these knees. And maybe our new earthworks will put on a show - they should be draining the barrages today.’ But Dolphin could see none of the Pretani knew what that meant. ‘Dolphin, child, are you still there?
Dolphin took her arm. ‘This way, Ana. The first step down’s just ahead of you.’
88
By the time they had reached the Northern Barrage, following Ana at her crawling pace, quite a crowd had gathered to follow them, some from Etxelur itself, and snailheads, World River folk, others who had come here for the Spring Walk - and Eel folk whose parents or grandparents had once been brought here as slaves. The children ran and played, each of them covering ten times the distance walked by the solemn adults.
One little girl, aged seven, was cheeky enough to come and walk beside Ana, trying to hold her hand. This was Zuba, granddaughter of Arga - known as a formidable swimmer, as her grandmother had once been. The world was full of children, and there always seemed to be more of them in these first bright days of every spring, playing among the first flowers. Dolphin thought of her own children, the four boys who were all but grown already, and the two others who had died young. How many of the children playing today would live to see ten years, or twenty? Let them have this brief day in the sun, and enjoy it as they could.
Having walked across the Bay Land the party climbed a line of stranded dunes, and then came upon the Northern Barrage. Stretching roughly east to west, this wall ran the length of the old tidal causeway between Flint Island and the mainland, but had been greatly extended. The southern face of smoothly worked sandstone shone in the sunlight, while the sea, excluded and tamed, lapped passively at the northern face.
Ana and her party climbed up onto the dyke from the abutment at its island end, and then walked along the stone-clad upper surface. Only Ana, Dolphin, Kirike, Acorn, Resin and Sunta walked along the wall, while those who had followed watched from below. Kirike bore the bag of bones, as he had all the way from Pretani. Ana walked with her arm linked in Dolphin’s. Aside from the gull-like shouts of the playing children, the only sounds up here were the wash of the waves against the wall, and the tap-tap of Ana’s stick on the stone.
Dolphin looked to her right, over the sea, where Ana’s last great project, the long dykes that had been built around the site of the drowned Mothers’ Door, was all but complete. This morning people were still working on the tops of the dykes, laden with sacks and ropes, and silhouetted against the sun-dazzled brilliance of the sea - but the dykes were intact enough for the long labour of excluding the sea to have begun. Today, close to the spring equinox, the tide would be exceptionally low, and Dolphin knew that the great gates could be opened in the walls to allow more water within to drain away. This was the show Ana had hoped might be fortuitously mounted to impress the Pretani, and to honour Shade.
But the bemused Pretani, staring at the earthworks, clearly understood little of what they were seeing.
The party reached the centre of the dyke’s curving face and came to a halt. Here the heavy facing stones had been lifted from the upper surface of the dyke, and cists - small, stone-walled tombs - had been dug into the mud and rock of the interior.
Kirike seemed surprised to have come here. ‘I wondered where we were walking, away from Flint Island . . . You would inter him here? Not in the middens?’
‘We don’t use the old middens any more,’ Ana said. The breeze off the sea picked up, and whipped her stringy hair about her face; Acorn brushed back the greying wisps. ‘Thank you, child . . . It was after the war, after your mother died in my arms, Kirike, at the hands of your father. Zesi’s were the first bones I placed here, in the wall. Since then we have dismantled the middens, and we brought the bones of all the dead to this place, the dyke, and to the Eastern Barrage too, across the mouth of the bay.’
She turned to Kirike, her blank eyes questing. ‘This is my plan, Kirike. Let the sea walls be more than mere mounds of timber and mud and