reminder.
‘We should go,’ Matu shouted. He had his family clutched close to him, his sons, his wife. He pointed south. ‘If we climb up into the hills, we’ll get wet but-’
‘No,’ Ana said.
‘What?’
‘We won’t run any more.’ She glanced around, and Zesi saw a cold determination in that young, pinched face. ‘Matu, make sure your children are safe. Dreamer, take your baby. Zesi, maybe you and Arga should go. The rest of you-’
‘We can’t defy the river,’ the priest shouted.
‘But we can,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You go if you want to, priest. The rest of you, help me.’ And she got to her knees and began to scrape at the muddy ground, making a mound. ‘Get the shovels. We can’t stop the river flood. But we can rise up above it.’
The others stood frozen, for a single heartbeat.
Then Matu pushed his wife away. ‘Go, take the boys. Hurry, hurry. I’ll be fine…’
Novu ran off, and quickly returned with shovels, shoulder-blades of deer and cattle strapped to stout poles. Matu took a shovel, and so did the priest. Soon there were six, eight, ten of them, all digging as Zesi watched. Some of the shovels were meant for clearing snow in the winter, but they did a good enough job in the sticky mud.
Soon a mound began to rise up above the sodden ground. Still the storm lashed down, and now water surged from the broken banks of the river. Even as the water ponded around them the diggers pushed their blades into the mud and heaped it up.
There was something about the whole situation that Zesi couldn’t bear – Ana’s strange doggedness in the face of the danger of the rising river, the way the others followed her unflinchingly. Even the priest, she saw, even the priest, who was as new to this as she was.
She pushed her way through to Ana. ‘This is mad. You’ll get somebody drowned.’
Ana didn’t look up. ‘You weren’t here when the Great Sea came. I was. Dig, or go. Look after Arga.’
Zesi hesitated, torn. Arga had gone with Matu’s family. Soaked to the skin, her hair flattened against her skull, Zesi ran after her. When she returned in the morning, coming down from the low hills to the south of the settlement, Zesi found a low dome of black, glistening earth, and a dozen diggers sitting exhausted on top of it. The river had subsided, but water pooled around the mound. The storm had long blown out, and the sun had broken through, and the diggers smiled up into its light, filthy and soaked but safely above the water.
If Ana saw Zesi coming, she showed no signs of it. ‘This is the future,’ she said gravely. She held her own shovel over her head like a hunter’s spear. ‘The future.’
51
The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice. Heni lifted the door flap and brought Arga into Ana’s house, his arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. Arga had been on a great adventure. Wrapped in a blanket of thick aurochs skin and with goose fat smeared on her bare arms, she looked as if she had been very, very cold; but she was beaming, that big moon smile.
Lightning, asleep by the fire, stirred and grumbled at the draught. When he saw Arga his tail gave a fluttering wag, and then he subsided into sleep once again.
Through the door flap Ana glimpsed the day, and was surprised to see how low the light was already. But it was only a few days from midwinter. She had sat in here all day with Zesi and Novu and Ice Dreamer and her baby, talking by the smoky light of the whale oil lamps, with others coming and going with bits of business. These deep- winter days without sunlight, brief and dim, felt like they were no days at all.
‘Come sit with me, by the fire.’ She made a space for Arga between herself and Ice Dreamer, and got a dry cloth and began to rub Arga’s wet hair.
‘And shut that flap, curse your bones, old man,’ Zesi snapped. ‘You’re letting all the heat out.’ Zesi, big with her child now, was grumpy, restless, frustrated by the way her pregnancy slowed her down, habitually ill- tempered.
‘All right, all right.’ Heni shuffled in, huge in the cramped house, and he shucked off his big fur jacket, wet and smelling of sea salt. ‘Is that Kirike’s fish stew?’
‘Here.’ Novu handed Heni a wooden bowl of the stew, which had been simmering for days, with extra fish, stock, roots, nuts, oil and spices steadily added until the flavour became deep and enriching. It had been Kirike’s favourite winter dish; he had been able to keep a single pot going for days.
‘Ah.’ Heni raised the bowl and drank deeply of the stock, and he belched, rubbing his belly. ‘That’s going to get me warm through.’ He glanced at the chunks of fish in his bowl. ‘There were more bodies down on the beach.’
Ana asked. ‘Anybody you recognised?’
‘One was a snailhead, I think. You could only tell from the funny shape of the skull. Face chewed off. Other kinds of people I didn’t know at all. One had a necklace of tiny skulls, otters maybe. Chucked it back in the sea.’ Heni inspected a lump of cod. ‘But we have to eat.’
Ana nodded. They had been through these arguments. The folk of Etxelur had become uncomfortable eating the fish which had so evidently been feeding on the bodies in the ocean. But they had lost all their summer store to the Great Sea, and the autumn hunts had been disastrous on the shattered, salt-poisoned land. This autumn and winter, it was only the sea that kept them alive – the murderous sea turned provider. ‘We have to eat.’ She deliberately scooped up a cup of the broth, gathering bits of fish, and took a mouthful, chewing deliberately, though she was not hungry. ‘With respect.’
Heni put the cod in his mouth and chewed carefully. ‘With respect.’
Zesi snorted. She tended to scorn such rituals.
‘So,’ Ice Dreamer said, and she hugged Arga. ‘You’ve been diving again, down to the Door.’
‘She has,’ Heni said proudly. ‘That little one can hold her breath, I counted it this time, a full hundred and fifty of my heartbeats. And I’ve got a big old heart that beats pretty slow, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything like it, like you’re half-dolphin, girl. I’m always relieved when she comes up for air, because I couldn’t fetch her if she didn’t.’
Arga smiled shyly. ‘I like it. It’s easy.’
‘It’s ridiculous that you sent her out diving today, Ana,’ Zesi said. ‘It’s midwinter!’
Arga said, ‘It’s not that cold when you’re in the water, even if it’s snowing up in the air. And as long as you keep moving you’re all right. Anyhow the goose fat keeps you warm.’
Zesi pressed, ‘And if you got stuck? If you caught your foot?’
‘I wouldn’t catch my foot. I’m not a baby.’
Novu leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Never mind all that. Tell us what you saw this time.’
Arga’s smiled broadened. ‘I went to the house on the hill, in the middle, North Island. I went inside!’ Since the day of the Great Sea, and despite the hardships they had suffered, Ana and the others hadn’t been able to put aside the memories of what they had glimpsed when the sea had rolled back. She and Novu and Dreamer had talked endlessly of the circular banks they called the Door to the Mothers’ House, for Ana believed it truly to be the drowned heart of old Etxelur. They had even made sketches with bits of charcoal on skin of what they had seen.
Zesi had mocked all this, as she mocked much of what Ana got up to with Dreamer and Novu, ‘your cabal of strangers’ as she called them. Ana ignored her, though this infuriated Zesi even more. For she knew, deep in her gut, that this was important, for herself, for Etxelur, for the future.
Of course the Door was submerged once more, as it had been for generations before that one strange day. It had begun to seem that those brief glimpses were all Ana would ever be allowed.
But then in the late autumn Arga, the best diver in Etxelur, had come up with the idea of swimming down to see if she could see any more. Once Ana and the rest were convinced she could do it they had leapt on the idea.
So Heni had started to take Arga out on his fishing trips. He had been wary at first, and she had scornfully
