Stone spring

56

The First Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice. Jurgi the priest, in his Giving finery of poppy crown on his head and new flint axe at his neck, waited for the snailhead party on the southern bank of the outflow of the Little Mother’s Milk. He had brought food for the visitors, dried fish and hazelnuts, and sacks of drinks.

Kara, wife of Matu, had come with him to set up this small feast. Kara had laced her hair with flowers. She was still thin from the winter’s deprivations, as they all were, but she looked welcoming and beautiful.

And here came Knuckle, leading a party of a dozen snailheads down the valley of the Milk, with Eyelid, wife of his dead brother, at his side. They strode easily, smiling in the midsummer sunshine. The country was generous at this time of year, and they hadn’t needed to carry much – bundles of spare clothes, a few tools, skins for overnight shelters. Eyelid’s daughter Cheek was running around, weaving complicated patterns of her own around the adults’ steady plod. She grew more active and confident every time Jurgi saw her.

Jurgi saw how easily Knuckle and Eyelid walked together, their arms brushing. The company of others was a subtle and consoling gift of the little mothers.

As they approached, the snailheads broke from their walk to fall on the refreshments Jurgi had brought. The children soon found the honeycombs.

Jurgi, smiling, came up to Knuckle with a skin sack. ‘Blackcurrant juice,’ he said in the traders’ tongue. ‘I remember how much you like it.’

‘Good man.’ He took the sack, removed the wooden stopper from the sewn neck, and poured the thick liquid into his throat. ‘Honour to have the priest of Etxelur come to meet us.’

‘The honour is mine. It’s been a hard year – hard for everybody in Northland. But without you we would be much worse off.’

Knuckle nodded, his great misshapen head gleaming with beads of sweat, and he looked down at the children gorging on the chunks of honeycomb. ‘In the end we knew you were right – and Ana, your young goddess. If you had been forced from the coast, it would have been our turn next. Time to take a stand.’ ‘Exactly. Look, your people are welcome to go on around the shore to the Giving feast. The stand has been set up by the middens as usual.’ He glanced up at the sun. ‘I think the games will have started by now. But come with me along the river valley, Knuckle. I want you to see what’s become of your gift of logs and labour. I think you’ll be impressed – and surprised.’

His chin smeared with fruit juice, Knuckle grinned, showing his studded tongue. He turned to Eyelid and his people, and they had a short, jabbered conversation in their own guttural language. The children were keen to get to the beaches, for swimming in the sea was a treat for these inlanders. The younger men and women wanted to take their chances in the contests, the running and throwing, and to see how the crop of Etxelur youngsters – those who had survived the Great Sea – had blossomed in the last year. But Eyelid decided she and Cheek would walk with the men.

So, led by Jurgi, the four of them set off up the valley of the Little Mothers’ Milk, heading roughly west.

Away from the estuary the valley soon narrowed, the languid water passing between walls of sandstone. The trail they followed was sometimes hard to make out, so high was the bracken around them. The flowers’ colours were bright in the midsummer light, and fat bees hummed in clouds of pollen.

‘World full of life,’ Knuckle said. ‘Less than a year since whole place smashed by the Great Sea.’

‘But some have not returned. Otters, for instance.’ On impulse the priest bent down, rooted at the base of the bracken, and came up with a handful of soil. It was speckled with white. ‘And the sea-bottom mud is still here as a reminder. In time it will be hidden, but it will always be visible to anybody who cares to dig down into the ground. Like the extra thickness of a healed bone.’

Knuckle grunted. ‘You are thoughtful. Glad I’m not a priest, having to think. Happy to live in the now.’ The path dipped closer to the water, where the air was thick and hot. ‘How far is this mystery of yours?’

The priest grinned. ‘Just a little further…’

The valley opened out here and the river broadened, becoming shallower as it ran over its bed of gravel and mud. On the south bank, where they walked, a broad grassy plain stretched away, studded with tall bright thistles and churned up by the hooves of the cattle that came here to drink. To the north the land rose up into the low hills that divided this valley from the bay.

The priest pointed to the north bank, where a rivulet descended between two green hummocks towards the river. ‘See that?’

‘A stream. So what?’

‘It wasn’t there this time last year. We need to cross the river. There’s a ford just further down.’

They walked on to a place where the river was wide and very shallow. Following the priest’s lead, the snailhead slipped off his boots and walked out across the river’s gravelly bed. Knuckle enjoyed the walk in the water, childlike, as he hopped from one stone to the next. He slipped once, and laughed as he recovered, splashing water over the priest.

Cheek was delighted by the water, and gurgled as she splashed with her mother.

