The Root shook his huge head. ‘It has gone too far. Blood has already been spilled. It must end here.’
Shade said, ‘And I-’
The Root moved with blinding speed. He grabbed his son’s hand, the hand holding the blade – and he drove it deep into his own belly. The Root groaned, and his eyes rolled. Yet he held onto Shade’s shoulder with his other hand, dropping his own knife.
Shade, his arm already soaked in blood, was shocked. He tried to step back. ‘Father-’
The Root wouldn’t let him go. He gasped, ‘I will not live to see two sons die. Now, son. As it was with your brother. You did it well for him. I saw you. Up and to the heart.’ Father and son were locked in a ghastly, struggling embrace. ‘The heart! The heart!’
Weeping, Shade braced, obeyed his father, and thrust deep.
The mother screamed and fell to the ground. The hunters rushed forward towards their leader.
The priest put his arm around Zesi. ‘Into the house. Come, quickly.’ The following morning Alder, grim-faced, summoned Zesi and the priest from their house. They were to watch the last of it.
Zesi saw that a pit had been dug into the ground, in a gap in the outer circle of young trees. An oak sapling lay on the ground, neatly uprooted; dirt still clung to its roots. Shade stood over the pit, naked, his father’s blood still staining his belly and legs. His men stood behind him.
Nobody else was here; the women and children and slaves stayed in their houses as the men pursued their drama of blood and death.
Shade raised a hand to beckon Zesi forward.
With the priest, she came to the edge of the pit. The Root’s heavy corpse lay in the pit, on his back. He was naked, unadorned, with pink-grey guts spilling from the huge, ragged wound in his belly. He looked as if he had been thrown in there, without ceremony.
Shade glared at Zesi, his eyes bright, his face unreadable. That new wound over his forehead seemed to be seeping blood – and she wondered if it would soon be joined by a second kill scar. There was little left of the Shade she had known, the boy who had come to Etxelur just months ago.
‘I wanted you to see this,’ he said to Zesi. He spoke in the Etxelur tongue, his accent thick. ‘To see what you have done. Because of you my brother is dead, my father is dead – both dead at my own hand – and my mother is gone, off into the forest, insane with her grief.’ He glanced down at the corpse. ‘We did this to ourselves. But we broke ourselves on you, Zesi, like a dog dashing out its brains against a tree. When this is done, go from here. Go to your home.’
She said hotly, hand on belly, ‘I carry your baby.’
‘Pray to your little mothers that you never see my face again.’
Then he bent, picked up the young tree, and rammed it upside down into his father’s pit, branches in the ground, the roots in the air, a grotesque mockery of life.
36
Off the Scandinavian shore, deep under the sea, huge mounds of silt were in motion. The undersea landslip would not be a large event, on a planetary scale. Only a volume the size of a small country, a mass of mud entirely submerged, sliding deeper into the abyss.
But an equivalent volume of water, pushed aside by the silt, would have to find somewhere to go.
37
Ana led the way along the track across the Flint Island marsh, with Novu following, Dreamer with her baby in a sling on her back, and then Arga. Arga, at least, was singing the ancient song of the trail, which she was trying to learn. Nobody else seemed happy.
The track felt solid underfoot to Ana. But then, earlier in the year, she herself had helped set down a new layer of logs on this very track, cut and shaped, to press down on the old. Sometimes she wondered how long this had been going on, how many generations had worn away while the rows of logs, one on top of the other, had been pushed down ever deeper into the soft mud, the soaked and rotten wood of the lowest at last dissolving away.
The four of them had crossed the causeway and come to this marsh on the north side of the island to show Novu and Dreamer a new place, a new kind of landscape for them, and maybe to trap some birds or an otter or two. It had been her father’s idea, a way for them all to get to know each other better, his daughter and the two newcomers. So Kirike had pronounced, before he had got into his boat and paddled away over the horizon with Heni, once again leaving Ana to work it all out.
The sourness wasn’t just to do with this pack of strangers and misfits, Ana thought. Everything felt wrong this late summer afternoon. It was too hot, the air dank and clammy and full of midges, the sun too bright and reflecting off the standing water. There was something odd in the air, a kind of tension. It was a day when she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.
But dragonflies hovered over the water, and on patches of dryer land butterflies flickered between purple sedge and pale pink-white cuckoo flowers. The birds were beautiful too. They disturbed a reed bunting, the white collar around its black head bright as it flapped off indignantly. And a flock of lapwings took to the air, flying so tight and close it seemed impossible they didn’t collide with each other.
Novu was startled by the lapwings. As usual these days he carried a big skin pack on his back; Ana had no idea what he was carrying in it, but its weight made him sweat. ‘Those things were close.’
‘Lapwings rarely attack people,’ Ana said dryly.
He glanced to either side of the path, which cut across sodden ground. ‘The water looks deep just here.’
‘So it is. The path is safe.’
‘How do you know to walk here?’
Arga piped up, ‘Because this is where the logs are!’
Novu grinned, good-natured enough. ‘Yes, yes. What I mean is, how did your grandmothers know where to put the logs in the first place?’
‘The song tells you where,’ Arga said, and she sang, ‘ “Over the water bridge, and by the smiling ridge, walk to the afternoon sun, until you come-” ’
‘Which came first, the trail or the song?’
‘The trail,’ Ana said.
‘The song,’ Arga said.
‘Maybe a bit of both,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘It is the same in my country. The land is overlaid by the lore and tradition of the past. And over and through this landscape of memory move the living.’
‘But it’s all so strange. There’s nothing here. At home we build walls. Marker stones!’ He stood on the causeway, in the middle of the marsh, and held up his arms. ‘In Jericho, at any moment, you know exactly where you are.’
‘Well, you’re not in Jericho now,’ Arga said. And she ran at Novu and shoved him in the back.
He flailed comically, then went into the water head first. He came up coughing, reeds clinging to his body, a sticky slime hanging like drool from his face. The water wasn’t quite knee deep, but, pulled back by his heavy pack, he was having trouble standing in the soft mud.
Laughing, Ana and Dreamer knelt down and pulled him out, landing him on his belly on the log path. He managed to stand. He had his foot stuck in an eel wicker basket. Panting, dripping, he said, ‘Thanks a lot, Arga.’
‘At least it shut you up,’ Ana said. She began to wrestle the basket off his foot. ‘This is one of Jaku’s. He’ll be furious.’
They got the wrecked trap off him, threw it back in the water, and continued on.
At the edge of the marsh the land rose up into a line of dunes before the beach, the marsh green giving way to yellow-brown sand. Here Ana stopped, shucked off the pack she was carrying and dumped it on the ground. ‘We’ll
