the gruff, familiar voice. It was Heni, striding towards her from his beached boat. He bore a big basket of shellfish he’d been using for bait.
‘Oh, Heni—’ She ran to him, and he dropped his basket and enfolded her. He was a squat man but powerful, and he smelled of fish and salt and sweat, of the sea. He was the nearest to her father she would ever see again. Yet even now the tears would not come.
Stroking her hair, he murmured, ‘I was with him, you know. Kirike. On the day he died. We were out at sea. I was a coward. I wanted to paddle away from shore, where we would be safe. He wanted to come home, to be with his family. We fought. He jumped over the side and tried to swim in. I—There was nothing I could do to stop him. You know your father. We found his body. He’s on the middens if you want to see him. I was a coward,’ he said, desolate.
‘You’re alive,’ the priest said grimly. ‘You made the right choice. Kirike was a brave man, a very brave man. But sometimes it takes more courage to do nothing.’
Heni seemed to notice the priest for the first time. ‘You! You poppy-squeezing faker.’ To Zeni’s amazement Heni raised a fist.
Matu immediately got between the two men, and Novu wrapped an arm across Heni’s chest, pulling him away. ‘No more,’ Novu said, pointing at Arga, who was starting to cry. ‘We’ve had enough upset without that.’
Heni made a visible effort to calm down. ‘All right, I won’t do anything stupid. But you, priest, you let us down. Where were you when the Great Sea came? Where were you when we tended the sick? Where were you when we gathered up the dead? Where were you when poor Ana tried to find words to say over the bodies, all those bodies, up on the holy middens? Where were you? ’
‘It’s not his fault,’ Zesi snapped. ‘He didn’t cause the Great Sea. He couldn’t have stopped it—’
‘It’s all right, Zesi,’ Jurgi said. ‘He’s right. I’m the priest. I wasn’t here, at the one time in my whole life, probably, I was needed the most. He’s right to blame me, for I wasn’t here to help him blame the gods.’ He glanced at the middens. ‘And I wasn’t here to spare Ana. I will always regret that.’
‘Oh, I survived.’
Ana was walking up from the sea. Like the others she looked too thin to Zesi, her clothes filthy with fish blood and crusted with salt, her hair tied back from a sweat-streaked forehead. Her face was expressionless. ‘Hello, Zesi.’
‘Oh, Ana—’ Zesi wrapped her sister in her arms. She felt Ana respond, putting her own arms behind Zesi’s back, but stiffly. She stepped back and faced Ana, the two sisters dry-eyed. ‘Come. Let’s walk.’
They set off together along the beach.
‘You survived Albia, then,’ Ana said.
‘Only just . . . It’s not the time to tell you about that. One thing you should know, though.’
‘What?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
That made Ana stop. ‘The father is Shade?’
‘Yes.’
Ana shrugged, and walked on, slowly. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever see Shade again, or the Root.’
‘The Root’s dead. It got complicated. Even more complicated.’
Ana said gravely, ‘We need babies. We are few, now. Less than half left alive. There are snailheads here. They help. But we will have to work hard to live, Zesi. Work for the rest of our lives.’
Unless, Zesi thought dismally, we leave this desperate, half-drowned place and go south to the rich lands beyond this layer of white death, beyond the reach of another Great Sea, lands she’d walked through only days ago. She took a breath. ‘Heni told me about father.’
Ana nodded. ‘We have his body. It’s on the midden still. Even the gulls are few this autumn, and slow in their work.’
‘I’ll say goodbye to him—’
‘Sometimes I think it’s because of me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You remember that night, the night of my blood tide, in the midwinter? When the owl became my Other. Since then Sunta died and Gall and father, and Rute and Jaku and so many others—’
‘No. Hush.’
‘I am the owl. I am death.’
It was alarming to hear her say such things; she was only fifteen years old. Zesi stopped walking and hugged her again. ‘You’re my kid sister,’ she said, trying to tease her gently. ‘What makes you think you’re so important, that the mothers should send down a Great Sea to batter us all?’ But