57
The next morning Ana sent word that she was calling a gathering.
By noon, all of Etxelur had come together on the beach before the Giving platform. The snailheads were here too.
Jurgi, slipping through the silent crowd, made sure he stood close to Knuckle. The snailhead was white with anger and hatred – just as he had been almost exactly a year ago, when he had lost his brother.
On the stage itself stood Ana and Zesi. Ana had her arms folded. Zesi, standing alone, wore the same skin tunic she had yesterday; she looked as if she hadn’t washed, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept.
Everybody was utterly silent. In the background was a wash of noise, from the lapping sea, the gulls crying.
When Ana decided everybody was assembled she began. ‘We are here because of what my sister has done-’
‘I did it for you,’ Zesi blurted. She turned to the people. ‘For all of you. I wanted to show you how fragile this thing you’re building is. How much danger you’re putting yourselves in. How much effort you are wasting-’
‘Shut up,’ Ana said softly.
Zesi immediately complied, trembling. Jurgi felt a twinge of fear at Ana’s power, her authority even over her rivalry-ridden older sister.
Ana said, ‘Today we consider what was done. Not why. The why doesn’t matter. Let Knuckle and Eyelid come forward.’
But Eyelid, weeping, stayed with her family.
Knuckle strode forward. He spoke to Ana, his Etxelur language crude and thickly accented. ‘Last year, brother died, because of this woman. This year, niece dies. Because of this woman.’ Muscles bunched in his neck, and his hands were clenched into fists so tight that blood trickled from palms pierced by his fingernails. ‘Punish her your way, but punish her so she never forgets what she did. Never forget my niece.’
Ana walked up to Zesi.
Zesi cowered. ‘I didn’t mean it! Can’t you see? I meant to protect you. I never meant to harm anybody! Do you think I intended for this to happen? Oh, you fools, listen to me…’
But she fell silent before Ana’s cold gaze.
When Ana spoke it was softly, yet the priest was sure everybody present could hear. ‘Zesi, my sister, you are dead to us. Dead as the child whose life you took. Dead to those of Etxelur. Dead to all our allies. Dead to the snailheads.’ There was a growl of agreement from Knuckle’s people. ‘We will not feed you, we will not look at you, we will not speak to you, for you are one with the dead. Go from this place; you do not exist here.’
As she uttered these words the priest watched Ana’s face. It was hard and cold as stone, ancient and implacable. It was the owl’s unblinking stare, the priest thought suddenly, the stare of her deathly Other. Ana was barely sixteen years old.
Zesi looked shocked. But then a spark of her old defiance returned. ‘Fine. I’ll go. I’ll go back to Albia. I’ll take my son. Kirike is the son of the Root. He has a place there, and will win one for me. The moon take you to its ice heart, Ana…’ But Ana did not react, and a new horror broke over Zesi’s face. ‘My son. Where is Kirike?’
‘He is of Etxelur,’ Ana said. ‘You are as dead to him as to me. Don’t try to find him. Go. I can no longer see you.’ She turned away.
As one, the crowd before the platform broke up and moved away, murmuring quietly. Knuckle had his arm around Eyelid, who was weeping steadily.
Nobody was looking at Zesi, as if the curse Ana had laid on her had made her truly invisible. She pursued Ana as she walked off the stage. ‘Ana! You can’t do this! My baby – give me back my baby!’
Her agonised pleas filled the priest with darkness and dread, and he wondered what consequences would flow from this moment.
FOUR
58
The years passed, and the world followed its ancient cycles, seasons succeeding each other like intakes of breath.
For Northland, there was no repeat of the calamity of the Great Sea – not yet anyhow. But the ocean rose steadily, fuelled by melting ice and the very expansion of its own water mass in a warming clime. It bit away relentlessly at the surviving land and there were surges when it was assisted by storms or landslips. Before the sea’s advance anything living on the land had to retreat, if it could, or die. Humans too, their lives brief compared to the sea’s long contemplations, had to make way for the water.
That, at least, was how it used to be. Now the northern coast of Northland was acquiring a kind of crust, of works that defied the sea’s advances.
And the humans who lived there, though as always they grew and aged and died to be replaced by new generations, weren’t going anywhere.
59
The Fifteenth Year After the Great Sea: Late Spring. Qili, following the northern shore of Northland, walked steadily west, as he had done for many days.
The sea was a blue-grey expanse to his right, stretching to the northern horizon, and he saw fishing boats working far out, grey outlines against the sky. On the wrack-strewn beach gulls and wading birds worked, squabbling noisily. The day was warm, less than two months short of midsummer, one of the hottest days of the year so far, and the sun was high in a clear sky. Qili had his boots on a bit of rope slung around his neck, and he walked in the damp sand that bordered the sea. The cool wavelets that broke over his feet eased the ache of callused soles, but did nothing to relieve the weight of the pack on his back, grubby and stained after his long walk from home at the mouth of the World River, far to the east.
He rounded a headland of gravel that spilled from the feet of eroding dunes, and the view to the west opened up. And he saw Etxelur, birthplace of his grandfather Heni, for the first time in his life.
It was just as his father’s visitor from Etxelur had described. There was Flint Island lying just offshore, and there the bay cupped by the island’s bulk and the gentle hills of the mainland. With land and sea mixed together, an estuary-dweller like Qili could see at a glance how desirable it was as a place to live.
But there, cutting across the sea, stretched between island and mainland, was a line, dead straight and bone white. It was clearly unnatural, sharp and straight in a world of curves and randomness.
All along the Northland coastline he had glimpsed similar works, walls to keep the water out, channels to let it run away, many of the works fresh cut from the earth. Everywhere people were working the land to keep it from the clutches of the sea. A part of him quailed at the thought of this reshaping of the world. Yet, standing here before the great dyke, he felt a spark of wonder. He was seventeen years old.
A pair of birds flew over his head, casting sweeping shadows. Their outspread wings had a clear white stripe along their brown surfaces, and behind sharp bills they had bright red necks; their call was a low-pitched ‘whee-t’. He watched, entranced.
‘Phalaropes. We call them phalaropes.’ The words were in the traders’ tongue.
Two women were approaching him, coming from the west. They were bare-footed, dressed in simple dyed- cloth tunics that left their arms and legs bare. The older woman, perhaps in her early twenties, had a serious face and blonde hair tied back behind her head. The younger, perhaps younger than Qili, was more exotic, her hair thick
