was closed, one stitch at a time. Heni held the ends of the wound firmly until the stitching was done. Then Heni smeared a poultice over the wound, made of herbs given them by Jurgi the priest.
When it was done Kirike gently lifted Dreamer up at the shoulders, and she moaned again. Heni got a bandage of sealskin under her lower back, and pulled it around her body.
Kirike thrust his head out of the shelter. He tipped the placenta out of the bowl into the sea, and let his hands trail in the water until they were clean. Then he stopped, breathing in, relishing the air’s freshness after the stink of blood. He was shuddering, but not from the cold, though it was a clear starlit night. He started weeping, whether for Dreamer, the baby, Sabet, himself, even Heni, he didn’t know. He touched his face and felt the tears frosting.
And he saw pale rings of light in the water, two of them, concentric around the boat.
He reached down and dangled his fingers. The disturbed water glowed, purple, orange, yellow and grey-white. He knew that if he looked closely enough he would see the myriad living things in every droplet, burning up their little lives for the sake of this gentle light. Looking away from the boat he saw sleek, pale bodies swimming around and around the boat, stirring up the water and making it glow in the inner ring. And a fin, more ominous, circled in the outer ring.
Sharks would be drawn to Dreamer’s blood, the placenta, even to the scent of it from the woman and baby inside the boat. But the dolphins in the inner ring were circling the boat, keeping the sharks away. He muttered a silent prayer, thanking the dolphins.
When he ducked back inside, Dreamer was already conscious, her eyes huge, and she held the scrap of baby to her breast.
Heni was grinning as if he had fathered it himself. ‘I told you we could do it!’
23
The Year of the Great Sea: Summer Solstice.
A sound like a stampede, or like thunder, came rolling across the ocean from the north.
In her house Ana looked up, distracted from her work on the paint. Lightning had been sleeping on one of Zesi’s old skins. He opened his eyes and lifted his ears. It was probably nothing, probably just a storm, just weather. Ana murmured to soothe the dog. Lightning closed his eyes, soon asleep again.
Ana tried to concentrate on what she was doing. Sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, she had lumps of red and yellow ochre, brought by a trader from mines far away in Gaira. She ground these lumps against a sandstone block, making piles of powder that she collected on the scapula of a deer. She also had charcoal powder set aside, and a pot of grease from deer fat, and another of pig’s urine. She mixed these ingredients together in different proportions to make paints in shades of red, orange, yellow, that she ladled carefully into the hollows of bird bones. On the day of the midsummer Giving the priest would use these to mark faces and bodies, and to stain the tattoos of the hunters and racers and swimmers and wrestlers.
It was slow and careful work, and she had to get on with it. The solstice, only days away, wouldn’t wait for her.
It was also quite a responsibility. In years past she’d helped her mother prepare the paint, and before that her grandmother, Mama Sunta, but now the job was hers alone. It was delicate work, you could easily waste a whole batch of the precious ochre, and getting the colours just right was important for the priest’s ceremonies.
Thunder, though. Odd. Distracted, she put down the ochre lumps.
She was alone in the house, and had the door flap shut against draughts, though bright midsummer daylight seeped around its loosely fixed seams. The house was tidy, orderly. Neither of the Pretani boys had come back from the disastrous summer camp, Gall having run off after the murder of the snailhead, and Shade having headed home. Ana and Zesi had thrown out their abandoned gear, their skins and their weapons and their piss-pots, and they had practically taken the house apart to get rid of the boys’ male stink. Yet the house wasn’t the way it had been before, in the old days before their mother had died and their father disappeared. It had become a lifeless place, where the tension between the sisters crackled