Stone Spring Part 4

'What do you think you're doing?'

'Coming with you,' he whispered back. 'To the midden.'

'Oh, no, you're not.' She glared at the priest, beyond the door flap. 'Is this your doing, Jurgi?'

The priest spread his hands. 'We need somebody to dig. Shade said he'd do it. Would you rather do it yourself?'

'Please,' Shade said. 'I knew Sunta too.'

Jurgi beckoned. 'We'll discuss this outside. Don't wake the others.'

But of course, once they got outside, all three bundled up in their winter cloaks, and Jurgi had handed Shade his shovel made of a deer's shoulder bone, there was no point debating it any more. Ana stomped away, with bad grace.

The laying-out platform was set up on a dune matted with marram gra.s.s. It was a frame of precious driftwood, taller than a person, long enough for three adults to be laid end to end - or several infants.

The priest and Shade stood by while Ana climbed a step up to the platform. Here was Mama Sunta, a bundle of ragged deerskin and bones and bits of flesh. At least there was no sign of the growth that had eaten her from within. The bones were cold and shone with dew.

From this slight elevation, Ana looked around. It was still not yet dawn; the sky was a high grey-blue, scattered with cloud. The air was very cold, and the dew was heavy. Mama Sunta had lived out her whole long life in this place, and Ana saw traces of Sunta's long life and her work wherever she looked. From here the Seven Houses were all visible, and Sunta's own home was a mound of kelp thatch the deep green of the sea. The ground between the houses was thoroughly trampled. On the landward side, downwind from the prevailing breezes, was a waste pit and racks where early-season fish were drying. Sunta had always been the best cook. A rubbish tip was full of broken tools and bits of old bone and stone, hide and cloth. Sunta had always emphasised to the children that nothing was ever discarded here, just put aside until it came in handy. A s.p.a.ce trampled flat and stained with old blood was used for butchery, and in a smaller area nearby stone was worked. Both places had been barred to the children by Sunta, for fear of their bare feet tearing on flint shards or bone sc.r.a.ps.

A dormouse scuttled past Ana's feet, fresh out of its hibernation, busy already, early in the year, early in the day. In a world without Sunta.

The priest was watching her. 'Are you all right?'

'You know, I often come out like this. Before the dawn. Just to walk around by myself.'

'I know you do. You probably shouldn't be alone.'

'But people . . .' People shunned her, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. 'People can see the owl in me. I'm bad luck.'

'I don't think you're bad luck. That midwinter day was Sunta's time to die, as it was your time for the blood tide. I know it's affected you. But just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean they're linked.'

She wrinkled her nose. 'That's a funny thing to say. I don't remember the old priest talking like that.'

'Well, I'm a funny sort of priest. You must give people time, Ana. A chance to know you, now you're a woman. And you need to give yourself a chance to get over this - to get past your grandmother's death. Why do you think I insisted it must be you who buries her today?'

'For Sunta's sake.'

'No. For you.' He touched her arm. 'Come now, we should get to the midden before the sun is too high.'

So Ana lifted Mama Sunta. Most of the joints had lost their ligaments, and as she lifted the skeleton it broke up, and Sunta's skull rolled backwards, revealing empty sockets where worms moved sluggishly in a kind of black muck.

Shade, watching her, said, 'In Albia we hang our dead in the branches of a tree, an oak if we can find one. And when the birds and the worms have done their work we plant the man in the ground, and put an acorn on top of him, so a tree will grow and hold his spirit.'

Ana understood by now that Shade's language had no word for 'woman', no distinction between 'his' and 'hers', as if women were an inferior sort of men.

'But our great men, like our father when he dies, we will plant a whole tree on top of him. I mean, we dig it up roots and all, and make a hole in the ground, and put the living tree over him . . .'

Ana ignored him as she worked. Gently but reverently she wrapped the bones in a parcel made of the remains of Sunta's clothing.

