Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  “How do you know to walk here?”

  Arga piped up, “Because this is where the logs are!”

  Novu grinned, good-natured enough. “Yes, yes. What I mean is, how did your grandmothers know where to put the logs in the first place?”

  “The song tells you where,” Arga said, and she sang, “ ʻOver the water bridge, and by the smiling ridge, walk to the afternoon sun, until you come—’ ”

  “Which came first, the trail or the song?”

  “The trail,” Ana said.

  “The song,” Arga said.

  “Maybe a bit of both,” Dreamer murmured. “It is the same in my country. The land is overlaid by the lore and tradition of the past. And over and through this landscape of memory move the living.”

  “But it’s all so strange. There’s nothing here. At home we build walls. Marker stones!” He stood on the causeway, in the middle of the marsh, and held up his arms. “In Jericho, at any moment, you know exactly where you are.”

  “Well, you’re not in Jericho now,” Arga said. And she ran at Novu and shoved him in the back.

  He flailed comically, then went into the water headfirst. He came up coughing, reeds clinging to his body, a sticky slime hanging like drool from his face. The water wasn’t quite knee deep, but, pulled back by his heavy pack, he was having trouble standing in the soft mud.

  Laughing, Ana and Dreamer knelt down and pulled him out, landing him on his belly on the log path. He managed to stand. He had his foot stuck in an eel wicker basket. Panting, dripping, he said, “Thanks a lot, Arga.”

  “At least it shut you up,” Ana said. She began to wrestle the basket off his foot. “This is one of Jaku’s. He’ll be furious.”

  They got the wrecked trap off him, threw it back in the water, and continued on.

  At the edge of the marsh the land rose up into a line of dunes before the beach, the marsh green giving way to yellow-brown sand. Here Ana stopped, shucked off the pack she was carrying and dumped it on the ground. “We’ll get ourselves set up here; it’s dry enough. Then we’ll see what we can catch in the marsh.”

  Dreamer said, “Arga, will you help me down with the baby? She’s due a feed.”

  Arga happily lifted the baby out of its sling on Dreamer’s back. She unfolded its wrap while Dreamer found a dry place to sit, and dug out fresh dry moss to pack around the baby to absorb its soil.

  Novu, still dripping wet, dumped his pack on the ground beside Dreamer and walked a little further up the dune slope.

  Ana followed him. The sand was soft and gave easily, but there was a better grip from the clumps of dune grass, long, tough, deep-rooted.

  They reached the crest of the dune. This was the north coast of Flint Island, where the great crescent-shaped middens faced out to sea. To the north, beyond the scattered rocks where seals lay languid in the heat, there was nothing but the sea lying still and flat.

  “You have slime in your hair,” Ana said. She scraped it away with the side of her hand.

  “Thanks . . . Incredible.”

  “What is?”

  He waved a hand. “The sea. All that emptiness. I walked for month after month to get here. If Jericho is the center of the world, here I am at its very edge.”

  She frowned. “The edge of the world? But the sea is full of life. Fish and dolphins and whales. Look, you can see the seals.” She pointed. “I think that’s my father, fishing.”

  “Your eyes are better than mine.”

  “To me, this is the center. The shore, Etxelur, the sea, the whole of Northland, the estuaries, the beaches, the tidal pools, and the fringes of forest where we hunt. If you go too far south there’s nothing but forest, choking the land. That’s the edge.”

  “I see an edge. You see a center. Can a world have two centers?”

  “I don’t know . . . Ask the priest.” She felt snappy, irritable, her head somehow stuffy. “Can’t you ever just talk about normal things?”

  But he didn’t reply. He seemed distracted, his eyes squinting against the brilliant sunlight, his lips pursed in a frown. “Listen.”

  There was a sound like thunder, rolling in off the sea, as if from a storm very far away.

  And Dreamer called up from the base of the dune, “Ana? I think you’d better come down and see this.” She had opened Novu’s pack.

  Novu stared, horrified, then ran down the dune.

  In the boat, the sound of thunder made Heni sit up. Kirike had thought he was asleep.

