Stone Spring Part 8

The woman sat by a poor, shoddy fire under a shelter made of a heap of driftwood. She was dressed in tattered skins. Her dark hair was a mat of filth and grease, her face streaked with old blood. Bits of kit lay on the ground around her, amid folds of dirty leather. Her belly was swollen, though she was terribly thin; her wrist looked so fine Kirike thought he could have closed his thumb and forefinger around it. She held a child in her arms, a girl, perhaps eight or ten - nothing but skin and bones, and not moving.

The woman had been speaking, murmuring nonsense in an unknown tongue. Now she looked at Kirike with pale, blank eyes, and he suppressed a shudder.

Heni hissed, 'Can you smell that rot? Like spoiled meat.'

'Yes.'

'Do you think she's mad?'

'She's beautiful,' Kirike said. 'Or was. And she's pregnant.'

'Yes. Far gone with it. And look at the kid she's holding. How stiff she is . . .'

Kirike stepped forward cautiously. The woman, watching, didn't move. He crouched and touched the dangling arm of the girl, the wrist. The skin was cold as stone, and he could find no pulse. He moved closer, deliberately smiling at the woman. There was an overpowering stink of filth, of s.h.i.+t and p.i.s.s and sweat, of stale fish grease - and that dread rot stench. He worked his fingers under the matted hair at the girl's neck, and felt the cold flesh.

He drew back. 'She's dead.'

'Dead for days, I'd say.' Heni leaned forward and cautiously unwrapped the skin around the girl's leg. The limb was swollen to the size of a log, and an open wound swarmed with maggots. He fell back, his hand over his mouth. 'Well, we know how she died.'

'Try not to frighten the live one.' Still smiling, Kirike tried to slide his arms under the girl's stiff body, to take her from the woman. But the woman grabbed the girl back. 'I bet she won't speak a word of any tongue we know. n.o.body in this moon-struck land does. It's going to take a while to persuade her to give up that corpse.'

Heni said, 'It's going to take no time at all. We just walk away and leave her to the sea, or the wolves.'

'She's pregnant, man! And she's half-starved. Who knows how long she's been nursing this wretched child? No wonder it's driven the sense from her head. I wonder what happened to her.'

'I don't know, and I don't care. And if she's pregnant, that's another morsel for the wolves. She's not our problem, Kirike. She's not one of ours. This isn't our country!'

'If we can get the body away from her, get some food inside her, clean her up-'

Heni stood over him, arms folded. 'We're going home. You agreed. We leave tomorrow, or the day after. As soon as we fill the boat-'

'Fine. You fill the boat. We'll leave as we said. And, unless she recovers and runs off, we take her with us.'

For a long moment Heni didn't move. 'One day I'll walk away from you, cousin. I'll just walk away, and you'll be dead in a month.'

'But today's not that day, is it? Look - you cover up that stinking leg, and try to lift the body . . .'

The two of them moved towards the cowering woman. Kirike smiled, murmuring soft words in a tongue she could not know.

And then he noticed the design on the rock face on which she was sitting: three circles with a common centre, and a radial slash - the design that had been tattooed into his own wife's belly, the sign of the Door to the Mothers' House - the sign of Etxelur, carved into a rock on the wrong side of the ocean.

15.

They walked every day, Novu and his owner, the trader Chona, at a steady, ground-eating pace, following water courses and well-worn tracks, generally following the river north from Jericho. Sometimes they even walked by night.

Generally they walked in silence. In fact Novu got more slaps from Chona, stinging blows on the back of the head, than he did words, for every time he got something wrong, a slap. He quickly learned what was wrong and what was right.

And for the first few days, as he shuffled along in the filthy old skins Chona had given him, a heavy pack on his back, Novu was hobbled by bark rope tied tightly around his ankles.

Novu was a town boy. He had never walked far in his life. He had boots, but his soft feet blistered. Every joint seemed to ache as he s.h.i.+fted the ma.s.s of the pack, trying to favour one shoulder and then the other. The hobble made it much worse. He couldn't make Chona's big strides; he had to make two steps for every one of Chona's, and he felt perpetually out of breath. He didn't have a knife, but his hands were free, and he could unpick the knots - but they were tied expertly and he would need time, which Chona, ever vigilant, was never going to give him. But he longed to be free of the hobble, and to be able to stretch his legs.

