Stone spring

75

Kirike and Dolphin walked along the northern beach of Flint Island, heading towards the Giving platforms. Thunder scampered at their feet, happy to be out on the beach.

It was a bright morning, still a few days short of the solstice. But there was a mist in the air and an unseasonably brisk bite to the wind off the sea; frothy foam blew along the littoral, and the fishing boats out at sea, grey shadows against the glittering water, were lifted by the waves. Gulls wheeled in the air, cawing, looking for food, competing for mates. To Dolphin they looked as if they were playing, and if she could fly, she thought with a deep, physical surge of joy, she would be up there playing with the best of them.

She and Kirike were still in a sleepy fug, after another long night in their own new house, the house they had built for themselves. She could smell the smoke of their fire about him, the sweet musk of his sweat. Just as every year under Ana’s leadership, the latest Giving was to be more lavish than ever, and there was plenty of work for everybody in Etxelur – but as far as Dolphin was concerned this morning, all that could wait.

But in the shade of a sandstone bluff at the top of the beach, outside a slumped hut, slaves were making rope.

Dolphin slowed, curious.

Etxelur always needed rope, for hauling timbers and stone, or dragging water sleds over the hillside. Making it was simple, repetitive work that, the Pretani said, you could trust to a slave. So here were seven slaves working together in silence, one man, two women, four children, the youngest of whom was only maybe five years old.

They looked up as Kirike and Dolphin stood before them, the adults incurious, the children vaguely fearful. The dog sniffed around them, tail wagging, but the people ignored him.

The women sat together on the ground, their legs crossed. They were cleaning aurochs hide with small hand-held flint scrapers, making soft repetitive rasping sounds as they cleared the last bits of fat and ligament. Dolphin could see the hide had already been cleaned of hair by scorching. The man was pushing a scraped hide into a pit, dug into the ground and lined with stone, skin and hardened mud. The pit stank of old urine. This was part of the complex process of tanning the hides. More hides lay at his feet in a heap, and Dolphin saw he had been cutting them into strips. Eventually these strips would be twisted and plaited into strong rope.

The children, meanwhile, were working on a heap of lime branches and logs. They used small flint knives to cut the bark from the wood and to divide it into strips. More pits full of water stood ready to take the bark; soaked, it would separate into long strands that could then be woven into string.

Dolphin saw that one little girl had cut the palm of her hand, for blood trickled down her arm. Her eyes were moist, but she didn’t make a sound.

Their ‘house’ was just a slumped driftwood lean-to, heaped against the bluff. Their hearth was a shelf of pebbles scavenged from the beach, and Dolphin could see the remains of their food: offal and other scraps.

A family, working together, making rope. Slaves in Etxelur.

Kirike seemed uneasy. ‘Why have we stopped?’ he asked in the Etxelur tongue, a language the slaves probably wouldn’t know.

‘I-’ Dolphin wasn’t sure. She had been curious about the slaves since the first of them had been driven here by the Pretani a month ago, hauling stone.

‘Let’s go on,’ Kirike said, uneasy.

‘No, wait.’ She let go of his hand and stepped forward. ‘You,’ she said to the man, switching to the traders’ tongue. ‘What’s your name?’

The man looked up at her, unsmiling. He was gaunt, too thin, the joints showing in his arms like bags of hazelnuts. ‘I make rope.’ His accent was thick.

‘You are a man, not just a rope-maker. Are you a father, a husband? What is your name?’

He didn’t reply.

Kirike plucked her sleeve. ‘Dolphin-’

The man’s sullenness irritated her, and that reaction disturbed her. Unsure where she was going with this, she said now, ‘Stand up.’

‘I am working.’

She glanced around. The nearest Pretani was a fat brute of a man down at the sea’s edge, squatting to shit into the sea. ‘Do as I say or I’ll call him over.’

Slowly, with evident reluctance, the man put down his hide and stood before her. He was shorter than she was. He had a tattoo coiled around one bare thigh, an eel with a gaping mouth. Dark, slim, not tall, he wasn’t much older than she was, she realised.

The women and children bent over their work, not looking at Dolphin or Kirike.

‘Tell me your name.’

