Hollow the trader knew this land as well as anybody. He pointed. “There’s the flint lode.” It was a wound in the earth, right in the middle of the Bay Land. “But for months they’ve been making a stockpile of the stuff, over there beneath the dyke.” Following his finger, Bark could see a heap of yellow-brown stone that must have been as tall as a man, piled up against that strange sea wall. “That’s the easy picking today,” Hollow said. “Tomorrow we can put the slaves to work digging out the rest from the main lode.”
“Then that’s our target.” Bark sniffed, feeling oddly uneasy. “Funny place, this. I never saw anything like it.”
“Well, this whole landscape ought to be deep under the sea. The Etxelur folk have defied their own gods to expose it to the air like this.”
“And I don’t like that sea wall. The men won’t like it either.”
“But that’s where the good flint is,” Hollow said, unperturbed. “Which I predict the men will like, more than they fear the wall.”
“True enough. Anyhow we have to follow the plan we worked out with the Root.” Bark glanced at the rising sun. It was time. “Let’s get on with it.” Without further discussion he jabbed his spear into the air: the signal to cut the Leafies loose from their leashes.
So it began.
Driven on with spear jabs and threats, the Leafy Boys swarmed down into the great bowl of the Bay Land, screaming, jumping and yelling. Soon people were coming out of their houses, or rising up from their early-morning piss-pots, or scrambling for weapons, or just running in terror.
Like a fire sweeping over dry grassland, the Leafies with their grasping hands and meat-hungry teeth always spread confusion and chaos and fear. But Bark knew the creatures well enough by now to understand that the Leafies, pining for their green canopy world, were probably more terrified in this strange place than were the Etxelur folk.
And as always the Leafy assault soon burned itself out. A few houses had been pulled down, people were running—and a few lay dead, including a couple of the Leafy Boys. But there wasn’t as much damage and mayhem as Bark had been expecting.
He turned on Hollow. “Where are these slaves of yours that are supposed to be rising up?”
Hollow looked uneasy, but he shrugged. “Do you need slaves to fight your battles for you?”
Bark glared. “Don’t push me, trader. You’ve always been too good at lying for my liking.” He looked down at the Bay Land. If he didn’t act now he would lose any advantage he’d gained. “But you’re right. We don’t need a bunch of ragged-assed slaves to win our war.” He raised his spear again. “We go in!”
The men behind him yelled, and ran forward, a mass of bloody hide and angry scars and shit-covered spears, pouring down the slope from the stranded dunes into the Bay Land.
But the ground turned out to be difficult. Around the willows and the hazel stands it was boggy, and mud clung to their boots, trapping their legs and weighing them down. Bark, frustrated, saw that the straight-line ditches Hollow said were supposed to keep the ground drained had been clogged with stones and brimmed with water, drenching the land. The advance soon slowed as the men staggered through the mud.
And now a spear flew through the air, narrowly missing Bark. He looked up to see Etxelur folk advancing, men and older boys, and women too, scared-looking but hefting spears and knives. They ran at the Pretani in little bands of two or three, not mounting a full-scale attack, but jabbing and thrusting and then retreating. Bark’s warriors fought back, but one by one they fell, spilling their Pretani blood into the muddy ground.
Concern flickered. Bark hadn’t expected this much resistance, not after so many days’ travel with no sign of the Etxelur folk at all. But this was just how he would set a trap, he thought uneasily, if he were planning it. Draw in your prey, get him stuck in the flooded ground, and then pick him off.
But he was Pretani, not some frightened piglet. He lifted his spear arm. “So they want a fight!” he yelled. “I hoped they would! At them!”
The men roared in response, and surged forward anew, despite the mud.
83
Shade and Zesi followed True onto the causeway to Flint Island. The Eel-folk slave, decked out like a Pretani in hide tunic and cloak, led the way cautiously along the narrow path across the sea. Behind Shade the Pretani warriors walked, two or three abreast, moving silently, visibly uneasy.
