Stone spring

70

The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox. Dolphin was standing on the dyke across the mouth of the bay when she heard Kirike’s call.

She could see him down there on the Bay Land, near a stand of willows, mature trees growing out of what had once been sea-bottom mud. He waved, his broad smile revealing a flash of white teeth.

The people around Dolphin, labouring on the dyke, looked up, distracted. They were all snailheads, most of them children, doing small jobs under the supervision of the adults. One girl grinned when she saw it was Kirike calling. You couldn’t keep secrets, and everybody knew about Dolphin and Kirike.

A flood of complicated, contradictory feelings welled up in Dolphin. She’d missed him every day he’d been away on his late-summer hunting jaunt with the other boys to the southern forests. Now he had returned, but she had to share some seriously bad news with him. Besides, she felt grimy, ragged, her clothes and skin covered in dust from the Pretani sandstone she had been handling all day. It was late afternoon, and she was tired. Why couldn’t he have come home in the morning, when she was clean and fresh?

He called again, his voice as distant as a gull’s cry. She pointed north, beyond Flint Island; they had a favourite spot on the shore. He nodded, and began to jog that way.

She jabbered her apologies to the snailheads. They shrugged, dirty, sweating, bored; few of them would work much longer today anyhow.

Then she walked across the dyke to its abutment at its northern end, on the island, and clambered down to the sandy beach. Her afternoon shadow stretched before her, long, oddly elegant – more elegant than she felt herself. As she walked she kicked off her boots and let the damp sand soothe her feet, which were aching after a day of cutting and hauling stone. It was almost the autumn equinox and the water was sharply cold.

At the headland she glanced back once at the dyke. The wall stood proud, defying the sea, though it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as when viewed from the Bay Land side, where its whole face was exposed. It was a patchwork, with around a quarter of the original core of mud bricks and plaster now faced by sandstone slabs.

The work with the stone, with stuff that was heavy, unfamiliar and blighted by a superstitious dread, was progressing slowly. Dolphin was coming to hate the dyke, for the way it ate her life, and the lives of so many others.

She turned her back on the dyke and walked on, and was glad when she turned around the headland to the island’s north shore, and the dyke was out of her sight altogether. Here wading birds, vast variegated flocks of them, worked their way along the littoral, having paused here on their way to their winter homes. There was plenty of evidence of humanity here, in the great middens, the houses standing on their mounds looking out over the ocean, even the stubs of the new dykes extending out to sea towards the Mothers’ Door. But somehow, away from the great drained expanse of the Bay Land, there was more of a sense of nature, of the world as it was supposed to be.

And here came Kirike, walking along the beach to meet her. She flung away her boots and ran towards him.

They collided in a tangle of limbs, tripped each other up, and fell to the sand. His face was before hers, the skin soft under a stubble of dark beard, and she could smell his sweat, and a subtle tang of wood sap, and crushed acorns on his breath when he kissed her. ‘You smell of forest,’ she murmured into his mouth.

‘And you smell of the sea. And of stone.’

‘Ugh. Does that bother you?’

He rolled away, sat up and shrugged. ‘I don’t much care. Maybe that’s the Pretani blood in me. Come on, shall we go up to our shell place? We’ll be out of this breeze.’

She got up, brushing sand from her legs. ‘Getting out of the breeze. That’s all you’re concerned about, is it?’

He grinned, standing. ‘For now.’ He grabbed her hand so they were drawn together, arms and bodies and foreheads touching. ‘Wait until we get back to the house – as long as we can get your mother out of the way.’ He kissed her lightly, teasing. ‘Come on.’

Then he pulled away and jogged across the sand to where she’d thrown her boots, and picked them up. He was tidy that way, with a neatness that she lacked. She mocked him for it, but it was one of the ways they fit together, the ways they worked better together than apart.

They walked along the beach, and before they reached the holy middens they clambered up into the dunes. Here there was a little hollow between one dune ripple and the next, bounded by long stalks of marram grass, just wide enough for two people to lie side by side – a spot they called their ‘shell place’, for it was always carpeted by broken sea shells, washed up from the beach. It was here that they had first made love, not long after returning from the midsummer Giving expedition to the World River. It was a place Dolphin liked to think was special, was theirs alone – but that was probably a dream.