  The boat rocked at Heni’s sudden movement. But it was already full of a healthy catch of salmon and, bottom-heavy, settled back on a smooth sea.

  Heni fixed his hat on his head and looked around. “You heard that?”

  “If it was a storm it was far away . . .”

  They both sat silently, listening, the only sounds their breathing, the lap of the big, slow waves, the gentle creaking of the laden boat, the net ropes scraping against the boat’s hull.

  The two men had paddled off to the northeast of Flint Island, out over the deep sea. From here much of the mainland was out of sight, only the island itself visible in the misty air. Kirike liked to be distant, so far out that the land was reduced to a kind of dream, and the world shrank down to his boat and the steady work of the fishing, and the companionship of Heni, the most enduring relationship in his life.

  But was there to be a storm? The weather today was hard to read. The air was hot and, out on the breast of the sea, promised to get a lot hotter. The sky was free of cloud but there was a washed-out mistiness about it. The day felt odd to Kirike. Tetchy. Skittish.

  Heni asked, “Can you have thunder without a storm?”

  “Maybe it’s a big storm very far away.”

  “Maybe. But do you remember the day of the Giving?” On that day too there had been a rumble out of a cloudless sky, and a big, strange wave. Men whose lives depended on listening to the moods of sea and air couldn’t help but remember something like that. “Something’s going on. Maybe the little mother of the ocean fell out of bed.”

  Kirike laughed. “Twice in a month?”

  Heni sighed. “So do you want to go back?”

  Kirike glanced at the catch, the big, heavy fish that lay glistening in the bilge. “Nobody would blame us if we did. We’ve enough already.” The salmon were early this year. The autumn was the best time to catch them, when they came swimming in from the ocean, funneling into the big river estuaries on their way to their spawning grounds upstream. All you had to do was lower a net into the river, and let the fish swim in. It was much too early for the peak catches now, but this late-summer day had been fruitful enough: there were times when the little mothers were kind to their hardworking children. But still . . . “Do you want to go back?”

  Heni lay back in the boat’s prow, his broad-brimmed leather hat tipped forward to keep the sun off his face, and chewed on a bit of wood. “Seems a waste of the sunshine. Thought I saw some dolphins playing further out. We could try driving a few ashore.”

  “Sounds like hard work.”

  Heni squinted up at the sky. “Or we could just lie here and soak up the heat. Maybe we deserve it. We had enough months freezing our asses off when we got lost in the winter. I sometimes feel like my bones never thawed out.” And as if to prove the point he coughed, a deep, racking heave that twisted his body. He had to hold onto his hat to keep it from falling off.

  It was a winter cough, a cough that should have dried out by now but had clung to his lungs all summer. Kirike had a deep guilty fear that this was one legacy of their unlikely jaunt across the ocean that Heni was never going to be free of.

  Heni said, “You’ll have to face Ana’s nagging when we get back.”

  “That’s not fair . . . She’s not happy.” He thought back over conversations with Ice Dreamer. “Since her mother died, her whole world has fallen apart. That’s what her nagging is about. Just anxiety. I think in her head she longs to put everything back the way it was.”

  “But you never
can. And then there’s Ice Dreamer and her kid. Living in your own house! That can’t be easy for Ana.”

  Kirike turned away. “She’s nothing to be jealous about.”

  “So you haven’t tupped Dreamer yet.”

  “Little mothers help me, but you’re coarse sometimes.”

  Heni laughed, but it broke up into another cough. “Oh, come on. She’s a shapely one now she’s over her pregnancy, and a bit of life to her too. And she’s suckling, isn’t she?” He winked. “So she can’t get pregnant again.”

  “It’s not like that . . . It’s less than a year since Sabet.”

  “Ah.” Heni nodded. “I know. I’ll tell you what I think. I never saw two people closer than you and Sabet. You fit together like a bone in its socket. And then you lost her. Give yourself time. Dreamer’s a smart woman. She’ll wait, if she wants you. I needed the time.”

  Heni hardly ever spoke of his own past. “You’re thinking of Meli.”

