Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

As she moved away from the houses the land grew silent, even the cries of the children muffled. Sunta once told her that snow was sound made solid and fallen to the ground, birdsong and wolf cries and the calls of people all compressed into the same shimmering white.

When she breasted the ridge the wind pushed into her face, and she paused for breath, looking out over the northern panorama. Here on her dune she stood over the mouth of a deep bay, which opened out to the sea to her right. On the far side of the bay stood Flint Island, a central pile of tumbled yellow-brown rocks surrounded by a rim of wrack-scarred beach. The tide was high just now, and the grey waters of the bay covered the causeway that linked the island to the mainland, to the west. Above the drowned causeway a flight of whooper swans clattered. On the mud flats further west huge flocks of wading birds and fowl had gathered, their plumage bright in the cold winter sunlight. She recognised wigoes, geese. Seals littered the rocky islets off the eastern point of Flint Island, their bodies glistening, their voices raised in the thin cries she had heard outside her grandmother’s house.

All around the bay she could see people working. Down below the dunes the fishing boats had been dragged up onto the beach, and their catch lay in glistening silver heaps on the sand. Further back the drying racks were set up. A thin, slow-moving figure must be Jurgi, the priest, apologising to the tiny spirits of the fish. On the mud flats and marshes people gathered rushes and reeds, and some of the men hunted swans with their spears and bolas. On the island she saw Pretani, bulky dark figures, hovering over a heap of mined flint. There were other strangers here, traders and folk from east and south, gathering at a time of year when, paradoxically, despite the shortness of the days, frozen lakes and snow-covered ground made for easy walking and sled-dragging.

The whole place swarmed with children. They dug in the mud and raced at the sea, daring each other as they fled the frothy waves. Dogs ran with the children, yapping their excitement at the games they played. There were always more children than adults in Etxelur, burning through lives that, for many, would be brief.

Beyond Flint Island there was only the sea, the endless sea. Its grey flatness was matched by a lid of cloud above, though the sun was visible low in the sky, a milky blur across whose face wisps of cloud raced like smoke. More snow coming, Ana thought. She looked to the north, trying to make out the stud of rock that was North Island, the holy place to which she would be taken tonight for the blood tide. But the midwinter daylight was murky, uncertain.

This place, this bay with its island of flint treasures and marshland and dune fields, was Etxelur. And this was the northernmost coast of Northland, a rich, rolling landscape that extended to the south as far as you could walk. Ana had grown up here, and she knew every scrap of it, every outcrop of jutting, layered rock, every grain of sand. She loved this rich, generous place, and its people. Despite the Pretani she couldn’t stay unhappy for long, not today. This was her day, the day of her blood tide, the first truly significant day of any woman’s life.

And as she walked down the track through the dunes towards the beach, people nodded to her, smiling as they worked. ‘The sun’s warmth stay with you on the ocean tonight, Ana!’

Little Arga, seven years old and Ana’s cousin, came running up. ‘Ana! Ana! Where have you been? I want to see your marks. Has Mama Sunta drawn them yet?’

Ana took her hand. ‘Let me get out of the wind first. Where’s Zesi?’

‘With the flint.’ Arga pointed. Flint samples, hewn from the lodes on the island, had been set out in neat rows on a platform of eroded rock above the high water mark, sorted by size, colour and type. Ana saw her sister Zesi sitting cross-legged on the sand – and, she saw with dismay, the two Pretani boys loomed over her. Evidently they were discussing the flint.

‘Let’s show Zesi your blood marks,’ Arga said. She was slim, tall for her age, with the family’s pale skin and red hair.

Ana hung back. ‘She’s busy with the Pretani. Let’s not bother her…’

But now the older Pretani, Gall, touched Zesi’s hair, a flame of red on this drab day. Zesi snapped at him and pulled her hair back. Gall laughed and drifted off, heading for the smoking fish, and Shade followed, looking back with vague regret.

Arga said, ‘They’re gone. Come on.’

The two girls ran hand in hand down the beach, towards the rock flat. Close to, Ana could see how artfully the flints had been arrayed, over the big triple-ring marking that had been cut into the rock flat in a time before remembering.

Zesi greeted them with a grin as they sat on the sand beside her. ‘So how’s blood tide day so far?’

‘A nightmare.’

‘Oh, everybody feels that way; it works out in the end. Let me see your circles.’

Reluctantly Ana pushed back her cloak and opened her tunic. Arga bent close to see, her small face intent.

Zesi traced the circles on her sister’s belly. ‘It’s not bad.’

‘Sunta’s very weak.’

‘She’ll finish this off for you, she won’t let you down.’

‘Unless those Pretani idiots mess everything up.’

Zesi let her hair come loose, and shook it out around her head. In the wan daylight the colour made her pale skin shine like the moon. Zesi was seventeen, three years older than Ana, and, Ana knew, she would always be more beautiful. ‘Oh, the Pretani! The older one – Gall? – went on about the argument he had with Mama Sunta.’

‘I know. I was there.’

‘I think they’ve come here for wives, as well as the seven-year visit and the trading for flint. Their forest is full of their cousins, so they say. They’re disappointed father isn’t here. They wanted to talk it over with him.’

Ana frowned. ‘If there was going to be a marriage it would have to be you with that oaf Gall. And it would be Mama Sunta who would have to agree.’

‘Yes, but that’s not how it works where they live. There, the men run everything. And, listen to this, I worked it out from what Gall said – if I married him I’d have to leave here and go and live with his family.’

‘That’s stupid,’ Arga said. ‘If you get married the man comes to live with you and your mother. Everybody does it that way.’

‘Evidently not in Albia.’ She sighed. ‘They’re disappointed we have no brothers, too. They wanted the oldest brother to come back and fight in the forest with them, in the summer.’

‘What for?’

‘The wildwood challenge. Another every-seven-years thing, hunting aurochs in the Albia forest, everybody seeing who’s got the biggest cock. You know what men are like.’

‘Arses,’ said Arga, seven years old and solemn.

‘Not all men.’ It was the younger Pretani, Shade. He was coming back, almost shyly. ‘I am sorry if my speaking is not good. The traders’ tongue is difficult.’

Ana pulled her tunic tight. ‘And you’ve come for another look at my chest, have you?’

He may not have understood the words, but he got the sentiment. He blushed under his sparse beard, suddenly looking much younger. ‘I was curious.’

‘Where’s your brother? Isn’t he curious?’

Shade gestured. Gall was with the fishing parties, who were showing off hooks of antler bone and nets of plaited sinew and bark, and telling stories of the sea. ‘He is telling heroic tales of his own battles with bears and wolves. A good tale is worth telling. And Gall is loud, and catches my father’s ear.’

‘Your tunic looks itchy,’ Arga said, staring.

‘It is hide. It is what we wear, in Albia.’