Kirike lay back in the soft, dry sand, his arms tucked behind his head. ‘Ah – it’s good to stop moving. Believe it or not I’m pretty tired. It felt like we ran all the way to the southern forests and back.’

She grunted, not impressed. That was what you had to expect with boys and young men. She settled down beside him with her head on his shoulder. ‘So how was the hunting?’

‘The deer were shy this year. We came back with heaps of mushrooms, though. Mushrooms, and acorns. We were lousy hunters, but the squirrels won’t forget us in a hurry. And how’s the wall building going?’

‘Dismal. Hard. Boring. Listen, Kirike, we need to talk. Ana wants to see us later. And my mother-’

He covered her hand with his. ‘In a moment. I just got back. Let’s not talk about that lot of old monsters, just for a while longer.’ He sat up, pushing back his thick black hair from his eyes, and looked out to sea.

From here they could see the sweep of the ocean, the shadowed mass of Flint Island’s single hill, the huge, empty, deep blue sky. On a rocky headland to the west Dolphin saw movement, small, fat, white shapes crawling. Baby grey seals, just born, venturing out into a new world. And in the air she saw a flight of swans leaving for the winter, their huge wings pink-white as they caught the sun’s low-angled light, and waders swooping in from the east, to settle like snowflakes on the littoral.

Kirike said, ‘I love this time of year, and the spring. The equinoxes, the times of change. When the birds of summer fly away, and the birds of winter come. As if the world is taking a huge breath. It’s so beautiful here. Every time I go away I forget… Even if I don’t belong here.’

‘Don’t say that. Listen, Kirike – my mother. She’s talking about going away.’

He turned to look at her. ‘Where?’

‘She fears she is the last of her people – or I am. She thinks she should go back and find others. Save them, perhaps, as she was saved by Kirike, your grandfather.’

‘She wants to go back over the ocean?’

‘She’s done it before.’

‘But my grandfather Kirike is dead, and Heni who travelled with him. Without Kirike and Heni, how could she even find the way?’

‘My mother thinks she might remember. There are plenty of young men who say they want the adventure. Anyhow she is talking of trying.’ Dolphin frowned. ‘She’s not happy here – not any more. She and Ana bicker a lot. There was always tension between them, because when she first came here Ana thought my mother was taking her father away from her. I think she grew close to Ana when they were recovering from the Great Sea together.’

He snorted, and spat a gob of phlegm into the sand. ‘These old folk, with their ancient fights and their Great Sea. Don’t you get sick of hearing about it?’

‘If she goes,’ Dolphin said simply, ‘she wants me to go with her.’

‘Oh.’ He dug his fingers into the sand. ‘What about us?’

‘My mother doesn’t want us to be together anyhow. You know that.’

‘What about you? What do you want?’

His Pretani-dark eyes were on her, and she saw how important this question was to him. She didn’t want to answer, she wanted their relationship to continue to be the wonderful game it had been so far. But she knew that what she told him now would shape them for ever. It must be the deepest truth.

She set her hand on his. ‘How could I leave you? Our babies will be beautiful.’

He grabbed her to him. ‘Beautiful, yes. Hairy, but beautiful.’

That made her laugh.

He whispered in her ear, his breath hot, ‘It doesn’t matter where we came from, or our parents. All that matters is who we are, and where we are. What we feel, here and now…’ She felt his hand move down her back, strong and confident. She thrilled as he explored the cleft of her buttocks.

But she pushed him away. ‘No. You were right. Too windy and cold here. And besides, Ana will be waiting.’

He pulled back, reluctant. ‘All right. What shall we say to your mother?’

‘Nothing.’ She stood, brushing away sand from her tunic. ‘We know what we’re going to do. But it’s none of her business – not until she asks, or we choose to tell her. Come on. You can carry my boots, as you’re so keen on them.’

They walked away down the dunes and along the beach, heading for the abutment of the dyke and the way back to Ana’s house.