Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

Ana sat, shivering, and Zesi put her arms around her. ‘The owl,’ Ana said. The owl that dared hunt only at night, in the domain of the moon, the goddess of death. The owl that had flown into the air just as Sunta had died, bringing death to this unique moment of life. ‘The owl. My Other! No mother, no father, now this… Oh, Jurgi, can’t you help me?’

The priest leaned forward. ‘I am sorry. The Other chooses you… Come, Zesi, put a cloak around her.’

From the other boat, in the dark, came the sound of Rute sobbing.

Far around the curve of the world – to the west of Etxelur, beyond Albia’s forest-clad valleys, beyond an ocean flecked with ice and a handful of fragile skin boats – there was a land where the sun had not yet set. And a boy was crying. ‘Dreamer, what’s wrong with him?’ Moon Reacher plucked at Ice Dreamer’s sleeve. ‘Stone Shaper. Why is he crying?’

Ice Dreamer stopped walking and looked down at Moon Reacher, the girl’s red, windblown face, her tied-back nut-brown hair, her shapeless, grubby hide clothes scavenged from the bodies of the dead. Moon Reacher’s words seemed to come from another reality – perhaps from the Big House where your totem carried your spirit when you died. Words were human things. Ice Dreamer wasn’t in a human world, not any more.

This world, the land of the Sky Wolf, was a place of ground frozen hard as rock under her skin boots, and air so cold it was like a blade sliding in and out of her lungs, and, to the north, only ice, ice that shone with a pale, cruelly pointless beauty, ice as far as she could see. The only warmth in the whole world was in her belly, her own core, where her new baby lay dreaming dreams of the Big House she had so recently left. And Ice Dreamer didn’t even like to think about that, for when the baby came, who would there be to help her with the birth? All the women and girls were dead or lost, all save Moon Reacher, only eight years old. Maybe it would be better if the baby was never born at all, if she just stayed and grew old in the warmth and mindless safety of Dreamer’s womb.

Yet here was Moon Reacher, still tugging at her sleeve. ‘Dreamer! Why is Stone Shaper crying?’

Mammoth Talker loomed over them, massive in his furs, his pack huge on his back, his treasured spear in his fist.

And beside him Stone Shaper was indeed crying again, shuddering silently, the tears frosting on his cheeks. His medicine bag hung around his neck. Even wrapped in his bearskin cloak Shaper looked skinny, weak; he was nineteen years old.

They were all that was left. The four of them might be the last of the True People, anywhere.

Mammoth Talker growled, ‘He cries because he is weak. Less than a priest. Less than a woman, than a child. That unborn thing in your belly, Dreamer. Shaper is less than that.’ Talker was somewhere over thirty years old, perpetually angry, irritated to be stopped yet again.

Dreamer shot back, ‘If he’s so weak, Talker, you should have taken the medicine bag when Wolf Dancer got himself killed. Reacher, I think he’s crying because he thinks this is his fault.’ She gestured. ‘The cold. The winter. He thinks he isn’t saying the right words to make the spring come.’

‘That’s silly,’ Reacher looked up at Shaper, and took his hand. ‘The winter’s bigger than you will ever be.’

Shaper looked down at her, taking gulping breaths.

‘She’s right,’ said Dreamer. ‘And you shouldn’t be wasting your strength on tears. Have you still got the fire safe?’

‘Of course I have.’ He held up his medicine bag.

‘Then you’re doing the most important job you have.’ She looked around. The world was a mouth of grey, the sky featureless, the tough grass on the ground frozen flat, the sun invisible. Trying to get some relief from the north wind they had been heading roughly east, skirting a bluff of rocks, soft brown stone worn by the wind into fantastic shapes. She turned to Mammoth Talker. ‘How late do you think it is?’

‘How am I supposed to know? Ask him. Maybe the answer lies in the track of his tears.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ They were all tired, however early or late it was. Glancing across at the rock formation, she saw there was a kind of hollow under a ledge of stone, with a drift of soil underneath it. There was no source of water she could see, but there were old snow drifts in shadowed crevices above that lower ledge, ice they could melt. ‘Look at that. Maybe we could make a shelter for the night.’

For a heartbeat it seemed Talker might refuse. His huge fist opened and closed around his spear, with its precious point bequeathed by his father, a blade as long as a man’s head, finely shaped, elaborately fluted. In his eyes he was the only hunter left, a hunter trailed by a gaggle of a woman, a boy-priest, and a child. He always wanted to go on, go further. But they had nowhere to go. ‘All right. Make your shelter.’ He shucked his pack off his shoulders and dropped it on the ground. ‘I’ll go find us something to eat. Take care of my spear points.’ He hoisted his spear and stalked off towards the south.

‘Watch out for the Cowards. And bring back wood if you find it,’ Dreamer called after him, but if he heard he showed no sign of it.

‘I’ll set the traps,’ Moon Reacher said. She took off her pack and dug into it, looking for the snares, loops of bison-sinew rope with sharp bone stakes to stick into the ground. ‘I bet there are jackrabbits around these rocks.’

‘Look out for running water, a spring. And be careful.’ Moving cautiously, trying not to strain the muscles of her belly, Dreamer lifted her own pack’s strap over her head, and let it fall to the ground beside Talker’s. ‘Come on, Shaper. Let’s see what we can make of this place.’

Shaper unpicked Mammoth Talker’s heavy pack, which, aside from his carefully wrapped bundle of spear points, mostly consisted of skins, enough for a small house.

Dreamer crawled under the ledge, exploring. At the front the space was high enough to kneel, but it narrowed at the back. Dry, dirty soil had been piled up here by the wind, along with dead grass and a handful of bones. There were animal scuts, small pellets, maybe gopher droppings – with any luck Moon Reacher would turn out to be right about the jackrabbits – and bigger turds, maybe from the scavenger that had brought the bones in here. She scraped the scuts and grass and bones into a heap. All of these would burn, but if Talker didn’t come back with wood it wouldn’t be enough.

As she scraped up the dung her baby, some six months since conception, kicked her hard. She winced, and had to rest.

She had a sudden, sharp memory of her own childhood, when she had been younger than Moon Reacher, and the houses, six, seven, eight of them, had stood by a lake where trees dipped into the water. That had been a place somewhere far to the south of here, south and east. She could surely never find it again, for the people had been walking away from it since before she had become a woman. All gone now, she supposed. Oh, the lake and the grassy plain would still be there. But now, if anybody lived there, it would be Cowards in their swarming numbers and shabby huts, and they would know nothing of the people who had gone before. And here she was burning turds, and melting snow to drink.

Stone Shaper clumsily lifted a hide sheet over the mouth of the hollow, dropped it, and bent to try again. With a sigh Ice Dreamer crawled out of the cave to help him. They used loose rocks to hold the hide in place, and shut out the breeze from the little cave. Once back inside, Dreamer scraped a pit in the sandy ground to make the hearth, and lined it with flat stones gathered from the back of the hollow.

Stone Shaper reverently unpacked his medicine bag. In with the precious stones, herbs and strange old bits of curved tooth was an ember of last night’s fire, wrapped in moss and soft leather. He made a bed of dry moss and bits of grass in the hearth, laid down the ember, and blew on it gently, adding shreds of moss one by one until a tiny flame caught. This he sheltered with his hands, and Ice Dreamer helped him, feeding the flame with dried grass from the cave. When the fire was burning they sat back. It gave off light but little heat; for that they would have to wait for Mammoth Talker’s return with some decent fuel.