Stone spring

2

The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice. The day of Ana’s blood tide, with her father missing and her mother dead, was always going to be difficult. And it got a lot worse, early that very morning, when the two Pretani boys walked into her house.

Sunta, Ana’s grandmother, sat with Ana opposite the door. Ana was holding open her tunic, the skin of her exposed belly prickling in the cold air that leaked in around the door flap. Sunta dipped her fingertips in a thick paste of water, menstrual blood and ochre, carefully painting circles around Ana’s navel. The sign, when finished, would be three big concentric circles, the largest spanning Ana’s ribs to her pubis, with a vertical tail cutting from the centre down to her groin. This was the most ancient mark of Etxelur, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House – the land of ancestors. Later this painting would be the basis of a tattoo Ana would carry through her life.

Thus they sat, alone in the house, when the two Pretani boys pushed through the door flap.

They looked around. They just ignored the women. There was snow on their shoulders and their boots. Under fur cloaks they wore tunics of heavy, stiff hide, not cloth as the Etxelur women wore. The boys dumped their packs on the floor’s stone flags, kicked at pallets stuffed with dry bracken, walked around the peat fire in the big hearth, tested the strength of the house’s sloping wooden supports by pushing at them with their shoulders, and jabbered at each other in their own guttural language. To Ana it was as if two bear cubs had wandered into the house.

For her part Sunta didn’t even look up. ‘Pretani,’ she murmured.

Fourteen years old, Ana had only a blurred memory of the last time Pretani had come to Etxelur, a memory of big men who smelled of leather and tree sap and blood. ‘What are they doing in our house? I thought the snailheads were coming for the midwinter gathering.’

Sunta, sitting cross-legged, was stick-thin inside a bundle of furs. She was forty-seven years old, one of the oldest inhabitants of Etxelur, and she was dying. But her eyes were sharp as flint. ‘Arses they are, like the last time they were here, like all Pretani, like all men. But it is custom for the chief Pretani to lodge in my house, the house of the Giver’s mother, and here they are. Oh, just ignore them.’ She continued working on the design on Ana’s belly, her clawlike finger never wavering in the smooth arcs it drew.

But Ana couldn’t take her eyes off the Pretani. She tried to remember what her mother had told her about them before she died. They were younger than they had looked at first. Boy-men, from the forests of Albia.

Under tied-back mops of black hair, both of them wore beards. The older one had a thick charcoal-black line tattooed on his forehead. But the younger one, who was probably not much older than Ana, had a finer face, a strong jaw, thin nose, high brow, prominent cheekbones. No forehead scars. He peered into the stone-lined hole in the ground where they kept limpets for use as bait in fishing, and he studied the way the house had been set up over a pit dug into the sand, knee deep, to give more room. These were features you wouldn’t find in houses in the woods of Albia, she supposed, where nobody fished, and drainage would always be a problem. The younger boy was similar enough to the other that they must be brothers, but he seemed to have a spark of curiosity the other lacked.

He glanced at Ana, a flash of dark eyes as he caught her watching him. She looked away.

His brother, meanwhile, raised his fur-boot-swathed foot and swung a kick at the wall, not quite opposite where the women sat. Brush snapped, and layers of dried kelp fell to the floor. Even a little snow fell in.

At last Sunta rose to her feet. She wore her big old winter cloak, sealskin lined with gull down, and as she rose stray wisps of feathers fluttered into the air around her. She wasn’t much more than two-thirds the size of the Pretani, but she looked oddly grand. ‘Stop that.’ She switched to the traders’ tongue. ‘I said, stop kicking my wall, you big arse.’

The man looked down at her, directly for the first time. ‘What did you call me?’

‘Oh, so you can see me after all. Arse. Arse.’ She bent stiffly and slapped her bony behind, through the thickness of her cloak.

Ana sought for the words in the unfamiliar tongue. ‘But then,’ she said, ‘grandmother calls all men arses.’

The Pretani’s gaze flickered over her body, like a carrion bird eyeing up a piece of meat. She realised she was still holding open her tunic, exposing her throat and breasts and belly. She fumbled to close it.

Her grandmother snapped, ‘Leave that. You’ll smudge the paint.’ In the traders’ tongue she said, ‘You. Big fellow. Tell me your name.’

The man sneered. ‘Get out of my way.’

‘You get out of my way.’

‘In my country the women get out of the way of the men, who own the houses.’

‘This isn’t your country, and I thank the mothers for that.’

He looked around. ‘Where is the Giver? Where is the man who owns this house?’

‘In Etxelur the women own the houses. This is my house. I am the oldest woman here.’

‘From the shrivelled look of you, I think you are probably the oldest woman in the world. My name is Gall. This is my brother Shade. In our country our father is the Root. The most powerful man. Do you understand? We have come to this scrubby coastal place to hunt and to trade and to let you hear our songs of killing. Every seven years, we do this. It is an old custom.’

Sunta said, ‘And did you travel all this way just to kick a hole in my wall?’

