Stone Spring

by Stephen Baxter

  Knuckle strode forward. He spoke to Ana, his Etxelur language crude and thickly accented. “Last year, brother died, because of this woman. This year, niece dies. Because of this woman.” Muscles bunched in his neck, and his hands were clenched into fists so tight that blood trickled from palms pierced by his fingernails. “Punish her your way, but punish her so she never forgets what she did. Never forget my niece.”

  Ana walked up to Zesi.

  Zesi cowered. “I didn’t mean it! Can’t you see? I meant to protect you. I never meant to harm anybody! Do you think I intended for this to happen? Oh, you fools, listen to me . . .”

  But she fell silent before Ana’s cold gaze.

  When Ana spoke it was softly, yet the priest was sure everybody present could hear. “Zesi, my sister, you are dead to us. Dead as the child whose life you took. Dead to those of Etxelur. Dead to all our allies. Dead to the snailheads.” There was a growl of agreement from Knuckle’s people. “We will not feed you, we will not look at you, we will not speak to you, for you are one with the dead. Go from this place; you do not exist here.”

  As she uttered these words the priest watched Ana’s face. It was hard and cold as stone, ancient and implacable. It was the owl’s unblinking stare, the priest thought suddenly, the stare of her deathly Other. Ana was barely sixteen years old.

  Zesi looked shocked. But then a spark of her old defiance returned. “Fine. I’ll go. I’ll go back to Albia. I’ll take my son. Kirike is the son of the Root. He has a place there, and will win one for me. The moon take you to its ice heart, Ana . . .” But Ana did not react, and a new horror broke over Zesi’s face. “My son. Where is Kirike?”

  “He is of Etxelur,” Ana said. “You are as dead to him as to me. Don’t try to find him. Go. I can no longer see you.” She turned away.

  As one, the crowd before the platform broke up and moved away, murmuring quietly. Knuckle had his arm around Eyelid, who was weeping steadily.

  Nobody was looking at Zesi, as if the curse Ana had laid on her had made her truly invisible. She pursued Ana as she walked off the stage. “Ana! You can’t do this! My baby—give me back my baby!”

  Her agonized pleas filled the priest with darkness and dread, and he wondered what consequences would flow from this moment.

  Four

  58

  The years passed, and the world followed its ancient cycles, seasons succeeding each other like intakes of breath.

  For Northland, there was no repeat of the calamity of the Great Sea—not yet anyhow. But the ocean rose steadily, fueled by melting ice and the very expansion of its own water mass in a warming clime. It bit away relentlessly at the surviving land and there were surges when it was assisted by storms or landslips. Before the sea’s advance anything living on the land had to retreat, if it could, or die. Humans too, their lives brief compared to the sea’s long contemplations, had to make way for the water.

  That, at least, was how it used to be. Now the northern coast of Northland was acquiring a kind of crust, of works that defied the sea’s advances.

  And the humans who lived there, though as always they grew and aged and died to be replaced by new generations, weren’t going anywhere.

  59

  The Fifteenth Year After the Great Sea: Late Spring

  Qili, following the northern shore of Northland, walked steadily west, as he had done for many days.

  The sea was a blue-gray expanse to his right, stretching to the northern horizon, and he saw fishing boats working far out, gray outlines against the sky. On the wrack-strewn beach gulls and wading birds worked, squabbling noisily. The day was warm, less than two months short of midsummer, one of the hottest days of the year so far, and the sun was high in a clear sky. Qili had his boots on a bit of rope slung around his neck, and he walked in the damp sand that bordered the sea. The cool wavelets that broke over his feet eased the ache of callused soles, but did nothing to relieve the weight of the pack on his back, grubby and stained after his long walk from home at the mouth of the World River, far to the east.

  He rounded a headland of gravel that spilled from the feet of eroding dunes, and the view to the west opened up. And he saw Etxelur, birthplace of his grandfather Heni, for the first time in his life.

  It was just as his father’s visitor from Etxelur had described. There was Flint Island lying just offshore, and there the bay cupped by the island’s bulk and the gentle hills of the mainland. With land and sea mixed together, an estuary-dweller like Qili could see at a glance how desirable it was as a place to live.

