Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  Zesi took another step forward, her fist closed on a bloody stabbing spear. “Who are you? You are nothing. You are a worm beside me. All my life you got in the way. My father always favored you—”

  “That’s foolish.”

  “And then you took it on yourself to judge me, and to throw me out of my homeland—”

  “If I had not you would have destroyed us all by now, as you killed the snailhead child under the reservoir you breached.”

  “And for that, you exiled me! You said it must end here, Ana. Then let it be so.”

  “I won’t fight you.” Ana had a spear and a knife; she dropped them both.

  Zesi grinned. “If that’s how you want it.” She raised her stabbing spear.

  Kirike, baffled and distressed, called, “What are you doing, Zesi—Mother?”

  “No,” Ana said sharply. “Please, Kirike. Stay back—”

  Zesi snarled, “Don’t stand in my way, boy.”

  And Shade said, “Enough is enough.”

  His thrust was clean, the blade driving through Zesi’s body from the back. For a moment more she stood, supported by the spear, an expression of outraged shock on her face.

  Shade stood behind her, whispering in her ear. “You destroyed my family. Even my mother went to her grave cursing me, because of you. You would even have killed our son, wouldn’t you, to get to your sister? Now we face defeat. My men are being slaughtered. And was it for this, Zesi—your hurt pride, your hatred of your sister? I kill you, but you have killed me already.” And he thrust again. The blade punctured her heart and burst out of her ribs. She fell forward, into Ana’s arms, blood spouting from her chest and mouth, already dead.

  Kirike cried out, and fell on his father, but Shade easily brushed his clumsy blows aside. Then he held the boy, until he dissolved into weeping.

  Shade looked over the boy’s head at Ana. “It had to be me that finished it,” he said blackly. “Let my hands take the last of the blood, as they have the rest. I should never have come here, never have let her back into my life . . . Well. Let it end here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ana whispered, clinging to the body of her sister. “Yes, let it end, Zesi. And if I couldn’t honor you in life as you wanted, I will honor you in death.”

  85

  Me roamed, looking for Leafy Boys. The cut leash still dangled from his neck. He was panting, bloodied but uninjured, deeply scared, lost.

  In this strange place trees grew on salty land, and fires sprouted away from the hearths where the grounders usually kept them. The world was all broken down and jumbled up. He longed for the canopy, or failing that the security of the leash and the net. But the only grounders he found lay dead or dying.

  Then he found another Leafy, alive. A girl. She was feeding on a dog, its belly ripped open by a spear. The smell of blood reminded him how hungry he was. He pushed the girl aside and shoved his face into the dog’s open belly, and tore away a mouthful of meat. But he hadn’t eaten all day, and something about the blood trickling down his throat worked in him, and his gut ached. He crouched, and let out an enormous fart, and then a bit of shit dribbled from his bare backside.

  The girl stared at him. Then she laughed.

  He laughed too. He felt better. Together they pushed their faces into the dog’s belly.

  The food made him feel better, and he thought more clearly. He remembered the way they had come, the way the grounders had driven them here. They had come from the south and climbed down into this bowl of land. Then that was the way they must return. Maybe they would find the grounders again. Better yet, they might find their way back to the forest canopy, the endless green.

  He picked up the dog. The girl fought and snapped, until she saw he did not mean to take it from her. He slung it over his shoulder, still chewing its flesh. With the girl at his side he loped off to the west, across the salty land.

  Five

  86

  The Thirty-third Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox

  Following the slow rise of the land, the Pretani party walked out of the forest cover and into the glare of the spring sun. It was noon, the sun was as high in the southern sky as it would get all day, and the air was heavy and windless.

  Acorn, twenty-five years old and proud in her hide tunic, led steadily and strongly, Kirike thought, as befitted his half sister’s rank as the Root of the Pretani. But the handful of warriors who followed her grumbled under their breaths about how thirsty they were and the state of their feet. Warriors always grumbled.

  And old Resin, who had seen thirty-six summers, hobbled into the light, muttering and squinting. “Wretched sun . . . Give me the forest shade any day. If we’d been meant to stumble about in the light the tree gods wouldn’t have blessed us with their shadow.”

