here. We’ll be able to see, even if we can’t reach it today.’
‘All right.’ Arga sounded relieved. Maybe under all the bravery she too had been scared by the strangeness of the day. She ran over to the dune and immediately began to climb, getting down on all fours to scramble up the muddy slope.
Ana followed her, and then Novu and Dreamer, more cautiously. If crossing the plain had been hard, this was twice as difficult, for the mud was slick and sticky. By the time they reached the crest they had all fallen more than once, and were smeared with black mud down their fronts.
From the dune’s narrow crest, panting hard, Dreamer could see the sweep of the sea-bottom plain. The true shore was far behind them, frighteningly far, blurred by mist, with those big arcs of the holy middens standing proud. All over the exposed seabed people worked, hauling away fish and crustaceans and seaweed. Children were playing, splashing and rolling in the mud, using huge dead silvery fish to play-fight. All this on a plain that had been deep under the sea this morning.
Ana and Arga were peering further north. And in this day of strangeness and wonder, a new marvel revealed itself to Dreamer.
The earthwork ridges were sweeping circular arcs that curved away from her view – cupped one inside another, like the rings in a tree trunk. She tried to count them – one, two, were there three? She was not high enough to see clearly. Water glinted, pooled in the ditches between the ridges. Though the walls were streaked with mud and draped with seaweed and fish corpses, they were too regular to be natural, no work of wind or rain or ice.
All of this Dreamer saw from afar, through a blurring curtain of heat haze that made it seem unreal, a vision in a dream.
‘It’s like your town,’ Ana said to Novu. ‘It’s like Jericho. The way you talked about it.’
‘It’s as big as Jericho,’ he murmured. ‘But people live in Jericho. They live in houses – not houses like yours… I don’t see where people would live here.’
‘I can see one house,’ Arga said. ‘I think so, anyway. See at the middle of the big rings, there’s a sort of hill? And there’s something near the top of the hill. A kind of white box, like a big skull.’
Dreamer strained to see. ‘Your eyes are sharper than mine, Arga-’
Ana said, ‘That’s North Island! The hill in the middle. I recognise it – I was taken there for my blood tide, when the sea lowers and reveals it… I never knew all this lay hidden by the water.’
Dreamer was feeling giddy with the heat and the exertion, and with the extraordinary sights around her. ‘You’re missing it,’ she mumbled.
Ana turned to her. ‘Dreamer? Are you all right?’
‘You’re missing the most obvious thing. Look!’ She pointed to the shore of Flint Island, beyond the exposed sea plain. ‘Look at the middens, where you celebrate the Giving, where you buried your own grandmother at midwinter. Your most sacred sites. Now look at these circles in the mud. What do you see?’
Ana turned her head from one to the other. ‘The middens, their shapes – they match the curves of the shining walls. Like ripples on a pond.’
‘Yes,’ Arga said, excited. ‘All with the same centre where you threw your stone.’
‘And that’s not all.’ Dreamer grabbed Ana’s tunic and lifted it, exposing her belly. And there, above the cloth she wore over her loins, was Ana’s blood-tide tattoo. Dreamer traced it with a trembling finger. ‘Can you see? Three circles, cut to their common centre by this tail. You have this symbol scrawled over your bodies, your tools and weapons, your clothes, your houses. And look!’ She gestured at the earthwork. ‘Three circles…’
Arga and Ana jabbered to each other in their own rapid tongue, barely comprehensible to Dreamer. ‘The Door to the Mothers’ House! This is it! She must be right.’
There was a dull roar in Dreamer’s ears. The heat, the exhaustion were draining her. She clung to Novu’s arm, determined not to faint.
Novu looked out to sea. ‘Can you hear something?’
‘Only the blood pounding in my head.’
‘Something else. A rumbling.’
The girls jumped, excited. Dreamer, growing dizzier, was losing her ability to translate the girls’ words, and their prattle blurred in her mind as they repeated their name for the earthwork, over and over. ‘The Door to the Mothers’ House. Door, mothers, house… Ate, l’ami, nt’etxe… Att-lann-tiss…’
There was a scream, from far away. Shouting voices.
Novu pointed north. ‘What’s that?’
Dreamer peered, and saw a band of blue-black, flecked with white, racing over the exposed mud. The sea, returning.
Ana cried, ‘Run!’ The four of them scrambled down the dune slope, slithering, half-sliding to the bottom. But Arga landed awkwardly on her ankle, and cried out.
Down on the plain, Dreamer, gasping for breath, couldn’t run. She couldn’t even lift her feet out of the mud. ‘I can’t – I can’t-’
‘You have to.’ Novu held her arm, urging her on.
‘Let me take the baby,’ Ana said. Dreamer felt hands working at the sling on her back. ‘I can carry her, and run faster than you.’
Dreamer made an instant decision. ‘Go, then.’
Ana held the baby in one arm, and grabbed Arga’s hand with her free hand. ‘Come on, Arga!’ She began to run to the shore, but Arga limped badly, crying out.
Novu said, ‘You too, Dreamer. Come on.’ He pulled at Dreamer, his arm around her shoulders.
They began hobbling towards a shore that seemed a terribly long way away. Ahead she saw people fleeing, abandoning the fish they had gathered, running from the advancing sea.
Novu, trying to support her, tripped and fell heavily in the mud. They had gone only a few paces. He rose, filthy, cursing loudly in his own tongue. And he shucked the bag of stones off his back and dropped it in the mud. ‘There will be other treasures.’ He leaned over, got his shoulder under Dreamer’s belly and hoisted her up, holding her legs.
Her head and upper body flopped over his back. It was shocking, suddenly to be carried like a child.
He began running. His back was drenched with sweat where it had been under the pack. His strides jarred and winded her.
She strained to lift her head. That wall of returning ocean looked terribly close. She looked for Ana – and there she was, cradling the baby, and trying to drag Arga. But the younger girl was crying and stumbling, her ankle obviously damaged. No matter how hard Ana pulled her hand, Arga could run no faster than a hobble.
Ana seemed to be calling to Dreamer, but her voice was drowned by the water’s gathering roar. Then Ana stood still, panting hard. She looked at the baby in her arms, and the limping, weeping Arga. It might only have been a heartbeat. It seemed an eternity to the watching Dreamer.
And then Ana ran, with the baby, abandoning Arga. The girl in the mud screamed in terror. But Ana ran on, fast and sure over the mud, cradling the baby in her arms. Dreamer whimpered her relief.
But now the water was close. The new wave was a wall flecked with foam and laden with debris – with whole trees, drowned and ancient and now ripped out of the earth. The very ground shook under the water’s tremendous tread.
She closed her eyes and tucked her head against Novu’s sweating back.
41
The second wave had upended the boat.
Kirike swam up into sunlight. He coughed, spewing water from deep in his throat. After too long underwater his limbs were shaking, his chest aching, his heart hammering. His head was full of fear, for himself, for his daughters and his family, even for Heni.
But, exhausted, for now he could do nothing but roll onto his back, floating in the water, the hot sunlight beating on his face.
Something touched his hand. It was a frond of seaweed. The sea was silty and full of debris, the weed and