  But there, cutting across the sea, stretched between island and mainland, was a line, dead straight and bone white. It was clearly unnatural, sharp and straight in a world of curves and randomness.

  All along the Northland coastline he had glimpsed similar works, walls to keep the water out, channels to let it run away, many of the works fresh cut from the earth. Everywhere people were working the land to keep it from the clutches of the sea. A part of him quailed at the thought of this reshaping of the world. Yet, standing here before the great dyke, he felt a spark of wonder. He was seventeen years old.

  A pair of birds flew over his head, casting sweeping shadows. Their outspread wings had a clear white stripe along their brown surfaces, and behind sharp bills they had bright red necks; their call was a low-pitched “whee-t.” He watched, entranced.

  “Phalaropes. We call them phalaropes.” The words were in the traders’ tongue.

  Two women were approaching him, coming from the west. They were barefooted, dressed in simple dyed-cloth tunics that left their arms and legs bare. The older woman, perhaps in her early twenties, had a serious face and blond hair tied back behind her head. The younger, perhaps younger than Qili, was more exotic, her hair thick and jet-black, her features strong, her skin a rich brown. Her tunic was open at the waist, and he saw a marking on her belly: three concentric circles and a single radial stab, disappearing into the wrap around her loins. She was taller than he was. He’d never seen anyone quite like her. She was undoubtedly beautiful, but intimidating.

  As they reached him they stood apart, and he saw that both had bone-handled stone blades hanging on loops from their leather belts. If he had been meaning to attack them, he could not have reached both with a single movement. That was a reasonable precaution, strangers were often unfriendly, but he had no such intention. And he couldn’t take his eyes off the weapons’ blades, shaped from a rich, creamy, pale brown flint. Back home only the big men and the priests would wear such things. Was Etxelur really as rich as they said?

  The women were watching him, waiting to see what he would do. He smiled and spread his hands, showing they were empty.

  The older woman asked, “You speak the traders’ tongue?”

  “Not well.” He glanced up. “Phalaropes. We call them red-cheeks. They are early this year. Often not seen before . . .” He stumbled on the word.

  “Midsummer? No. My name is Arga. This is Dolphin Gift.”

  “I am Qili. I come from a land east of here, at the mouth of the World River. You are from Etxelur.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Well, I can see it,” he said, gesturing to the island. “Just as has been described. And I recognized the marking on your stomach,” he said to the younger woman. Dolphin scowled at him. He said, “It was the same marking as on the cheek of our visitor.”

  “What visitor?”

  “His name was Matu son of Matu. He said he was from Etxelur. And he said he was searching for sons of Heni of Etxelur.”

  “I see he found you.” Arga smiled, and her face was transformed, a smile as wide as the moon.

  “I am Heni’s grandson, not his son. I never met Heni.”

  “But you have come to celebrate his death and life.”

  Dolphin Gift said, “That’s a long way, just to see the end of some old man you never knew.” Despite her looks, when she spoke she had just the same accent as Arga.

  “My father is too ill to
travel. He is quite old—thirty-three.”

  Arga nodded. “We think Heni was fifty! He said he stopped counting once he passed forty, and there is nobody left alive who can remember his birth.”

  “I come for my father, who remembers Heni with affection—even though he rarely saw him.”

  “That was Heni for you,” Arga said. “Always out on his boat.”

  “And I come for myself, for I am curious to see Etxelur. Everybody knows about Etxelur. The traders come here from across Northland, across Albia and the Continent, to bring their goods to you in exchange for your flint—so I have heard, anyhow. But I never met anybody from Etxelur before Matu son of Matu came in his fishing boat to our estuary.”

  “Well, here you are,” Arga said. “I’m glad we happened to meet you. Anyone of Etxelur would have made a grandson of Heni welcome. Walk with us.”

  “I’ll carry your pack.” Dolphin held out her arm.

  He didn’t need his pack carrying, but something in her manner didn’t encourage argument. He slipped off the pack, and she picked it up with one hand.

