Stone spring

37

Ana led the way along the track across the Flint Island marsh, with Novu following, Dreamer with her baby in a sling on her back, and then Arga. Arga, at least, was singing the ancient song of the trail, which she was trying to learn. Nobody else seemed happy.

The track felt solid underfoot to Ana. But then, earlier in the year, she herself had helped set down a new layer of logs on this very track, cut and shaped, to press down on the old. Sometimes she wondered how long this had been going on, how many generations had worn away while the rows of logs, one on top of the other, had been pushed down ever deeper into the soft mud, the soaked and rotten wood of the lowest at last dissolving away.

The four of them had crossed the causeway and come to this marsh on the north side of the island to show Novu and Dreamer a new place, a new kind of landscape for them, and maybe to trap some birds or an otter or two. It had been her father’s idea, a way for them all to get to know each other better, his daughter and the two newcomers. So Kirike had pronounced, before he had got into his boat and paddled away over the horizon with Heni, once again leaving Ana to work it all out.

The sourness wasn’t just to do with this pack of strangers and misfits, Ana thought. Everything felt wrong this late summer afternoon. It was too hot, the air dank and clammy and full of midges, the sun too bright and reflecting off the standing water. There was something odd in the air, a kind of tension. It was a day when she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.

But dragonflies hovered over the water, and on patches of dryer land butterflies flickered between purple sedge and pale pink-white cuckoo flowers. The birds were beautiful too. They disturbed a reed bunting, the white collar around its black head bright as it flapped off indignantly. And a flock of lapwings took to the air, flying so tight and close it seemed impossible they didn’t collide with each other.

Novu was startled by the lapwings. As usual these days he carried a big skin pack on his back; Ana had no idea what he was carrying in it, but its weight made him sweat. ‘Those things were close.’

‘Lapwings rarely attack people,’ Ana said dryly.

He glanced to either side of the path, which cut across sodden ground. ‘The water looks deep just here.’

‘So it is. The path is safe.’

‘How do you know to walk here?’

Arga piped up, ‘Because this is where the logs are!’

Novu grinned, good-natured enough. ‘Yes, yes. What I mean is, how did your grandmothers know where to put the logs in the first place?’

‘The song tells you where,’ Arga said, and she sang, ‘ “Over the water bridge, and by the smiling ridge, walk to the afternoon sun, until you come-” ’

‘Which came first, the trail or the song?’

‘The trail,’ Ana said.

‘The song,’ Arga said.

‘Maybe a bit of both,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘It is the same in my country. The land is overlaid by the lore and tradition of the past. And over and through this landscape of memory move the living.’

‘But it’s all so strange. There’s nothing here. At home we build walls. Marker stones!’ He stood on the causeway, in the middle of the marsh, and held up his arms. ‘In Jericho, at any moment, you know exactly where you are.’

‘Well, you’re not in Jericho now,’ Arga said. And she ran at Novu and shoved him in the back.

He flailed comically, then went into the water head first. He came up coughing, reeds clinging to his body, a sticky slime hanging like drool from his face. The water wasn’t quite knee deep, but, pulled back by his heavy pack, he was having trouble standing in the soft mud.

Laughing, Ana and Dreamer knelt down and pulled him out, landing him on his belly on the log path. He managed to stand. He had his foot stuck in an eel wicker basket. Panting, dripping, he said, ‘Thanks a lot, Arga.’

‘At least it shut you up,’ Ana said. She began to wrestle the basket off his foot. ‘This is one of Jaku’s. He’ll be furious.’

They got the wrecked trap off him, threw it back in the water, and continued on.

At the edge of the marsh the land rose up into a line of dunes before the beach, the marsh green giving way to yellow-brown sand. Here Ana stopped, shucked off the pack she was carrying and dumped it on the ground. ‘We’ll get ourselves set up here, it’s dry enough. Then we’ll see what we can catch in the marsh.’

Dreamer said, ‘Arga, will you help me down with the baby? She’s due a feed.’

