Stone spring

51

The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice. Heni lifted the door flap and brought Arga into Ana’s house, his arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. Arga had been on a great adventure. Wrapped in a blanket of thick aurochs skin and with goose fat smeared on her bare arms, she looked as if she had been very, very cold; but she was beaming, that big moon smile.

Lightning, asleep by the fire, stirred and grumbled at the draught. When he saw Arga his tail gave a fluttering wag, and then he subsided into sleep once again.

Through the door flap Ana glimpsed the day, and was surprised to see how low the light was already. But it was only a few days from midwinter. She had sat in here all day with Zesi and Novu and Ice Dreamer and her baby, talking by the smoky light of the whale oil lamps, with others coming and going with bits of business. These deep-winter days without sunlight, brief and dim, felt like they were no days at all.

‘Come sit with me, by the fire.’ She made a space for Arga between herself and Ice Dreamer, and got a dry cloth and began to rub Arga’s wet hair.

‘And shut that flap, curse your bones, old man,’ Zesi snapped. ‘You’re letting all the heat out.’ Zesi, big with her child now, was grumpy, restless, frustrated by the way her pregnancy slowed her down, habitually ill-tempered.

‘All right, all right.’ Heni shuffled in, huge in the cramped house, and he shucked off his big fur jacket, wet and smelling of sea salt. ‘Is that Kirike’s fish stew?’

‘Here.’ Novu handed Heni a wooden bowl of the stew, which had been simmering for days, with extra fish, stock, roots, nuts, oil and spices steadily added until the flavour became deep and enriching. It had been Kirike’s favourite winter dish; he had been able to keep a single pot going for days.

‘Ah.’ Heni raised the bowl and drank deeply of the stock, and he belched, rubbing his belly. ‘That’s going to get me warm through.’ He glanced at the chunks of fish in his bowl. ‘There were more bodies down on the beach.’

Ana asked. ‘Anybody you recognised?’

‘One was a snailhead, I think. You could only tell from the funny shape of the skull. Face chewed off. Other kinds of people I didn’t know at all. One had a necklace of tiny skulls, otters maybe. Chucked it back in the sea.’ Heni inspected a lump of cod. ‘But we have to eat.’

Ana nodded. They had been through these arguments. The folk of Etxelur had become uncomfortable eating the fish which had so evidently been feeding on the bodies in the ocean. But they had lost all their summer store to the Great Sea, and the autumn hunts had been disastrous on the shattered, salt-poisoned land. This autumn and winter, it was only the sea that kept them alive – the murderous sea turned provider. ‘We have to eat.’ She deliberately scooped up a cup of the broth, gathering bits of fish, and took a mouthful, chewing deliberately, though she was not hungry. ‘With respect.’

Heni put the cod in his mouth and chewed carefully. ‘With respect.’

Zesi snorted. She tended to scorn such rituals.

‘So,’ Ice Dreamer said, and she hugged Arga. ‘You’ve been diving again, down to the Door.’

‘She has,’ Heni said proudly. ‘That little one can hold her breath, I counted it this time, a full hundred and fifty of my heartbeats. And I’ve got a big old heart that beats pretty slow, I can tell you. I’ve never seen anything like it, like you’re half-dolphin, girl. I’m always relieved when she comes up for air, because I couldn’t fetch her if she didn’t.’

Arga smiled shyly. ‘I like it. It’s easy.’

‘It’s ridiculous that you sent her out diving today, Ana,’ Zesi said. ‘It’s midwinter!’

Arga said, ‘It’s not that cold when you’re in the water, even if it’s snowing up in the air. And as long as you keep moving you’re all right. Anyhow the goose fat keeps you warm.’

Zesi pressed, ‘And if you got stuck? If you caught your foot?’

‘I wouldn’t catch my foot. I’m not a baby.’

Novu leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Never mind all that. Tell us what you saw this time.’

Arga’s smiled broadened. ‘I went to the house on the hill, in the middle, North Island. I went inside!’ Since the day of the Great Sea, and despite the hardships they had suffered, Ana and the others hadn’t been able to put aside the memories of what they had glimpsed when the sea had rolled back. She and Novu and Dreamer had talked endlessly of the circular banks they called the Door to the Mothers’ House, for Ana believed it truly to be the drowned heart of old Etxelur. They had even made sketches with bits of charcoal on skin of what they had seen.

Zesi had mocked all this, as she mocked much of what Ana got up to with Dreamer and Novu, ‘your cabal of strangers’ as she called them. Ana ignored her, though this infuriated Zesi even more. For she knew, deep in her gut, that this was important, for herself, for Etxelur, for the future.

Of course the Door was submerged once more, as it had been for generations before that one strange day. It had begun to seem that those brief glimpses were all Ana would ever be allowed.

But then in the late autumn Arga, the best diver in Etxelur, had come up with the idea of swimming down to see if she could see any more. Once Ana and the rest were convinced she could do it they had leapt on the idea.

So Heni had started to take Arga out on his fishing trips. He had been wary at first, and she had scornfully refused his offer of tying her to a length of fishing line so she could be hauled up if she got into trouble. She kept insisting she wasn’t a baby. But as Heni had watched her dive he soon grew confident in her abilities, and trusted to her own native sense to keep her out of trouble.

