layers. It was difficult to see. There was kelp everywhere, fronds waving in the sea, like a forest.’
Jurgi nodded. ‘The bulls, then the deer, then the woman, all sitting on top of the stone heap.’
‘That’s what I saw. All in this stone house. That’s all.’ She sat back, and drank some more broth.
Ice Dreamer, suckling Dolphin Gift, gave Arga a playful pinch. ‘You know how to spin out a story, don’t you?’
‘It’s all true!’
‘I know, I know. But you tell it well.’
Novu shook his head. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Think of how it would have looked,’ Ana said. ‘The mound was above the level of the ridges. From anywhere in the Door, if you were on the ridges or in a boat, you could look up and see the mound, and the house of stone, and the woman inside, riding her deer.’
‘They must have been dead,’ Novu said. ‘The woman and her deer. Who would sit there all day until the roof fell in on them? Maybe she was stuffed. I heard of people doing that, keeping corpses by taking out the innards and filling them with sand and spices. The deer too.’
‘Ugh,’ Heni said.
‘Stuffed and painted. What a sight it must have been! So, Arga, did you see—’
‘Hush,’ Dreamer said. One-handed, she gently took the broth bowl out of Arga’s hands. The girl had fallen asleep, just like that, and was slumping on Ana’s shoulder.
‘She’s worn out, poor thing,’ Heni said. ‘For all she’s brave the cold does take it out of her, I think.’
‘I told you,’ said Zesi. ‘You’re risking her neck with these stunts. If her father was alive—’
‘But he’s not, so that’s enough about that.’
Zesi poked at the fire and stirred the broth, her ill temper evident in her every movement. She hissed at Ana, ‘We need to talk.’
Ana put her fingers to her lips, and mouthed, Not now. She sat with the sleeping Arga, letting the girl’s head fall to her lap, rocking her gently.
52
When Arga was deeply asleep on a pallet beside the dog, Ana, needing air, pushed her way out of the house.
She waited just outside the house for a while, letting her eyes adapt to the dark. She was surprised by the deep cold outside. Since Heni had brought Arga home the weather had changed, the murky air and cloud cover clearing away. Now the sky was a blanket of stars, frost coated the ground, and a sliver of moon offered a little light. Her breath steamed before her mouth, catching the colourless moonlight, and she pulled her skin wrap tighter around her shoulders. She could really have done with a thicker layer, but she didn’t want to go back into the house to face more of Zesi’s glares.
A spiderweb stretched from the centre pole of the house down its flank; it was heavy with dew that had frozen in the cold snap, so that its threads were thick with ice crystals. But she could not see the spider that had built the web. Perhaps the cold had driven it away. Cold brought beauty and death in equal measures.
She walked away from the house, and climbed the bank of dunes just to the north. These had been wrecked by the Great Sea, and the going was harder than it had once been. But tonight there was a crust of frozen sand that crunched under her feet, making the way a little easier.
When she reached the ragged ridge of the dunes she walked west. A thousand moons reflected from the ripples of the bay, to her right, and she could see the hulking forms of boats, upturned on the beach above the high-water mark. In the very early days after the Great Sea people had been forced to sleep under their boats, for lack of any other shelter. Tonight, she knew, as on every calm night, a few boats would be out, for no fishing weather could be wasted this hard winter, day or night. Meanwhile, to her left the land lay sleeping under a fine blanket of frost. The new houses of the people were shapeless heaps, shadows in the dark. And she could see the mounds she had ordered to be built, rising up from the plain. For now they were just heaps of earth, but they would show their worth when the next flood came.
The more she walked, the more the world seemed to open up around her, the stillness of the sky and the land, the calmness of the sea.