Stone Spring (3 page)

Ana frowned. ‘If there was going to be a marriage it would have to be you with that oaf Gall. And it would be Mama Sunta who would have to agree.’

‘Yes, but that’s not how it works where they live. There, the men run everything. And, listen to this, I worked it out from what Gall said - if I married him I’d have to leave here and go and live with his family.’

‘That’s stupid,’ Arga said. ‘If you get married the man comes to live with you and your mother. Everybody does it that way.’

‘Evidently not in Albia.’ She sighed. ‘They’re disappointed we have no brothers, too. They wanted the oldest brother to come back and fight in the forest with them, in the summer.’

‘What for?’

‘The wildwood challenge. Another every-seven-years thing, hunting aurochs in the Albia forest, everybody seeing who’s got the biggest cock. You know what men are like.’

‘Arses,’ said Arga, seven years old and solemn.

‘Not all men.’ It was the younger Pretani, Shade. He was coming back, almost shyly. ‘I am sorry if my speaking is not good. The traders’ tongue is difficult.’

Ana pulled her tunic tight. ‘And you’ve come for another look at my chest, have you?’

He may not have understood the words, but he got the sentiment. He blushed under his sparse beard, suddenly looking much younger. ‘I was curious.’

‘Where’s your brother? Isn’t he curious?’

Shade gestured. Gall was with the fishing parties, who were showing off hooks of antler bone and nets of plaited sinew and bark, and telling stories of the sea. ‘He is telling heroic tales of his own battles with bears and wolves. A good tale is worth telling. And Gall is loud, and catches my father’s ear.’

‘Your tunic looks itchy,’ Arga said, staring.

‘It is hide. It is what we wear, in Albia.’

‘Not cloth, like sensible people?’

‘Cloth?’

‘We make it from reeds and bark and stuff. And you’re shivering,’ Arga said bluntly.

‘No, I am not.’

‘You are,’ said Ana. ‘It’s because you’re wearing that stupid deerskin cloak. We wear those in summer.’

‘This is what we wear,’ he said miserably. ‘It is fine in Albia.’

Zesi laughed, for he was blushing again. ‘Oh, come here. Sit between Ana and Arga. They’ll warm you up.’

The Pretani hesitated. Perhaps he thought Zesi was playing some trick on him. But he sat, smoothing his cloak under him.

‘So,’ Ana said, ‘why aren’t you over there with your brother telling lies?’

‘I know little about cod, and fishing. I do know about other things. Flint, and trading.’ He picked up a piece from the display before him; inside a remnant carapace of brittle chalk, it was creamy brown. ‘This is good quality.’

‘It comes from the island,’ Zesi said, pointing. ‘Flint Island, we call it. But the best pieces we have are much older. We don’t usually trade them. Sometimes they are used as tokens in the Giving feasts in the summer.’

‘Why older, I mean, why the best . . .’ He gave up his attempt to frame the question in the unfamiliar language.

Ana pointed to the centre of the bay, to their west. ‘The best lode of all is out there. That’s where the good old stuff came from. The sea covered it over.’

He frowned. ‘Like a tide coming in?’

‘It wasn’t a tide,’ Ana said.

‘I know nothing of the sea.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Ana snapped. She felt oddly resentful of his questions.

But Zesi seemed amused. ‘Ask something else.’

‘What does this mean?’ He indicated the design etched into the rock flat, the three circles of grooves and ridges, the straight-line tail that slashed to the centre.

‘You’ll see this all over Etxelur. Some say it’s a kind of memory of the Door to the Mothers’ House. Which is the old land we came from.’

Arga said seriously, ‘We lived there without dying. But when the moon gave death to the world we had to leave.’

Shade stared at the mark. ‘So,’ he said, turning shyly to Ana, ‘why are these circles drawn on your belly in blood?’

‘It isn’t just blood,’ Ana said. ‘There’s water and ochre and honey and other stuff.’

Zesi said briskly, ‘This is the blood tide. After a girl becomes a woman, at low tide in the next midwinter she is taken out by boat to North Island, which is north of Flint Island. The moon is death, ice. Ana’s new body is a gift of warmth and life. We must show we defy the moon, and the tides she draws . . .’

‘Still sitting with the women, brother?’ Gall approached. He held an immense cod in his left hand; he had bits of bone and scaly skin stuck in his beard, and Ana could smell the wood-smoke on him. His traders’ tongue was guttural, coarse. ‘You’ll turn into a girl yourself. Come on, let’s go back to that Giver’s hovel and see if we can persuade that old crone to cook this for us.’

