disturb old bones—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just be respectful.’
Shade knelt and began to dig his blade into the midden surface, crunch, scoop, crunch. He was soon done, and stood back.
The priest looked down at Ana. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Let’s get it done.’ She clutched Mama Sunta closer to her chest, and climbed the midden slope, stepping cautiously on the uncertain surface, determined not to stumble.
She stood awkwardly on the lip of the pit the Pretani had dug. The hole was neat and round. Glancing into it she saw a gleam of white, perhaps an exposed bone, picked clean by whatever creatures lived here, feasting on the dead. There was a smell of fresh, salty rot. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Just place her in the pit.’
She leaned down, and placed Mama Sunta on the rough floor.
Jurgi nodded. ‘Good. Now we wait. We will seal the pit as soon as the sun clears the horizon. But first I will speak to Sunta.’ He shifted his deer mask from where it hung on his chest and fixed it over his face. It was just a skull with antlers still fixed, and holes crudely cut to allow his human eyes to see.
But when he shifted his posture, and wrapped his deerskin cloak tighter around him, it was as if his Other, the deer, had taken his place.
‘In the beginning was the gap,’ he said. ‘The awful interval between being and not being. The gap stretched, and created an egg, out of nothing. Its shell was ice and its yolk was slush and mud and rock. For an unmeasured time the egg was alone, silent. Then the egg shattered. The fragments of its shell became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.
‘From the slush and mud of the yolk grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and the sun and the earth serpent and the sky bird of thunder.
‘But still the giants fought, until they fell on the first mother. Her own body, torn apart by the giants, became the substance of the earth, and of animals, and of people. The world became rich.
‘But when the land became too full of mouths, the little mothers and the sun came to a concord with the moon, a terrible pact, and death was given to the world.
‘Now, Sunta, by lying in these broken shells, you are returned to the egg from which all creation emerged . . .’ He shook his head, as if dizzy. He began to speak other words, words so old nobody but the priests understood them any more.
Somewhere a sea bird called, welcoming the day. Ana saw how the low, pinkish sunlight glinted from the shells of the midden, tens of tens of tens of them, the labour of generations. It was unexpectedly beautiful, the sparkling shells, the sweeping curve of the middens. She would not cry, she told herself. Not today.
Shade the Pretani touched her shoulder. ‘I am your friend, Ana. I think we are alike, you and I. If you would like to talk of your grandmother, or your mother or father—’
She could smell his sweat. She turned away. She didn’t even look at him again, as the priest completed the ceremony, and the sun, mistily visible, at last hauled its bulk clear of the sea.
8
In the days that followed, far to the west of Etxelur the last of the True People in the land of the Sky Wolf struggled to stay alive.
And far to the east, beyond a continent of rivers and forest, a man walking alone approached a place where people lived in a huddle of mud bricks and stone walls.
Chona was not prone to fear.
This morning he walked alone, as he preferred, with his pack of dried meat and trade goods on his back, his worn walking staff in his right hand, his left hand hanging loosely by the blade hidden in a fold of his cloak. He had walked up from the Salt Sea to this river valley, its banks thick with woodland, reeds and papyrus, a green belt in this arid country that led him north towards the town. Skinny to the point of gaunt, the skin of his face made leathery by years of sunlight and wind, the soles of his feet hard as rock, Chona knew he looked elderly, at nearly thirty years old. No threat to anybody. Easy to drive away, even to rob of his precious pack of goods. Well, he was