Stone spring

26

Novu could hear Etxelur long before he saw it. It was the drumming that carried furthest inland, and occasional snatches of song.

Loga led his party down a broadening river valley towards a marshy estuary. It was a bright, clear morning, the sun still low in the east. Novu was laden with trade goods, as was Loga, and indeed so were his two wives and their children. The ground was thick with green bracken that clawed at their legs and towered over the smaller children, and it was hard going.

But on this warm midsummer day the world was dense with life, birds singing vigorously, the birch trees heavy with leaves, flowers like foxgloves and irises clustering in open spaces, dragonflies humming over open water. All of this was still alien to Novu, who didn’t even have names for many of the living things he came across in this strange, damp, green, western country. But he was impressed with the abundance of life. This place made Jericho with its fields of grain look barren.

Now Loga led his party up an animal track over a softly eroded ridge, and the view opened up to the north, and Novu saw Etxelur at last.

Trails ran down from this ridge to a bank of grassy dunes that fringed a beach of yellow sand. Seven houses, squat and purposeful, a vivid green, stood behind the dunes, and smoke threads rose into the still air. The beach was at the outlet of a bay, much of which was fringed by flat, marshy land where water glimmered, blue-green. To the north the bay was closed by a causeway that led to an island, a lump of sandstone fringed by beaches of shingle and sand. And beyond that lay only the sea, stretching to the horizon, flat and perfect. There were more houses everywhere, on the beaches and the dunes and in the marshes, houses that were cones and half-balls, all of them the brown of reeds or the green of seaweed. You had to look closely to see them; aside from the rising smoke, they looked natural, like something washed up by the sea, not human at all.

Novu took a breath of fresh, salty air. A place more unlike Jericho, its harsh landscape and walls of brick and stone, was hard to imagine. Yet he sensed this was a good place. And he heard that drumming again.

Loga was looking at him suspiciously.

‘What?’

‘Smiling. You. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ He held out his arms. ‘Beautiful day. Beautiful place. People happy; I can hear them. And I’m young and fit and unusually good-looking.’ He did a few steps of a hopping dance, which made the younger wife giggle as she cradled her infant. ‘Why not smile?’

‘Suit yourself,’ Loga grunted. ‘We go that way.’ He pointed west. ‘They’re all on the island, the far side. We cut around the bay and take that causeway. Sea rises up soon. Walk quick or we swim,’ he snapped at the women and children, and strode off down a fresh trail.

They trudged on, their faces drawn. They had been walking since dawn. Novu, feeling benevolent, reached down and lifted the pack off the back of the youngest walker, a six-year-old boy. He grinned his thanks and went running ahead, chasing butterflies. Loga made no comment.

‘So,’ Novu asked, ‘why the celebration?’

‘Solstice.’ Loga pointed at the rising sun. ‘All people celebrate midsummer, different ways. Here, the Giving feast. Big event for all people around, people of the coast, of the land. People happy. Good trade.’ He grinned, dreaming of profit.

‘You’re all heart, my friend.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

It wasn’t long before they had rounded the marshy land at the end of the bay, and then walked out along the causeway, a remarkable strip of land that cut the sea in two. The world was flat here, a panorama of mud flats and the brutal plain of the sea, fringed by lumpy sand dunes and the bulk of Flint Island. But the island was still so far away that the mist washed out its colours to a blue-grey, so that it looked unreal, a marking on a wall, not solid at all. The sea, at this time of the tide, was far away from their feet, and the causeway was a trail that led across a broad stretch of mud flats. Grass grew here, long, tough stuff. But you could tell the sea had been here recently. The grass was beaten down, there were standing pools of brackish water, and there was a tide line above the path they were following, marked by a litter of broken shells and seaweed tangles. This was an odd, eerie place, suspended between two worlds – a place where grass grew, yet which was daily covered over by the sea.

A crowd of curlews dipped and swooped overhead, making their odd chuckling cry.

After the causeway, they rounded a last sandstone bluff and came to a long, broad beach facing north, fringed by a line of dunes. The beach was thronged with people, slim figures busy everywhere, silhouetted against the brilliant light reflecting off the sea. He heard laughing, shouting, singing, the shrieks of the children splashing in the clean blue sea – many, many children, swarming around the adults. There must be hundreds of people here, he thought, not as many as in Jericho, but a larger gathering than any he had encountered since leaving home. Smoke rose up from scores of fires, and cooking smells reached Novu, even here at the western end of the beach, meat and salty fish.

