Stone spring

84

Watching from the midden beach, Ana saw a handful of Pretani break out of the melee by the causeway’s abutment, and come running onto the island.

‘Here they come,’ said Kirike.

Ana took his hand. ‘Walk with me. We’ll go out along the ocean dyke.’

Kirike was reluctant. ‘We’ll be trapped out there. You go. I’ll stay and fight them off.’ He was scared, Ana saw, scared to his bones. He believed he was going to die. Yet he was prepared to stand to try to save her.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Stay beside me. I’m still in charge.’ She pulled at his hand until he followed her.

The dykes pushed out into the ocean towards the submerged Mothers’ Door. Their abutments were covered in heaps of unused rock and timber. Ana picked her way through this to the left-hand dyke, and they walked out along its surface, until the dyke grew too narrow and ragged for them to go further safely. Looking out from here, you could see the rows of posts driven into the seabed that would become the foundation of the dyke.

And here, Ana decided, in the arms of the ocean she had been trying to tame ever since the Great Sea, she would make her stand. She gripped Kirike’s hand, and they turned to face the shore.

There were five, six, seven Pretani – all that was left of the mob that had come here from their wooded country, or at least this half of them, while the rest had got bogged down in the Bay Land. The Etxelur defenders weren’t far behind.

When the Pretani leader saw that Ana and Kirike had gone out alone onto the dyke, he snapped quick words to his followers. And then he and one other walked cautiously out onto the dyke, following the footsteps of Ana and Kirike, both glancing down nervously at the lapping sea. Ana knew immediately who they were – and saw that the rumours about who was really behind this attack had been correct.

When her own defenders came running along the beach, the remaining Pretani turned to face them, spears raised. Ana raised both her hands, palms out. Wait. Wait. The Etxelur folk were clearly uncertain, but they slowed to a halt, some way short of the Pretani band.

The two warriors on the dyke saw this. A woman’s voice called, in fluent Etxelur speak, ‘Good, Ana. No need for anybody else to die today.’

‘Nobody but us?’ Ana called back.

‘As long as it ends here,’ called the other, a stocky man. ‘One way or another.’

‘Oh, it will,’ Ana said. ‘I promise you that.’

They stopped only ten or fifteen paces short of Kirike and Ana. The man had thick black hair, the woman pale red like Ana’s though greying, and both had their hair pulled back and tied in the Pretani style. Both of them had been fighting, hard; the man had a gashed shoulder, and the woman was splashed with blood, perhaps not her own, gore smeared over her face and hands and tunic.

Kirike stared. ‘Who are they?’

The man called, ‘My name is Shade. I speak for the Pretani.’

And the woman said, ‘You are Kirike. You have my father’s name, the name I gave you. I am not Pretani. I am of Etxelur blood. My name is Zesi. I am the daughter of Kirike, and sister of Ana. Kirike, I am your mother. And this man, the Root of the Pretani – this is your father.’

‘I never saw you before.’

‘Not since you were too small to remember – no. You were taken away from me.’

Kirike just stared, apparently speechless.

Shade faced Ana. There was little left of the Shade Ana remembered, little of that dreamy boy in this tough, tired, competent-looking man.

‘I heard you were pregnant,’ he called. ‘By Jurgi?’

‘Yes.’

He smiled. ‘A good man. I had plans to make him my own priest.’

‘You could have done worse.’

‘Ana, Ana – must people die each time we meet?’

‘It seems so. That’s why it would have been best if we had never met again.’ She glanced at her sister. ‘There were rumours that Zesi lived, that she had come to you.’

‘Those treacherous slaves-’

‘I think I would have known anyway. This whole scheme, how you worked your way into our world, into my head, with the stone and the labour, and then the slaves rising up against us – I knew it was too clever a plan for any Pretani. Even you, Shade.’

He grinned, and there was just a flash of the boyishness she remembered – the tender face she had longed to kiss, but never had. ‘Still, it nearly worked, didn’t it?’

‘Why did you come back, Zesi? Why spill so much blood?’

‘For the sake of the son you stole from me.’ She reached out her arms towards Kirike and tried to smile. ‘For you.’ But she was grotesque, her hardened face smeared with the blood of dead men, more dried blood under her fingernails, and Kirike flinched back. Zesi turned on Ana. ‘You took him from me.’

‘He was not safe with you. None of us were safe, with you in the world.’

Zesi took another step forward, her fist closed on a bloody stabbing spear. ‘Who are you? You are nothing. You are a worm beside me. All my life you got in the way. My father always favoured you-’

‘That’s foolish.’

‘And then you took it on yourself to judge me, and to throw me out of my homeland-’

‘If I had not you would have destroyed us all by now, as you killed the snailhead child under the reservoir you breached.’

‘And for that, you exiled me! You said it must end here, Ana. Then let it be so.’

‘I won’t fight you.’ Ana had a spear and a knife; she dropped them both.

Zesi grinned. ‘If that’s how you want it.’ She raised her stabbing spear.

Kirike, baffled and distressed, called, ‘What are you doing, Zesi – mother?’

‘No,’ Ana said sharply. ‘Please, Kirike. Stay back-’

Zesi snarled, ‘Don’t stand in my way, boy.’

And Shade said, ‘Enough is enough.’

His thrust was clean, the blade driving through Zesi’s body from the back. For a moment more she stood, supported by the spear, an expression of outraged shock on her face.

Shade stood behind her, whispering in her ear. ‘You destroyed my family. Even my mother went to her grave cursing me, because of you. You would even have killed our son, wouldn’t you, to get to your sister? Now we face defeat. My men are being slaughtered. And was it for this, Zesi – your hurt pride, your hatred of your sister? I kill you, but you have killed me already.’ And he thrust again. The blade punctured her heart and burst out of her ribs. She fell forward, into Ana’s arms, blood spouting from her chest and mouth, already dead.

Kirike cried out, and fell on his father, but Shade easily brushed his clumsy blows aside. Then he held the boy, until he dissolved into weeping.

Shade looked over the boy’s head at Ana. ‘It had to be me that finished it,’ he said blackly. ‘Let my hands take the last of the blood, as they have the rest. I should never have come here, never have let her back into my life… Well. Let it end here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ana whispered, clinging to the body of her sister. ‘Yes, let it end, Zesi. And if I couldn’t honour you in life as you wanted, I will honour you in death.’