I am your grandmother, and I remember my grandmother telling me how this was the way when she was a girl, and her grandmother told her of it when she was a girl, and before that only the sun and moon remember. This is custom, like it or not.’
‘I don’t care about custom. I live here. All my things are here . . .’
‘They won’t touch you, you know.’
‘That’s not the point. And why today, of all days?’ She felt tears prickle her eyes. Her grandmother didn’t approve of crying; she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. ‘It’s my blood tide. And now them. If only my father were here—’
‘But he isn’t,’ Sunta said. Her voice broke up in a flurry of dry, painful-sounding coughs. She sat back and dipped her finger in the paint once more. ‘Now let’s see how much mess you’ve made.’
Ana turned away, breathing hard. She was no longer a child; her blood tide marked the dawning of adulthood. She had to behave well. Deliberately she calmed herself and opened her tunic.
But when she turned back Sunta had fallen asleep. A single thread of drool dripped from her open mouth, the stubs of her worn teeth.
3
As the day wore on towards noon, and with her blood-tide mark still no more than a sketch, Ana pulled on her own sealskin cloak and left the house to collect fish for her grandmother’s meal. The fishing boats were due back at noon, and perhaps she could get some fresh cod, Sunta’s favourite; if not there was probably some on the drying racks. And if her father had been here, she couldn’t help but think, they might all be feasting on whale meat.
Once outside Ana could hear seals calling, like children singing.
The house was one of seven clustered together on a plain of tough grass, just south of a bank of dunes that offered some protection from the north wind. This morning the fresh snow, a hand deep, covered the Seven Houses’ thatch of dried kelp; the houses were conical heaps, like wind-carved snow drifts. The adults scraped the snow away from the houses and piled it into banks. They had shovels made of the shoulder blades of deer, big old tools. Children ran around, excited, throwing snow in the air and over each other.
Ana picked her way north, towards the dunes and the coast beyond. The snow crunched and squeaked under her feet. The ground between the houses had been churned to mud, frozen, then blanketed over by snow, so you couldn’t see the ridges in the soil, hard as rock, or the places where a sheet of ice covered a puddle of ice-cold mud, waiting to trap an unwary foot. The going got easier as she climbed the ridge of dunes, for here the frost and snow and sand were mixed up, and the long dead grass brushed her legs. Even on the newest snow she saw tracks of rabbits, deer, the arrow-head markings of birds, and here and there tiny paw prints, almost invisible, that were the tracks of stoats and weasels. Ana went at it briskly, relishing the feeling of her heart and lungs working.
As she moved away from the houses the land grew silent, even the cries of the children muffled. Sunta once told her that snow was sound made solid and fallen to the ground, birdsong and wolf cries and the calls of people all compressed into the same shimmering white.
When she breasted the ridge the wind pushed into her face, and she paused for breath, looking out over the northern panorama. Here on her dune she stood over the mouth of a deep bay, which opened out to the sea to her right. On the far side of the bay stood Flint Island, a central pile of tumbled yellow-brown rocks surrounded by a rim of wrack-scarred beach. The tide was high just now, and the grey waters of the bay covered the causeway that linked the island to the mainland, to the west. Above the drowned causeway a flight of whooper swans clattered. On the mud flats further west huge flocks of wading birds and fowl had gathered, their plumage bright in the cold winter sunlight. She recognised wigoes, geese. Seals littered the rocky islets off the eastern point of Flint Island, their bodies glistening, their voices raised in the thin cries she had heard outside her grandmother’s house.
All around the bay she could see people working. Down below the