The sourness wasn’t just to do with this pack of strangers and misfits, Ana thought. Everything felt wrong this late summer afternoon. It was too hot, the air dank and clammy and full of midges, the sun too bright and reflecting off the standing water. There was something odd in the air, a kind of tension. It was a day when she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin.
But dragonflies hovered over the water, and on patches of dryer land butterflies flickered between purple sedge and pale pink-white cuckoo flowers. The birds were beautiful too. They disturbed a reed bunting, the white collar around its black head bright as it flapped off indignantly. And a flock of lapwings took to the air, flying so tight and close it seemed impossible they didn’t collide with each other.
Novu was startled by the lapwings. As usual these days he carried a big skin pack on his back; Ana had no idea what he was carrying in it, but its weight made him sweat. ‘Those things were close.’
‘Lapwings rarely attack people,’ Ana said dryly.
He glanced to either side of the path, which cut across sodden ground. ‘The water looks deep just here.’
‘So it is. The path is safe.’
‘How do you know to walk here?’
Arga piped up, ‘Because this is where the logs are!’
Novu grinned, good-natured enough. ‘Yes, yes. What I mean is, how did your grandmothers know where to put the logs in the first place?’
‘The song tells you where,’ Arga said, and she sang, ‘ “Over the water bridge, and by the smiling ridge, walk to the afternoon sun, until you come-” ’
‘Which came first, the trail or the song?’
‘The trail,’ Ana said.
‘The song,’ Arga said.
‘Maybe a bit of both,’ Dreamer murmured. ‘It is the same in my country. The land is overlaid by the lore and tradition of the past. And over and through this landscape of memory move the living.’
‘But it’s all so strange. There’s nothing here. At home we build walls. Marker stones!’ He stood on the causeway, in the middle of the marsh, and held up his arms. ‘In Jericho, at any moment, you know exactly where you are.’
‘Well, you’re not in Jericho now,’ Arga said. And she ran at Novu and shoved him in the back.
He flailed comically, then went into the water head first. He came up coughing, reeds clinging to his body, a sticky slime hanging like drool from his face. The water wasn’t quite knee deep, but, pulled back by his heavy pack, he was having trouble standing in the soft mud.
Laughing, Ana and Dreamer knelt down and pulled him out, landing him on his belly on the log path. He managed to stand. He had his foot stuck in an eel wicker basket. Panting, dripping, he said, ‘Thanks a lot, Arga.’
‘At least it shut you up,’ Ana said. She began to wrestle the basket off his foot. ‘This is one of Jaku’s. He’ll be furious.’
They got the wrecked trap off him, threw it back in the water, and continued on.
At the edge of the marsh the land rose up into a line of dunes before the beach, the marsh green giving way to yellow-brown sand. Here Ana stopped, shucked off the pack she was carrying and dumped it on the ground. ‘We’ll get ourselves set up here, it’s dry enough. Then we’ll see what we can catch in the marsh.’
Dreamer said, ‘Arga, will you help me down with the baby? She’s due a feed.’
Arga happily lifted the baby out of its sling on Dreamer’s back. She unfolded its wrap while Dreamer found a dry place to sit, and dug out fresh dry moss to pack around the baby to absorb its soil.
Novu, still dripping wet, dumped his pack on the ground beside Dreamer and walked a little further up the dune slope.
Ana followed him. The sand was soft and gave easily, but there was a better grip from the clumps of dune grass, long, tough, deep-rooted.
They reached the crest of the dune. This was the north coast of Flint Island, where the great crescent-shaped middens faced out to sea. To the north, beyond the scattered rocks where seals lay languid in the heat, there was nothing but the sea lying still and flat.
‘You have slime in your hair,’ Ana said. She scraped it away with the side of her hand.
‘Thanks… Incredible.’
‘What is?’
He waved a hand. ‘The sea. All that emptiness. I walked for month after month to get here. If Jericho is the centre of the world, here I am at its very edge.’
She frowned. ‘The edge of the world? But the sea is full of life. Fish and dolphins and whales. Look, you can see the seals.’ She pointed. ‘I think that’s my father, fishing.’
‘Your eyes are better than mine.’
‘To me, this is the centre. The shore, Etxelur, the sea, the whole of Northland, the estuaries, the beaches, the tidal pools, and the fringes of forest where we hunt. If you go too far south there’s nothing but forest, choking the land. That’s the edge.’
‘I see an edge. You see a centre. Can a world have two centres?’
‘I don’t know… Ask the priest.’ She felt snappy, irritable, her head somehow stuffy. ‘Can’t you ever just talk about normal things?’
But he didn’t reply. He seemed distracted, his eyes squinting against the brilliant sunlight, his lips pursed in a frown. ‘Listen.’
There was a sound like thunder, rolling in off the sea, as if from a storm very far away.
And Dreamer called up from the base of the dune, ‘Ana? I think you’d better come down and see this.’ She had opened Novu’s pack.
Novu stared, horrified, then ran down the dune. In the boat, the sound of thunder made Heni sit up. Kirike had thought he was asleep.
The boat rocked at Heni’s sudden movement. But it was already full of a healthy catch of salmon and, bottom-heavy, settled back on a smooth sea.
Heni fixed his hat on his head and looked around. ‘You heard that?’
‘If it was a storm it was far away…’
They both sat silently, listening, the only sounds their breathing, the lap of the big, slow waves, the gentle creaking of the laden boat, the net ropes scraping against the boat’s hull.
The two men had paddled off to the north-east of Flint Island, out over the deep sea. From here much of the mainland was out of sight, only the island itself visible in the misty air. Kirike liked to be distant, so far out that the land was reduced to a kind of dream, and the world shrank down to his boat and the steady work of the fishing, and the companionship of Heni, the most enduring relationship in his life.
But was there to be a storm? The weather today was hard to read. The air was hot and, out on the breast of the sea, promised to get a lot hotter. The sky was free of cloud but there was a washed-out mistiness about it. The day felt odd to Kirike. Tetchy. Skittish.
Heni asked, ‘Can you have thunder without a storm?’
‘Maybe it’s a big storm very far away.’
‘Maybe. But do you remember the day of the Giving?’ On that day too there had been a rumble out of a cloudless sky, and a big, strange wave. Men whose life depended on listening to the moods of sea and air couldn’t help but remember something like that. ‘Something’s going on. Maybe the little mother of the ocean fell out of bed.’
Kirike laughed. ‘Twice in a month?’
Heni sighed. ‘So do you want to go back?’
Kirike glanced at the catch, the big, heavy fish that lay glistening in the bilge. ‘Nobody would blame us if we did. We’ve enough already.’ The salmon were early this year. The autumn was the best time to catch them, when they came swimming in from the ocean, funnelling into the big river estuaries on their way to their spawning grounds upstream. All you had to do was lower a net into the river, and let the fish swim in. It was much too early for the peak catches now, but this late summer day had been fruitful enough: there were times when the little mothers were kind to their hard-working children. But still… ‘Do you want to go back?’