wound itself the leg was swollen from hip to ankle, the skin a bruised purple.
Dreamer went to work cleaning the wound, with a bit of cloth dipped in the hot water.
She remembered how, when she had been small, younger than Reacher now, there had been a hunter with a wound like this; he had been alone in the forest for days. The priest, grim-faced, hadn’t tried to treat the wound at all. He had made the women hold the hunter down, and he had used a special long saw, a deer shinbone studded with many tiny flint blades, to cut away the leg altogether, from a little below the hip. Would that save Reacher’s life? Could Dreamer, alone, make such a cut – and how would she treat the wound afterwards?
Reacher was sleeping again. Her breathing was scratchy and shallow, and a thin sheen of sweat stood on her brow. Dreamer slept lightly, as always.
Once she heard something come by the shelter. A deep rumble, a heavy tread, a brush against the shelter as if a huge man had walked by. Perhaps it was a bear. It did not return, and she slept again, fitfully.
When the dawn light poked through the gaps in the shelter roof, without disturbing Reacher, she clambered out to make water. She always tried to do this out of sight of Reacher so the girl wouldn’t see the blood in her piss.
It was a bright morning, with a bit of warmth already in the low sun. There was a slight rise, only a few paces further on; she vaguely remembered it from the night before. She walked to the ridge and climbed it, the long grass sweeping over her bare legs.
And the country opened up before her, to reveal a lake, wider and deeper than any she had ever seen in her life, glittering blue water that reached the horizon and spanned the world from north to south. She had gone as far east as she could; there was nowhere left for her to walk.
13
It was the middle of the day before Heni returned from his latest walk down this strange shore to visit the Hairy Folk.
Kirike, sitting by their upturned boat, saw him coming from the south, walking along the shingle just above the tidal wrack. Heni was carrying his boots slung around his neck, and his big bare feet made the stones crunch. In one hand he carried a folded skin, heavy with gifts from the Hairy Folk. He looked dark and solid in the brightness of the day, the light of the sea.
Kirike had kept the fire going with logs from the dense pine forest just above the beach. Now he threw on a couple more of the big clams that were so common here. He had a little bowl of mashed acorn, gathered from the oak groves further south; he sprinkled some of this on the flesh of the opening clams for flavouring. The clams were huge oceanic beasts like nothing at home. He was collecting the shells, a heap of them on a string to take home, to make Ana and Zesi marvel.
Heni rolled up, panting hard, and dumped his pack by the fire. He stripped off his coat, cut from the fur of a bear. The lighter skin tunic he wore underneath was soaked with sweat.
‘Urgh! By the moon’s shining buttocks you stink,’ Kirike protested.
‘There’s heat in that sun. It will be a hot summer, I tell you. At least it will be here, wherever we are.’ Heni threw himself down. He gulped fresh water from a skin, took a shell and scooped up a big mouthful of clam flesh.
Heni was Kirike’s cousin, a little older than Kirike at thirty-four. His head was a mass of thick black hair and beard, and his nose was misshapen from multiple breaks – he was an enthusiastic fighter but not an effective one. They had grown up together, playing and mock-hunting on the beaches of Etxelur. At first Heni had been the leader, the guide, at times the bully who forced Kirike to learn fast. As Kirike had grown he had eventually overtaken Heni in maturity, and now Kirike, as Giver, relied on Heni as his closest ally. Kirike couldn’t pick a better companion to have got lost at sea with. But today he did stink, and Kirike pulled a face.
Heni grunted and took another oyster. ‘Well, you’d be rank if you had to sit through another blubber feast with those Hairy Folk.’ You always had to eat with the strange dark hunters down the beach before they’d consider a trade. ‘Mind you, the turtle soup was good, in those big upturned shells.’ He winked at Kirike. ‘And that little woman with the big arse caught my eye again.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘This time she submitted to a little tenderness from old Heni. We snuck off into one of those funny little shacks they have.’ Houses made of skin stretched over the ribs of some huge sea beast. ‘We didn’t get to threading the spear through the shaft-straightener, if you know what I mean, but-’
‘You sure which hole was which under all that hair? You sure it’s even a woman? I’ll swear she’s got a better beard than I have.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got bigger tits as well. She’s not that hairy. They just wear it long, that’s all. Gives you something to grip onto.’ Heni lumbered to his feet, stood over their boat, rummaged in his leggings, and with a sigh of satisfaction pissed over the skin of the hull. When he was done he lifted the boat by its prow so that his urine ran in streaks. The boat was a frame of wood and stretched skin. You could clearly see where they had patched it during the winter months here on this beach, with new expanses of deer hide, scraped and soaked in their own piss. ‘Look at that,’ Heni said. ‘Not a leak.’ He eyed Kirike. ‘So if the boat’s ready… time to go home? You’ve been saying all winter that you’d try to be back for the Giving.’
Kirike looked out to sea. As always when they spoke of going home he felt a deep dread stealing over him. ‘Maybe a few more days,’ he said. ‘Collect a bit more meat. Work on the boat some more while we’ve got the chance. Put some more flesh on our bones before we face the ice again…’
‘There’s no reason not to leave now,’ Heni said bluntly. ‘Look. I understand. Or I think I do. Remember, it was me who went out in the boat with you in those first days after Sabet died.’
Sabet, Kirike’s wife, had died as she laboured to give birth to a dead baby the previous summer. The baby wasn’t expected; he had thought that Sabet had put the dangers of childbirth behind her years before, when Zesi and Ana were born, and they were safe. The shock, the sudden end of his long marriage, had broken his heart.
‘You weren’t much use then, I’ll tell you that,’ Heni said.
‘I know. But I didn’t want to be anywhere but in the boat. All those people, the women, Sabet’s sister, her mother, the girls… If I thought I could have got by in the boat without you I would have done.’
‘Well, I was there. And I was there when that storm pushed us west. That gave you an excuse to stay out for a few more days, didn’t it?’
‘I couldn’t help the storm.’
‘No. But then you said we had to sail north.’
The storm had caused them two days and nights of non-stop bailing: no paddling, no sleeping, no eating, you pissed where you sat and drank and ate one-handed, and with the other hand you bailed. When the storm had blown over they had no idea where they were. They were out of water, had lost their food, their catch and their fishing gear, and the boat leaked in a dozen places. It was obvious they’d been driven west, for that was the way the storm had blown them. South: that was the way to go. If they’d headed south they would have hit the shore of Northland, or maybe somewhere on the Albia coast. Then, even if they didn’t recognise where they were, they could rest up, fix the boat, and shore-hop east until they reached home.
Instead Kirike had insisted they sail north. ‘We went over it and over it,’ he said now. ‘I just had this feeling we were closer to land to the north than the south.’
‘Pig scut.’
‘I thought I saw a gull flying that way.’
‘Pig scut! There was no gull, except maybe in your head. But I let you talk me into it.’
‘We found land, didn’t we?’
So they had, a cold shore littered with strange black rocks, where the ice had almost come down to the sea. There had been no people there. No wood either, no trees growing, though they found some driftwood on the strand. But there were seals who had evidently never seen people, for each of them was trusting and friendly right up until the moment the club, delivered with respect, hit the back of its head. They had rested up in a shelter built of snow blocks, ate the seals’ flesh, fixed the boat as best they could with sealskin and caulked it with the animals’ fat, and then paddled off.
