Stone spring

88

By the time they had reached the Northern Barrage, following Ana at her crawling pace, quite a crowd had gathered to follow them, some from Etxelur itself, and snailheads, World River folk, others who had come here for the Spring Walk – and Eel folk whose parents or grandparents had once been brought here as slaves. The children ran and played, each of them covering ten times the distance walked by the solemn adults.

One little girl, aged seven, was cheeky enough to come and walk beside Ana, trying to hold her hand. This was Zuba, granddaughter of Arga – known as a formidable swimmer, as her grandmother had once been. The world was full of children, and there always seemed to be more of them in these first bright days of every spring, playing among the first flowers. Dolphin thought of her own children, the four boys who were all but grown already, and the two others who had died young. How many of the children playing today would live to see ten years, or twenty? Let them have this brief day in the sun, and enjoy it as they could.

Having walked across the Bay Land the party climbed a line of stranded dunes, and then came upon the Northern Barrage. Stretching roughly east to west, this wall ran the length of the old tidal causeway between Flint Island and the mainland, but had been greatly extended. The southern face of smoothly worked sandstone shone in the sunlight, while the sea, excluded and tamed, lapped passively at the northern face.

Ana and her party climbed up onto the dyke from the abutment at its island end, and then walked along the stone-clad upper surface. Only Ana, Dolphin, Kirike, Acorn, Resin and Sunta walked along the wall, while those who had followed watched from below. Kirike bore the bag of bones, as he had all the way from Pretani. Ana walked with her arm linked in Dolphin’s. Aside from the gull-like shouts of the playing children, the only sounds up here were the wash of the waves against the wall, and the tap-tap of Ana’s stick on the stone.

Dolphin looked to her right, over the sea, where Ana’s last great project, the long dykes that had been built around the site of the drowned Mothers’ Door, was all but complete. This morning people were still working on the tops of the dykes, laden with sacks and ropes, and silhouetted against the sun-dazzled brilliance of the sea – but the dykes were intact enough for the long labour of excluding the sea to have begun. Today, close to the spring equinox, the tide would be exceptionally low, and Dolphin knew that the great gates could be opened in the walls to allow more water within to drain away. This was the show Ana had hoped might be fortuitously mounted to impress the Pretani, and to honour Shade.

But the bemused Pretani, staring at the earthworks, clearly understood little of what they were seeing.

The party reached the centre of the dyke’s curving face and came to a halt. Here the heavy facing stones had been lifted from the upper surface of the dyke, and cists – small, stone-walled tombs – had been dug into the mud and rock of the interior.

Kirike seemed surprised to have come here. ‘I wondered where we were walking, away from Flint Island… You would inter him here? Not in the middens?’

‘We don’t use the old middens any more,’ Ana said. The breeze off the sea picked up, and whipped her stringy hair about her face; Acorn brushed back the greying wisps. ‘Thank you, child… It was after the war, after your mother died in my arms, Kirike, at the hands of your father. Zesi’s were the first bones I placed here, in the wall. Since then we have dismantled the middens, and we brought the bones of all the dead to this place, the dyke, and to the Eastern Barrage too, across the mouth of the bay.’

She turned to Kirike, her blank eyes questing. ‘This is my plan, Kirike. Let the sea walls be more than mere mounds of timber and mud and stone to our people. Let our children know that this is the resting place of their ancestors, who survived the Great Sea and built the first walls. And let them know that they are protected not just by mute, dead stone but by the last legacy of those grandmothers – their very bones.’ She sniffed. ‘People think this is a trick. Jurgi was always accusing me of manipulation, of twisting custom for my own needs, and inventing others where none suited. Well, what of it? Jurgi himself lies in the wall now, keeping a watchful eye on the sea. And now you too, Shade of the Pretani, will join my sister in the long sleep. You Pretani – Resin, if there’s anything you want to say…’

‘No,’ Resin growled. ‘All the words were said in Pretani. The gods need no more words.’

‘Then get on with it.’

Kirike knelt down and opened up his bag. Reverently he unpacked the bones, and began to lay them in the shallow cist.

Ana, gripping Dolphin’s arm, turned her sightless face to the northern sea. ‘When I was a little girl I rarely thought of the future. What child does? Even when I was grown it seemed to me the past must have been the same as the present, and the future could be no different. Well, the Great Sea washed that away, I can tell you. And now I know there will be a future, for I have created it – I and Novu and Jurgi and all the rest – it is divided from the past as cleanly as this wall divides land from sea.

‘But what next? That I cannot see. Knuckle’s boys have dreams of their own – do you remember Knuckle? Good man, another hothead, but not all his boys are entirely foolish. The snailheads abandoned their land in the south because of the encroachment of the sea. Well, if dykes can be built here, why not there? And maybe it ought to be done if we don’t want the sea washing up from the south to overwhelm us, just when we’ve excluded it from the north. But that’s a task for another generation, not for mine, and I won’t see it done. I think I’ve stirred them up to do it, however.

‘And then there’s whatever’s going on in the east.’ She glanced that way, thoughtful. ‘I mean the very far east, beyond the Continent where the traders walk, a world away. It’s different where Novu was born, in Jericho, where people live in nests of stone, and don’t hunt as we do but live with the cattle they feed on. Just one of them came here with a head full of strangeness, and he changed everything, for Novu’s was the inspiration for building the dykes in the first place.

‘What else are they up to over there? What happens when the next Novu comes here, and the next – or a whole herd of them? Well, let them come. I remember Novu said that at first he could barely see us at all, barely see Etxelur, so lightly had we touched the land. Even our houses were just heaps of seaweed to him. Let them try not to see us now…’

‘Ana! Look at me!’

Ana turned her head towards the ocean. ‘That sounds like Arga. It can’t be Arga. Although she was always a good swimmer, and now she swims in the stone of the dyke…’

‘Ana!’

Dolphin peered out to sea. The voice wasn’t Arga’s, but Zuba’s, Arga’s granddaughter. She was standing within the circle of the ocean dykes – standing on a dry surface, on a wall that curved and glistened, studded by shells and draped with seaweed.

As the water drained out through the gates in Ana’s dykes, for the first time since the day of the Great Sea, the circular arcs of the Door to the Mothers’ House were rising into the sunlit air.