  They began to walk toward Etxelur, along the beach. The women kept to either side of him, just out of his reach, showing residual caution.

  Arga said, “When poor Heni died we sent Matu out in his boat off to the east, while his brother went west, hoping to find Heni’s sons. For we didn’t want to lay Heni in the midden without family present.”

  “You honor Heni, to do so much.”

  “Heni helped Dolphin’s mother give birth to her, out in a boat rolling around in the middle of the western ocean. And he saved my life when I was swept out by the Great Sea.”

  This took some translation. “We call the big wave the Gods’ Shout.”

  “Without Heni I wouldn’t be standing here now, I wouldn’t have loved my husband, I wouldn’t have had my two children.”

  Qili frowned, puzzling out a sentence that was long and convoluted in the traders’ tongue, which, rich with words but with crude grammar, was better suited to simple exchanges. “Your husband?”

  “Died, some years ago.”

  Dolphin said morbidly, ”Killed trying to deal with a failure of one of the dykes.”

  “Dykes. Matu explained that word. I am curious about the dykes.” But they said nothing more, for now. He glanced at Dolphin, who walked with her head hung low, staring at the shallow craters her feet left in the soft moist sand. “I am curious about you too,” he said at length. “You don’t seem happy to have found me.”

  Dolphin glanced at Arga, who looked away. “Oh, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s about Arga and my mother. Ice Dreamer, she’s called—you’ll meet her.”

  “Ice Dreamer.” This was a name like none he had ever heard.

  “She’s not from here. My mother thinks I don’t keep the right company.”

  “She’s talking about a boy,” Arga said.

  “A man,” Dolphin snapped. “We aren’t children, Arga. My mother has Arga supervise me when she can’t, to make sure we don’t start humping on the beach—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Dolphin.”

  “You’re the one being ridiculous. Everybody else my age has got babies. You had a baby when you were thirteen.”

  Qili said, “I have two children myself. They’re boys aged one and two.”

  Dolphin wasn’t listening. She snapped at Arga, “Kirike and I are getting old waiting, while you fools keep us apart!”

  “You’ve no need to wait,” Arga said. “Just find somebody else.”

  “You see,” Dolphin said to Qili. “She takes my mother’s side. She always does.”

  “I just want to avoid upset,” Arga said. “And I agree with your mother that if you and Kirike were together there would be nothing but upset.”

  Qili frowned. “Why?”

  “Because of the past,” Dolphin said bitterly. “Long story. All to do with who Kirike’s mother and father were. The past! All because of the stupid things our parents once did. Sorry. You walked a long way to arrive in the middle of an argument.”

  Qili shrugged. “We have arguments at home. At least here they are different arguments.”

  Arga asked, “So what do you argue about?”

  He hesitated, and decided to be honest. “Mostly about whether to trade with Etxelur.”

  “Really?”

  “Some people find you scary.”

  Arga considered that, then nodded. “Sometimes I find us scary. Well, you can make your own mind up, because we’re nearly there.”

  60

  They approached the mouth of the bay. He could see the wall between island and mainland clearly now, a white, smooth-surfaced barrier against which the waves lapped.

  “Come,” Arga said, “I’ll show you where we live.”

  She led him up a sandy slope and behind a row of dunes. The dunes had evidently been battered by the Gods’ Shout; they were misshapen and the marram grass was not yet fully regrown. He had seen such sights all the way along the Northland coast. Behind the dunes, visible beyond low hills, was a grassy plain that extended off to the south.

  And, tucked in just behind the dunes, a row of low hillocks stood, round and neat, perhaps twice as tall as he was, their slopes covered with grass. They were not natural, he saw immediately, with a jolt of shock; they were too regular for that. Houses stood on top of these mounds, heaps of kelp thatch over frameworks of stout logs. A low wall stood around each house, gleaming white.

  Arga saw him staring, and smiled. “Everybody reacts the same, the first time. Come and see.”

  Steps had been cut into the side of the nearest mound. Arga climbed these effortlessly. Qili followed, the grass cool under his bare feet. In turn Dolphin Gift followed him, still carrying his pack.

