be more beautiful. ‘Oh, the Pretani! The older one - Gall? - went on about the argument he had with Mama Sunta.’
‘I know. I was there.’
‘I think they’ve come here for wives, as well as the seven-year visit and the trading for flint. Their forest is full of their cousins, so they say. They’re disappointed father isn’t here. They wanted to talk it over with him.’
Ana frowned. ‘If there was going to be a marriage it would have to be you with that oaf Gall. And it would be Mama Sunta who would have to agree.’
‘Yes, but that’s not how it works where they live. There, the men run everything. And, listen to this, I worked it out from what Gall said - if I married him I’d have to leave here and go and live with his family.’
‘That’s stupid,’ Arga said. ‘If you get married the man comes to live with you and your mother. Everybody does it that way.’
‘Evidently not in Albia.’ She sighed. ‘They’re disappointed we have no brothers, too. They wanted the oldest brother to come back and fight in the forest with them, in the summer.’
‘What for?’
‘The wildwood challenge. Another every-seven-years thing, hunting aurochs in the Albia forest, everybody seeing who’s got the biggest cock. You know what men are like.’
‘Arses,’ said Arga, seven years old and solemn.
‘Not all men.’ It was the younger Pretani, Shade. He was coming back, almost shyly. ‘I am sorry if my speaking is not good. The traders’ tongue is difficult.’
Ana pulled her tunic tight. ‘And you’ve come for another look at my chest, have you?’
He may not have understood the words, but he got the sentiment. He blushed under his sparse beard, suddenly looking much younger. ‘I was curious.’
‘Where’s your brother? Isn’t he curious?’
Shade gestured. Gall was with the fishing parties, who were showing off hooks of antler bone and nets of plaited sinew and bark, and telling stories of the sea. ‘He is telling heroic tales of his own battles with bears and wolves. A good tale is worth telling. And Gall is loud, and catches my father’s ear.’
‘Your tunic looks itchy,’ Arga said, staring.
‘It is hide. It is what we wear, in Albia.’
‘Not cloth, like sensible people?’
‘Cloth?’
‘We make it from reeds and bark and stuff. And you’re shivering,’ Arga said bluntly.
‘No, I am not.’
‘You are,’ said Ana. ‘It’s because you’re wearing that stupid deerskin cloak. We wear those in summer.’
‘This is what we wear,’ he said miserably. ‘It is fine in Albia.’
Zesi laughed, for he was blushing again. ‘Oh, come here. Sit between Ana and Arga. They’ll warm you up.’
The Pretani hesitated. Perhaps he thought Zesi was playing some trick on him. But he sat, smoothing his cloak under him.
‘So,’ Ana said, ‘why aren’t you over there with your brother telling lies?’
‘I know little about cod, and fishing. I do know about other things. Flint, and trading.’ He picked up a piece from the display before him; inside a remnant carapace of brittle chalk, it was creamy brown. ‘This is good quality.’
‘It comes from the island,’ Zesi said, pointing. ‘Flint Island, we call it. But the best pieces we have are much older. We don’t usually trade them. Sometimes they are used as tokens in the Giving feasts in the summer.’
‘Why older, I mean, why the best . . .’ He gave up his attempt to frame the question in the unfamiliar language.
Ana pointed to the centre of the bay, to their west. ‘The best lode of all is out there. That’s where the good old stuff came from. The sea covered it over.’
He frowned. ‘Like a tide coming in?’
‘It wasn’t a tide,’ Ana said.
‘I know nothing of the sea.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Ana snapped. She felt oddly resentful of his questions.
But Zesi seemed amused. ‘Ask something else.’
‘What does this mean?’ He indicated the design etched into the rock flat, the three circles of grooves and ridges, the straight-line tail that slashed to the centre.
‘You’ll see this all over Etxelur. Some say it’s a kind of memory of the Door to the Mothers’ House. Which is the old land we came from.’
Arga said seriously, ‘We lived there without dying. But when the moon gave death to the world we had to leave.’
Shade stared at the mark. ‘So,’ he said, turning shyly to Ana, ‘why are these circles drawn on your belly in blood?’
‘It isn’t just blood,’ Ana said. ‘There’s water and ochre and honey and other stuff.’
Zesi said briskly, ‘This is the blood tide. After a girl becomes