Stone spring

18

That first night they had nothing to do with the snailheads, though they could see the smoke of their fires around the curve of the river.

Gall’s red deer, when he returned with it, was set aside for the morning. That night they fed on birds’ eggs and young chicks and smaller game flushed out by the dogs, pine martens and a young beaver. The meat was roasted on a fire of fallen branches collected from the forest, the eggs splashed onto hot rocks to be fried and scraped up with wooden spatulas.

The small children, worn out by the walk and the excitement, started to grow sleepy as soon as the sun had gone down and there was food in their bellies. They were put down in the one surviving house; for tonight the adults would make do with lean-tos. It was still early enough in the year for the night to be cold, and Ana took it on herself to check on the children, making sure they were covered with skins and heaps of leaves. Lightning, meanwhile, curled up close to the fire.

The adults and older children got to work at simple jobs, knapping fresh stone blades, repairing rips in house covers with thread made of plaited, greased bark. They had found antlers, dropped by the deer the previous autumn; now they sat around the fire working at the antlers with flint chisels, making awls and scrapers and fish hooks and harpoons with fine, multiple barbs. It was steady, patient, satisfying work, and the priest led them in murmured songs.

They carefully ignored the snailheads.

In the morning, the day began with the butchery of Gall’s deer. It was a big beast, a handsome male. Gall had already removed its antlers. The women took the lead in the butchery, picking up tools from a shared heap as they needed them. But Gall looked faintly disgusted when some of the men of Etxelur joined in – and even more so when Shade picked up a stone blade. Ana knew that in Gall’s culture the women did such work, with the hunter sitting around and lapping up the praise for his kill. Maybe Shade was curious about learning a new skill. Or maybe he was just trying to irritate his brother.

The animal’s head was removed first, and this was the job of the priest, who used an ancient, lustrous flint tool from his charm bag. He apologised to the deer, closing its lifeless eyes and kissing the lids. Then he cut through the animal’s cheek and briskly removed its tongue, severing it at the root; this juicy treat would be his reward.

Then came the skinning. The women made cuts around the hooves and along the inside of the legs; the torso was sliced from throat to crotch. Then the animal was turned over and the skin peeled back, the men hauling, the women crawling around with their blades to chop away sinews and clinging tissue. The skin came away almost intact, and was folded and set aside.

The animal was cut open with heavy blades, and its stomach wall and ribs pulled back. The lungs were torn out and discarded, the guts spilled to the ground. The liver was dug out of the pile of offal and handed to Gall, the hunter, as his prize; he bit into it raw. Then the butchers moved around the carcass, working steadily. The legs were removed and broken at the joints, the ribs put aside, meat sliced from the body. As the animal disintegrated neat piles grew up around it, of meat fillets, big bones to be sucked clean of their marrow, sinews and useful bits of smaller bones, heaps of gut to be chopped up and mixed with blood, salted, fried. Some of the more bitter internal organs would be thrown into the waste pit, which had been placed close to the forest’s edge to lure pigs. Only a few scattered fragments were thrown aside, chopped vertebrae, bone fragments.

Before the butchery was finished, Ana went to work with her sister on the skin. They scraped it clean of the last of the blood and fat and sinews, using tools of small stone blades stuck into a bit of bone with resin. It was fine, careful work; you had to get rid of all the waste while not cutting the skin. After they were done here, the skin would be rinsed in the river water and then soaked in the urine pit for a couple of days, after which the hide would be taken out, washed, and put through a process of stretching, rubbing, folding, soaking, until it was quite soft. Meanwhile there were the deer’s sinews to work on. These would be scraped with even finer tools. Back at the coast they would be washed in sea water, hung up to dry, and split into fine threads. These would be made soft by working over with scrapers, as Ana preferred, or working through your teeth, as others chose.

In this way virtually none of the deer was wasted, and a proper price paid for taking its life.

Glancing up, wiping a bloody hand across her forehead, Ana saw that four young buzzards were circling overhead, their round wings and tail easily visible. When the people had gone and the birds and worms were done with their feeding, nothing would be left of the deer but a few fragments of bone and broken flint. And perhaps when the river shifted its course again, even those traces would be washed out to sea, leaving the land as clean as if humans had never come here at all.