  “It was different for me when she went. The boys, the ones who had lived past childhood, were grown, off with their wives and their own kids. I was free. And once I was over the loss I found the world was full of willing widows.”

  That was always true. Men often died younger than women, as they pursued more dangerous occupations like forest hunting and deep-sea fishing—but women died too. So there were always widows and widowers, often with broods of growing children. In Etxelur men and women took only one spouse at a time, unlike the Pretani, say. First marriages were always delicately arranged and negotiated, to build ties between communities. But after that the rules were relaxed.

  “Willing widows, and you tried them all out,” Kirike said.

  “And across the ocean too,” Heni said, and he yawned hugely. “I hope all those hairy girls with their flat faces and strange eyes remember my name to tell their good-looking children . . . Oh.”

  The whole boat was lifted up into the air.

  Kirike, startled, gripped the boat’s frame. The surge was smooth, but powerful and relentless, and completely unexpected on such a smooth sea.

  And then it passed. The boat slid down the face of the water and came to rest, bobbing slightly, creaking.

  They stared at each other. It had been a wave, a single huge muscle of water that had lifted them as if in the palm of a huge hand. They could see it passing on toward the shore, a glistening hump.

  “By the first mother’s left tit,” Heni said, “I never felt anything like that in my life.”

  Kirike shook his head; he felt too hot, his thinking fuzzy. Two strange things in one day. “Do you think it had something to do with that thunder we heard?”

  “Maybe.”

  The wave receded. Diminished by distance it looked harmless—soon it was hard even to make out. But Kirike knew from experience that it would grow when it approached the land, the water heaping up on itself. “That is a big wave,” he said.

  “And it will break when it gets to the shore.”

  “Yes.”

  They stared at each other for a heartbeat. Then they hauled up their nets and reached for their paddles.

  38

  Ana hurried back down the dune, followed by Novu.

  Something spilled from Novu’s pack, glinting.

  “It’s my fault,” Arga blurted. “I was trying to help. I was opening the packs. Look, I opened yours, Ana! I was just trying to get to the food and the embers and stuff, and the water bags. I didn’t mean anything.”

  Novu, panting, his arms folded around his body, had a complex expression on his face; his eyes flickered, as if he were a trapped animal looking for escape. “You should have asked.”

  “It’s just a pack.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “I didn’t know he had all that stuff in there!”

  Ana frowned, baffled. “What stuff?”

  Dreamer gestured. “Take a look.”

  Ana leaned down. The crudely sewn deerskin sack was stuffed with stones: flints, mostly, but a few shining gleams of obsidian, spilling out onto the sand. She tipped the sack up so the rest fell out.

  Novu darted forward. “Hey! Careful. You’ll damage the pieces.”

  Ana looked at him, and began to sort through the stones. Some of them were unworked lumps of flint, even complete nodules, and some finished tools. “I wish Josu was here; he would know this stuff. But I can see this is good quality.” She picked up an axe-head, finely worked. “And I think I recognize this. I used it once; I borrowed it to cut wood, and I remember leaving that chip in the blade . . . I think it is Jaku’s.”

  Arga nodded. “Yes, that’s my dad’s.”

  “All of this is mine,” Novu said with a touch of desperation. “I worked for it all! You saw my house, Ana. The pieces on the shelves. This is what I do. I work for stones.”

  “No one could work this hard,” Dreamer said dryly.

  Ana rummaged through the rest of the pieces. It was quite a collection. There were knives and spearheads, and many intricately carved blades, no larger than a fingernail, that could be stuck in bone shafts to make scrapers and awls. Most looked fresh to her, as if they had yet to be used.

  And she found one big axe blade made of a sheet of beautiful, milky brown flint shaped to a perfect symmetry. You could barely see the marks of the hammer, so fine had the knapper’s work been.

  Dreamer gasped. “That’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is. And it belongs to Jurgi. The priest. He wears it on special occasions, like weddings and the Giving. This is old, and very precious.” She looked up at Novu. “There is nothing you could do that would make Jurgi give you this blade. Why, it’s not his to give. The priests have held it for generations, passing it from one to the next. And you took it, and hid it in your house, your pack? Why are you carrying it now? Were you afraid somebody would find it?”

