Stone spring

33

Led by the Root and Shade as usual, with Zesi and Jurgi bringing up the rear, the hunting party rounded a bend of the Great River of Albia. The forest stood all around them, tall trees growing right down to the water’s edge.

And there, lying in the water, was a canoe – a tremendous log, dug out and shaped, by far the largest canoe Zesi had ever seen.

Men stood on the riverbank by the canoe, or sat around a big smoking fire. They wore tattoos in the Pretani style. More men laboured in the canoe, polishing its surfaces, bailing out water. When they spotted the Root the men by the fire leaped to their feet and started jumping, waving, shouting. The Root’s hunters waved back.

‘So,’ the priest murmured to Zesi, ‘after all these days of walking, we have arrived. Evidently the Root will ride the rest of the way home in this mighty craft. I wonder how long these men have waited here for their leader to return.’

‘That canoe,’ Zesi mumbled.

‘What about it?’

‘Priest, it is huge.’ The men inside the canoe were dwarfed by the craft. And she saw now that the big central hull was flanked by outriders, four of them, fixed to the main hull with beams and ropes, there to keep the boat stable in the water. Each of the riders alone was larger than any canoe in Etxelur. She tried to imagine the labour involved in felling this immense tree, in shaping it as a canoe – the fires must have been banked day and night – and then somehow hauling it to the water.

The priest said dryly, ‘It had to be a big boat, Zesi. With men like the Root, even a simple canoe must be bigger than anybody else’s in the whole world. If you have power, you must flaunt it to impress.’

‘Well, I am impressed.’

The Root brushed by the fawning men by the fire and went straight to the boat, where they walked along one of the outrider beams and settled into a place near the prow. The bailing men cringed and kept out of his way.

Shade followed, and then Zesi and the priest. The boat was so massive it barely shifted in the water under their weight, almost as stable as if they walked on dry land. Zesi saw that the boat’s hollowed-out interior was finely worked, smoothed and greased from one end to the other, and the hull itself had been shaped to give the canoe a sharp prow and stern. Zesi had to sit among the Pretani hunters, on shallow log benches. Alder the medicine man, friendlier than the rest, made room for her.

A few of the men who had been by the fire jumped in now, to much jabbering in the Pretani tongue, and those who had been bailing took their places and pushed paddles into the water.

The canoe glided away from the bank. After a few strokes one of the rowers began to sing, a doleful but rhythmic chant, and the others joined in. It seemed to help them maintain the pace of the heavy paddling. The river here was broad, sluggish, calm, but they were heading upstream, against the current, and the paddlers were soon working hard, and sweat gleamed on grimy torsos.

Out on the river the heat was intense, the air humid. The water looked thick, almost oily, and was dense with life, with tiny fish that clustered around the boat and green fronds that waved under the water, and the fat pads of lilies by the shore. Insects swarmed over the surface, clouds of them that caught the sunlight, but they did not trouble Zesi. Sometimes Zesi thought she saw movement in the trees, in the solid canopy like a roof to either side of the river. Fleeting, elusive motion tracking the canoe, a blur of shadows, a glint of sharp eyes. She saw the Pretani mutter and point, and she thought she heard them say, ‘Leafy Boys.’

They turned a bend and startled a group of young deer that had come to the water. The animals, light-boned and big-eyed, watched the boat for a heartbeat, and then bounded away into the forest’s shade, almost silent, their muscles working with a springy suppleness, their white tails bobbing.

‘The men who paddle,’ the priest said to Alder in the heroes’ tongue. ‘They are not like the others…’ They lacked the Pretani’s characteristic arrays of facial kill scars and tree tattoos, though some had other sorts of designs on their bodies. One man had his whole ears slit in two from the lobes upward, with the two halves bound by some kind of thread. They all looked skinny, dirty, subdued, and some bore injuries, including stripe marks on their backs.

Alder smiled. ‘They are slaves.’ The priest had to translate for Zesi; there was no such word in the Etxelur language.

‘Why would a man be kept as a slave?’

‘He doesn’t get the choice,’ the priest said. ‘Like Novu, remember? As a slave you work or you die.’