This was what was best about life, she thought, a little wistfully. Useful labour hard enough to make your muscles ache and your skin glow with sweat. People building their lives together through one small task after another, while respecting the world and the endless gifts the mother gods provided for them.

It was while she was in this pleasant, dreamy, late-morning mood that the party from the snailhead camp approached. Three came, two men and a woman. None of them looked much older than Zesi. They had no weapons. One man carried something wrapped in a bit of skin that dripped with blood, and a sack heavy with some liquid. The woman carried a bundle that squirmed, feebly – a baby, Ana saw. One man had blond hair; the other man and woman had brown hair, darker eyes.

They looked ordinary, Ana thought, just like the folk of Etxelur. Ordinary save for their elongated skulls, which stuck out behind their heads, and the bone plugs in their tongues that showed when they opened their mouths. Beyond them, the smoke from their camp beyond the river’s bend snaked into the sky.

Gall dumped his bit of liver and marched up to the newcomers, fists clenched. ‘What do you want?’ He spoke in the tongue of Etxelur.

The man holding the bloody parcel faced him. ‘Trader tongue,’ he said bluntly.

Zesi, followed by Jurgi, came bustling past Gall. ‘Trader tongue,’ she agreed. ‘I speak for these people, not this man.’

‘We have gifts,’ the man said. He held out his bloody bundle. It was the heart of a deer.

Gall laughed at it. ‘What did that come from, an unborn? My left bollock is bigger.’

The snailheads evidently didn’t understand all his words, but they caught his tone. The blond man’s expression darkened, and Ana saw muscles bunch in his arm. With his heavy frown and his strange, bony, tubular skull, he looked strange, unearthly, frightening.

The priest stepped forward hastily. ‘We didn’t come here to fight.’ He continued in his own tongue, ‘And we don’t know how many of them there are. Zesi, take the gifts.’

Zesi hesitated. Then she took the heart from the snailhead, bowing her thanks.

The priest took the sack, removed a bone pin from its neck, and drank. ‘Blackcurrant juice! Saved through winter!’

The blond snailhead grinned. ‘Good?’

‘Good!’ Jurgi laughed, a bit too loudly. ‘Come, sit, have some of my dock tea…’

They sat around the embers of the fire, the three snailheads, the priest, Zesi, Ana, Shade, others. Big flat stones and wooden bowls were set on the fire, to cook meat and prepare broths from the deer’s entrails. Gall sat a short way away, gnawing on his liver, studiously ignoring the newcomers, yet clearly hearing every word.

Arga and the other children stood by, staring at the newcomers’ big heads. Lightning wouldn’t be kept away; he came sniffing around the strangers, butting their knees until they rewarded him with attention.

The priest began to make his tea. He took a precious relic from his charm bag: a bowl made from the skull of a bear, brown with handling and polished with age. The visitors looked suitably impressed. Jurgi scooped up water from a wooden bowl and set it on the edge of the fire. Then he took dock and sage leaves, crumbled them in his fingers, and dropped them in the skull bowl.

The blond snailhead man pointed to himself, and his companions. ‘Knuckle. Gut. Eyelid.’ Their own name for themselves wasn’t, of course, ‘snailhead’, but something like ‘the One People’.

The woman called Eyelid smiled and opened up her bundle of soft skin. The baby was sleeping, a thumb in her mouth. Her head from the brow up was tightly bound by plaited rope. She didn’t seem to be in any discomfort as her head grew within these bonds, shaped and elongated.

Knuckle pointed at Eyelid’s baby. ‘Cheek. We camp.’ He pointed down the river. ‘There.’

Zesi asked, ‘How many?’

The traders’ tongue was rich in words for numbers. There were over fifty snailheads, men, women and children, just out of sight of the Etxelur summer camp.

This was shocking for the Etxelur folk to hear. The world was big, so big that you never had to share your favourite spaces with anybody else, save for happy meetings like the Giving. It was genuinely disconcerting to find fifty snailheads here, as if they had shown up in the heart of Etxelur itself.

