World River estuary, and here Ana had built her Giving platform and set up a dreamers’ house and organised the games, and Novu set out his trade goods. For, Ana argued, the estuary was the richest single site in all of Northland – and rich with people whose labour she could buy.
The heart had gone out of the Giving, complained old folk like Arga. It was as if the rebuilding of Etxelur had become a madness that was eating all their lives, and turning them away from the wisdom of the mothers. Some had gone to the priest, asking him to speak to Ana, but Jurgi had always been an ally of Ana. Ana and her core team didn’t seem to care.
And so here they were, on midsummer day, far from home, doing business.
Novu’s tokens, made of soft clay, were crudely shaped into human figures, each with a shapeless blob for a head, and limbs divided from the body by grooves. And each had a pattern of circles and bars inscribed into its belly.
Novu, as he always did, went through the meaning of the tokens to make sure the Bone People elders understood. ‘This man has a single circle on his belly. That means one worker, for one summer.’ He held up a finger. ‘This little man has two circles, that’s two workers. Three, four, five. Now look.’ The next figure had a radial bar cutting to the centre of one small circle. ‘The bar stands for five, for one hand.’ He held up his open right hand to demonstrate. ‘And the circle is one more. Six.’ He held up his left forefinger. ‘And this next one, a bar with two circles, means seven. And eight, and nine…’ This system was continued up to the most complex inscription, of four bars and five circles, which stood for twenty-five.
The boy-priest picked up one of the little men. His skull-tower cap wobbled. The boy made the clay man walk up and down on his stumpy legs, humming a kind of tune. Novu waited patiently until the boy had finished playing, and restored the token to its place in the row before him.
Despite her restlessness to be away, Dolphin always enjoyed watching Novu go through this strange procedure, the cleverness of the little tokens. It had come about because of too many disputes about who had agreed to what, how many nodules had been promised for how many young workers or sacks of lime or boats laden with fish – disputes that were either the product of bad faith, or of deals done in the dreamers’ house where nobody could remember whether they’d agreed to anything at all. One or two such lapses you could live with, but the building of Etxelur required a lot of planning, and a better way was needed.
Using tokens to record a deal was an idea Novu remembered from his home in Jericho, and what he had heard of practices among neighbouring peoples. He and Jurgi had worked out this system between them, basing it on the ancient concentric-circles symbol of Etxelur. Thus, as Novu produced two tokens to record the deal for forty workers – one little man with a four-bar, five-ring ‘twenty-five’ symbol, and another with a two-bar, five-ring ‘fifteen’ – he was giving the Bone People a reminder not just of the deal but of the spirit of Etxelur itself.
‘Look, I will keep copies of the same tokens myself.’ He held them up. ‘Now we mark them so we know they record the truth.’ He spat on his thumb, and pressed it into the soft clay of the heads of each of the four tokens, depressing the right side. Then he gave the tokens to one of the elders who, with prompting from Novu, did the same, pressing his thumb down on the left side of each shapeless face.
When this was done, the elder held up the little men he had been given, curious and, Dolphin thought, afraid, as if it was a new kind of magic. So he should be, she sometimes thought. The tokens were just bits of clay, yet they remembered conversations and deals more reliably than any human memory. What was that if not magic?
Ana and the others relaxed a little before moving on to their next business, which was a deal for a load of dried, salted eel. Ana drank juice from a sack, and spoke to the priest. Some of the Bone People got up and stretched their stiff legs, pacing on the raft’s wooden floor.
Dolphin touched Kirike’s shoulder. ‘Now’s our chance.’
He grinned and nodded. ‘Just keep your head down.’
So they crawled away from the murmuring adults, making for the open side of the awning, and emerged into bright sunlight. Dazzled, Dolphin had to shield her eyes and look around to orient herself. The gangway to the next raft was a bridge of stout logs bound up with rope and lashed in place.
She grabbed Kirike’s hand, and they skipped away, laughing.
66
Dolphin and Kirike felt welcome here on the World River. They were allowed to walk where they liked, stepping from raft to raft, and people smiled as they passed, and children ran after them. They were even offered bits of food. The Etxelur Giving was still a time of generosity and friendship. Meanwhile the contests were continuing, as spears were thrown and hapless target animals run through, and races were fought out on land and in the river.
The rafts were too many to count, tethered to each other and to the western bank of the river. Far bigger than mere boats, or the petty platforms Etxelur folk built in the marshes to go eel-hunting, the rafts were stout structures of planks strapped to huge stripped tree trunks. Some of them were very old, as you could see by the weathering of the planks and the support beams. And people lived here, in houses of wooden frames and brush and skin set up on the back of the rafts. Fires burned, built on stone hearths, fires burning on the river.
The river itself was so wide here that you couldn’t see its eastern bank – it was a river with a horizon, like an ocean. Further downstream the river spread out into a tremendous delta, its water running between huge marshy islands where even more crowds of people lived.
This was why this place was such a valuable resource for Ana and Novu, why they had come here. All these people, all these communities stretching inland as far as anybody had travelled, all connected to each other by the river – and all available as a source of labour to be mined like Etxelur’s own flint lode.
And yet even here there were signs of the long, slow battle being waged between sea and land. The river folk spoke of islands far out in the delta once occupied by their grandparents and now abandoned, drowned by the rising ocean. And in patches along the forest-clad bank, even after sixteen years, you could still see heaps of the pale salty sea-bottom mud that had been hurled far inland by the mindless energies of the Great Sea – the Gods’ Shout.
They arrived at a raft where cages of wicker, weighted with stones, were suspended over the raft’s side, just below the surface of the water. Inside each cage was a body. Bone showed through fish-chewed flesh, pale in the sunlight that dappled through the water. Even when they died, the people of the river were dominated by its tremendous presence; whereas in Etxelur you were laid out to be cleansed by sky, here it was left to the sharp teeth of the waters to strip your bones.
‘I’ll tell you what I heard today,’ Kirike said. ‘There are people here who spend their whole lives on the rafts – they never set foot on the dry land, not once in their lives.’
‘I heard that too,’ came a voice.
It was the dark man they had glimpsed watching them during Ana’s meeting. He walked confidently across a gangway, carrying a bulky pack. Dolphin saw that Qili, Heni’s grandson, was following him, looking faintly embarrassed. The stranger was smiling. Dolphin didn’t smile back.
The man kept talking as he approached, in a fluent, lightly accented Etxelur tongue. ‘In fact, to be a priest you have to be one of the water-dwellers, you can never be sullied by contact with the ground, for they believe that all their gods live in the river and that the land is dead. There have been a few scandals in the past when some roguish priest was found to be slipping ashore for his own purposes – you know what those fellows are like! And they had a crisis after the Great Sea when all their rafts got smashed, and those who survived had to clamber out on the shore.’
Kirike was interested. ‘Ah. And that’s why their priest back there is only fourteen or so.’
‘Yes. The very first boy born safely on the rafts after the Great Sea, and he immediately got that tower of skulls stuck on his unfortunate head. This is a place where a single footprint in the mud can stop you being as a priest! But I suppose we all must look strange, from the outside.’
‘And you look like a Pretani,’ Dolphin said. ‘Yet you speak the Etxelur tongue like a native.’
He just laughed. Tall, solid, heavy, the muscles prominent on his bare arms and legs, his face all but concealed by a thick black beard and two prominent kill scars, he looked out of place among the paler, more delicate river folk.
