Stone spring

48

The Year of the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox. It was a huge relief to Zesi when she and the priest at last emerged from the forest cover.

It was around noon. She and Jurgi faced an open landscape of low hills studded with stands of trees, through which snaked the shining trail of a wide, sluggish river – a river that would head northward, just as they would, until it and they reached the sea. The sky was a deep, clear blue, cleansed by recent rains, and fat white clouds drifted. An autumn sky, she thought.

And as they walked into the sunlight Jurgi turned around, raised a grimy face to the sun, and, walking backwards, began to sing a song in praise of the little mother of the sky.

‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ Zesi grumbled.

‘And you’re a misery.’ A cloud of midges hummed around his head; distracted, he swatted at them. ‘What a relief it is to break out of that awful dense clinging forest with those mad Pretani. Like being in a great green belly.’ He breathed in deep and spread his arms, and for a moment she feared he was going to sing again. ‘The sky and the sea – the greatest gifts of the first mother. Just to stand here – you can feel your mind expanding, filling the world.’

She grumbled, ‘When I look at that sky all I see is a threat of rain. When I look at the land I see the distance we still have to travel before we get home. And when we get home I will see only the work that has to be done before the winter comes, all the things that my father won’t have got around to sorting out yet.’

‘You are a leader,’ he said. ‘And that’s a good thing. We need leaders. Nothing would get done otherwise. But leaders need calm too. You can share some of your energy with me. And I will share my calm with you.’

‘We’ll see,’ she said, noncommittal. There was a bite in the wind from the north, a breeze that sent ripples scudding across the long grass. ‘Look how low the sun is, even though it’s noon. The year is late. It took us much longer to work our way back out of the forest than it took to go the other way.’

‘Are you surprised? Those trails they follow are narrower than a stoat’s back passage. Shade and his boys probably hoped we would never make it out at all.’

‘I told you, if I never hear that name again, I’ll be happy.’

Jurgi grunted. ‘And now that he’s buried his father and brother, dead at his own hands, Shade probably feels the same way about you. Anyway, come on.’ He turned around and strode off north, his pack on his back. ‘We’ll eat up a bit more distance before we have to make camp for the night.’

She followed his lead, hitching her own pack on her back, settling her stabbing spear in the straps, and marching on.

The priest seemed to have thrived on the adventure. He had become stronger, healthier in every way since joining her on this summer jaunt. She had to admit he had been a good companion during this long summer of walking.

But what had she taken away from her journey? Her understanding of the world had expanded hugely. She now knew the country of the Pretani; she no longer thought of the Pretani as mere savages but had glimpsed their culture, their background. Maybe you had to leave home to learn about the world – even to learn about home itself.

But these were lessons she had learned at what felt like great cost.

She hadn’t wielded the blades that had been plunged into the bellies of the dead men. She hadn’t created Pretani society with all its peculiar tensions and challenges. But if she had never existed, the Root and Gall would probably still be alive, and Shade would still be the bright, curious, loving boy she had met, instead of the bitter thing he had become in the course of a single summer. She’d made a mess of her time in Etxelur too, in her father’s absence. What was it about her that caused her to trail death and unhappiness wherever she went? It was the darkness in herself she’d had to confront this summer that disturbed her most, more than all the horrors she had seen in Albia.

And then, of course, there was the baby.

It was her first child. She had no idea how it was supposed to feel, growing inside her. She could have asked Jurgi. In Etxelur tradition medical lore was scattered in everybody’s heads, which was how her father had been competent enough to deliver Ice Dreamer’s baby in a boat out on the ocean – but the priest, above all, guarded and supervised that lore. But pride kept her silent. She was the experienced hunter, she was in control while they were away from home. She did draw comfort from the priest’s silence on the matter. She had the feeling that if there had been something to be worried about he would have spoken out.

This priest had a way of guiding you without opening his mouth at all. Curse the man!

But despite everything she was, at last, going home. Keeping up with the priest, she walked briskly, swinging her arms, concentrating on the simple pleasure of not having to pick her way along some cramped, confusing trail in the enclosure of the woods, and relishing the raspberries and blackberries they plucked as they marched.

Suddenly Jurgi stopped dead. He breathed in deeply. ‘Why – I’m sure I can smell salt.’

She sniffed suspiciously. She could smell it too. They shouldn’t be smelling the ocean this far south. Something was wrong.