Arga happily lifted the baby out of its sling on Dreamer’s back. She unfolded its wrap while Dreamer found a dry place to sit, and dug out fresh dry moss to pack around the baby to absorb its soil.

Novu, still dripping wet, dumped his pack on the ground beside Dreamer and walked a little further up the dune slope.

Ana followed him. The sand was soft and gave easily, but there was a better grip from the clumps of dune grass, long, tough, deep-rooted.

They reached the crest of the dune. This was the north coast of Flint Island, where the great crescent-shaped middens faced out to sea. To the north, beyond the scattered rocks where seals lay languid in the heat, there was nothing but the sea lying still and flat.

‘You have slime in your hair,’ Ana said. She scraped it away with the side of her hand.

‘Thanks… Incredible.’

‘What is?’

He waved a hand. ‘The sea. All that emptiness. I walked for month after month to get here. If Jericho is the centre of the world, here I am at its very edge.’

She frowned. ‘The edge of the world? But the sea is full of life. Fish and dolphins and whales. Look, you can see the seals.’ She pointed. ‘I think that’s my father, fishing.’

‘Your eyes are better than mine.’

‘To me, this is the centre. The shore, Etxelur, the sea, the whole of Northland, the estuaries, the beaches, the tidal pools, and the fringes of forest where we hunt. If you go too far south there’s nothing but forest, choking the land. That’s the edge.’

‘I see an edge. You see a centre. Can a world have two centres?’

‘I don’t know… Ask the priest.’ She felt snappy, irritable, her head somehow stuffy. ‘Can’t you ever just talk about normal things?’

But he didn’t reply. He seemed distracted, his eyes squinting against the brilliant sunlight, his lips pursed in a frown. ‘Listen.’

There was a sound like thunder, rolling in off the sea, as if from a storm very far away.

And Dreamer called up from the base of the dune, ‘Ana? I think you’d better come down and see this.’ She had opened Novu’s pack.

Novu stared, horrified, then ran down the dune. In the boat, the sound of thunder made Heni sit up. Kirike had thought he was asleep.

The boat rocked at Heni’s sudden movement. But it was already full of a healthy catch of salmon and, bottom-heavy, settled back on a smooth sea.

Heni fixed his hat on his head and looked around. ‘You heard that?’

‘If it was a storm it was far away…’

They both sat silently, listening, the only sounds their breathing, the lap of the big, slow waves, the gentle creaking of the laden boat, the net ropes scraping against the boat’s hull.

The two men had paddled off to the north-east of Flint Island, out over the deep sea. From here much of the mainland was out of sight, only the island itself visible in the misty air. Kirike liked to be distant, so far out that the land was reduced to a kind of dream, and the world shrank down to his boat and the steady work of the fishing, and the companionship of Heni, the most enduring relationship in his life.

But was there to be a storm? The weather today was hard to read. The air was hot and, out on the breast of the sea, promised to get a lot hotter. The sky was free of cloud but there was a washed-out mistiness about it. The day felt odd to Kirike. Tetchy. Skittish.

Heni asked, ‘Can you have thunder without a storm?’

‘Maybe it’s a big storm very far away.’

‘Maybe. But do you remember the day of the Giving?’ On that day too there had been a rumble out of a cloudless sky, and a big, strange wave. Men whose life depended on listening to the moods of sea and air couldn’t help but remember something like that. ‘Something’s going on. Maybe the little mother of the ocean fell out of bed.’

Kirike laughed. ‘Twice in a month?’

Heni sighed. ‘So do you want to go back?’

Kirike glanced at the catch, the big, heavy fish that lay glistening in the bilge. ‘Nobody would blame us if we did. We’ve enough already.’ The salmon were early this year. The autumn was the best time to catch them, when they came swimming in from the ocean, funnelling into the big river estuaries on their way to their spawning grounds upstream. All you had to do was lower a net into the river, and let the fish swim in. It was much too early for the peak catches now, but this late summer day had been fruitful enough: there were times when the little mothers were kind to their hard-working children. But still… ‘Do you want to go back?’

