Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

They came to the middens. These were heaps of mollusc shells and fishbone and other detritus, tall and long, each curving gracefully like the crescent moon, as if embracing the sea. Windblown snow was piled up in the lee of the middens. The boats that would carry Ana to North Island were waiting here, cupped by the middens.

But first the priest carried his charm bag to the crest of one of the middens. Here he set out his branding irons, bits of the hard, rusty stuff that, it was said, had fallen from the sky – unimaginably rare pieces, more valued even than the priest’s scraps of gold. These pieces were used for nothing but marking the people with the symbols of their Others, be they otter, fox, snow hare, pine marten – most precious of all the seal, most unwelcome the owl. One of these would be chosen to mark Ana that evening, in a flash of fire and pain, after it became clear what her Other must be.

Jurgi seemed to hesitate. Then he beckoned to Ana. She made her way after him up the midden. Loose shells slid and cracked under her feet, and there was a rich, cloying smell of salt and rot.

The priest had laid out the equipment for the fire, bits of false gold and flint to make a spark, scraps of dried moss for kindling, blocks of peat for fuel. He took out the wolf jaw that filled his upper mouth. ‘The fire must be built,’ he said gravely, his toothless speech slurred. She understood; the brand had to be heated in a new fire, started from scratch, not from an ember of some old blaze. ‘This is a role for a man from your house. Your father, your brother…’

‘I have no brother. My father is-’

‘I know. Still the fire must be started.’

‘I will do it!’ The call came from the Pretani boy Shade. Without waiting for permission he scrambled up the midden, slipping on the unfamiliar surface. His brother hooted and laughed, and called out insults in his own tongue. ‘I will do it,’ Shade repeated breathlessly, as he reached the crest of the mound.

Ana glared at him. ‘Why must you push your way in like this? You aren’t my brother or my father. You aren’t even from Etxelur.’

‘But I am living in your house. And I am good at starting fires.’

Ana frowned. ‘There must be another way. Custom decrees-’

The priest tried to look grave, then laughed. ‘Custom decrees that we are allowed a little imagination. Trust me. But can I trust you, Pretani?’

‘Oh, yes.’ But Shade was distracted. ‘This place is so strange, this hill. I don’t know the word.’

‘Midden,’ said Ana heavily. ‘It’s a midden.’

‘A heaping-up of shells… So high and so long – a hundred paces? I will measure it out. Many, many shells.’

The priest nodded. ‘It has taken many generations to build these middens. They are holy places for us. We bury the bones of our dead here. But, can you see, the sea is taking back the land…’

The ends of the midden arcs where they cut to the coast were eroded, worn down by the sea.

Shade held out his arms along the line of the midden. ‘Still, they are two bits of circles. Like those on your belly, on the stone flat on the beach, and now here in the ocean. This is how you know yourself. Circles in circles.’

Jurgi said dryly, ‘Maybe you should be a priest.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Ana said. She’d had enough; this was her night. She started to make her way down the midden. ‘Let him build his stupid fire. Come on, priest, let’s get to the boats before the tide turns.’ A little fleet of boats pushed off from the island’s sandy shore, paddles lapping at the chill black water. The boats were frames of wood over which hide was stretched, dried and caulked with tallow.

Ana travelled in one boat, which was paddled by the priest and by Zesi in the place of her father. Mama Sunta sat in another boat with her daughter Rute, Ana’s aunt, and Rute’s husband Jaku. Ana’s eyes were used to the dark now, and she could see them all quite clearly in the misty moonlight. The paddlers all wore heavy fur mittens to protect their hands from the cold. Out on the water in the dark Ana felt small, terribly fragile, yet she had barely left the land. But her father, if he lived, was out on the breast of the wider ocean in a boat not much more substantial than this.

Nobody spoke as the boats receded from the shore. Indeed it had been a long while since Sunta had said anything; she was just a heap of sealskin, with her crumpled white face barely visible beneath a hat of bear fur. Ana was glad of the silence, compared to the clamour and the foolishness that had plagued the day since the arrival of the Pretani boys.

Lost in her thoughts, she was startled by a noise coming from the dark, beyond the waves’ lapping, a kind of shuffling, a snort of breath. The priest stopped paddling and put his finger to his lips. Then he pointed ahead.

Suddenly Ana saw a black shape like a hole cut neatly out of the moonlit sky. This was North Island, a scrap of rock only exposed at low tide; already they had reached it.

And on its tiny foreshore a bulky form stirred. It was a seal, a huge one, a bull.

The priest dipped his paddle in the water and, almost noiselessly, swung the boat around to bring Ana alongside the seal. Only paces separated them. The seal, clearly visible now in the moonlight, was looking straight back at Ana, quite still, its eyes pools of blackness. She could make out no colours in its pelt.

The priest smiled at her.

She understood why. The seal was the best Other of all. The seal was a survivor of the days before death had come to the world, when humans had lived among the animals, and had shifted forms from one kind to another as easily as ice melts to water. That had ended when the little mothers made their lethal bargain with the moon, and so had saved the whole world from starvation as the undying animals ate all there was to eat. But just as humans and animals now had to die, so they could no longer share each other’s forms. A human was for ever a human, a dog a dog. The seals, however, had been too busy playing to hear of the little mothers’ bargain. And so they had become stuck in a middle form, neither of the land or the sea, with faces like dogs and bodies like fish, and there they had remained ever since, relics of a better time.

Ana couldn’t look away from the seal’s deep, heavy gaze.

But then, without warning, it slid off its rock, slipped into the water and vanished. The priest frowned, and Ana felt a stab of disappointment. Was the seal not to be her Other after all? The boats, quietly paddled, drifted towards the island.

Jurgi nodded to Ana. ‘It is time.’

She shucked off her cloak and opened up her tunic. Zesi helped her pull her boots off her feet. Then, uncertainly, the ring-symbol of Northland painted on her bare belly, she stood up in the boat and faced the island. The ice cold air was sharp on her flesh.

The priest turned to the second boat. ‘Mama Sunta…’ Sunta, in the place of Ana’s mother, was to stand now, and drop into the ocean a rag stained with Ana’s first woman-blood, now dried and rust-brown. All this was to be performed in the light of the moon, the goddess of death, as a defiance of her dread legacy.

But Sunta didn’t move. Rute, her daughter, reached over and touched her shoulder. The old woman seemed to start awake, but her eyes were unseeing. She clutched at her belly, at the thing growing inside her. Ana, standing in the cold air, smelled an acrid stink of piss and shit; Sunta’s bowels had emptied. Then she fell back, limp, and sighed like a receding tide. Rute shook her. ‘Mama Sunta!’ But Sunta moved no more.

And a clatter of wings came from the island. Ana, startled, would have fallen if Zesi had not helped her. She saw an owl, unmistakable, lift from a rocky ledge and make for the mainland, beating its great wings, its eerie flat face held before it.