Carrying the body - it was shockingly light - she stepped down from the burial platform. With the priest and the Pretani boy to either side of her, she began the long walk around the bay. In the uncertain light it was sometimes difficult to see the track. But she glimpsed frogsp.a.w.n ma.s.sing in the dense water, and crocuses thrusting green shoots out of the dead brown earth. She could feel the change in the world, feel the spring coming, like the moment of the turning of a great tide. And yet her grandmother, in her arms, was dead.

They walked silently. Jurgi, beside her, was an extraordinarily calming man, Ana thought, with his open, beardless face, his blue-dyed hair tied back in a tail, and those sharp brown eyes that seemed to see right into her spirit. He was one of the few who had never recoiled from Ana because of her dread Other.

None in Etxelur was more important than the priest, who was the people's bridge between the world of the senses and the world of the G.o.ds. But Jurgi was quite unlike the last priest, Petru, a capering fool with wild hair who always hid his face behind his deer-skull mask. Finally he had danced himself to a frenzied death at a midsummer Giving. Jurgi was already twenty-five, she realised. Few people lived much beyond thirty; Sunta had been unusual in living to see her granddaughters grow up. Jurgi might not have many more years. Ana would miss him when he was gone.

They trudged over the causeway to Flint Island, the going still soggy from the last tide, and walked on, pa.s.sing around the island's north coast, until the great middens stood before them. The edge of the sun had already lifted over the sea's eastern horizon, which was clear of cloud.

The boy grinned, strong and confident, and hoisted his scapula shovel. 'Where shall I dig?'

The priest clambered up the innermost midden, and paced its length. 'Here.' He pointed to a spot on the midden perhaps a third of its length along. 'This feels right.'

The boy climbed up the midden slope, the sh.e.l.ls crunching under his heels. 'And if I disturb old bones-'

'It doesn't matter. Just be respectful.'

Shade knelt and began to dig his blade into the midden surface, crunch, scoop, crunch. He was soon done, and stood back.

The priest looked down at Ana. 'Are you ready?'

'Let's get it done.' She clutched Mama Sunta closer to her chest, and climbed the midden slope, stepping cautiously on the uncertain surface, determined not to stumble.

She stood awkwardly on the lip of the pit the Pretani had dug. The hole was neat and round. Glancing into it she saw a gleam of white, perhaps an exposed bone, picked clean by whatever creatures lived here, feasting on the dead. There was a smell of fresh, salty rot. 'I don't know what to do.'

'Just place her in the pit.'

She leaned down, and placed Mama Sunta on the rough floor.

Jurgi nodded. 'Good. Now we wait. We will seal the pit as soon as the sun clears the horizon. But first I will speak to Sunta.' He s.h.i.+fted his deer mask from where it hung on his chest and fixed it over his face. It was just a skull with antlers still fixed, and holes crudely cut to allow his human eyes to see.

But when he s.h.i.+fted his posture, and wrapped his deerskin cloak tighter around him, it was as if his Other, the deer, had taken his place.

'In the beginning was the gap,' he said. 'The awful interval between being and not being. The gap stretched, and created an egg, out of nothing. Its sh.e.l.l was ice and its yolk was slush and mud and rock. For an unmeasured time the egg was alone, silent. Then the egg shattered. The fragments of its sh.e.l.l became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.

'From the slush and mud of the yolk grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and the sun and the earth serpent and the sky bird of thunder.

'But still the giants fought, until they fell on the first mother. Her own body, torn apart by the giants, became the substance of the earth, and of animals, and of people. The world became rich.

'But when the land became too full of mouths, the little mothers and the sun came to a concord with the moon, a terrible pact, and death was given to the world.

'Now, Sunta, by lying in these broken sh.e.l.ls, you are returned to the egg from which all creation emerged . . .' He shook his head, as if dizzy. He began to speak other words, words so old n.o.body but the priests understood them any more.

