out of my sight.’
The Root growled, ‘You don’t tell a Pretani what to do.’
‘I see your ugly face. Father of killer?’
Root glared at the priest. ‘What did he say? Tell me, priest.’
Jurgi, exasperated and alarmed, twisted his hands together. ‘He said – it doesn’t matter what he said-’
But then the arguments began again, everybody shouting, Jaku, Knuckle, the Root, Zesi, their followers waving fists and spears and knives, and the priest crying out for order, a three-way fight conducted in four languages, if you counted the traders’ tongue.
Ana pulled out of the angry mass, dismayed. She looked up at the whale’s huge eye. She was so close to it she could smell the sea on it, see the barnacles that peppered its flesh. The eye rolled, and she thought it looked down on her.
And somebody was clapping, above the fighting. Clap, clap, clap, steady as a heartbeat.
‘The priest’s right,’ came a voice in the traders’ tongue. ‘Who said what, it doesn’t matter. You’re all so busy squabbling you forget what’s important – the whale, whose life is being given up for you.’
The clapping was having a quieting effect; the squabbling groups shut up and turned to see. The voice was coming from above her – on top of the whale.
‘And besides,’ came the voice, ‘if a whale is driven ashore, as this one was, the ownership goes to the one who did the driving. Isn’t that the custom, priest? Sorry we’ve been away so long. But you have to admit we brought home a decent present for the Giving.’
Ana stepped back until she could see two men standing on top of the whale, one taller, the other heavier, the latter apparently winded by the effort of climbing up there. They were silhouetted against the sky, but she knew who they were immediately.
She couldn’t move. She could barely think.
Zesi’s shriek broke the silence. ‘Father!’ She ran forward and pressed her hands against the whale’s damp flank.
Kirike knelt and reached down to Zesi; the whale was so big that, reaching up on her tiptoes, she could only just touch his fingers. He looked around until he saw Ana, and smiled at her.
Somebody started applauding, one of the Etxelur folk. One by one others joined in. The rest, the snailheads and the Pretani, just stared, bemused.
The priest was shaking his head. ‘Trust Kirike and Heni to make such a show of coming home. But it’s the will of the little mothers that they should show up on the very day the Root and his boys arrive…’
Ana still couldn’t move. None of this seemed real.
A woman approached her, walking around the head of the whale. She was tall, with rich dark hair tied back in a knot. She wore skins that were stained by salt water, and she carried a baby, a lump no more than weeks old. She looked tired, but oddly resilient. ‘You must be Zesi, or-’
‘Ana.’
‘Your father told me all about you.’ Her language was the Etxelur tongue, spoken slowly but clearly enough. The woman staggered, and tucked the baby closer to her chest, and smiled. ‘Forgive me. We have been at sea for moons.’
‘Months.’
‘Months. Yes… I have forgotten the land, how to stand. I am Ice Dreamer. I hope we will be friends.’
A dog yapped. It was Lightning, racing across the sand, come to greet his long-lost master.
25
Ana lay back in the crook of her father’s arm. He was drinking a nettle tea she had made him. Lightning lay on Kirike’s other side, contentedly curled up against his leg.
They were in their home. The afternoon had grown ferociously hot. There was plenty going on outside – she could hear the shouts of the people beginning the long process of butchering the whale, and even from here she could smell the sharp stink of blood and blubber and brine – but she was grateful for some time in the shade. And after so long in his boat, Kirike said, so was he.
He didn’t smell like her father, not yet. There was too much of the sea on him. And she thought he had lost weight, grown greyer – grown old in the nine months he had been away. Grown that bit stranger. But she didn’t care. It was him, solid and alive, as if back from the dead; she had him back, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be but here with him.
But the stranger was here too, the woman he had brought back with her baby. She was sitting with the priest, talking quietly. Even her name was odd: Ice Dreamer.
They were trying to work out where she had come from, how far away was the land where Kirike had picked her up. They had lifted the mats from the floor, and the priest scrawled a map in the dirt, showing the familiar countries, Albia, Gaira, and Northland between, and a vaguer sketch of what lay to the west, mostly picked up from traders’ tales: a warm sea to the south, a cold, icebound ocean to the north, and beyond a greater ocean to the west a vast continent. Dreamer spoke of her land, which was evidently a big, complicated place of lakes and forests and ice. But she was even vaguer than the priest, for as a child she had grown up far from any sea, believing she lived on an endless plain – just land, going on for ever. She hadn’t even known the ocean existed.
Neither recognised what the other drew, and there seemed no way of connecting them up, save for a dim impression of Kirike and Heni’s westward journey, hopping between rocky islands and ice floes, and then a similar step-by-step journey back.
‘It is as if we inhabit different worlds,’ the priest said, doodling with his stick. ‘Ours to the east, yours to the west. Connected only by an accidental journey that might never be made again…’
Dreamer was sitting cross-legged with her baby on her lap. Out of her heavy skins, she wore a light tunic over her heavy breasts. Her face was well defined, the bones of her cheeks high, her brow proud, her nose thin and straight. She was beautiful, Ana thought, watching her. Strange, beautiful.
Dreamer shifted to see what Jurgi was sketching now. He had drawn three concentric circles, a line piercing to the centre. Unthinking, he’d drawn it over Etxelur in his map. Dreamer asked, ‘What is this? I see that sign everywhere here, on your houses, carved into the rocks. Even on people’s faces. I have seen it in my own country.’
‘You have?’
‘We saw it carved in the rocks,’ Kirike called over. ‘Over the beach where we picked her up.’
‘The sign is very old,’ the priest said. ‘It means many things. For one thing, we use it to remember the better world of the past.’
Kirike grunted. ‘When Etxelur was strong, and did not have to take insults from a bull-man like the Root.’
‘But I think it means other things too,’ Jurgi said. ‘Circles come back to where they started. As the moon and sun cycle in the sky, as the seasons give way one to another, always returning.’ He glanced at Dreamer’s baby. ‘As a baby girl is born, who grows to be a woman, and gives birth in turn.’
‘Maybe he has drawn sharks and dolphins swimming around a boat,’ Kirike said.
Ice Dreamer flashed him a smile, bright in the dark.
Ana didn’t know what they meant. They shared memories, experiences she didn’t. She felt an odd, unworthy pang. Resentment. Jealousy. Ugly emotions she didn’t like to recognise in herself.
Ice Dreamer said to Jurgi, ‘Much separates us. Your language is like none I ever heard.’
‘That isn’t so much,’ said the priest. ‘The traders who cross the Continent by the valleys of the great rivers say that everywhere languages are spoken that are as different from mine as mine is from yours.’
‘But she did not speak the traders’ tongue, even,’ Kirike said.
‘Even so, Ice Dreamer, much more unites us than divides us. You are human. Two arms, two legs-’
‘Half a belly, or at least that’s how it feels.’
‘I can tell you,’ Kirike said now, ‘she’s the same inside as we are. If not, she wouldn’t be here now.’
The priest said, ‘Nothing here seems so very strange to you, does it? Nothing about the way we live.’
‘No. We too have houses. Spears. Fires, hearths. Only the small things are different.’
