Stone spring

21

Ice Dreamer lay in a heap of furs like a bug in a cocoon. She slept, or woke in a daze that was no different from sleeping, save for the continuing pain of torn thighs, aching breasts, a deeper hurt within.

Somehow, even in her bloodiest reveries, even when she didn’t know who she was, Ice Dreamer always knew she was on a boat.

Her world was sky. By day it was either an unbearable bright blue, or was choked with grey clouds. By night there were stars, a silent forest of them. Yet the sky’s dark was broken sometimes by sheets of green light that rippled and folded.

And when the rain fell, or the snow, a blanket of skin would be pulled across, enclosing her in a creaking, rocking chamber of leather and wood and smoke, and pale, glimmering firelight.

Other sensations. Water cool in her mouth. Another liquid, heavier, salty and rich, warm, a soup.

The heat inside her. That was the first thing outside herself she was clearly aware of. A warm mass of tissue and blood, it was in her, and of her, and yet not her. She folded her thoughts around it, felt its sleeping weight. It was a comfort.

And then the faces.

They hovered over her in the tented dark at night, blurs in the faint yellow lamplight, or they were there in the day, leathery bearded faces framed by hoods of fur, weather-beaten skin pocked by frostbite scars. The faces of men. At first they blurred in her mind, but they gradually separated into two. One older, his face rounder, who eyed her sceptically. The other younger, hair red and tightly curled, nose straight, eyes a startling blue, who looked at her with more complicated feelings. A kind of compassion. But even as he looked at her his attention seemed turned inside, into his own soul.

Men’s faces. A memory sharp as a stone blade cut into her mind, of the Cowards’ eager faces over her.

In that instant she remembered who she was. She sat bolt upright.

In response to her sudden movement the boat rocked. The men turned, alarmed, and jabbered in some unknown tongue. Working together quickly and expertly, they stuck their blades flat in the water to stabilise the boat.

It was a bright, clear day, the sun low behind her. She glimpsed sky, and grey water scattered with ice floes. Two men sat before her in the boat, huge in their fur hoods and cloaks and mittens, paddling patiently with big leather blades fixed to poles.

She was suddenly aware of her heavy belly. The baby. It felt big, bigger than she remembered; oh, earth and sky, was its time close? And Moon Reacher – she remembered now – she looked around for the girl, but she was not here. Only the two men and herself in this pitifully small boat, alone on the endless water.

The men’s breath steamed around their heads as they watched her. They seemed wary of her. The older one, at the boat’s prow, stayed where he was sitting. Roundface, she called him. The younger one, Longnose, shipped his blade inside the boat, and, shuffling, came towards her.

She cowered back. Her weight made the boat tip up.

Roundface jabbered, ‘Whoa, whoa!’ Longnose leaned back quickly. The boat settled again, rocking and creaking.

Longnose tugged off his mittens, showing dirty hands, and he spoke again. His tongue was like none she had ever heard, not even the Cowards’. He seemed to be smiling, behind that beard.

‘My name is Ice Dreamer,’ she said, or tried to; her voice was a croak, her mouth dry as dust. ‘Ice Dreamer,’ she said again. ‘Ice Dreamer.’ She pointed at her chest. ‘And if you come any nearer I’ll jump over the side.’

He listened carefully. ‘Ice – Ice-’

‘Ice Dreamer. Dreamer.’

‘Ice Dreamer.’ His accent was thick, almost incomprehensible. He pointed to his own chest. ‘Kirike.’ And the other man. ‘Heni.’

‘Kirike. Heni.’ They were meaningless names, and too short. Maybe these men didn’t have totems. Her throat remained dry. She dipped her hand into the water; she didn’t have to lean far over the boat’s shallow side. When she lifted it to her mouth the water was so salty it made her gag, and she spat it out.

Heni spoke again. Kirike took a small skin sack and threw it carefully over to Dreamer. It landed heavily, and when she picked it up she could feel liquid slosh inside. Its neck was fixed by a splinter of bone. She opened it, sniffed suspiciously, and then took a sip. It was water, cold, a little brackish, not salty. She drank deeply, letting the cool stuff slide over her throat. ‘Better,’ she said. ‘Better,’ more loudly. Her voice was working. She sang a snatch of song, a hymn to the coyote.

