Stone spring

54

The First Year After the Great Sea: Late Winter. Cheek, the snailhead toddler, ran ahead of Ana’s group along the new causeway. Her mother Eyelid, walking behind Knuckle, watched Cheek cautiously, but didn’t try to stop her. Lightning ran after the child, wagging his tail and barking.

The causeway, rebuilt, cut across the ocean to Flint Island, a smooth arc. The way was solid underfoot on an upper surface of wood, logs pressed into mud. Gentle waves lapped to either side. To the left lay the open sea, and to the right the bay, where a couple of boats worked this morning searching for eels. And on the bay’s southern shore Ana could see new houses sitting on their flood-defying mounds of dark earth. Half a year after the Great Sea, Etxelur was recovering.

It was a bright winter day, not yet a month after the midwinter solstice, and the weather was benign, the wind low, the sea calm, and the ocean water reflected a diffuse, cloudy sky: a world grey above, grey below, and bitterly cold, yet full of light. Ana offered up silent thanks to the little mothers for the weather, as she walked between the priest and Knuckle, with Novu stepping quietly behind them with the rest of the snailheads. Maybe the mildness of the day would soothe the snailheads’ mood – and make them more amenable to giving Ana what she wanted of them today.

Little Cheek was a bundle of furs, with hide bandages wrapped around her growing snailhead skull. But she was wide-eyed, fascinated by the water that lapped so close to her feet. Knuckle watched her indulgently. Eyelid was the wife of Knuckle’s dead brother Gut; Cheek was his niece. Knuckle had grown closer to Eyelid, since Ana had rejected his tentative advances. Ana was glad for them.

Not that she knew them all that well; they were still very odd by Etxelur’s standards. Walking now with Eyelid, she tried to think of something to say to her. But with the snailheads, as with the Pretani, the men decided everything of significance, while the women did the work – or anyhow that was how it seemed to Ana. Eyelid wouldn’t even speak to the Etxelur folk save through Knuckle.

‘Cheek can’t remember the ocean,’ Knuckle said now. ‘She was last here at midsummer. Long ago for a three-year-old.’

‘For all of us,’ said the priest. ‘Because of the Great Sea the world has changed since those days. But I don’t suppose the little girl will remember that either.’

‘No,’ said the snailhead grimly, ‘and she’s lucky for that.’

Ana nodded. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been possible to walk this way just a few months ago. It’s taken a lot of hard work to restore the causeway.’

Jurgi glanced at her with approval; she was learning subtlety, and was steering the conversation the way she wanted it to go. It had even been her idea to bring the snailheads out to the causeway, the nearest they had to a demonstration of the dream they wanted the snailheads to share.

Knuckle said now, testing his tread on the logs under his feet, ‘Better than I remember. I never trusted that muddy track.’

Novu stepped forward and said, ‘The old causeway was a gift of the gods. What we did this time was to start again from the beginning. Of course the natural track was the starting point. We pushed rocks and gravel and brush into the mud. And then we laid logs over the top, pressing them down. Now the causeway’s stronger than before and higher. And it’s sturdier. You can feel that. It’s already withstood a couple of winter storms. I don’t know if it could survive another Great Sea.’ He glanced out at the placid ocean. ‘I’d like to find out.’

‘Don’t challenge the gods,’ the priest murmured, ‘lest they take you up on it.’

Knuckle asked Ana, ‘So how is your sister? Produced her Pretani pup yet?’

‘No. Well, not the last time I saw her.’ Which was another gift from the gods, as far as Ana was concerned. Zesi, fuming, frustrated, continued to oppose all Ana’s projects, and ranted at anybody who came within earshot about how their father wouldn’t have run things this way. She would have been particularly difficult this morning, for she had been central to the mess that had led to the death of Gut, Knuckle’s brother, at the hands of Gall the Pretani. But her long pregnancy was keeping her out of the way, and Ana was grateful to be able to get some work done.

They reached the island, and walked around its northern shore towards the holy middens, now half-rebuilt themselves. Cheek ran ahead along the sand, kicking at washed-up seaweed, and the dog ran after her.

Suddenly Ana saw oystercatchers, a pair of them flying low along the coast. They were big birds, black and white with distinctive orange beaks and a plaintive, repetitive cry. They were probably both males, this early in the year, preparing for their flight up the river valleys where they would stake out territory on a shingle bar, to build their ground nests. She felt her spirit expand, as if thawing out, at this latest sign of the turn of the season.

Knuckle watched the birds fly, his great head gleaming in the sun’s watery light. ‘We were coastal folk, like you, down in the south, before the sea drove us away. We live in the forest now. But the forest has its charms, even in the winter. You can see the squirrels run in the bare trees, and the nests of the rooks.’

The priest nodded. ‘It is said a rook always comes back to her old nest.’

Knuckle grunted. ‘Just as you have come back to yours – even though the ocean told you it didn’t want you any more.’

Ana said, ‘This is our home. Our ancestors’ bones are piled deep in the middens.’

The snailhead raised a shaved eyebrow. ‘That’s your choice. So why have you asked us here? I think you want something,’ he said bluntly.

‘I suppose that must be obvious,’ said the priest. ‘But you’re right. We have something to show you. Come. Just a little further.’

They walked away from the beach and cut south across the island, picking their way along a trail that led through sea-battered dunes, and then around the island’s central hillock.

