Stone spring

61

When Qili emerged from Arga’s house the next day, the weather was if anything even brighter, even more cheerful. He heard a melodic, bubbling cry, and looked up to see a pair of curlews flapping overhead in their usual leisurely way, with their pale bellies and distinctive curved beaks, perhaps on their way to the marshy ground to the west.

Too beautiful a day for a funeral, he thought. But already people were emerging from the houses on the mounds and making their way towards the coast.

Arga and Dolphin Gift followed Qili out of the house. They wore simple smocks and cloaks, their hair had been plaited into tight coils, and their cheeks were marked with the ubiquitous rings-and-slash symbol, painted on with a mixture of ochre and goose fat. The house belonged to Ana, he had come to understand, as the senior woman in her family. But last night Arga and Dolphin had stayed with Qili, and Arga’s children had stayed with a friend to make room for him. Meanwhile Ana, and Dolphin’s mother, Ice Dreamer, had visited Etxelur’s priest to discuss the ceremony for Heni.

They walked together down the mound’s steep slope, and set off once more towards the beach. They joined a sparse crowd that converged at the abutment of the dyke that spanned the mouth of the bay, running north to Flint Island. Dolphin anxiously scanned the crowd, evidently looking for somebody.

Close to, Qili was able to see the detail of the dyke’s construction. Rows of fat wooden piles contained a core of rock and sand and mud. Further out into the water this foundation was buried under rock, with a facing of mud bricks coated with white plaster. On its dry side the dyke was a wall three times the height of a person, brilliant white, smooth-faced – but on the other side the sea lapped not far below its edge. Arcing across the bay mouth, unnatural and intimidating, the dyke oddly made Qili think of death; pale as bone, it divided the living world in two.

And he was going to have to walk across it, he realised now. The people were funnelling towards the abutment and starting to stream onto the path across the top. Children ran ahead, shouting, chased by barking dogs.

As they walked forward Arga said to Qili, ‘We always use the dyke on occasions like this, to get to the island. Saves getting your feet muddy on the Bay Land. Of course before the dyke was built you had to walk all the way around the bay…’

Qili found it hard to listen, as he followed her steady pace.

Soon he was out on the dyke itself, with a drop down to the Bay Land to his left, and the sea lapping not far below the lip of the wall to his right. It was an extraordinary experience, a little like walking a cliff edge, or as if the whole world was unbalanced and tilting over, and he had an odd fear of falling. Once a child jostled him, rushing past; Qili, stumbling, was glad of Arga’s supporting hand.

‘Kirike! Kirike!’ Suddenly Dolphin was jumping and waving.

A man a few paces further along stopped and turned, waved back, and pushed back through the sparse line. When he met Dolphin they embraced. He was tall, strong-looking, darker than most of the Etxelur folk, many of whom were pale and redhaired or blond.

Arga tutted loudly. ‘I suppose I was never going to keep them apart today.’ She said in a lower, gossipy tone, ‘Kirike is Ana’s nephew. But he’s half Pretani. And it wasn’t a happy chain of events that led to his birth. Ana’s sister – his mother – was called Zesi. Not here. Dead, probably. A long story – you don’t want to know.’ Arga sighed. ‘But, look at them. I don’t know if Ice Dreamer is doing the right thing in keeping them apart. Nothing Dolphin does now with Kirike is going to change the past, all the feuding and the blood that was spilled. And look at the boy! As handsome as an aurochs bull and about as smart – I’ll swear he’s more Pretani than Etxelur. But what a piece of meat he is. Why, if I were a few years younger…’ She had a dreamy look on her face.

Qili was embarrassed by this display of elderly lust. Arga must have been twenty-one, twenty-two at least.

To Qili’s relief they stepped out on the dry land of the island. They walked around the shore to the north beach, where two great middens, each curved like the crescent moon, stood on the dry ground above the tide mark. The one closest to the sea was smoothly faced and intact, but the other was damaged, eroded and breached, with shells and stones and mud spilled on the sand.

‘This is our holiest site,’ Arga murmured to Qili as she led him through the throng. ‘Where your grandfather will be interred. But you can see that the Great Sea didn’t spare the holy middens, even. We kept one as the Sea left it, to remember. The young complain sometimes, for they can’t see the point of all the hard work we do. But this is the point, our most sacred place smashed to pieces, and there was nothing we could do about it.’

Qili faced the sea, which stretched untamed to the horizon, and breathed deeply of the salty air. He saw a group of eiders gathered to nest on a heap of offshore rocks that protruded above the receding tide. They were picking at molluscs with their beaks, or resting in the sun, preening and sleeping. Qili had always rather admired eiders. They liked exposed places, and braved the rough seas around the rocky shores, places they didn’t have to share with anybody else.