  Acorn said, “Oh, stop complaining, old man.” She dug a battered cloth cap out of Resin’s pack and set it on his bald, sunburned head. “That’s enough shade for you. Mind you, from now on it’s open spaces and sunlight all the way to Etxelur. What about you, Kirike? I suppose you’re used to this.”

  Kirike set down the bag he was carrying, turned his face up to the sun and stretched. “But it’s a long time since I made my home among you.” More than fifteen years, in fact, since he had come home with his father, Shade, to the woods of Albia. He was over thirty years old himself now. He breathed deep of the air, and he thought he detected a whiff of salt, that odd sharpness that he remembered vividly from his boyhood, so different from the damp, cloying smells of the forest. Suddenly his heavy, scratchy hide tunic felt uncomfortable, and he remembered how he had run with Dolphin Gift along the endless strands. “I have Pretani blood, but Etxelur is in me too. Besides, even the strongest tree needs the sun.”

  Resin hawked and spat. “A nice Pretani saying for an Etxelur boy. Let me remind you of another. Saplings grow only when the great tree falls. And this old tree hasn’t fallen yet. Is that bag of bones too heavy for you? If so pass it over, and let’s get on.”

  Kirike’s sack, carried on a long shoulder strap, contained the bones of their father, Shade, dead a year now. They were making the long trek to Etxelur to fulfill his strange but firm wish that his bones should be placed in the land where the events that had shaped his whole life and the future of his people had occurred. “No,” he said. “My father’s not heavy.” He hoisted the pack. “Anyhow, I vaguely remember this route.”

  Resin hobbled onward up the grassy slope, leaning heavily on a gnarled stick. “So you should. This is the way we marched when we made war on Etxelur, all those years ago. And this is the place we decided to call Boundary Ridge, for it’s as good as any a place to say that here Albia ends, and Northland begins . . .”

  When they reached the crest of the ridge the land fell away before Kirike, the forest-choked hills of Albia giving way to a broad plain that stretched all the way to a misty, washed-out horizon. It was a land of shining water, streams and marshes and lakes reflecting the blue sky. The only trees grew in scattered clumps, probably willow and alder, water-lovers. Everywhere threads of smoke rose up from the people’s fires. Off to his left-hand side, to the north, he glimpsed the ocean, a gray horizon perfectly flat.

  But Northland was not as it had once been. There were ditches dead straight across the ground, cut as if by knives, and reservoirs round as cups. Some of the larger streams were dammed by pale walls, and the flow behind them was backed up into new lakes. By the ocean shore he could make out the sea walls, pale lines and arcs drawn all along the coastline. Over three decades after the disaster of the Great Sea, people had shaped the landscape. And such systems now stretched all the way along Northland’s northern coast, from Albia in the west to the World River estuary and Gaira in the east.

  “Remarkable,” he said now. “It all started at Etxelur. But now it’s spread across the whole country, like, like—”

  “Like a pox,” Resin grunted, standing beside him. “More to the point, look down there. There’s a house, right in the middle o
f our trail.”

  So it was, a slim cone that stood on a ledge of flat ground, halfway down the slope. Its walls were leather, unlike the kelp houses Kirike remembered from Etxelur—a tent meant for a summer’s hunting inland, perhaps. A couple of hare, skinned, hung on a rack outside the house, and a hearth barely smoked, choked with ashes.

  As they waited, a young man, bare to the waist, emerged from the house. When he saw the Pretani party on their ridge he waved and called into the house.

  Acorn said, “Did you see the marking on his belly? Rings and tail.”

  It was a mark Kirike wore tattooed on his own body, a mark he hadn’t otherwise seen in years. The mark of Etxelur. His breath caught; he was thrilled.

  A young woman came out of the house, not much more than a girl, perhaps fifteen years old. She looked up at the Pretani. With a murmur to the boy she walked up the slope. Wearing a simple green smock, she was barefoot, and wore her strawberry blond hair swept back—red and green, light and airy.