‘In fact,’ murmured Alder, ‘you work and then you die.’

Zesi asked, ‘But why would you keep a slave, then?’

The priest said, ‘With his slaves the Root can gather more food, to feed more hunters, who go out and capture more slaves. It is how he extends his power. And without slaves I doubt if he could have made this boat, for instance.’

Zesi looked at the paddlers with horror – and yet with interest. How would it be to command such men, to have such power? To be able to treat another human being as if he was another limb… But her father’s face swam into her mind, and she imagined what he would say if she voiced such ideas.

‘It is not our way to own slaves,’ she said firmly.

‘Let us hope it will never become our way to be enslaved… Look – a settlement.’

You could see it through a screen of willows at the water’s edge, a clearing cut into the forest, or perhaps burned, with houses roofed with leafy thatch. As the slaves’ singing wafted across the still air, children came running down to the water’s edge and shouted and jumped, waving.

The water front had been cleared, and a jetty had been set up in the water, a platform of logs set on piles driven into the river mud. The boat pulled into the bank. A couple of the Root’s men jumped out and tied up the boat, while others came hurrying from the settlement beyond, typical Pretani, shouting and waving.

Again the Root did not pause. As soon as the boat was fixed he stood and stalked off, and walked right through the settlement. Shade, Zesi, the priest and the rest had to scramble out of the boat and follow him.

Zesi glanced back at the paddling slaves in the boat, who were doubled over, panting, exhausted. Yet a Pretani was already shouting at them, gesturing, and they picked up their paddles to make the journey back.

They hurried through the settlement in the wake of the Root. Among the houses Zesi glimpsed the usual mob of children, dogs, food pits, hearths, people preparing food or working at stone blades and spear shafts and bits of clothing. In this place, most of the workers were women.

Zesi met the eye of one girl, baby at her breast, who laboured over a huge wooden bowl of stew at a fire. She seemed very young – younger than Ana – and, pale and blonde, she looked nothing like the Pretani. Whereas women ‘owned’ Etxelur, men owned Albia; if you married a Pretani man you were expected to come live in such a settlement as this, live his way. Dull, languid, drenched with sweat, the girl barely seemed aware of Zesi’s presence. Zesi had to hurry on.

Once across the clearing they cut into the forest, following a wide track kept clear of new growth; Zesi could see where saplings and bracken had been hacked back, and to either side oaks towered. The trail ran straight, and the Root led confidently.

Soon the way opened out into another, much larger clearing. This roughly circular space was dominated by a single oak at the centre, wide and tangled, ancient even by the standards of this forested peninsula. Around the oak a ring of posts had been set up, each a tree trunk massive in itself, cleaned of bark, planed and cut so that the posts were all but identical. And outside the ring of posts there was a circle of trees, all of them oaks, some quite young, none as massive as the big specimen at the centre. It was obvious they had been deliberately planted, or perhaps moved. There were only a handful of houses, massive and old-looking, their hide covers stained black by smoke.

Aside from the track they had followed, Zesi glimpsed more ways cut into the forest, leading off from this place. Maybe this was how the Pretani lived – inside the forest itself, in these clearings cut and burned into the tree cover, linked by their wide, straight ways. And if the Root lived here perhaps the network was centred on this huge, impressive site.

The Pretani men dumped their packs and stripped off sweat-soaked tunics. More men, and a number of women and children, came out of the houses to greet them. The women did not seem so deferential here. One of them walked up to the Root himself and immediately started to harangue him.

Shade saw Zesi staring, and he grinned. ‘My mother. And his number one wife. He has several, as is the custom for the Root. But she is the one who counts, the one he has to listen to-’

There was a cry, unearthly and agonising. Zesi saw the branches of that big central tree rustle, and out leapt a figure, a man, green as the tree itself. He dropped to the ground on all fours, capered over to the Root, and performed an odd dance, more animal than human. Then the green stranger sniffed the air, and ran straight over to Jurgi.

Zesi felt for her blade.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Jurgi murmured. ‘I’ve heard of this. This is their priest – he lives in their most sacred tree. It’s rare for him to come down to the ground at all.’

