‘But what of the greater things – the greatest of all?’
‘You mean the gods.’
‘The stories of the past, of those who made the world, and destroyed it,’ said the priest. They looked at each other, suddenly curious.
As they spoke of ice giants and wolves in the sky, Kirike hugged Ana closer and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m sorry I missed your blood tide.’
‘It was fine. Mama Sunta was there, and the priest, and Zesi… They helped me. But my Other is an owl.’
‘So Jurgi told me. Your Other can represent many things,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sure the priest has told you that. And everything has its place. The night needs the owl as a summer’s day needs the swallow.’
‘Am I the night, then? Am I death?’
‘No. But you’re a much more serious girl than the one I left behind, and I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry about your sister too.’ He looked towards the open flap of the tent, as if hoping Zesi would suddenly appear, or fearing it. ‘She’s hardly spoken a word to me since I came back.’
‘I love you,’ Ana said. ‘I missed you. She loves you. But she’s angry.’
‘Why? Because I went away?’
Ana said carefully, not wanting to be disloyal, ‘She liked having all the responsibility. As Giver, as senior woman of the house… Even though she complained about it all the time. What people say isn’t always what they mean, is it?’
‘No, child, it isn’t.’
‘Did you know she told the Root she would take the wildwood challenge?’
‘No.’ His muscles hardened, his grip on her tightening. ‘I won’t allow that. I’d rather go myself. Those Pretani animals don’t go into their wildwood to play, but to earn their killing scars.’
She snuggled in closer. ‘You’d better tell her that yourself.’
The priest and Ice Dreamer seemed to have finished telling each other their stories.
‘Different stories, but the same elements,’ the priest said. ‘The birth of the world in ice and fire, the coming of death…’ He massaged his temples. ‘I think these stories are not lies. I think our first mother was real, and your Sky Wolf was real. It is a consolation of humanity that we aren’t born with the memories of ten thousand generations of misery. Each new mind is as bright as a celandine in spring, and as empty of thought. But the bad thing is we forget the past – what to do when the rainstorm comes, how the world was made. This is why we need grandmothers, and priests. To remember for us.’
‘Yes. My people believe the world was different, before. Better. Then it was ruined, by ice and cold. Now lesser people own the world, and we are the last of those who went before. In fact I may be the last of all – or my baby is.’ The baby woke up coughing, and cried. Dreamer held her on her lap and looked down at her, concerned. ‘Oh, child, what’s wrong?’ She murmured something in her own unknown tongue.
Kirike took his arm from around his daughter’s shoulders, and crossed to the woman and huddled with her over the baby, his back to Ana. Lightning followed him, curious, wagging his tail. Ana was left alone.
26
Novu could hear Etxelur long before he saw it. It was the drumming that carried furthest inland, and occasional snatches of song.
Loga led his party down a broadening river valley towards a marshy estuary. It was a bright, clear morning, the sun still low in the east. Novu was laden with trade goods, as was Loga, and indeed so were his two wives and their children. The ground was thick with green bracken that clawed at their legs and towered over the smaller children, and it was hard going.
But on this warm midsummer day the world was dense with life, birds singing vigorously, the birch trees heavy with leaves, flowers like foxgloves and irises clustering in open spaces, dragonflies humming over open water. All of this was still alien to Novu, who didn’t even have names for many of the living things he came across in this strange, damp, green, western country. But he was impressed with the abundance of life. This place made Jericho with its fields of grain look barren.
Now Loga led his party up an animal track over a softly eroded ridge, and the view opened up to the north, and Novu saw Etxelur at last.
Trails ran down from this ridge to a bank of grassy dunes that fringed a beach of yellow sand. Seven houses, squat and purposeful, a vivid green, stood behind the dunes, and smoke threads rose into the still air. The beach was at the outlet of a bay, much of which was fringed by flat, marshy land where water glimmered, blue-green. To the north the bay was closed by a causeway that led to an island, a lump of sandstone fringed by beaches of shingle and sand. And beyond that lay only the sea, stretching to the horizon, flat and perfect. There were more houses everywhere, on the beaches and the dunes and in the marshes, houses that were cones and half-balls, all of them the brown of reeds or the green of seaweed. You had to look closely to see them; aside from the rising smoke, they looked natural, like something washed up by the sea, not human at all.
Novu took a breath of fresh, salty air. A place more unlike Jericho, its harsh landscape and walls of brick and stone, was hard to imagine. Yet he sensed this was a good place. And he heard that drumming again.
Loga was looking at him suspiciously.
‘What?’
‘Smiling. You. Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ He held out his arms. ‘Beautiful day. Beautiful place. People happy; I can hear them. And I’m young and fit and unusually good-looking.’ He did a few steps of a hopping dance, which made the younger wife giggle as she cradled her infant. ‘Why not smile?’
‘Suit yourself,’ Loga grunted. ‘We go that way.’ He pointed west. ‘They’re all on the island, the far side. We cut around the bay and take that causeway. Sea rises up soon. Walk quick or we swim,’ he snapped at the women and children, and strode off down a fresh trail.
They trudged on, their faces drawn. They had been walking since dawn. Novu, feeling benevolent, reached down and lifted the pack off the back of the youngest walker, a six-year-old boy. He grinned his thanks and went running ahead, chasing butterflies. Loga made no comment.
‘So,’ Novu asked, ‘why the celebration?’
‘Solstice.’ Loga pointed at the rising sun. ‘All people celebrate midsummer, different ways. Here, the Giving feast. Big event for all people around, people of the coast, of the land. People happy. Good trade.’ He grinned, dreaming of profit.
‘You’re all heart, my friend.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
It wasn’t long before they had rounded the marshy land at the end of the bay, and then walked out along the causeway, a remarkable strip of land that cut the sea in two. The world was flat here, a panorama of mud flats and the brutal plain of the sea, fringed by lumpy sand dunes and the bulk of Flint Island. But the island was still so far away that the mist washed out its colours to a blue-grey, so that it looked unreal, a marking on a wall, not solid at all. The sea, at this time of the tide, was far away from their feet, and the causeway was a trail that led across a broad stretch of mud flats. Grass grew here, long, tough stuff. But you could tell the sea had been here recently. The grass was beaten down, there were standing pools of brackish water, and there was a tide line above the path they were following, marked by a litter of broken shells and seaweed tangles. This was an odd, eerie place, suspended between two worlds – a place where grass grew, yet which was daily covered over by the sea.
A crowd of curlews dipped and swooped overhead, making their odd chuckling cry.
After the causeway, they rounded a last sandstone bluff and came to a long, broad beach facing north, fringed by a line of dunes. The beach was thronged with people, slim figures busy everywhere, silhouetted against the brilliant light reflecting off the sea. He heard laughing, shouting, singing, the shrieks of the children splashing in the clean blue sea – many, many children, swarming around the adults. There must be hundreds of people here, he thought, not as many as in Jericho, but a larger gathering than any he had encountered since leaving home. Smoke rose up from scores of fires, and cooking smells reached Novu, even here at the western end of the beach, meat
