Stone spring

27

The dozen runners jostled behind the line scratched by the Giver in the sand.

Shade, braced to run, looked along an empty stretch of beach lined by cheering children. It looked an awfully long way to the prize at the far end, a big convoluted shell full of rattling stones that hung from a pole. Only one man could grab that shell; only one man could win the race. The day was hot, the sun high, and the dry sand was soft under his feet and would be tiring to run on – which, of course, was the idea. After a morning of sports he was already exhausted. The sun had got to him too; his skin, used to the shelter of the forest, was red raw across his back and belly and thighs.

And Knuckle, a snailhead with a grudge, was right alongside him, itching for the race to start.

Zesi stood watching beside her father, the Giver. Arga held her hand, the little girl holding her own trophies of shells and beads that she had won in the children’s deep-diving contests; she looked excited and happy. Zesi was brave enough to smile at Shade. He dared not smile back.

Now his father came up behind him. Even in the bright sunlight the Root wore his finery of bull skin and skull. Shade could smell smoke on him, rich, tangy fumes. The Root had spent much of the day in the dreaming house, as the Etxelur folk called it, where the leaders smoked pipes full of dried weed, and burned strange logs, and breathed the vapours from seeds cast on hot stones – all prepared by the Etxelur priest, who wore a crown of poppies today – plants brought here from far away, for they did not grow in Etxelur – and a huge axe of creamy, beautiful flint was suspended from a rope around his neck.

The Root leaned over his son. ‘We lost the fishing challenges.’

‘We are hunters,’ Shade hissed. ‘Not fishers.’

‘Yes, but we lost the spear-throwing as well.’ His speech was slightly slurred. ‘We couldn’t begin to compete in the dolphin riding. The Giver himself won most of the swimming races.’

‘Is that my fault?’

‘I won’t go away a loser,’ the Root said softly, sinister. ‘If Gall were here he’d win his challenges one way or another.’

‘But he’s not here, is he?’

‘No. All I’ve got is you. And if you’re any son of mine, you won’t – lose – this – race.’ He straightened up and backed away.

Knuckle, standing beside Shade, growled, ‘I follow your cow language.’ He was sweating hard, that extraordinary long skull coated in sand, and his tongue when he showed it had a huge stone plug sticking through it, obscuring his speech.

‘Leave me alone, snailhead.’

‘I will leave you alone in a heartbeat, when race runs. But make it interesting. If you beat me I have reward for you. See our priest, down there by the shell? Today we make our boys into men, into truth-tellers. If you beat me we make you one of us.’ He ruffled Shade’s hair. ‘Don’t worry, not touch your pretty skull. An honour – for a man. Are you a man, little boy?’

‘Do your talking in the race, Knuckle.’

‘Oh, I will…’

Kirike pulled a bull roarer around his head, once, twice, three times. Lightning jumped around his feet, excited as the rest. The watching people hushed.

Shade lined up with the others, as the runners jostled and pushed. He had the feeling it would be more of a long fight than a true race.

Kirike released the bull roarer. The bit of bone sailed in the air. The crowd yelled. Drums sounded like thunder.

Shade lurched forward, fighting for space between strong, pressing bodies.

But before he had made three strides he got a punch between the shoulder blades that laid him out flat on the ground. Heavy feet trampled over his back, and his face was pressed in the sand.

As soon as they were clear he pushed himself to his feet and ran. Most of the runners were already far ahead of him, and people were pointing, children laughing at him. He wasn’t the worst off; two others had fallen and lay without moving.

And Knuckle looked back, grinning. It was too much to bear.

Shade ignored the rest and threw himself after the snailhead. When he got close enough he lunged headlong, arms outstretched, not caring how his sunburned skin scraped over the hot sand, and with one reaching hand clipped the snailhead’s heel. Knuckle fell. This time Shade was first up. He ran over Knuckle, stepping on the snailhead’s swollen skull for good measure, and hurtled after the rest.

The watching people screamed and shook their fists, willing on their favourites.

