Men’s faces. A memory sharp as a stone blade cut into her mind, of the Cowards’ eager faces over her.
In that instant she remembered who she was. She sat bolt upright.
In response to her sudden movement the boat rocked. The men turned, alarmed, and jabbered in some unknown tongue. Working together quickly and expertly, they stuck their blades flat in the water to stabilise the boat.
It was a bright, clear day, the sun low behind her. She glimpsed sky, and grey water scattered with ice floes. Two men sat before her in the boat, huge in their fur hoods and cloaks and mittens, paddling patiently with big leather blades fixed to poles.
She was suddenly aware of her heavy belly. The baby. It felt big, bigger than she remembered; oh, earth and sky, was its time close? And Moon Reacher – she remembered now – she looked around for the girl, but she was not here. Only the two men and herself in this pitifully small boat, alone on the endless water.
The men’s breath steamed around their heads as they watched her. They seemed wary of her. The older one, at the boat’s prow, stayed where he was sitting. Roundface, she called him. The younger one, Longnose, shipped his blade inside the boat, and, shuffling, came towards her.
She cowered back. Her weight made the boat tip up.
Roundface jabbered, ‘Whoa, whoa!’ Longnose leaned back quickly. The boat settled again, rocking and creaking.
Longnose tugged off his mittens, showing dirty hands, and he spoke again. His tongue was like none she had ever heard, not even the Cowards’. He seemed to be smiling, behind that beard.
‘My name is Ice Dreamer,’ she said, or tried to; her voice was a croak, her mouth dry as dust. ‘Ice Dreamer,’ she said again. ‘Ice Dreamer.’ She pointed at her chest. ‘And if you come any nearer I’ll jump over the side.’
He listened carefully. ‘Ice – Ice-’
‘Ice Dreamer. Dreamer.’
‘Ice Dreamer.’ His accent was thick, almost incomprehensible. He pointed to his own chest. ‘Kirike.’ And the other man. ‘Heni.’
‘Kirike. Heni.’ They were meaningless names, and too short. Maybe these men didn’t have totems. Her throat remained dry. She dipped her hand into the water; she didn’t have to lean far over the boat’s shallow side. When she lifted it to her mouth the water was so salty it made her gag, and she spat it out.
Heni spoke again. Kirike took a small skin sack and threw it carefully over to Dreamer. It landed heavily, and when she picked it up she could feel liquid slosh inside. Its neck was fixed by a splinter of bone. She opened it, sniffed suspiciously, and then took a sip. It was water, cold, a little brackish, not salty. She drank deeply, letting the cool stuff slide over her throat. ‘Better,’ she said. ‘Better,’ more loudly. Her voice was working. She sang a snatch of song, a hymn to the coyote.
That surprised the men. They both burst out laughing. Immediately she remembered where she was, alone with these two men. She stopped singing.
Longnose – Kirike – held his hands up again. He began to speak to her, earnestly, gesturing. He was clearly trying to explain something to her. She just sat and listened. He had a tattoo on his cheek, above the beard, concentric rings and a tail. She had seen it etched in the rocks of the coast, where her walk had ended. He spoke slowly and loudly, as if she was deaf. Heni nudged his back, and they had a short jabbered conversation. Ice Dreamer thought the meaning was clear. ‘She doesn’t understand, idiot. Try something else.’
Kirike looked at her, a bit helplessly. Then an idea struck. He rummaged in the bottom of the boat, and he came up with a wooden bowl, covered by skin. He took off the skin to reveal a puddle of some kind of broth. He stuck his finger into the broth and licked off heavy droplets, making a satisfied noise. ‘Mmmmm. ’ He held it out to her.
She took it. Cautiously, she dipped in her own finger and tasted the cold stuff. It was thick, meaty, salty, rich. Memories flooded back. Lying half-awake under the furs, she had tasted this stuff, this broth; she had eaten it before. Kirike smiled. He mimed spooning the stuff up into his mouth, then pointed at her. He had fed her.
She couldn’t remember it all. Maybe she would never remember, not properly. But she began to work out how she must have got from that barren beach with Moon Reacher, to here, on this huge, limitless lake, in this boat with these men. They must have landed on the beach in their boat. They must have found her. They could have killed her. Instead, evidently, they had taken her onto their boat. And they had cared for her.
She was still heavily pregnant. Her thighs and her crotch and her deep innards still ached from the attentions of the Cowards. But she was not dead. She was not even hungry. Her head was clear. And it was because of these men.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Their faces were blank. She still held the bowl. She drained it of the last scrap of broth, and handed it back to Kirike, nodding. ‘Thank you.’
A grin broke across his face, like the sun breaking through cloud. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he repeated.
She looked around the boat again. ‘The girl,’ she said. ‘With me, the little girl – Moon Reacher. On the beach.’ She desperately mimed – like me, shorter – I held her like this… She cradled the cold air like a baby.
Kirike seemed baffled, but Heni spoke softly. Kirike nodded. He reached into a fold of his tunic, and produced a lock of nut-brown hair, tied up with a bit of bark rope. He passed the hair to Dreamer, and she teased at it so that it caught the low sun. It was Moon Reacher’s, no doubt about it. Kirike spoke steadily to her, his expression grave. His meaning wasn’t hard to understand. The child is dead… We couldn’t save her… Or perhaps, She was already dead when we found you. Dreamer recalled how cold and still Reacher had been, in those last days. Had the child’s spirit already vanished from that pale, frail body, even as Dreamer had cradled her, trying to give her warmth?
Moon Reacher, dead like Mammoth Talker and all the others. There was no consolation to be had when the young died. Yet Dreamer felt nothing. Maybe her own spirit had gone, leaving this battered husk of a body behind.
The men were watching her. They were being kind, she saw. They were giving her time, letting her get used to being alive again.
But, behind them, ahead of the drifting boat, a huge mass of ice stuck out of the water like a fist. ‘Look out!’ she yelled, and she pointed.
The men turned, shouted, and grabbed their paddles. As they dug at water littered with flecks of ice, they snapped at each other and cursed in their own language. Dreamer wondered what strange gods they invoked. The sun set. Its light made the floating ice blaze pink, though where larger lumps stuck out of the water she could sometimes see subtler shades, purples and greys fading from blue. The men resolutely paddled their boat away from the sunset, heading east – just as she had walked east from her lost home, east until she had run out of country altogether.
As the sun crept below the horizon, the light faded, the cold gathered, and Heni and Kirike shipped their blades. At the boat’s prow was a scorched platform of wood, which Heni now detached and stuck in place at the boat’s mid-section. It had a worn hollow, and here he set bits of dry moss, wood shavings, and scraps of wood and bone. Then, from a fold of his outer skin, he produced an ember, wrapped up in moss and greasy leather. He set this on the scorched block and blew it until the moss and kindling caught. He nursed the nascent fire, leaning over it to shelter it from the breeze, feeding it one fragment of fuel after another.
A fire on a boat!
The boat’s frame was sturdy lime and ash, and its ribs were of bent hazel, tied together with plaited cords made of twisted roots. The outer skin was fixed to the frame by robust stitches, the holes stopped with a mix of animal fat and resin. The People had used boats, on the rivers and the lakes. She had never seen any boat as big or as elaborate as this one. And she certainly hadn’t ever seen anybody start a fire in a boat. You’d just put into shore for the night, and build your fire there. If they were so far from the shore, this must be a very wide lake indeed.