in the year, early in the day. In a world without Sunta.
The priest was watching her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘You know, I often come out like this. Before the dawn. Just to walk around by myself.’
‘I know you do. You probably shouldn’t be alone.’
‘But people . . .’ People shunned her, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. ‘People can see the owl in me. I’m bad luck.’
‘I don’t think you’re bad luck. That midwinter day was Sunta’s time to die, as it was your time for the blood tide. I know it’s affected you. But just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re linked.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s a funny thing to say. I don’t remember the old priest talking like that.’
‘Well, I’m a funny sort of priest. You must give people time, Ana. A chance to know you, now you’re a woman. And you need to give yourself a chance to get over this - to get past your grandmother’s death. Why do you think I insisted it must be you who buries her today?’
‘For Sunta’s sake.’
‘No. For you.’ He touched her arm. ‘Come now, we should get to the midden before the sun is too high.’
So Ana lifted Mama Sunta. Most of the joints had lost their ligaments, and as she lifted the skeleton it broke up, and Sunta’s skull rolled backwards, revealing empty sockets where worms moved sluggishly in a kind of black muck.
Shade, watching her, said, ‘In Albia we hang our dead in the branches of a tree, an oak if we can find one. And when the birds and the worms have done their work we plant the man in the ground, and put an acorn on top of him, so a tree will grow and hold his spirit.’
Ana understood by now that Shade’s language had no word for ‘woman’, no distinction between ‘his’ and ‘hers’, as if women were an inferior sort of men.
‘But our great men, like our father when he dies, we will plant a whole tree on top of him. I mean, we dig it up roots and all, and make a hole in the ground, and put the living tree over him . . .’
Ana ignored him as she worked. Gently but reverently she wrapped the bones in a parcel made of the remains of Sunta’s clothing.
Carrying the body - it was shockingly light - she stepped down from the burial platform. With the priest and the Pretani boy to either side of her, she began the long walk around the bay. In the uncertain light it was sometimes difficult to see the track. But she glimpsed frogspawn massing in the dense water, and crocuses thrusting green shoots out of the dead brown earth. She could feel the change in the world, feel the spring coming, like the moment of the turning of a great tide. And yet her grandmother, in her arms, was dead.
They walked silently. Jurgi, beside her, was an extraordinarily calming man, Ana thought, with his open, beardless face, his blue-dyed hair tied back in a tail, and those sharp brown eyes that seemed to see right into her spirit. He was one of the few who had never recoiled from Ana because of her dread Other.
None in Etxelur was more important than the priest, who was the people’s bridge between the world of the senses and the world of the gods. But Jurgi was quite unlike the last priest, Petru, a capering fool with wild hair who always hid his face behind his deer-skull mask. Finally he had danced himself to a frenzied death at a midsummer Giving. Jurgi was already twenty-five, she realised. Few people lived much beyond thirty; Sunta had been unusual in living to see her granddaughters grow up. Jurgi might not have many more years. Ana would miss him when he was gone.
They trudged over the causeway to Flint Island, the going still soggy from the last tide, and walked on, passing around the island’s north coast, until the great middens stood before them. The edge of the sun had already lifted over the sea’s eastern horizon, which was clear of cloud.
The boy grinned, strong and confident, and hoisted his scapula shovel. ‘Where shall I dig?’
The priest clambered up the innermost midden, and paced its length. ‘Here.’ He pointed to a spot on the midden perhaps a third of its length along. ‘This feels right.’
The boy climbed up the midden slope, the shells crunching under his heels. ‘And if I