Loga led his party along the beach, to a patch of dry sand between the shoulders of two dunes. ‘This will do. Shelter from the wind if it picks up.’ He glanced around. ‘Bit far from centre, the middens. Better to be closer, for passing trade. Arrive too late.’ He glared at one of the children. ‘If that one not sick, we’d have gained a day.’ But he shrugged.

The women settled wearily to the sand.

Novu dropped his pack. ‘I’ll go take a look around.’

Loga grunted, indifferent, unfolding his skin packs.

Novu walked along the beach. After a while he slipped off his boots, slung them over his shoulder, and walked on the fringe of the sea where the sand was wet. His feet, hardened by months of steady walking, enjoyed the crisp coolness of the water, the softness of the sand.

There were many different communities here, he soon saw, gathered on this bright beach. Folk evidently from the estuaries had their flat-bottomed skin boats drawn up on the beach, and wooden trays of eels and strange-looking crustaceans set out on the sand. Ocean fishers had bigger, deeper boats and racks of fish, with some spectacular catches on display; one huge cod looked longer than Novu was tall. A group of goat herders had a dozen animals penned up inside a wicker fence, reinforced by posts thrust into the sand. Another group who evidently hailed from the forests inland had set up a pole, a tree trunk stripped of branches and bark and carved along its length with distorted faces, images of gods perhaps.

The people themselves were all different too. The men with the god-pole wore trousers cut away to leave their crotches exposed, and Novu, wincing, saw that their dangling cocks had been sliced and stitched and tattooed. He saw heads shaven bald, or with hair raised in sticky spikes, and skin adorned with tattoos in black, red and even green, and distortions of noses and ear lobes and necks and even heads stretched like great tubers. Another group of estuary folk wore skulls heaped upon their heads like hats. All these groups spoke in their own languages, all of them sounding different from anything even Novu the hardened traveller had heard before.

But this was a day of sharing, evidently, and he heard people chatting in the traders’ argot as they gave each other fuel for the fires and swapped food, a bit of fish for a slice of meat. And the children who played in the surf and in the rocky pools, many of them naked, seemed entirely unaware of their differences as they ran and swam and chased and shouted and played with their barking dogs, big skulls, dangling ear lobes, tattooed buttocks and all.

He reached what seemed to be the central part of the beach. Here, before the dunes to his right, he saw odd, curving formations – almost like walls, almost like something from Jericho. Close to he could see they were middens, banks of shells and other waste, but carefully shaped. And before them stood a wooden structure, a kind of stage of wood planks set on piles driven into the sand, with a curve that roughly followed the crescent shapes of the middens. Poles stood around the stage, and trophies dangled in the air: the skin of a bear, the toothsome jaw of some huge fish, and flags of hide bearing a symbol: concentric circles cut by a dark radius. Nobody was on the stage for now, but maybe this would be the focus of the ‘Giving’ that Loga had mentioned – whatever that meant.

He stood in the middle of the beach, alone, surrounded by groups, families. He felt oddly excluded, out of place. He wondered if he should go back to Loga and his family. But he didn’t really belong there either.

He noticed a woman sitting alone, save for a baby wriggling on a skin on the sand beside her. Bare-legged, sitting up straight, she was tall, striking, with black hair pulled back from a fine-boned face, and a slightly darker complexion than those around her. She had a pile of stones, big rough-cut flint blades, and she was working on one, holding it over a leather apron on her lap and pressing its face with a bone tool. Bits of flint were scattered on the sand before her. Concentrating on her work, alone with her baby, she seemed utterly unaware of the clamour around her.

Drums pounded suddenly, making Novu jump. And then came a roar. He turned and saw a deer running along the beach, a huge one, its fur bright brown in the sunlight, its head ducking, antlers like tree branches splayed. To Novu’s astonishment, children were running towards the animal, clapping and smiling, and he heard music, the piping of flutes and whistles, clatters and rasps.

But as the beast approached he saw it wasn’t a deer at all, but a skin stretched over a frame of bone and wood. A bull of a man ran at the front, brandishing the great head on a pole, while under the skin children in ornate clothing played whistles and shook rattles, all of them carved from white bones. Behind the deer came more men whirling bits of shaped bone on ropes in the air; it was these that made the rhythmic roaring sound.

The deer hurried past, trailed by excited children, and continued up the beach.

Somebody spoke to him. He turned. The striking woman on the beach had been joined by a girl, who knelt beside her – redhaired, younger, slimmer, with a rather serious expression. She wore a tunic that was cut open at the waist to reveal a belly marked with a tattoo of concentric circles, like the sign on the flags, and a smaller mark on her hip in the shape of an owl.

