Stone spring

64

They sat in Shade’s house.

Shade had called for his priest to sit with them, feeling the need for spiritual support in this confrontation, but Resin, poppy-addled and terrified, was barely conscious. Bark, meanwhile, refused to go further than a couple of paces from the Root’s side with strangers in the clearing. He sat just outside the house’s door flap where he could watch Zesi and her grimy followers, who sat around the open-air hearth, sharing a deer haunch.

The two Leafies lay huddled together on the ground, pinned under a net weighted down with logs.

In the house, Zesi told Shade what had become of her in the fifteen years since the summer of the Great Sea, when she had left Albia after the death of the Root.

‘So we got rid of you from here. And then Ana threw you out of Etxelur.’

‘More than that,’ Zesi said, every word dripping with bitterness. ‘I am dead in Etxelur. What you see is a sack of bones walking around. And I nearly did die too, in those first days alone. But you know me. I was always a fighter.’

She grinned, cold, somehow more savage even than the Leafy child-woman she had unleashed on the Pretani. He wondered how he could ever have imagined he loved her. ‘So you came back.’

‘I had no real intention, no plan. Nowhere to go – I knew I wouldn’t be welcome here. Yet I came this way. Perhaps drawn by your memory.’ She didn’t look at him when she said this. ‘Or perhaps it was the forest. You can hide in a forest. Hole up. You can’t do that in Northland, all those open spaces.’

‘So you hid away.’

‘Not well enough. They soon found me.’ She nodded at the band who had accompanied her, most of them men, some women, all of them grimy and tough-looking. ‘Them or their predecessors. Many of that first lot are long dead now.’

‘Bandits,’ said Shade. This was a traders’-tongue word. Bandits, rootless folk who preyed on others, were a plague, especially in the forests where they could hide in the shadows. ‘I can imagine how they treated you. A woman alone-’

‘You should imagine how I treated them. Before they learned to leave me alone one man had to die, choked to death on his own severed cock.’

He was careful not to react. ‘So you survived. And you came to lead them.’

‘Not just this lot. There are many bandit groups. The forest swarms with them. You know that.’

‘I suppose it doesn’t surprise me. You always were a leader. And now you have the Leafy Boys under your sway, I see.’

She grinned. ‘Did you like my stunt? I’m sorry one of your people got killed – it shouldn’t have gone that far.’

‘Death always did follow you around, Zesi.’

‘It made the point, though, about how vicious they can be. Imagine a swarm of them falling on your houses! They would chew your eyes out before you had time to shout the alarm.’

‘And you control them.’

‘Just those we capture. We smoke them out with fires. They have no language; they can’t be trained. And they’ll only eat red meat – never cooked. Some of the men think they’re not human at all.’

‘They steal our infants,’ Shade said sadly. ‘They are human enough.’

‘Hey, you.’ She threw a boar rib at Bark, who snarled back at her. ‘The female over there is a gift, for you and your men, if you can handle her. Some of my men say it’s worth the cost in bites and scratches. We kept her fresh for you. If you spoil her it doesn’t matter, there are always more to trap. Go ahead. Enjoy.’

Bark wasn’t about to leave Shade alone. But he beckoned over one of his men and spoke quietly.

Soon a group of the men, with the bandits’ help, were cautiously separating the male and female Leafies. They hauled the squirming female over to the edge of the clearing, away from the women and children. Then they bent over her, half a dozen of them, like a pack of dogs shoving their muzzles into the open belly of a deer, Shade thought with disgust.

Zesi watched him, her face a mask of wrinkles and scars. ‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’ve changed so much. I can’t even count the kill scars on your brow.’

He grunted. ‘Haven’t aged well, have we?’

‘You’ve survived here, Shade. But you’ve achieved nothing. You’ve just held onto what your father had.’

‘Wait until the Giving,’ he said angrily. ‘See how many come to kneel at my feet.’

‘Oh, they fear you. But they’d be rid of you if they could.’

‘And you’ve achieved so much more, have you?’

She shrugged. ‘Once I was a woman alone. Now I command the bandits, and the Leafy Boys. Think how much damage I could do with that.

‘And think what we could do together, your hunters with my killers! We could take all of Albia and its patchwork tribes.’ She gestured at the clearing. ‘You could build your circles of wood up and down the length of the peninsula. From north to south, east to west, all would know your name, and all would bow to you.’ She eyed him. ‘You would be safe. You and your children. None would dare to challenge you.’

He felt uncomfortably that she knew him too well. He was not like his father and never had been. He craved safety and security for his family, his people, more than he desired war or loot, or to control others. But aggression seemed to be the only way to achieve that. ‘Is that what you’ve come to propose, Zesi, a war? And what would you get out of it? What do you want?’

‘Only one thing. Etxelur. If all of Albia is to bow to you, Etxelur will bow to me.’

‘Etxelur has changed. It is rich now. Everybody knows that. Its flint is the best you’ll find anywhere, and is prized.’

‘You can have the flint – have it all. All I want is my sister’s head under my heel.’ She leaned forward and grabbed his hand. The unexpected touch sent a jolt through him; his body remembered her, even if his mind refused to accept her. ‘And there’s more. There’s something else you want in Etxelur, Shade, even if you don’t know it. Something we made together.’

He drew back from her touch, his head swimming. The priest murmured in his stupefied sleep. Shade asked with dread, ‘And what is that?’

‘Your son. Our son. Your only son, in fact – yes? I know how important sons are to you Pretani. You and I could never have built a life together. But maybe, together, we can build a world-’

There was another raw, guttural cry, shouting.

Shade said to Zesi, ‘Everywhere you go, must you be accompanied by screams of pain and fear?’ He pushed out of his house. The Leafy female had got away. One man lay on the ground, his tunic hitched up around his waist, a wooden stake protruding from his thigh. Another Leafy lay dead on the ground – a third, another boy, his neck snapped.

‘Incredible,’ Bark said as Shade came up. ‘Six men around her. This fellow about to stick his cock in her, it seems. Then this Leafy Boy comes charging out of the forest. Stabs the fellow with a stake, and drags the girl away. The lads caught him, and they did for him as you can see, but the girl escaped. Look at the state of him.’ Bark lifted up the boy’s right arm, which was clearly broken. ‘A busted arm, and he still beat off six Pretani!’

‘Just as I told you,’ Zesi murmured in Shade’s ear. ‘All this wildness, all this strength. Imagine if we can control it, together. It will be a Great Sea of violence. Do you want to hear my plan?’

Deeply uneasy, he asked, ‘How does it start?’

‘With stone.’