That surprised the men. They both burst out laughing. Immediately she remembered where she was, alone with these two men. She stopped singing.

Longnose – Kirike – held his hands up again. He began to speak to her, earnestly, gesturing. He was clearly trying to explain something to her. She just sat and listened. He had a tattoo on his cheek, above the beard, concentric rings and a tail. She had seen it etched in the rocks of the coast, where her walk had ended. He spoke slowly and loudly, as if she was deaf. Heni nudged his back, and they had a short jabbered conversation. Ice Dreamer thought the meaning was clear. ‘She doesn’t understand, idiot. Try something else.’

Kirike looked at her, a bit helplessly. Then an idea struck. He rummaged in the bottom of the boat, and he came up with a wooden bowl, covered by skin. He took off the skin to reveal a puddle of some kind of broth. He stuck his finger into the broth and licked off heavy droplets, making a satisfied noise. ‘Mmmmm. ’ He held it out to her.

She took it. Cautiously, she dipped in her own finger and tasted the cold stuff. It was thick, meaty, salty, rich. Memories flooded back. Lying half-awake under the furs, she had tasted this stuff, this broth; she had eaten it before. Kirike smiled. He mimed spooning the stuff up into his mouth, then pointed at her. He had fed her.

She couldn’t remember it all. Maybe she would never remember, not properly. But she began to work out how she must have got from that barren beach with Moon Reacher, to here, on this huge, limitless lake, in this boat with these men. They must have landed on the beach in their boat. They must have found her. They could have killed her. Instead, evidently, they had taken her onto their boat. And they had cared for her.

She was still heavily pregnant. Her thighs and her crotch and her deep innards still ached from the attentions of the Cowards. But she was not dead. She was not even hungry. Her head was clear. And it was because of these men.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Their faces were blank. She still held the bowl. She drained it of the last scrap of broth, and handed it back to Kirike, nodding. ‘Thank you.’

A grin broke across his face, like the sun breaking through cloud. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he repeated.

She looked around the boat again. ‘The girl,’ she said. ‘With me, the little girl – Moon Reacher. On the beach.’ She desperately mimed – like me, shorter – I held her like this… She cradled the cold air like a baby.

Kirike seemed baffled, but Heni spoke softly. Kirike nodded. He reached into a fold of his tunic, and produced a lock of nut-brown hair, tied up with a bit of bark rope. He passed the hair to Dreamer, and she teased at it so that it caught the low sun. It was Moon Reacher’s, no doubt about it. Kirike spoke steadily to her, his expression grave. His meaning wasn’t hard to understand. The child is dead… We couldn’t save her… Or perhaps, She was already dead when we found you. Dreamer recalled how cold and still Reacher had been, in those last days. Had the child’s spirit already vanished from that pale, frail body, even as Dreamer had cradled her, trying to give her warmth?

Moon Reacher, dead like Mammoth Talker and all the others. There was no consolation to be had when the young died. Yet Dreamer felt nothing. Maybe her own spirit had gone, leaving this battered husk of a body behind.

The men were watching her. They were being kind, she saw. They were giving her time, letting her get used to being alive again.

But, behind them, ahead of the drifting boat, a huge mass of ice stuck out of the water like a fist. ‘Look out!’ she yelled, and she pointed.

The men turned, shouted, and grabbed their paddles. As they dug at water littered with flecks of ice, they snapped at each other and cursed in their own language. Dreamer wondered what strange gods they invoked. The sun set. Its light made the floating ice blaze pink, though where larger lumps stuck out of the water she could sometimes see subtler shades, purples and greys fading from blue. The men resolutely paddled their boat away from the sunset, heading east – just as she had walked east from her lost home, east until she had run out of country altogether.