The flint-making woman was smiling at him.

He hadn’t understood their words. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said in the traders’ tongue.

The girl said, ‘I just asked if you were all right. The music deer made you jump.’

‘It was a shock.’

The older woman swept a bit of sand smooth with her forearm. ‘Please,’ she said, her accent different from the girl’s.

He sat beside her.

‘The deer runs at every Giving,’ the girl said. ‘It is the start of the day, in a way. You never saw the deer before? This is your first time here?’

‘Oh, yes. And I’ve come a long way to be here.’ He sipped from his water skin, and offered it to the women, who shook their heads. ‘My name is Novu.’

‘Ana.’

‘Ice Dreamer.’

These names were strange to Novu, but he was used to that. ‘Ana. You live here?’

‘Yes. Etxelur is my home. My father is the Giver today-’

‘I meant to ask you about that,’ said the woman, Ice Dreamer. ‘He got Zesi to agree in the end?’

‘Not without a fight. And in return he had to agree to let her go on the wildwood hunt with the Pretani, and he wasn’t happy about that.’

‘I can imagine.’

Ana looked at Novu. ‘Zesi is my sister.’

‘Ah. And what exactly is this Giving?’

‘Everybody comes together and gives everything they bring,’ Ana said. ‘My father organises it. We have plenty to give ourselves, oils and meat from a whale, the produce of the sea-’

‘We have a similar custom in my country,’ Ice Dreamer said. ‘Every summer we would come together and share. Those who had gone short in the winter are helped by the generosity of their neighbours.’

‘Knowing that next year it might be their turn to give.’

‘That’s the idea. So why are you here? To Give?’

‘No,’ Novu said. ‘I came with a trader. He hopes to do business. I travel with him, but I don’t trade.’

‘Then what do you do?’

‘I make bricks.’ He used a Jericho word; there was no word in the traders’ tongue.

Ana frowned. ‘What is a-’

How do you describe a brick? ‘A block.’ He mimed with his hands. ‘Made of clay and straw. Like a stone.’

Ana pointed. ‘There are stones lying around all over the place.’

‘Not like my bricks.’

‘What do you do with them?’

‘Build houses.’

That made her laugh. ‘We make houses out of wood and seaweed.’ She pushed a wisp of her red-gold hair out of her eyes, her freckled face scrunched up against the sun. ‘Is this place different from where you come from?’

‘It couldn’t be more different.’

‘Do you like it, though?’

Novu glanced around, at the sea, the beach, the children, the laughing people. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would be good to stay here for a time. Though I’ve no idea what I’d do here.’

‘Make bricks,’ Ice Dreamer said, and she laughed too.

A man’s voice could be heard shouting, before the platform.

Ana jumped up. ‘The races! I’ll talk to you later, Ice Dreamer. And you-’

‘Novu.’

‘Yes.’ She stared at him for one heartbeat longer, then ran off.

Dreamer picked up her baby, sitting her on her lap.

Novu touched an unfinished blade. It was bigger than any spear point he’d ever seen, longer than his outstretched hand when he laid it on his palm. The shape of a leaf, it had two worked faces, a fine edge, and peculiar fluting channels down at the thicker end.

‘I haven’t been here long either,’ Ice Dreamer said now. ‘Ana’s a good kid. Reserved, mixed up, but good-hearted.’

‘I never saw a blade like this before.’

‘It is the way my people, the True People, always made them.’ She pointed. ‘You see, you use pressure from the bone tools to work either side of the blank, shaping the edge. And then the fluting, which is used to attach the blade more firmly to its shaft – you knock out a thin section of flint to achieve that.’

‘It’s bigger than any blade I’ve seen.’

‘It is meant to bring down bigger animals than you have seen, I imagine. Bigger even than the music deer. I have made these before, but under instruction… My craft is poor. But I will improve with practice.’

He blurted, ‘Could I have one of these?’

She seemed surprised. He continually had to remind himself that people generally didn’t want things, not outside Jericho. But she said, ‘Of course. Come back when I’ve finished one.’

He nodded. ‘Thank you… Where is your country?’

‘To the west of here.’ She pointed at the sea. ‘Further west than you can imagine. And yours?’

‘Further east than you can imagine.’

‘We are both far from home, then.’

‘We are.’

She asked, ‘Why did you come here?’

‘It was more a case of leaving home. And you?’

‘That’s a long story.’

‘I have time,’ he said.

‘And so do I. Here. Hold the baby, while I try to finish this blade…’

The baby was warm in his lap, heavy, and he thought she smiled at him.