Stone spring

67

‘What do you mean, we should be having more children?’ Arga was indignant, almost shouting. ‘Since when did you become a little mother, Ana?’

‘Maybe we should calm down,’ said Jurgi, glancing uneasily at the door flap of the stuffy raftborne house.

Ana just glared at Arga, apparently unmoved by her outburst.

It was dark in this house despite the brightness of the day, and they had lit some of the whale oil lamps they had brought from Etxelur; their smoky glow underlit Ana’s face, making her look even older than she was, severe.

It was the day before the Etxelur water council. This was another invention of Ana’s, a meeting she held every quarter around the time of the equinoxes and solstices, as a way of ensuring all the complicated activities in Etxelur were fitting together properly. They might have come all the way to the World River estuary but Ana wasn’t going to let the chance of a council go by. And as she customarily did, Ana had summoned Jurgi, Novu, Ice Dreamer and Arga in advance of the council to see if they could guess the concerns that might be brought up, and to practise their answers. They’d all done this before, and the arguments were typical.

But Jurgi was far from comfortable. They were guests in a house loaned them by estuary folk, on a raft that rode the body of the World River. This wasn’t Ana’s house, from which people kept a respectful distance; anybody might be listening to their arguments. He said now, ‘Let’s keep our voices down at least.’

Novu was sweating heavily, his face slick, irritable. ‘Maybe we should just go and sit out in the open and have done with it. Anything’s better than this stuffiness.’

Ana grunted unsympathetically. ‘I thought you and the priest enjoyed making each other sweat in the dark.’

Novu snapped back, ‘And I am getting sick of the way you speak to us.’

Ice Dreamer smiled. ‘I suspect she’s just jealous of the consolation you two have found together. She is alone, more alone than any of the rest of us.’

‘And you’re alone too,’ Ana shot back, ‘since my father spoiled your plan to crawl into his bed by getting himself killed.’

‘Shut up,’ Arga said. ‘Shut up. I can’t stand your bickering.’ She glared at them, one after another. ‘Didn’t you hear what Ana just said? She wants us to have more babies. Jurgi, you’re still the priest. Can’t you tell her why that’s so wrong?’

‘Yes, tell me, Jurgi.’

He bit back a sharp response. ‘Arga has a point. It may be different in Jericho. But all across Northland, and even in Albia and Gaira, I never heard of any people who didn’t space out their children.’

‘This is the wisdom of the little mothers,’ Arga protested. ‘You can’t have too many children, not too soon, not close together. It’s always been this way. For when the flood comes, or the famine, and you have to run-’

Ice Dreamer said, ‘It is the same in my country.’

Ana said dismissively, ‘Yes, yes. You can only carry one child, the others must be able to run – or die. But times are different now. We of Etxelur don’t have to run anywhere. And in the meantime we lost half our number to the Great Sea, and we haven’t recovered yet, nor will we for a generation or two at this rate. We need more people, more than ever before-’

Arga snapped, ‘More people to build your dykes and reservoirs!’

‘Exactly.’ Ana waved a hand. ‘Look where we are! We have come all this way just to beg the loan of a few lumps of muscle from the river folk. Imagine if every woman in Etxelur had a child, and then another, and another. In fifteen more years we’d have a strong cohort of workers. We could do our own work, fulfil our own dreams-’

‘Your dreams,’ murmured Arga.

‘And we wouldn’t have to use up our precious flint persuading somebody else to do it for us.’

‘They may not accept it,’ said the priest uneasily. ‘The people. They’ve followed you this far, Ana, but-’

‘If you back me up they’ll swallow it,’ she said, sounding uninterested. ‘Just say it’s the will of the mothers. That always works.’

Jurgi felt a spark of anger at her casual insults. ‘Take care, Ana. I am still a priest, your priest, and you should listen to what I say. You don’t see all. You don’t hear all. They come to me sometimes. They complain to me. Argue about whether the mothers really want us to do this, or that. I try to persuade them it’s so. I’m not sure if I always succeed.’

Ana became thoughtful. ‘So, even after all these years of us working together, they still come to you without telling me?’

The priest stiffened. ‘The people’s relationship with the little mothers has existed as long as the world. Long before you or I were ever born.’

‘But the fact is there are still two centres in Etxelur. Two sources of decision-making. Or at least that’s how the people see it, evidently.’ She stared at him. ‘I think I’m going to have to do something about that.’

He felt vaguely alarmed, having no idea what she might mean.

Arga was still angry at Ana. ‘I’m telling you the people won’t stand for it, this business of the babies. If the priest tells them they must, they’ll challenge him. That’s what I think.’

‘She may be right,’ said Ice Dreamer languidly.

Ana thought it over, and nodded. ‘All right. Maybe it’s too early to bring it up at this council. We’ll leave it until the autumn equinox, and give ourselves time to work out how to argue for it. But argue it we will, for I’m convinced this is the only way forward for Etxelur… Until next time. Now, Novu, what’s this rubbish I hear about stone from Albia?’

‘It’s far from rubbish,’ Novu said. He shifted stiffly, and from the pile of goods beside him he produced a heavy block of stone, wrapped in skin. Unwrapped, it seemed to glow in the soft, diffuse light of the lamps. ‘Look at this stuff. Now, Ana, yes, it’s Pretani, and I know we have had our problems with them. But Kirike brought me this, and he thinks they are sincere, they really do just want to trade. I think we have to consider it. Just think what we could do with this – our dykes covered in this fine stone rather than my clumsy mud bricks and plaster!’

Arga said, ‘Once again your dreams expand. Think how many more babies we will have to conceive to build everything out of stone!’

But Ana wasn’t listening. She leaned forward and ran her hand over the stone’s smoothly worked surface.