‘We come here every year or two years,’ Zesi said pointedly. ‘Our parents before us, and their parents before them.’ Her meaning was clear. This is our place. ‘You?’

Gut shrugged. ‘Never been here before. Plenty of room. Plenty of deer for you, for me.’ He grinned. Ana saw that his tongue was pierced by a stone plug as fat as her thumb. ‘Don’t stay here long. Rest, feed, repair kit. Then move on.’

Zesi asked, ‘Which way?’

‘North.’

‘That’s where we live,’ the priest said. ‘Already we saw some of your people. A few moons ago. At a beach. It was strange to see snailheads except at a solstice gathering.’

Knuckle shrugged.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Need somewhere new to live. We lived south. Beach. Far south… Many months of walking. A winter of walking.’

Gall called over, ‘So what was wrong with it? Why aren’t you still there now?’

‘The sea. In the south, our beach. Sea shifts over land.’ He mimed a sea’s waves, chunks of land falling into it. ‘Splash, splash, splash…’

‘So you couldn’t live there any more,’ the priest said.

‘We walk away. North, east, west.’

‘Where will you live?’

‘Where there isn’t people.’

‘Where will that be?’

‘We haven’t found that yet. We will,’ said the man with a quiet confidence.

‘They are so strange,’ Shade murmured to Ana in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Those heads… But you have met these people before.’

‘A few usually come to the Givers’ feast at midsummer. You know how it is. People travel a long way.’

‘But not fifty of them.’

‘Not fifty. And not to come to stay.’

‘I think I know of their homeland. Where he means, the far south.’ Shade sketched with a fingertip in the dusty ground. ‘Albia here, Gaira here. Albia is nearly an island. But Albia and Gaira are joined by the Northland. A neck, like a bird’s head to its body…’

She struggled to understand. ‘Oh.’ She pointed to the bottom of his sketch. ‘This is north. This is where Etxelur is. The coast.’

‘Yes. We are here, a little way inland. But the snailheads come from the other side of the neck.’ He pointed to the top of his sketch, the south. Here he had drawn the sea making a deep cut into the land. ‘There, a great river flows between cliffs of white chalk. The people live on the cliff tops. Maybe the sea is cutting away the cliffs.’

‘Can the sea do that?’

He looked at her. ‘The sea drowned the flint beds mined by your ancestors.’

‘They can’t go home.’ The thought horrified her. ‘But they can’t stay here.’

Gut, the younger of the snailhead men, grinning, was watching them. ‘I hear,’ he said, in the Etxelur tongue. He held thumb and forefinger a sand grain’s width apart. ‘A bit. “Can’t stay here.”

The priest forced a smile. ‘We didn’t come here to argue. And nor did you. You have your camp, and we have ours. As to what the future holds, only our gods know that, and yours. But for today and tomorrow and the next day, yes, there is plenty of deer for all, and pig and aurochs, and fish in the river and birds in the air and reeds in the marshes.’

Knuckle nodded, evidently a man as much intent on peace as the priest. ‘Yes. Well said. No need to fight, nothing to fight over.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘Ah! We can share. Hunt together? Catch more that way. The One People are good at hunting deer.’

Gall, looking over, his mouth still stained with blood, grinned dangerously. ‘Yes. We’ll hunt together. And I’ll show you snailheads how to do it properly.’

Gut looked slyly at Ana and Zesi. ‘When we live on your beach we will need wives. I will need a wife.’ Mocking, he turned to Zesi and stuck out his pierced tongue. ‘Will you be my wife? You look strong. Good babies-’

Gall lunged at him, but the priest saw it coming; he threw himself at Gall and blocked him. He said urgently in the Etxelur tongue, ‘Beat him at hunting. That’s how you win.’

Gall, breathing hard, eyes bulging, backed off. ‘At the hunt, then.’

Gut showed his studded tongue again. He hadn’t so much as flinched.

‘Good,’ said the priest. ‘Now – who wants some dock tea?’