Shade inspected one of the islanders’ sturdy houses. He stepped inside its reed cover and let his eyes adjust to the dark. The big support beams were stained black with smoke and, in the middle of this marsh, had somehow been kept as dry as old bones. The posts were of oak, the right wood for the task, and must have been hauled to this soggy place from far away. He wondered how they kept the ground drained to stop the beams rotting. There was stuff on the floor, clothes, half-prepared food, a necklace of fish bones, a toy animal made of straw that looked as if it had been much played with. The people who lived here not been long gone, but were never coming back.
He went to the fire, picked out an ember glowing red hot, cupped it in a bit of hide and brought it to a wall. He knelt down and teased out dry straw from the wall, set the ember down, and began to breathe on it delicately.
“Generations old,” he whispered to the house. “”Parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. This very morning a family woke here, thinking it was just another day.” The straw had caught; flames licked, and he stepped back. “And now it’s over.”
“And that pleases you.”
He turned.
Zesi stood by the door flap, silhouetted against the daylight. “The ability to destroy, on a whim. To kill, or not to kill. The most fundamental power of all. And you don’t even have to lift a finger to wield it. Feels good, doesn’t it?”
And it did, though Shade sometimes felt uneasy to admit it. What did that say about him, about the state of his own spirit? Not for the first time he wished he had a decent priest to talk this over with. Maybe he ought to do something about getting Resin off the poppy.
Smoke was already gathering in the house, so Shade followed Zesi outside, where Bark waited. Then he watched with thoughtful interest as the fire ate up the reed cover of the house, leaving only a skeleton of posts, lit up by the flames. Then the oak, too, began to burn.
He was aware of the captive islanders sitting in their loops of rope, watching apathetically.
He turned, looking around at the island, the shining water that spread around this place, the drifting boats, the banks of gravel and mud. This soggy place, in the north of Albia, was rich and populous, comparatively, and peaceful. Now its human story was over. But some of the birds were coming back, to swim on the water and to plunge for food. The birds always came back, he had observed, as soon as the human fuss was over—and the other birds, the buzzards that enjoyed human flesh, and had, he suspected, learned to follow the Pretani around.
“What a disgusting place,” Bark said, wrinkling his fleshy nose. “Water. Mud. Watery mud and muddy water. Fish and eels, and not a dry scrap of land or a decent tree anywhere.”
“Much of Northland is like this,” Zesi murmured.
“Well, there you are. The fight went well.”
“I could see that,” Shade said.
“The Leafy Boys did their job. I sometimes wonder if they’re worth all the trouble. But they cost nothing to feed and they deliver a mighty shock, especially in those first few moments of the attack.”
Shade eyed the captives. Healthy adults and older children were the prize, the point of these raids. Workers and hunters. There seemed pathetically few of them as a reward for all the destruction and lost life. “Let’s get on with the breaking. Pick out the biggest man. You know the routine.”
Bark grumbled as he went over to the captives, “”Since I worked it out, yes, I know the routine. You.” He made the chosen man stand, bound his hands tighter, and brought him before Shade.
The man was tall, strong-looking, maybe twenty, twenty-one. He was bare to the waist, and had a tattoo of the kind these people seemed to favor, an eel wrapped around his thigh. He looked at Zesi and Shade with a spark of defiance.
Zesi brought over heaps of purloined hide. She set these on the ground, and she and Shade sat, sharing a water skin.
“Kneel.” Bark repeated the word in the traders’ tongue. When the man did not comply Bark slammed his spear shaft into the back of the man’s knees, forcing him into a kneel, grunting with pain.
The islander lifted his head, and said something in his own tongue.
“Speak traders’ tongue,” Shade snapped back. “Everybody speaks the traders’ tongue.”
“Why?” the man said thickly. “Why have you done this? Why have you killed our children?”
“Well, the children are no use to us,” Shade said, almost kindly. “What is your name?”
The man considered. “True. True, son of True.”
