Stone spring

25

Ana lay back in the crook of her father’s arm. He was drinking a nettle tea she had made him. Lightning lay on Kirike’s other side, contentedly curled up against his leg.

They were in their home. The afternoon had grown ferociously hot. There was plenty going on outside – she could hear the shouts of the people beginning the long process of butchering the whale, and even from here she could smell the sharp stink of blood and blubber and brine – but she was grateful for some time in the shade. And after so long in his boat, Kirike said, so was he.

He didn’t smell like her father, not yet. There was too much of the sea on him. And she thought he had lost weight, grown greyer – grown old in the nine months he had been away. Grown that bit stranger. But she didn’t care. It was him, solid and alive, as if back from the dead; she had him back, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be but here with him.

But the stranger was here too, the woman he had brought back with her baby. She was sitting with the priest, talking quietly. Even her name was odd: Ice Dreamer.

They were trying to work out where she had come from, how far away was the land where Kirike had picked her up. They had lifted the mats from the floor, and the priest scrawled a map in the dirt, showing the familiar countries, Albia, Gaira, and Northland between, and a vaguer sketch of what lay to the west, mostly picked up from traders’ tales: a warm sea to the south, a cold, icebound ocean to the north, and beyond a greater ocean to the west a vast continent. Dreamer spoke of her land, which was evidently a big, complicated place of lakes and forests and ice. But she was even vaguer than the priest, for as a child she had grown up far from any sea, believing she lived on an endless plain – just land, going on for ever. She hadn’t even known the ocean existed.

Neither recognised what the other drew, and there seemed no way of connecting them up, save for a dim impression of Kirike and Heni’s westward journey, hopping between rocky islands and ice floes, and then a similar step-by-step journey back.

‘It is as if we inhabit different worlds,’ the priest said, doodling with his stick. ‘Ours to the east, yours to the west. Connected only by an accidental journey that might never be made again…’

Dreamer was sitting cross-legged with her baby on her lap. Out of her heavy skins, she wore a light tunic over her heavy breasts. Her face was well defined, the bones of her cheeks high, her brow proud, her nose thin and straight. She was beautiful, Ana thought, watching her. Strange, beautiful.

Dreamer shifted to see what Jurgi was sketching now. He had drawn three concentric circles, a line piercing to the centre. Unthinking, he’d drawn it over Etxelur in his map. Dreamer asked, ‘What is this? I see that sign everywhere here, on your houses, carved into the rocks. Even on people’s faces. I have seen it in my own country.’

‘You have?’

‘We saw it carved in the rocks,’ Kirike called over. ‘Over the beach where we picked her up.’

‘The sign is very old,’ the priest said. ‘It means many things. For one thing, we use it to remember the better world of the past.’

Kirike grunted. ‘When Etxelur was strong, and did not have to take insults from a bull-man like the Root.’

‘But I think it means other things too,’ Jurgi said. ‘Circles come back to where they started. As the moon and sun cycle in the sky, as the seasons give way one to another, always returning.’ He glanced at Dreamer’s baby. ‘As a baby girl is born, who grows to be a woman, and gives birth in turn.’

‘Maybe he has drawn sharks and dolphins swimming around a boat,’ Kirike said.

Ice Dreamer flashed him a smile, bright in the dark.

Ana didn’t know what they meant. They shared memories, experiences she didn’t. She felt an odd, unworthy pang. Resentment. Jealousy. Ugly emotions she didn’t like to recognise in herself.

Ice Dreamer said to Jurgi, ‘Much separates us. Your language is like none I ever heard.’

‘That isn’t so much,’ said the priest. ‘The traders who cross the Continent by the valleys of the great rivers say that everywhere languages are spoken that are as different from mine as mine is from yours.’

‘But she did not speak the traders’ tongue, even,’ Kirike said.

‘Even so, Ice Dreamer, much more unites us than divides us. You are human. Two arms, two legs-’

‘Half a belly, or at least that’s how it feels.’

‘I can tell you,’ Kirike said now, ‘she’s the same inside as we are. If not, she wouldn’t be here now.’

The priest said, ‘Nothing here seems so very strange to you, does it? Nothing about the way we live.’

‘No. We too have houses. Spears. Fires, hearths. Only the small things are different.’

‘But what of the greater things – the greatest of all?’

‘You mean the gods.’

‘The stories of the past, of those who made the world, and destroyed it,’ said the priest. They looked at each other, suddenly curious.

As they spoke of ice giants and wolves in the sky, Kirike hugged Ana closer and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m sorry I missed your blood tide.’

‘It was fine. Mama Sunta was there, and the priest, and Zesi… They helped me. But my Other is an owl.’

‘So Jurgi told me. Your Other can represent many things,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sure the priest has told you that. And everything has its place. The night needs the owl as a summer’s day needs the swallow.’

‘Am I the night, then? Am I death?’

‘No. But you’re a much more serious girl than the one I left behind, and I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry about your sister too.’ He looked towards the open flap of the tent, as if hoping Zesi would suddenly appear, or fearing it. ‘She’s hardly spoken a word to me since I came back.’

‘I love you,’ Ana said. ‘I missed you. She loves you. But she’s angry.’

‘Why? Because I went away?’

Ana said carefully, not wanting to be disloyal, ‘She liked having all the responsibility. As Giver, as senior woman of the house… Even though she complained about it all the time. What people say isn’t always what they mean, is it?’

‘No, child, it isn’t.’

‘Did you know she told the Root she would take the wildwood challenge?’

‘No.’ His muscles hardened, his grip on her tightening. ‘I won’t allow that. I’d rather go myself. Those Pretani animals don’t go into their wildwood to play, but to earn their killing scars.’

She snuggled in closer. ‘You’d better tell her that yourself.’

The priest and Ice Dreamer seemed to have finished telling each other their stories.

‘Different stories, but the same elements,’ the priest said. ‘The birth of the world in ice and fire, the coming of death…’ He massaged his temples. ‘I think these stories are not lies. I think our first mother was real, and your Sky Wolf was real. It is a consolation of humanity that we aren’t born with the memories of ten thousand generations of misery. Each new mind is as bright as a celandine in spring, and as empty of thought. But the bad thing is we forget the past – what to do when the rainstorm comes, how the world was made. This is why we need grandmothers, and priests. To remember for us.’

‘Yes. My people believe the world was different, before. Better. Then it was ruined, by ice and cold. Now lesser people own the world, and we are the last of those who went before. In fact I may be the last of all – or my baby is.’ The baby woke up coughing, and cried. Dreamer held her on her lap and looked down at her, concerned. ‘Oh, child, what’s wrong?’ She murmured something in her own unknown tongue.

Kirike took his arm from around his daughter’s shoulders, and crossed to the woman and huddled with her over the baby, his back to Ana. Lightning followed him, curious, wagging his tail. Ana was left alone.