As the sun crept below the horizon, the light faded, the cold gathered, and Heni and Kirike shipped their blades. At the boat’s prow was a scorched platform of wood, which Heni now detached and stuck in place at the boat’s mid-section. It had a worn hollow, and here he set bits of dry moss, wood shavings, and scraps of wood and bone. Then, from a fold of his outer skin, he produced an ember, wrapped up in moss and greasy leather. He set this on the scorched block and blew it until the moss and kindling caught. He nursed the nascent fire, leaning over it to shelter it from the breeze, feeding it one fragment of fuel after another.

A fire on a boat!

The boat’s frame was sturdy lime and ash, and its ribs were of bent hazel, tied together with plaited cords made of twisted roots. The outer skin was fixed to the frame by robust stitches, the holes stopped with a mix of animal fat and resin. The People had used boats, on the rivers and the lakes. She had never seen any boat as big or as elaborate as this one. And she certainly hadn’t ever seen anybody start a fire in a boat. You’d just put into shore for the night, and build your fire there. If they were so far from the shore, this must be a very wide lake indeed.

Both Kirike and Heni, with glances back at Dreamer, knelt, pulled up their tunics and pissed over the side of the boat. Their urine steamed, thick and yellow. Kirike pointed to a bowl near Dreamer’s feet. They must have been keeping her clean. She felt a stab of shame, and clutched her skins closer.

Then, when the fire was crackling healthily, Kirike lifted a pole, a stripped sapling, from the bottom of the boat and set it upright in a socket. He unfolded grease-coated skins and set them up in a kind of tent, tied to the top of the pole and fixed to bone hooks around the rim of the boat. It was low, to get inside you had to crouch down under the shallowly sloping skins, and you certainly couldn’t stand up. Dreamer vaguely imagined that if you raised the tent thing too high the whole boat might topple over. But the skins were heavy enough to shut out the wind, and the fire’s warmth soon filled the little space.

Once the tent was sealed Kirike and Heni loosened their clothing, shucking off their heavy mitts and boots. Kirike set up a couple of lamps, wicks burning in some kind of oil in stone dishes, and put them at either end of the boat. A soft light suffused the boat – the light she remembered seeing reflected from their faces, in the dark times of her illness.

Kirike and Heni started unwrapping bits of food. Kirike offered her strips of meat, dried and salted. She took them cautiously. The meat was tough, leathery, but she found she was hungry, and it was satisfying to have something to chew.

As they ate Kirike dug out more packets, carefully wrapped in skin. He showed her a collection of big shells, each bigger than Kirike’s widespread hand, that he seemed very proud of. The shells were strung on a bit of rope. And they had tools, stone blades and bone harpoons and spear-straighteners. These looked like artefacts of the Cowards, and she wasn’t interested. He had nothing that might have come from the People – none of the big fluted spear points that had once been so prized. Kirike and Heni talked amiably as they picked over their trophies, here in this covered-over boat.

It wasn’t like being in a house. It was too small, and the boat creaked and groaned in the swell, and if you put your foot down incautiously you could find yourself stepping in the cold water that constantly seeped through the skin’s seams. But nevertheless these two men trusted their boat, as they clearly trusted each other. Dreamer felt oddly safe in its rolling embrace.

There was a bit of comedy when Heni decided he needed a shit. The men bickered, Kirike evidently complaining about losing heat, Heni twisting with agitation as the pressure in his bowels built up. They were like husband and wife, stuck together and too used to each other. In the end Heni got his way and stuck his bare arse out of the boat. Cold air swirled. He strained and was mercifully quick, letting the shit just drop over the side, but when he pulled his backside into the boat Kirike mockingly picked icicles off the thick black hairs coating his buttocks.

After that the men dug themselves down into heaps of furs. Arguing mildly, coughing, farting, blowing their noses into their hands, the men settled down to sleep.

Dreamer closed her eyes and listened to the boat creak, and settled her hands on her belly. The baby was asleep. It seemed content. She thought she could feel its heart beat, feel the heaviness of the blood it drew from her body. As she slid into sleep herself she was troubled, for the baby was very large, and she knew its time must be near, and she had no idea how she could cope. Yet sleep she did. In the days that followed she came to learn the routine of the men’s strange lives, here in their boat-home.