Soon they were all on the north bank. The rivulet, descending from the slope, emptied into an area of marshy land.

The snailhead spread his hands. ‘We came all this way to see this?’

‘Taste it.’

Knuckle grunted. ‘Thirsty anyhow.’ He took a healthy scoop of water in his cupped hand, tipped it into his mouth, and immediately spat it out. He looked at the priest, astonished. ‘Salt!’ The snailhead looked up at the innocent hillside. ‘Salt, like the sea!’

‘Salt. But it wasn’t this way before. Come on. You might want to put your boots back on. We have to climb.’

Cheek and Eyelid decided not to follow. They stayed playing in the stream, while Knuckle climbed after the priest.

They followed the rivulet’s little valley, cut into natural folds in the landscape, up the side of the hill. It wasn’t steep, but the priest had to take big strides over the long grass. He walked close to the rivulet, and he could smell the salt of its water, growing stronger as they climbed further.

They were both breathing hard by the time they had reached the summit of the hillock. From here, looking north over the shoulders of rounded hills, they could see the complicated geography of Etxelur, the bay, Flint Island, and the sea beyond. A soft breeze blew from the sea.

‘Nice view,’ Knuckle said, panting.

‘Yes. But I brought you here to see this.’ Jurgi pointed at a pond that nestled on the hillock’s broad summit.

You could immediately see that the reservoir was artificial. Reservoir: another of Novu’s words from Jericho that had become part of the Etxelur tongue. Several paces across, it had been a natural feature, a pond gathered in a dip, but it had been deepened and made neatly circular, and lined with stones and clay and mud to make it waterproof. In a confident flourish two rings of earth had been dug up around its perimeter to make a crude approximation of the three-ring symbol of Etxelur.

And the reservoir was brimming with water – even though, as the priest indicated to the snailhead, water flowed out of the pond through a breach in the wall to feed the rivulet.

Knuckle tasted the pond water. ‘More salt,’ he said without surprise.

‘It mixes with the natural runoff. I can’t imagine it will do much harm to the wildlife of the Milk, its flow is so tiny compared to the river’s grander flow. And ultimately, of course, it will be washed all the way to the estuary and out to sea.’

‘Fine. But how does salt water get up here in the first place?’

‘Come and see.’

The priest led him over the summit to the hill’s north face. From here more ponds were easily visible, one, two, three of them, cut in a row down the side of the hill that led to the marshy shore of the bay. Each of these ponds was as neat and circular as the first; each of them had been made by deepening and sealing a natural feature. There were people working between the second and third ponds, two rough lines of them.

The snailhead nodded. ‘I begin to see. The saltwater comes from the sea-’

‘No. From the bay. Behind the dyke.’ Jurgi pointed to the curve of the dyke, which was now complete and swept across the mouth of the bay at its narrowest point, shutting out the wider sea. ‘That’s important.’

‘So the water is lifted up to these ponds. One after another, until it runs out on the far side of this hill to the river-’

‘And then out to sea.’

The snailhead shook his head. ‘How is it lifted?’

The priest grinned. ‘A good practical question. I’ll show you.’ He led the way down the hill a little way, until he came to a length of rope to which a kind of sled had been fixed. The sled, made of sewn, caulked skin sitting on wooden runners, was big, several paces long. The rope was fixed to one end of the sled, and trailed on down the hill from the other end, to the next sled. ‘We had our boat-builders’ help; they made the sleds the same way they make their craft, from wooden frames over which skin is stretched and then caulked…’ He lifted up the sled; large as it was, it was light when empty. ‘See these rails? Just like a sled you drag over the snow. It glides easily over the ground, even when full.’

‘Full of what? Water?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I feel dull-witted,’ said the snailhead. ‘Following your path one step at a time. You fill this sled with sea water. And you drag it with this rope, all the way up the hill from the bay-’

‘No. Only from the next reservoir down. And there’s more than one sled. See, there is a whole set of them, connected in a loop by the rope.’

The snailhead squinted to see. ‘Like a necklace. A necklace of sleds.’

‘That’s it, exactly. There is a necklace between each pair of the ponds, the first to the second, the second to the third, all the way up from the bay. Come on, I’ll show you.’

Climbing down the hillside towards the bay, shallow on this side, was a lot easier than climbing up the other.

They came to where the people were working, between the second and third ponds. Most of them stood in a line, facing downhill, hauling on a rope. As they pulled, they dragged laden sleds up from the lower pond towards the higher. Others worked at the ponds, dunking each sled to fill it at the lower pond, or tipping it out into the upper pond. A few people guided the return of the empty sleds from upper to lower, making sure the descending line didn’t snag the ascending. Arga was busy with this today; when she saw the priest she waved.

