With a sigh of relief Ana settled on the couch Dolphin’s sons had made for her. This was the trunk of a fat oak, laboriously carved and polished. Early this morning Dolphin had loaded it with cushions stuffed with goose down. Dolphin sat cross-legged beside her and resumed her work, mending a torn tunic for her youngest boy.
Ana’s latest dog, an ageing mutt called Hailstorm, was already asleep at the couch’s foot. He was the son of Thunder and grandson of Lightning, and she said he was the laziest of the lot.
Ana’s house still stood where it always had, when it had belonged to her long-dead grandmother Sunta, one of the Seven Houses that stood behind the line of dunes that still fringed the southern shore of Etxelur’s bay – even though the bay, long drained, was now greened and thick with willows. But old Sunta would surely not have recognised this place, for the house had been rebuilt on top of a mound, its faces covered with marram grass and its base fringed by a low wall of good Pretani stone. Today the mound’s slope was speckled with celandine, an early flower drawn out by the sunshine. When Dolphin absently plucked one she counted its eight perfect, spiky leaves. And, nestling in the celandine carpet, she saw the rich purple of dead-nettles, tiny, intricate flowers.
Once she was settled Ana leaned her stick against the chair where she could find it again, folded her hands in her lap, and turned her cataract-silvered eyes towards the sun. ‘Ah, the light.’ She rubbed her bare elbows with hands like claws. ‘It’s been such a long winter. Odd how the winters don’t get any shorter as you get older, though the summers fly by fast as swallows… The sun’s good for me.’
‘I know, Ana.’ So she did; Ana made the same sort of speech every day. But there were some who said that Ana craved the light as part of her life-long battle against her dread Other, the owl, a creature of the dark and the cold.
Noise came floating to them on the breeze – banging drums, excited cries, the squeals of children, merging into the cries of the gulls as they wheeled over the shore.
Ana turned her head. ‘What’s all the din?’
‘Well, I don’t know, sitting here, do I? But it’s surely to do with the Spring Walk.’
Ana nodded. ‘Just three days away.’ The sunlight was making Ana’s eyes water, and she wiped her face on a sleeve. ‘It’s all so long ago – the last time Pretani came on a Spring Walk. All that blood spilled. Hardly anybody remembers it now. The worse thing about growing old, you know, isn’t setting out your friends’ bodies for the sky burial, it is being the only one who remembers how it was, and why it was. The way we worked together – the way we fought. Novu, who died alone in his nest of bricks. Jurgi, dear Jurgi, the wisest man I ever met, who loved me, even if he never forgave me. And your mother, of course, Ice Dreamer, how I fought with her when my father brought her home! We all worked so closely together we were like the fingers of a single hand. Now they’re all gone, and me left here alone.’
‘You aren’t alone. People know your name from Gaira to Albia. You’re loved by everyone.’
Ana reached over and patted her shoulder with her bent fingers. ‘It should be quite a show when they bury me in the sea wall then, shouldn’t it?’
Somebody called, ‘As long as it doesn’t outshine what you’re planning for my father.’
Ana turned her head at the new voice, her blind eyes searching. ‘Who’s that?’
Four people were approaching the mound, two men and a woman in the heavy hide garb of the Pretani, and Ana’s daughter Sunta, barefoot in a skimpy smock. The younger Pretani man bore a heavy leather sack. Looking beyond them, Dolphin saw a few more Pretani, and a ragged bunch of Etxelur folk following. Most of them were curious children who had probably never seen a Pretani before, dancing around the warriors and pulling at their hide cloaks.
The younger Pretani was Kirike. Dolphin hadn’t seen him in years. She felt her heart race.
She was still holding her ripped tunic, her needle of antler. She put the stuff down hastily, feeling foolish, and stood. She hoped she wasn’t actually blushing.
Ana, leaning heavily on her stick, was trying to stand. ‘It’s the Pretani, is it? We’ll go down the mound and greet our guests.’
‘No need.’ The Pretani woman took charge. She walked up the steps cut into the side of the mound and stood before Ana. ‘Giver. My father told me all about you. It’s an honour to meet you.’
‘Acorn?’ Ana reached out with a bent finger, and stroked the woman’s cheek, the line of her brow. ‘You are Acorn. You have your father’s cheekbones. I remember Shade’s cheekbones… And now you’re the Root of the Pretani. A woman!’
‘Much has changed.’
‘And for the better,’ Ana said firmly. ‘Thank you for speaking to me in my own tongue. That’s respectful of you. And you’ve come a long way.’
‘We came for our father,’ said the younger man, stepping forward. He put down his bag, and Dolphin could hear a rattle of bones.
‘Kirike.’ Ana’s face twisted into a smile and she held out her arms. Kirike came forward and embraced his aunt; he was a stocky man, built like his Pretani father, and he overwhelmed the slight, hunched woman. Ana reached back for Dolphin. ‘Come to me, child. You two haven’t see each other for much too long.’
So Dolphin came face to face with Kirike, the boy she’d grown to love as they grew up together, the man she’d lost in the great falling-out after the Pretani war. She felt fifteen again as the two of them stood there on the mound. ‘You haven’t changed.’ She touched his bearded cheek. ‘And yet you have. Does that make sense?’
‘No.’ He smiled. There were lines around his eyes and on his forehead, under a single kill scar. ‘But you always did talk in riddles.’
‘When we were young I thought you looked like your mother Zesi. Now you look more of a Pretani, like your father.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘No. Because I can still see my Kirike in there, under all the years.’
He slapped his belly. ‘Under all the weight, you mean.’ He leaned forward, and said a few halting words in the tongue of Dolphin’s mother, the tongue of the True People from across the ocean. ‘You still smell of the sea.’
Dolphin laughed. ‘And you of the forest. You must meet my children. Four of them. All boys.’
He grinned. ‘I left my own litter at home. Three girls!’
She held his gaze for one more heartbeat. ‘What might have been?’
‘What indeed? But we must make the most of the world as we find it.’
‘Well,’ Ana barked, ‘that’s an attitude I’ve been arguing against my whole life, I must say.’ She hobbled forward to Kirike’s bag, poking it with her stick. ‘I take it this is the old man?’
‘Let me.’ Resin stepped forward, opened the bag, and picked out the Root’s skull to hand to Ana.
Ana took it carefully and touched one cheekbone with a bent fingertip. ‘Poor Shade! He was a good man, you know – better than the rest of you Pretani put together, and certainly better than his father and brother who were both little more than animals.’
Dolphin murmured, ‘Ana-’
‘No, it’s true, and it has to be said. If anybody deserved to be born into a better world it was him. I always thought, you know, that if he’d been born in Etxelur he’d have made a good priest. He had the right instinct about people.’ She glared at Sunta. ‘Shame you never met him, child. He might have taught you a few things.’ Carefully she handed the skull back to Kirike and turned her face to the sun, closing her streaming eyes. ‘It’s a beautiful day – best of the year so far. Why wait? Isn’t it a good enough day to lay poor old Shade down for his final sleep?’
Dolphin glanced at the Pretani. ‘It’s not the equinox yet, Ana. We haven’t arranged a proper ceremony, a procession-’
‘Well, I know that. But would Shade care?’ Ana turned to the Pretani. ‘From what I remember of your father-’