None of them looked much older than Zesi. They had no weapons. One man carried something wrapped in a bit of skin that dripped with blood, and a sack heavy with some liquid. The woman carried a bundle that squirmed, feebly - a baby, Ana saw. One man had blond hair; the other man and woman had brown hair, darker eyes.
They looked ordinary, Ana thought, just like the folk of Etxelur. Ordinary save for their elongated skulls, which stuck out behind their heads, and the bone plugs in their tongues that showed when they opened their mouths. Beyond them, the smoke from their camp beyond the river’s bend snaked into the sky.
Gall dumped his bit of liver and marched up to the newcomers, fists clenched. ‘What do you want?’ He spoke in the tongue of Etxelur.
The man holding the bloody parcel faced him. ‘Trader tongue,’ he said bluntly.
Zesi, followed by Jurgi, came bustling past Gall. ‘Trader tongue,’ she agreed. ‘I speak for these people, not this man.’
‘We have gifts,’ the man said. He held out his bloody bundle. It was the heart of a deer.
Gall laughed at it. ‘What did that come from, an unborn? My left bollock is bigger.’
The snailheads evidently didn’t understand all his words, but they caught his tone. The blond man’s expression darkened, and Ana saw muscles bunch in his arm. With his heavy frown and his strange, bony, tubular skull, he looked strange, unearthly, frightening.
The priest stepped forward hastily. ‘We didn’t come here to fight.’ He continued in his own tongue, ‘And we don’t know how many of them there are. Zesi, take the gifts.’
Zesi hesitated. Then she took the heart from the snailhead, bowing her thanks.
The priest took the sack, removed a bone pin from its neck, and drank. ‘Blackcurrant juice! Saved through winter!’
The blond snailhead grinned. ‘Good?’
‘Good!’ Jurgi laughed, a bit too loudly. ‘Come, sit, have some of my dock tea . . .’
They sat around the embers of the fire, the three snailheads, the priest, Zesi, Ana, Shade, others. Big flat stones and wooden bowls were set on the fire, to cook meat and prepare broths from the deer’s entrails. Gall sat a short way away, gnawing on his liver, studiously ignoring the newcomers, yet clearly hearing every word.
Arga and the other children stood by, staring at the newcomers’ big heads. Lightning wouldn’t be kept away; he came sniffing around the strangers, butting their knees until they rewarded him with attention.
The priest began to make his tea. He took a precious relic from his charm bag: a bowl made from the skull of a bear, brown with handling and polished with age. The visitors looked suitably impressed. Jurgi scooped up water from a wooden bowl and set it on the edge of the fire. Then he took dock and sage leaves, crumbled them in his fingers, and dropped them in the skull bowl.
The blond snailhead man pointed to himself, and his companions. ‘Knuckle. Gut. Eyelid.’ Their own name for themselves wasn’t, of course, ‘snailhead’, but something like ‘the One People’.
The woman called Eyelid smiled and opened up her bundle of soft skin. The baby was sleeping, a thumb in her mouth. Her head from the brow up was tightly bound by plaited rope. She didn’t seem to be in any discomfort as her head grew within these bonds, shaped and elongated.
Knuckle pointed at Eyelid’s baby. ‘Cheek. We camp.’ He pointed down the river. ‘There.’
Zesi asked, ‘How many?’
The traders’ tongue was rich in words for numbers. There were over fifty snailheads, men, women and children, just out of sight of the Etxelur summer camp.
This was shocking for the Etxelur folk to hear. The world was big, so big that you never had to share your favourite spaces with anybody else, save for happy meetings like the Giving. It was genuinely disconcerting to find fifty snailheads here, as if they had shown up in the heart of Etxelur itself.
‘We come here every year or two years,’ Zesi said pointedly. ‘Our parents before us, and their parents before them.’ Her meaning was clear. This is our place. ‘You?’
Gut shrugged. ‘Never been here before. Plenty of room. Plenty of deer for you, for me.’ He grinned. Ana saw that his tongue was pierced by a stone plug as fat as her thumb. ‘Don’t stay here long. Rest, feed, repair kit. Then move on.’
Zesi asked, ‘Which way?’
‘North.’
‘That’s where we live,’ the priest said. ‘Already we saw some of your people. A few moons ago. At a beach.