Stone spring

45

Through the night they huddled on top of the hill, Ana, Dreamer and Novu, with Dreamer’s baby cupped between their bodies. Other refugees crowded the slopes.

In the starlit dark, Ana slept only fitfully. All night Lightning cuddled up against Ana’s back, his head tucked in against her tunic, with occasional twitches, snuffles and yipped barks as he chased pine martens in his sleep. Once the baby stirred, hungry, and mewled; Dreamer held her close and fed her, murmuring soft words in her own transoceanic language.

Ana longed to be the one cuddling in, to be sleeping between her mother and her father as she used to when she was very small. But that wasn’t going to happen, not ever again.

They began to stir not long after dawn. Oddly Ana had just fallen into her deepest slumber, and she had trouble waking up.

Novu walked away and stepped behind a rock to make water; she could hear him groan from stiffness and bruises. Dreamer sat cross-legged, rocking her baby and murmuring to her, for a brief moment lost in the bond between them, but when Ana sat up Dreamer smiled warmly at her. Ana understood. Without Ana, Dreamer’s baby might not even be alive to see this morning. But with that thought came the memory of how she had been forced to abandon Arga.

Ana moved over to a broken heap of rocks, took off her loin wrap, and squatted to piss. The hill’s small summit, the flint lode, the sandstone tufted with grass and sparse heather, looked deceptively normal. After all, even the great third wave had not climbed as high as this. All around her people were moving, children and adults waking, and picking their way down the slopes.

Lightning came sniffing at Ana’s bare rump, wagging his tail, and she pushed him back. ‘Oh, get away, you silly dog…’ The dog roamed around, marking stones and patches of turf with sprinkles of urine, and he licked at the light dew on the blades of grass.

‘He’s thirsty,’ Novu observed, hitching his trousers. ‘Well, so am I. There’s no spring up here, is there? We’ve no food either.’

‘We’ll find water easily enough when we climb down,’ Dreamer said.

Ana asked, ‘Is it safe to go down?’

‘The sea’s gone back,’ Novu said, pointing north. ‘It looks normal to me. Lapping away as it always has. It’s what it’s done to the land that’s going to be interesting. Are you ready? There’s no point staying here.’

‘Help me with the baby,’ Dreamer said.

With Novu’s help Dreamer fixed Dolphin in her sling on her back. Ana pulled on her boots.

Then the three of them stood together, looking at each other. Ana flexed her arms and legs, spreading her hands; she was stiff, sore, but everything worked. ‘We’re all whole, at least. No broken limbs, no cracked heads.’

Novu was bare to the waist, his tunic ripped apart. Like the others he was covered in minor cuts, and bruises that were beginning to yellow. He said, ‘Today’s going to be difficult. Just remember – one footstep at a time. I learned that on the road. That’s how to get through the tough times.’

A bubble of fear and resentment burst inside Ana. ‘Brave words from the thief who hides away in a hole in the ground.’

Novu flinched.

Dreamer said, ‘That was yesterday, Ana. Today the world is different, and we are different people in it. I have a feeling we’re going to need each other.’

This was very adult, but Ana didn’t much want to be an adult right now. ‘Enough talking. Let’s go.’ She turned away, ignoring the others.

The dog ran around and barked, mouth open, tail wagging; he thought it was time for a walk. She led the way down the path they had climbed in such haste yesterday, with Lightning running at her heels. It was a well-worn track that led down from the flint lodes, a track she had walked many times.

It was a calm morning. She heard gulls calling somewhere, the distant sigh of breaking waves. Everything felt normal. That dismal flight yesterday was like something from a nightmare, not connected to the mundane reality of the morning at all.

Then, on the hill’s lower slope, she first came to the pale sand. She stepped forward onto it cautiously. White, full of stones and shells, it crunched under her feet.

From this ragged edge onwards the sand covered the ground like a layer of snow.

‘Look at this.’ Novu walked to a stand of trees, alder and lime. Most of the trees still stood, though one had been knocked flat, its trunk snapped. Novu kicked at the trees’ roots. ‘There’s no soil…’ Ana saw that the surviving trees were rooted to a reef of gravel. Only scraps of peat and topsoil and grass clung to the roots. ‘I never saw anything like it,’ Novu said. ‘It looks as if the trees grew out of the gravel bank.’

‘The waves,’ Dreamer said slowly. ‘If they sucked people out to sea, so they sucked away the earth itself.’

The dog was digging at the roots of one of the larger of the surviving trees. He pushed his small face forward and lapped. Ana remembered there had been a spring here where she had sometimes drunk herself. But Lightning backed off, staring at the water as if puzzled.

Novu bent down, cupped some of the water in his hand and sipped it. ‘Salty. Like the sea.’

‘It can’t be,’ Ana said. ‘There’s a spring here. Springs are fresh water.’

He shrugged and backed away. ‘Check for yourself. There’s nothing for us here.’

‘Let’s go on,’ Ana said.

She led them towards the beach. This was the way they had walked yesterday morning, but now everything had changed. Water stood in pools, briny and lifeless. Even the path they followed, trodden by generations of feet, had vanished under the strange all-covering layer of pale new sand.

The beach itself was littered with debris, with great banks of seaweed and driftwood, even whole trees, and sheets of turf, the skin of the land ripped off and dumped here. All the works of people had vanished, the drying racks for the fish, the boats. There was no sign of the fishing nets and tangled-up bodies. Maybe they had been swept to sea, or deposited somewhere else. But there was a reef at the high water mark of other sorts of corpses: fat seals, glistening fish, and many, many birds, their fragile wings broken and twisted.

A few people were here, looking dazed, poking among the beach’s litter. The dog nosed around seaweed heaps, curious. There was a gathering stink of rot, and scavenger birds circled. Novu climbed over the sea wrack, and Ana wondered spitefully if he was searching for his bag of stolen stones.

Dreamer pointed. ‘The dunes have gone – or they’re changed, at least.’ So they had; the neat line of dunes, bound together by marram grass, had been broken and smashed, and sand lay heaped up in disorderly piles. ‘And the middens.’

Novu said, ‘It’s as if those who made your world – the little mothers? – returned to smash up what they built.’

That swelling of fearful anger threatened to rise up again in Ana. ‘Whatever caused this was nothing to do with the mothers.’

Dreamer touched her shoulder, trying to soothe her. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Your father told me of your gods, in those long days and nights in the boat. The mothers built the world; perhaps now they will return to help you build again.’

‘Come on,’ Novu said, clearly shaken by Ana’s flare of anger, growing uneasy. ‘We need to get back to the mainland. That’s where we’ll find food and water, and people, and we can start sorting out this mess. Do you think the tide is low enough for us to cross the causeway?’ And he led the way west along the shore.

Dreamer followed, then Ana, and then the dog, frisky, anxious, his tongue lolling from his thirst.