Ana jumped to her feet. ‘You leave her alone. She’s ill.’

‘Not too ill to lash me with her tongue, was she? Well, if she can’t do it, you’ll have to.’ He threw the cod in the sand at her feet, belched, and looked down at the circles on the rock. ‘I heard you wittering about this scratch. Yak, yak, yak. You’d get more sense out of those seals on that island. I’ll tell you the bit I like.’ With his booted toe he traced out the tail that cut through the concentric grooves and ridges, and he leered at Ana. ‘Straight and hard and thrusting up into the belly.’

Zesi got up, her expression icy, and picked up the fish. ‘I’ll cook your food. Just you leave Mama Sunta alone.’

‘Hah! Come on, little brother, let’s put some flesh on your bones.’

Shade stood, expressionless, and followed his brother and Zesi towards the dunes.

Arga sat with Ana, watching them go. ‘Arses,’ she said.

4

Late in the day Sunta told Ana that the boats were waiting for her, on the north shore of Flint Island.

It was dark when Ana emerged from her house, ready for the long walk around the bay to the island. At least the threatened fresh snow hadn’t appeared, and the cloud cover was thin enough to show a brilliant moon. The snow carelessly piled up by the people with their reindeer-bone scrapers had frozen again, hard enough to hurt if you kicked it.

The moon’s face was surrounded by a ring of colour. This was said to be a crowd of the spirits of the dead, falling to their final destination in the moon’s icy embrace.

But tonight Ana wasn’t bothered so much by the dead as by the living, who had come drifting out of the Seven Houses. Many of the people of Etxelur, friends and family, had turned out to walk with her. But in among them were strangers, come to see the show. The two Pretani boys, with Gall munching on a haunch of whale meat and leering at the women. Traders, jabbering the crude argot that was their only common tongue. Even snailheads - early arrivals of the people from the far south. The centre of attention, she felt as if she was withering with embarrassment.

They wasted no time in the cold. The priest, Jurgi, led the way as he always did on such occasions. As they set off you could see by the moonlight how his mouth protruded, the great incisors of a wolf sticking out of his human lips. Arga solemnly walked beside him, wide-eyed, honoured to be carrying the skin bag that contained the priest’s irons.

Ana followed, with Mama Sunta and Zesi. Which was all wrong, of course. Ana should have been walking with her parents, not Sunta and Zesi. But only a year before her mother had died in childbirth, and her father, some said half-mad with grief, had gone sailing off and never returned. And Sunta was so weak that Zesi and Ana had to walk to either side of her, holding her up in her great sealskin coat.

‘I feel stupid,’ Ana murmured to Zesi over Mama Sunta’s lolling head.

Zesi replied, ‘Everybody feels that way. Tonight is about you and the moon. If you want to find the right Other, then you must concentrate.’

Ana said bitterly, ‘It was easy for you. A good Other chose you, the crossbill. Father was here. And mother.’

‘Easy, was it?’ Zesi snapped. ‘Well, I’m not your mother, and I don’t have to listen to you moaning.’

They trudged on in sullen silence.

They crossed the causeway to the island, a stripe of dry land that, when the tide was low, separated bay water from the open sea. Ana looked back over the bay, across the water to the southern beaches. Fires burned all along the shore, the tanners and knappers and fisherfolk working, brilliant human sparks in the drab darkness of the night. The moon’s cold white light glimmered from stretches of open water, on the ocean, in the bay of Etxelur, and across the boggy landscape. At times, Ana thought, Etxelur seemed more water than land.

Once over the causeway they headed north towards the islands, following a trail through low, rounded hills that, under sparse snow, were coated with dry, brown, fallen bracken, lying like lank hair, with here and there the stubborn green of grass. As they broke out at the shore the wind hit them, a hard steady gust coming off the sea, and white-capped waves growled. They clambered down the last line of dunes to the beach. Their boots crunched over gravel eroding from the dunes, fringing the level sand. On the beach itself the tide was low, and rock formations glistened, exposed to the air, dark with clinging weed and barnacles. There was much wrack gathered up in bands, strips and tubes of seaweed, bits of driftwood pushed high up the beach, relics of a winter storm. Ana’s footstep stirred the blanched, disarticulated remnants of a crab.