An Etxelur boy, skinny as rope, was first, to collect the winner’s shell.

But Shade had beaten the snailhead. Surrounded by the runners’ families, the Root stood with his arms folded. Shade knew he wasn’t about to be praised for failing to win, but he had fought off the challenge of the snailhead, and Shade could see a kind of grim satisfaction in his father’s face under the bull’s black muzzle.

Knuckle grabbed his lower arm, sweating, panting, evidently winded from his fall. ‘Well done, boy. You fought dirtier than me.’

‘I did, didn’t I?’ Shade tried to shake his arm free.

But Knuckle was strong. ‘I made promise. Come on – priest over there.’

The snailhead priest was a skinny man who looked extraordinarily old, with a tube-like head grotesque even by snailhead standards. He grinned and waggled his tongue at Shade; it contained a plug of stone so wide he couldn’t close his mouth around it.

Knuckle said, ‘I told you – honour you. Today you become a truth-talker, one of us. Oh, don’t look for your father. I spoke to him. He knows. Doesn’t mind a little pain for you.’

Shade saw it. ‘You’re going to make a hole in my tongue, aren’t you?’

‘Clever boy. Here.’ He held out a narrow flint blade, very sharp, blood-stained, and folded Shade’s fingers around it. ‘When priest working, squeeze hard.’

‘I’ll cut my palm to shreds.’

‘True. But you forget other agonies…’

Now the priest stepped forward. Because of his own tongue plug he could barely speak, but his mime was clear enough. He had a bone needle that he would push up through Shade’s tongue. That would be followed by a length of aurochs horn, narrow-tipped but quickly widening. And then would come the stone plug, as wide as Shade’s thumb. The priest beckoned with one hand, holding the needle with the other, while Knuckle shoved him forward.

But a snailhead woman ran up. It was Eyelid. She had her baby on her hip, but she was pointing. ‘There.’ And she gabbled snailhead speech so fast Shade couldn’t follow.

Knuckle screamed in anger. He immediately let go of Shade and went running.

Shade turned to see. A group of snailhead men had hold of a struggling figure. The Root and his Pretani hunters were running over too.

The man the snailheads held was Shade’s brother, Gall.

For the second time that day, Shade ran after Knuckle. At the centre of a mob, Knuckle faced Gall. Both were held back by their countrymen, snailheads and Pretani. Others were running up, even children, intoxicated by excitement, eager to see the day’s latest spectacle. Kirike the Giver came running up too, pulling people away; his daughters followed, Zesi with an anguished expression on her face.

The Root forced his way through, brushing lesser men aside. Shade ran after his father.

Gall was filthy, ragged. He must have been living wild for months, since the incident at the summer camp. But tracks ran down his muddy, sand-coated face, as if he had been weeping. Knuckle, the muscles in his neck distended, was screaming abuse in his face, in his own language. As he strode up, the Root roared back in the Pretani tongue.

‘Enough,’ Kirike cried, trying to force his way through. ‘Enough! Speak in the traders’ tongue, all of you. What has been happening here while I’ve been away? Who is this man?’

‘My son,’ the Root rumbled.

‘I saw you were here,’ Gall said, his voice thick. ‘Father – I have not been far from here. I hunted. I lived as a man – but alone. And when I saw you-’

‘When you saw me, what?’ the Root said, silencing him. ‘Did you expect me to fix the mess you have made for yourself? Did you expect me to take you home like a lost calf? What sort of a man expects that?’

Kirike asked again, ‘What has happened here? Knuckle, what do you want?’

Knuckle pushed his face at Gall. ‘I want to know why this man killed my brother, and then ran away.’

‘Is this true?’

The Root glared at his son. ‘Well?’

‘Yes! Yes, I killed Gut! I can hardly deny it – all saw the spear thrown – it was a good kill, father, clean. Look at my brow. I fixed my own kill-tattoo.’ There were two lines cut into his forehead now, Shade saw, one more ragged than the other, and half-healed.

But the Root showed no pleasure. ‘A man does not kill for no reason. Why? What had this snailhead done to you?’