They didn’t speak further, and walked on. They sheltered that night in a copse of trees, dominated by an old oak. But when they awoke in the morning that smell of salt in the air was stronger.

The scent gathered in the days that followed. And they started to notice changes in the land.

They came to a stand of trees, obviously dying, their roots waterlogged, their leaves limp. Zesi approached cautiously. Through her boots she felt the coldness of the damp ground around the tree roots. Only the alders seemed to be flourishing. One big oak that must have survived centuries was clearly suffering. There was no sign of life in the soggy undergrowth, no voles stirring. She found the mouth of a badger sett, stopped up with leaves and abandoned.

She touched the bark of the silent oak, then crouched down by its roots. A few acorns floated in a puddle, and she collected a handful absently. Then she dipped a finger in the water and tasted it.

‘Salt?’ the priest asked.

‘Salt, yes. I think I remember this place. We are still at least a day from home, from the coast and the sea. How can salt water be poisoning these trees, this far inland?’ She looked north, troubled; she sensed a great silence. ‘Something has happened, priest.’

‘Yes. Though I can’t imagine what.’

It got worse the next day. They saw more dead trees, more standing puddles of water that always proved to be brackish. In one place the river opened out to a marsh, where at this time of year the wading birds should have been flocking, preparing for their flights to their winter homes, and the reeds turning from green to brilliant gold. But there were no birds, and the reeds were wilted and the willows bare. The place stank of salt and rot and death, and Zesi and Jurgi made a detour to avoid it.

Then they started to notice a strange covering over the land, a pale, whitish, sandy mud. It had clearly been there for some time, many days or even months, for it had been worked on by the rain and was washing away into rivulets and streams. But in places it stood thick, banked up like snow. Zesi bent to explore this strange stuff; it was gritty and full of stones and broken shells from the sea, and very salty on the tongue.

As they walked on the blanket of pale mud grew thicker, until it covered whole swathes of land. In places it included big blocks of peat, torn from the ground. Sometimes it obscured familiar features in the landscape, making tracks hard to spot. There were no raspberries to pluck now, nothing to eat, even fresh water rare.

But then they came to a place where somebody had taken a stick and scrawled in the mud, making the symbol of Etxelur, the three concentric rings and the radial slash. They both stood over this, oddly reluctant to go on.

‘Hello! Hello!’ A man stood by a copse, carrying a wicker basket. He was waving vigorously. His call had been in the Etxelur tongue. ‘By moon and sun, I’m glad to see you, Zesi, Jurgi, we all will be!’

He was Matu, a friend of Zesi’s father. They sat together, and shared dried meat and water.

His skin tunic was filthy, his legs were coated with the white dirt, and his basket was less than half full of acorns. He had been out since dawn, he said. They were half a day from home. ‘But you have to come further south every day to find acorns, to find a tree that’s not been poisoned by the Great Sea. I’ve never known an autumn like it. Well, none of us have. We’re trying to get ready for the winter, we all are. But I sometimes wonder if I’m working off more fat than I’ll get back from my share of the acorns. But what can you do?’

Ana and Jurgi glanced at each other. The Great Sea?

‘Tell us what happened,’ Jurgi said gently.

So Matu told his story. He mostly spoke to the priest. Jurgi seemed to have a knack of listening, of keeping the man’s anxious gabble flowing. But neither of them knew what to make of Matu’s account, of how the ocean had risen up and smashed Etxelur, drenched the land with salt water and mud, and poisoned every stream and well.

This wasn’t the Matu Zesi had known, this gaunt, anxious man with the hollow eyes, and gabbling speech. She’d never been much interested in him. He was a decade or so older than her, quiet, not particularly competent, short, squat, balding, with watery eyes. He was never a leader, never the sort of man who could challenge or excite Zesi. She supposed that without people like Matu no community like Etxelur could exist – there would be no stage for the more exciting exploits of people like herself. But now this uninteresting, unprepossessing man lived on where so many others had died.

And there was something crucial he wasn’t telling them.

She broke into Matu’s descriptions and grabbed his arm. ‘My family,’ she snapped. ‘You say many are dead. What became of my family?’

Matu was frightened, she saw, intimidated by her. Yet he faced her, and spoke clearly.

And so she learned that she and Ana and Arga were alone now; Kirike was dead, and Arga’s parents, her uncle and aunt.

She grabbed her pack and spear and stood up. ‘Let’s go home.’