The Jaguar girl nudged his ribs.
They were side by side in the stern of the boat, like two fat seals in their layers of furs, under a sky that was deep blue but streaked with pink cloud to the east, the sign of the coming dawn. There was the usual morning stink of greasy human flesh, farts, fish guts, and the stale brine of the bilge water. Around them the men were waking, more bundles of fur from which peered human faces, thick with beards and smeared with fat to keep out the night cold. On Caxa’s other side the priest Xivu lay curled up, still asleep. Caxa was the only female in the boat, and these men had been away from home for a long time; Deri had made sure that whenever they slept the girl was walled in by Xivu on one side, Tibo on the other.
Tibo was falling asleep again. She nudged him. ‘Smoke. Smoke!’
He struggled to sit up. ‘No. Not smoke.’ In the course of the long voyage he had been trying to teach her the rudiments of the Etxelur tongue. She was a slow learner, or an incurious one. ‘We didn’t light the boat’s fire last night, remember? It was raining.’ Another night of salted fish, wet furs and cold. ‘There can’t be any smoke. Do you mean “clouds”?’
‘Not clouds.’ This time the nudge was hard enough to hurt, despite the thickness of the furs. ‘Know clouds, know smoke. Smoke!’ She thrust out an arm and pointed beyond the boat’s prow.
He peered to see in the dim light. And he made out a black column that rose up from the north-east horizon, billowing, spreading into a layer at the top, flat and tenuous. He thought he saw a flicker of light in the column — like lightning, like a storm.
The men saw it; they stirred and muttered. Deri was already awake, sitting up, one hand loosely holding a rope rowlock. He was watching the smoke too.
‘What is it, father?’
‘Home. That’s Kirike’s Land. We’re due to come on it today, tomorrow at latest.’
‘And what’s that smoke? Fires?’
‘Not that. A different kind of smoke. I saw it once before, years ago — before you were born. It might mean nothing. And, see the way it’s climbing straight up? Not a breath of wind. No point unfurling the sail this morning. Come on, lads, time to get moving, this boat won’t row itself.’
The men, seven of them plus Tibo and Deri, stirred, grumbling. The boat rocked gently as one after another knelt up to piss over the side, or to bare his arse and dump his soil. Deri got to work dragging up the sea anchor.
And a noise like thunder came rumbling over the sea, from the north-east, from the direction of Kirike’s Land.
‘Told you,’ Caxa said, her thin face almost ghostly in the dawn light.
They came upon Kirike’s Land after noon, approaching from the south. Snow-capped mountains and glaciers, bone-white, showed first above the horizon, and then the green of the lower lands, the meadows and birch woods. The men grew animated at the sight of home, and they pointed out landmarks to each other, massifs, cliffs and headlands.
The southern coast was long and with few harbours, and as soon as Deri got his bearings he directed the crew to row west, towards the big bay called the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm. There was a touch of breeze now, blessedly coming from the east, and the men gratefully hoisted their leather sail and let the little mother of the sky guide them home through these last stages. They passed through the usual fleet of fishing boats, and were greeted with hails and waves and obscene cries. One fast little boat raced ahead of them to the Cupped Palm, so a welcome would be made ready for them. Caxa stared out curiously as the island’s shore slid past — gaunt, rocky, yet with birch forest lapping down almost to the sea in some places, and the flanks of mountains beyond striped with ice. It was late spring. The winter always lay heavily on this land.
And that smoke pillar towered over the island. When the wind shifted it brought a smell of ash and sulphur. Deri said it seemed to be coming from a mountain called the Hood, in the south of the island.
Xivu was uneasy. ‘We have such mountains at home,’ he said in his stilted Northlander.
‘Here, the land often stirs,’ Deri said evenly. ‘We believe the little mother of the earth comes to this island to sleep beneath the ground when she flushes with heat, as many old women do. There is rarely any harm in it.’
