Stone spring

43

When Ana, Novu and Dreamer staggered to Arga’s parents’ house, Rute and Jaku were both inside. Lightning had followed them back from the beach, and when the three of them came in he jumped up at Ana, tail wagging in pleasure.

Jaku was stunned to see them. Their presence pushed back the nameless fears in his head, just a little.

But Rute continued preparing a fire in the hearth. She barely looked up. Since they had watched the sea take Josu, Jaku didn’t know what was going on in his wife’s mind.

Now Jaku took in the state of the three of them, Ice Dreamer draped over Novu, Ana clutching Dreamer’s baby. They were panting, soaked, battered, all of them smeared with blood and sea-bottom mud. Novu was all but naked, as if the clothes had been ripped off his back.

And his daughter was missing. Somehow he hadn’t seen it immediately. ‘Where’s Arga? Wasn’t she with you? You were going down to the sea-’

‘We got caught by the second wave,’ Ana said. ‘We hung on…’

Novu insisted, ‘We have to go on. All of us. Get to the high ground. As high as possible above the next wave.’

‘What next wave? Where’s Arga? ’ Jaku faced Ana. He wanted to shake her, but she held the baby close.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ana said, desolate. ‘She hurt her leg. I had the baby. I couldn’t carry Arga too-’

Rute, still working the fire as if this was a normal day, just a friendly visit, actually smiled. ‘Arga’s a strong swimmer. She’ll be all right in the sea.’

Ana said, ‘Rute. Aunt – you have to come with us. It might not be safe here.’

‘No, no, I’ve got this fire to build. Arga’s going to be cold and wet when she gets in. And hungry, mark my words. She takes a lot of feeding, that girl!’ She kept heaping up peat blocks, and she inspected a bowl of broth hanging on a rope from a house post.

Jaku touched Ana’s arm. ‘She’s been this way since the beach. At first she was all right – she reacted quicker than I did. But then the first wave came and took poor Josu, just like that. Since then she’s been like this.’

‘You have to come,’ Novu said grimly. ‘If the next wave is bigger than the second, as the second was bigger than the first-’

Jaku looked back at his wife, despairing, his head full of a formless anxiety over Arga. ‘It’s no use. Even if I tried to drag her we’d be too slow. We’re going to have to take our chances here. Who knows? Maybe there won’t be another wave.’

Ana’s eyes brimmed. ‘Oh, Jaku-’

‘Go.’ Go, he thought, before I begin to hate you for abandoning my daughter. ‘Take her, Novu.’

Novu nodded curtly. Still supporting Dreamer, he took firm hold of Ana’s arm and dragged her out of the house.

Lightning followed, wagging his tail, but then looked back at Jaku, obviously confused. Jaku made a sweeping gesture after Ana. ‘Go with Ana, you stupid dog! Ana, call him.’

‘Lightning! Come on, boy!’ Lightning, thinking he was going to play, ran after her, yapping.

Jaku went back to his wife, who was continuing to build her fire. He knelt beside her. ‘You’re doing a good job.’

She smiled. ‘You know me. The most important skill in the world, Mama Sunta used to say, knowing how to make a good fire. Could you pass me more kindling? There’s a new heap in the corner.’

So they worked in silence. Jaku deliberately thought of nothing else but the fire, the fine art of layering the fuel over the kindling so there were plenty of gaps for the air to flow through. At length it was time for Jaku to unwrap the ember from last night. He placed it reverently in the middle of the fire. Rute took some bits of dried moss and dropped them on the ember, blowing on them as they started to smoke.

But then she sat back and looked at the floor. ‘Oh. That will make a mess of things.’

Cold, muddy sea water was seeping over the floor. It was coming in from the door, which faced north like all the houses in Etxelur, a steady flow that soon became a gush. They stood up, suddenly ankle-deep in cold sea water.

There was a roaring, like some huge gruff animal approaching, and the sky seemed to darken.

Jaku held his wife and hugged her close. ‘It would have been a good fire,’ he murmured.

‘Yes. Shame it’s going to waste.’

The ground shook. He felt his heart expand with a huge love, for his wife, his daughter, for this place where he’d lived such a happy life. He longed for Arga, but it was better that she wasn’t here – that there was a chance she was alive somewhere else. ‘You know, Rute-’

The third wave was like a slap from a giant, smashing the house and ending their lives in an instant. Ana, Novu and Dreamer reached the summit of Flint Island’s single low hill, which had long ago been cut open to reveal its precious flint lode. They flung themselves down, exhausted.

Ana handed Dreamer her baby. Dreamer hugged Dolphin close, murmuring, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ in her own tongue and Ana’s, over and over.

More people came struggling up the hill, children, adults carrying infants, some burdened with bags of tools or clothes. Ana knew everybody by name. Nobody spoke, for there was little to say.

Only Lightning was full of energy. He ran around, sniffing the baby’s wrap and tugging at the adults’ tunics, wagging his tail in his demands to play. Eventually he saw a pair of pine martens, driven to this high ground as the people had been, and ran off, barking.

There was an interval when the sea looked calm, as if it had returned to normal, settling back to its usual tide line. Then Ana saw the third wave. Rushing in from the horizon, it was a wall of grey water that would have towered even over its predecessors.

The beach, littered with corpses and struggling people still tangled in the fishing nets, was covered over, erased.

Then the wave broke over the dunes, and the great curving middens, already eroded, were broken open. Ana saw the pale glint of exposed bone, the work of uncounted generations undone in an eye blink. The water pushed through the dune line and into the lower land beyond, pooling across meadows, tearing whole trees out by their roots, crushing houses. It did not stop until it poured into the calmer waters of the bay behind the island, and had covered all of Etxelur.