The sun set. Its light made the floating ice blaze pink, though where larger lumps stuck out of the water she could sometimes see subtler shades, purples and greys fading from blue. The men resolutely paddled their boat away from the sunset, heading east - just as she had walked east from her lost home, east until she had run out of country altogether.
As the sun crept below the horizon, the light faded, the cold gathered, and Heni and Kirike shipped their blades. At the boat’s prow was a scorched platform of wood, which Heni now detached and stuck in place at the boat’s mid-section. It had a worn hollow, and here he set bits of dry moss, wood shavings, and scraps of wood and bone. Then, from a fold of his outer skin, he produced an ember, wrapped up in moss and greasy leather. He set this on the scorched block and blew it until the moss and kindling caught. He nursed the nascent fire, leaning over it to shelter it from the breeze, feeding it one fragment of fuel after another.
A fire on a boat!
The boat’s frame was sturdy lime and ash, and its ribs were of bent hazel, tied together with plaited cords made of twisted roots. The outer skin was fixed to the frame by robust stitches, the holes stopped with a mix of animal fat and resin. The People had used boats, on the rivers and the lakes. She had never seen any boat as big or as elaborate as this one. And she certainly hadn’t ever seen anybody start a fire in a boat. You’d just put into shore for the night, and build your fire there. If they were so far from the shore, this must be a very wide lake indeed.
Both Kirike and Heni, with glances back at Dreamer, knelt, pulled up their tunics and pissed over the side of the boat. Their urine steamed, thick and yellow. Kirike pointed to a bowl near Dreamer’s feet. They must have been keeping her clean. She felt a stab of shame, and clutched her skins closer.
Then, when the fire was crackling healthily, Kirike lifted a pole, a stripped sapling, from the bottom of the boat and set it upright in a socket. He unfolded grease-coated skins and set them up in a kind of tent, tied to the top of the pole and fixed to bone hooks around the rim of the boat. It was low, to get inside you had to crouch down under the shallowly sloping skins, and you certainly couldn’t stand up. Dreamer vaguely imagined that if you raised the tent thing too high the whole boat might topple over. But the skins were heavy enough to shut out the wind, and the fire’s warmth soon filled the little space.
Once the tent was sealed Kirike and Heni loosened their clothing, shucking off their heavy mitts and boots. Kirike set up a couple of lamps, wicks burning in some kind of oil in stone dishes, and put them at either end of the boat. A soft light suffused the boat - the light she remembered seeing reflected from their faces, in the dark times of her illness.
Kirike and Heni started unwrapping bits of food. Kirike offered her strips of meat, dried and salted. She took them cautiously. The meat was tough, leathery, but she found she was hungry, and it was satisfying to have something to chew.
As they ate Kirike dug out more packets, carefully wrapped in skin. He showed her a collection of big shells, each bigger than Kirike’s widespread hand, that he seemed very proud of. The shells were strung on a bit of rope. And they had tools, stone blades and bone harpoons and spear-straighteners. These looked like artefacts of the Cowards, and she wasn’t interested. He had nothing that might have come from the People - none of the big fluted spear points that had once been so prized. Kirike and Heni talked amiably as they picked over their trophies, here in this covered-over boat.
It wasn’t like being in a house. It was too small, and the boat creaked and groaned in the swell, and if you put your foot down incautiously you could find yourself stepping in the cold water that constantly seeped through the skin’s seams. But nevertheless these two men trusted their boat, as they clearly trusted each other. Dreamer felt oddly safe in its rolling embrace.