Stone spring

65

The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice. ‘Then it’s agreed,’ said Novu to the elders of the Bone People. Sitting on the dusty deck of the raft, in the shade of a cloth canopy, he showed them the basket in front of him. ‘You get forty nodules of the best Etxelur flint. In return, you send forty of your strongest young people to labour on our dykes next year.’ He spoke fast, fluent traders’ tongue, and he smiled, keen to close the deal.

Ana sat beside him, raised above the rest on a heap of skins, themselves valuable commodities. ‘They should be healthy, mind,’ Ana warned. ‘The people you send. Good workers. No ill, no lame, nobody too young or too old…’

Dolphin, watching, thought that if Novu’s face was open and trustworthy, a natural trader’s, Ana’s face, in the shade of the awning, was stern, hard to read.

The leaders of the Bone People, in a line before Novu, Ana and Jurgi, stared back. They were greedy for the flint; they could barely keep their eyes off the creamy, pale brown stone. Yet they were wary of the transaction Novu was trying to conduct.

It got even worse when Novu produced his counting tokens, little clay figurines with circles on their bellies.

Dolphin was sitting with Kirike and others of Etxelur’s senior families on this borrowed raft in the background of the talks. They had no real part to play in these discussions. They were just here to add some weight to the Etxelur party. It was midsummer day, and they were in the estuary of the World River. Even in the canopy’s shade it was intensely hot and humid, out here on the breast of the river. Midges hummed in the air. Occasionally, as a wave rolled down the languid water, the floor lifted and the wooden structure groaned like a great, relaxed sigh.

The Bone People elders were all men, for that was the way of these people from far inland, far up the river valley. They went naked, with their penises painted bright red with ochre, and each man wore a cap made of the upper skull of an honoured ancestor, and had a finger-bone from another grandparent shoved through the fleshy part of his nose. Their priest was just a boy, aged about fourteen. He had a whole tower of skulls on his head, threaded together through holes drilled in their crowns. He looked baffled, still a child, out of place in this meeting of adults.

Dolphin, distracted, saw a dragonfly that had somehow got under the awning, flitting about, confused. One of the Bone People snatched it neatly out of the air in his fist, inspected it, then crushed it and popped it into his mouth.

Kirike plucked her elbow. ‘I’m bored,’ he whispered.

‘Me too…’

‘There’s some old man over there watching us.’

Dolphin peered past the Bone People into the gloom, and she saw a man in heavy furs, dark, strong-looking, with scars striped across his forehead, like a Pretani. He was maybe thirty. There were a few people from other groups here, though the meeting was dominated by Etxelur folk and Bone People. When he saw Dolphin looking at him the stranger smiled; she looked away.

Kirike said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Wait until they’re not watching.’

Kirike was restless, but sat still, as Novu continued his patient setting out of the counting tokens.

The Bone People were intrigued by the trading, but they were disturbed too, faintly troubled. And well might they be, for so were many of the Etxelur folk. Too many traditions were being defied. All Dolphin’s life the midsummer Giving, presided over by Ana, had been the most significant event of the year, as well as the most fun. People came to it from all across Northland. Some trade had always gone on – indeed traders like the one who had brought Novu himself to Etxelur could travel all the way across the Continent to such fairs, carrying their precious bits of iron and gold and obsidian and carved bone. But the point of the event wasn’t the trade; the point was the Giving, the sharing.

That was how it used to be, anyhow.

The trouble was, Etxelur’s huge projects, the dykes and drainage schemes, were always hungry for labour. But people still had to spend most of their time gathering food and building houses and making clothes and chasing children – the business of staying alive. And in Etxelur, it had soon become apparent, there just weren’t enough people to fulfil Novu’s grand schemes.

So Etxelur had started to buy labour from its neighbours.

Its treasure was the flint mined from Flint Island, and from the lode freshly exposed in the Bay Land. A rough exchange had soon been established: one nodule of high-quality flint in return for the labour of one healthy youngster for a summer. Many of these transactions were conducted at the Givings, and gradually the nature of the ceremony had changed, as Novu and the priest, watched over by a hawk-eyed Ana, spent much of their time conducting elaborate negotiations.