‘I was making a new door.’ He pointed. ‘That door is in the wrong place.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Ana said. ‘In all our houses the door faces north.’

The younger boy, Shade, asked, ‘Why? What’s so special about north? There’s nothing north of here but ocean.’

‘That’s where the Door to the Mothers’ House lies. Where our ancestors once lived, now lost under the sea-’

Gall snorted. ‘We have doors facing south-east.’

‘Why?’ Sunta snapped at him.

‘Because of the light – it goes around – something to do with the sun. That’s the priest’s business. All I know is I’m not going to stay in a house with a door in the wrong place.’

Sunta smiled. ‘But this is the Giver’s house. It is the largest in Etxelur. If you don’t stay here you’ll have to stay in a smaller house, and it would not be the Giver’s house. What would your father think of that?’

Gall scowled. ‘I ask you again – if this is the Giver’s house, where is the Giver?’

Ana said, ‘In the autumn my father went to sea to hunt whale.’

Shade looked at her. ‘He has not come back?’

‘No.’

Gall sneered. ‘Then he’s dead.’

‘No!’

‘He’s dead and you have no Giver.’

‘Kirike is not dead,’ Sunta said quietly. ‘Not until the priest says so, or his body washes up on the beach, or his Other, the pine marten, says so in a human tongue. Anyhow we don’t need a Giver until the summer. And even if he returns, even if he were standing here now-’

‘What?’

‘Even then, Pretani arse, you would do as I say, here in my house.’

Enraged, he ran a dirty thumbnail along the line on his forehead. ‘See this? I got this scar when I first took a man’s life. I was fourteen years old.’

Sunta smiled. ‘If you like I’ll show you the scars I got when I first gave a woman her life. I was thirteen years old.’

Complicated, baffled expressions chased across Gall’s face. He was evidently grasping for a way out of this while saving his pride. ‘This house is evidently the least unsuitable in this squalid huddle for sons of Albia. We will stay here. We will discuss the issue of the door later.’

‘As you wish,’ Sunta said, mocking. ‘And we will also discuss how you are going to fix my wall.’

He was about to argue with that when Lightning burst in. The dog’s tail was up, his eyes bright, tongue lolling, his fur covered in snow. Excited by the presence of the strangers, the dog jumped up at them, barking.

Gall cringed back. ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ He drew a flint-blade knife from his belt.

Ana stood between Gall and the dog. ‘You harm him and I’ll harm you back, Pretani.’

Sunta laughed, rocking. ‘Lightning is Kirike’s dog – oh, come here, Lightning! He chose him because he was the runt of the litter, and gave him his name as a joke, because as a puppy he was the slowest dog anybody had ever seen. And you big men cower before him!’

Shade looked nervous, but he was smiling. ‘Pretani don’t keep dogs.’

‘Maybe you should,’ Ana said, petting Lightning.

Gall, trying to regain his pride, put away his knife and strutted around the house. ‘I am hungry from the journey.’

‘Are you indeed?’ Sunta asked. She gave no sign she was going to offer him food.

He paused by the hearth. ‘What kind of fire is this? Where is the wood?’

‘This is not your forest-world. Wood is precious here. We burn peat.’

‘It is a stupid fire. It gives off smoke but no heat.’ He hawked and spat on the inadequate fire. ‘Come, Shade. Let’s find a less ugly old woman who might feed us.’ And with that he walked out of the north-facing door. His brother hurried after him, with a backwards glance at Ana. When they were gone the space suddenly seemed huge and empty.

Sunta seemed to collapse, as if her bones had turned to water. ‘Oh, what a fuss. Give me your hand, dear.’ Ana helped her back to where she had been sitting. Sunta’s seal-fur cloak fell open, scattering feathers and exposing her body; the only flesh on her was the mass that protruded from her belly, the growth that so horribly mimicked a pregnancy. ‘All men are arses. Do something about that hole in the wall, would you? The wind pierces me.’

Ana took handfuls of dry bracken from a pallet and shoved them into the broken place. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘About what?’

‘About letting them stay here!’

‘Every seven years the Pretani hunters come to the winter gathering. And they always stay in the Giver’s house. I am your grandmother, and I remember my grandmother telling me how this was the way when she was a girl, and her grandmother told her of it when she was a girl, and before that only the sun and moon remember. This is custom, like it or not.’

‘I don’t care about custom. I live here. All my things are here…’

‘They won’t touch you, you know.’

‘That’s not the point. And why today, of all days?’ She felt tears prickle her eyes. Her grandmother didn’t approve of crying; she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. ‘It’s my blood tide. And now them. If only my father were here-’

‘But he isn’t,’ Sunta said. Her voice broke up in a flurry of dry, painful-sounding coughs. She sat back and dipped her finger in the paint once more. ‘Now let’s see how much mess you’ve made.’

Ana turned away, breathing hard. She was no longer a child; her blood tide marked the dawning of adulthood. She had to behave well. Deliberately she calmed herself and opened her tunic.

But when she turned back Sunta had fallen asleep. A single thread of drool dripped from her open mouth, the stubs of her worn teeth.