Shade gestured at the island, the burning house. “And what do you call yourselves?”
“We are the People of the Great Eel.”
Zesi laughed. “That’s new.”
“We have lived here since the beginning of time, when the gods of water and land and sky fought the Great Eel at the Center of the Earth—”
“Save it for your priest, if he lives,” Shade said. “Well, you don’t live here anymore. And you are no longer the People of the Great Eel. You have no name, save a name I may choose to give you. We, by the way, are the Pretani, and I am Shade. Now we will take you far from here—some of you, those who choose to live; those who defy us we will kill, and throw their bodies to the water, so that the Great Eel may feast one last time.”
Zesi burst out laughing.
True looked at her as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Shade thought he knew how he felt. True said, “You will take us far from here—what then?”
“You will cut stone. And then you will carry the stone, or drag it, to another place even further away.”
True looked bewildered. His face was very expressive for a big man, Shade thought absently. “Stone? Like flint?”
“No. Sandstone. And not for tools. Big blocks of it.”
“The other thing you might do for us is fight,” Zesi said.
“Fight who?”
Shade said, “We don’t know yet. Others, like you. You will fight, so that others may be taken. And they in turn will cut stone, or fight. Some of the men who attacked you today were once as you are, captured. This is how we proceed. How we grow.”
True shook his head. “You are mad. What is all this for?”
“That does not concern you.”
“How long must we do this, this cutting of the stone and fighting?”
Zesi sighed. “There was me thinking you were clever. You’ll do this forever. Or until you die, at any rate.”
“My children.” He glanced over his shoulder. “If they survive in the reeds—”
Shade said, again not unkindly, “They are probably dead. And even if not, you will never see them again. But you’re young. You may have more children.”
“And what will become of them?”
“They will cut stone.”
True looked still more bewildered, more shocked than fearful or angry. Shade had seen this reaction before. He simply didn’t understand what he was hearing.
Zesi leaned forward. “Let me teach you a new word. Slave. This is what you are. You are a slave. You will die a slave. And in future your children will be born slaves, and will die slaves.”
His eyes were wide. “Are you even human, woman?”
“Oh, yes,” Zesi said. “But you aren’t. Not anymore. Nor are your children, who don’t even exist yet. You are as dogs to us, that we control, and we do what we like with.”
True considered this. “I would rather die than cut your stone.” And he spat on the ground, bringing up a mouthful of bloody phlegm.
“Let me see if I can persuade you.” Shade nodded to Bark.
Bark grinned, and went over to the other captives, hefting his spear. At random he shoved the blunt end into the face of a man, who howled and went down. Shade carefully watched True’s reaction. Bark struck a woman next, then another man, then aimed for another woman—
True flinched, tugging at his bonds.
“That’s the one,” Shade called. “Bring her over.” As Bark separated the woman from
the group, Shade asked Zesi, “So who is she, do you think? A lover, a sister? Well, it doesn’t matter.”
Bark got a couple of the men to help. Holding the girl’s limbs, they briskly cut her clothes from her and got her on the ground, laughing and coarsely fumbling at her as they did so. About the same age as True, she wasn’t very pretty, Shade thought, but she had good full breasts, and a slight swelling at her belly that might be a pregnancy.
Bark laid out long hide tethers on the ground. He carefully soaked them with water from a leather pitcher, and then tied them around the woman’s wrists and ankles. With the help of the hunters he pulled the tethers away so the woman was stretched out on the ground, arms and legs spread wide. The men fixed the tethers to house posts and fish racks, dragging them tight until the girl screamed, and Shade heard a joint crack.
Bark stood back and inspected what had been done. “This is a lot easier in a forest with lots of handy trees standing around, I can tell you. But it will do, I think.”