Somewhere a sea bird called, welcoming the day. Ana saw how the low, pinkish sunlight glinted from the sh.e.l.ls of the midden, tens of tens of tens of them, the labour of generations. It was unexpectedly beautiful, the sparkling sh.e.l.ls, the sweeping curve of the middens. She would not cry, she told herself. Not today.

Shade the Pretani touched her shoulder. 'I am your friend, Ana. I think we are alike, you and I. If you would like to talk of your grandmother, or your mother or father-'

She could smell his sweat. She turned away. She didn't even look at him again, as the priest completed the ceremony, and the sun, mistily visible, at last hauled its bulk clear of the sea.

8.

In the days that followed, far to the west of Etxelur the last of the True People in the land of the Sky Wolf struggled to stay alive.

And far to the east, beyond a continent of rivers and forest, a man walking alone approached a place where people lived in a huddle of mud bricks and stone walls.

Chona was not p.r.o.ne to fear.

This morning he walked alone, as he preferred, with his pack of dried meat and trade goods on his back, his worn walking staff in his right hand, his left hand hanging loosely by the blade hidden in a fold of his cloak. He had walked up from the Salt Sea to this river valley, its banks thick with woodland, reeds and papyrus, a green belt in this arid country that led him north towards the town. Skinny to the point of gaunt, the skin of his face made leathery by years of sunlight and wind, the soles of his feet hard as rock, Chona knew he looked elderly, at nearly thirty years old. No threat to anybody. Easy to drive away, even to rob of his precious pack of goods. Well, he was not so weak, as would-be robbers had found to their cost.

He had travelled further than anybody he knew, even among the loose community of traders who met at the harbours and river estuaries and confluences, key nodes in the natural routes that spanned the Continent. He believed he had seen as much of the world as anybody alive. He spoke a dozen languages, knew many more in fragments, and was a master of the crude, flexible traders' tongue that people spoke from one end of the Continent to the other. He was clever and resourceful, and he was without fear - almost.

But he was afraid of Jericho. And he could already see the pall of smoke, fed by dozens of fires, that hung over his destination. His belly clenched.

Following a trail well defined by the feet of animals and people, he climbed away from the river and up towards the higher ground, heading north-west. It was close to noon, and the morning clouds had long burned from a blue sh.e.l.l of sky. Away from the river the ground was dusty and the air was dry as a dead man's mouth.

He heard a murmur of voices, a clatter of hooves, a rattle of stones. Ahead of him on the trail a group of boys were herding goats. They carried long sticks to prod the animals as they bleated and jostled. The rattling Chona heard came from wooden gourds, each containing a pebble, hung around the neck of each goat.

Even this was a strange sight to Chona. They were only boys, but he found his footsteps slowing. Goats were for hunting, or for chasing down for milk when you needed it. Why gather them? Why fix gourds to their necks?

He always felt like this. He could turn back, head down south to the communities of fisherfolk around the sh.o.r.e of the Salt Sea, where his bone harpoons and elaborate lures always ensured him a welcome.

'Chona.' Magho came striding down the dusty slope to meet him. He clapped the trader on the shoulder. 'So you came.'

'Yes, I came. But-'

'But you nearly turned back.' Magho boomed laughter. 'I know you, my friend, and that's why I came to fetch you. Once I have a fish on the hook I don't let him get away!' He was a big, burly man, grown fat on the produce of his wheat meadows. He had a heavy bull-like jaw and fleshy nose and thick, tied-back black hair, and his luxuriant beard was turning to grey. He wore a skin tunic, but tied around his ample waist was a belt of green-dyed spun yarn.

If Magho had been keen enough to haul his ugly bulk all the way out to the river trail to meet him, he must want Chona's goods rather badly, and Chona, an instinctive trader, began to smell a deal, and his fear receded. 'You know me well enough, Magho. Only the promise of your hospitality lures me on.'

'You have the obsidian.'

'I have it.'

Magho's grin widened.

