the bag he was carrying, turned his face up to the sun and stretched. ‘But it’s a long time since I made my home among you.’ More than fifteen years, in fact, since he had come home with his father, Shade, to the woods of Albia. He was over thirty years old himself now. He breathed deep of the air, and he thought he detected a whiff of salt, that odd sharpness that he remembered vividly from his boyhood, so different from the damp, cloying smells of the forest. Suddenly his heavy, scratchy hide tunic felt uncomfortable, and he remembered how he had run with Dolphin Gift along the endless strands. ‘I have Pretani blood, but Etxelur is in me too. Besides, even the strongest tree needs the sun.’
Resin hawked and spat. ‘A nice Pretani saying for an Etxelur boy. Let me remind you of another. Saplings grow only when the great tree falls. And this old tree hasn’t fallen yet. Is that bag of bones too heavy for you? If so pass it over, and let’s get on.’
Kirike’s sack, carried on a long shoulder strap, contained the bones of their father, Shade, dead a year now. They were making the long trek to Etxelur to fulfil his strange but firm wish that his bones should be placed in the land where the events that had shaped his whole life and the future of his people had occurred. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My father’s not heavy.’ He hoisted the pack. ‘Anyhow, I vaguely remember this route.’
Resin hobbled onward up the grassy slope, leaning heavily on a gnarled stick. ‘So you should. This is the way we marched when we made war on Etxelur, all those years ago. And this is the place we decided to call Boundary Ridge, for it’s as good as any a place to say that here Albia ends, and Northland begins . . .’
When they reached the crest of the ridge the land fell away before Kirike, the forest-choked hills of Albia giving way to a broad plain that stretched all the way to a misty, washed-out horizon. It was a land of shining water, streams and marshes and lakes reflecting the blue sky. The only trees grew in scattered clumps, probably willow and alder, water-lovers. Everywhere threads of smoke rose up from the people’s fires. Off to his left-hand side, to the north, he glimpsed the ocean, a grey horizon perfectly flat.
But Northland was not as it had once been. There were ditches dead straight across the ground, cut as if by knives, and reservoirs round as cups. Some of the larger streams were dammed by pale walls, and the flow behind them was backed up into new lakes. By the ocean shore he could make out the sea walls, pale lines and arcs drawn all along the coastline. Over three decades after the disaster of the Great Sea, people had shaped the landscape. And such systems now stretched all the way along Northland’s northern coast, from Albia in the west to the World River estuary and Gaira in the east.
‘Remarkable,’ he said now. ‘It all started at Etxelur. But now it’s spread across the whole country, like, like—’
‘Like a pox,’ Resin grunted, standing beside him. ‘More to the point, look down there. There’s a house, right in the middle of our trail.’
So it was, a slim cone that stood on a ledge of flat ground, halfway down the slope. Its walls were leather, unlike the kelp houses Kirike remembered from Etxelur - a tent meant for a summer’s hunting inland, perhaps. A couple of hare, skinned, hung on a rack outside the house, and a hearth barely smoked, choked with ashes.
As they waited, a young man, bare to the waist, emerged from the house. When he saw the Pretani party on their ridge he waved and called into the house.
Acorn said, ‘Did you see the marking on his belly? Rings and tail.’
It was a mark Kirike wore tattooed on his own body, a mark he hadn’t otherwise seen in years. The mark of Etxelur. His breath caught; he was thrilled.
A young woman came out of the house, not much more than a girl, perhaps fifteen years old. She looked up at the Pretani. With a murmur to the boy she walked up the slope. Wearing a simple green smock, she was barefoot, and wore her strawberry blonde hair swept back - red and green, light and airy.
And when she got close enough for him to