darkened, and Ana saw muscles bunch in his arm. With his heavy frown and his strange, bony, tubular skull, he looked strange, unearthly, frightening.
The priest stepped forward hastily. ‘We didn’t come here to fight.’ He continued in his own tongue, ‘And we don’t know how many of them there are. Zesi, take the gifts.’
Zesi hesitated. Then she took the heart from the snailhead, bowing her thanks.
The priest took the sack, removed a bone pin from its neck, and drank. ‘Blackcurrant juice! Saved through winter!’
The blond snailhead grinned. ‘Good?’
‘Good!’ Jurgi laughed, a bit too loudly. ‘Come, sit, have some of my dock tea…’
They sat around the embers of the fire, the three snailheads, the priest, Zesi, Ana, Shade, others. Big flat stones and wooden bowls were set on the fire, to cook meat and prepare broths from the deer’s entrails. Gall sat a short way away, gnawing on his liver, studiously ignoring the newcomers, yet clearly hearing every word.
Arga and the other children stood by, staring at the newcomers’ big heads. Lightning wouldn’t be kept away; he came sniffing around the strangers, butting their knees until they rewarded him with attention.
The priest began to make his tea. He took a precious relic from his charm bag: a bowl made from the skull of a bear, brown with handling and polished with age. The visitors looked suitably impressed. Jurgi scooped up water from a wooden bowl and set it on the edge of the fire. Then he took dock and sage leaves, crumbled them in his fingers, and dropped them in the skull bowl.
The blond snailhead man pointed to himself, and his companions. ‘Knuckle. Gut. Eyelid.’ Their own name for themselves wasn’t, of course, ‘snailhead’, but something like ‘the One People’.
The woman called Eyelid smiled and opened up her bundle of soft skin. The baby was sleeping, a thumb in her mouth. Her head from the brow up was tightly bound by plaited rope. She didn’t seem to be in any discomfort as her head grew within these bonds, shaped and elongated.
Knuckle pointed at Eyelid’s baby. ‘Cheek. We camp.’ He pointed down the river. ‘There.’
Zesi asked, ‘How many?’
The traders’ tongue was rich in words for numbers. There were over fifty snailheads, men, women and children, just out of sight of the Etxelur summer camp.
This was shocking for the Etxelur folk to hear. The world was big, so big that you never had to share your favourite spaces with anybody else, save for happy meetings like the Giving. It was genuinely disconcerting to find fifty snailheads here, as if they had shown up in the heart of Etxelur itself.
‘We come here every year or two years,’ Zesi said pointedly. ‘Our parents before us, and their parents before them.’ Her meaning was clear. This is our place. ‘You?’
Gut shrugged. ‘Never been here before. Plenty of room. Plenty of deer for you, for me.’ He grinned. Ana saw that his tongue was pierced by a stone plug as fat as her thumb. ‘Don’t stay here long. Rest, feed, repair kit. Then move on.’
Zesi asked, ‘Which way?’
‘North.’
‘That’s where we live,’ the priest said. ‘Already we saw some of your people. A few moons ago. At a beach. It was strange to see snailheads except at a solstice gathering.’
Knuckle shrugged.
‘Why are you here?’
‘Need somewhere new to live. We lived south. Beach. Far south… Many months of walking. A winter of walking.’
Gall called over, ‘So what was wrong with it? Why aren’t you still there now?’
‘The sea. In the south, our beach. Sea shifts over land.’ He mimed a sea’s waves, chunks of land falling into it. ‘Splash, splash, splash…’
‘So you couldn’t live there any more,’ the priest said.
‘We walk away. North, east, west.’
‘Where will you live?’
‘Where there isn’t people.’
‘Where will that be?’
‘We haven’t found that yet. We will,’ said the man with a quiet confidence.
‘They are so strange,’ Shade murmured to Ana in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Those heads… But you have met these people before.’
‘A few usually come to the Givers’ feast at midsummer. You know how it is. People travel a long way.’
‘But not fifty of them.’
‘Not fifty. And not to come to stay.’
‘I think I know of their homeland. Where he means, the far south.’ Shade sketched with a fingertip in the dusty ground. ‘Albia here, Gaira here. Albia is nearly an island. But Albia and Gaira are joined by the Northland. A neck, like a bird’s head to its body…’
She struggled to understand. ‘Oh.’ She pointed to the bottom of his sketch. ‘This is north. This is where Etxelur is. The coast.’
‘Yes. We are here, a little way inland. But the snailheads come from the other side of the neck.’ He pointed to the top of his sketch, the south. Here he had drawn the sea making a deep cut into the land. ‘There, a great river flows between cliffs of white chalk. The people live on the cliff tops. Maybe the sea is cutting away the cliffs.’
‘Can the sea do that?’
He looked at her. ‘The sea drowned the flint beds mined by your ancestors.’
‘They can’t go home.’ The thought horrified her. ‘But they can’t stay here.’
Gut, the younger of the snailhead men, grinning, was watching them. ‘I hear,’ he said, in the Etxelur tongue. He held thumb and forefinger a sand grain’s width apart. ‘A bit. “Can’t stay here.”
The priest forced a smile. ‘We didn’t come here to argue. And nor did you. You have your camp, and we have ours. As to what the future holds, only our gods know that, and yours. But for today and tomorrow and the next day, yes, there is plenty of deer for all, and pig and aurochs, and fish in the river and birds in the air and reeds in the marshes.’
Knuckle nodded, evidently a man as much intent on peace as the priest. ‘Yes. Well said. No need to fight, nothing to fight over.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘Ah! We can share. Hunt together? Catch more that way. The One People are good at hunting deer.’
Gall, looking over, his mouth still stained with blood, grinned dangerously. ‘Yes. We’ll hunt together. And I’ll show you snailheads how to do it properly.’
Gut looked slyly at Ana and Zesi. ‘When we live on your beach we will need wives. I will need a wife.’ Mocking, he turned to Zesi and stuck out his pierced tongue. ‘Will you be my wife? You look strong. Good babies-’
Gall lunged at him, but the priest saw it coming; he threw himself at Gall and blocked him. He said urgently in the Etxelur tongue, ‘Beat him at hunting. That’s how you win.’
Gall, breathing hard, eyes bulging, backed off. ‘At the hunt, then.’
Gut showed his studded tongue again. He hadn’t so much as flinched.
‘Good,’ said the priest. ‘Now – who wants some dock tea?’
19
The hunters were up early the next morning, before the glow of the night’s fire had been conquered by the gathering light of dawn.
Ana pushed her head out of the lean-to she shared with Arga. She could make out hunters from the snailhead camp, already waiting by the bend of the river that separated the two camps. Closer by, Shade was pressing his spear point against the ground to test the rope-and-resin attachment of the head to its wooden shaft. Gall was by the urine pit, noisily emptying his bladder over the deer skin. And Zesi was at the edge of the hearth, scooping up grey ash and rubbing it over her face and arms, the better to hide in the shadows of the forest. The snailheads had been surprised that Etxelur women hunted.
