a house with its door flap sewn shut. But tonight she looked slightly flushed, and she smiled, her lips parted. The priest, too, though he was as grave as ever, cradled her hand as if it was as fragile as a fledgling bird.
A baby was still a baby no matter what you intended to do with it, a lover still a lover no matter for what reasons you took him into your arms. Just as a little girl who was a slave was still a little girl. Life had a funny way of breaking through, just like the weeds and wild flowers that bravely grew in cracks in Etxelur’s dykes and reservoirs, and had to be cleared out every summer by the small hands of the children.
Now Qili spoke. ‘This is good news. There’s nothing more precious than a new life – and nothing more fragile. All our friends at the estuary will wish you well.’ His Etxelur language was now fluent, but heavily accented – and his tone was oddly wistful.
Arga turned to look at him, surprised. He looked as if he’d aged; his skin was faded, and there were bags of shadowed flesh under his eyes. She’d never paid him much attention, yet she could see that something was wrong. ‘Are you all right? You sound sad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said firmly. ‘This is your evening, Ana, not mine.’
‘Tell us,’ Arga said.
He shrugged, looking away from their gazes. ‘It’s nothing. Or rather, it’s commonplace. We lost our new baby, my wife and I. She was half a year old. She just sickened and died. There was nothing our priest could do; if she was sick, she had something he didn’t recognise.’
Arga nodded. ‘Sometimes the moon just takes them back.’
Ana said, ‘This little girl had Heni’s blood in her. All of Etxelur will grieve with you.’
‘It’s commonplace,’ Qili said again, as if convincing himself. ‘Babies die all the time. We have other children.’
‘It might be commonplace,’ said Jurgi. ‘More than half of us die before we leave childhood. Did you know that? But it is not commonplace when it happens to you.’
Knuckle grunted. ‘I too have lost children, my friend.’ His harsh snailhead accent was a contrast to Qili’s more fluent tones. ‘I won’t say it gets easier. It doesn’t. But, with time, you remember the joy of the life, rather than the pain of the death. And at least you will have the comfort of knowing she can never grow up to become a slave of the Pretani.’
Everybody stiffened. Arga saw Ana draw her hands back from the priest. If she had looked briefly like a human being, now she looked like Ana again, leader of Etxelur and builder of dykes. ‘No folk of the World River will ever be slaves here. And nor will snailheads, Knuckle. You know that.’
‘Do I?’
‘The Pretani are our allies. We have agreements-’
‘Allies?’ Knuckle turned his head, elaborately looking around. ‘If the Pretani are your friends, why do you not invite them into your house?’ Evidently he was saying what he had come here to say. ‘And if they did turn on us, would you stop them, Ana? Or would you rub your hands at the idea of getting your stone walls built even quicker?’
Novu stirred. Arga thought it was typical of him to wake up when his precious building works were mentioned. ‘You mustn’t bring the walls into this.’
Knuckle was incredulous. ‘Why not? Without the walls, no stone and slaves. And no Pretani hanging around.’
Novu closed his eyes. ‘Because whatever it takes to get the walls built is justified. Because when we are dead and gone, nobody will ever know how the walls were built or who by, slave or free. Any more than we know the names of the ice giants who built the hills and carved the bays. And that is the way it should be.’ He stood. ‘Whenever we talk, it is always this way. Chatter about nothing – never about the work. You may talk all you like; I’ve had enough.’
Jurgi said plaintively, ‘Oh, Novu, wait-’
‘Goodnight, Ana, the rest of you.’ And he swept out through the door flap.
Jurgi grinned tiredly. ‘I was only trying to tell him the shellfish smells cooked.’
Dreamer cleared away the burned-off sticks and grass, and set the wide-open shells on wooden plates, with heaps of salt and crushed herbs.
Arga said, ‘Do you think we should call Novu back?’
‘No. Let him dream of his walls. More for us,’ Knuckle said. He grinned as he took his plate and slurped down his first oyster.
75
Kirike and Dolphin walked along the northern beach of Flint Island, heading towards the Giving platforms. Thunder scampered at their feet, happy to be out on the beach.
It was a bright morning, still a few days short of the solstice. But there was a mist in the air and an unseasonably brisk bite to the wind off the sea; frothy foam blew along the littoral, and the fishing boats out at sea, grey shadows against the glittering water, were lifted by the waves. Gulls wheeled in the air, cawing, looking for food, competing for mates. To Dolphin they looked as if they were playing, and if she could fly, she thought with a deep, physical surge of joy, she would be up there playing with the best of them.
She and Kirike were still in a sleepy fug, after another long night in their own new house, the house they had built for themselves. She could smell the smoke of their fire about him, the sweet musk of his sweat. Just as every year under Ana’s leadership, the latest Giving was to be more lavish than ever, and there was plenty of work for everybody in Etxelur – but as far as Dolphin was concerned this morning, all that could wait.
But in the shade of a sandstone bluff at the top of the beach, outside a slumped hut, slaves were making rope.
Dolphin slowed, curious.
Etxelur always needed rope, for hauling timbers and stone, or dragging water sleds over the hillside. Making it was simple, repetitive work that, the Pretani said, you could trust to a slave. So here were seven slaves working together in silence, one man, two women, four children, the youngest of whom was only maybe five years old.
They looked up as Kirike and Dolphin stood before them, the adults incurious, the children vaguely fearful. The dog sniffed around them, tail wagging, but the people ignored him.
The women sat together on the ground, their legs crossed. They were cleaning aurochs hide with small hand- held flint scrapers, making soft repetitive rasping sounds as they cleared the last bits of fat and ligament. Dolphin could see the hide had already been cleaned of hair by scorching. The man was pushing a scraped hide into a pit, dug into the ground and lined with stone, skin and hardened mud. The pit stank of old urine. This was part of the complex process of tanning the hides. More hides lay at his feet in a heap, and Dolphin saw he had been cutting them into strips. Eventually these strips would be twisted and plaited into strong rope.
The children, meanwhile, were working on a heap of lime branches and logs. They used small flint knives to cut the bark from the wood and to divide it into strips. More pits full of water stood ready to take the bark; soaked, it would separate into long strands that could then be woven into string.
Dolphin saw that one little girl had cut the palm of her hand, for blood trickled down her arm. Her eyes were moist, but she didn’t make a sound.
Their ‘house’ was just a slumped driftwood lean-to, heaped against the bluff. Their hearth was a shelf of pebbles scavenged from the beach, and Dolphin could see the remains of their food: offal and other scraps.
A family, working together, making rope. Slaves in Etxelur.
Kirike seemed uneasy. ‘Why have we stopped?’ he asked in the Etxelur tongue, a language the slaves probably wouldn’t know.
‘I-’ Dolphin wasn’t sure. She had been curious about the slaves since the first of them had been driven here by the Pretani a month ago, hauling stone.
‘Let’s go on,’ Kirike said, uneasy.
‘No, wait.’ She let go of his hand and stepped forward. ‘You,’ she said to the man, switching to the traders’ tongue. ‘What’s your name?’
The man looked up at her, unsmiling. He was gaunt, too thin, the joints showing in his arms like bags of