Heni lay back in the boat’s prow, his broad-brimmed leather hat tipped forward to keep the sun off his face, and chewed on a bit of wood. ‘Seems a waste of the sunshine. Thought I saw some dolphins playing further out. We could try driving a few ashore.’

‘Sounds like hard work.’

Heni squinted up at the sky. ‘Or we could just lie here and soak up the heat. Maybe we deserve it. We had enough months freezing our arses off when we got lost in the winter. I sometimes feel like my bones never thawed out.’ And as if to prove the point he coughed, a deep, racking heave that twisted his body. He had to hold onto his hat to keep it from falling off.

It was a winter cough, a cough that should have dried out by now but had clung to his lungs all summer. Kirike had a deep guilty fear that this was one legacy of their unlikely jaunt across the ocean that Heni was never going to be free of.

Heni said, ‘You’ll have to face Ana’s nagging when we get back.’

‘That’s not fair… She’s not happy.’ He thought back over conversations with Ice Dreamer. ‘Since her mother died, her whole world has fallen apart. That’s what her nagging is about. Just anxiety. I think in her head she longs to put everything back the way it was.’

‘But you never can. And then there’s Ice Dreamer and her kid. Living in your own house! That can’t be easy for Ana.’

Kirike turned away. ‘She’s nothing to be jealous about.’

‘So you haven’t tupped Dreamer yet.’

‘Little mothers help me, but you’re coarse sometimes.’

Heni laughed, but it broke up into another cough. ‘Oh, come on. She’s a shapely one now she’s over her pregnancy, and a bit of life to her too. And she’s suckling, isn’t she?’ He winked. ‘So she can’t get pregnant again.’

‘It’s not like that… It’s less than a year since Sabet.’

‘Ah.’ Heni nodded. ‘I know. I’ll tell you what I think. I never saw two people closer than you and Sabet. You fit together like a bone in its socket. And then you lost her. Give yourself time. Dreamer’s a smart woman. She’ll wait, if she wants you. I needed the time.’

Heni hardly ever spoke of his own past. ‘You’re thinking of Meli.’

‘It was different for me when she went. The boys, the ones who had lived past childhood, were grown, off with their wives and their own kids. I was free. And once I was over the loss I found the world was full of willing widows.’

That was always true. Men often died younger than women, as they pursued more dangerous occupations like forest hunting and deep-sea fishing – but women died too. So there were always widows and widowers, often with broods of growing children. In Etxelur men and women took only one spouse at a time, unlike the Pretani, say. First marriages were always delicately arranged and negotiated, to build ties between communities. But after that the rules were relaxed.

‘Willing widows, and you tried them all out,’ Kirike said.

‘And across the ocean too,’ Heni said, and he yawned hugely. ‘I hope all those hairy girls with their flat faces and strange eyes remember my name to tell their good-looking children… Oh.’

The whole boat was lifted up into the air.

Kirike, startled, gripped the boat’s frame. The surge was smooth, but powerful and relentless, and completely unexpected on such a smooth sea.

And then it passed. The boat slid down the face of the water and came to rest, bobbing slightly, creaking.

They stared at each other. It had been a wave, a single huge muscle of water that had lifted them as if in the palm of a huge hand. They could see it passing on towards the shore, a glistening hump.

‘By the first mother’s left tit,’ Heni said, ‘I never felt anything like that in my life.’

Kirike shook his head; he felt too hot, his thinking fuzzy. Two strange things in one day. ‘Do you think it had something to do with that thunder we heard?’

‘Maybe.’

The wave receded. Diminished by distance it looked harmless – soon it was hard even to make out. But Kirike knew from experience that it would grow when it approached the land, the water heaping up on itself. ‘That is a big wave,’ he said.

‘And it will break when it gets to the shore.’

‘Yes.’

They stared at each other for a heartbeat. Then they hauled up their nets and reached for their paddles.