The causeway was an arc of stone that sliced the world in two ahead of Shade, excluding the blue sea to his left from the Bay Land that stretched away to his right, several paces beneath the crest of the wall along which they walked. Shade hadn’t been here in years. He was stunned by the changes that had been wrought. And he had never in his life seen anything like this wall that stood against the sea.
But today the Pretani had come to Northland. Already he could hear yells and screams drifting up from the Bay Land, see smoke drifting. Bark and his men, making their move. So they had gotten the timing right, with the two thrusts into the Etxelur heartland launched at the same moment. But he did not let himself be distracted by looking that way, for he had his own fight to win.
And there would be a fight, for their way was not clear, Shade saw, looking ahead. A gang of Etxelur folk had gathered at the far abutment of the causeway, where it met the island.
“We’re going to have to fight our way across,” Shade said to Zesi.
At his side, she too was dressed as a Pretani warrior, lacking only the kill scars. Now she scowled at him, the lines in her face deepened by the low light of the morning sun. “What did you expect? That Etxelur folk would just give up and let you walk in? You don’t know us very well if that’s your opinion, Pretani.”
He shook his head, irritated. “Now’s not the time for posturing, woman. You’re sure Ana is where she’s supposed to be?”
Irritated, Zesi snapped, “My sister has been sleeping on the midden shore for months. Who knows why? Maybe she wants to be close to her grave, where she’ll be lying soon enough. That’s where we’ll find her this morning, and that’s where we’ll kill her—”
There was a roar, coming from ahead of them. The band of Etxelur folk had broken into a run.
Shade had no doubt his Pretani warriors would be able to bring down these wall-builders and ditch-scrubbers in an open fight—but this wasn’t an open fight, and wasn’t the kind of encounter Bark had trained them for. Suspended between ocean on one hand and a steep drop on the other, with warriors closing on him, he suddenly felt extraordinarily vulnerable.
“Those aren’t all Etxelur,” Zesi said now, peering ahead at the approaching warriors. “I recognize those twisted skulls. Those are snailheads. So Etxelur is calling on its friends to fight for them.”
“We Pretani don’t need friends,” Shade said.
“Just as well, as you don’t have any. And, look! The man on the right—the tattoo around his thigh.”
The man, short, squat, yelling and stabbing his spear into the air, was still a good way from Shade, but he could see the tattoo. It was an eel, wrapped around the man’s leg.
Furious, Shade stepped forward and punched True’s shoulder. “That man’s of the Eel folk! You promised the slaves would rise against Etxelur, not fight the Pretani!”
True turned and faced Shade. Then he broke into a savage grin. “I lied. For my children!” And he roared, raised his own stabbing spear, and drove it down with two hands into Shade’s shoulder.
Shade staggered back, stunned, the spear sticking out of this shoulder, its heavy mass tearing at him, the pain coming in waves.
Zesi lunged forward and with all her strength drove her own spear up into the soft flesh beneath True’s chin, through the man’s skull and up into his brain. True’s body fell away, shuddering in death, and slid down the wall and into the ocean water.
Shade’s men supported him to keep him from falling. But the world seemed to freeze around him, the sea, the wall, all icy clear, as the pain washed out from the hot wound. Was this his last moment
of life?
Without warning Zesi yanked the Eel man’s spear from his shoulder. He felt his flesh rip, and he had to work hard to keep from screaming at the blistering pain.
“You’ll live,” she growled. She ripped a handful of cloth from her own tunic, wadded it up and pressed it against the wound. “Hold this. You’ve still got one good hand.”
“Just as well.” For the charging Etxelur warriors were about to close. Shade pushed away his support, stood alone, and braced, spear in his good hand, hunching over his injured shoulder. To Zesi he muttered, “They were expecting us.”
“Obviously. This is a trap.” She hefted her weapons. “But whatever it takes, however many lives I have to waste, I’m coming for you, little sister—”
“Be ready! Here they are!”