  Novu started pacing, muttering in his own language. When he spoke aloud he lapsed into a mix of the Etxelur language and the traders’ tongue. “It’s not like that. You don’t understand.”

  Dreamer looked stern, but oddly weary. “What is there to understand? You’re a thief, Novu.” She used a traders’-tongue word. There was no precise matching word in Etxelur.

  Ana was slowly working it out. “You must have gone into houses when the people were out, and just taken things. Flints, tools. Whatever you liked. You even went into the priest’s house, and went through his bags, the sacred, ancient stuff.”

  “It was easy,” he said lightly. “The man’s gone wandering off in the forest, hasn’t he? There’s nobody in his house.”

  Ana could see emotions chasing across his face. He liked to be cheeky, to be daring, elusive, unpredictable—although he had hinted that it was those qualities that had caused him to be thrown out of his home by his father in the first place. He was trying to laugh this off.

  But then, before their three serious faces, something seemed to snap. He sat down suddenly, his legs folded up, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging.

  Exchanging glances, the others sat more slowly, facing him.

  “All right. Yes. I took the stuff. Even though I know what you’ve all done for me.” He lifted his head. “You, Ice Dreamer. You spoke to me when I first showed up here.”

  Arga put in, “And I showed you how to set hare traps.”

  “You did,” he replied solemnly. He turned to Ana. “And you, Ana . . .”

  Ana couldn’t face him. She burned with a kind of embarrassment. How could she have been so stupid as to waste her time on this man?

  “Please, Ana. Look at me.”

  “I owe you nothing.”

  “No.” Beaten, he dropped his head again. “All right. Let me just tell you why I did this. I didn’t do it to hurt you, any of you. I did it because I had to. This is what we do, in Jericho! We have stuff. We collect it and keep it, we buy it and sell it. And if you don’t have stuff you have no power, you have nothing, you are nothing. Oh, by the blood of the bull gods, I have turned into my father! I desp
ised him for this . . .“ He looked at Ana and spoke with a blunter edge to his voice. “Look, you have been kind to me. But I think you adopted me—like raising a lost puppy. That was what you needed. But I’m more than that. I’m a man of Jericho.”

  “You could have told me how you felt,” Ana said.

  “Would you have listened? Could you have understood? Well, maybe you could. You’re better than me; that’s obvious.” He straightened up. “So what now? Shall we go back? Maybe we should wait for your father to get back from his fishing . . . I’ll leave tonight. I’ll find somewhere. I learned how to live away from people, when I was walking with the traders.”

  Dreamer glanced at Ana. Arga looked hugely distressed.

  Neither wanted Novu to go, Ana saw. And she realized that if she fixed this mess, here and now, she could persuade her father to accept her solution later. “Take the stones back,” she said impulsively.

  “What?”

  “Give them back to whoever you stole them from. And don’t sneak around doing it when they’re out. Do it to their faces. Apologize.”

  He rubbed his chin doubtfully. “One or two will kick my ass. Your uncle Jaku for instance.”

  “You’ll deserve it. And when Jurgi gets home, tell him what you did. He’ll probably kick your ass too. And never do this again.”

  “I swear I won’t.” He looked at her uncertainly. “It might not be enough. They might throw me out anyway.”

  “I’ll have to speak to my father. I can tell him I’ll watch you until you’ve got through this madness, and you can be trusted.”

  He regarded her. “You’re so angry. Why are you helping me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said hotly. “Maybe it’s because I’ll look less stupid this way.”

  He laughed. “Well, that’s a good enough reason. I’ll owe you everything, Ana. My whole life, maybe.”

  Dreamer said sternly, “Just remember that.”

  Ana glanced at her cousin. “Arga? Do you want to say anything?”

  But Arga was frowning. “Can you hear that?”

  “What?”

  The girl stood up, looking around at the open ground. “Rum-bling. Like aurochs running. Or thunder.”