Stone spring

12

‘Hungry,’ Moon Reacher whimpered. ‘Hungry!’

‘I know, child,’ said Ice Dreamer. ‘So am I. We will stop soon.’

Soon. For now, they walked.

They walked east away from the setting sun, which this late in the day cast a pink glow the colour of Dreamer’s piss when she squatted. To the south, their right, was the forest’s scrubby fringe, birch and pine and a dense undergrowth now shot through with spring green. And to their left, the north, stretched a plain of grass and scrub and isolated stands of trees, where raccoons and voles ran, and sometimes you would see deer or bison or horse in distant herds. Some days it almost looked pretty, with scatters of early spring flowers.

And there were people, fast-moving, elusive hunters on the grass, and enigmatic shadowy foragers in the green depths of the forest. These weren’t Cowards. Dreamer and Reacher had walked far from the Cowards’ range. But they weren’t True People either. They were other sorts of strangers, folk Dreamer had never seen or heard of.

Dreamer kept them heading east, following the boundary between the southern forest and the northern plain, looking for a place where there were no people at all, nobody to drive them away. They walked as they had for uncounted days, while the world washed through its cycle of the seasons, and winter slowly relented. The child with a wounded leg that had now stiffened and smelled of rot, so she had to lean on the woman to make every step. And the woman with burdens of her own, the baby growing lustily in her belly, the pack on her back that weighed her down, the enduring ache in her torn thighs and her lower belly. They walked, for there was nothing else for them to do.

A faint breeze stirred from the east, lifting Dreamer from her numb self-absorption. She stopped, and Reacher stumbled against her, panting hard. Dreamer pushed back her deerskin hood and sniffed the air. For a moment she thought she tasted salt. Another lake ahead? But then the breeze shifted around to the north, to be replaced by the richer, dry, almost burned smell of the grassland.

Leaning heavily on Dreamer, Reacher tugged her sleeve. ‘Hungry!’

‘I know, child.’ Dreamer glanced around. The light was fading and they needed to find shelter. They were on the fringe of a dense clump of forest. She could detect no sign of people, smell no smoke, see no markings on the bark. She decided to take the chance. ‘Come on,’ she said to Reacher. ‘Just a little further.’

They limped together into the shade of the trees. They were mostly pine, tall old trees sparsely spread. It had rained recently – that was going to make it harder to find dry wood for the fire – and there was a rich warm smell of green growth and the rot of the last of the autumn’s leaves.

They came to a fallen tree that had ripped a disc of shallow roots out of the ground, leaving a rough hollow shaded by the root mass, a space that might give a little shelter. A little way away she saw a glimmer of open water. This would do. She dropped her pack with relief.

She spread a skin over the damp ground and helped Reacher lie down, favouring her bad leg. Reacher curled up like a baby, knees tucked up to her chest, and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Dreamer longed to rest herself, but she knew that if she lay down she wouldn’t be able to move again.

So she collected branches from the fallen tree, dragged them back to the root hollow, and leaned them against the roots to make a roof over Reacher’s body. She shook out more of her skins and laid them over the branches, then piled up bracken and leaves and dirt. This crude shelter would keep out any rain, and seal in the warmth of the fire – if she could get it started. She tucked the rest of her kit inside the shelter to keep it dry, the bag with the nuts and dried meat, the remains of Stone Shaper’s medicine bag.

Then she pulled out their traps and set them carefully around the forest floor, driving stakes of splintered bone into the ground. Maybe they would be lucky tonight. As she moved, she picked up bits of branch and bark, the older-looking the better; everything was wet, but last season’s falls would at least be dry inside and might burn.

At last she took a skin sack and filled it with water from the brackish pond, and crawled inside the shelter.

Reacher slept, still and silent. Dreamer carefully took her ember from the medicine bag. She placed it on a strip of bark, and began to feed it with dried moss, blowing carefully.

While the fire was taking, she dug with her fingers into the dirt, looking for worms and grubs.

Every time she built the fire she remembered their first night, after Mammoth Talker had led them into the kill site of the Cowards.

When the men had done with her they had walked back to their meat and their fires. Dreamer, half-conscious, naked, her body a mass of pain, could barely move.

An unknown time later Reacher had joined her, as naked as she was, the blood streaming from that gash on her leg. Reacher had helped her up, and they had hobbled away. Later Dreamer found she had slung Stone Shaper’s abandoned medicine bag around her neck. She didn’t remember picking it up. She hadn’t seen Stone Shaper since, and didn’t imagine she ever would again.

Nor did she remember how they had got back to the shelter under the rock ledge, where the rest of their stuff waited, untouched. That first night they had been able to do no more than huddle together under a heap of skins.