The first man to come at Shade was a heavy snailhead. Shade got his good shoulder down and used the man’s own charge to shove him off the wall and into the sea. The second man stabbed but missed, and Shade managed to grab the shaft of his spear and shove him back. But then came the third, and the fourth.
And then a woman, tall and dark, called to them. “Hello, Zesi. Remember me?”
“Ice Dreamer? Aren’t you dead yet?” Zesi screamed and lunged, but the woman, tall, muscular and dark, fended her off easily.
Shade, dizzy with pain and loss of blood, battling for his own life against snailheads and estuary folk and former slaves, could offer her no protection or help.
Bark led the Pretani charge across the floor of the Bay Land, heading straight for the heap of flint at the foot of the eastern barrage. When they got the chance they smashed down houses and stands on which hides cured and fish dried, and kicked over hearths to start fires. In places the Etxelur folk and their allies stood and fought, and blood yells and screams echoed across the bowl of a landscape. But mostly the Etxelur folk jabbed, fell away and scattered, to regroup further back.
Hollow was hot and already out of breath. He was a trader, not a fighter. But he seemed determined to keep up with the rest. “Not far now. We’re cutting through this Etxelur rabble like a flint knife through a calf’s scrotum.”
Bark wished he had somebody more experienced with him; he wished he was at Shade’s side. “It’s too easy.”
“What?”
“It’s too easy! These Etxelur folk are barely putting up a fight at all.”
“They’re cowards.”
“No! Think, man. Where are the children? Where are the sick, the lame, the old? They’ve been moved out of our way, is where they are.”
Hollow shook his head, panting as they jogged across the heavy ground. “You’re too suspicious. Just because it’s easier than you thought doesn’t make it any the less glorious. We’re driving across this unnatural land just as tonight you’ll be driving your manhood between the thighs of some Etxelur virgin—you mark my words.”
It was all a trap, Bark thought. The more he considered it, the more certain he became. But there was no point talking to Hollow about it, for the man’s head was full of greed for the flint.
And besides, there was nothing he could do about it now. Many of his men had fallen already, and lay broken or dead across the ground behind the advance. Those who survived and could still fight had the sniff of victory, as did Hollow, and were chasing down the scattered bands of Etxelur fighters. Their blood was up. Trap or not, all they could do was fight, or die.
They were almost on the flint stockpile. The sea wall towered above them, its face of Pretani stone many times the height of a warrior. They had been drawn here right across the expanse of the Bay Land, Bark saw. If the flint was bait, it had worked well.
Hollow ran to the flint, picking up rattling armfuls of nodules. “Look at this stuff. Look at it! Enough to last a lifetime, a generation, more! Now the whole world will tremble before the singing blades of the Pretani.”
Some of the warriors joined him. They stood panting beside the flints, and fingered the nodules, or looked up at the great wall, or back the way they had come, uncertain. Some looked at Bark, hoping for guidance. What now? But he had no answers.
And there was a groan, like the branch of a giant tree straining in the wind. A scrape of stone on stone. The men looked bewildered, alarmed. Even Hollow fell silent.
The noise had come from overhead.
Bark looked up. He saw pale faces looking down at him, and glimpsed long, stripped branches being rammed into place and used as levers. And he saw the upper section of the wall tipping over, huge blocks of Pretani sandstone folding grandly. Water gushed into the air behind the blocks, breaking up into droplets, like rain.
Hollow screamed, high-pitched, like a trapped deer. The warriors, yelling, jostled to get away from the wall. Bark was knocked to the ground, facedown. And he heard a yell, a single savage word in the Etxelur tongue. Raising his head he saw Etxelur folk on the plain, boiling up out of nowhere, advancing with their stabbing spears to trap the fleeing Pretani.
Above him the vast blocks fell slowly, as if they were thistledown, not stone, and seawater splashed his face. In the end, the block that came for him filled the sky.
84
Watching from the midden beach, Ana saw a handful of Pretani break out of the melee by the causeway’s abutment, and come running onto the island.
“Here they come,” said Kirike.
Ana took his hand. “Walk with me. We’ll go out along the ocean dyke.”
Kirike was reluctant. “We’ll be trapped out there. You go. I’ll stay and fight them off.” He was scared, Ana saw, scared to his bones. He believed he was going to die. Yet he was prepared to stand to try to save her.
“No,” she said firmly. “Stay beside me. I’m still in charge.” She pulled at his hand until he followed her.
The dykes pushed out into the ocean toward the submerged Mothers’ Door. Their abutments were covered in heaps of unused rock and timber. Ana picked her way through this to the left-hand dyke, and they walked out along its surface, until the dyke grew too narrow and ragged for them to go further safely. Looking out from here, you could see the rows of posts driven into the seabed that would become the foundation of the dyke.
And here, Ana decided, in the arms of the ocean she had been trying to tame ever since the Great Sea, she would make her stand. She gripped Kirike’s hand, and they turned to face the shore.
There were five, six, seven Pretani—all that was left of the mob that had come here from their wooded country, or at least this half of them, while the rest had gotten bogged down in the Bay Land. The Etxelur defenders weren’t far behind.
When the Pretani leader saw that Ana and Kirike had gone out alone onto the dyke, he snapped quick words to his followers. And then he and one other walked cautiously out onto the dyke, following the footsteps of Ana and Kirike, both glancing down nervously at the lapping sea. Ana knew immediately who they were—and saw that the rumors about who was really behind this attack had been correct.
When her own defenders came running along the beach, the remaining Pretani turned to face them, spears raised. Ana raised both her hands, palms out. Wait. Wait. The Etxelur folk were clearly uncertain, but they slowed to a halt, some way short of the Pretani band.
The two warriors on the dyke saw this. A woman’s voice called, in fluent Etxelur speak, “Good, Ana. No need for anybody else to die today.”
“Nobody but us?” Ana called back.
“As long as it ends here,” called the other, a stocky man. “One way or another.”
“Oh, it will,” Ana said. “I promise you that.”
They stopped only ten or fifteen paces short of Kirike and Ana. The man had thick black hair, the woman pale red like Ana’s though graying, and both had their hair pulled back and tied in the Pretani style. Both of them had been fighting, hard; the man had a gashed shoulder, and the woman was splashed with blood, perhaps not her own, gore smeared over her face and hands and tunic.
Kirike stared. “Who are they?”
The man call
ed, “My name is Shade. I speak for the Pretani.”
And the woman said, “You are Kirike. You have my father’s name, the name I gave you. I am not Pretani. I am of Etxelur blood. My name is Zesi. I am the daughter of Kirike, and sister of Ana. Kirike, I am your mother. And this man, the Root of the Pretani—this is your father.”
“I never saw you before.”
“Not since you were too small to remember—no. You were taken away from me.”
Kirike just stared, apparently speechless.
Shade faced Ana. There was little left of the Shade Ana remembered, little of that dreamy boy in this tough, tired, competent-looking man.
“I heard you were pregnant,” he called. “By Jurgi?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “A good man. I had plans to make him my own priest.”
“You could have done worse.”
“Ana, Ana—must people die each time we meet?”
“It seems so. That’s why it would have been best if we had never met again.” She glanced at her sister. “There were rumors that Zesi lived, that she had come to you.”
“Those treacherous slaves—”
“I think I would have known anyway. This whole scheme, how you worked your way into our world, into my head, with the stone and the labor, and then the slaves rising up against us—I knew it was too clever a plan for any Pretani. Even you, Shade.”
He grinned, and there was just a flash of the boyishness she remembered—the tender face she had longed to kiss, but never had. “Still, it nearly worked, didn’t it?”
“Why did you come back, Zesi? Why spill so much blood?”
“For the sake of the son you stole from me.” She reached out her arms toward Kirike and tried to smile. “For you.” But she was grotesque, her hardened face smeared with the blood of dead men, more dried blood under her fingernails, and Kirike flinched back. Zesi turned on Ana. “You took him from me.”
“He was not safe with you. None of us were safe, with you in the world.”
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