Shade switched to the traders’ tongue. “All right, True. Let me explain what will happen now. You’re going to stay there on your knees. Your lady will lie there on the ground. And in time those hide tethers will dry out. They will shrink, and cut tighter, down into the skin and the fat and the flesh, through to the bone. Very slowly. And meanwhile the long lengths that are holding her will contract too. You can imagine what will happen.” He tried to project a kind of glee. It was important to make True believe he would go through with this. “Her body will give way where it is weakest, at the knees and the elbows. She will be jointed. Her limbs will come off, one by one.”
“No.” True raged, hauling at his ropes. “Must I cut your stone to make you stop this?”
“Oh, no,” Zesi said. “To save the girl . . .” She leaned close to True, who was sweating now, shuddering. “Choose another.”
“What?”
“Choose another of your family, your friends, to take her place.”
“I will not.”
“It is the only way you can save her. Do it, and you’ll have her back. Otherwise you will spend a day and a night and a day watching her—”
“Gentle.”
Shade snapped, “What?”
“Take Gentle.” He turned. “The one with the beard. Take him.”
Shade looked at the man, who looked harmless enough, but he was growing alarmed. “Why him? No, don’t answer. I don’t care. Bark, free the girl and get this Gentle.”
Gentle was already screaming, cursing, struggling, for he knew what was to come. True was crying openly now, in shame and bitterness, his spirit broken, as intended. Bark cut the girl loose, and Shade saw the huge relief on her face as she folded over on herself, realizing she was not going to die today.
Suddenly he was sickened.
70
The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox
Dolphin was standing on the dyke across the mouth of the bay when she heard Kirike’s call.
She could see him down there on the Bay Land, near a stand of willows, mature trees growing out of what had once been sea-bottom mud. He waved, his broad smile revealing a flash of white teeth.
The people around Dolphin, laboring on the dyke, looked up, distracted. They were all snailheads, most of them children, doing small jobs under the supervision of the adults. One girl grinned when she saw it was Kirike calling. You couldn’t keep secrets, and everybody knew about Dolphin and Kirike.
A flood of complicated, contradictory feelings welled up in Dolphin. She’d missed him every day he’d been away on his late-summer hunting jaunt with the other boys to the southern forests. Now he had returned, but she had to share some seriously bad news with him. Besides, she felt grimy, ragged, her clothes and skin covered in dust from the Pretani sandstone she had been handling all day. It was late afternoon, and she was tired. Why couldn’t he have come home in the morning, when she was clean and fresh?
He called again, his voice as distant as a gull’s cry. She pointed north, beyond Flint Island; they had a favorite spot on the shore. He nodded, and began to jog that way.
She jabbered her apologies to the snailheads. They shrugged, dirty, sweating, bored; few of them would work much longer today anyhow.
Then she walked across the dyke to its abutment at its northern end, on the island, and clambered down to the sandy beach. Her afternoon shadow stretched before her, long, oddly elegant—more elegant than she felt herself. As she walked she kicked off her boots and let the damp sand soothe her feet, which were aching after a day of cutting and hauling stone. It was almost the autumn equinox and the water was sharply cold.
At the headland she glanced back once at the dyke. The wall stood proud, defying the sea, though it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as when viewed from the Bay Land side, where its whole face was exposed. It was a patchwork, with around a quarter of the original core of mud bricks and plaster now faced by sandstone slabs.
The work with the stone, with stuff that was heavy, unfamiliar and blighted by a superstitious dread, was progressing slowly. Dolphin was coming to hate the dyke, for the way it ate her life, and the lives of so many others.
She turned her back on the dyke and walked on, and was glad when she turned around the headland to the island’s north shore, and the dyke was out of her sight altogether. Here wading birds, vast variegated flocks of them, worked their way along the littoral, having paused here on their way to their winter homes. There was plenty of evidence of humanity here, in the great middens, the houses standing on their mounds looking out over the ocean, even the stubs of the new dykes extending out to sea toward the Mothers’ Door. But somehow, away from the great drained expanse of the Bay Land, there was more of a sense of nature, of the world as it was supposed to be.
