Dreamer cradled Reacher in her arms over her own swollen belly, the two of them, the last of the True People, on the beach before this strange poisonous lake, and she told Reacher the story of the world.
‘In those days the world was rich and teemed with game. People crawled out of the sea to populate the land. The People hunted and grew wise and lived long. Even when they died they were born again into this world, for this was the most perfect world there could be. Their most powerful totems were the mammoth, which was like a hairy boulder walking the earth, and the horse, which was a swift runner.
‘But then the Sky Wolf, jealous of his banishment from the earth, decided to smash the world.
‘When the clouds and frost and the ash had cleared, the great animals had gone, and nothing stirred but stunted creatures barely worthy of the hunt. There was only a handful of True People left, but the earth swarmed with a new race of sub-men who evolved from the cowardly things that burrowed in the ground.
‘Now the True People still make their fluted blades, but there is nothing left to hunt. Even when we die we can’t return to the hunting ground of the past. The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, the anti-world. Even our totems are dead…’
She thought she heard Reacher murmur. She held her closer, looking into her hooded eyes. ‘You must listen,’ she said. ‘Listen to the story. For you, Reacher, must tell it to me when I am in labour, and you, child in my womb, must speak it over my bed as I lie dying, for there is nobody else…’
Two men were watching her. The woman sat by a poor, shoddy fire under a shelter made of a heap of driftwood. She was dressed in tattered skins. Her dark hair was a mat of filth and grease, her face streaked with old blood. Bits of kit lay on the ground around her, amid folds of dirty leather. Her belly was swollen, though she was terribly thin; her wrist looked so fine Kirike thought he could have closed his thumb and forefinger around it. She held a child in her arms, a girl, perhaps eight or ten – nothing but skin and bones, and not moving.
The woman had been speaking, murmuring nonsense in an unknown tongue. Now she looked at Kirike with pale, blank eyes, and he suppressed a shudder.
Heni hissed, ‘Can you smell that rot? Like spoiled meat.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think she’s mad?’
‘She’s beautiful,’ Kirike said. ‘Or was. And she’s pregnant.’
‘Yes. Far gone with it. And look at the kid she’s holding. How stiff she is…’
Kirike stepped forward cautiously. The woman, watching, didn’t move. He crouched and touched the dangling arm of the girl, the wrist. The skin was cold as stone, and he could find no pulse. He moved closer, deliberately smiling at the woman. There was an overpowering stink of filth, of shit and piss and sweat, of stale fish grease – and that dread rot stench. He worked his fingers under the matted hair at the girl’s neck, and felt the cold flesh.
He drew back. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Dead for days, I’d say.’ Heni leaned forward and cautiously unwrapped the skin around the girl’s leg. The limb was swollen to the size of a log, and an open wound swarmed with maggots. He fell back, his hand over his mouth. ‘Well, we know how she died.’
‘Try not to frighten the live one.’ Still smiling, Kirike tried to slide his arms under the girl’s stiff body, to take her from the woman. But the woman grabbed the girl back. ‘I bet she won’t speak a word of any tongue we know. Nobody in this moon-struck land does. It’s going to take a while to persuade her to give up that corpse.’
Heni said, ‘It’s going to take no time at all. We just walk away and leave her to the sea, or the wolves.’
‘She’s pregnant, man! And she’s half-starved. Who knows how long she’s been nursing this wretched child? No wonder it’s driven the sense from her head. I wonder what happened to her.’
‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. And if she’s pregnant, that’s another morsel for the wolves. She’s not our problem, Kirike. She’s not one of ours. This isn’t our country!’
‘If we can get the body away from her, get some food inside her, clean her up-’
Heni stood over him, arms folded. ‘We’re going home. You agreed. We leave tomorrow, or the day after. As soon as we fill the boat-’
‘Fine. You fill the boat. We’ll leave as we said. And, unless she recovers and runs off, we take her with us.’
For a long moment Heni didn’t move. ‘One day I’ll walk away from you, cousin. I’ll just walk away, and you’ll be dead in a month.’
‘But today’s not that day, is it? Look – you cover up that stinking leg, and try to lift the body…’
The two of them moved towards the cowering woman. Kirike smiled, murmuring soft words in a tongue she could not know.
And then he noticed the design on the rock face on which she was sitting: three circles with a common centre, and a radial slash – the design that had been tattooed into his own wife’s belly, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House – the sign of Etxelur, carved into a rock on the wrong side of the ocean.
15
They walked every day, Novu and his owner, the trader Chona, at a steady, ground-eating pace, following water courses and well-worn tracks, generally following the river north from Jericho. Sometimes they even walked by night.
Generally they walked in silence. In fact Novu got more slaps from Chona, stinging blows on the back of the head, than he did words, for every time he got something wrong, a slap. He quickly learned what was wrong and what was right.
And for the first few days, as he shuffled along in the filthy old skins Chona had given him, a heavy pack on his back, Novu was hobbled by bark rope tied tightly around his ankles.
Novu was a town boy. He had never walked far in his life. He had boots, but his soft feet blistered. Every joint seemed to ache as he shifted the mass of the pack, trying to favour one shoulder and then the other. The hobble made it much worse. He couldn’t make Chona’s big strides; he had to make two steps for every one of Chona’s, and he felt perpetually out of breath. He didn’t have a knife, but his hands were free, and he could unpick the knots – but they were tied expertly and he would need time, which Chona, ever vigilant, was never going to give him. But he longed to be free of the hobble, and to be able to stretch his legs.
Sometimes Chona stayed the night with those he traded with. But Novu always had to stay outside, huddled under a skin or a lean-to. Such people didn’t live as Novu had in Jericho, but in communities of a few dozen people, in houses that might be shaped like bricks or like pears or like cowpats, maybe with a few herded goats and a scrap of cultivated wheat. They could be very strange, these isolated folks – people who went naked or with feathers sticking up from their topknots, or who tattooed themselves and their children red and black all over, or who stretched their necks or ear lobes or their lower lips, or who wore bones through their cheeks and necks. Chona said it was possible that traders like himself were the only strangers these people ever saw. No wonder they were odd.
It was worse when they stayed out in the country, away from people altogether. Chona carried skins in his backpack, remarkably light and supple, that he would use to make lean-tos in stands of trees. It wasn’t long before he had taught Novu how to make a dry and warm shelter.
But when the dark came Novu always found himself curling up in the dirt like an animal in its den. It was not like being at home, snug in the belly of Jericho with the warm bodies of hundreds of people all around him. Here he was outside, and there was nothing around him but the wind, and the howls of distant wild dogs – and, occasionally, the snuffling and tread of some curious visitor in the dark. At times even the rope tether by which Chona attached Novu to himself at night was a comfort, of sorts.