Zesi laughed, for he was blushing again. ‘Oh, come here. Sit between Ana and Arga. They’ll warm you up.’
The Pretani hesitated. Perhaps he thought Zesi was playing some trick on him. But he sat, smoothing his cloak under him.
‘So,’ Ana said, ‘why aren’t you over there with your brother telling lies?’
‘I know little about cod, and fishing. I do know about other things. Flint, and trading.’ He picked up a piece from the display before him; inside a remnant carapace of brittle chalk, it was creamy brown. ‘This is good quality.’
‘It comes from the island,’ Zesi said, pointing. ‘Flint Island, we call it. But the best pieces we have are much older. We don’t usually trade them. Sometimes they are used as tokens in the Giving feasts in the summer.’
‘Why older, I mean, why the best…’ He gave up his attempt to frame the question in the unfamiliar language.
Ana pointed to the centre of the bay, to their west. ‘The best lode of all is out there. That’s where the good old stuff came from. The sea covered it over.’
He frowned. ‘Like a tide coming in?’
‘It wasn’t a tide,’ Ana said.
‘I know nothing of the sea.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Ana snapped. She felt oddly resentful of his questions.
But Zesi seemed amused. ‘Ask something else.’
‘What does this mean?’ He indicated the design etched into the rock flat, the three circles of grooves and ridges, the straight-line tail that slashed to the centre.
‘You’ll see this all over Etxelur. Some say it’s a kind of memory of the Door to the Mothers’ House. Which is the old land we came from.’
Arga said seriously, ‘We lived there without dying. But when the moon gave death to the world we had to leave.’
Shade stared at the mark. ‘So,’ he said, turning shyly to Ana, ‘why are these circles drawn on your belly in blood?’
‘It isn’t just blood,’ Ana said. ‘There’s water and ochre and honey and other stuff.’
Zesi said briskly, ‘This is the blood tide. After a girl becomes a woman, at low tide in the next midwinter she is taken out by boat to North Island, which is north of Flint Island. The moon is death, ice. Ana’s new body is a gift of warmth and life. We must show we defy the moon, and the tides she draws…’
‘Still sitting with the women, brother?’ Gall approached. He held an immense cod in his left hand; he had bits of bone and scaly skin stuck in his beard, and Ana could smell the wood-smoke on him. His traders’ tongue was guttural, coarse. ‘You’ll turn into a girl yourself. Come on, let’s go back to that Giver’s hovel and see if we can persuade that old crone to cook this for us.’
Ana jumped to her feet. ‘You leave her alone. She’s ill.’
‘Not too ill to lash me with her tongue, was she? Well, if she can’t do it, you’ll have to.’ He threw the cod in the sand at her feet, belched, and looked down at the circles on the rock. ‘I heard you wittering about this scratch. Yak, yak, yak. You’d get more sense out of those seals on that island. I’ll tell you the bit I like.’ With his booted toe he traced out the tail that cut through the concentric grooves and ridges, and he leered at Ana. ‘Straight and hard and thrusting up into the belly.’
Zesi got up, her expression icy, and picked up the fish. ‘I’ll cook your food. Just you leave Mama Sunta alone.’
‘Hah! Come on, little brother, let’s put some flesh on your bones.’
Shade stood, expressionless, and followed his brother and Zesi towards the dunes.
Arga sat with Ana, watching them go. ‘Arses,’ she said.
4
Late in the day Sunta told Ana that the boats were waiting for her, on the north shore of Flint Island.
It was dark when Ana emerged from her house, ready for the long walk around the bay to the island. At least the threatened fresh snow hadn’t appeared, and the cloud cover was thin enough to show a brilliant moon. The snow carelessly piled up by the people with their reindeer-bone scrapers had frozen again, hard enough to hurt if you kicked it.
The moon’s face was surrounded by a ring of colour. This was said to be a crowd of the spirits of the dead, falling to their final destination in the moon’s icy embrace.
But tonight Ana wasn’t bothered so much by the dead as by the living, who had come drifting out of the Seven Houses. Many of the people of Etxelur, friends and family, had turned out to walk with her. But in among them were strangers, come to see the show. The two Pretani boys, with Gall munching on a haunch of whale meat and leering at the women. Traders, jabbering the crude argot that was their only common tongue. Even snailheads – early arrivals of the people from the far south. The centre of attention, she felt as if she was withering with embarrassment.
They wasted no time in the cold. The priest, Jurgi, led the way as he always did on such occasions. As they set off you could see by the moonlight how his mouth protruded, the great incisors of a wolf sticking out of his human lips. Arga solemnly walked beside him, wide-eyed, honoured to be carrying the skin bag that contained the priest’s irons.
Ana followed, with Mama Sunta and Zesi. Which was all wrong, of course. Ana should have been walking with her parents, not Sunta and Zesi. But only a year before her mother had died in childbirth, and her father, some said half-mad with grief, had gone sailing off and never returned. And Sunta was so weak that Zesi and Ana had to walk to either side of her, holding her up in her great sealskin coat.
‘I feel stupid,’ Ana murmured to Zesi over Mama Sunta’s lolling head.
Zesi replied, ‘Everybody feels that way. Tonight is about you and the moon. If you want to find the right Other, then you must concentrate.’
Ana said bitterly, ‘It was easy for you. A good Other chose you, the crossbill. Father was here. And mother.’
‘Easy, was it?’ Zesi snapped. ‘Well, I’m not your mother, and I don’t have to listen to you moaning.’
They trudged on in sullen silence.
They crossed the causeway to the island, a stripe of dry land that, when the tide was low, separated bay water from the open sea. Ana looked back over the bay, across the water to the southern beaches. Fires burned all along the shore, the tanners and knappers and fisherfolk working, brilliant human sparks in the drab darkness of the night. The moon’s cold white light glimmered from stretches of open water, on the ocean, in the bay of Etxelur, and across the boggy landscape. At times, Ana thought, Etxelur seemed more water than land.
Once over the causeway they headed north towards the islands, following a trail through low, rounded hills that, under sparse snow, were coated with dry, brown, fallen bracken, lying like lank hair, with here and there the stubborn green of grass. As they broke out at the shore the wind hit them, a hard steady gust coming off the sea, and white-capped waves growled. They clambered down the last line of dunes to the beach. Their boots crunched over gravel eroding from the dunes, fringing the level sand. On the beach itself the tide was low, and rock formations glistened, exposed to the air, dark with clinging weed and barnacles. There was much wrack gathered up in bands, strips and tubes of seaweed, bits of driftwood pushed high up the beach, relics of a winter storm. Ana’s footstep stirred the blanched, disarticulated remnants of a crab.
They came to the middens. These were heaps of mollusc shells and fishbone and other detritus, tall and long, each curving gracefully like the crescent moon, as if embracing the sea. Windblown snow was piled up in the lee of the middens. The boats that would carry Ana to North Island were waiting here, cupped by the middens.
But first the priest carried his charm bag to the crest of one of the middens. Here he set out his branding irons, bits of the hard, rusty stuff that, it was said, had fallen from the sky – unimaginably rare pieces, more valued even than the priest’s scraps of gold. These pieces were used for nothing but marking the people with the symbols of their Others, be they otter, fox, snow hare, pine marten – most precious of all the seal, most unwelcome the owl. One of these would be chosen to mark Ana that evening, in a flash of fire and pain, after it became clear what her Other must be.