They soon broke through to Flint Island’s south coast, where they had a clear view of the promontory just on the other side of the bay. On the narrow beach here logs had been heaped up, stripped of their bark. A couple of men were working on them, using heavy flint axes to sharpen one end of each log.

While child and dog ran off to play with another mound of seaweed, the adults shared skins of water, carried by the priest.

Knuckle looked around, sniffing the cold air. ‘Never came here.’

‘There’s no reason why you should,’ Novu said, stepping forward. ‘Yet it’s an important place.’ He waved a hand. ‘You can see we’re at the mouth of the bay. The narrowest point, where Flint Island comes closest to the mainland. When the tide rises the water rushes through here to fill up the bay. When the tide goes out the current is just as strong the other way. The kids like to swim here.’

‘Never much liked swimming myself. So what are those lads doing hacking away at logs?’

Novu took a deep breath, and Ana remembered how hesitant he had been when he had first described his grand scheme to her and the priest and Dreamer, in the confines of her house. It was all founded on Ana’s determination, but it was Novu’s vision, and now he had to describe it all over again.

‘We want to build a dyke across the bay. Just here, between this headland and that promontory, across the bay’s neck at its narrowest.’

Knuckle frowned. Ana wondered if he was familiar with Novu’s Jericho word ‘dyke’. ‘What? Another causeway?’

‘No. Well, you could walk across it, it will be wide enough, but it’s not just a causeway. It will be a kind of wall. Look around. Once this bay was dry land – that’s what the Etxelur folk say. Their grandparents mined flint here. But then it became marshy, and then salty, and the grass and the trees died, and the houses had to be moved up to the beach. Now it often floods high beyond the beach, even at a normal high tide. And if you get an exceptional tide or a storm-’

‘The sea has taken the land back. Just as in the south, our home under the cliffs of white rock. That’s what the sea does.’

‘Yes. But that’s what we want to fight against. We’ll build a dyke, right across the bay. It will rise up high above the water – above the high tide level. So then, you see, the ocean won’t be able to break into the bay again. The bay itself will be like a lagoon, isolated from the sea.’

‘No more flooding,’ Knuckle said.

‘No more flooding.’

‘If you can build this dyke.’ Knuckle stepped forward and peered at the sea, where it ran between headland and promontory. ‘How? You built the causeway where the old one ran. There is no causeway here.’

‘No. In fact the seabed is deeper here, because it’s been scoured by the tides. That’s why we need the logs, these sharpened stakes. You see, we’ll drive them into the sea-bottom mud, in parallel rows-’

‘You built dykes like this before?’

‘No,’ Novu said defiantly. He’d faced this question before. ‘But my people have. I’ve seen it done.’

‘Hmm. Seen a bird fly. Doesn’t mean I can do it myself. Doesn’t mean I should try.’ He turned to Jurgi. ‘You will defy your gods?’

The priest said, ‘We fight the ocean, but not our gods. When the great cold retreated, our ancestors walked into this land behind the little mothers. While the mothers built the hills and river valleys and beaches, the people named each living and non-living thing, and gave each a story. We made the land hand in hand with the gods. There’s no reason the gods will be unhappy if we build it again.’

Knuckle eyed him. ‘You’re a clever man, priest. I think you have a way of saying what needs to be said. And when will you start to build your wall?’

Novu gestured at the men sharpening the logs. ‘You can see the work’s already started. But the spring equinox will be the key time. The days of the low tide. That is when the seabed will be easiest to reach.’ He walked to the sea’s edge and sketched great arcs with his hands. ‘We plan to work out from either side of the bay, and meet in the middle.’

Knuckle turned and looked around at them, Ana and Novu and the priest, and the two men desultorily hacking at the logs. Ana imagined what he saw: scrawny people in their ragged clothes, stick-thin already and with the hungriest part of the winter still to come, and yet here they were talking of expelling the sea itself. Knuckle said gently, ‘Ana, Jurgi, you have done well to survive. But this wall across the sea is a dream. Look at you. You don’t have the strength… Oh.’

Ana smiled.

‘This is why you asked me to come here. You want us to help build the dyke?’

‘There are more of you than us now. I don’t know if we can do it alone. We’ll try. But with your help-’

‘We’re half-starved ourselves.’ He glanced at Cheek, who was tugging on a piece of seaweed with the dog. ‘I see a busy year, full of the work of staying alive. That will be hard enough.’

‘I know what I’m asking.’

‘Do you?’ His face grew harder. ‘You Etxelur folk look down on us, for we are newcomers to your land. Why should we come here now, risk our own chances of life, just to help you?’

Jurgi said, ‘But it isn’t just about us. Think. The sea is rising. We know that. Our grandmothers were driven back from the floor of this bay, just as you had to retreat north when the sea lapped higher against your white cliffs. We could give up. We could simply walk away from here, and go south – but you’re already there. And as the sea rises more and more, as we head further south and others come pouring north-’ ‘All right!’ Knuckle snapped.

Ana nodded. ‘So will you help us?’

He looked around, at the channel into the bay. ‘I don’t know. Not for me to say, not alone. The elders will talk about it. That’s all I can do.’

Novu said urgently, ‘But you must make them see-’

Ana touched his arm, hushing him. She said to Knuckle gravely, ‘Thank you. We can’t ask any more of you. Look, you’re our guests here. Let us feed you. If you’ll come to our house-’

Knuckle glanced up at the sun. ‘Yes. We need to eat. Which is the quickest way back? Eyelid, Cheek – this way!’ And he marched off across the beach.