And here came Kirike, walking along the beach to meet her. She flung away her boots and ran toward him.
They collided in a tangle of limbs, tripped each other up, and fell to the sand. His face was before hers, the skin soft under a stubble of dark beard, and she could smell his sweat, and a subtle tang of wood sap, and crushed acorns on his breath when he kissed her. “You smell of forest,” she murmured into his mouth.
“And you smell of the sea. And of stone.”
“Ugh. Does that bother you?”
He rolled away, sat up and shrugged. “I don’t much care. Maybe that’s the Pretani blood in me. Come on, shall we go up to our shell place? We’ll be out of this breeze.”
She got up, brushing sand from her legs. “Getting out of the breeze. That’s all you’re concerned about, is it?”
He grinned, standing. “For now.” He grabbed her hand so they were drawn together, arms and bodies and foreheads touching. “Wait until we get back to the house—as long as we can get your mother out of the way.” He kissed her lightly, teasing. “Come on.”
Then he pulled away and jogged across the sand to where she’d thrown her boots, and picked them up. He was tidy that way, with a neatness that she lacked. She mocked him for it, but it was one of the ways they fit together, the ways they worked better together than apart.
They walked along the beach, and before they reached the holy middens they clambered up into the dunes. Here there was a little hollow between one dune ripple and the next, bounded by long stalks of marram grass, just wide enough for two people to lie side by side—a spot they called their “shell place,” for it was always carpeted by broken seashells, washed up from the beach. It was here that they had first made love, not long after returning from the midsummer Giving expedition to the World River. It was a place Dolphin liked to think was special, was theirs alone—but that was probably a dream.
Kirike lay back in the soft, dry sand, his arms tucked behind his head. “Ah—it’s good to stop moving. Believe it or not I’m pretty tired. It felt like we ran all the way to the southern forests and back.”
She grunted, not impressed. That was what you had to expect with boys and young men. She settled down beside him with her h
ead on his shoulder. “So how was the hunting?”
“The deer were shy this year. We came back with heaps of mushrooms, though. Mushrooms, and acorns. We were lousy hunters, but the squirrels won’t forget us in a hurry. And how’s the wall building going?”
“Dismal. Hard. Boring. Listen, Kirike, we need to talk. Ana wants to see us later. And my mother—”
He covered her hand with his. “In a moment. I just got back. Let’s not talk about that lot of old monsters, just for a while longer.” He sat up, pushing back his thick black hair from his eyes, and looked out to sea.
From here they could see the sweep of the ocean, the shadowed mass of Flint Island’s single hill, the huge, empty, deep blue sky. On a rocky headland to the west Dolphin saw movement, small, fat, white shapes crawling. Baby gray seals, just born, venturing out into a new world. And in the air she saw a flight of swans leaving for the winter, their huge wings pink-white as they caught the sun’s low-angled light, and waders swooping in from the east, to settle like snowflakes on the littoral.
Kirike said, “I love this time of year, and the spring. The equinoxes, the times of change. When the birds of summer fly away, and the birds of winter come. As if the world is taking a huge breath. It’s so beautiful here. Every time I go away I forget . . . Even if I don’t belong here.”
“Don’t say that. Listen, Kirike—my mother. She’s talking about going away.”
He turned to look at her. “Where?”
“She fears she is the last of her people—or I am. She thinks she should go back and find others. Save them, perhaps, as she was saved by Kirike, your grandfather.”
“She wants to go back over the ocean?”
“She’s done it before.”
“But my grandfather Kirike is dead, and Heni who traveled with him. Without Kirike and Heni, how could she even find the way?”
“My mother thinks she might remember. There are plenty of young men who say they want the adventure. Anyhow she is talking of trying.” Dolphin frowned. “She’s not happy here—not anymore. She and Ana bicker a lot. There was always tension between them, because when she first came here Ana thought my mother was taking her father away from her. I think she grew close to Ana when they were recovering from the Great Sea together.”
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