Stone spring

31

A month after his midsummer arrival at Etxelur, Novu was building his home.

It was far from complete, but, only a short walk from the Seven Houses, already it was like nothing else in Etxelur. Within a boundary stone wall, two low boxy houses stood so close together they touched. Their walls were a weave of sapling wood plastered with mud, and their roofs were planks set horizontally and heaped with rough thatch. The ground around the entrance was trampled, and little grew here save for a cluster of tree mallows, their pink flowers a bright contrast to the paleness of the bare sandy soil.

Ana sat on the ground near the low, dark doorway, waiting for Novu to emerge. It was like the mouth of some ground-dwelling animal’s burrow. She could hear him moving around inside.

Somewhere a curlew called. It was a bright summer morning, the sky a washed-out pale blue that spoke of the intense heat that was to come later in the day. She wasn’t sure why she was here. Something about this stranger from the east fascinated her.

At last Novu came crawling out of the hole in the house wall. He was naked save for a scrap of cloth around his loins, his skin greasy, his hair tied back, and he smelled of oily smoke from his lamps. He carried a bowl full of his night soil. As he got to his feet, he seemed embarrassed to see Ana sitting there. ‘What do you want? I mean – sorry. Good morning. Let me get rid of this.’ He walked up and over a low dune’s shallow slope, and dumped the waste on the far side.

‘You’re a late riser.’

He grinned as he walked back. ‘Or you’re an early one. Have you been sitting there long? I don’t get much light in there.’

‘That’s obvious. It’s so weird that you bury yourself in the dark.’

‘But it reminds me of home.’ He lifted his head to the sun, closing his eyes, and sniffed the salty air. ‘Although I do admit it’s nice to smell something other than myself.’ His words were heavily accented, but his language was mostly Etxelur now, mixed with the word-rich jabber of the traders’ tongue.

He was good-looking, she thought, in his own dark way, strong-featured with the nostrils of that big shapely nose flaring as he drank in the air. When he had arrived here, after months of walking with the traders who had owned him as a slave, he had been scrawny, underfed, his muscles small and hard, like walnuts. Now he was filling out, and his bare skin had tanned a rich brown in the summer sun. But he would always be small compared to Etxelur men. Small in height, more lightly muscled, prone to flab, and with those oddly worn teeth.

He was watching her calmly. ‘See something you like?’

Embarrassed, she looked away. ‘No.’

‘So what are you doing here? You are a curious one, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose. I never met anybody like you before.’

‘I should think not. I came a very long way. You want to come in and take a look around?’

That was why she was here, but she looked into the dark hole dubiously.

‘Come on. You’ll have to crawl, mind, the door’s a bit low…’ He got down on his hands and knees and wriggled inside, disappearing like a huge bank vole vanishing into its hole.

She got to her knees and followed him. She could feel her back scraping the door frame.

Inside, she found herself in a space high enough for her to sit up but not to stand. Stone lamps filled with what smelled like whale oil burned smokily. The floor was flat, much of it paved with slabs of sandstone from the beach that must have been hard work to haul in here. A hearth was set in the centre of the floor, a circle of heavy stones, but there was no sign of fire.

The walls were flat and smooth; she could see the marks of his hands where he’d pressed and stroked the damp mud before it dried. Alcoves had been dug into the walls, and were heaped with objects. A second door had been cut into the wall, leading to an even darker space.

Novu was sitting on a pallet set against one wall. ‘Take your time. Let your eyes open to the dark. See what I’ve done.’ He pointed up. ‘I’m cutting a chimney. See the hole in the roof? When I break through I’ll clog it with thatch to keep the rain out. It’s been so warm I haven’t needed the fire yet.’ He wrapped his arms around his bare torso. ‘I know your winter is going to be colder than I’m used to. But I’ll be warm enough in here, with the fire.’

‘Where does that door go?’

‘The other room. There will be more rooms eventually.’

Rooms. A Jericho word that didn’t have a precise match in Etxelur. Here, houses weren’t divided up into rooms. ‘Is this how people live in Jericho?’

