gray, her rather expressionless face lined, her eyes close and calculating. A woman shut in on herself, Qili thought, and yet the center of this little group.

  Qili was struck again by how old all these people were. Qili knew only a few people of this great age back home, and they were elders who kept out of the way of the young folk. Here this cabal of ancients seemed to control everything about Etxelur. And they were evidently obsessed by the Great Sea, an event most people alive now couldn’t even remember.

  The reason he was here was at Ana’s feet: a set of bones, fragmented but assembled roughly into a skeleton, respectfully laid out on a deerskin.

  Arga led him forward, and he bowed to Ana. He stared down at these mute remains of a man he had never known. “My grandfather.”

  Ana nodded. “I am glad you have come. Heni was much loved here.” She spoke the traders’ tongue fluently. “He was a close friend of my father, before the Great Sea took him. Like an uncle to me.”

  “From what I hear he saved many lives.”

  Jurgi the priest said, “You can do nothing more valuable with your own life than that. Qili, do you want some time alone with your grandfather? Do your people have any appropriate customs?”

  Ana snorted. “Well,
you might have asked him that yesterday when there was time to prepare.”

  “It’s fine,” Qili said. “He was one of you. I honor him in my heart.”

  Ice Dreamer asked Arga, “What about my daughter? What’s she up to?”

  “Guess who she’s with,” Arga said reluctantly.

  Dreamer shot an angry glance at her. “I asked you to keep them apart.”

  “What do you expect me to do, hobble them?”

  Ana said sharply, “Oh, leave it for today. How I hate funerals! Everybody forced to come together whether they love or loathe each other, all the tensions coming out.” She turned on the priest and Novu. “And you two can stop fiddling with each other as well. You’ve got a job to do, priest; keep your mind on that.”

  Novu and Jurgi moved apart, so their arms were no longer touching. Novu just grinned at Ana’s attack, but Jurgi looked offended. “I’ll do my job as I always do it, as the mothers know very well.”

  “Well, I hope the mothers turn away from the sight of you two licking each other’s ball sacs in the dark. Company and consolation is one thing, but you push your luck, priest.” Qili was amazed by her bluntness.

  Her mind evidently moving on, she looked out at the sea, the incomplete dykes. “I’d like to get people pushing on with the new dykes before the Giving. Do you think I can use Heni’s death as an argument? After all it was him who used to take Arga out to swim around the Mothers’ Door, and here we are trying to take the Door back from the sea.”

  The priest frowned. “Maybe we can be more subtle. The low tide is coming. Tell them of the moon, who has taken Heni; when the sea is low, and the moon distracted, we can steal something back from her . . .”

  They held this conversation, evidently unthinking, in the traders’ tongue.

  Arga drew Qili aside. “You mustn’t be offended. They don’t mean any disrespect to Heni. It’s just the way Ana is. She always works on several things at once.“ She flexed her fingers. ”Like a spider pulling on many threads. She uses occasions like this to bring the people together, to remind them who they are. And she pushes the work she wants done next—like the big dykes she’s building out to sea. But at the same time she is sincere about what she said about your grandfather. I know her; I’m sure of that.”

  Qili nodded. But he felt constrained by these people, this old woman with her manipulation and her scheming, as if he was caught up in her web. He longed for the day to be over, for an excuse to get away, to the simplicity of life in the World River estuary.

  It was time to begin the ceremony. The priest pulled out his wooden teeth, spat on his wolf jaw, and shoved it into his mouth. Then, with a sigh, fangs protruding grotesquely, he began the short climb up the side of the midden.

  62

  In the heart of Pretani’s endless forest, three big old oak trees stood tall around a clearing where hazel grew thick.

  A young doe stepped out of the trees’ shade, wary in the light. Me watched from his vantage above.

  Clearings of this size were rare in the forest, mostly made by the grounders with their fire. Open spaces meant danger. Yet the doe was drawn to the hazels’ lush leaves.

  Me could smell her, smell the musky richness of her coat and the tang of her dung. His mouth watered at the thought of the red meat that lay under that fine coat. He hefted his weapon, a bit of branch broken off to leave a sharp point.

  Shadows moved in the branches of other oak trees, one, two, Old and Mother. Two more Leafy Boys. The doe would not smell them; they had left no trace of their presence on the ground, for they had come this way through the canopy, moving from tree to tree.

  The doe bent a slim neck and nibbled silently at a hazel.

  A single leaf crackled.

  The doe looked back over her shoulder. Her soft brown coat, her stillness, made her blend into the background, as if she was nothing but a pattern of light and shade herself.

  It had been Old, in his tree. Me saw Mother cast a savage glare at him. Me barely breathed. He felt his heart beat heavy and slow in his chest.

  After an unmeasured time the doe relaxed, subtly, and bent her head to her meal again.

  Mother clenched her fist and pumped it down.

  Me let go of the branches and dropped. He saw the others fall too, like pale, heavy fruit.