Sometimes Chona stayed the night with those he traded with. But Novu always had to stay outside, huddled under a skin or a lean-to. Such people didn't live as Novu had in Jericho, but in communities of a few dozen people, in houses that might be shaped like bricks or like pears or like cowpats, maybe with a few herded goats and a sc.r.a.p of cultivated wheat. They could be very strange, these isolated folks - people who went naked or with feathers sticking up from their topknots, or who tattooed themselves and their children red and black all over, or who stretched their necks or ear lobes or their lower lips, or who wore bones through their cheeks and necks. Chona said it was possible that traders like himself were the only strangers these people ever saw. No wonder they were odd.

It was worse when they stayed out in the country, away from people altogether. Chona carried skins in his backpack, remarkably light and supple, that he would use to make lean-tos in stands of trees. It wasn't long before he had taught Novu how to make a dry and warm shelter.

But when the dark came Novu always found himself curling up in the dirt like an animal in its den. It was not like being at home, snug in the belly of Jericho with the warm bodies of hundreds of people all around him. Here he was outside, and there was nothing around him but the wind, and the howls of distant wild dogs - and, occasionally, the snuffling and tread of some curious visitor in the dark. At times even the rope tether by which Chona attached Novu to himself at night was a comfort, of sorts.

Every day he was taken further away from Jericho. But in a way he was glad of it, glad when after the first few days they got far enough from Jericho that there was no chance of encountering anybody who might know him, and laugh at his shame - or, worse, turn away in pity.

After many days of walking they came to a lake. Chona had Novu make camp in a stand of willow, while he sat and bathed his bare feet in the stagnant water at the lake's edge.

'So,' Chona said at length. 'Do you know where you are?' He spoke in Novu's own tongue, his words lightly accented.

Novu had tried to follow the route, with the vague idea of running back home if he got away. After the first couple of days he had run out of familiar landmarks, and since then he knew only that they had kept moving north. He admitted, 'No.'

'Good.' Chona, sitting on the ground, was a slim silhouette in the light of the low sun that reflected from the still water. He looked calm and strong. 'Now, if you ever got away from me, you'd run south, trying to get back to Jericho.'

Novu shrugged. That seemed obvious.

'But if you did flee, I'd run you down easily. Even if you had a day's head start. You know that, don't you?'

'I suppose-'

'And when I did catch you, I'd hamstring you. Do you know what that means? Probably just one leg. You could walk with a crutch. You could still make bricks. But you'd never run anywhere ever again. Do you believe me?'

'Yes. Yes, I believe you.'

Chona folded his legs under him, stood easily, and came over to where Novu was sitting. He dug a stone blade from a fold of his tunic. The boy flinched back, but Chona bent down, and held the blade to the rope hobble at Novu's ankles. 'Then we understand each other.' He cut the attaching rope with a single swipe of the blade. 'Get those bands off your ankles, and bathe your feet. Then go catch some fish.' He coughed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and walked away.

After that they walked on, still as master and slave, Novu still bearing the bulk of the load. But now at least they went side by side, for Novu, without the hobble, was able to keep up with Chona's long stride, and Chona no longer bothered with the demeaning tether at night.

Novu got less things wrong, and less slaps to the back of the head. Chona helped Novu repair his soft town boots when they started to wear out. He even taught him a few words in the traders' tongue, which he said was spoken from one end of the Continent to the other.

And he began to talk more openly to Novu.

One night he sketched a kind of plan of his world in riverside mud. 'Here is Jericho, at the eastern end of a great ocean that runs far to the west. There are lands to the north of the ocean, lands to the south, as you see. I know little of what lies south, but to the north there are many people, much trading to be done. A vast, vast area. This is the land we call the Continent.'

Novu was used to drawings and plans; they were used all the time in Jericho in building work. But he had no clear idea of what an 'ocean' was, or how far this body of water stretched. It was only when Chona used his thumb to indicate how far they had walked in comparison that he began to grasp its scale.

'That ocean's huge.'

'Yes,' Chona said. 'But I, and other traders, walk its coasts, and have seen the gates of rock in the far west where it opens out into a greater ocean still. Now, I had been thinking of taking you to the north, here . . .' This was a fat peninsula between the middle ocean to the south, and a lesser sea, still a great body in its own right, to the north. 'There are communities that live like you do in Jericho. All heaped up in boxes of mud. There, I am sure, your skills as a brickmaker will be worthy of trading - if your father wasn't lying about you.'

Novu said hotly, 'My father lies about many things, but not about that.'

'But the year is wakening.' He waved his hand over the sketched Continent. 'The trade routes are opening. There are many mountains and forests in the way, but rivers span the Continent east to west, north to south. Trade flows along these great channels, as sap rises in a tree in spring, as the blood flows in a young man's c.o.c.k. Hah! There are great gatherings here and here, where the rivers rise or cross, and much business can be done.' The places he indicated with stabs of his muddy finger were dauntingly far to the west. 'These gatherings are soon. I would go there. You can carry my trade goods there, and my bounty back. Then, in the autumn, I will return you to the villages of mud and brick and find somebody who will trade for your skill.'

