There was no choice but to go on after them. ‘Come,’ Novu said grimly to Dreamer. ‘Look, take my arm.’
They continued their plod across the clinging sand, following the girls.
And the inverted world got stranger yet. They came to the wreck of a boat, a huge one, much bigger than Kirike’s, or any Dreamer had seen in this place. Little survived but its wooden frame, blackened, and rotted, with barnacles clinging thickly. The remains of a reindeer-bone harpoon was still attached to a loop by a strip of rotted hide. Ana and Arga stared as they hurried past, at wooden ribs like the skeleton of some vast animal.
Then they came to a stand of trees, bare of leaves and with their roots exposed, standing drunkenly in the mud. They were big heavy oaks, perhaps centuries old when they died. They stood beside what looked like a river valley, a broad stripe in the muddy landscape, populated now only by remnant puddles of sea water. Dreamer saw neat heaps of wreckage, posts and pits and what looked like sewn skins. They might easily once have been houses, just like those Ana and her family lived in now.
Giddy with the heat, Dreamer shook her head and tried to think. Did sea creatures build houses? Did oaks grow underwater? Surely not. She remembered Kirike’s talk of the precious lode of flint, creamy and flawless, lost under the risen waters of the bay south of Flint Island. Maybe, then, today was not the first time the sea had behaved strangely. Maybe before, perhaps long ago, it had risen up and covered over these trees, these houses, like that precious flint lode.
Ana and Arga were slowing again.
Ana said, ‘It’s still far away. The earthwork, the curving ridges. They must be bigger than we thought, and further away.’
‘Good,’ Dreamer snapped as she came up, panting. ‘At last you’re talking sense.’
‘If the sea hasn’t come back by tomorrow, we’ll come out again and explore properly.’
Arga looked doubtful. Sea-bottom mud coated her lower legs, brown-black and clinging. ‘But it might not be here tomorrow. After all, it wasn’t here yesterday,’ she said reasonably.
Ana pointed. They were close to a dune-like feature, a ripple of sand on the wet seabed. ‘Look – let’s climb up here. We’ll be able to see, even if we can’t reach it today.’
‘All right.’ Arga sounded relieved. Maybe under all the bravery she too had been scared by the strangeness of the day. She ran over to the dune and immediately began to climb, getting down on all fours to scramble up the muddy slope.
Ana followed her, and then Novu and Dreamer, more cautiously. If crossing the plain had been hard, this was twice as difficult, for the mud was slick and sticky. By the time they reached the crest they had all fallen more than once, and were smeared with black mud down their fronts.
From the dune’s narrow crest, panting hard, Dreamer could see the sweep of the sea-bottom plain. The true shore was far behind them, frighteningly far, blurred by mist, with those big arcs of the holy middens standing proud. All over the exposed seabed people worked, hauling away fish and crustaceans and seaweed. Children were playing, splashing and rolling in the mud, using huge dead silvery fish to play-fight. All this on a plain that had been deep under the sea this morning.
Ana and Arga were peering further north. And in this day of strangeness and wonder, a new marvel revealed itself to Dreamer.
The earthwork ridges were sweeping circular arcs that curved away from her view – cupped one inside another, like the rings in a tree trunk. She tried to count them – one, two, were there three? She was not high enough to see clearly. Water glinted, pooled in the ditches between the ridges. Though the walls were streaked with mud and draped with seaweed and fish corpses, they were too regular to be natural, no work of wind or rain or ice.
All of this Dreamer saw from afar, through a blurring curtain of heat haze that made it seem unreal, a vision in a dream.
‘It’s like your town,’ Ana said to Novu. ‘It’s like Jericho. The way you talked about it.’
‘It’s as big as Jericho,’ he murmured. ‘But people live in Jericho. They live in houses – not houses like yours… I don’t see where people would live here.’
‘I can see one house,’ Arga said. ‘I think so, anyway. See at the middle of the big rings, there’s a sort of hill? And there’s something near the top of the hill. A kind of white box, like a big skull.’
Dreamer strained to see. ‘Your eyes are sharper than mine, Arga-’
Ana said, ‘That’s North Island! The hill in the middle. I recognise it – I was taken there for my blood tide, when the sea lowers and reveals it… I never knew all this lay hidden by the water.’
Dreamer was feeling giddy with the heat and the exertion, and with the extraordinary sights around her. ‘You’re missing it,’ she mumbled.
Ana turned to her. ‘Dreamer? Are you all right?’
‘You’re missing the most obvious thing. Look!’ She pointed to the shore of Flint Island, beyond the exposed sea plain. ‘Look at the middens, where you celebrate the Giving, where you buried your own grandmother at midwinter. Your most sacred sites. Now look at these circles in the mud. What do you see?’
Ana turned her head from one to the other. ‘The middens, their shapes – they match the curves of the shining walls. Like ripples on a pond.’
‘Yes,’ Arga said, excited. ‘All with the same centre where you threw your stone.’
‘And that’s not all.’ Dreamer grabbed Ana’s tunic and lifted it, exposing her belly. And there, above the cloth she wore over her loins, was Ana’s blood-tide tattoo. Dreamer traced it with a trembling finger. ‘Can you see? Three circles, cut to their common centre by this tail. You have this symbol scrawled over your bodies, your tools and weapons, your clothes, your houses. And look!’ She gestured at the earthwork. ‘Three circles…’
Arga and Ana jabbered to each other in their own rapid tongue, barely comprehensible to Dreamer. ‘The Door to the Mothers’ House! This is it! She must be right.’
There was a dull roar in Dreamer’s ears. The heat, the exhaustion were draining her. She clung to Novu’s arm, determined not to faint.
Novu looked out to sea. ‘Can you hear something?’
‘Only the blood pounding in my head.’
‘Something else. A rumbling.’
The girls jumped, excited. Dreamer, growing dizzier, was losing her ability to translate the girls’ words, and their prattle blurred in her mind as they repeated their name for the earthwork, over and over. ‘The Door to the Mothers’ House. Door, mothers, house… Ate, l’ami, nt’etxe… Att-lann-tiss…’
There was a scream, from far away. Shouting voices.
Novu pointed north. ‘What’s that?’
Dreamer peered, and saw a band of blue-black, flecked with white, racing over the exposed mud. The sea, returning.
Ana cried, ‘Run!’ The four of them scrambled down the dune slope, slithering, half-sliding to the bottom. But Arga landed awkwardly on her ankle, and cried out.
Down on the plain, Dreamer, gasping for breath, couldn’t run. She couldn’t even lift her feet out of the mud. ‘I can’t – I can’t-’
‘You have to.’ Novu held her arm, urging her on.
‘Let me take the baby,’ Ana said. Dreamer felt hands working at the sling on her back. ‘I can carry her, and run faster than you.’
Dreamer made an instant decision. ‘Go, then.’
Ana held the baby in one arm, and grabbed Arga’s hand with her free hand. ‘Come on, Arga!’ She began to run to the shore, but Arga limped badly, crying out.
Novu said, ‘You too, Dreamer. Come on.’ He pulled at Dreamer, his arm around her shoulders.
They began hobbling towards a shore that seemed a terribly long way away. Ahead she saw people fleeing, abandoning the fish they had gathered, running from the advancing sea.
Novu, trying to support her, tripped and fell heavily in the mud. They had gone only a few paces. He rose, filthy, cursing loudly in his own tongue. And he shucked the bag of stones off his back and dropped it in the mud. ‘There will be other treasures.’ He leaned over, got his shoulder under Dreamer’s belly and hoisted her up, holding her legs.