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