  Me hit the ground on a bed of dead leaves and bracken. His legs flexed, absorbing the fall. Suddenly he was dazzled, in full unshaded sunlight, but he was ready.

  But Old fell clumsily, landed heavily on his right arm, and cried out. The doe whirled. Me and Mother immediately began to move in. But Old was still down. The doe saw the gap and was through in a single bound.

  Me glimpsed the doe only once more, her white tail disappearing into the forest shadows. It was already over.

  Mother fell on Old. She yelled as she pummeled him with her fists. Old tried to defend himself, raising his left arm, but his right was bent awkwardly, and he screamed as he fell back on it.

  Me shoved Mother back. He recoiled from the deep, savage anger that burned in her eyes. Nobody got as angry as Mother. But he faced her down. She snarled at him, teeth bared.

  Then she leapt, slim, naked, strong, caught the lower branches of the nearest tree, and squirmed up out of sight. Me followed, climbing easily away from the dangers of the forest floor and the clearing. He glanced back once to see Old struggling to rise, his right arm dangling, like a grounder infant newly snatched from its mother, trying to stand.

  Mother, still angry, led them on a relentless journey, jumping and swinging from tree to tree. Even Me had trouble keeping up. Old, he could see, with his bad arm, soon fell behind. But Me wasn’t about to lose Mother and the protection of her company, and he chased her doggedly.

  As the sun rolled across the sky and the shadows lengthened, they didn’t see anybody else, no other Leafies.

  Leafy Boys had no home. It wasn’t a good idea for too many of them to gather in one place at one time. They were scattered through the forest, not organized, collecting in little hunting bands that formed and split up spontaneously. There was always a rush of noisy squabbling as people formed up. This wasn’t the best group Me had ever been in. People were wary of Old because of his age, and of Mother for her savagery and anger. Now Me looked forward to finding others and going off with somebody else. That wasn’t going to happen today, however.

  As the shadows lengthened, Mother slowed at last.

  She stopped at a particular tree, a big fat old oak. Me knew this tree, as he knew many of the forest’s best trees. With strong branches and thick foliage it was a good place to hide, and there was a spring at the bottom where you could drink.

  He and Mother clambered down. It was only the second time he’d touched the ground in many days. They lapped at the spring. Mother found some mushrooms growing from a broken root. That would fill their bellies, but on a day when they had found no meat they would go hungry tonight. Me could tell Mother was still angry, in the hard, jerky way she broke up the mushrooms.

  They were already clambering back up into the branches when Old turned up, moving stiffly and cautiously. Me looked down on him as he splashed water into his mouth with his good hand, and picked at what was left of the mushrooms. Mother snarled softly and spat a bit of mushroom at him, but she did not drive him away.

  The three sat in the tree’s branches, silent. The sun dropped, and its light shone through the leaves, showing their fine veins and filling the canopy with a green light that dappled on the tree bark. Me held out his hand. Tiny discs formed on his palm, where the sun’s light peeked through the leaves. In the back of his head curiosity stirred. How did the discs get there? But the light faded, and soon there were no more discs on his hand, no more shadows.

  Moving slowly, the three of them piled up dead leaves at the root of a fat branch, and lay down together, wriggling, trying to get comfortable. Mother was in the middle of the three. She was the strongest and so took the safest place, shielded by the bodies of the others.r />
  As Me lay down, his belly to her back, her hard buttocks pushed into his groin and he felt his penis grow long. But he was hungry and would not have wished to rut, even if it had been someone other than Mother, who rutted with nobody. He turned away and relieved his hardness with a few strong tugs.

  Then he closed his eyes, his back pressed against Mother’s, and tried to sleep, ignoring the hunger that gnawed at his stomach.

  The Leafy Boys lived almost silently. They hunted, fought, pissed, shit, rutted, slept, and died, but they didn’t talk.

  And they had no names for themselves. Me thought of himself as just that: Me, the center of the world-forest. “Old” had earned his label in Me’s head because he was a little older than the others. Few survived beyond two, three, four years after your body learned to rut; you grew too heavy, too stiff, for the work of climbing, and you fell, or you were done in by the grounders. Old knew this. You could see the fear in his eyes when he woke in the morning.

  As for “Mother,” she had once gotten a baby growing in her belly.

  The Leafy Boys didn’t keep babies. They kept their numbers up by snatching grounder children. No Leafy girl had ever survived getting a baby in her belly—none but Mother. As the pregnancy developed she had hunted as hard as anybody else, until her belly was too big for her to move, and she had begun to starve because nobody would help her.

  In the end, when the bloody water had gushed from between her legs, the others had driven her off with fists and sticks. Her clumsiness, her stink and her blood traces would make it impossible for them to hunt. Even the grounders might be able to smell her. So she had gone off alone, clambering through the canopy clumsily, her pain obvious. Me thought she would fall, and that would be that, and he would never see her again.

  Some days later she came back, with her belly slack but empty. Again the others tried to drive Mother away, for she smelled strange, and had a bleakness in her eyes that scared everybody. But she had fought for her place. One had died, opposing her.