‘To me, this is the centre. The shore, Etxelur, the sea, the whole of Northland, the estuaries, the beaches, the tidal pools, and the fringes of forest where we hunt. If you go too far south there’s nothing but forest, choking the land. That’s the edge.’
‘I see an edge. You see a centre. Can a world have two centres?’
‘I don’t know . . . Ask the priest.’ She felt snappy, irritable, her head somehow stuffy. ‘Can’t you ever just talk about normal things?’
But he didn’t reply. He seemed distracted, his eyes squinting against the brilliant sunlight, his lips pursed in a frown. ‘Listen.’
There was a sound like thunder, rolling in off the sea, as if from a storm very far away.
And Dreamer called up from the base of the dune, ‘Ana? I think you’d better come down and see this.’ She had opened Novu’s pack.
Novu stared, horrified, then ran down the dune.
In the boat, the sound of thunder made Heni sit up. Kirike had thought he was asleep.
The boat rocked at Heni’s sudden movement. But it was already full of a healthy catch of salmon and, bottom-heavy, settled back on a smooth sea.
Heni fixed his hat on his head and looked around. ‘You heard that?’
‘If it was a storm it was far away . . .’
They both sat silently, listening, the only sounds their breathing, the lap of the big, slow waves, the gentle creaking of the laden boat, the net ropes scraping against the boat’s hull.
The two men had paddled off to the north-east of Flint Island, out over the deep sea. From here much of the mainland was out of sight, only the island itself visible in the misty air. Kirike liked to be distant, so far out that the land was reduced to a kind of dream, and the world shrank down to his boat and the steady work of the fishing, and the companionship of Heni, the most enduring relationship in his life.
But was there to be a storm? The weather today was hard to read. The air was hot and, out on the breast of the sea, promised to get a lot hotter. The sky was free of cloud but there was a washed-out mistiness about it. The day felt odd to Kirike. Tetchy. Skittish.
Heni asked, ‘Can you have thunder without a storm?’
‘Maybe it’s a big storm very far away.’
‘Maybe. But do you remember the day of the Giving?’ On that day too there had been a rumble out of a cloudless sky, and a big, strange wave. Men whose life depended on listening to the moods of sea and air couldn’t help but remember something like that. ‘Something’s going on. Maybe the little mother of the ocean fell out of bed.’
Kirike laughed. ‘Twice in a month?’
Heni sighed. ‘So do you want to go back?’
Kirike glanced at the catch, the big, heavy fish that lay glistening in the bilge. ‘Nobody would blame us if we did. We’ve enough already.’ The salmon were early this year. The autumn was the best time to catch them, when they came swimming in from the ocean, funnelling into the big river estuaries on their way to their spawning grounds upstream. All you had to do was lower a net into the river, and let the fish swim in. It was much too early for the peak catches now, but this late summer day had been fruitful enough: there were times when the little mothers were kind to their hard-working children. But still . . . ‘Do you want to go back?’
Heni lay back in the boat’s prow, his broad-brimmed leather hat tipped forward to keep the sun off his face, and chewed on a bit of wood. ‘Seems a waste of the sunshine. Thought I saw some dolphins playing further out. We could try driving a few ashore.’
‘Sounds like hard work.’
Heni squinted up at the sky. ‘Or we could just lie here and soak up the heat. Maybe we deserve it. We had enough months freezing our arses off when we got lost in the winter. I sometimes feel like my bones never thawed out.’ And as if to prove the point he coughed, a deep, racking heave that twisted his body. He had to hold onto his hat to keep it from falling off.
It was a winter cough, a cough that should have dried out by now but had clung to his lungs all summer. Kirike had