will have many children and grandchildren, and we will live in houses as they do in Jericho.’
‘What’s in the holes in the wall?’
‘My stuff, and my treasures.’ He moved around the room, showing her heaps of garments, tools, fire-making gear, dried food, water sacks. His ‘treasures’ were stones, high-quality flint and bits of obsidian, some of them shaped into tools. He laid these things out on the floor.
She picked up an obsidian flake, finely worked, light, smooth, glinting in the lamp light. ‘This is beautiful.’
‘A gift from Loga. You know, the trader I came here with. Not as significant as the gift of my freedom. A reward for all the work I did helping him get himself and his wives across the Continent to this place. It comes from a lode quite near my home.’
She fingered other pieces of flint, richly textured, pale brown. ‘These look like Etxelur flint, from the island.’
‘I worked for these pieces too. Just as I worked for the obsidian.’ He sounded defensive.
‘I’m not denying it.’
‘For instance I help your father with his catches, when he comes in from the sea.’
‘Are you going to make tools?’
He picked up a flint core and hefted it in his hand, feeling its weight. ‘Oh, this stuff’s too good for tools.’
‘So why do you want it?’
He frowned, thinking it over. ‘Because it’s real. More real than us. Nothing lasts in this world, does it? Your clothes wear out. Your houses rot and fall down. Plants and animals wither. People grow old and die. Only the stone remains.’ He held up the flint. ‘Stone, that doesn’t die when we die.’
She looked at the stone, at the earnest boy with the strange accent, trying to understand. ‘Stone doesn’t die because it is already dead. People die, but…’ She thought of the clumps of mallow outside this very house. ‘Every spring, the world begins again. Why do you people live like this? All heaped up like rats. Pawing over bits of stone.’
‘Ana, in Jericho, there are single houses where more people live than in the whole of Etxelur.’ He gestured. ‘This is a huge country, and a rich one. But there’s nobody here! And your dwellings, those huts made of wood and seaweed – sometimes, if I look at them, and I look away, I barely see them at all. Just lumps on the ground.’ He held out his hand like a knife, the palm vertical. ‘In my country there is none of this blurring into the green. In Jericho, there is nothing but people. And pigs and chickens, obviously. And goats. But still, the point remains. Jericho is a totally human place. Carved out of the world, separate from it. I have to live like this – live my way. I learned that in all those long months walking with Loga, and the other who held me before him. I need to live with walls between me and the green – walls that will last. Otherwise I would go insane, I think.’
‘Some say you already are insane.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. So why are you hiding away in this hole with me?’ His insightful gaze made her uncomfortable. ‘How’s Knuckle?’
She turned away. ‘I don’t care about Knuckle.’
‘That snailhead cares about you. That’s the gossip, anyhow.’
All this was true. But Knuckle was too old for her, too strange, too complicated. She didn’t want to discuss this with Novu. ‘Who gossips with you?’
‘Arga. Ice Dreamer, though she knows even less about what goes on than me. That business with the Pretani was bruising for you, wasn’t it? I remember how it all blew up on the very day I arrived, at the Giving. One brother killing the other, who had killed a snailhead in turn… I barely knew what was going on.’
‘It was my sister’s row.’
‘Yes. But you were caught up in it, weren’t you? Maybe you feel nobody notices you, that you get brushed aside. Is this why you come to me?’ He grinned, clever, probing. ‘Coming here is an escape from home, isn’t it? Why, Ice Dreamer spoke to me the other day, and she said-’
‘Zesi. Knuckle. Ice Dreamer.’ She rolled onto her knees, and brushed away his laid-out stones with her arms. ‘I came to see you in your stupid house, with your stupid stuff. Not to talk about this.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He held up his hands. ‘I talk too much. It’s got me in trouble before. You should ask my father. Please, you can come talk to me any time-’
But she was already squeezing out through the doorway, it seemed narrower and tighter than when she’d gone in, and she emerged with relief into the open air. She plucked one of the mallows, pressed it to her nose, and walked away towards the dunes.
32
Dreamer’s sobs broke into her troubled dreams. She woke to find her eyes wet, her throat sore.
Kirike sat over her, a shadow in the dark. ‘It’s all right…’ She couldn’t see his face, but she sensed his presence, his calm mass. And she could smell him, the salt-sea smell he never quite shook off. He was speaking comforting words in her own tongue, the tongue of the True People.
She sat up, clutching her hide cover to her body. There was only a little light from the dying fire in the hearth, and from the deep blue of a pre-dawn sky that leaked through the open door flap. She replied in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Did I wake you?’
A snort from the dark, a slim shape moving in the shadows. Ana, fetching water from the skins. ‘You were screaming in your dreams. Again. Yes, you woke us. It’s a wonder Dolphin isn’t crying too.’
Dreamer turned and looked for her baby. Dolphin Gift lay on a tiny pallet a pace away from her, under a lamp that burned smokily. Dolphin slept peacefully, one little hand with fingers like buds showing outside her wrap of soft, woven cloth. This was the wisdom of the women of Etxelur, that you didn’t lie with your newborn for fear of rolling over on top of her, and that the lamp, burning some mixture of oils, was good for an infant’s breathing. ‘She’s fine. It’s not long since she fed; she’ll sleep a while yet.’
Kirike murmured, ‘That little mite was born at sea and slept through ocean storms. She’s had to learn to be a good sleeper in her short life.’
‘But you’re not at sea now.’ Ana came over and sat cross-legged beside them.
Ana’s face, shadowed, was youthfully smooth, yet somehow pinched, Dreamer always thought. As if the spirit inside was old before her time. But here she was with wooden cups of water, which she handed to Kirike and Dreamer. Complicated the girl might be, resentful and wary, but she had a good heart.
‘No,’ Dreamer said. ‘But I dreamed I was at the coast, watching the tide.’ She had never seen the ocean before she had stumbled to that distant shore, with Moon Reacher already dead in her arms. She had never seen the tide, never imagined that a body of water as big as the world could rise and fall, rise and fall. ‘I dreamed they were all there. Moon Reacher and Mammoth Talker and Stone Shaper, and all the others I knew before, my mother and sisters and the priests. All on the shore. Then the tide came in and covered them over. When the tide went out the beach was empty. When I die – if Dolphin were to die – there would be nothing left. Not even the memory. All of them deader than the dead. “The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, of which even the priest knew nothing. Even our totems are dead…” ’
‘Enough,’ Kirike said sharply. ‘You’re safe now. With us. You’re not going to die. And nor is Dolphin Gift.’ He leaned over and smiled at the baby.
Abruptly Ana stood, unravelling her legs in a single graceful movement, and pushed out of the house through the door flap. She left her cup of water standing on the floor.
Dreamer cursed in her own tongue. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for,’ Kirike said grimly. ‘That child needs to learn to think about the feelings of other people.’
‘Oh, Kirike, be fair. She was trying, she brought me water. And she’s not a child. She’s of an age to take a man, to have children of her own.’
‘I know. There are younger mothers in Etxelur.’
‘I see that snailhead boy is paying her attention.’
‘Knuckle? Well, she could do worse. They’re a strange lot, and they’ve come to live a bit too close for my liking. But maybe it would be a good alliance, the two of them. Smooth the friction.’ He glanced around. ‘There’s room in
