country!’
‘If we can get the body away from her, get some food inside her, clean her up—’
Heni stood over him, arms folded. ‘We’re going home. You agreed. We leave tomorrow, or the day after. As soon as we fill the boat—’
‘Fine. You fill the boat. We’ll leave as we said. And, unless she recovers and runs off, we take her with us.’
For a long moment Heni didn’t move. ‘One day I’ll walk away from you, cousin. I’ll just walk away, and you’ll be dead in a month.’
‘But today’s not that day, is it? Look - you cover up that stinking leg, and try to lift the body . . .’
The two of them moved towards the cowering woman. Kirike smiled, murmuring soft words in a tongue she could not know.
And then he noticed the design on the rock face on which she was sitting: three circles with a common centre, and a radial slash - the design that had been tattooed into his own wife’s belly, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House - the sign of Etxelur, carved into a rock on the wrong side of the ocean.
15
They walked every day, Novu and his owner, the trader Chona, at a steady, ground-eating pace, following water courses and well-worn tracks, generally following the river north from Jericho. Sometimes they even walked by night.
Generally they walked in silence. In fact Novu got more slaps from Chona, stinging blows on the back of the head, than he did words, for every time he got something wrong, a slap. He quickly learned what was wrong and what was right.
And for the first few days, as he shuffled along in the filthy old skins Chona had given him, a heavy pack on his back, Novu was hobbled by bark rope tied tightly around his ankles.
Novu was a town boy. He had never walked far in his life. He had boots, but his soft feet blistered. Every joint seemed to ache as he shifted the mass of the pack, trying to favour one shoulder and then the other. The hobble made it much worse. He couldn’t make Chona’s big strides; he had to make two steps for every one of Chona’s, and he felt perpetually out of breath. He didn’t have a knife, but his hands were free, and he could unpick the knots - but they were tied expertly and he would need time, which Chona, ever vigilant, was never going to give him. But he longed to be free of the hobble, and to be able to stretch his legs.
Sometimes Chona stayed the night with those he traded with. But Novu always had to stay outside, huddled under a skin or a lean-to. Such people didn’t live as Novu had in Jericho, but in communities of a few dozen people, in houses that might be shaped like bricks or like pears or like cowpats, maybe with a few herded goats and a scrap of cultivated wheat. They could be very strange, these isolated folks - people who went naked or with feathers sticking up from their topknots, or who tattooed themselves and their children red and black all over, or who stretched their necks or ear lobes or their lower lips, or who wore bones through their cheeks and necks. Chona said it was possible that traders like himself were the only strangers these people ever saw. No wonder they were odd.
It was worse when they stayed out in the country, away from people altogether. Chona carried skins in his backpack, remarkably light and supple, that he would use to make lean-tos in stands of trees. It wasn’t long before he had taught Novu how to make a dry and warm shelter.
But when the dark came Novu always found himself curling up in the dirt like an animal in its den. It was not like being at home, snug in the belly of Jericho with the warm bodies of hundreds of people all around him. Here he was outside, and there was nothing around him but the wind, and the howls of distant wild dogs - and, occasionally, the snuffling and tread of some curious visitor in the dark. At times even the rope tether by which Chona attached Novu to himself at night was a comfort, of sorts.
Every day he was taken further away from Jericho. But in a way he was glad of it, glad when after the first few days they got far enough from Jericho that there