  “This is where you live,” Qili said to Arga.

  She nodded. “The house I share with Ana herself.” The door flap was a leather sheet with the characteristic symbol of Etxelur etched into it, the three rings and the radial tongue. “We started building these mounds right after the Great Sea. Even before the dykes. It was Ana’s own idea. Up here, the worst floods can’t get us—even if the dykes were to fail, which they won’t.”

  He bent to inspect the wall. It ran right around the house, sealing it in, yet it was low enough for him simply to step over. “Does this keep out the water too?”

  “No. It’s just for show.” She showed him what the wall was made of—square-edged blocks, stuck together somehow and colored white—and he learned words that were new to him, and new to Etxelur too, he found, brought here by a man from far away: brick, mortar, plaster. “To make the bricks we haul clay from the valley floor on wooden sleds. It is mixed with straw and cut into blocks and left to dry in the sun. To make the plaster we burn limestone in hot pits until it disintegrates into powder. This we mix with water and pour it over the walls, shaping it with our hands. It dries to give this smooth white cover. Well. I think Ana is at the flint lode in the Bay Land this afternoon. Would you like to rest now?”

  He shook his head. “I’d be better to wash off the travel dirt with a swim, but that can wait. I’m keen to see Ana—and the rest of Etxelur.”

  “Good. Come on. Leave your pack.” Arga began to make her way down the mound’s slope.

  “And you can leave me behind too,” Dolphin said. “I’ve got things to do.”

  “You’ll stay with me,” Arga said with a mild authority, “until we’ve found your mother.”

  With a snarl of disgust, Dolphin followed Arga and Qili back down the path.

  Arga led Qili through the collection of mounds, each topped by houses and scraps of wall, and rows of sun-drying bricks on the ground. The people they met, pursuing their daily lives, seemed friendly enough to Qili, and when they learned he was a grandson of Heni they made him welcome. The children ran everywhere—there were always children, wherever you went—and they smiled or pulled faces at the newcomer. Everyone seemed fluent in the traders’ tongue, even the children, but their
language was sprinkled with many unfamiliar words.

  They climbed the dunes and paused at the summit. From here, looking north, Qili could see a strip of beach, beyond which lay a grassy plain studded with sparse trees—a gentle bowl shape, rising toward the sides, and its floor rippled with low hills, like dunes. This bowl of grass and trees and ditches was sheltered by the hills to the south, the bulk of Flint Island to the north—and to the east and to the northwest by two walls, both shining with plaster, that stood proud above the land.

  “The dykes of Etxelur,” he said. They looked much more impressive than when he had seen the dyke from the ocean side, covered up by the sea.

  “Exactly,” Arga said. “And if you listen closely you’ll hear the sea breaking against their outer walls. Walk with me.”

  They walked down the dune, crossed a strip of sandy beach to mud flats, and then they came to the plain. The ground was soft, the soil rich, and crisscrossed by narrow channels.

  “This is Etxelur Bay,” Arga said. “Or it was. Now we call it the Bay Land. When I was born this place was at the bottom of the sea.”

  This had been described to him by Matu son of Matu. Seeing it was quite different. He gaped, unable to believe.

  ”When the ground was first exposed it was muddy, salty. Well, you’d expect that. Once we cleared away the seaweed, the first things to grow were plants from the salt marshes. But in time the rain cleared the salt away, and we helped it by breaking up the soil, and the grass started to take. Then the trees, willow and alder at first—well, you can see that. I suppose they are better able to stand whatever salt is left in the soil than others. One day there will be birch and oaks here, growing where we stand.”

  Qili found it hard to understand what he was seeing. “Grass and flowers and trees,” he said. He looked down, peering through the long, sparse grass. “Soil. But under it, in the earth—”

  Arga knelt down, pulled aside the grass and dug her hand into the ground. She pulled up rich, black, crumbling earth, but when she broke it up in her fingers Qili saw it contained fragments of seashells. She grinned at his wonder. “Come on, I’ll take you to meet Ana. Wait until you see the flint lode.”