this house for Knuckle, and a baby or two. We’d have to have a conversation about the business of binding the babies’ skulls.’
‘But is that what Ana wants? I know what an intrusion I am in her life. She lost her mother. Then she lost you. And now, even when her father comes home, he brings me. A brand new family to replace the old.’
‘Dolphin’s not my child. You’re not my woman.’
She took his hand, the palm scarred by the cuts of fishing lines. ‘That may not be how it looks to Ana.’
He stared into her eyes. ‘And how does it look to you?’
She didn’t reply.
He hesitated, then pulled away. ‘Try to sleep a bit more.’ He walked back to his own pallet.
33
Led by the Root and Shade as usual, with Zesi and Jurgi bringing up the rear, the hunting party rounded a bend of the Great River of Albia. The forest stood all around them, tall trees growing right down to the water’s edge.
And there, lying in the water, was a canoe – a tremendous log, dug out and shaped, by far the largest canoe Zesi had ever seen.
Men stood on the riverbank by the canoe, or sat around a big smoking fire. They wore tattoos in the Pretani style. More men laboured in the canoe, polishing its surfaces, bailing out water. When they spotted the Root the men by the fire leaped to their feet and started jumping, waving, shouting. The Root’s hunters waved back.
‘So,’ the priest murmured to Zesi, ‘after all these days of walking, we have arrived. Evidently the Root will ride the rest of the way home in this mighty craft. I wonder how long these men have waited here for their leader to return.’
‘That canoe,’ Zesi mumbled.
‘What about it?’
‘Priest, it is huge.’ The men inside the canoe were dwarfed by the craft. And she saw now that the big central hull was flanked by outriders, four of them, fixed to the main hull with beams and ropes, there to keep the boat stable in the water. Each of the riders alone was larger than any canoe in Etxelur. She tried to imagine the labour involved in felling this immense tree, in shaping it as a canoe – the fires must have been banked day and night – and then somehow hauling it to the water.
The priest said dryly, ‘It had to be a big boat, Zesi. With men like the Root, even a simple canoe must be bigger than anybody else’s in the whole world. If you have power, you must flaunt it to impress.’
‘Well, I am impressed.’
The Root brushed by the fawning men by the fire and went straight to the boat, where they walked along one of the outrider beams and settled into a place near the prow. The bailing men cringed and kept out of his way.
Shade followed, and then Zesi and the priest. The boat was so massive it barely shifted in the water under their weight, almost as stable as if they walked on dry land. Zesi saw that the boat’s hollowed-out interior was finely worked, smoothed and greased from one end to the other, and the hull itself had been shaped to give the canoe a sharp prow and stern. Zesi had to sit among the Pretani hunters, on shallow log benches. Alder the medicine man, friendlier than the rest, made room for her.
A few of the men who had been by the fire jumped in now, to much jabbering in the Pretani tongue, and those who had been bailing took their places and pushed paddles into the water.
The canoe glided away from the bank. After a few strokes one of the rowers began to sing, a doleful but rhythmic chant, and the others joined in. It seemed to help them maintain the pace of the heavy paddling. The river here was broad, sluggish, calm, but they were heading upstream, against the current, and the paddlers were soon working hard, and sweat gleamed on grimy torsos.
Out on the river the heat was intense, the air humid. The water looked thick, almost oily, and was dense with life, with tiny fish that clustered around the boat and green fronds that waved under the water, and the fat pads of lilies by the shore. Insects swarmed over the surface, clouds of them that caught the sunlight, but they did not trouble Zesi. Sometimes Zesi thought she saw movement in the trees, in the solid canopy like a roof to either side of the river. Fleeting, elusive motion tracking the canoe, a blur of shadows, a glint of sharp eyes. She saw the Pretani mutter and point, and she thought she heard them say, ‘Leafy Boys.’
They turned a bend and startled a group of young deer that had come to the water. The animals, light-boned and big-eyed, watched the boat for a heartbeat, and then bounded away into the forest’s shade, almost silent, their muscles working with a springy suppleness, their white tails bobbing.
‘The men who paddle,’ the priest said to Alder in the heroes’ tongue. ‘They are not like the others…’ They lacked the Pretani’s characteristic arrays of facial kill scars and tree tattoos, though some had other sorts of designs on their bodies. One man had his whole ears slit in two from the lobes upward, with the two halves bound by some kind of thread. They all looked skinny, dirty, subdued, and some bore injuries, including stripe marks on their backs.
Alder smiled. ‘They are slaves.’ The priest had to translate for Zesi; there was no such word in the Etxelur language.
‘Why would a man be kept as a slave?’
‘He doesn’t get the choice,’ the priest said. ‘Like Novu, remember? As a slave you work or you die.’
‘In fact,’ murmured Alder, ‘you work and then you die.’
Zesi asked, ‘But why would you keep a slave, then?’
The priest said, ‘With his slaves the Root can gather more food, to feed more hunters, who go out and capture more slaves. It is how he extends his power. And without slaves I doubt if he could have made this boat, for instance.’
Zesi looked at the paddlers with horror – and yet with interest. How would it be to command such men, to have such power? To be able to treat another human being as if he was another limb… But her father’s face swam into her mind, and she imagined what he would say if she voiced such ideas.
‘It is not our way to own slaves,’ she said firmly.
‘Let us hope it will never become our way to be enslaved… Look – a settlement.’
You could see it through a screen of willows at the water’s edge, a clearing cut into the forest, or perhaps burned, with houses roofed with leafy thatch. As the slaves’ singing wafted across the still air, children came running down to the water’s edge and shouted and jumped, waving.
The water front had been cleared, and a jetty had been set up in the water, a platform of logs set on piles driven into the river mud. The boat pulled into the bank. A couple of the Root’s men jumped out and tied up the boat, while others came hurrying from the settlement beyond, typical Pretani, shouting and waving.
Again the Root did not pause. As soon as the boat was fixed he stood and stalked off, and walked right through the settlement. Shade, Zesi, the priest and the rest had to scramble out of the boat and follow him.
Zesi glanced back at the paddling slaves in the boat, who were doubled over, panting, exhausted. Yet a Pretani was already shouting at them, gesturing, and they picked up their paddles to make the journey back.
They hurried through the settlement in the wake of the Root. Among the houses Zesi glimpsed the usual mob of children, dogs, food pits, hearths, people preparing food or working at stone blades and spear shafts and bits of clothing. In this place, most of the workers were women.
Zesi met the eye of one girl, baby at her breast, who laboured over a huge wooden bowl of stew at a fire. She seemed very young – younger than Ana – and, pale and blonde, she looked nothing like the Pretani. Whereas women ‘owned’ Etxelur, men owned Albia; if you married a Pretani man you were expected to come live in such a settlement as this, live his way. Dull, languid, drenched with sweat, the girl barely seemed aware of Zesi’s presence. Zesi had to hurry on.
Once across the clearing they cut into the forest, following a wide track kept clear of new growth; Zesi could see where saplings and bracken had been hacked back, and to either side oaks towered. The trail ran straight, and the Root led confidently.
Soon the way opened out into another, much larger clearing. This roughly circular space was dominated by a single oak at the centre, wide and tangled, ancient even by the standards of this forested peninsula. Around the oak