‘Nothing,’ Gall admitted.

‘Nothing? Nothing?’ Knuckle was screaming now. ‘Then why kill him?’

As if goaded, Gall yelled, ‘Because I could not kill my own brother!’

There was a shocked silence. Shade felt his own face burn. Zesi covered her eyes.

Kirike asked quick, incisive questions, and the truth came out. Gall had raged at the developing love between Zesi and Shade. Unable to cope with the consequences of striking down his brother, he had taken out his anger on a snailhead whose only crime had been to flirt briefly with Zesi.

The Root glared at his sons. ‘Let him go.’ He nodded to his hunters. ‘And you, Shade, come here. Stand before your brother. Let us speak the truth. When I sent you here I knew of Kirike’s two daughters. I promised the elder, Zesi, to Gall as a bride…’

‘You might have spoken to me first,’ Zesi snapped. ‘What am I, a piece of meat to be traded by strangers?’

The priest held her arm, his ornamental axe gleaming on his chest.

The Root said to Shade, ‘Yet you took the woman for yourself.’

Shade looked at Zesi, despairing. ‘It wasn’t like that-’

The Root said levelly, ‘You dishonoured your brother, and yourself. You dishonoured me. And you, Gall, in your rage and your cowardice – you should have faced your brother – you took a stranger’s life without purpose, and fled from the consequences. You too have dishonoured me.’

He took his sons’ upper arms and held them both before him, face to face. Shade was shocked by the hatred in Gall’s face – and yet this was a man who had destroyed himself, effectively, rather than take his brother’s life. Gall’s one act of fraternal loyalty, the only one Shade could remember in his life, even if it had come accompanied by a killing.

The Root pronounced, ‘Hear me now, all of you, you Pretani and you lesser folk. There is bad blood between my sons. That blood must be let. Otherwise it will fester. From now on I will have only one son. Only one of you will walk away from this place. Which one is up to you.’

Shade said, ‘You can’t-’

Gall growled, ‘He can.’

The Root said, ‘You others, you snailheads. You stand here and see me lose a son. Whichever of them survives, will you accept that as vengeance for your loss?’

The snailheads looked at Knuckle, who nodded, curtly.

‘Then let it be done-’

And Gall’s hands were immediately at Shade’s throat, massive, unbelievably powerful, crushing his windpipe. Gall, taller, pressed down; Shade fought to stay standing.

The surrounding people, shocked, stood back. Zesi cried out and might have run forward, but her father and sister held her back.

But Shade still had the snailhead knife in his hand – the toy knife meant to get him through the pain of the tongue stud. He worked it in his grip, pushing out the blade.

Gall, grunting with exertion, said through clenched teeth, ‘Brother, I should have finished you off that day at the camp. I should have strangled you at birth-’

And Shade drove the knife into his brother’s belly, under his tunic, straight into the flesh and through muscle walls, guts.

Gall grunted like a speared ox. Still he stood, though foam flecked his mouth and his eyes bulged. And still he crushed Shade’s throat. Shade, unable to breathe, saw him as if at the end of a holloway, long and deep and dark.

And so Shade braced himself, and pushed the blade upwards under Gall’s ribs and into his heart. Gall shuddered and groaned, and hot blood gushed over Shade’s hands, arms, stomach. At last those gripping fingers released their hold.

Gall fell forward on to Shade. He was heavy, and Shade, weakened, bloody, could barely hold him. But he lowered his brother to the ground, gently, and knelt over him.

The Root glared down at them, expressionless. Then he turned and walked away.

A wider ring of people stood, shocked, their mouths wide with horror. Ana had her arms around Zesi, who could not look at Shade.

Kirike came forward. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’ll clean you up – we’ll take care of your brother, we’ll talk to your priest-’

There was a rumble, like thunder, or an immense drum. It came from out to sea. People turned to the north, to the ocean, distracted, even Kirike, even Shade.

And a single wave, almost stately, anomalously tall, came washing from the sea to break high up the beach.