And now, this year, Ana had decreed a new departure. It was a year since Heni’s death, and Qili’s journey all the way from the estuary last year had given her the idea. This year, Etxelur’s Giving wouldn’t even be held in Etxelur at all. Instead, much of the population had made the long walk along the north coast of Northland to the World River estuary, and here Ana had built her Giving platform and set up a dreamers’ house and organised the games, and Novu set out his trade goods. For, Ana argued, the estuary was the richest single site in all of Northland – and rich with people whose labour she could buy.

The heart had gone out of the Giving, complained old folk like Arga. It was as if the rebuilding of Etxelur had become a madness that was eating all their lives, and turning them away from the wisdom of the mothers. Some had gone to the priest, asking him to speak to Ana, but Jurgi had always been an ally of Ana. Ana and her core team didn’t seem to care.

And so here they were, on midsummer day, far from home, doing business.

Novu’s tokens, made of soft clay, were crudely shaped into human figures, each with a shapeless blob for a head, and limbs divided from the body by grooves. And each had a pattern of circles and bars inscribed into its belly.

Novu, as he always did, went through the meaning of the tokens to make sure the Bone People elders understood. ‘This man has a single circle on his belly. That means one worker, for one summer.’ He held up a finger. ‘This little man has two circles, that’s two workers. Three, four, five. Now look.’ The next figure had a radial bar cutting to the centre of one small circle. ‘The bar stands for five, for one hand.’ He held up his open right hand to demonstrate. ‘And the circle is one more. Six.’ He held up his left forefinger. ‘And this next one, a bar with two circles, means seven. And eight, and nine…’ This system was continued up to the most complex inscription, of four bars and five circles, which stood for twenty-five.

The boy-priest picked up one of the little men. His skull-tower cap wobbled. The boy made the clay man walk up and down on his stumpy legs, humming a kind of tune. Novu waited patiently until the boy had finished playing, and restored the token to its place in the row before him.

Despite her restlessness to be away, Dolphin always enjoyed watching Novu go through this strange procedure, the cleverness of the little tokens. It had come about because of too many disputes about who had agreed to what, how many nodules had been promised for how many young workers or sacks of lime or boats laden with fish – disputes that were either the product of bad faith, or of deals done in the dreamers’ house where nobody could remember whether they’d agreed to anything at all. One or two such lapses you could live with, but the building of Etxelur required a lot of planning, and a better way was needed.

Using tokens to record a deal was an idea Novu remembered from his home in Jericho, and what he had heard of practices among neighbouring peoples. He and Jurgi had worked out this system between them, basing it on the ancient concentric-circles symbol of Etxelur. Thus, as Novu produced two tokens to record the deal for forty workers – one little man with a four-bar, five-ring ‘twenty-five’ symbol, and another with a two-bar, five-ring ‘fifteen’ – he was giving the Bone People a reminder not just of the deal but of the spirit of Etxelur itself.

‘Look, I will keep copies of the same tokens myself.’ He held them up. ‘Now we mark them so we know they record the truth.’ He spat on his thumb, and pressed it into the soft clay of the heads of each of the four tokens, depressing the right side. Then he gave the tokens to one of the elders who, with prompting from Novu, did the same, pressing his thumb down on the left side of each shapeless face.

When this was done, the elder held up the little men he had been given, curious and, Dolphin thought, afraid, as if it was a new kind of magic. So he should be, she sometimes thought. The tokens were just bits of clay, yet they remembered conversations and deals more reliably than any human memory. What was that if not magic?

Ana and the others relaxed a little before moving on to their next business, which was a deal for a load of dried, salted eel. Ana drank juice from a sack, and spoke to the priest. Some of the Bone People got up and stretched their stiff legs, pacing on the raft’s wooden floor.

Dolphin touched Kirike’s shoulder. ‘Now’s our chance.’

He grinned and nodded. ‘Just keep your head down.’

So they crawled away from the murmuring adults, making for the open side of the awning, and emerged into bright sunlight. Dazzled, Dolphin had to shield her eyes and look around to orient herself. The gangway to the next raft was a bridge of stout logs bound up with rope and lashed in place.

She grabbed Kirike’s hand, and they skipped away, laughing.