The dragging was heavy work, and the people who hauled, men and women side by side, sang an antique song about the moon’s treachery – gloomy but rhythmic, a steady beat that helped them work together. Some of them were snailheads, the priest noted, and that was lucky; he hadn’t thought to make sure Knuckle’s countrymen were here today to impress him, but the mothers in their beneficent midsummer mood had smiled on him anyhow.

‘You see the idea,’ the priest said to Knuckle. ‘It’s a lot easier to raise the water in stages than all at once. We have teams; we take turns. Ana works out who should work when. We all pitch in, all of us who are able.’

‘Do you? It seems a dismal labour. People always want to make sure their families don’t go hungry first. How do you get people to work if they don’t want to?’

‘Ana has her ways,’ the priest said. Which was true.

The way they had to work on these big projects was new to the people of Etxelur. In the old days, if you wanted to build a house, you would have just done it yourself, with the help of your sisters and brothers and their spouses and children and your friends. If you wanted to fish, you just built a boat and went fishing. And so on. None of it needed much coordination, or permission, or compulsion – unlike these complicated new tasks. Ana had had to develop a harder side, using her own strange authority to face down grown men and women, to shame them to do their share. And when that didn’t work she had developed a new system of what she called gatherings, bringing everybody in Etxelur together to confront the unwilling one. Most people would rather just put in the work than face that. But Knuckle was right to guess that not everybody was happy.

One way or the other, however, the work was getting done.

‘We’ve been working on this since the spring,’ Jurgi said. ‘We started filling up the lower ponds even before we’d dug out the upper.’

The snailhead sat on the grass. ‘Just watching them work makes me feel tired. All right. Ponds, sleds – all very clever. Now the real question. Why? Why haul water all the way up a hill, only to let it run away again?’

The priest sat beside him. From here the expanse of the bay was opened up, with the bulk of Flint Island beyond. ‘Look at the bay. Look at the shore. Remember how it was last time you saw it.’

All around the shore the waterline was lower than it had been, exposing swathes of mud and sand, littered with drying weed, laced by human footprints and worked by wading birds. Children were playing on mud flats all the way to the water’s edge, picking shells and mussels from the sand. Their voices rose up to the watching men like the cries of distant gulls.

With their steady labour, the people had already removed a significant fraction of the water in the bay.

‘You see? With the dyke and the built-up causeway we turned the bay from an open stretch of the sea into a sealed bowl. And we’ve been emptying that bowl, one sled after another. Now those children are playing in mud that just months ago was at the bottom of the sea.’

The snailhead frowned. ‘It is hard to believe.’

‘And look in the centre of the bay,’ the priest said, pointing. ‘Can you see – it’s just breaking the water-’

‘Like an island.’

‘Yes. That is Etxelur’s flint lode. Once the finest flint anybody knew about, finer even than what we mine from the island. Lost to the rising sea for generations.’

‘But no more.’

‘But no more. Soon we will be able to walk out from the shore, all the way out, and mine it as our ancestors did.’

‘You are not just keeping the sea out. You are taking your land back.’

‘Yes.’

‘It is mad.’

‘Probably.’

‘It is magnificent.’

‘Certainly. And it’s all because of you snailheads, and your logs, and the work you contributed-’

There was a scream, from the other side of the hill, behind them.

Knuckle turned immediately. ‘Cheek?’ He ran back up the grassy slope.

The priest scrambled to his feet, and laboured to follow through the long grass. As he reached the summit, he stared in disbelief.

Zesi stood over the highest reservoir. She had an axe in her hand. She was breathing hard, and, turned away, was looking down the southern hillside.

The reservoir, which had been brimming, was drained.

Knuckle ran forward, past her, and on down the hill. ‘Eyelid! Cheek!’

Jurgi climbed the last few paces to stand beside Zesi, and he began to understand. She had taken her axe, a heavy thing with a flint blade, to the lip of the reservoir, where it drained into the rivulet. And when she had breached the reservoir all its water was released at once. A mass of water had surged down the rivulet and pooled at the hill’s base. He could see how the force of the water had displaced the rocks of the river bed.

And blood was splashed over those rocks.

‘I did it because of Ana,’ Zesi said, breathless, looking shocked at her own handiwork. ‘Because nobody would listen. I did it for everybody in Etxelur-’

Eyelid was in the river, soaked with water and blood, pulling at the rocks, calling Cheek’s name over and over. Knuckle ran on down the hillside to her.

The priest was appalled. ‘By the mothers’ tears, Zesi, what have you done?’