he whirled around his head to make a tremendous screaming noise that had the smaller children running to their mothers and the adults cheering.
And then they were off, with Zesi in the lead and Jurgi walking in his place just behind her, both of them singing the ancient songs of the land ways – and each quietly reminding the other which way to go where the path wasn’t clear. The people chattered loudly, and some of the children sang a song in praise of the little mother of the land. The two Pretani boys, who wouldn’t let themselves be excluded, whooped and hollered aggressive hunting songs of their own.
Zesi thought she could feel everybody’s relief to be off on this adventure after the long winter. Even the dogs ran and yapped in excitement, even Lightning who had spent the winter pining for his owner, Kirike.
They headed south, making for the valley of the river they called the Little Mother’s Milk. Away from the coast the land rose and became a sandstone fell, bleaker and more exposed. In places huge layered rocks lay tumbled, as if dropped by giants.
The sun was bright, but a spring mist hung in the air, glowing with light, masking the plains of the far horizon. To either side of the trail, littered with loose, pale sand worn free of the soft underlying rock by footsteps human and animal, the heather had begun to grow, thick and short and green. Zesi found some hawthorn as she walked along, and absently plucked the buds, still early, bright green. They had a rich, nutty flavour when she chewed them. And the first pileworts were out, a bright and early flower with shining yellow petals. She pointed this out to the priest, for it was a good treatment for piles, and worth collecting.
But the country was troubling her, as she sang her songs with the priest. It had been some years since the last walk, and while the trail was easy to find it seemed to Zesi that in some places the ancient songs of the land, with their lists of landmarks and directions, did not match what she saw before her eyes.
The ground was boggier than it used to be, and new ponds pooled in hollows. Here was a stand of trees she remembered playing in as a child. Now the birch were leafless and dead, though a couple of alders survived, and where she remembered fern and grass there now grew samphire and cordgrass. When she dipped her finger in the muddy water that pooled around the surviving alders, she tasted salt. Very strange.
At last the path led them down into the valley of the Milk, steep-sided and cloaked with wood. The pace slowed as people spread out to look for water or to hunt, or bled the birch trees of their sap for resin for rope-making, or inspected fallen trees for flint nodules dragged up out of the earth by the roots.
Zesi was relieved when Gall ran off into the first dense bit of forest they came to, stabbing spear in his hand.
The younger Pretani, Shade, however, stayed close by, walking with her. He was taken with the holloways they followed, paths close to the river that had been worn into the earth. They were channels choked with debris, plant growth, tree roots, last year’s leaves, and pools of brackish water. The people kicked them clear as they walked.
As the sun started to go down they stopped to make shelter for the night, close to the river. People worked busily, collecting wood for lean-tos and for the fires.
Zesi sat at the edge of a pond and set to work using a flint knife to dig out a stand of bulrushes. Later she would char their thick stems on the fire, and they would suck out the starchy interior.
Shade was still close by, as he had been all day. He had an endearing awkwardness, as if he was never quite sure what he should be doing.
They spotted hares chasing each other through the long grass. Two big animals faced each other, their long black-tipped ears bristling, a male and female, and they stood up on their back legs and boxed with their front paws – mad with lust, Zesi thought, for it was that time of year.
Watching the hares, Shade spoke to her shyly. ‘This land is very old,’ he said. ‘So old your feet have worn tracks into the earth.’
‘We follow the tracks our ancestors made when they first walked here, following the little mothers as they made the world. Where’s that brother of yours? He’s been gone a long time.’
‘He is a great hunter. Sometimes, at home, he is away for days, alone. He won’t come back without a kill. You’ll see… The walk is useful.’
That word made her laugh. ‘Useful? How?’
‘The children are learning how to live on the move. In the forest. As your ancestors might once have lived. They are learning old skills, that might be needed again.’
She grunted. ‘You sound like our priest. He likes to say how useful things are. You sound like an old man, not a kid.’
His cheeks burned under his sparse beard. ‘I am older than your sister!’
She tried hard not to laugh. ‘Does Ana treat you like a kid?’
‘She treats me badly. I don’t know why. I-’
‘I can tell you why.’ The voice was Gall’s. Suddenly he was here, a massive presence silhouetted by the low sun. Zesi saw that he had something heavy and limp draped over his shoulders. He was breathing hard, his tunic bloodied. ‘Because you’re a skinny runt. Here, little boy, I bought you a present.’ And he threw his burden to the ground.
It was a deer, a young female, and pregnant.
‘Be a man,’ Gall said. ‘Finish it off. This is your chance to show cold-faced Ana you’ve got balls – and I don’t mean those shrivelled-up nuts she sees you washing every morning, hah!’
Zesi could see the swelling of the doe’s belly clearly against its slim form. Panting, salivating, exhausted, obviously terrified, it tried to stand. But the backs of its legs were matted with blood, and every time it rose it fell back to the ground.
There was something fascinating in the deer’s agony, Zesi found herself thinking. And the power Gall had over it.
Gall was watching her, amused.
‘This is not how we hunt, Pretani. A quick kill, an apology to the beast’s spirit – that’s our way. Not this, not a half day of agony for a creature like this, all to play a kind of joke on your brother.’
But maybe Gall saw something darker in her, under her bluster. He winked. ‘Fun, though, isn’t it?’
She turned to Shade. ‘Go and get the priest. The deer is his Other.’
Shade ran.
Zesi got to her knees beside the frightened doe. She stroked its neck and held its head. ‘There, there. I am sorry. It will be over soon. Soon, soon.’ The deer seemed to calm, its eyes wide.
Gall scoffed. ‘I think we’re more alike than you want to admit – what a beauty you are when you are bloody-’ ‘Out of my sight, you Pretani savage.’
He held his place for one more heartbeat. Then, growling obscenities in his own tongue, he walked away.
11
They climbed out of the valley of the Milk, and crossed higher, hilly land.
It took days to cross the First Mother’s Ribs. But by the fifth afternoon you could smell the salt in the air, and hear the cry of the gulls. The children clambered up ridges and climbed trees, competing to be the first to spot the water.
The sun was low in the sky when the group broke through the last line of trees, and the Moon Sea lay open before them. Here the rocky ground tumbled down to a shallow beach. The tide was low, the beach of this inland sea wide and glistening. Far off to the west Zesi saw movement – probably a seal colony. And even from the treeline you could see the oysters like pebbles on the beach, the promised gift of the moon.
The day had been unseasonably hot, and adults and children alike, worn down by days in the forested hills, dumped their packs, threw off their heavy cloaks and ran down the slope towards the water. Some folk made their way along the coast to an area of salt marsh, a place of thick, sloppy, grey clay, cut through by a complicated network of creeks and channels and small islands, all washed regularly by the tide. Here they spread out, inspecting sea aster, golden samphire, glasswort: plants that liked salt and fed on what they trapped from the tidal flows.