As they walked on, Magho kept up a steady flow of chatter. Chona had no family, no children, and preferred not to talk of his life, which consisted of walking to places Magho had never heard of, to make deals with people he didn't want Magho to know about. So he let Magho speak of his own family, his wife, their home, their three children, of whom the eldest boy Novu was such a disappointment. It was all a tactic to keep Chona on that fish hook, of course, but Chona endured it politely.

Now, following a track that curved around to the north-west, they were pa.s.sing through the gardens that surrounded the town. They were a patchwork of shapes, lopsided circles and rough squares marked out by wicker fences. Here women and many children laboured, bent over, plucking weeds from the meadows of wheat and barley and pulses. They didn't look up at Chona and Magho.

The men pa.s.sed a field where bricks of mud and straw had been laid out in rows to dry in the sun. Another extraordinary sight.

And as they neared the town that pall of smoke spread a dirty brown stain across the sky ahead, and Chona could already smell meat roasting, and human ordure.

Then, approaching from the west, the trail led them over a bluff, and at last Chona saw Jericho itself. It sprawled across the landscape, a ma.s.s of round, brick-built houses pressed together in a plain of dirty mud. Beyond lay the river valley and its reed beds, brilliant white and yellow. Even in the heat of the day smoke seeped up from the reed-thatched roofs of the houses, for the people of Jericho were always busy, busy.

But even stranger to Chona was the wall that faced him, standing in front of the town at its western end. Built of stone pressed into dried mud, the wall ran for dozens of paces, cutting the town off from the country to the west, and looping around like a moon crescent to enclose the buildings, though the loop was not completed. The people of Jericho, or their ancestors, had built this wall to save their town from floods and mud slides from the western hills. Strangest of all was the 'tower' that had been built against the wall, a round structure like a vast tree trunk, wider than it was tall, and likewise made of stone blocks pressed into mud. Chona had seen this before. The tower was so wide you could walk inside it, and climb steps up to the top.

As far as Chona had travelled he had never seen such a structure as this. He believed it must be unique in all the world. Why, even the 'tower' only had a name in the language of Jericho itself, a word that was needed nowhere else. Yet the wall was very ancient; you could see how the stones were worn and cracked, and the wall itself looked half-buried by mud drifts and acc.u.mulated garbage.

They walked on, rounding the wall, and the crammed-in houses of Jericho were revealed. Chona recoiled from the crowd and the clamour, and the rank stench. But Magho led the way boldly, treading between the p.i.s.s puddles, ignoring the stinks and the shouts of children and the bleating of goats, shouting greetings to friends or relatives.

A mob of people crushed through narrow, tangled lanes, some carrying baskets of grain or heavy bread loaves. Children, skinny, pale creatures, ran everywhere, playing and yelling as children always did. And there were animals in with the people: goats, hairy, long-legged sheep, even cattle, adding to the filth around the houses. Birds hovered overhead, gulls roosting on the house roofs or swooping down to feed on heaps of waste.

Chona was always overwhelmed by the sheer number of people you saw in this place. And yet many of them looked so unhealthy, the women with their gappy teeth, the children with their stick-thin limbs and pock-marked faces, the men worn down by the constant work.

In some ways this place wasn't unique. Who didn't have a favourite hazel tree? Who didn't try to keep the weeds out of a favourite mushroom patch? People even built walls and dug ditches to take away the rainwater. But nowhere else, in all Chona's travels, had these habits been driven to the extremes you saw around Jericho. Nowhere did you see the obsession, the bent backs and anxious eyes. Nowhere else did people live crushed in together like this, though Chona had travelled as far as anybody else in this empty world, east until you came to the deserts where the camels and horses ran in huge herds, or to the far west along the great river roads until you came to the grey ocean. Nowhere save here: Jericho.

The deep human core of him recoiled. But the trader in him was drawn back here again and again, like a fly to a t.u.r.d. And so he walked on with Magho, pus.h.i.+ng his doubts and fears deep down inside.

9.

