Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

‘Mammoth Talker is right,’ said Stone Shaper. He loosened his tunic at the neck, and sat with his legs stretched out. ‘I am no priest. I am no man. I am shamed by my tears.’

‘Well, Talker isn’t much of a man himself to say such things. You’re the only priest we’ve got.’

‘I never wanted to be a priest.’ He flexed his hands. ‘I am Stone Shaper. That’s my name, that’s what I should do.’

And, she thought bitterly, I never wanted to be Pregnant Woman, far from my grandmothers and aunts. ‘This is the pattern of our lives, Shaper. Why, do you think Wolf Dancer wanted to be a priest either? The last true priest was Eagle Seer, before the split…’

It had been fifteen years since the True People had abandoned the houses by the lake and walked north in search of hunting lands free of the presence of the Cowards. Eagle Seer had been raised on the march. But the priest before him, who Dreamer remembered as a tired old man called the Coyote, had made sure Seer had been trained the way a priest should be trained – from boyhood, from the moment it was clear the spirits had chosen him.

But there had been a split. When it began to seem that nowhere was free of the swarming Cowards, the hunters had started arguing among themselves. Dreamer remembered the long nights, the desperate men posturing and shouting, the women and children, hungry, exhausted, sitting at their feet and trying to keep warm. In the end the men could only agree to do what Ice Dreamer had always thought was the worst choice of all: to split up. Most had turned west. Some, including Mammoth Talker and Horse Driver, who was to become the father of Dreamer’s baby, chose east. The women and their children had to follow their men. Dreamer had said goodbye to her sister, her aunt, her mother.

And the only priest, Eagle Seer, had chosen to go west. Talker’s group could not survive without a priest, without a door to the world of the spirits. There was no time for Eagle Seer to raise a new priest in accordance with custom. But Seer did his best. Talker and Driver and the other men had chosen Wolf Dancer, and Seer worked hard to train that young man in the arts of healing and weather lore and talking to the dead. He even made Dancer a new medicine bag and filled it with treasures from his own – to much hostility from those he would walk with, who thought he was diluting their own protection.

Well, since the split Ice Dreamer had heard nothing of those who had gone west; even if they lived they were dead to her. One by one her own party had dwindled, as the old and the young failed to keep the pace, and anybody who fell ill was quickly lost. She had been dismayed to find herself pregnant.

And then had come the night of the flood. It had been Horse Driver’s fault, Driver who insisted he had seen caribou in the shadow of a grimy glacier that scoured down from an eroded mountain. He had led them to the shore of a chill lake at the glacier’s foot, and left the women and children to make camp while the men hunted shadows. Nobody had wanted to be there. They believed that glaciers were the claws of the Sky Wolf, who had smashed the good earth, making it dark and cold and wiping the land clean of game. Driver would not listen.

Well, the Sky Wolf had stirred in his sleep that night. A great piece of his glacier-claw broke away, and a wave of slushy water washed over their poor camp. Only four had survived, or five if you counted the child in Dreamer’s belly: Dreamer herself, Mammoth Talker, orphaned Moon Reacher, and poor Stone Shaper, who the hunters had thought was too weak to go with them, and who had found the dead priest’s medicine bag.

Now Shaper, exhausted, hungry, stared into the fragment of flame. He fingered the bits of curved tooth in his bag. ‘I was thinking about our totems,’ he said. ‘Here are the three of us, named for the bare bones of the world, ice and stone and moon – and Mammoth Talker, named for a beast nobody living has seen. Have our totems abandoned us?’

Ice Dreamer shifted, trying to find a less uncomfortable position. ‘Whether they have or not, it is up to us to behave as if it is not so.’

He nodded gravely. ‘Maybe you should be the priest.’

That made her laugh.

Moon Reacher pushed her way into the shelter. ‘Oh, it’s cosy. Not very warm yet. Why are you laughing?’

‘Because we’re alive.’ Dreamer could smell the blood. ‘You caught something.’

With a flourish, Reacher produced a jackrabbit from behind her back and held it up by the ears. The snare still dangled from its leg, and Reacher had broken its neck.

Dreamer leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You are a great hunter. Come on, let’s get this cooking.’

The three of them worked together. Dreamer quickly detached the animal’s head and sleeved off its skin. Dreamer and Shaper butchered the jackrabbit quickly, and Reacher used her own small obsidian blade to cut the meat fillets finely, so they would cook faster on the small fire.

When the meat was sizzling on a hot stone, Mammoth Talker pushed into the shelter. He let the cold wind in, and they all had to huddle around the fire to make room. ‘I found no prey,’ he growled. ‘But I did find this.’ He dragged in a bundle of wood, dried, old.

They eagerly piled it on the fire. Bark curled, the wood crackled, and smoke began to billow. For the first time that day Dreamer began to feel warm.

‘You can have some of my jackrabbit,’ Reacher said brightly. She handed Talker a leg.

He gnawed it, crunching the delicate bones. ‘And I saw Cowards. Many of them.’

The mood in the shelter immediately turned cold again. Dreamer asked, ‘Are we safe here until morning?’

‘Yes. But listen to me. The Cowards have killed bison. They drove them into a valley… You should see it. Many animals. More bison than Cowards, I think.’

‘What have Cowards and their bison to do with us?’

‘Don’t you see? There is more meat than they can eat, even if every man, woman and child gorges until the meat rots. More than they can carry away. Meat for us. All we have to do is take it.’

‘But it’s the Cowards’ kill,’ Shaper said. ‘They hunted these beasts. We will be scavenging, like the dogs of the prairie.’

Dreamer could see that Talker, the proud hunter, hadn’t allowed himself to think that way. ‘You should applaud me. Not peck at me with these questions, peck, peck, peck. I will sleep outside this hovel.’ He grabbed a handful of Reacher’s jackrabbit fillets, more than his share, and pushed his way out of the shelter.

‘Don’t be a-’ Fool. Dreamer bit back the word before she could say it; it would do far more harm than good.

Talker left a skin flapping loose. Stone Shaper crawled over to shut out the cold.

Mammoth Talker woke them all not long after the dawn.

If he had been uncomfortable in the night, huddled alone in the cold protected only by his cloak, he said nothing of it. But Dreamer thought he looked paler, his eyes that bit darker. Even his great strength was not infinite, and he was a fool to waste it on displays of temper.

He pointed with his spear. ‘The kill site is that way. South. Not far. We will leave our stuff here.’

Moon Reacher wasn’t happy. She was a child who in her eight years had seen almost everything taken from her, her whole family destroyed by the glacial flood, and now she had a habit of clinging to what was left.

Dreamer squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Reacher. We will be fine, our stuff will be safe here.’

Stone Shaper objected too. ‘I will take the medicine bag, and the fire, even so.’

‘By the Wolf’s teeth – fine, fine, just make sure you bring your blades.’ Mammoth Talker hefted his spear. ‘Everybody had a drink and a piss and a shit? Anybody got anything else to say? Then let’s go.’ So they walked south. As soon as they were away from the lee of the rock bluff the wind from the icebound north bit at their backs. The country seemed lifeless, with only dead grass and scrub at their feet. Once Dreamer saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, far to the east. A crowd of large animals – bison, perhaps, or horses, or deer.