He was glad to be at the shore. He welcomed the openness and the lack of enclosure compared to the strange artificial bowl of the Bay Land. It felt more like home. But even here people were rearranging the world; two more dykes, both incomplete, pushed out to sea from the land, with heaps of logs and stones at their abutments.

He was brought to Ana and her closest companions, who stood before the middens. He’d met them all yesterday at the flint lode. Ice Dreamer was here, an older, greying, more elegant version of her vivacious daughter Dolphin, and Novu, the peculiar, dark, squat man from the Continent, and the priest, Jurgi, bare save for a strip of leather around his loins, his tattoos bright, his hair dyed blue, and his wooden teeth gleaming in his mouth. Today he had the upper jaw of a wolf dangling on a thread around his neck. Novu and Jurgi stood close together, Qili saw, their arms brushing, their fingers loosely cupped. They were old, Novu in his thirties, Jurgi even older in his forties.

Ana herself was a short, compact woman, her red hair shot through with grey, her rather expressionless face lined, her eyes close and calculating. A woman shut in on herself, Qili thought, and yet the centre of this little group.

Qili was struck again by how old all these people were. Qili knew only a few people of this great age back home, and they were elders who kept out of the way of the young folk. Here this cabal of ancients seemed to control everything about Etxelur. And they were evidently obsessed by the Great Sea, an event most people alive now couldn’t even remember.

The reason he was here was at Ana’s feet: a set of bones, fragmented but assembled roughly into a skeleton, respectfully laid out on a deerskin.

Arga led him forward, and he bowed to Ana. He stared down at these mute remains of a man he had never known. ‘My grandfather.’

Ana nodded. ‘I am glad you have come. Heni was much loved here.’ She spoke the traders’ tongue fluently. ‘He was a close friend of my father, before the Great Sea took him. Like an uncle to me.’

‘From what I hear he saved many lives.’

Jurgi the priest said, ‘You can do nothing more valuable with your own life than that. Qili, do you want some time alone with your grandfather? Do your people have any appropriate customs?’

Ana snorted. ‘Well, you might have asked him that yesterday when there was time to prepare.’

‘It’s fine,’ Qili said. ‘He was one of you. I honour him in my heart.’

Ice Dreamer asked Arga, ‘What about my daughter? What’s she up to?’

‘Guess who she’s with,’ Arga said reluctantly.

Dreamer shot an angry glance at her. ‘I asked you to keep them apart.’

‘What do you expect me to do, hobble them?’

Ana said sharply, ‘Oh, leave it for today. How I hate funerals! Everybody forced to come together whether they love or loathe each other, all the tensions coming out.’ She turned on the priest and Novu. ‘And you two can stop fiddling with each other as well. You’ve got a job to do, priest; keep your mind on that.’

Novu and Jurgi moved apart, so their arms were no longer touching. Novu just grinned at Ana’s attack, but Jurgi looked offended. ‘I’ll do my job as I always do it, as the mothers know very well.’

‘Well, I hope the mothers turn away from the sight of you two licking each other’s ball sacks in the dark. Company and consolation is one thing, but you push your luck, priest.’ Qili was amazed by her bluntness.

Her mind evidently moving on, she looked out at the sea, the incomplete dykes. ‘I’d like to get people pushing on with the new dykes before the Giving. Do you think I can use Heni’s death as an argument? After all it was him who used to take Arga out to swim around the Mothers’ Door, and here we are trying to take the Door back from the sea.’

The priest frowned. ‘Maybe we can be more subtle. The low tide is coming. Tell them of the moon, who has taken Heni; when the sea is low, and the moon distracted, we can steal something back from her…’

They held this conversation, evidently unthinking, in the traders’ tongue.

Arga drew Qili aside. ‘You mustn’t be offended. They don’t mean any disrespect to Heni. It’s just the way Ana is. She always works on several things at once.’ She flexed her fingers. ‘Like a spider pulling on many threads. She uses occasions like this to bring the people together, to remind them who they are. And she pushes the work she wants done next – like the big dykes she’s building out to sea. But at the same time she is sincere about what she said about your grandfather. I know her; I’m sure of that.’

Qili nodded. But he felt constrained by these people, this old woman with her manipulation and her scheming, as if he was caught up in her web. He longed for the day to be over, for an excuse to get away, to the simplicity of life in the World River estuary.

It was time to begin the ceremony. The priest pulled out his wooden teeth, spat on his wolf jaw, and shoved it into his mouth. Then, with a sigh, fangs protruding grotesquely, he began the short climb up the side of the midden.