And then, of course, there was the baby.
It was her first child. She had no idea how it was supposed to feel, growing inside her. She could have asked Jurgi. In Etxelur tradition medical lore was scattered in everybody’s heads, which was how her father had been competent enough to deliver Ice Dreamer’s baby in a boat out on the ocean – but the priest, above all, guarded and supervised that lore. But pride kept her silent. She was the experienced hunter, she was in control while they were away from home. She did draw comfort from the priest’s silence on the matter. She had the feeling that if there had been something to be worried about he would have spoken out.
This priest had a way of guiding you without opening his mouth at all. Curse the man!
But despite everything she was, at last, going home. Keeping up with the priest, she walked briskly, swinging her arms, concentrating on the simple pleasure of not having to pick her way along some cramped, confusing trail in the enclosure of the woods, and relishing the raspberries and blackberries they plucked as they marched.
Suddenly Jurgi stopped dead. He breathed in deeply. ‘Why – I’m sure I can smell salt.’
She sniffed suspiciously. She could smell it too. They shouldn’t be smelling the ocean this far south. Something was wrong.
They didn’t speak further, and walked on. They sheltered that night in a copse of trees, dominated by an old oak. But when they awoke in the morning that smell of salt in the air was stronger.
The scent gathered in the days that followed. And they started to notice changes in the land.
They came to a stand of trees, obviously dying, their roots waterlogged, their leaves limp. Zesi approached cautiously. Through her boots she felt the coldness of the damp ground around the tree roots. Only the alders seemed to be flourishing. One big oak that must have survived centuries was clearly suffering. There was no sign of life in the soggy undergrowth, no voles stirring. She found the mouth of a badger sett, stopped up with leaves and abandoned.
She touched the bark of the silent oak, then crouched down by its roots. A few acorns floated in a puddle, and she collected a handful absently. Then she dipped a finger in the water and tasted it.
‘Salt?’ the priest asked.
‘Salt, yes. I think I remember this place. We are still at least a day from home, from the coast and the sea. How can salt water be poisoning these trees, this far inland?’ She looked north, troubled; she sensed a great silence. ‘Something has happened, priest.’
‘Yes. Though I can’t imagine what.’
It got worse the next day. They saw more dead trees, more standing puddles of water that always proved to be brackish. In one place the river opened out to a marsh, where at this time of year the wading birds should have been flocking, preparing for their flights to their winter homes, and the reeds turning from green to brilliant gold. But there were no birds, and the reeds were wilted and the willows bare. The place stank of salt and rot and death, and Zesi and Jurgi made a detour to avoid it.
Then they started to notice a strange covering over the land, a pale, whitish, sandy mud. It had clearly been there for some time, many days or even months, for it had been worked on by the rain and was washing away into rivulets and streams. But in places it stood thick, banked up like snow. Zesi bent to explore this strange stuff; it was gritty and full of stones and broken shells from the sea, and very salty on the tongue.
As they walked on the blanket of pale mud grew thicker, until it covered whole swathes of land. In places it included big blocks of peat, torn from the ground. Sometimes it obscured familiar features in the landscape, making tracks hard to spot. There were no raspberries to pluck now, nothing to eat, even fresh water rare.
But then they came to a place where somebody had taken a stick and scrawled in the mud, making the symbol of Etxelur, the three concentric rings and the radial slash. They both stood over this, oddly reluctant to go on.
‘Hello! Hello!’ A man stood by a copse, carrying a wicker basket. He was waving vigorously. His call had been in the Etxelur tongue. ‘By moon and sun, I’m glad to see you, Zesi, Jurgi, we all will be!’
He was Matu, a friend of Zesi’s father. They sat together, and shared dried meat and water.
His skin tunic was filthy, his legs were coated with the white dirt, and his basket was less than half full of acorns. He had been out since dawn, he said. They were half a day from home. ‘But you have to come further south every day to find acorns, to find a tree that’s not been poisoned by the Great Sea. I’ve never known an autumn like it. Well, none of us have. We’re trying to get ready for the winter, we all are. But I sometimes wonder if I’m working off more fat than I’ll get back from my share of the acorns. But what can you do?’
Ana and Jurgi glanced at each other. The Great Sea?
‘Tell us what happened,’ Jurgi said gently.
So Matu told his story. He mostly spoke to the priest. Jurgi seemed to have a knack of listening, of keeping the man’s anxious gabble flowing. But neither of them knew what to make of Matu’s account, of how the ocean had risen up and smashed Etxelur, drenched the land with salt water and mud, and poisoned every stream and well.
This wasn’t the Matu Zesi had known, this gaunt, anxious man with the hollow eyes, and gabbling speech. She’d never been much interested in him. He was a decade or so older than her, quiet, not particularly competent, short, squat, balding, with watery eyes. He was never a leader, never the sort of man who could challenge or excite Zesi. She supposed that without people like Matu no community like Etxelur could exist – there would be no stage for the more exciting exploits of people like herself. But now this uninteresting, unprepossessing man lived on where so many others had died.
And there was something crucial he wasn’t telling them.
She broke into Matu’s descriptions and grabbed his arm. ‘My family,’ she snapped. ‘You say many are dead. What became of my family?’
Matu was frightened, she saw, intimidated by her. Yet he faced her, and spoke clearly.
And so she learned that she and Ana and Arga were alone now; Kirike was dead, and Arga’s parents, her uncle and aunt.
She grabbed her pack and spear and stood up. ‘Let’s go home.’
49
They walked down the valley of the Little Mother’s Milk, and at last came home to Etxelur.
Everything had changed. Much of the land was blanketed by the white muddy sand, which this close to the coast lay waist-deep in places. The old houses were gone, smashed and ruined, just as Matu had described. Even the sheltering dunes had been swept away, leaving heaps of sand and ragged clumps of marram grass.
All that Zesi recognised of her own home, the site of the Seven Houses, as they walked quietly up, was the basic shape of the land, its relation to the river valley to the east. Debris lay scattered on the ground – torn clothes, a necklace of pierced shells tied tight to suit a little girl’s neck. There was only one structure here now, on the site of Zesi’s own old house, a single pole thrust into the ground with a kind of lean-to of posts and kelp and skins heaped up around it.
And there was only one person here, a girl. She had her back to the newcomers. Dirty, sweating, she was working at a pit dug into the ground. She had a heap of gravel, and with her hands she shovelled this into the pit. Zesi recognised what she was doing. This was a winter store, designed to keep acorns safe from rot and rodents. You sealed the walls with wet clay, and laid down a layer of pebbles and chopped-up reeds, then poured in your acorns, then another layer of rock and reeds, then more acorns. When the acorns were dug out in the leanest times of the winter, they would have lost their bitterness. But Zesi could see the pit was all but empty – a third full, maybe a quarter.
‘It’s going to be a hard winter,’ she murmured.
The girl spun around. It was Arga. Like Matu, she had lost so much weight she was barely recognisable. But a smile as wide as the moon spread across her face. ‘Zesi! Oh, Zesi!’ She got up and hurled herself at her cousin. Zesi felt the girl’s shuddering sobs. ‘Zesi, Zesi – you’ve been gone so long.’
‘Only a couple of months-’
‘I thought you were dead!’
Zesi stroked her hair. ‘Now why would you think that?’
‘Because everybody else is. My mother and my father and Kirike and-’ She stopped, and her hand flew to her