They came to the middens. These were heaps of mollusc shells and fishbone and other detritus, tall and long, each curving gracefully like the crescent moon, as if embracing the sea. Windblown snow was piled up in the lee of the middens. The boats that would carry Ana to North Island were waiting here, cupped by the middens.

But first the priest carried his charm bag to the crest of one of the middens. Here he set out his branding irons, bits of the hard, rusty stuff that, it was said, had fallen from the sky - unimaginably rare pieces, more valued even than the priest’s scraps of gold. These pieces were used for nothing but marking the people with the symbols of their Others, be they otter, fox, snow hare, pine marten - most precious of all the seal, most unwelcome the owl. One of these would be chosen to mark Ana that evening, in a flash of fire and pain, after it became clear what her Other must be.

Jurgi seemed to hesitate. Then he beckoned to Ana. She made her way after him up the midden. Loose shells slid and cracked under her feet, and there was a rich, cloying smell of salt and rot.

The priest had laid out the equipment for the fire, bits of false gold and flint to make a spark, scraps of dried moss for kindling, blocks of peat for fuel. He took out the wolf jaw that filled his upper mouth. ‘The fire must be built,’ he said gravely, his toothless speech slurred. She understood; the brand had to be heated in a new fire, started from scratch, not from an ember of some old blaze. ‘This is a role for a man from your house. Your father, your brother . . .’

‘I have no brother. My father is—’

‘I know. Still the fire must be started.’

‘I will do it!’ The call came from the Pretani boy Shade. Without waiting for permission he scrambled up the midden, slipping on the unfamiliar surface. His brother hooted and laughed, and called out insults in his own tongue. ‘I will do it,’ Shade repeated breathlessly, as he reached the crest of the mound.

Ana glared at him. ‘Why must you push your way in like this? You aren’t my brother or my father. You aren’t even from Etxelur.’

‘But I am living in your house. And I am good at starting fires.’

Ana frowned. ‘There must be another way. Custom decrees—’

The priest tried to look grave, then laughed. ‘Custom decrees that we are allowed a little imagination. Trust me. But can I trust you, Pretani?’

‘Oh, yes.’ But Shade was distracted. ‘This place is so strange, this hill. I don’t know the word.’

‘Midden,’ said Ana heavily. ‘It’s a midden.’

‘A heaping-up of shells . . . So high and so long - a hundred paces? I will measure it out. Many, many shells.’

The priest nodded. ‘It has taken many generations to build these middens. They are holy places for us. We bury the bones of our dead here. But, can you see, the sea is taking back the land . . .’

The ends of the midden arcs where they cut to the coast were eroded, worn down by the sea.

Shade held out his arms along the line of the midden. ‘Still, they are two bits of circles. Like those on your belly, on the stone flat on the beach, and now here in the ocean. This is how you know yourself. Circles in circles.’

Jurgi said dryly, ‘Maybe you should be a priest.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Ana said. She’d had enough; this was her night. She started to make her way down the midden. ‘Let him build his stupid fire. Come on, priest, let’s get to the boats before the tide turns.’

A little fleet of boats pushed off from the island’s sandy shore, paddles lapping at the chill black water. The boats were frames of wood over which hide was stretched, dried and caulked with tallow.

Ana travelled in one boat, which was paddled by the priest and by Zesi in the place of her father. Mama Sunta sat in another boat with her daughter Rute, Ana’s aunt, and Rute’s husband Jaku. Ana’s eyes were used to the dark now, and she could see them all quite clearly in the misty moonlight. The paddlers all wore heavy fur mittens to protect their hands from the cold. Out on the water in the dark Ana felt small, terribly fragile, yet she had barely left the land. But her father, if he lived, was out on the breast of the wider ocean in a boat not much more substantial than this.

Nobody spoke as the boats receded from the shore. Indeed it had been a long while since Sunta had said anything; she was just a heap of sealskin, with her crumpled white face barely visible beneath a hat of bear fur. Ana was glad of the silence, compared to the clamour and the foolishness that had plagued the day since the arrival of the Pretani boys.

Lost in her thoughts, she was startled by a noise coming from the dark, beyond the waves’ lapping, a kind of shuffling, a snort of breath. The priest stopped paddling and put his finger to his lips. Then he pointed ahead.

Suddenly Ana saw a black shape like a hole cut neatly out of the moonlit sky. This was North Island, a scrap of rock only exposed at low tide; already they had reached it.