Stone Spring (27 page)

‘I speak first,’ the Root said. ‘It is the custom.’ He spoke in his coarse Pretani tongue, and Zesi struggled to follow.

‘Then speak,’ Shade said, his tone dripping with contempt.

‘Why are we here, son?’

‘Because I challenged you, father.’

‘Why did you challenge me?’

‘Because you tried to kill Zesi of Etxelur. Tried in a way that lacked honour.’

‘The Leafy Boys attacked her.’

‘They were drawn by her wound. The cast stone caused the wound.’

‘I did not cast the stone.’

‘The priest is your creature. It is as if you cast the stone yourself. You shame yourself if you deny it.’

The Root shrugged. ‘I do not deny it. Why do you care if the Etxelur woman lives or dies?’

‘Because I lay with her. Because she carries my baby.’

The hunters gasped. Zesi saw the mother cast her a look of pure hatred.

‘And why,’ Shade asked now, ‘do you want to see Zesi dead?’

‘The same reason.’ It was the mother who answered, her voice shrill. She pointed at Zesi. ‘Because she carries your baby!’

The Root rumbled, ‘Be silent!’

But she would not. ‘I regret the day I told you to find brides for the boys in Etxelur! One son dead already. The seed of the other wasted in the belly of an Etxelur woman. Now she has Shade’s baby. She is here, stirring up trouble. Shade will leave me and go to her. It’s as clear as night follows day—’

‘I challenge you,’ Shade said to his father, ‘because you are less than a man. You tried to kill a woman. You tried to kill my child, your own unborn grandchild. Your clumsy meddling in our lives . . . You compound mistake after mistake. You have destroyed your family, and you keep destroying it, even to the next generation. And you did all this because of her,’ and he pointed to his mother. ‘I challenge you because I cannot challenge her.’

Jurgi murmured to Zesi, ‘He either loves you as no man loved a woman before. Or he’s gone insane. Or both . . .’

Alder stepped forward. ‘The priest is not here. I will say his words. The challenge has been issued. Yet neither need die. Agree a price. A finger from each man, an eye. Make your blows, your cuts. Then turn your backs and walk away.’

The Root shook his huge head. ‘It has gone too far. Blood has already been spilled. It must end here.’

Shade said, ‘And I—’

The Root moved with blinding speed. He grabbed his son’s hand, the hand holding the blade - and he drove it deep into his own belly. The Root groaned, and his eyes rolled. Yet he held onto Shade’s shoulder with his other hand, dropping his own knife.

Shade, his arm already soaked in blood, was shocked. He tried to step back. ‘Father—’

The Root wouldn’t let him go. He gasped, ‘I will not live to see two sons die. Now, son. As it was with your brother. You did it well for him. I saw you. Up and to the heart.’ Father and son were locked in a ghastly, struggling embrace. ‘The heart! The heart!’

Weeping, Shade braced, obeyed his father, and thrust deep.

The mother screamed and fell to the ground. The hunters rushed forward towards their leader.

The priest put his arm around Zesi. ‘Into the house. Come, quickly.’

The following morning Alder, grim-faced, summoned Zesi and the priest from their house. They were to watch the last of it.

Zesi saw that a pit had been dug into the ground, in a gap in the outer circle of young trees. An oak sapling lay on the ground, neatly uprooted; dirt still clung to its roots. Shade stood over the pit, naked, his father’s blood still staining his belly and legs. His men stood behind him.

Nobody else was here; the women and children and slaves stayed in their houses as the men pursued their drama of blood and death.

Shade raised a hand to beckon Zesi forward.

With the priest, she came to the edge of the pit. The Root’s heavy corpse lay in the pit, on his back. He was naked, unadorned, with pink-grey guts spilling from the huge, ragged wound in his belly. He looked as if he had been thrown in there, without ceremony.

Shade glared at Zesi, his eyes bright, his face unreadable. That new wound over his forehead seemed to be seeping blood - and she wondered if it would soon be joined by a second kill scar. There was little left of the Shade she had known, the boy who had come to Etxelur just months ago.