But Xivu was not reassured. He was deeply reluctant to be here in the first place. Tibo didn’t know how it had been finally decided that Xivu would be the one to accompany Caxa on this long trip across the ocean. Perhaps he was the best speaker of the Etxelur tongue; perhaps he knew Caxa the best — or perhaps it was just that he was the least skilful at avoiding an unpleasant chore. Anyhow here he was, and he had been complaining since his first bout of seasickness, and the strange smoke column wasn’t helping his mood.
They sailed into the Ice Giant’s Cupped Palm, and for their final approach into harbour the men folded their sail and wielded their oars. Tibo felt a surge of relief to be home, as he looked around at the houses, the rising smoke, the boats littering the water, and the looming ice-striped mountain in the background. But the smoke column from the Hood cast a kind of pall over the sky, staining it a faint orange, and that smell of sulphurous burning lingered.
When the boat pulled into the shore, Tibo leapt out with the rest to haul it above the high-water mark. There was a party waiting, cheerful wives who threw themselves at their husbands, a few traders hoping for trinkets from the Land of the Jaguar. Children came swarming, as children always did, great mobs of them outnumbering the adults. Xivu and Caxa looked taken aback. Luckily the children seemed to find these exotic folk strange rather than interesting, and they were as wary as the Jaguar folk themselves.
And here came Medoc, Tibo’s grandfather, huge in his furs, striding along the strand towards them. ‘Deri! So you managed not to sink the boat, son. And Tibo! I swear you grow a bit more every time I see you.’ He held Tibo’s shoulders and shook him hard enough to make his head rattle on his shoulders. Medoc’s tremendous grey-flecked beard was studded with fish bones, and his walrus fur stank of smoke. ‘Look at you now, arms like tree trunks, neck as thick as an ice giant’s cock! Well, I’m just back from Etxelur myself, and I’ll tell you all about it.’ He turned on Caxa, who flinched. ‘Oh, and who’s your lover?’
Deri took his father’s arm. ‘This is our sculptor.’
Medoc’s eyes widened. ‘What — bound for Northland, for the Annid’s carving? The last master sculptor I saw was a fat old man.’
Xivu said precisely, ‘Vixixix was the master a decade ago. The last to visit Northland, for your Annids are blessedly long-lived.’ He stepped forward. He had shucked off his loaned furs, despite the relative chill of the afternoon, and he stood proud in his kilt of exotically coloured linen, his torso and arms bare, his mirror of bronze hanging from his neck. ‘This is Caxa. The granddaughter of Vixixix. She is the current master sculptor.’
‘And she is not,’ Tibo said, ‘my lover.’
‘Well, you’re welcome here, Xivu, whatever the reason you’ve come
…’ Medoc was distracted by his own reflection in the mirror on the priest’s chest. He plucked half a fish-head from the depths of his beard and popped it into his mouth. ‘Wondered where that got to. Well! Come with me.’ Crunching bone, he led the way from the shore towards the houses.
They walked past tremendous racks of drying fish, set up so that the prevailing breeze carried the stink away from the houses.
Caxa seemed curious. ‘Sacrifice?’
‘Not a sacrifice,’ Tibo said. ‘Well, we apologise to the fish when we catch them… We dry the fish. And then we send it home.’
She looked puzzled. ‘Home?’
‘I mean to Northland. I was born here. This is my home. But everybody calls Northland home.’
‘Fish would stink on boat. Go rotten.’
‘That’s the secret. If you dry them out the right way, the fish keep for months. We trade them in Northland. They call it Kirike-fish.’
Medoc’s house, one of half a dozen arranged around a rough hearthspace, was set on a grassed-over mound of earth. Children swarmed around, and Deri and Tibo bent to greet nieces and nephews and cousins.
Vala, Medoc’s wife, came pushing out of the house through the door flap. She carried a pot of meat and herbs she was mixing with a wooden spoon. Her face was sturdy but pleasant, and she wore her greying dark hair tied back. She smiled at Xivu, and managed to give the wide-eyed Caxa a gentle embrace without the girl recoiling. Not yet forty, she was Medoc’s second wife, a cousin of his first, long dead; she was stepmother to Deri, step- grandmother to Tibo. She greeted Deri and Tibo with kisses and brief hugs, and she called out her own children, a