Her first dives had been scouting trips to establish just where the Door was. It wasn’t difficult if you knew where to look. The central mound really was North Island, and from there you could sometimes see the rest, Heni said, huge shadows beneath the water, unnaturally perfect arcs.

And then Arga had begun to inspect the Door. She would make two, three, four dives a day, until Heni judged she was getting too tired. She only dived on good days, when the sea was calm and clear and she was able to see what she was exploring. As the winter had begun to close in there had been talk of stopping the dives. But Heni pointed out he was going to have to go out fishing every day anyhow, and Arga was keen to carry on. Ana suspected it was good for Arga, better than sitting around in a hut all winter brooding on how she had lost her parents.

And, gradually, they were coming to map the Door, the strange structures lost beneath the sea.

Surrounding the central island were three circular ridges, which Novu called ‘walls’, sharing a common centre, nested one inside the next. Between the ridges were ditches, dug deep and full of sea-bottom mud. Arga said she saw the wreck of a boat in one of the ditches – a big boat, bigger than anything Etxelur had, similar to the giant wreck that had been exposed on the day of the Great Sea. The ditches had evidently been dug big enough to allow such boats to pass. Arga had found a straight ditch cutting through this complex of rings to the centre. This was surely another passage for boats. This discovery thrilled Dreamer, for it was another similarity to the rings-and-tail tattoos worn throughout Etxelur.

The walls themselves were tall, taller than Etxelur’s middens, several times an adult’s height if you measured them from the bottom of the ditches. Once Arga had dived down to the outermost wall. Under a layer of silt and seaweed and barnacles she had found a harder surface, too tough for her to pick apart with her hands. It was gloomy down there, but she said this surface gleamed in the murky light with bright colours, red and white and black, the colours of shells and stones embedded in some denser material.

In recent days Arga had been exploring the very centre of the complex.

‘It’s not an island, it’s a mound, like the ones you build, Ana. You can tell by the shape. Somebody built it. And just under the very top of this mound is a house.’ Every adult in the shelter was rapt as the girl spoke, her eyes bright with intelligence, the remnant of the goose fat on her cheeks and neck shining in the light of the oil lamps. ‘But it’s not a house like this one, wood and skin and seaweed. It’s stones, carved into shapes and heaped up.’

‘Like Jericho,’ Novu murmured, ‘or some of it.’

‘There might have been a roof once, but it’s open now, you can swim down inside and there is a heap of stone blocks on the floor. And on top of that-’

‘Yes?’ Novu asked.

‘Bones.’

‘Bones?’

‘It was confusing. I’ll tell you what I think I saw. I’ll probably have to go back to be really sure. On the top was a woman.’

‘A woman,’ Ana said.

‘Well, a person. There was nothing left but the bones, all the rest had been eaten by the fish. She’s all sprawled out on top of a deer. I know a deer’s bones! But this was a big deer, bigger than I ever saw.’ She reached up with her hands, indicating height. ‘Big antlers.’

Novu frowned. ‘Loga told me traders’ tales of how giant deer live up in the northern lands, the north of the Continent, where it is always cold. They are hunted for their huge antlers and their big bones, which make deep-throated flutes. They are never seen as far south as this.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Dreamer said, ‘such animals exist?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Arga went on, ‘There was something under the deer too. I only saw it dimly, and the woman and her deer were in the way. It was skulls. Cattle skulls, bulls with horns. There were lots of them, all lined up together and heaped up in big layers. It was difficult to see. There was kelp everywhere, fronds waving in the sea, like a forest.’

Jurgi nodded. ‘The bulls, then the deer, then the woman, all sitting on top of the stone heap.’

‘That’s what I saw. All in this stone house. That’s all.’ She sat back, and drank some more broth.

Ice Dreamer, suckling Dolphin Gift, gave Arga a playful pinch. ‘You know how to spin out a story, don’t you?’

‘It’s all true!’

‘I know, I know. But you tell it well.’

Novu shook his head. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Think of how it would have looked,’ Ana said. ‘The mound was above the level of the ridges. From anywhere in the Door, if you were on the ridges or in a boat, you could look up and see the mound, and the house of stone, and the woman inside, riding her deer.’

‘They must have been dead,’ Novu said. ‘The woman and her deer. Who would sit there all day until the roof fell in on them? Maybe she was stuffed. I heard of people doing that, keeping corpses by taking out the innards and filling them with sand and spices. The deer too.’

‘Ugh,’ Heni said.

‘Stuffed and painted. What a sight it must have been! So, Arga, did you see-’

‘Hush,’ Dreamer said. One-handed, she gently took the broth bowl out of Arga’s hands. The girl had fallen asleep, just like that, and was slumping on Ana’s shoulder.

‘She’s worn out, poor thing,’ Heni said. ‘For all she’s brave the cold does take it out of her, I think.’

‘I told you,’ said Zesi. ‘You’re risking her neck with these stunts. If her father was alive-’

‘But he’s not, so that’s enough about that.’

Zesi poked at the fire and stirred the broth, her ill temper evident in her every movement. She hissed at Ana, ‘We need to talk.’

Ana put her fingers to her lips, and mouthed, Not now. She sat with the sleeping Arga, letting the girl’s head fall to her lap, rocking her gently.