a woman, at low tide in the next midwinter she is taken out by boat to North Island, which is north of Flint Island. The moon is death, ice. Ana’s new body is a gift of warmth and life. We must show we defy the moon, and the tides she draws . . .’
‘Still sitting with the women, brother?’ Gall approached. He held an immense cod in his left hand; he had bits of bone and scaly skin stuck in his beard, and Ana could smell the wood-smoke on him. His traders’ tongue was guttural, coarse. ‘You’ll turn into a girl yourself. Come on, let’s go back to that Giver’s hovel and see if we can persuade that old crone to cook this for us.’
Ana jumped to her feet. ‘You leave her alone. She’s ill.’
‘Not too ill to lash me with her tongue, was she? Well, if she can’t do it, you’ll have to.’ He threw the cod in the sand at her feet, belched, and looked down at the circles on the rock. ‘I heard you wittering about this scratch. Yak, yak, yak. You’d get more sense out of those seals on that island. I’ll tell you the bit I like.’ With his booted toe he traced out the tail that cut through the concentric grooves and ridges, and he leered at Ana. ‘Straight and hard and thrusting up into the belly.’
Zesi got up, her expression icy, and picked up the fish. ‘I’ll cook your food. Just you leave Mama Sunta alone.’
‘Hah! Come on, little brother, let’s put some flesh on your bones.’
Shade stood, expressionless, and followed his brother and Zesi towards the dunes.
Arga sat with Ana, watching them go. ‘Arses,’ she said.
4
Late in the day Sunta told Ana that the boats were waiting for her, on the north shore of Flint Island.
It was dark when Ana emerged from her house, ready for the long walk around the bay to the island. At least the threatened fresh snow hadn’t appeared, and the cloud cover was thin enough to show a brilliant moon. The snow carelessly piled up by the people with their reindeer-bone scrapers had frozen again, hard enough to hurt if you kicked it.
The moon’s face was surrounded by a ring of colour. This was said to be a crowd of the spirits of the dead, falling to their final destination in the moon’s icy embrace.
But tonight Ana wasn’t bothered so much by the dead as by the living, who had come drifting out of the Seven Houses. Many of the people of Etxelur, friends and family, had turned out to walk with her. But in among them were strangers, come to see the show. The two Pretani boys, with Gall munching on a haunch of whale meat and leering at the women. Traders, jabbering the crude argot that was their only common tongue. Even snailheads - early arrivals of the people from the far south. The centre of attention, she felt as if she was withering with embarrassment.
They wasted no time in the cold. The priest, Jurgi, led the way as he always did on such occasions. As they set off you could see by the moonlight how his mouth protruded, the great incisors of a wolf sticking out of his human lips. Arga solemnly walked beside him, wide-eyed, honoured to be carrying the skin bag that contained the priest’s irons.
Ana followed, with Mama Sunta and Zesi. Which was all wrong, of course. Ana should have been walking with her parents, not Sunta and Zesi. But only a year before her mother had died in childbirth, and her father, some said half-mad with grief, had gone sailing off and never returned. And Sunta was so weak that Zesi and Ana had to walk to either side of her, holding her up in her great sealskin coat.
‘I feel stupid,’ Ana murmured to Zesi over Mama Sunta’s lolling head.
Zesi replied, ‘Everybody feels that way. Tonight is about you and the moon. If you want to find the right Other, then you must concentrate.’
Ana said bitterly, ‘It was easy for you. A good Other chose you, the crossbill. Father was here. And mother.’
‘Easy, was it?’ Zesi snapped. ‘Well, I’m not your mother, and I don’t have to listen to you moaning.’
They trudged on in sullen silence.
They crossed the causeway to the island, a stripe of dry land that, when the tide was low, separated bay water from the open sea. Ana looked back over the bay, across the water to