Stone spring

23

The Year of the Great Sea: Summer Solstice. A sound like a stampede, or like thunder, came rolling across the ocean from the north.

In her house Ana looked up, distracted from her work on the paint. Lightning had been sleeping on one of Zesi’s old skins. He opened his eyes and lifted his ears. It was probably nothing, probably just a storm, just weather. Ana murmured to soothe the dog. Lightning closed his eyes, soon asleep again.

Ana tried to concentrate on what she was doing. Sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, she had lumps of red and yellow ochre, brought by a trader from mines far away in Gaira. She ground these lumps against a sandstone block, making piles of powder that she collected on the scapula of a deer. She also had charcoal powder set aside, and a pot of grease from deer fat, and another of pig’s urine. She mixed these ingredients together in different proportions to make paints in shades of red, orange, yellow, that she ladled carefully into the hollows of bird bones. On the day of the midsummer Giving the priest would use these to mark faces and bodies, and to stain the tattoos of the hunters and racers and swimmers and wrestlers.

It was slow and careful work, and she had to get on with it. The solstice, only days away, wouldn’t wait for her.

It was also quite a responsibility. In years past she’d helped her mother prepare the paint, and before that her grandmother, Mama Sunta, but now the job was hers alone. It was delicate work, you could easily waste a whole batch of the precious ochre, and getting the colours just right was important for the priest’s ceremonies.

Thunder, though. Odd. Distracted, she put down the ochre lumps.

She was alone in the house, and had the door flap shut against draughts, though bright midsummer daylight seeped around its loosely fixed seams. The house was tidy, orderly. Neither of the Pretani boys had come back from the disastrous summer camp, Gall having run off after the murder of the snailhead, and Shade having headed home. Ana and Zesi had thrown out their abandoned gear, their skins and their weapons and their piss-pots, and they had practically taken the house apart to get rid of the boys’ male stink. Yet the house wasn’t the way it had been before, in the old days before their mother had died and their father disappeared. It had become a lifeless place, where the tension between the sisters crackled…

Summer storms were unusual. Earlier the day had been bright and clear, the sky the colour of eggshells. Not a stormy day at all.

She heard a commotion outside, raised voices. Glad of the excuse, she stood up. Lightning lifted his head. ‘You stay,’ she said. ‘Good boy.’

She pushed her way out of the house. As she emerged, blinking in the bright noon light, she saw people streaming over the bank of dunes towards the Seven Houses. Nobody was smiling.

Arga dashed up to her. ‘Ana, I came to tell you!’

‘What is it – a storm?’

‘No, silly. It’s Shade. He’s back! The Pretani are back!’

And Ana understood the grim expressions on the faces of the adults. She hurried after the crowd. Here they came – she counted – a dozen Pretani, clambering over the dunes. All male as far as she could see, all big men, they wore heavy brown cloaks and headdresses and thick fur boots; they must be hot on this summer day. Some of them were beating drums, wooden bowls over which fine hide was stretched, their leather-topped sticks making a cacophonous, threatening noise. But that wasn’t the thunder she had heard earlier, she was sure.

‘Moon and sun,’ muttered Zesi, who came to stand beside Ana. ‘That’s Shade.’ She pointed at one of the men in the lead.

‘You can tell from this distance? Well, I suppose you’d know. You saw more of him than me-’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘And the big man with him-’

‘His father, I guess. The Root. The big man of the Pretani.’

Now Ana looked more closely, she saw how the Root looked more like Gall than his younger son, the same stocky build, the same blunt face. ‘Better keep Lightning tied up, then. We don’t want to scare them to death.’

Zesi almost smiled. It had been a long time since either of them had laughed at the other’s jokes.

‘What’s the Root doing here? He hasn’t attended a Giving for years.’ So long ago Ana could not remember it; he had always sent brothers, sons, hunters.

‘Well, it might be to do with that business about Gall,’ Zesi said, sarcastic. She was tense, distracted; she pushed loose red hair from her eyes. ‘Did you hear that thunder?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not a cloud on the horizon. Strange storms. The Pretani arriving. It’s an ominous day.’

The Pretani reached the houses. To a gesture from the Root the drumming stopped abruptly, and the hunters stood still as tree trunks.

The people of Etxelur, in a loose knot, stood facing them, the wide-eyed children restless. The Root didn’t even look at them. His headdress was the almost intact head of a huge bull, lacking only its lower jaw, with twisting horns and black stones pressed into its eye sockets. The moment stretched. Arga giggled nervously. The Pretani’s sudden silence and stillness was frightening, Ana thought. As it was meant to be.

From the beach floated the sounds of laughter, of people working, the calls of gulls. Evidently the Pretani weren’t going to speak first.

Zesi stepped forward. ‘Shade. It is good to see you-’

The Root spoke, his voice loud, used to command. In his own language he snapped, ‘Speak to me, not him. And use the heroes’ tongue. You know how to speak, don’t you, woman?’

