Stone spring

50

They made it back across the causeway, but the storm closed in before dark.

Zesi was welcomed into the rough hut that had been built on the site of their old house, the house she had grown up in with Ana and their parents and grandparents. Now there were only Ana and Arga and Zesi. The house, such as it was, was cramped, and as the wind picked up it creaked noisily, and rainwater leaked through the makeshift roof. It wasn’t cold, at least; there was no need to try to build a fire in the rough hearth.

After eating some dried fish Ana, clearly exhausted, curled up on a pallet, her face to the wall, having said little to Zesi.

Zesi had thought Arga at least might be more curious. In her head during the long walk home she had rehearsed the kind of stories she might tell Arga about Pretani – exciting anecdotes for a seven-year-old, rather than the full truth of death and vengeance and twisted honour. But to Zesi’s disappointment all Arga wanted to do was play fingerbones, a complicated game where you moved knuckle bones and fancy shells around a board scraped in the dirt. Arga had lost her parents, and most of her playmates of her own age; this was all she wanted. So, by the light of a lamp of whale oil in a stone bowl, Zesi played one game after another, almost always getting beaten.

At least playing a kid’s game was better than facing the dark thoughts swirling around in her own head. It was the end of a long day when she had discovered her home was smashed and her father dead, along with around half of all the people she had ever known. And yet she found her thoughts turning to Ana, and the way everybody had deferred to her, out on the beach. Even Heni! Zesi had always been the leader, the strong one, the bright exciting one who everybody applauded. Now she had come back from a near-lethal adventure – she had come back with a baby – and nobody wanted to know, and it was her skinny, dull kid sister who got all the attention and respect.

Was she jealous? Was she so mean, so shallow, that she was jealous of Ana, even on such a terrible night – the night she had learned they had lost their father? She didn’t want to feel like this. She tried not to hate Ana for making her feel this way. Tried not to hate herself for these unwelcome emotions.

The door flap was pushed back, letting in the wind and a shower of raindrops. It was Matu. ‘Ana, I’m sorry.’ He didn’t even look at Zesi.

Ana rolled on her back, instantly awake. ‘What is it?’

‘The Milk. The storm has caused a surge on the river. It’s looking like it’s going to flood again. Some of us are heading for the higher ground.’

‘I’ll come.’ Ana rolled out of bed, pulled on boots and a skin cloak, and pushed out of the hut. Arga followed.

Zesi was left sitting by the abandoned game. She had been utterly ignored in the whole exchange. But water was soaking in under the bottom of the walls, and pooling on the floor, in the shallow dip of the hearth. She grabbed her cloak and pushed her way out of the shelter. The storm was wild, the wind howling, and the rain came at you flat and hard. Zesi was soaked in an instant. The ground was pooled with water, and she could hear the rush of the river. It was still not yet dark, with light coming from the horizon, a deep twilight that rendered everything blue or black or grey.

Novu was here, holding onto Ice Dreamer who had her baby in a sling before her, and Heni, the priest, a number of others. Arga started crying over her acorn pit, which was brimming with water, ruined.

Zesi saw terror in the eyes of the survivors of the Great Sea, of which this storm must be a terrible reminder.

‘We should go,’ Matu shouted. He had his family clutched close to him, his sons, his wife. He pointed south. ‘If we climb up into the hills, we’ll get wet but-’

‘No,’ Ana said.

‘What?’

‘We won’t run any more.’ She glanced around, and Zesi saw a cold determination in that young, pinched face. ‘Matu, make sure your children are safe. Dreamer, take your baby. Zesi, maybe you and Arga should go. The rest of you-’

‘We can’t defy the river,’ the priest shouted.

‘But we can,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You go if you want to, priest. The rest of you, help me.’ And she got to her knees and began to scrape at the muddy ground, making a mound. ‘Get the shovels. We can’t stop the river flood. But we can rise up above it.’

The others stood frozen, for a single heartbeat.

Then Matu pushed his wife away. ‘Go, take the boys. Hurry, hurry. I’ll be fine…’

Novu ran off, and quickly returned with shovels, shoulder-blades of deer and cattle strapped to stout poles. Matu took a shovel, and so did the priest. Soon there were six, eight, ten of them, all digging as Zesi watched. Some of the shovels were meant for clearing snow in the winter, but they did a good enough job in the sticky mud.

Soon a mound began to rise up above the sodden ground. Still the storm lashed down, and now water surged from the broken banks of the river. Even as the water ponded around them the diggers pushed their blades into the mud and heaped it up.

There was something about the whole situation that Zesi couldn’t bear – Ana’s strange doggedness in the face of the danger of the rising river, the way the others followed her unflinchingly. Even the priest, she saw, even the priest, who was as new to this as she was.

She pushed her way through to Ana. ‘This is mad. You’ll get somebody drowned.’

Ana didn’t look up. ‘You weren’t here when the Great Sea came. I was. Dig, or go. Look after Arga.’

Zesi hesitated, torn. Arga had gone with Matu’s family. Soaked to the skin, her hair flattened against her skull, Zesi ran after her. When she returned in the morning, coming down from the low hills to the south of the settlement, Zesi found a low dome of black, glistening earth, and a dozen diggers sitting exhausted on top of it. The river had subsided, but water pooled around the mound. The storm had long blown out, and the sun had broken through, and the diggers smiled up into its light, filthy and soaked but safely above the water.

If Ana saw Zesi coming, she showed no signs of it. ‘This is the future,’ she said gravely. She held her own shovel over her head like a hunter’s spear. ‘The future.’