‘Wise,’ he said at last. ‘My name is Wise.’

She nodded. ‘My name is Dolphin Gift. This is Kirike.’

He stared at her, and Kirike. ‘What do you want?’

‘Yes, what?’ Kirike muttered in their own tongue.

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I never spoke to a slave before. Wise. You call yourself the People of the Great Eel.’

He was cautious in his replies. ‘That is what we were.’

‘Are these your children? Which of these women is their mother?’

Wise glared at her.

Kirike murmured in the Etxelur tongue, ‘The Pretani ask questions like this. If they know which kid is yours they can make you work harder by threatening her.’

That shocked her. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘Really – I’m just curious. Please, tell me about your family.’

Again he hesitated. But in the end he pointed to one of the women. ‘She, my wife. The two older children, ours. And she, wife’s sister. The two little ones, hers. Her husband died. We took her and her children in. She had four children; two of them died…’

It was a story that you could have heard all over Etxelur, of broken families joined together for support. All very ordinary. And yet her relationship with this Wise wasn’t ordinary at all.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Do what I tell you. Sit down.’

Kirike murmured, ‘What are you doing, Dolphin?’

Wise stood still for a long heartbeat. Then, slowly, with a kind of unspoken insolence, he sat.

‘Now stand up.’

Again he drew the moment out. But then he stood, unwinding his thin legs.

She said to Kirike, ‘I control him in everything he does, as I control the fingers of my own hand. It’s not even like a trained dog, for he is human, as we are, and can understand exactly what is asked of him. I can make him do anything. I wonder how far I could go. If I told you to take that stone knife and to start slicing away at your own flesh, would you do it, Wise?’

‘Stop it, Dolphin.’

‘Just imagine if everyone was your slave. You could do anything you wanted. You could rebuild the whole world! You could tear down the hills, and banish the sea.’

Kirike muttered, ‘Ana seems to think she can do that already. How would you know if you gave the right commands? We aren’t the little mothers. Even if we had the power, we wouldn’t have their wisdom.’

‘You could always ask the priest,’ she said, but she giggled. ‘But if he was a slave, how could you trust his answers? And besides-’

‘What?’

She looked down at the children. ‘Having slaves around is probably all right as long as you aren’t one. Look, that little one has cut her hand.’ She knelt down and reached out to take the child’s arm. The girl flinched away, and the women tensed. Dolphin murmured, ‘It’s all right. I won’t hurt you. I just want to help. Oh, get your nose out, Thunder, she doesn’t want you licking her!’

The wound was small but deep; the blood had smeared all down the girl’s arm and over the bark she had been working. The girl was evidently terrified, and now she started to cry, though the women tried to hush her.

Dolphin said, ‘This will get infected if it’s not treated. The little one will get sick.’ The women were scared to respond, she could see, and she wasn’t sure how much they understood. She looked up at Kirike. ‘Go find the priest. Bring some moss, and ask him for healing herbs – he’ll know what’s best – and bring cloth soaked in sea water.’

Kirike hesitated, then he nodded and jogged away.

Dolphin smiled at the girl. ‘It will be all right. You’ll see. I’ll clean out the wound and wrap it up.’

‘We have healing,’ one of the women said unexpectedly. ‘In home, in land of Great Eel. Not bring. Pretani. Not let us bring.’

‘Well, it’s stupid to stop you keeping yourselves healthy, for if you get sick you can’t work, can you?’

Wise shrugged. ‘Always more Eel folk. Always more children. Why are you helping us?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Because I’m an outsider here too, and so is Kirike. Because I made you stand up and sit down, and I don’t like the fact that I enjoyed it.’ She probed at that bit of guilt, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t say sorry to me.’

‘I’m sorry anyhow. When Kirike comes back we’ll fix up her hand. Later I’ll bring you more healing stuff.’

‘The Pretani will take it away. Punish us for having it.’

‘Then we’d better make sure they don’t find out, hadn’t we?’ She grinned. But the women looked wary, and Dolphin was reminded that this wasn’t a game to these people, but a question of the lives and deaths of their children.

So she sat quietly and held the little girl’s hand until Kirike came back with a satchel of medicines.