Chona had no idea how Magho found his way through the muddle to his home; all the houses looked the same to him, just heaps of mud brick rising up in the midden-like town like ugly brown poppies.

Magho brushed aside a gap in the wall covered by a mat of reeds, and led Chona down earthen steps into a kind of pit dug down beneath the level of the ground. Rush mats had been scattered on the ground. A fire burned in a central hearth, banked up and not giving off much smoke, but even so the air was dense and hot. Most of the daylight was shut out, and the house was like a cave. The faecal stink outside was alleviated a bit, but in here there was a more complex aroma of stale food, farts, baby milk, sweat, and a disturbing, almost sweet smell of profound rot.

Two women sat, cross-legged, tying knots in some kind of twine. They wore smocks dyed bright green, with their legs left bare. Chona knew one must be Magho's wife, but he couldn't tell which. And three children were here, one older boy who sat sullen against a wall with his legs drawn up against his chest, and two little ones who played with toy mud bricks on the floor. All this Chona glimpsed in the light that leaked through the reed thatch roof.

Magho clapped his hands. 'Out! Come on, I need to talk to my friend here. Not you, Novu, you little snot,' and he pointed a finger at the older boy, who didn't look up.

The women, looking weary, rolled up their twine, gathered their toddlers, and pushed past Chona. The second was much younger than the first, perhaps a younger sister. She was a plump little thing with bare legs, wide innocent eyes, and full b.r.e.a.s.t.s whose weight showed through her loose smock.

He felt a stir of interest in his loins. He had been on the road a while. Jericho was a place where the ancient balance between man and woman, of which he had witnessed all manner of variants in his travels, was tipped firmly in the man's favour. Here a woman hardly dared even speak without a man's permission. And certainly the body of a female relative would be within Magho's gift. It would depend how badly Magho wanted Chona's goods, of course, and how protective he felt of the girl. He might even have his eye on her as a second wife himself - Chona couldn't remember, nor did he care, what the marriage rules were here. If so, Magho might not want her spoiled. And spoiled she would be, Chona thought, indulging in a faint reverie, if he got his hands on her. As with all things in the human world, it just depended who wanted what, and how badly. Those innocent eyes . . .

For now he had to concentrate, as Magho was beckoning him to the mats. 'Sit down, sit down.' Magho offered him food. 'Here, have some meat, this is pickled and spiced, have some bread.'

Chona dropped his pack by the door and propped his walking staff up against a wall. He kept his blade hidden at his left side, however. Magho was a harmless sort, but you never knew, and he didn't much like the look of the boy sitting against the wall. He stepped cautiously through the house's clutter of clothes and bits of food and clay pots, making for Magho on his mats. Niches had been cut into the dried mud of the bricks in the wall, and small artefacts stood here, like sculptures of human heads, with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and protruding tongues done in bright ochre paint. Chona knew from his previous visits that these were in fact real heads, the flensed skulls of honoured ancestors coated in mud and painted. Chona never liked to meet the eyes of these ancients, who he imagined might know the deals he was trying to strike all too well.

Magho cracked open one of his loaves, digging big earthy fingers into the thick crust, and tore off a piece to hand to Chona.

The trader bit into it. This 'bread', another word Chona had learned here, did fill your stomach, but it was like eating dry wood, and he knew that the coa.r.s.e gritty stuff wore your teeth down if you ate too much of it.

Chewing, he sat on the mat Magho had indicated, crossing his legs. But something pale pushed out of the dirt before his mat. It was a skull embedded in the ground, its jaws gaping, dust sifting in its eye sockets.

The boy saw him flinch, and laughed. He was perhaps sixteen. He was wearing a robe not unlike his mother's, not of hide but of woven vegetable fibre, dyed a bright green. 'Nothing to be afraid of, trader man. It's just another grandfather, wearing his way out of the ground. We bury our dead in the ground under our houses where the worms can cleanse their bones. So you're sitting on a big old heap of corpses. No wonder it stinks of rot in here - that's what you're thinking, aren't you?'