‘What next wave? Where’s Arga? ’ Jaku faced Ana. He wanted to shake her, but she held the baby close.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ana said, desolate. ‘She hurt her leg. I had the baby. I couldn’t carry Arga too-’
Rute, still working the fire as if this was a normal day, just a friendly visit, actually smiled. ‘Arga’s a strong swimmer. She’ll be all right in the sea.’
Ana said, ‘Rute. Aunt – you have to come with us. It might not be safe here.’
‘No, no, I’ve got this fire to build. Arga’s going to be cold and wet when she gets in. And hungry, mark my words. She takes a lot of feeding, that girl!’ She kept heaping up peat blocks, and she inspected a bowl of broth hanging on a rope from a house post.
Jaku touched Ana’s arm. ‘She’s been this way since the beach. At first she was all right – she reacted quicker than I did. But then the first wave came and took poor Josu, just like that. Since then she’s been like this.’
‘You have to come,’ Novu said grimly. ‘If the next wave is bigger than the second, as the second was bigger than the first-’
Jaku looked back at his wife, despairing, his head full of a formless anxiety over Arga. ‘It’s no use. Even if I tried to drag her we’d be too slow. We’re going to have to take our chances here. Who knows? Maybe there won’t be another wave.’
Ana’s eyes brimmed. ‘Oh, Jaku-’
‘Go.’ Go, he thought, before I begin to hate you for abandoning my daughter. ‘Take her, Novu.’
Novu nodded curtly. Still supporting Dreamer, he took firm hold of Ana’s arm and dragged her out of the house.
Lightning followed, wagging his tail, but then looked back at Jaku, obviously confused. Jaku made a sweeping gesture after Ana. ‘Go with Ana, you stupid dog! Ana, call him.’
‘Lightning! Come on, boy!’ Lightning, thinking he was going to play, ran after her, yapping.
Jaku went back to his wife, who was continuing to build her fire. He knelt beside her. ‘You’re doing a good job.’
She smiled. ‘You know me. The most important skill in the world, Mama Sunta used to say, knowing how to make a good fire. Could you pass me more kindling? There’s a new heap in the corner.’
So they worked in silence. Jaku deliberately thought of nothing else but the fire, the fine art of layering the fuel over the kindling so there were plenty of gaps for the air to flow through. At length it was time for Jaku to unwrap the ember from last night. He placed it reverently in the middle of the fire. Rute took some bits of dried moss and dropped them on the ember, blowing on them as they started to smoke.
But then she sat back and looked at the floor. ‘Oh. That will make a mess of things.’
Cold, muddy sea water was seeping over the floor. It was coming in from the door, which faced north like all the houses in Etxelur, a steady flow that soon became a gush. They stood up, suddenly ankle-deep in cold sea water.
There was a roaring, like some huge gruff animal approaching, and the sky seemed to darken.
Jaku held his wife and hugged her close. ‘It would have been a good fire,’ he murmured.
‘Yes. Shame it’s going to waste.’
The ground shook. He felt his heart expand with a huge love, for his wife, his daughter, for this place where he’d lived such a happy life. He longed for Arga, but it was better that she wasn’t here – that there was a chance she was alive somewhere else. ‘You know, Rute-’
The third wave was like a slap from a giant, smashing the house and ending their lives in an instant. Ana, Novu and Dreamer reached the summit of Flint Island’s single low hill, which had long ago been cut open to reveal its precious flint lode. They flung themselves down, exhausted.
Ana handed Dreamer her baby. Dreamer hugged Dolphin close, murmuring, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ in her own tongue and Ana’s, over and over.
More people came struggling up the hill, children, adults carrying infants, some burdened with bags of tools or clothes. Ana knew everybody by name. Nobody spoke, for there was little to say.
Only Lightning was full of energy. He ran around, sniffing the baby’s wrap and tugging at the adults’ tunics, wagging his tail in his demands to play. Eventually he saw a pair of pine martens, driven to this high ground as the people had been, and ran off, barking.
There was an interval when the sea looked calm, as if it had returned to normal, settling back to its usual tide line. Then Ana saw the third wave. Rushing in from the horizon, it was a wall of grey water that would have towered even over its predecessors.
The beach, littered with corpses and struggling people still tangled in the fishing nets, was covered over, erased.
Then the wave broke over the dunes, and the great curving middens, already eroded, were broken open. Ana saw the pale glint of exposed bone, the work of uncounted generations undone in an eye blink. The water pushed through the dune line and into the lower land beyond, pooling across meadows, tearing whole trees out by their roots, crushing houses. It did not stop until it poured into the calmer waters of the bay behind the island, and had covered all of Etxelur.
44
The sky was huge. Arga had never seen so many stars. But her mother had always said that with the stars the more you looked the more you saw, and it was true.
She tried not to think of her mother, however. If she did, she remembered how far away she was from home. After all, if she lifted her head and looked around, she could see nothing but stars all the way down to a pitch-black horizon. No line of fires, no sign of the shore.
She thought she slept a bit.
When she woke, she found her unconscious body had snuggled down to find a more comfortable position, enfolded by the tree. Lying here like this, even her sprained ankle didn’t hurt any more, and she seemed to forget how hungry she was, how thirsty. The tree didn’t even roll that much as it rose up over the waves, which were gentler now. It was as if the tree was embracing her, holding her safe. Well, it was as far from home as she was, its very roots ripped out of the ground.
The tree was all that was real. The only sound she heard outside her own head was the soft lapping of the water against the branches and trunk. Maybe she ought to be afraid of the huge expanse of sea beyond, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it.
She slept again.
The next time she woke she saw light. A pink-grey sheen was seeping into one side of the sky, reflecting from flat layers of cloud. The other way, to the west, the stars still shone, though more palely. Above her head the sky was a deep blue dome, with only the brightest stars left visible. She felt a vast reluctance to be dragged into the day, from the safety of the dreamlike night.
And she heard something, a small splashing, a creak like a branch in the wind.
She sat up, making the tree rock, and looked east. She saw a shape silhouetted against the light, cutting through the water, and for an instant she thought it was a shark. Then she made out the clean profile of a boat, and the shadow of a man, alone, working two paddles. Smooth slow ripples spread from the prow.
She waved, and tried to call. ‘Hello?’ But her throat was sore and dry, her voice no more than a whisper, dwarfed by the sea. ‘Hello! Hello! I’m here!’
45
Through the night they huddled on top of the hill, Ana, Dreamer and Novu, with Dreamer’s baby cupped between their bodies. Other refugees crowded the slopes.
In the starlit dark, Ana slept only fitfully. All night Lightning cuddled up against Ana’s back, his head tucked in against her tunic, with occasional twitches, snuffles and yipped barks as he chased pine martens in his sleep. Once
