drawn. They had been walking since dawn. Novu, feeling benevolent, reached down and lifted the pack off the back of the youngest walker, a six-year-old boy. He grinned his thanks and went running ahead, chasing butterflies. Loga made no comment.
‘So,’ Novu asked, ‘why the celebration?’
‘Solstice.’ Loga pointed at the rising sun. ‘All people celebrate midsummer, different ways. Here, the Giving feast. Big event for all people around, people of the coast, of the land. People happy. Good trade.’ He grinned, dreaming of profit.
‘You’re all heart, my friend.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
It wasn’t long before they had rounded the marshy land at the end of the bay, and then walked out along the causeway, a remarkable strip of land that cut the sea in two. The world was flat here, a panorama of mud flats and the brutal plain of the sea, fringed by lumpy sand dunes and the bulk of Flint Island. But the island was still so far away that the mist washed out its colours to a blue-grey, so that it looked unreal, a marking on a wall, not solid at all. The sea, at this time of the tide, was far away from their feet, and the causeway was a trail that led across a broad stretch of mud flats. Grass grew here, long, tough stuff. But you could tell the sea had been here recently. The grass was beaten down, there were standing pools of brackish water, and there was a tide line above the path they were following, marked by a litter of broken shells and seaweed tangles. This was an odd, eerie place, suspended between two worlds - a place where grass grew, yet which was daily covered over by the sea.
A crowd of curlews dipped and swooped overhead, making their odd chuckling cry.
After the causeway, they rounded a last sandstone bluff and came to a long, broad beach facing north, fringed by a line of dunes. The beach was thronged with people, slim figures busy everywhere, silhouetted against the brilliant light reflecting off the sea. He heard laughing, shouting, singing, the shrieks of the children splashing in the clean blue sea - many, many children, swarming around the adults. There must be hundreds of people here, he thought, not as many as in Jericho, but a larger gathering than any he had encountered since leaving home. Smoke rose up from scores of fires, and cooking smells reached Novu, even here at the western end of the beach, meat and salty fish.
Loga led his party along the beach, to a patch of dry sand between the shoulders of two dunes. ‘This will do. Shelter from the wind if it picks up.’ He glanced around. ‘Bit far from centre, the middens. Better to be closer, for passing trade. Arrive too late.’ He glared at one of the children. ‘If that one not sick, we’d have gained a day.’ But he shrugged.
The women settled wearily to the sand.
Novu dropped his pack. ‘I’ll go take a look around.’
Loga grunted, indifferent, unfolding his skin packs.
Novu walked along the beach. After a while he slipped off his boots, slung them over his shoulder, and walked on the fringe of the sea where the sand was wet. His feet, hardened by months of steady walking, enjoyed the crisp coolness of the water, the softness of the sand.
There were many different communities here, he soon saw, gathered on this bright beach. Folk evidently from the estuaries had their flat-bottomed skin boats drawn up on the beach, and wooden trays of eels and strange-looking crustaceans set out on the sand. Ocean fishers had bigger, deeper boats and racks of fish, with some spectacular catches on display; one huge cod looked longer than Novu was tall. A group of goat herders had a dozen animals penned up inside a wicker fence, reinforced by posts thrust into the sand. Another group who evidently hailed from the forests inland had set up a pole, a tree trunk stripped of branches and bark and carved along its length with distorted faces, images of gods perhaps.
The people themselves were all different too. The men with the god-pole wore trousers cut away to leave their crotches exposed, and Novu, wincing, saw that their dangling cocks had been sliced and stitched and tattooed. He saw heads shaven bald, or with hair raised in sticky spikes, and skin adorned with tattoos in black, red and even green, and distortions of noses and ear lobes and necks and even heads stretched like great tubers.