Whenever they could they paddled, always heading east. Often they would sleep in the boat, as they had that first night, but other times they would push the boat in towards an ice floe, or sometimes even a scrap of rocky land. At one extraordinary shore she saw a huge dome of ice squatting over the land. It thinned towards the coast and she saw dark mountains sticking up out of the ice, their peaks sculpted like a flint core, and rivers of dirty ice flowed between the mountains towards the water. Nothing lived here but birds, and creatures that flopped up onto the ice out of the sea. They did not land here.

When they did find a place to land, the men would drag the boat out of the water, with Dreamer still riding inside, and then help her out. The first time they landed she had trouble standing; her legs felt weak as a child’s, and it felt odd to stand on a surface that wasn’t pitching and rocking. But Kirike supported her and, holding her arm, encouraging her with a flow of words in his strange language, he made her take one step, two, three. Her heart pumped, and a kind of mist cleared from her head, and she was a little more herself again.

Whenever they managed to get out of the boat the three of them would walk away from each other, sometimes until they became dark specks on a sheet of white. She would squat on the ice and leave runny turds steaming in the cold air, and watch with dismay as urine laden with blood pooled around her feet.

Sometimes they would stay two nights, three, on the land. The men would make minor repairs to the boat, and gather food. They would take the boat out for a morning or afternoon, empty of everything but their fishing kit, leaving Dreamer with the heaps of spare gear. Alone with her unborn child, she waited in a world reduced to abstractions, plain white below, clear empty blue above, and wondered what might become of her if they never returned. But the men always did return, hauling their catch, and they would all bundle up into the little house-boat for another night.

Sometimes, out on the sea, she saw creatures like fish, but much greater than fish, accompanying the boat. They would even leap out of the water, their grey sleek bodies massive and heavy, and she flinched. But Kirike laughed at her, and threw fish scraps. These strange companions were just playing, and her spirits came to lift when their graceful bodies broke the surface, with their strange smiling faces and rattling cries.

And then there were the even stranger fish-animals the men hunted, whenever they spotted one. She had never seen their like before. These creatures that could be bigger than a man had bodies like a fish’s but faces like a dog’s, and they seemed to spend as long sitting out on the ice or rocks as they did in the water. Kirike and Heni hunted them enthusiastically, but with respect, and their butchery was quick and efficient.

Dreamer soon learned that the broth that had kept her alive during her illness was made from boiled meat from the fish-animal. In the process she learned her first word of Kirike’s language, through his pointing. ‘Seal.’

‘Seal.’

More pointing. ‘Dolphin. Fish. Spear. Net. Harpoon…’ The journey went on and on, until she had long lost track of the days.

Sometimes the weather would close in, and they would be stuck in their tiny shelter for days, and their mood inevitably turned inwards, souring. There was always a tension between the men, she realised, as she learned to read their moods. Kirike was more welcoming; maybe it was Kirike who had wanted to save her in the first place. Heni was much more grudging. She saw something in Kirike’s eyes. He was injured within. Somehow helping her helped him. She fretted that it was a pretty tenuous reason to be kept alive. Dreamer always tried to stay out of the way of any arguments.

As the days passed, it was the sheer endlessness of the journey that wore her down. How large could this briny lake be? Maybe, she thought, brooding, the lake was not of this world at all. She feared she was the last of the True People. If everybody else was dead, maybe she was dead too. What if these strange men weren’t human, but were agents of the Sky Wolf whose rage had destroyed the world?

One day, as the men paddled, with the setting sun bright and pointlessly beautiful in her eyes, she folded her hands on her swollen belly and repeated the ancient priest’s words to her child. ‘ “The world is dead. We are dead, already dead; this is the afterlife, of which even the priests know nothing. Even our totems are dead…” ’ She folded over and began to weep, deep heaving sobs, though her tears would not flow.

Kirike stopped paddling. He worked his way down the boat to her, and folded her in his arms. But his thick furs were frost-coated and there was no hint of warmth from him, as if he was dead too, the dead embracing the dead.

Heni snorted his contempt. He stayed where he was, paddling gently.

Thus the days and nights wore away. Until the night she woke up screaming in agony.