  And when she got close enough for him to make out her features Kirike gasped. The small, rather serious face, the compact frame—the resemblance was unmistakable. “You’re Ana’s daughter,” he said. She frowned, and he realized he had used the Pretani tongue. He made a mental effort to switch to the Etxelur language of his boyhood, and repeated what he had said.

  “Yes. My name is Sunta, named for my mother’s grandmother. And you are Kirike. My mother described you well.”

  He grunted. “I’m surprised, since I haven’t seen her since she was pregnant with you.”

  She laughed, and Kirike saw a row of wooden teeth in her open mouth. “Your mother was my mother’s sister,” she said, precisely, as if figuring it out. “So we are cousins.” She glanced at his companions.

  Kirike said, “This is Resin, our priest, closest companion of my father, Shade. This is Acorn, my father’s daughter—my half sister. And now the Root of the Pretani.”

  Acorn smiled. “We share no blood, Sunta. But I would like to think we are cousins of a sort.”

  Sunta’s grin widened. “You speak the Etxelur tongue!”

  “Kirike taught me. I hope you can forgive my slips.”

  “It is all so different from how it was when your father’s father was the Root, and he came to Etxelur.”

  “All that was long ago. In the end my father, Shade, paid the price for those times.” Kirike hefted the sack. “I think that is why he wanted his bones to rest among you. To close a too-long story.”

  She nodded. “Today is all about honor, I hope. You, Acorn, honor us by speaking our tongue. Shade honors Etxelur with his final wish. And my mother urged me to honor you by coming out here to meet you at this junction between Albia and Northland. For we knew you would come this way.”

  Acorn nodded. “And she sent her priest. I noticed your teeth. Do the priests of Etxelur still wear the teeth of wolves in their ceremonies?”

  “Oh, they do,” Sunta said lightly. “And, yes, that was why I was conceived, for my mother wanted me to be both Giver and priest. My father, Jurgi, took out my adult teeth when they started to grow, and he started my training. But it didn’t take with me, and before he died Jurgi persuaded my mother to pick somebody else. You can imagine what a row that caused.”

  Acorn glanced at Kirike. “I can. Similarly, I think our father always intended Kirike to become the Root.”

  “But Acorn is much better at the job than me,” Kirike said with a smile.

  Resin growled, “Kids never turn out the way you hope they will. It’s the blight of humanity, and why nothing ever gets done.”

  Sunta laughed. “I never wore the wolf’s jaw. Still, I’m my mother’s daughter and here I am.” She gestured. “Please, come and join us. We have food, you can see, and water, and fruit juice.”

  “All I want is a bit of leafy shade,” Resin muttered, and he limped forward.

  Sunta skipped forward and took his arm. Next to Resin she was like ivy wrapped around an old tree trunk. “Then come into the house. Shall we rest for the remainder of the day, and begin our walk to Etxelur tomorrow?”

  87

  “Dreamer? Are you there?”

  Dolphin went to Ana’s pallet, set aside the piss-pots she had filled during the night, and helped Ana swivel her legs off the pallet and grab onto her stick. Ana, nearly forty-eight, was the oldest living person in Etxelur. Her eyes were filmed over with cataracts, and she could barely walk for the pain in swollen joints. And at this time of year, in the summer heat, it was extra hard work to care for her because Ana insisted on keeping a fire banked up in her stuffy house day and night, convinced that cold made her aches worse.

  But here was Dolphin helping her out of her house and into the morning sunlight. Dolphin, over thirty herself and the mother of four boisterous sons, had plenty of other ways she could have used her time. But Ana, too proud even to use the second walking stick the priest had carved for her, wouldn’t have anyone but Dolphin.

  And, though she grumbled, it warmed Dolphin deep inside to help her. To Dolphin Ana wasn’t just the visionary who had made Northland safe against the sea. Ana was the daughter of the man who had saved her own mother’s life and delivered Dolphin herself—and the woman who had done so much to help Dolphin in the difficult days after she had refused to accompany her mother on her return across the ocean. So Dolphin forgave Ana her complaints, and even her odd habit of calling her by her mother’s name.

  With a sigh of relief Ana settled on the couch Dolphin’s sons had made for her. This was the trunk of a fat oak, laboriously carved and polished. Early this morning Dolphin had loaded it with cushions stuffed with goose down. Dolphin sat cross-legged beside her and resumed her work, mending a torn tunic for her youngest boy.