The Pretani priest stood tall. Zesi saw that he was no more than a boy, slim, naked under a kind of net cloak of green leaves, though his skin itself was dyed a livid green. Young he may have been but he evidently recognised Jurgi as one of his own sort. He jabbered a lengthy speech in Pretani. Jurgi replied with a few words, backed up by phrases in the traders’ tongue. Then the priest scurried away and clambered up his tree, lithe as a cat.

‘What did he say?’ Zesi asked.

‘It was a welcome, of a sort,’ Jurgi said.

‘What sort?’

‘If we keep quiet and obey all the rules, we might live long enough to be dishonoured by defeat in the wildwood hunt. That sort.’

Shade approached them. ‘Look – you can use the house over there. There’ll be a feast tonight, to welcome home my father. It would be best to stay out of the way.’

Zesi snorted. ‘Not much of a way to treat a guest.’

The priest touched her arm to hush her. ‘Look over there.’ He gestured towards the Root and his wife, who was, Zesi saw now, pointing at her and Jurgi.

‘They’re arguing about us,’ she said.

Shade said with a tired smile, ‘About you, Zesi, I’m afraid. About all that happened at the Giving. For my father the issue is settled. Not for my mother, who rejects the honour of men. You being here is – provocative.’

Zesi said angrily, ‘If that woman wants some kind of showdown-’

‘No,’ said both Shade and Jurgi, together. ‘Please,’ said Shade. ‘Just stay out of the way. Look – don’t come out of your house tonight. During the feast. You may not like what you’d see.’

Zesi did not enjoy being hidden out of sight. But she stomped off to the house. The house itself was massively built, laden thick with leaves sandwiched between two hide layers, and it was cool inside. There was a hearth, unlit, a couple of hide pallets stuffed with leaves, and bowls of water.

It had been a long journey. After a wash to rinse the grime off her limbs and a soak of her feet, and a piss into a pit at the rear of the house, with relief Zesi lay down on one of the pallets. It crackled softly, smelling of autumn and wood smoke, and she fell into a deep sleep.

She didn’t wake until evening, with the scent of cooked meat in her nostrils.

She sat up, suddenly hungry. The house was dark. By the light of a lamp of oil burning in a stone bowl, the priest was unwrapping a parcel of meat covered with leaves. He sat by the hearth but the fire still wasn’t lit; the night was too warm.

She could hear chanting outside, laughter, running footsteps, a kind of singing.

She came to join Jurgi. ‘They’re having their feast.’ She found her blade, grabbed a bit of meat and sawed at it.

‘Yes. Making quite a row at times. This is the Pretani in the wild, I guess. And I think the Root is using his Etxelur gift, the herbs and unguents and seeds. I’m glad he didn’t ask me to administer it for him-’

A scream cut through the night like a blade, making them both jump.

Zesi hurried to the door flap.

The priest called after her, ‘Zesi – no – you heard what Shade said.’

‘I’m just going to peek.’ She loosened the flap’s ties, making a crack so she could see out.

Fires blazed all around the grove, making a light bright as day. People danced, frenzied, men and women alike, even older children, in the flickering shadows of the ring of poles. There were no drums, no flutes, as there would have been in Etxelur; the only music came from the people’s ragged song. The Root and his green-clad priest stood before the great old tree at the heart of the clearing.

And a man was suspended from the holy tree, his arms outspread, his wrists tied by lengths of rope to the branches. Zesi could see how he shifted his weight, agonised, struggling to breathe, his face a grimace in the firelight.

It was Shade.

Jurgi’s hand was on her shoulder; otherwise she might have lunged forward. ‘Stay,’ he whispered. ‘This is their way. This is Shade’s way. Come back inside.’

But she shook him off and stayed to see more.

The Root stood on a log before his son. He held up a blade and swiped it across Shade’s forehead, creating a vivid red gash. She understood. This would be the kill tattoo, a memory of Shade’s brother that he would carry for ever.

The blood ran in a sheet over Shade’s forehead and into his eyes. Suspended, he thrashed, but made no sound.