Stephen Baxter: Stone spring

Movement. She saw them clearly, two, three, four, five – four men, one woman – sneaking through broken ground at the lip of the valley. Even on this freezing day they went naked. They wore their hair stiffened with dust into spikes, and painful-looking jagged tattoos had been incised into their cheeks. They bore no spears or knives, but they each hefted rocks, as you would use to drive a dog away.

They knew Talker was there. They thought he was a scavenging dog or coyote. And meanwhile Talker dug his hand deep in the innards of the dead bison. Perhaps he was looking for the gall bladder; she knew he relished that morsel. He had not heard the Cowards, who were nearly on him.

She stood up. She yelled, ‘Talker! Cowards!’

Without waiting to see what happened, she ducked back down. ‘They know we are here. Go!’

Stone Shaper did not hesitate. He didn’t even pick up his medicine bundle. He ran back the way they had come, keeping to cover, heading for the stone bluff where they had hidden.

But Moon Reacher clung to Dreamer’s arm. ‘I won’t leave you.’

Dreamer could hear the jabber of the Cowards, only paces away. ‘Come, then.’ And she ran, clutching her heavy belly, the child hanging onto her arm.

She risked one glance back. She saw Talker standing – not running – facing the Cowards. ‘I am Mammoth Talker,’ he yelled. ‘Mammoth Talker! Remember me!’ And he hurled his heavy spear with his fluted blade straight at the lead Coward. The spear, heavy enough to bring down a charging bison, smashed into the Coward’s chest, and heart and lungs were torn out of his back before he was pinned to the ground.

The Cowards hesitated; they were armed only with rocks. But now Talker had only his stone meat-cutting blade. In a heartbeat they were on him.

Dreamer turned and ran harder. Maybe even now they might make it, if she could get them to a bit of cover where they might hide out-

It felt as if a huge fist grabbed her heels, pulling them out from under her. She went down hard, face first, her nose slamming into the dirt. Tasting blood, she looked down to see rope wrapped around her legs, a throwing rope weighted with stones.

The shouts of the Cowards were loud.

Reacher was still here, dragging at her hand. ‘Get up!’ she screamed. ‘Get up!’

Dreamer, stunned, unable to talk, tried to push the child away.

Hands grabbed her, her shoulders, legs, hair. She was dragged back along the ground, and the pain of her scalp made her scream.

Then she was hauled to her feet and turned around. She saw the men around her in a blur. Before she got her balance the punches came, one in her face that jarred her jaw, another in the pit of her belly. She tried to double over to protect the baby, but the hands pulled her up. She could smell the men, the meat and blood and sweat and smoke from their fires, all around her, she had no control, could do nothing.

There was a respite from the blows. She found she was being held before Mammoth Talker. He dangled, held up by his hair. His chest and face had been smashed inwards so they were like caves of blood and bone. They had killed him with their fists and their stones, the last hunter of the True People. But he had fought, and done some damage. One man stood before her holding up a gashed arm, his face a tattooed mask. He screamed at her in his own tongue.

She hawked and spat blood and dust in his face. Again they fell on her with punches and kicks, and she went down again.

Somebody began to jabber commands. They got her on her back and began to drag at her skins, and somebody took hold of her ankles, forcing her legs apart. She heard them calling, and more men came running to join in. She struggled and spat and bit, but the punches rained down, and she was weakening fast.

And, as if through a bloody haze, she remembered Moon Reacher. She forced her head to left, right, and there she was. A man held the girl up in the air with one big paw around her wrists, and with his other hand he was pulling away her skins like peeling a berry. Reacher’s leg was injured; blood streamed down from a wound in her thigh.

Dreamer stopped fighting. She looked around until she found the single Coward woman. As naked as the rest, and as garishly tattooed, she stood away from the men, nursing a bruised arm. ‘Please!’ Dreamer yelled until the woman looked at her, and met her eyes. ‘Please – the little girl – she is only a child – you’re a woman, help her-’

The woman could never understand her words. The language of the people and of the Cowards had nothing in common. But she shared some basic humanity. She stepped over to the man with Reacher. She slapped him until he let the girl go, and she gestured at Dreamer, on the ground. Take what you want over there. She dragged Reacher away, out of Dreamer’s sight.

The men were getting organised. One held her arms up over her head, another two, crouching, held her legs open. A younger man, not much more than a boy, ran his hands over her big belly and her milk-swollen breasts, as if fascinated. Then the men started clapping, and another approached her, a huge bull of a man with a swirling blood-red tattoo on his belly. He was already erect, she saw, his penis like a spear shaft, tattooed along its length and with what looked like a splinter of bone through the glans. He leaned over her and grinned.

She worked her aching mouth, summoning up one more mouthful, and spat blood and mucus in his face. That earned her a punch in the head, and the world fell away.

The Year of the Great Sea: Spring Equinox. A few days before the Spring Walk, Jurgi the priest decreed that Mama Sunta’s time of laying-out was done. He came to speak to the sisters in their house, the house that had been Sunta’s, and now belonged to Zesi, as the oldest surviving woman of the family.

Zesi’s house it might be – but the house was full of the Pretani boys, their sprawling beds of bracken and moss and skins, their spears and nets. The Pretani evidently liked it here at Etxelur. They’d stayed as winter turned to spring, and now they were even talking of staying all the way to the summer solstice and the Giving. So, after months and months, they were still here. To Ana’s nostrils the house stank of their filthy deerskin tunics and their meat-laden farts, and the acrid smells of their maleness.

Then there were the fights. Once Gall had tried to bring a woman to his bed: Pina, a young widow known to be generous with her body. Zesi had flown into a rage, and had hurled Gall’s bedding out of the house: ‘Get that slack-uddered cow out of my home!’ For days afterwards Gall had pulled down his lower eyelids every time Zesi passed, evidently a Pretani sign for jealousy.

And rare was the morning when he wouldn’t clamber out of bed naked, stretching, displaying an erection like a stabbing spear.

Sometimes Ana dreamed of burning it all down – or, better yet, she imagined the house being smashed by some great storm, or a tide from the sea. She feared that this was the voice of her Other, the owl, the death bird; she feared this was the darkness that had been discovered inside her the night Sunta died.

Certainly this polluted house wasn’t a place where she wanted to discuss the details of her grandmother’s burial.

But the priest, composed as ever, picked his way through the Pretani debris without a murmur or a glance, and sat with the women by the warmth of the night fire. He began, ‘I know it seems a long time since Sunta’s death, at the solstice full moon-’

‘We remember when it was,’ Zesi snapped.

‘My point is, the wait has been long. The months after the solstice are the coldest of all, when even the processes of a sky burial run slow. Some say even this is a blessing of the little mothers, for it gives time for the children of winter to be given up to the sky.’ Every winter took its cull of children; the ceremony of interring their little bones was a sad mark of each spring. ‘But Sunta is now ready for you to collect her. You understand this is a man’s role – if your father were here-’