  Ana’s latest dog, an aging mutt called Hailstorm, was already asleep at the couch’s foot. He was the son of Thunder and grandson of Lightning, and she said he was the laziest of the lot.

  Ana’s house still stood where it always had, when it had belonged to her long-dead grandmother Sunta, one of the Seven Houses that stood behind the line of dunes that still fringed the southern shore of Etxelur’s bay—even though the bay, long drained, was now greened and thick with willows. But old Sunta would surely not have recognized this place, for the house had been rebuilt on top of a mound, its faces covered with marram grass and its base fringed by a low wall of good Pretani stone. Today the mound’s slope was speckled with celandine, an early flower drawn out by the sunshine. When Dolphin absently plucked one she counted its eight perfect, spiky leaves. And, nestling in the celandine carpet, she saw the rich purple of dead nettles, tiny, intricate flowers.

  Once she was settled Ana leaned her stick against the chair where she could find it again, folded her hands in her lap, and turned her cataract-silvered eyes toward the sun. “Ah, the light.” She rubbed her bare elbows with hands like claws. “It’s been such a long winter. Odd how the winters don’t get any shorter as you get older, though the summers fly by fast as swallows . . . The sun’s good for me.”

  “I know, Ana.” So she did; Ana made the same sort of speech every day. But there were some who said that Ana craved the light as part of her lifelong battle against her dread Other, the owl, a creature of the dark and the cold.

  Noise came floating to them on the breeze—banging drums, excited cries, the squeals of children, merging into the cries of the gulls as they wheeled over the shore.

  Ana turned her head. “What’s all the din?”

  “Well, I don’t know, sitting here, do I? But it’s surely to do with the Spring Walk.”

  Ana nodded. “Just three days away.” The sunlight was making Ana’s eyes water, and she wiped her face on a sleeve. “It’s all so long ago—the last time Pretani came on a Spring Walk. All that blood spilled. Hardly anybody remembers it now. The worst thing about growing old, you know, isn’t setting out your friends’ bodies for the sky burial; it is being the only one who remembers how it was, and why it was. The way we worked togethe
r—the way we fought. Novu, who died alone in his nest of bricks. Jurgi, dear Jurgi, the wisest man I ever met, who loved me, even if he never forgave me. And your mother, of course, Ice Dreamer, how I fought with her when my father brought her home! We all worked so closely together we were like the fingers of a single hand. Now they’re all gone, and me left here alone.”

  “You aren’t alone. People know your name from Gaira to Albia. You’re loved by everyone.”

  Ana reached over and patted her shoulder with her bent fingers. “It should be quite a show when they bury me in the sea wall then, shouldn’t it?”

  Somebody called, “As long as it doesn’t outshine what you’re planning for my father.”

  Ana turned her head at the new voice, her blind eyes searching. “Who’s that?”

  Four people were approaching the mound, two men and a woman in the heavy hide garb of the Pretani, and Ana’s daughter, Sunta, barefoot in a skimpy smock. The younger Pretani man bore a heavy leather sack. Looking beyond them, Dolphin saw a few more Pretani, and a ragged bunch of Etxelur folk following. Most of them were curious children who had probably never seen a Pretani before, dancing around the warriors and pulling at their hide cloaks.

  The younger Pretani was Kirike. Dolphin hadn’t seen him in years. She felt her heart race.

  She was still holding her ripped tunic, her needle of antler. She put the stuff down hastily, feeling foolish, and stood. She hoped she wasn’t actually blushing.

  Ana, leaning heavily on her stick, was trying to stand. “It’s the Pretani, is it? We’ll go down the mound and greet our guests.”

  “No need.” The Pretani woman took charge. She walked up the steps cut into the side of the mound and stood before Ana. “Giver. My father told me all about you. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “Acorn?” Ana reached out with a bent finger, and stroked the woman’s cheek, the line of her brow. “You are Acorn. You have your father’s cheekbones. I remember Shade’s cheekbones . . . And now you’re the Root of the Pretani. A woman!”