and salty fish.
Loga led his party along the beach, to a patch of dry sand between the shoulders of two dunes. ‘This will do. Shelter from the wind if it picks up.’ He glanced around. ‘Bit far from centre, the middens. Better to be closer, for passing trade. Arrive too late.’ He glared at one of the children. ‘If that one not sick, we’d have gained a day.’ But he shrugged.
The women settled wearily to the sand.
Novu dropped his pack. ‘I’ll go take a look around.’
Loga grunted, indifferent, unfolding his skin packs.
Novu walked along the beach. After a while he slipped off his boots, slung them over his shoulder, and walked on the fringe of the sea where the sand was wet. His feet, hardened by months of steady walking, enjoyed the crisp coolness of the water, the softness of the sand.
There were many different communities here, he soon saw, gathered on this bright beach. Folk evidently from the estuaries had their flat-bottomed skin boats drawn up on the beach, and wooden trays of eels and strange- looking crustaceans set out on the sand. Ocean fishers had bigger, deeper boats and racks of fish, with some spectacular catches on display; one huge cod looked longer than Novu was tall. A group of goat herders had a dozen animals penned up inside a wicker fence, reinforced by posts thrust into the sand. Another group who evidently hailed from the forests inland had set up a pole, a tree trunk stripped of branches and bark and carved along its length with distorted faces, images of gods perhaps.
The people themselves were all different too. The men with the god-pole wore trousers cut away to leave their crotches exposed, and Novu, wincing, saw that their dangling cocks had been sliced and stitched and tattooed. He saw heads shaven bald, or with hair raised in sticky spikes, and skin adorned with tattoos in black, red and even green, and distortions of noses and ear lobes and necks and even heads stretched like great tubers. Another group of estuary folk wore skulls heaped upon their heads like hats. All these groups spoke in their own languages, all of them sounding different from anything even Novu the hardened traveller had heard before.
But this was a day of sharing, evidently, and he heard people chatting in the traders’ argot as they gave each other fuel for the fires and swapped food, a bit of fish for a slice of meat. And the children who played in the surf and in the rocky pools, many of them naked, seemed entirely unaware of their differences as they ran and swam and chased and shouted and played with their barking dogs, big skulls, dangling ear lobes, tattooed buttocks and all.
He reached what seemed to be the central part of the beach. Here, before the dunes to his right, he saw odd, curving formations – almost like walls, almost like something from Jericho. Close to he could see they were middens, banks of shells and other waste, but carefully shaped. And before them stood a wooden structure, a kind of stage of wood planks set on piles driven into the sand, with a curve that roughly followed the crescent shapes of the middens. Poles stood around the stage, and trophies dangled in the air: the skin of a bear, the toothsome jaw of some huge fish, and flags of hide bearing a symbol: concentric circles cut by a dark radius. Nobody was on the stage for now, but maybe this would be the focus of the ‘Giving’ that Loga had mentioned – whatever that meant.
He stood in the middle of the beach, alone, surrounded by groups, families. He felt oddly excluded, out of place. He wondered if he should go back to Loga and his family. But he didn’t really belong there either.
He noticed a woman sitting alone, save for a baby wriggling on a skin on the sand beside her. Bare-legged, sitting up straight, she was tall, striking, with black hair pulled back from a fine-boned face, and a slightly darker complexion than those around her. She had a pile of stones, big rough-cut flint blades, and she was working on one, holding it over a leather apron on her lap and pressing its face with a bone tool. Bits of flint were scattered on the sand before her. Concentrating on her work, alone with her baby, she seemed utterly unaware of the clamour around her.
Drums pounded suddenly, making Novu jump. And then came a roar. He turned and saw a deer running along the beach, a huge one, its fur bright brown in the sunlight, its head ducking, antlers like tree branches splayed. To Novu’s astonishment, children were running towards the animal, clapping and smiling, and he heard music, the piping of flutes and whistles, clatters and rasps.
But as the beast approached he saw it wasn’t a deer at all, but a skin stretched over a frame of bone and wood. A bull of a man ran at the front, brandishing the great head on a pole, while under the skin children in ornate clothing played whistles and shook rattles, all of them carved from white bones. Behind the deer came more men whirling bits of shaped bone on ropes in the air; it was these that made the rhythmic roaring sound.
The deer hurried past, trailed by excited children, and continued up the beach.
Somebody spoke to him. He turned. The striking woman on the beach had been joined by a girl, who knelt beside her – redhaired, younger, slimmer, with a rather serious expression. She wore a tunic that was cut open at the waist to reveal a belly marked with a tattoo of concentric circles, like the sign on the flags, and a smaller mark on her hip in the shape of an owl.
The flint-making woman was smiling at him.
He hadn’t understood their words. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in the traders’ tongue.
The girl said, ‘I just asked if you were all right. The music deer made you jump.’
‘It was a shock.’
The older woman swept a bit of sand smooth with her forearm. ‘Please,’ she said, her accent different from the girl’s.
He sat beside her.
‘The deer runs at every Giving,’ the girl said. ‘It is the start of the day, in a way. You never saw the deer before? This is your first time here?’
‘Oh, yes. And I’ve come a long way to be here.’ He sipped from his water skin, and offered it to the women, who shook their heads. ‘My name is Novu.’
‘Ana.’
‘Ice Dreamer.’
These names were strange to Novu, but he was used to that. ‘Ana. You live here?’
‘Yes. Etxelur is my home. My father is the Giver today-’
‘I meant to ask you about that,’ said the woman, Ice Dreamer. ‘He got Zesi to agree in the end?’
‘Not without a fight. And in return he had to agree to let her go on the wildwood hunt with the Pretani, and he wasn’t happy about that.’
‘I can imagine.’
Ana looked at Novu. ‘Zesi is my sister.’
‘Ah. And what exactly is this Giving?’
‘Everybody comes together and gives everything they bring,’ Ana said. ‘My father organises it. We have plenty to give ourselves, oils and meat from a whale, the produce of the sea-’
‘We have a similar custom in my country,’ Ice Dreamer said. ‘Every summer we would come together and share. Those who had gone short in the winter are helped by the generosity of their neighbours.’
‘Knowing that next year it might be their turn to give.’
‘That’s the idea. So why are you here? To Give?’
‘No,’ Novu said. ‘I came with a trader. He hopes to do business. I travel with him, but I don’t trade.’
‘Then what do you do?’
‘I make bricks.’ He used a Jericho word; there was no word in the traders’ tongue.
Ana frowned. ‘What is a-’
How do you describe a brick? ‘A block.’ He mimed with his hands. ‘Made of clay and straw. Like a stone.’
Ana pointed. ‘There are stones lying around all over the place.’
‘Not like my bricks.’
‘What do you do with them?’
‘Build houses.’
That made her laugh. ‘We make houses out of wood and seaweed.’ She pushed a wisp of her red-gold hair out of her eyes, her freckled face scrunched up against the sun. ‘Is this place different from where you come from?’
‘It couldn’t be more different.’
‘Do you like it, though?’