‘I wanted you to see this,’ he said to Zesi. He spoke in the Etxelur tongue, his accent thick. ‘To see what you have done. Because of you my brother is dead, my father is dead - both dead at my own hand - and my mother is gone, off into the forest, insane with her grief.’ He glanced down at the corpse. ‘We did this to ourselves. But we broke ourselves on you, Zesi, like a dog dashing out its brains against a tree. When this is done, go from here. Go to your home.’

She said hotly, hand on belly, ‘I carry your baby.’

‘Pray to your little mothers that you never see my face again.’

Then he bent, picked up the young tree, and rammed it upside down into his father’s pit, branches in the ground, the roots in the air, a grotesque mockery of life.

36

Off the Scandinavian shore, deep under the sea, huge mounds of silt were in motion. The undersea landslip would not be a large event, on a planetary scale. Only a volume the size of a small country, a mass of mud entirely submerged, sliding deeper into the abyss.

But an equivalent volume of water, pushed aside by the silt, would have to find somewhere to go.

37

Ana led the way along the track across the Flint Island marsh, with Novu following, Dreamer with her baby in a sling on her back, and then Arga. Arga, at least, was singing the ancient song of the trail, which she was trying to learn. Nobody else seemed happy.

The track felt solid underfoot to Ana. But then, earlier in the year, she herself had helped set down a new layer of logs on this very track, cut and shaped, to press down on the old. Sometimes she wondered how long this had been going on, how many generations had worn away while the rows of logs, one on top of the other, had been pushed down ever deeper into the soft mud, the soaked and rotten wood of the lowest at last dissolving away.

The four of them had crossed the causeway and come to this marsh on the north side of the island to show Novu and Dreamer a new place, a new kind of landscape for them, and maybe to trap some birds or an otter or two. It had been her father’s idea, a way for them all to get to know each other better, his daughter and the two newcomers. So Kirike had pronounced, before he had got into his boat and paddled away over the horizon with Heni, once again leaving Ana to work it all out.

The sourness wasn’t just to do with this pack of strangers and misfits, Ana thought. Everything felt wrong this late summer afternoon. It was too hot, the air dank and clammy and full of midges, the sun too bright and reflecting off the standing water. There was something odd in the air, a kind of tension. It was a day when she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.

But dragonflies hovered over the water, and on patches of dryer land butterflies flickered between purple sedge and pale pink-white cuckoo flowers. The birds were beautiful too. They disturbed a reed bunting, the white collar around its black head bright as it flapped off indignantly. And a flock of lapwings took to the air, flying so tight and close it seemed impossible they didn’t collide with each other.

Novu was startled by the lapwings. As usual these days he carried a big skin pack on his back; Ana had no idea what he was carrying in it, but its weight made him sweat. ‘Those things were close.’

‘Lapwings rarely attack people,’ Ana said dryly.

He glanced to either side of the path, which cut across sodden ground. ‘The water looks deep just here.’

‘So it is. The path is safe.’

‘How do you know to walk here?’

Arga piped up, ‘Because this is where the logs are!’

Novu grinned, good-natured enough. ‘Yes, yes. What I mean is, how did your grandmothers know where to put the logs in the first place?’

‘The song tells you where,’ Arga said, and she sang, ‘ “Over the water bridge, and by the smiling ridge, walk to the afternoon sun, until you come—” ’

‘Which came first, the trail or the song?’

‘The trail,’ Ana said.

‘The song,’ Arga said.

‘Maybe a bit of both,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘It is the same in my country. The land is overlaid by the lore and tradition of the past. And over and through this landscape of memory move the living.’

‘But it’s all so strange. There’s nothing here. At home we build walls. Marker stones!’ He stood on the causeway, in the middle of the marsh, and held up his arms. ‘In Jericho, at any moment, you know exactly where you are.’

‘Well, you’re not in Jericho now,’ Arga said. And she ran at Novu and shoved him in the back.

