The priest said, ‘The Pretani are ferocious hunters, but if there were a hundred times a hundred more of them they could never empty the world of game.’
As they walked, Zesi was aware of Shade all the time – all the time – as if he was the centre of the world, and the brightest thing in it. And in the night, when he lay just paces away from her, she ached for him deep in her belly. But she dared not speak to him, even come close to him. If he was drawn to her in the same way she saw no sign of it. Perhaps the murder of his brother, all because of her, had burned out whatever he felt for her.
The Pretani, men of the forest, were uncomfortable in open country, and they eyed the world around them suspiciously. Each night when they made camp it always had to be under trees, even if they stopped at some copse long before the sun was down, and wasted travelling time.
It was only when they rounded the vast salt marshes at the eastern neck of the Moon Sea, and walked west into a landscape coated more thickly with forest, that the Pretani started to look happier. Still, this wasn’t like the oak wildwood of their home; here birch dominated a more open forest, with groves of juniper and alder and rowan and cherry. Occasional pines grew tall, with lichen clinging thickly to their branches. Zesi knew that forest like this cloaked much of the southern reaches of Northland, all the way to the south coast where the snailheads came from. The going was easy, the forest open enough to let in plenty of light, and the Root led them confidently through an undergrowth of fern and bracken and vivid moss carpets.
That first evening in the forest, when they camped in comforting gloom under the trees, Zesi sat with the priest, preparing a meal of salted meat with mushrooms fried on a hot rock in the fire. The Pretani had picked the mushrooms for them, knowing what was safe to eat here and what was not. The scent of the burning birch logs was strong and resinous, and the flames licked bright orange.
Zesi heard the drumming of a woodpecker, loud and regular.
Jurgi got up, took a stick, and hammered on a tree trunk. The woodpecker stopped drumming and came fluttering into sight in the high branches of the tree, a big bird, black and white with a splash of red on its underbelly. ‘It drums to attract the females. Thinks I’m a rival.’ Jurgi dropped the stick and waved his fingers. ‘Fly away, little man. I’m no threat. Unlike these Pretani.’ He sat with Zesi again.
‘It occurs to me,’ she said, ‘that I don’t know any of their names. The Pretani, aside from Shade and the Root. I know everybody’s name in Etxelur.’
‘They run things differently in Albia. The Root and his sons matter more than anybody else, save maybe their priests. What they say goes. Everybody else just has to obey-’
‘Like a child.’
‘No, not that. You may guide a child’s behaviour, but you expect her to grow into an adult who will make her own decisions. No, the other Pretani are like dogs, like Lightning. Who must always do as they’re told, all their lives. I know it’s odd but it’s the way they are. And they’re not unique. You should talk to Novu.’
‘Who? Oh, the rock maker.’
‘Brick maker.’ He used Novu’s own word. ‘I think it’s similar where he comes from.’
‘Why would anybody want to live like that?’
‘Because it works. The Pretani seem to control a lot of their country. And it suits the top men. Look how big the Root’s belly is.’
That made her laugh.
She watched Jurgi as he sat at ease, bare to the waist, cross-legged, picking bits of meat and mushroom from the hot rock. She thought back to how she had looked at Ana as she had set off from Etxelur – as if she had never seen her sister before. It occurred to her that she rarely looked at people. She was too busy blundering through life, in pursuit of something or other. People were a means for her to achieve her goals, or they got in the way. ‘You’re doing well,’ she said now. ‘On the walk, I mean.’
He grinned. ‘Thanks. I’m enjoying learning how to hunt from the masters. The range of signs they look for, the animals’ scent, piss, scut, saliva, signs of feeding, broken twigs… Even a bent blade of grass tells a story. And they don’t just track the animals, they seem to try to guess how it thinks, where it will go, the decisions it will make. Remarkable. No wonder the Pretani eat so well.’
‘I thought you’d turn back in a day, or I’d be carrying your pack after two.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a priest. Priests don’t have to do a lot of walking, or carrying. But I was a boy before I became a priest. I won a lot of the kids’ challenges at the Giving feasts – this was when you were small, I guess you wouldn’t remember. Once I was chosen I gave all that up. People don’t want to find themselves being beaten in some race by a priest – or, worse, to beat him. It complicates relationships.’
‘How were you chosen?’
‘Old Petru touched my shoulder one day. You remember him, the priest before me? He told me he saw I was more interested in people than in hunting or fishing.’
‘In people? Not in the spirits?’
‘Petru said the way to hear the spirits is to listen to other people. I think he was right. And listening is the point of having a priest in the first place.’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He studied her coolly. ‘Even when no words are spoken, there is always something to listen to.’
That confused her, and she went on the offensive. ‘I still don’t understand why my father was so keen for you to come with me.’
He glanced over at the Pretani. ‘A man of Etxelur beside you when you sleep will make you seem less available to our hosts.’
‘I don’t need some man to fight for me.’
‘I understand that. As does your father. But he doesn’t want you fighting at all. There has been enough fighting. That’s why he chose me. I am a man, but not a man who fights. Now, are you going to eat the rest of that mushroom or not?’
She took some more mushroom, but the flesh was heavy, tasteless. Suddenly it made her nauseous. She left the rest to him.
The nausea didn’t go away. That night she slept badly, her stomach churning.
And in the morning, in the dawn light before most of the Pretani woke to begin their ritual of comparing overnight erections and noisy pissing, she found her belly convulsing. She staggered to the root of a tree and threw up, expelling half-chewed lumps of fungus. Jurgi rubbed her back until the vomiting was over, then gave her a wooden cup of water. He wasn’t perturbed; oddly he seemed to have been expecting this.
It had probably been the mushrooms.
30
The Root, following well-defined tracks, led them south until they broke out of the woodland and reached a coastal strip just north of an immense estuary. This was the mouth of a river pouring from the south-west, such an immense flow that the sea was discoloured by fresh water far from the shore. The Pretani called this the Great River.
Zesi knew where she was, roughly. All of Northland was like a great neck connecting Gaira and the eastern lands to the peninsula of Albia to the west. Just here that neck was close to its narrowest; only a few days’ walk south of here was another mighty estuary, fringed, so she had heard, with cliffs of dazzling white rock – the homeland of the snailheads.
They walked on, skirting the mud flats of the river mouth, disturbing flocks of birds. On the salt marsh sea lavender grew, attracting buzzing bees, and redshank and curlews fed busily. In the distance Zesi often saw threads of smoke rising, and flat-bottomed boats sliding over the glimmering waters: folk of the marshes living off prawns and crabs and eels and birds’ eggs, as such folk did everywhere. She felt a flicker of curiosity. Would these isolated folk speak the same kind of language as the Pretani, or Northland folk, or another sort of tongue entirely? But the Pretani marched on without stopping, and she never found out.
Now they followed trails that ran south and west, parallel with the river and pushing deep into the heart of Albia. Willow grew by the water’s edge, and where the river widened into a flood plain trees grew sparsely, mostly hazel and alder.
