It was noon, and still summer, only a couple of months after the solstice, an oppressive, colourless time of year, and though the sun was obscured by a lid of cloud the heat by the sea was intense.
One of the children splashed another, accidentally, and they giggled together, just like kids playing on a beach. But one of the women muttered a soft word in the tongue of the Eel folk, and they glanced uneasily at Dolphin, and fell silent.
Still Wise did not reply.
Dolphin snapped again, ‘Talk to me, or may the little mother of the sea drown you in her wrath.’
He glanced at his family. ‘Scaring children,’ he said in his softly accented traders’ tongue. ‘Walk.’ Still bending to pick cockles off the rocks, he turned and walked slowly away from the children.
She fumed, but followed. ‘You wouldn’t talk to a Pretani that way, would you?’
‘You are not Pretani,’ he said simply. ‘Will talk take long?’
‘What?’
He gestured at the rocks. ‘Pretani don’t feed us meat any more. Too many of us. We have fruits of sea. But we are hungry – we work hard – children growing. Shellfish not-’ He tapped his belly, running out of words. ‘They leave you hungry. We must gather many, many shells. Soon the tide will turn, rocks covered-’ ‘We know.’
He shifted the pack on his shoulder; she saw the leather strap was rubbing his bare skin raw. ‘Know what?’
‘What you intend.’ She glanced over her shoulder at his family, who continued to work in silence. ‘In Pretani there is a man called True. One of the Eel folk, like you. Perhaps you know him.’
‘Many called True.’
‘Just listen. The Pretani have a plan. They will come here in numbers, and attack us. This will be soon. And the Eel folk will be involved.’ She stepped forward, hand on hips, glaring at him, summoning all the authority she could muster. ‘You will rise up, all over Etxelur, and attack us. And when we turn to face you, the Pretani will fall on us like wolves on a lame calf. This is what True says has been planned. He says every adult of the Eel folk is prepared for it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We take stone and slaves from the Pretani, in return for flints. You know this. To make the trade the Pretani come here, and some of us go to their settlements in the forest. One day True spoke to a man from Etxelur. He told him about the Pretani’s plan.’
‘Why would this True do that? Never been here.’
‘He knows nothing of Etxelur, and cares nothing. He only knows that Etxelur is an enemy of the Pretani. And he asked our trader for favours.’
‘What favours?’
‘His freedom, and his family’s, when the Pretani are beaten.’
Wise studied her. His face was weather-beaten, burned; many of the Eel folk, used to the milder sun of their inland lakes, had broiled in the intense light of the coast, especially the children. The darkening and tightening of Wise’s skin gave him an alien, hardened look. ‘Why tell me?’
‘Ana is having your leaders brought to her. We’re trying to do this out of sight of the Pretani. We don’t want them to know what we know. Soon they will come for you. But I came first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want to understand.’ Deeply hurt, betrayed, she clung to her anger. ‘You aren’t denying it, are you?’
He sighed. ‘Why deny?’
‘Even though the Pretani beat your children and rape your women, you are prepared to work for them – to kill us to further their goals?’
He shrugged. ‘No choice. And besides, when the attack comes, great chaos. Perhaps we slip away.’
‘But you would turn on us? What have we ever done to you? We don’t beat you.’
‘No. You let Pretani do that.’
‘Would you have harmed me?’ She grabbed his forearm; covered with dense grey hair, it was slick with sweat and sea spray. ‘Look at me, Wise. Would you have hurt me?’
‘If I had to.’
She stepped back, shocked. ‘But I cared for you – your family. I brought you medicine for your sick child.’
‘I depend on your kindness for life of child.’ He studied her, staring at her face. ‘Understand, little girl? Don’t want your power over me, for good or ill.’ She was horrified to see something like pity in his eyes.
She turned away and ran back up the beach.
80
At the end of the day, with the setting sun striping long shadows along the Etxelur beaches, Ana called her closest people to the holy middens. As Jurgi waited with her they arrived in ones and twos, Novu, Ice Dreamer, Arga, Kirike. They had to wait for Dolphin.
Jurgi thought he had never known Ana so agitated, so obviously distressed. She paced by the middens and peered out to sea, and at the great new dykes reaching out towards the drowned Mothers’ Door – huge structures yet unfinished, with heaps of stone and sand at their abutments.
Arga stood by Jurgi. ‘She’s very worried.’
‘She needs to be calm,’ Jurgi said. ‘To think clearly.’
‘You’re the priest. It’s your job to soothe her, isn’t it?’
‘She’s a troubled spirit,’ he said grimly. ‘But… I saw her grow up. She respected me, then. Now she’s the woman who took me from my partner, and she is the mother of my unborn child, and she is the beating heart of the new Etxelur. How am I supposed to deal with such a being?’
Dolphin arrived, at last. And she had brought a slave with her, one of the Eel folk. A few years older than Dolphin, he was muscular but slim to the point of scrawny. His wrap of faded cloth was filthy and torn, and he stank of the sea, at whose edge he had probably been working most of the day. As the group stared, he simply stood before them, showing no sign of fear. He was oddly impressive.
Dolphin said the slave’s name was Wise. Jurgi had never learned any of the slaves’ names. Not knowing their names made it easier for him to bear their presence.
Novu turned on Dolphin. ‘I don’t care what his name is. Why have you brought him here? He and his kind mean to kill us all.’ With age he had become a small, angry man, plump in body and face, his dark brown eyes red-rimmed with anger. He was eaten up by his obsessions, scarred by a long-gone childhood. Jurgi believed he still loved Novu, but he had never seen him look more unappealing.
Dolphin spoke up for herself, young, angry, beautiful in her mother’s striking way with her strong nose and dark hair. ‘Why do you think I brought him? Because the Eel folk are at the centre of all this. If we don’t hear what they have to say we’re fools.’
Jurgi spoke up hastily. ‘She’s right. Let’s not bicker. We’ve got some hard thinking to do, some tough decisions to make. For a start I’ve been trying to make sure the Pretani in Etxelur don’t know that we know about their plan.’
Ice Dreamer asked, ‘And how are you doing that?’
‘Their big men are all in the dreamers’ house, working their way through my store of poppies.’
Dreamer laughed throatily.
Ana spoke, for the first time. ‘And what about this plan of theirs?’ She glanced at Jurgi, an unusual uncertainty showing on her small, solemn face. ‘Do we believe all we’ve been told?’
‘I think we must,’ Jurgi said. ‘There’s nothing for this man True to gain by lying. He deliberately sought out our trader to tell him about it. And the Eel folk here have admitted it.’ He glanced uneasily at Wise. ‘Though some of them had to be pressed.’
‘Maybe it’s all a bluff,’ Kirike said. ‘Maybe the Eel folk have been told to spin us this tale to frighten us.’
Jurgi hadn’t thought of that, and he considered. ‘I doubt it. We had no idea the Pretani were planning to fall on us at all. They wouldn’t give away the advantage of surprise just for the sake of stirring up a bit of confusion.’
‘Besides,’ Dreamer said, ‘as you should know, Kirike, you’ve got their blood in your veins, the Pretani aren’t the subtlest of folk. This scheme of planting warriors among us is pretty smart, but is probably the limit of their ingenuity. More likely, they just weren’t clever enough to imagine that one of their slaves would betray them.’