The next morning Dreamer was woken by the baby kicking. She was flooded with a strange mixture of relief and fear. Her baby was alive, but could her ruined body stand the birth? And, when it came, who would help her? She had wept then, her tears mingling with the blood on her hands.

Reacher had stirred, and, waking, cried out with pain. When Dreamer pulled back the skins that covered her legs, the stink of her swollen wound made Dreamer recoil. Dreamer knew little medicine; that was the priest’s job, and the senior women. But she should have cleaned the wound before they slept, maybe sucked out the poison. She would always regret that she had not tried to treat Reacher’s wound on that first night.

The priest’s ember had not survived the night. It had not been until the fourth night that she had finally succeeded in building a fire, with a roughly made thong bow. The ember she carried now was a relic of that first blaze. With its help, they had survived the long days and nights since.

Now, as the fire’s warmth built, Reacher tried to get up. Dreamer handed her the water skin. Reacher drank only a little, looking as pale as the moon for which she had been named. ‘I am hungry,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Me and the baby.’ Dreamer dug in her pack. Reacher rarely spoke about anything but food – food and pain. She never asked where they were. It didn’t matter, Dreamer supposed. They were nowhere. ‘I set the traps. Maybe we’ll have squirrel tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the snails. Do you remember when we caught them?’

She set a couple of snails on a stone before Reacher. The girl watched them dubiously. The snails barely stirred in their shells. Dreamer had carried them for three days; you had to starve a snail before eating it, to let any poisonous plants it might have eaten work through its system. Dreamer hammered them with a rock, and the shells crunched. Reacher started pulling away smashed shell from moist, sluggishly squirming flesh.

‘And worms,’ Dreamer said. ‘Fresh and warm, out of the ground.’ She dropped the creatures on Reacher’s stone.

‘Do we have any walnuts?’

‘We finished those days ago.’

Reacher put a worm in her mouth. ‘I’d like meat.’

‘I know.’

‘Hare would do. Deer, or a steak from a bison.’

They might get hare or gopher or vole, but there would be no deer or bison. She forced a smile. ‘Imagine it’s deer. Remember the way Elk Tracker used to make her stew?’ This old woman had had a way of boiling the meat in a big bowl chipped from stone, with dried herbs she collected, and the juice squeezed from the gall bladder of a young horse, an addition that brought out the flavour like no other. Reacher looked at the worm curling on her palm. ‘Close your eyes and imagine. Mmm. Thank you, Elk Tracker.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Reacher.

That was that for the food. Reacher didn’t even finish what she’d been given.

‘Come on,’ Dreamer said. ‘Let’s take a look at your leg, and then we’ll sleep.’ She put a wooden cup of water over the fire to heat up, and shifted so she could get to Reacher’s injury.

‘How is the baby?’

‘I felt her kick today. She kicks hard. I think she likes to play.’

A ghost of a smile touched Reacher’s face. They had somehow decided between them that the baby would be a girl; Reacher would be disappointed if it wasn’t. ‘Does she laugh?’

‘I-Yes, she laughs. I can feel it…’

Dreamer lifted back the hide wrap from the wounded leg and scraped away the sphagnum moss she had applied that morning, now a bloody mass. The flesh around the wound was black, greenish in places. Away from the wound itself the leg was swollen from hip to ankle, the skin a bruised purple.

Dreamer went to work cleaning the wound, with a bit of cloth dipped in the hot water.

She remembered how, when she had been small, younger than Reacher now, there had been a hunter with a wound like this; he had been alone in the forest for days. The priest, grim-faced, hadn’t tried to treat the wound at all. He had made the women hold the hunter down, and he had used a special long saw, a deer shinbone studded with many tiny flint blades, to cut away the leg altogether, from a little below the hip. Would that save Reacher’s life? Could Dreamer, alone, make such a cut – and how would she treat the wound afterwards?

Reacher was sleeping again. Her breathing was scratchy and shallow, and a thin sheen of sweat stood on her brow. Dreamer slept lightly, as always.

Once she heard something come by the shelter. A deep rumble, a heavy tread, a brush against the shelter as if a huge man had walked by. Perhaps it was a bear. It did not return, and she slept again, fitfully.

When the dawn light poked through the gaps in the shelter roof, without disturbing Reacher, she clambered out to make water. She always tried to do this out of sight of Reacher so the girl wouldn’t see the blood in her piss.

It was a bright morning, with a bit of warmth already in the low sun. There was a slight rise, only a few paces further on; she vaguely remembered it from the night before. She walked to the ridge and climbed it, the long grass sweeping over her bare legs.

And the country opened up before her, to reveal a lake, wider and deeper than any she had ever seen in her life, glittering blue water that reached the horizon and spanned the world from north to south. She had gone as far east as she could; there was nowhere left for her to walk.