Heni lay back in the boat’s prow, his broad-brimmed leather hat tipped forward to keep the sun off his face, and chewed on a bit of wood. ‘Seems a waste of the sunshine. Thought I saw some dolphins playing further out. We could try driving a few ashore.’
‘Sounds like hard work.’
Heni squinted up at the sky. ‘Or we could just lie here and soak up the heat. Maybe we deserve it. We had enough months freezing our arses off when we got lost in the winter. I sometimes feel like my bones never thawed out.’ And as if to prove the point he coughed, a deep, racking heave that twisted his body. He had to hold onto his hat to keep it from falling off.
It was a winter cough, a cough that should have dried out by now but had clung to his lungs all summer. Kirike had a deep guilty fear that this was one legacy of their unlikely jaunt across the ocean that Heni was never going to be free of.
Heni said, ‘You’ll have to face Ana’s nagging when we get back.’
‘That’s not fair… She’s not happy.’ He thought back over conversations with Ice Dreamer. ‘Since her mother died, her whole world has fallen apart. That’s what her nagging is about. Just anxiety. I think in her head she longs to put everything back the way it was.’
‘But you never can. And then there’s Ice Dreamer and her kid. Living in your own house! That can’t be easy for Ana.’
Kirike turned away. ‘She’s nothing to be jealous about.’
‘So you haven’t tupped Dreamer yet.’
‘Little mothers help me, but you’re coarse sometimes.’
Heni laughed, but it broke up into another cough. ‘Oh, come on. She’s a shapely one now she’s over her pregnancy, and a bit of life to her too. And she’s suckling, isn’t she?’ He winked. ‘So she can’t get pregnant again.’
‘It’s not like that… It’s less than a year since Sabet.’
‘Ah.’ Heni nodded. ‘I know. I’ll tell you what I think. I never saw two people closer than you and Sabet. You fit together like a bone in its socket. And then you lost her. Give yourself time. Dreamer’s a smart woman. She’ll wait, if she wants you. I needed the time.’
Heni hardly ever spoke of his own past. ‘You’re thinking of Meli.’
‘It was different for me when she went. The boys, the ones who had lived past childhood, were grown, off with their wives and their own kids. I was free. And once I was over the loss I found the world was full of willing widows.’
That was always true. Men often died younger than women, as they pursued more dangerous occupations like forest hunting and deep-sea fishing – but women died too. So there were always widows and widowers, often with broods of growing children. In Etxelur men and women took only one spouse at a time, unlike the Pretani, say. First marriages were always delicately arranged and negotiated, to build ties between communities. But after that the rules were relaxed.
‘Willing widows, and you tried them all out,’ Kirike said.
‘And across the ocean too,’ Heni said, and he yawned hugely. ‘I hope all those hairy girls with their flat faces and strange eyes remember my name to tell their good-looking children… Oh.’
The whole boat was lifted up into the air.
Kirike, startled, gripped the boat’s frame. The surge was smooth, but powerful and relentless, and completely unexpected on such a smooth sea.
And then it passed. The boat slid down the face of the water and came to rest, bobbing slightly, creaking.
They stared at each other. It had been a wave, a single huge muscle of water that had lifted them as if in the palm of a huge hand. They could see it passing on towards the shore, a glistening hump.
‘By the first mother’s left tit,’ Heni said, ‘I never felt anything like that in my life.’
Kirike shook his head; he felt too hot, his thinking fuzzy. Two strange things in one day. ‘Do you think it had something to do with that thunder we heard?’
‘Maybe.’
The wave receded. Diminished by distance it looked harmless – soon it was hard even to make out. But Kirike knew from experience that it would grow when it approached the land, the water heaping up on itself. ‘That is a big wave,’ he said.
‘And it will break when it gets to the shore.’
‘Yes.’
They stared at each other for a heartbeat. Then they hauled up their nets and reached for their paddles.
38
Ana hurried back down the dune, followed by Novu.
Something spilled from Novu’s pack, glinting.
‘It’s my fault,’ Arga blurted. ‘I was trying to help. I was opening the packs. Look, I opened yours, Ana! I was just trying to get to the food and the embers and stuff, and the water bags. I didn’t mean anything.’
Novu, panting, his arms folded around his body, had a complex expression on his face; his eyes flickered, as if he were a trapped animal looking for escape. ‘You should have asked.’
‘It’s just a pack.’
‘It’s mine.’
‘I didn’t know he had all that stuff in there!’
Ana frowned, baffled. ‘What stuff?’
Dreamer gestured. ‘Take a look.’
Ana leaned down. The crudely sewn deerskin sack was stuffed with stones: flints, mostly, but a few shining gleams of obsidian, spilling out onto the sand. She tipped the sack up so the rest fell out.
Novu darted forward. ‘Hey! Careful. You’ll damage the pieces.’
Ana looked at him, and began to sort through the stones. Some of them were unworked lumps of flint, even complete nodules, and some finished tools. ‘I wish Josu was here; he would know this stuff. But I can see this is good quality.’ She picked up an axe-head, finely worked. ‘And I think I recognise this. I used it once; I borrowed it to cut wood, and I remember leaving that chip in the blade… I think it is Jaku’s.’
Arga nodded. ‘Yes, that’s my dad’s.’
‘All of this is mine,’ Novu said with a touch of desperation. ‘I worked for it all! You saw my house, Ana. The pieces on the shelves. This is what I do. I work for stones.’
‘No one could work this hard,’ Dreamer said dryly.
Ana rummaged through the rest of the pieces. It was quite a collection. There were knives and spearheads, and many intricately carved blades, no larger than a fingernail, that could be stuck in bone shafts to make scrapers and awls. Most looked fresh to her, as if they had yet to be used.
And she found one big axe blade made of a sheet of beautiful, milky brown flint shaped to a perfect symmetry. You could barely see the marks of the hammer, so fine had the knapper’s work been.
Dreamer gasped. ‘That’s beautiful.’
‘Yes, it is. And it belongs to Jurgi. The priest. He wears it on special occasions, like weddings and the Giving. This is old, and very precious.’ She looked up at Novu. ‘There is nothing you could do that would make Jurgi give you this blade. Why, it’s not his to give. The priests have held it for generations, passing it from one to the next. And you took it, and hid it in your house, your pack? Why are you carrying it now? Were you afraid somebody would find it?’
Novu started pacing, muttering in his own language. When he spoke aloud he lapsed into a mix of the Etxelur language and the traders’ tongue. ‘It’s not like that. You don’t understand.’
Dreamer looked stern, but oddly weary. ‘What is there to understand? You’re a thief, Novu.’ She used a traders’-tongue word. There was no precise matching word in Etxelur.
Ana was slowly working it out. ‘You must have gone into houses when the people were out, and just taken things. Flints, tools. Whatever you liked. You even went into the priest’s house, and went through his bags, the sacred, ancient stuff.’
‘It was easy,’ he said lightly. ‘The man’s gone wandering off in the forest, hasn’t he? There’s nobody in his house.’
Ana could see emotions chasing across his face. He liked to be cheeky, to be daring, elusive, unpredictable – although he had hinted that it was those qualities that had caused him to be thrown out of his home by his father in the first place. He was trying to laugh this off.
But then, before their three serious faces, something seemed to snap. He sat down suddenly, his legs folded up, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging.