Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

The man sneered. ‘Get out of my way.’

‘You get out of my way.’

‘In my country the women get out of the way of the men, who own the houses.’

‘This isn’t your country, and I thank the mothers for that.’

He looked around. ‘Where is the Giver? Where is the man who owns this house?’

‘In Etxelur the women own the houses. This is my house. I am the oldest woman here.’

‘From the shrivelled look of you, I think you are probably the oldest woman in the world. My name is Gall. This is my brother Shade. In our country our father is the Root. The most powerful man. Do you understand? We have come to this scrubby coastal place to hunt and to trade and to let you hear our songs of killing. Every seven years, we do this. It is an old custom.’

Sunta said, ‘And did you travel all this way just to kick a hole in my wall?’

‘I was making a new door.’ He pointed. ‘That door is in the wrong place.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Ana said. ‘In all our houses the door faces north.’

The younger boy, Shade, asked, ‘Why? What’s so special about north? There’s nothing north of here but ocean.’

‘That’s where the Door to the Mothers’ House lies. Where our ancestors once lived, now lost under the sea-’

Gall snorted. ‘We have doors facing south-east.’

‘Why?’ Sunta snapped at him.

‘Because of the light – it goes around – something to do with the sun. That’s the priest’s business. All I know is I’m not going to stay in a house with a door in the wrong place.’

Sunta smiled. ‘But this is the Giver’s house. It is the largest in Etxelur. If you don’t stay here you’ll have to stay in a smaller house, and it would not be the Giver’s house. What would your father think of that?’

Gall scowled. ‘I ask you again – if this is the Giver’s house, where is the Giver?’

Ana said, ‘In the autumn my father went to sea to hunt whale.’

Shade looked at her. ‘He has not come back?’

‘No.’

Gall sneered. ‘Then he’s dead.’

‘No!’

‘He’s dead and you have no Giver.’

‘Kirike is not dead,’ Sunta said quietly. ‘Not until the priest says so, or his body washes up on the beach, or his Other, the pine marten, says so in a human tongue. Anyhow we don’t need a Giver until the summer. And even if he returns, even if he were standing here now-’

‘What?’

‘Even then, Pretani arse, you would do as I say, here in my house.’

Enraged, he ran a dirty thumbnail along the line on his forehead. ‘See this? I got this scar when I first took a man’s life. I was fourteen years old.’

Sunta smiled. ‘If you like I’ll show you the scars I got when I first gave a woman her life. I was thirteen years old.’

Complicated, baffled expressions chased across Gall’s face. He was evidently grasping for a way out of this while saving his pride. ‘This house is evidently the least unsuitable in this squalid huddle for sons of Albia. We will stay here. We will discuss the issue of the door later.’

‘As you wish,’ Sunta said, mocking. ‘And we will also discuss how you are going to fix my wall.’

He was about to argue with that when Lightning burst in. The dog’s tail was up, his eyes bright, tongue lolling, his fur covered in snow. Excited by the presence of the strangers, the dog jumped up at them, barking.

Gall cringed back. ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ He drew a flint-blade knife from his belt.

Ana stood between Gall and the dog. ‘You harm him and I’ll harm you back, Pretani.’

Sunta laughed, rocking. ‘Lightning is Kirike’s dog – oh, come here, Lightning! He chose him because he was the runt of the litter, and gave him his name as a joke, because as a puppy he was the slowest dog anybody had ever seen. And you big men cower before him!’

Shade looked nervous, but he was smiling. ‘Pretani don’t keep dogs.’

‘Maybe you should,’ Ana said, petting Lightning.

Gall, trying to regain his pride, put away his knife and strutted around the house. ‘I am hungry from the journey.’

‘Are you indeed?’ Sunta asked. She gave no sign she was going to offer him food.

He paused by the hearth. ‘What kind of fire is this? Where is the wood?’

‘This is not your forest-world. Wood is precious here. We burn peat.’

‘It is a stupid fire. It gives off smoke but no heat.’ He hawked and spat on the inadequate fire. ‘Come, Shade. Let’s find a less ugly old woman who might feed us.’ And with that he walked out of the north-facing door. His brother hurried after him, with a backwards glance at Ana. When they were gone the space suddenly seemed huge and empty.

Sunta seemed to collapse, as if her bones had turned to water. ‘Oh, what a fuss. Give me your hand, dear.’ Ana helped her back to where she had been sitting. Sunta’s seal-fur cloak fell open, scattering feathers and exposing her body; the only flesh on her was the mass that protruded from her belly, the growth that so horribly mimicked a pregnancy. ‘All men are arses. Do something about that hole in the wall, would you? The wind pierces me.’

Ana took handfuls of dry bracken from a pallet and shoved them into the broken place. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘About what?’

‘About letting them stay here!’

‘Every seven years the Pretani hunters come to the winter gathering. And they always stay in the Giver’s house. I am your grandmother, and I remember my grandmother telling me how this was the way when she was a girl, and her grandmother told her of it when she was a girl, and before that only the sun and moon remember. This is custom, like it or not.’

‘I don’t care about custom. I live here. All my things are here…’

‘They won’t touch you, you know.’

‘That’s not the point. And why today, of all days?’ She felt tears prickle her eyes. Her grandmother didn’t approve of crying; she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. ‘It’s my blood tide. And now them. If only my father were here-’

‘But he isn’t,’ Sunta said. Her voice broke up in a flurry of dry, painful-sounding coughs. She sat back and dipped her finger in the paint once more. ‘Now let’s see how much mess you’ve made.’

Ana turned away, breathing hard. She was no longer a child; her blood tide marked the dawning of adulthood. She had to behave well. Deliberately she calmed herself and opened her tunic.

But when she turned back Sunta had fallen asleep. A single thread of drool dripped from her open mouth, the stubs of her worn teeth.

As the day wore on towards noon, and with her blood-tide mark still no more than a sketch, Ana pulled on her own sealskin cloak and left the house to collect fish for her grandmother’s meal. The fishing boats were due back at noon, and perhaps she could get some fresh cod, Sunta’s favourite; if not there was probably some on the drying racks. And if her father had been here, she couldn’t help but think, they might all be feasting on whale meat.

Once outside Ana could hear seals calling, like children singing.

The house was one of seven clustered together on a plain of tough grass, just south of a bank of dunes that offered some protection from the north wind. This morning the fresh snow, a hand deep, covered the Seven Houses’ thatch of dried kelp; the houses were conical heaps, like wind-carved snow drifts. The adults scraped the snow away from the houses and piled it into banks. They had shovels made of the shoulder blades of deer, big old tools. Children ran around, excited, throwing snow in the air and over each other.

Ana picked her way north, towards the dunes and the coast beyond. The snow crunched and squeaked under her feet. The ground between the houses had been churned to mud, frozen, then blanketed over by snow, so you couldn’t see the ridges in the soil, hard as rock, or the places where a sheet of ice covered a puddle of ice-cold mud, waiting to trap an unwary foot. The going got easier as she climbed the ridge of dunes, for here the frost and snow and sand were mixed up, and the long dead grass brushed her legs. Even on the newest snow she saw tracks of rabbits, deer, the arrow-head markings of birds, and here and there tiny paw prints, almost invisible, that were the tracks of stoats and weasels. Ana went at it briskly, relishing the feeling of her heart and lungs working.