‘She does.’ Jurgi, the priest, came up now, panting; he must have run from the beach. ‘As do I.’ He bowed. ‘You are welcome, Root. It is many years since you graced the Giving in person-’

The Root sniffed the sea air, pawing at the sandy ground like a bull. ‘It’s only tradition that brings us back at all, priest. You know that. Tradition that dates back to the days when Etxelur was great, and everybody came here, from across Albia and Gaira as well as all Northland. A thread of tradition that’s fraying and close to breaking altogether, if you ask me. But this year, after I sent my sons into your country, I find one boy has gone rogue, and the other addled. All because of trouble with women, I hear – if you can call these scrawny bitches women at all.’

Ana grabbed Zesi’s arm; she felt her sister’s muscles bunch.

Jurgi spoke quickly. ‘Whatever the reason, we’re honoured you’re here. Please.’ He gestured at the Seven Houses. ‘If you would like to rest, to eat or drink-’

‘If I need a shit I won’t be asking your permission, priest.’

Jurgi said smoothly, ‘Then come see what we’re working on.’ He led them away from the houses. ‘You understand the Giving will be held on Flint Island as usual, on the north shore, facing the sea. But we’re busy preparing all over Etxelur. Josu, show us what you’re doing.’

The stoneworker, squatting over his hearth in the lee of the dunes, had been concentrating on preparing his flints. Now, startled as the Pretani approached, he tried to get up, and he almost fell over, betrayed by his damaged leg. ‘Sun and moon-’

‘It’s all right,’ the priest said. ‘Your flints. Can you tell us what you’re doing? Use the heroes’ tongue.’

Josu stumbled over his words. He showed the Pretani how he worked. In the centre of the hearth, with charcoal burning sullenly, he had dug out a sand bath. Here he placed lumps of flint, the high-quality stuff mined from Flint Island. Heat, if applied correctly, could change the quality of the stone and make it easier to shape. But you had to keep the heating slow and gradual, and at a temperature that Josu continually checked by sprinkling water on his sand baths. Too rapid a heat shock, for instance if you just threw a lump of flint onto a fire, and it would shatter uselessly…

The Root glared at Josu without speaking, and moved on. Further along a group of women had gathered the bones of a mature male deer, a big animal, specially hunted for the purpose. The skeleton had been roughly reassembled on the sandy ground, and the women were carefully working the bones. Jurgi, smiling at the women, picked up a flute made of a shin bone, a rattle made of a hip socket containing beach pebbles, a bull roarer carved from a bit of scapula, a rasper from a chipped rib. ‘You see, we like to turn the whole animal into music, even little drums and rattles for the children. Then at the solstice when we march to the Giving place we bring the spirit of the animal with us, and-’

The Root spat. ‘Cripples with lumps of flint. Whistles for children. Is this how the men of Etxelur spend their time, priest? No wonder you let your women chop your balls off.’

The priest tried to intervene again, but Zesi wouldn’t stay silent this time. ‘We live differently to you, Root,’ she said in passable Pretani – a skill she had probably picked up, Ana thought with an inward twist of pain, during the spring days she had spent, secretly, with Shade.

The Root said, with a kind of dangerous calm, ‘In Albia, no woman would dare speak to me at all – let alone this way.’

‘None but my mother,’ Shade said dryly.

‘Silence, boy.’ The Root leered at Zesi. ‘What else can you do with your tongue, little girl? Maybe that’s what drove my boys wild.’

Zesi’s face twisted into a snarl.

This time it was the priest who pulled her back. ‘You are our guests. We have food, drink – the fruits of the sea, which-’

‘Fish, you mean. You all stink of fish.’ Root put his hands on his hips and glared around. ‘What a pitiful display this is. Etxelur is dead, or all but. Twitching like a calf after its brains have been stove in. What kind of Giving will this be anyhow?’ He glared at Zesi again. ‘I heard your father is dead.’

‘Not dead. Missing.’

‘Since the autumn equinox – that’s what I heard. Dead – that’s what you call a man missing so long. But he was the Giver. Who will Give this year? His eldest son – that’s the custom, isn’t it, priest? Oh, but wait. He had no sons! How typical of a ball-less Etxelur hunter of little fish that he couldn’t even father a son.’

Jurgi said, ‘Zesi will Give, as the senior woman of Kirike’s house. It’s unusual but not without precedent-’

‘A woman, Giving!’ The Root bellowed laughter, and his men dutifully joined in, though Shade looked away. ‘That I’ve got to see. And what of the wildwood hunt? It’s the Giver, or his son, who stands for Etxelur on that too. Who will lead this year?’ He reached out to chuck Zesi under the chin. ‘You, tongue girl?’

She flinched, but snapped back, ‘Yes.’

The priest murmured, ‘Zesi, think about this-’

‘Yes, I will go on the wildwood hunt. And when I bring down a bull with bigger balls than yours, Root, you will apologise for your insults.’

The Root laughed again. ‘Then bring on the autumn! That I have to see.’ He turned to his men.

In her own tongue Ana murmured, ‘Zesi, oh Zesi – what have you done?’

‘I can hunt as well as any man,’ Zesi shot back.

‘That’s true,’ the priest said. ‘But it’s not the hunting that’s the danger. It’s the Pretani…’

‘I will fulfil my promise.’

‘Whale!’