Novu brought him another bowl of water. But when he returned the trader had slumped back to sleep, and was snoring loudly. Left alone, Novu, restless, bored, wandered around the cave. Odd pillar-like formations stood on the floor, and when Novu looked up he could see more pillars dangling from the roof, glistening, damp.
And at the back of the cave more clefts led off, presumably to more hollows deeper inside the rock.
Novu made a torch of a bit of pine branch wrapped tightly with dried reeds. He lit this in the fire, and returned to the back of the cave. He counted four, five, six clefts running off from this chamber, gaps wide enough for him to squeeze through. He picked one and pushed his way in. It was just a little wider than his shoulders, the walls rising above his head.
Maybe the whole cliff was riddled with caves, with clefts and passages everywhere. His imagination ran away. You could get lost. You could wander here for ever! Maybe there were whole tribes of people wandering in the dark, feeding on spiders or rats… Oddly he didn’t feel frightened by this idea. It would be like a huge, natural Jericho.
The passageway closed in, without revealing anything of interest.
He backed out to the cave, where Chona was still snoring, and tried the next passage along. This was clogged by dried brush that he had to push through. But after a few dozen paces the passage began to open out, the roof rising up, and he found himself in another chamber, longer than Chona’s, with tall, smooth, sloping walls. He thought he saw more of those dangling formations on the ceiling. He raised his torch to see better.
A horse bucked at him.
He stumbled back against the wall, nearly dropping the torch, his breath scratchy, his heart hammering. A horse! How could a horse be here? But he heard nothing, smelled nothing. He dared to raise the torch again.
The horse was painted on the wall. It was almost life size. And it wasn’t a stick figure, like the art of Jericho; a bold black outline was filled with shading, brown and grey and white, and the hairs of its mane were picked out one by one. He stared, astonished, and he wondered if some god had made this thing. But then, just below it, he saw the mark of a human hand, outlined in red paint.
He stepped up to the horse and touched it. He could scratch away bits of the horse under his nail, just powder, red ochre, black charcoal. When the torch’s fire had danced, he had thought that this image, so lifelike, had jumped out at him.
He had never been moved much by the spirit world, never impressed by the priests’ capering and gabbling. But there was a sense of age in this cave, age and deep time. If the horse’s spirit was still here, it would not harm him now.
A voice, faint, reached him. ‘Boy? Boy! I need you…’
‘Chona?’
The trader stumbled into the cave. His legs were bare, and his erection stuck out like one of the formations on the cave roof.
Novu snapped, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Taking what’s mine. Come on, boy. I haven’t had a good hump for days. You’ll do. I’ve watched you, the way you look at people. I know you’d like men as much as women, if you ever got the chance…’ Chona reached for him. Novu stepped back. Chona stumbled to his knees.
Novu laughed at him. ‘You sure about this? You won’t be able to sell me as a virgin then, will you?’
Chona knelt, breathing hard. ‘You, you,’ he said, and his speech was broken by coughing, ‘you worthless little turd.’
‘And you’re too feeble for your own hand tonight. Sleep is what you need.’
Chona fell back onto one arm, awkwardly. The erection crumpled. ‘You little turd.’
Novu put one hand behind Chona’s head, and lowered him to the floor. The trader’s pale flesh shone with moisture. Novu pulled off his own skin-shirt and began to dab at Chona’s face. Chona’s eyes closed, as if he was slumping back to sleep. Novu wiped a bit of drool from his open mouth, almost tenderly.
Then he pushed the bit of skin into Chona’s mouth.
The trader didn’t resist. Novu pushed in more skin. Chona gagged, and jerked.
Novu kept one hand over his mouth, and crawled forward so that he knelt over the trader, pinning Chona’s chest with his weight, holding down his arms with his legs. Chona twisted now, and bit. But Novu pushed the whole of his hide shirt over the trader’s face, and folded his arms before him and leaned forward, pressing down with all his body’s weight. Chona couldn’t move his arms or his head, but his legs kicked and thrashed.
Novu, his eyes closed, started to count. ‘One. Two. Three…’ He got to twelve, then twenty, then fifty, and then worked his way up to the big traders’ numbers Chona had taught him.
Long before he reached a hundred, Chona was still. When Novu came out of his cave, the morning was dry and bright. Yesterday’s rain gleamed on the grass, and pooled in muddy footprints. Novu thought the air felt cleansed. He walked down to the river and took a long, luxurious piss.
When he walked back, Loga was sitting outside his house. Smoke from the night fire seeped out of the house’s thatch. Loga was eating something, the baked corpse of some small animal spitted on a stick.
Novu stood before him, and waited.
Loga glanced over at the cave. ‘Chona?’
‘Dead. The sick-the sickness.’ Novu stumbled over the traders’ tongue.
Loga nodded. ‘Jericho curses. Seen it before. Don’t go there myself.’
‘Wise.’ Novu glanced around. ‘This place. Many rivers run from here?’
‘Four.’ Loga used his teeth to pull the last of his breakfast off the stick, and then started using the stick to sketch maps. This was what traders did, draw maps. ‘Four rivers,’ he said. ‘East. Jericho.’ He pinned an anonymous bit of mud.
‘The way we came.’
‘Yes. South. Middle ocean. West. Great ocean. North. Much land, cold ocean. Four rivers, four ways.’ He eyed Novu. ‘Alone?’
‘Me? Yes.’
‘Jericho boy?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Slave?’
‘Not any more.’
‘You go home? Go east. Easy down the river.’
‘I don’t think so. You?’
‘North.’ He sketched again. ‘Big country.’ He jabbed the stick to the left: ‘Albia.’ Right: ‘Gaira.’ Centre: ‘Northland. Big country. Boat, easy on river.’
‘Your boat. Big boat.’
‘Yes.’
Novu considered. ‘I come?’
Loga frowned. ‘Why?’
He meant, what was in it for Loga. ‘Strong,’ said Novu. ‘Paddle. And, Chona’s goods.’
‘Mine now?’
‘Some.’
Loga considered. ‘Fetch goods. We talk.’
21
Ice Dreamer lay in a heap of furs like a bug in a cocoon. She slept, or woke in a daze that was no different from sleeping, save for the continuing pain of torn thighs, aching breasts, a deeper hurt within.
Somehow, even in her bloodiest reveries, even when she didn’t know who she was, Ice Dreamer always knew she was on a boat.
Her world was sky. By day it was either an unbearable bright blue, or was choked with grey clouds. By night there were stars, a silent forest of them. Yet the sky’s dark was broken sometimes by sheets of green light that rippled and folded.
And when the rain fell, or the snow, a blanket of skin would be pulled across, enclosing her in a creaking, rocking chamber of leather and wood and smoke, and pale, glimmering firelight.
Other sensations. Water cool in her mouth. Another liquid, heavier, salty and rich, warm, a soup.
The heat inside her. That was the first thing outside herself she was clearly aware of. A warm mass of tissue and blood, it was in her, and of her, and yet not her. She folded her thoughts around it, felt its sleeping weight. It was a comfort.
And then the faces.
They hovered over her in the tented dark at night, blurs in the faint yellow lamplight, or they were there in the day, leathery bearded faces framed by hoods of fur, weather-beaten skin pocked by frostbite scars. The faces of men. At first they blurred in her mind, but they gradually separated into two. One older, his face rounder, who eyed her sceptically. The other younger, hair red and tightly curled, nose straight, eyes a startling blue, who looked at her with more complicated feelings. A kind of compassion. But even as he looked at her his attention seemed turned inside, into his own soul.