‘Not quite. I’ve seen places like it. This is the best I can do for now, until I start making bricks. When I make bricks I will build a better house. I will build many houses, all made of bricks, all jammed together.’ He grinned. ‘I will have many children and grandchildren, and we will live in houses as they do in Jericho.’

‘What’s in the holes in the wall?’

‘My stuff, and my treasures.’ He moved around the room, showing her heaps of garments, tools, fire-making gear, dried food, water sacks. His ‘treasures’ were stones, high-quality flint and bits of obsidian, some of them shaped into tools. He laid these things out on the floor.

She picked up an obsidian flake, finely worked, light, smooth, glinting in the lamp light. ‘This is beautiful.’

‘A gift from Loga. You know, the trader I came here with. Not as significant as the gift of my freedom. A reward for all the work I did helping him get himself and his wives across the Continent to this place. It comes from a lode quite near my home.’

She fingered other pieces of flint, richly textured, pale brown. ‘These look like Etxelur flint, from the island.’

‘I worked for these pieces too. Just as I worked for the obsidian.’ He sounded defensive.

‘I’m not denying it.’

‘For instance I help your father with his catches, when he comes in from the sea.’

‘Are you going to make tools?’

He picked up a flint core and hefted it in his hand, feeling its weight. ‘Oh, this stuff’s too good for tools.’

‘So why do you want it?’

He frowned, thinking it over. ‘Because it’s real. More real than us. Nothing lasts in this world, does it? Your clothes wear out. Your houses rot and fall down. Plants and animals wither. People grow old and die. Only the stone remains.’ He held up the flint. ‘Stone, that doesn’t die when we die.’

She looked at the stone, at the earnest boy with the strange accent, trying to understand. ‘Stone doesn’t die because it is already dead. People die, but…’ She thought of the clumps of mallow outside this very house. ‘Every spring, the world begins again. Why do you people live like this? All heaped up like rats. Pawing over bits of stone.’

‘Ana, in Jericho, there are single houses where more people live than in the whole of Etxelur.’ He gestured. ‘This is a huge country, and a rich one. But there’s nobody here! And your dwellings, those huts made of wood and seaweed – sometimes, if I look at them, and I look away, I barely see them at all. Just lumps on the ground.’ He held out his hand like a knife, the palm vertical. ‘In my country there is none of this blurring into the green. In Jericho, there is nothing but people. And pigs and chickens, obviously. And goats. But still, the point remains. Jericho is a totally human place. Carved out of the world, separate from it. I have to live like this – live my way. I learned that in all those long months walking with Loga, and the other who held me before him. I need to live with walls between me and the green – walls that will last. Otherwise I would go insane, I think.’

‘Some say you already are insane.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. So why are you hiding away in this hole with me?’ His insightful gaze made her uncomfortable. ‘How’s Knuckle?’

She turned away. ‘I don’t care about Knuckle.’

‘That snailhead cares about you. That’s the gossip, anyhow.’

All this was true. But Knuckle was too old for her, too strange, too complicated. She didn’t want to discuss this with Novu. ‘Who gossips with you?’

‘Arga. Ice Dreamer, though she knows even less about what goes on than me. That business with the Pretani was bruising for you, wasn’t it? I remember how it all blew up on the very day I arrived, at the Giving. One brother killing the other, who had killed a snailhead in turn… I barely knew what was going on.’

‘It was my sister’s row.’

‘Yes. But you were caught up in it, weren’t you? Maybe you feel nobody notices you, that you get brushed aside. Is this why you come to me?’ He grinned, clever, probing. ‘Coming here is an escape from home, isn’t it? Why, Ice Dreamer spoke to me the other day, and she said-’

‘Zesi. Knuckle. Ice Dreamer.’ She rolled onto her knees, and brushed away his laid-out stones with her arms. ‘I came to see you in your stupid house, with your stupid stuff. Not to talk about this.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He held up his hands. ‘I talk too much. It’s got me in trouble before. You should ask my father. Please, you can come talk to me any time-’

But she was already squeezing out through the doorway, it seemed narrower and tighter than when she’d gone in, and she emerged with relief into the open air. She plucked one of the mallows, pressed it to her nose, and walked away towards the dunes.