Novu grunted. 'You use me as my people use cattle, with heavy goods laden on their backs.'

'I use you any way I choose,' Chona snapped. 'Anyway, by the autumn you will be in better condition. Less of this flab.' He poked Novu's belly, not hard. Novu flinched back.

In the morning, they walked on.

Day by day, with the steady walking and his sleep deepened by exhaustion, Novu felt his body changing, growing more lean, the soles of his feet toughening, the muscles of his legs tightening. Once he glimpsed his reflection in a flat pond. His face had grown dark in the sun, dark and tough like Chona's.

He wouldn't say he liked Chona; he was too alien for that. But he came to admire the man's self-reliance, his inner strength, his composure, his competence. And now that he was over the shock of his departure he had no desire to go back to Jericho, save on his own terms. He didn't even have any wish for revenge over his father, who, now he thought back, struck him as a murky, worm-like figure, wriggling and jostling with other worms in the crowded, worked-over dirt of the town.

But he was wary of Chona. For one thing he was aware of the way Chona looked at him, at times, when he was was.h.i.+ng, or walked ahead. He'd seen Chona's l.u.s.t for his cousin Minda. The two of them were alone much of the time, sometimes spending days without seeing another human being. Novu had no wish to be the object of that angry pa.s.sion.

And then there was the coughing. It was getting worse; sometimes it woke Chona in the night, and then Novu. Clearly Chona was growing ill. Maybe he'd caught something back at Jericho. If so, Novu didn't want to share it.

Life could be worse. In many ways Novu's life back at Jericho had been worse than this. But Novu knew that if he ever got the slightest chance he would get away from Chona. If he had to kill the man, he would do it.

16.

Some days later they reached the sh.o.r.e of a sea. The strand was crowded with groups of people, but they were fisherfolk, eccentric and inward-looking, and not very interested in Chona's goods.

While they camped by the water Chona had Novu hunt for pretty sh.e.l.ls to trade.

At length they reached the outflow of a great river. The estuary with its mud flats, reed beds and threading water channels was densely populated, for it allowed access both to the sea and via the river and its valley to the forests to the west. Chona did not linger here, for, he said, this mighty river was one of the great trade routes that spanned the Continent. So he and Novu headed west, following tracks that paralleled the river.

This was not like the river close to Jericho. It was a broad, rich stream, muscular in its grand flow, and its banks were green, fringed by marshes and reed banks with woodland rising beyond. There was life everywhere, frogs and toads croaking in the shallows, whole flocks of birds nesting and feeding in the reeds, and deer shyly emerging from the forest fringes to drink. Slowly Novu gathered a sense of the huge, rich Continent that stretched to the west of here, on and on, and how this tremendous river drained its very heart.

And there were people here - there could scarcely not be, given how rich the land was, people scattered in small communities along the riverbank and sometimes further inland. They all lived off the land and the bounty of the river. Sometimes Chona would visit them, do a little trading. Some days they rode in their boats, paddled against the river's flow, in return for a few of Chona's sh.e.l.ls or bits of stone.

All these people were human beings who had babies and grew old. But apart from those basics they could differ in every detail of how they lived their lives - how they built their houses, how they adorned themselves, how they celebrated birth and death and coming of age, how they arranged their marriages. And, most striking to Novu, they differed hugely in their languages. You could walk for a day along the river to find yourself coming upon yet another community whose tongue was utterly unlike anything you'd ever heard before. He built up a picture in his head of a vast landscape of forests and rivers and gra.s.sland, populated by these little communities of people, each of them all but isolated. It was only the traders who travelled far, with their bundles of trade goods, smiling and nodding their way across the landscape.

But nowhere did Novu find a place that was remotely like Jericho. Maybe his father was right in his boasting, that Jericho was something new in the world, and the pride of all mankind.

As the days pa.s.sed and they headed ever further west the land changed its character, becoming more mountainous. Now the river was constrained by steep banks. The walking was hard work on the sloping ground near the river, and they had to climb to find easier tracks.

Then, one morning, the country opened out, and Novu was treated to a spectacular view of a gorge, deep but narrow. The river cut like a blade through cliffs of pale, banded limestone, coated with ragged forest that in places descended almost to the water's edge.