He flailed comically, then went into the water head first. He came up coughing, reeds clinging to his body, a sticky slime hanging like drool from his face. The water wasn’t quite knee deep, but, pulled back by his heavy pack, he was having trouble standing in the soft mud.

Laughing, Ana and Dreamer knelt down and pulled him out, landing him on his belly on the log path. He managed to stand. He had his foot stuck in an eel wicker basket. Panting, dripping, he said, ‘Thanks a lot, Arga.’

‘At least it shut you up,’ Ana said. She began to wrestle the basket off his foot. ‘This is one of Jaku’s. He’ll be furious.’

They got the wrecked trap off him, threw it back in the water, and continued on.

At the edge of the marsh the land rose up into a line of dunes before the beach, the marsh green giving way to yellow-brown sand. Here Ana stopped, shucked off the pack she was carrying and dumped it on the ground. ‘We’ll get ourselves set up here, it’s dry enough. Then we’ll see what we can catch in the marsh.’

Dreamer said, ‘Arga, will you help me down with the baby? She’s due a feed.’

Arga happily lifted the baby out of its sling on Dreamer’s back. She unfolded its wrap while Dreamer found a dry place to sit, and dug out fresh dry moss to pack around the baby to absorb its soil.

Novu, still dripping wet, dumped his pack on the ground beside Dreamer and walked a little further up the dune slope.

Ana followed him. The sand was soft and gave easily, but there was a better grip from the clumps of dune grass, long, tough, deep-rooted.

They reached the crest of the dune. This was the north coast of Flint Island, where the great crescent-shaped middens faced out to sea. To the north, beyond the scattered rocks where seals lay languid in the heat, there was nothing but the sea lying still and flat.

‘You have slime in your hair,’ Ana said. She scraped it away with the side of her hand.

‘Thanks . . . Incredible.’

‘What is?’

He waved a hand. ‘The sea. All that emptiness. I walked for month after month to get here. If Jericho is the centre of the world, here I am at its very edge.’

She frowned. ‘The edge of the world? But the sea is full of life. Fish and dolphins and whales. Look, you can see the seals.’ She pointed. ‘I think that’s my father, fishing.’

‘Your eyes are better than mine.’

‘To me, this is the centre. The shore, Etxelur, the sea, the whole of Northland, the estuaries, the beaches, the tidal pools, and the fringes of forest where we hunt. If you go too far south there’s nothing but forest, choking the land. That’s the edge.’

‘I see an edge. You see a centre. Can a world have two centres?’

‘I don’t know . . . Ask the priest.’ She felt snappy, irritable, her head somehow stuffy. ‘Can’t you ever just talk about normal things?’

But he didn’t reply. He seemed distracted, his eyes squinting against the brilliant sunlight, his lips pursed in a frown. ‘Listen.’

There was a sound like thunder, rolling in off the sea, as if from a storm very far away.

And Dreamer called up from the base of the dune, ‘Ana? I think you’d better come down and see this.’ She had opened Novu’s pack.

Novu stared, horrified, then ran down the dune.

In the boat, the sound of thunder made Heni sit up. Kirike had thought he was asleep.

The boat rocked at Heni’s sudden movement. But it was already full of a healthy catch of salmon and, bottom-heavy, settled back on a smooth sea.

Heni fixed his hat on his head and looked around. ‘You heard that?’

‘If it was a storm it was far away . . .’

They both sat silently, listening, the only sounds their breathing, the lap of the big, slow waves, the gentle creaking of the laden boat, the net ropes scraping against the boat’s hull.

The two men had paddled off to the north-east of Flint Island, out over the deep sea. From here much of the mainland was out of sight, only the island itself visible in the misty air. Kirike liked to be distant, so far out that the land was reduced to a kind of dream, and the world shrank down to his boat and the steady work of the fishing, and the companionship of Heni, the most enduring relationship in his life.

But was there to be a storm? The weather today was hard to read. The air was hot and, out on the breast of the sea, promised to get a lot hotter. The sky was free of cloud but there was a washed-out mistiness about it. The day felt odd to Kirike. Tetchy. Skittish.