‘It was my sister’s row.’
‘Yes. But you were caught up in it, weren’t you? Maybe you feel nobody notices you, that you get brushed aside. Is this why you come to me?’ He grinned, clever, probing. ‘Coming here is an escape from home, isn’t it? Why, Ice Dreamer spoke to me the other day, and she said-’
‘Zesi. Knuckle. Ice Dreamer.’ She rolled onto her knees, and brushed away his laid-out stones with her arms. ‘I came to see you in your stupid house, with your stupid stuff. Not to talk about this.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He held up his hands. ‘I talk too much. It’s got me in trouble before. You should ask my father. Please, you can come talk to me any time-’
But she was already squeezing out through the doorway, it seemed narrower and tighter than when she’d gone in, and she emerged with relief into the open air. She plucked one of the mallows, pressed it to her nose, and walked away towards the dunes.
32
Dreamer’s sobs broke into her troubled dreams. She woke to find her eyes wet, her throat sore.
Kirike sat over her, a shadow in the dark. ‘It’s all right…’ She couldn’t see his face, but she sensed his presence, his calm mass. And she could smell him, the salt-sea smell he never quite shook off. He was speaking comforting words in her own tongue, the tongue of the True People.
She sat up, clutching her hide cover to her body. There was only a little light from the dying fire in the hearth, and from the deep blue of a pre-dawn sky that leaked through the open door flap. She replied in the Etxelur tongue. ‘Did I wake you?’
A snort from the dark, a slim shape moving in the shadows. Ana, fetching water from the skins. ‘You were screaming in your dreams. Again. Yes, you woke us. It’s a wonder Dolphin isn’t crying too.’
Dreamer turned and looked for her baby. Dolphin Gift lay on a tiny pallet a pace away from her, under a lamp that burned smokily. Dolphin slept peacefully, one little hand with fingers like buds showing outside her wrap of soft, woven cloth. This was the wisdom of the women of Etxelur, that you didn’t lie with your newborn for fear of rolling over on top of her, and that the lamp, burning some mixture of oils, was good for an infant’s breathing. ‘She’s fine. It’s not long since she fed; she’ll sleep a while yet.’
Kirike murmured, ‘That little mite was born at sea and slept through ocean storms. She’s had to learn to be a good sleeper in her short life.’
‘But you’re not at sea now.’ Ana came over and sat cross-legged beside them.
Ana’s face, shadowed, was youthfully smooth, yet somehow pinched, Dreamer always thought. As if the spirit inside was old before her time. But here she was with wooden cups of water, which she handed to Kirike and Dreamer. Complicated the girl might be, resentful and wary, but she had a good heart.
‘No,’ Dreamer said. ‘But I dreamed I was at the coast, watching the tide.’ She had never seen the ocean before she had stumbled to that distant shore, with Moon Reacher already dead in her arms. She had never seen the tide, never imagined that a body of water as big as the world could rise and fall, rise and fall. ‘I dreamed they were all there. Moon Reacher and Mammoth Talker and Stone Shaper, and all the others I knew before, my mother and sisters and the priests. All on the shore. Then the tide came in and covered them over. When the tide went out the beach was empty. When I die – if Dolphin were to die – there would be nothing left. Not even the memory. All of them deader than the dead. “The world is dead and we are already dead; this is the afterlife, of which even the priest knew nothing. Even our totems are dead…” ’
‘Enough,’ Kirike said sharply. ‘You’re safe now. With us. You’re not going to die. And nor is Dolphin Gift.’ He leaned over and smiled at the baby.
Abruptly Ana stood, unravelling her legs in a single graceful movement, and pushed out of the house through the door flap. She left her cup of water standing on the floor.
Dreamer cursed in her own tongue. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for,’ Kirike said grimly. ‘That child needs to learn to think about the feelings of other people.’
‘Oh, Kirike, be fair. She was trying, she brought me water. And she’s not a child. She’s of an age to take a man, to have children of her own.’
‘I know. There are younger mothers in Etxelur.’
‘I see that snailhead boy is paying her attention.’
‘Knuckle? Well, she could do worse. They’re a strange lot, and they’ve come to live a bit too close for my liking. But maybe it would be a good alliance, the two of them. Smooth the friction.’ He glanced around. ‘There’s room in this house for Knuckle, and a baby or two. We’d have to have a conversation about the business of binding the babies’ skulls.’
‘But is that what Ana wants? I know what an intrusion I am in her life. She lost her mother. Then she lost you. And now, even when her father comes home, he brings me. A brand new family to replace the old.’
‘Dolphin’s not my child. You’re not my woman.’
She took his hand, the palm scarred by the cuts of fishing lines. ‘That may not be how it looks to Ana.’
He stared into her eyes. ‘And how does it look to you?’
She didn’t reply.
He hesitated, then pulled away. ‘Try to sleep a bit more.’ He walked back to his own pallet.
33
Led by the Root and Shade as usual, with Zesi and Jurgi bringing up the rear, the hunting party rounded a bend of the Great River of Albia. The forest stood all around them, tall trees growing right down to the water’s edge.
And there, lying in the water, was a canoe – a tremendous log, dug out and shaped, by far the largest canoe Zesi had ever seen.
Men stood on the riverbank by the canoe, or sat around a big smoking fire. They wore tattoos in the Pretani style. More men laboured in the canoe, polishing its surfaces, bailing out water. When they spotted the Root the men by the fire leaped to their feet and started jumping, waving, shouting. The Root’s hunters waved back.
‘So,’ the priest murmured to Zesi, ‘after all these days of walking, we have arrived. Evidently the Root will ride the rest of the way home in this mighty craft. I wonder how long these men have waited here for their leader to return.’
‘That canoe,’ Zesi mumbled.
‘What about it?’
‘Priest, it is huge.’ The men inside the canoe were dwarfed by the craft. And she saw now that the big central hull was flanked by outriders, four of them, fixed to the main hull with beams and ropes, there to keep the boat stable in the water. Each of the riders alone was larger than any canoe in Etxelur. She tried to imagine the labour involved in felling this immense tree, in shaping it as a canoe – the fires must have been banked day and night – and then somehow hauling it to the water.
The priest said dryly, ‘It had to be a big boat, Zesi. With men like the Root, even a simple canoe must be bigger than anybody else’s in the whole world. If you have power, you must flaunt it to impress.’
‘Well, I am impressed.’
The Root brushed by the fawning men by the fire and went straight to the boat, where they walked along one of the outrider beams and settled into a place near the prow. The bailing men cringed and kept out of his way.
Shade followed, and then Zesi and the priest. The boat was so massive it barely shifted in the water under their weight, almost as stable as if they walked on dry land. Zesi saw that the boat’s hollowed-out interior was finely worked, smoothed and greased from one end to the other, and the hull itself had been shaped to give the canoe a sharp prow and stern. Zesi had to sit among the Pretani hunters, on shallow log benches. Alder the medicine man, friendlier than the rest, made room for her.
A few of the men who had been by the fire jumped in now, to much jabbering in the Pretani tongue, and those who had been bailing took their places and pushed paddles into the water.
The canoe glided away from the bank. After a few strokes one of the rowers began to sing, a doleful but rhythmic chant, and the others joined in. It seemed to help them maintain the pace of the heavy paddling. The river here was broad, sluggish, calm, but they were heading upstream, against the current, and the paddlers were soon working hard, and sweat gleamed on grimy torsos.