Chona grunted, s.h.i.+fting his pack. 'This place is called the Narrow, in a hundred tongues. Look, we climb up over this next bluff, and then we'll come to the camp where we'll stay for the night.'

The camp, when they scrambled down to it, turned out to be a roughly flat area by the river where robust-looking houses sat, built on frames of thick tree trunks. All this was in the lee of a steep cliff whose bare rock was covered with odd, fish-shaped carvings. Chona, evidently knowing the place, led Novu in. They were met by the usual gaggle of curious children, and by one or two suspicious stares from the women.

Everyone seemed to be working on fish. The silver bodies were heaped everywhere, fresh caught, or were being gutted or sc.r.a.ped or skinned, or hung up to dry out, or were wrapped in river mud and baked slowly in pits. Wicker baskets and bone harpoons hung on racks and on the walls of the houses. Novu saw boats pulled up on the rocky sh.o.r.e and out working on the river, whose roar was a constant, not unpleasant background to the human noises of the settlement.

Well, it was clear how the folk of this place made their living. After so long by riverbanks and sea coasts Novu had thought he had got used to the stink of fish, but in this place it was ripe and high. There were no dogs, though, and that was unusual.

At last Chona came to a house he recognised, and called a name in another new language. Out came a burly, bearded man of perhaps thirty-five who reminded Novu, oddly, of his father. But this man was dressed in what looked like deerskin, carefully softened, cut and st.i.tched, and he had a hat thick with fish scales on his head, which would have appalled Magho. He greeted Chona with apparent pleasure, but he pulled back when Chona had one of his coughing fits. With gestures, he invited Chona into his home.

Chona turned to Novu, and pointed to the cliff face. 'You're sleeping over there. You'll find hollows and caves and such. No animals; the people use them for winter stores, and I think the children play in there.' He looked around. 'It's a rich place to live. You can see it. They hunt in the forest, where there's deer and aurochs and boar, and then there's the river itself. Fish, the river, it's everything to these people, you know. They bury their dead with their heads pointing downstream, so the river can take their spirits away. And, of course, anybody coming this way, like me, has to pa.s.s this point. So old Cardum and his friends can just sit here and let the food and the wealth flow by, and trap it in their nets like salmon. This is no Jericho, but they've been here a long time, and they're rich in their own way. A boy like you might feel at home here. Well - go fix yourself up. Cardum says he'll have his kids bring you supper.'

'Fish?'

Chona laughed. 'If I need you I'll call.'

Novu quickly found a deep, snug cave beneath the cliffs at the back of the settlement, too low to stand up in. It was clean enough, though he did find one dry, coiled t.u.r.d, maybe left by one of the playing children. He scooped this up in a handful of dirt - it actually smelled of fish - and threw it away. And as he did so he noticed more of those odd fish carvings, this time in the roof of the cave, out of the way of the wind and rain.

He went down to the river and, having drunk his fill and taken a discreet p.i.s.s, he returned with a bowl of water and an armful of dead branches. At the back of the cave he gathered stones to make a hearth, and dug the ember from last night's fire out of his pack.

As he was nursing his fire, two children peered under the overhang. Both boys, maybe eight years old, they looked oddly like Cardum, both round and jowly with thick black hair. They threw in a parcel of some kind, shouted what was evidently an insult, and ran off, giggling.

'And you're the same!' Novu yelled back.

The parcel turned out to be a couple of plump fish, fresh from the river, wrapped in thick broad-lobed leaves. He had no name for their kind, but he had learned how to prepare fish. He briskly skinned and gutted the fish. He buried the waste, not wanting to offend anybody by throwing it out or to attract rats by leaving it lying around. He dropped handfuls of dirt into his bowl of water, making clay, and plastered it over the fish, moulding a compact lump that he dropped on the fire.

After he'd fetched in more water he sat back, leaning against the wall, waiting for the fish to cook.

His cave looked north, and as the sun set the daylight sank down to a bare grey-blue. His eyes adapted to the dark, and he saw how the glow of the subdued fire was picking out the carvings on the roof of his shelter. He felt oddly content. Food, warmth, peace. It was a relief, for once, to be alone. The rush of the river filled his head, like the sound of his own blood flowing.

But it didn't last long. Chona came crawling in. He sniffed loudly, making himself cough. 'That smells good. Enough for two?'

'Maybe. And if not, I suppose I'll go hungry again, will I?'

Chona just laughed. He settled against the cave wall, shucked off his boots and pulled a skin over his legs. 'Getting colder.'

'So why didn't you stay in the house of, umm-'

'Cardum? Too crowded. Crawling with kids and farting men and complaining women. Ate my fill of his fish, though.'