Stone spring

14

‘In the beginning the father spirit gave birth to mother earth and father sky. A mud diver made the world from the body of the mother, and set it on the back of a turtle. But another diver dug the anti-world, a wolf thing, out of the body of the father. The father, disgusted, flung the wolf thing away into the sky…’

Dreamer lay back against the strange rock panel she had found at the head of the beach, with loops and lines carved into it, an oddly comforting design, brisk and complete. She had banked up the fire early today. Moon Reacher was very cold, and she hadn’t stirred, even when Ice Dreamer had poured fresh water from the spring into her mouth, and doused her wound with salt water from the great eastern lake of brine, trying to drown the squirming maggots. Reacher had been just the same yesterday, the face like snow, the purple, bruised lips, the cold limbs. Walking had been impossible for days.

Dreamer cradled Reacher in her arms over her own swollen belly, the two of them, the last of the True People, on the beach before this strange poisonous lake, and she told Reacher the story of the world.

‘In those days the world was rich and teemed with game. People crawled out of the sea to populate the land. The People hunted and grew wise and lived long. Even when they died they were born again into this world, for this was the most perfect world there could be. Their most powerful totems were the mammoth, which was like a hairy boulder walking the earth, and the horse, which was a swift runner.

‘But then the Sky Wolf, jealous of his banishment from the earth, decided to smash the world.

‘When the clouds and frost and the ash had cleared, the great animals had gone, and nothing stirred but stunted creatures barely worthy of the hunt. There was only a handful of True People left, but the earth swarmed with a new race of sub-men who evolved from the cowardly things that burrowed in the ground.

‘Now the True People still make their fluted blades, but there is nothing left to hunt. Even when we die we can’t return to the hunting ground of the past. The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, the anti-world. Even our totems are dead…’

She thought she heard Reacher murmur. She held her closer, looking into her hooded eyes. ‘You must listen,’ she said. ‘Listen to the story. For you, Reacher, must tell it to me when I am in labour, and you, child in my womb, must speak it over my bed as I lie dying, for there is nobody else…’

Two men were watching her. The woman sat by a poor, shoddy fire under a shelter made of a heap of driftwood. She was dressed in tattered skins. Her dark hair was a mat of filth and grease, her face streaked with old blood. Bits of kit lay on the ground around her, amid folds of dirty leather. Her belly was swollen, though she was terribly thin; her wrist looked so fine Kirike thought he could have closed his thumb and forefinger around it. She held a child in her arms, a girl, perhaps eight or ten – nothing but skin and bones, and not moving.

The woman had been speaking, murmuring nonsense in an unknown tongue. Now she looked at Kirike with pale, blank eyes, and he suppressed a shudder.

Heni hissed, ‘Can you smell that rot? Like spoiled meat.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think she’s mad?’

‘She’s beautiful,’ Kirike said. ‘Or was. And she’s pregnant.’

‘Yes. Far gone with it. And look at the kid she’s holding. How stiff she is…’

Kirike stepped forward cautiously. The woman, watching, didn’t move. He crouched and touched the dangling arm of the girl, the wrist. The skin was cold as stone, and he could find no pulse. He moved closer, deliberately smiling at the woman. There was an overpowering stink of filth, of shit and piss and sweat, of stale fish grease – and that dread rot stench. He worked his fingers under the matted hair at the girl’s neck, and felt the cold flesh.

He drew back. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Dead for days, I’d say.’ Heni leaned forward and cautiously unwrapped the skin around the girl’s leg. The limb was swollen to the size of a log, and an open wound swarmed with maggots. He fell back, his hand over his mouth. ‘Well, we know how she died.’

‘Try not to frighten the live one.’ Still smiling, Kirike tried to slide his arms under the girl’s stiff body, to take her from the woman. But the woman grabbed the girl back. ‘I bet she won’t speak a word of any tongue we know. Nobody in this moon-struck land does. It’s going to take a while to persuade her to give up that corpse.’

Heni said, ‘It’s going to take no time at all. We just walk away and leave her to the sea, or the wolves.’

‘She’s pregnant, man! And she’s half-starved. Who knows how long she’s been nursing this wretched child? No wonder it’s driven the sense from her head. I wonder what happened to her.’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. And if she’s pregnant, that’s another morsel for the wolves. She’s not our problem, Kirike. She’s not one of ours. This isn’t our country!’

‘If we can get the body away from her, get some food inside her, clean her up-’

Heni stood over him, arms folded. ‘We’re going home. You agreed. We leave tomorrow, or the day after. As soon as we fill the boat-’

‘Fine. You fill the boat. We’ll leave as we said. And, unless she recovers and runs off, we take her with us.’

For a long moment Heni didn’t move. ‘One day I’ll walk away from you, cousin. I’ll just walk away, and you’ll be dead in a month.’

‘But today’s not that day, is it? Look – you cover up that stinking leg, and try to lift the body…’

The two of them moved towards the cowering woman. Kirike smiled, murmuring soft words in a tongue she could not know.

And then he noticed the design on the rock face on which she was sitting: three circles with a common centre, and a radial slash – the design that had been tattooed into his own wife’s belly, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House – the sign of Etxelur, carved into a rock on the wrong side of the ocean.