Knuckle pointed at Eyelid’s baby. ‘Cheek. We camp.’ He pointed down the river. ‘There.’
Zesi asked, ‘How many?’
The traders’ tongue was rich in words for numbers. There were over fifty snailheads, men, women and children, just out of sight of the Etxelur summer camp.
This was shocking for the Etxelur folk to hear. The world was big, so big that you never had to share your favourite spaces with anybody else, save for happy meetings like the Giving. It was genuinely disconcerting to find fifty snailheads here, as if they had shown up in the heart of Etxelur itself.
‘We come here every year or two years,’ Zesi said pointedly. ‘Our parents before us, and their parents before them.’ Her meaning was clear. This is our place. ‘You?’
Gut shrugged. ‘Never been here before. Plenty of room. Plenty of deer for you, for me.’ He grinned. Ana saw that his tongue was pierced by a stone plug as fat as her thumb. ‘Don’t stay here long. Rest, feed, repair kit. Then move on.’
Zesi asked, ‘Which way?’
‘North.’
‘That’s where we live,’ the priest said. ‘Already we saw some of your people. A few moons ago. At a beach. It was strange to see snailheads except at a solstice gathering.’
Knuckle shrugged.
‘Why are you here?’
‘Need somewhere new to live. We lived south. Beach. Far south… Many months of walking. A winter of walking.’
Gall called over, ‘So what was wrong with it? Why aren’t you still there now?’
‘The sea. In the south, our beach. Sea shifts over land.’ He mimed a sea’s waves, chunks of land falling into it. ‘Splash, splash, splash…’
‘So you couldn’t live there any more,’ the priest said.
‘We walk away. North, east, west.’
‘Where will you live?’
‘Where there isn’t people.’
‘Where will that be?’
‘We haven’t found that yet. We will,’ said the man with a quiet confidence.
‘They are so strange,’ Shade murmured to Ana in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Those heads… But you have met these people before.’
‘A few usually come to the Givers’ feast at midsummer. You know how it is. People travel a long way.’
‘But not fifty of them.’
‘Not fifty. And not to come to stay.’
‘I think I know of their homeland. Where he means, the far south.’ Shade sketched with a fingertip in the dusty ground. ‘Albia here, Gaira here. Albia is nearly an island. But Albia and Gaira are joined by the Northland. A neck, like a bird’s head to its body…’
She struggled to understand. ‘Oh.’ She pointed to the bottom of his sketch. ‘This is north. This is where Etxelur is. The coast.’
‘Yes. We are here, a little way inland. But the snailheads come from the other side of the neck.’ He pointed to the top of his sketch, the south. Here he had drawn the sea making a deep cut into the land. ‘There, a great river flows between cliffs of white chalk. The people live on the cliff tops. Maybe the sea is cutting away the cliffs.’
‘Can the sea do that?’
He looked at her. ‘The sea drowned the flint beds mined by your ancestors.’
‘They can’t go home.’ The thought horrified her. ‘But they can’t stay here.’
Gut, the younger of the snailhead men, grinning, was watching them. ‘I hear,’ he said, in the Etxelur tongue. He held thumb and forefinger a sand grain’s width apart. ‘A bit. “Can’t stay here.”
The priest forced a smile. ‘We didn’t come here to argue. And nor did you. You have your camp, and we have ours. As to what the future holds, only our gods know that, and yours. But for today and tomorrow and the next day, yes, there is plenty of deer for all, and pig and aurochs, and fish in the river and birds in the air and reeds in the marshes.’
Knuckle nodded, evidently a man as much intent on peace as the priest. ‘Yes. Well said. No need to fight, nothing to fight over.’ Then a thought struck him. ‘Ah! We can share. Hunt together? Catch more that way. The One People are good at hunting deer.’
Gall, looking over, his mouth still stained with blood, grinned dangerously. ‘Yes. We’ll hunt together. And I’ll show you snailheads how to do it properly.’
Gut looked slyly at Ana and Zesi. ‘When we live on your beach we will need wives. I will need a wife.’ Mocking, he turned to Zesi and stuck out his pierced tongue. ‘Will you be my wife? You look strong. Good babies-’
Gall lunged at him, but the priest saw it coming; he threw himself at Gall and blocked him. He said urgently in the Etxelur tongue, ‘Beat him at hunting. That’s how you win.’
Gall, breathing hard, eyes bulging, backed off. ‘At the hunt, then.’
Gut showed his studded tongue again. He hadn’t so much as flinched.
‘Good,’ said the priest. ‘Now – who wants some dock tea?’
19
The hunters were up early the next morning, before the glow of the night’s fire had been conquered by the gathering light of dawn.
Ana pushed her head out of the lean-to she shared with Arga. She could make out hunters from the snailhead camp, already waiting by the bend of the river that separated the two camps. Closer by, Shade was pressing his spear point against the ground to test the rope-and-resin attachment of the head to its wooden shaft. Gall was by the urine pit, noisily emptying his bladder over the deer skin. And Zesi was at the edge of the hearth, scooping up grey ash and rubbing it over her face and arms, the better to hide in the shadows of the forest. The snailheads had been surprised that Etxelur women hunted.
When they were ready, bearing their day packs and their weapons, the Pretani, Zesi and a handful of Etxelur folk walked up the riverbank to join the snailheads. The hunters had a soft-voiced discussion about the day’s strategy, and then they slipped into the shadows of the trees.
Ana could have gone along. She had chosen not to; a day without Gall, Shade or Zesi would be a relief. She went back to the warmth of her pallet of leaves and soft doe skin, to sleep a bit more. She heard nothing more of the hunters until the sun was past its noon height.
‘Look out!’
The single cry in the Etxelur tongue was all the warning they had.
The women from Etxelur had been burning off reeds from the marshy land around the river. A pall of smoke rose high into the air, and the smell of ash was strong. The fire flushed out hare and vole and wildfowl that the children chased with nets of woven bark, and the burning would stimulate new growth.
Meanwhile Ana was on the bank of the lagoon with Arga, collecting club rushes. These were particularly prized plants, for you could eat all of them, their stems and seeds and fat tubers, and would be useful to carry back to Etxelur. Lightning had been digging his nose into their work and running off with tubers, to scoldings from Arga.
When that shout came Lightning reacted immediately, turning to face the forest and barking madly.
And Ana heard a rumble, like thunder, coming from the forest.
Arga tugged her sleeve. ‘I can feel it in my stomach. What is it?’
Ana saw shadows in the forest. Heard branches cracking. ‘Run!’ She dropped her flint blade and basket of rushes. She grabbed Lightning by the scruff of his neck, took Arga’s hand, and ran downstream, along the eroded bank.
The animal came crashing through the trees, hooves pounding on the peaty turf, gruffly bellowing its pain. Ana dared to glance back, and she saw it emerge into the sunlight, a huge aurochs bull, thick brown hair, flashing horns, wild rolling eyes, frothing mouth. And she saw a spear dangling from its flanks. The question was, which genius had stampeded it towards the camp?
Then the animal reached the river – the lagoon, where she and Arga had been working only heartbeats before. It crashed forward and fell, landing so hard its head was twisted right around, with a crunch like breaking wood. It struggled and bellowed, but did not rise.
Now the hunters came boiling out of the trees after it, yelling, half-naked, some brandishing spears, Etxelur, Pretani, snailhead together.
‘Come on.’ The priest was beside Ana. He handed her a spear; she took it by the shaft. ‘We’ll help them finish him off.’