The water fell on him, a huge weight that smashed down on his back and pushed him down into the sand. For a heartbeat he could feel his bundle under his body. But then he was driven forward, sc.r.a.ping over the sand, and he lost it all.
He was turned on his back. He could see the light, far above, the sun"s disc fragmented by the surface of the water, like a shattered flint nodule. But the water was turbulent, full of mud and seaweed. He coughed, gasped, and the water forced its way into his mouth, his throat. The pain was huge, like a great fist slamming into the core of his being.
So it was over, so suddenly. He felt a stab of regret about all the flint pieces he hadn"t been able to finish.
The pain soon receded, a tide going out.
Ana and the others watched from the dune crest.
It wasn"t like a tide. It was a single great wave; she could see its arc right across the bay, breaking on the beach and then running on, past the usual high water line, higher than any tide, even pushing into the long gra.s.s that fringed the dunes. People who had already fled from the beach had to run further inland.
Arga, silent, slipped her hand into Ana"s.
Novu was staring like the rest. "I never saw an ocean before I left Jericho. I don"t know anything about oceans. Is this what oceans do?"
"I never saw anything like this," Ana murmured. "Or heard of it."
"Strange events," murmured Dreamer. "Things n.o.body ever saw before, or since. This was how our world ended."
"Shut up," Ana hissed, holding tight to Arga.
Novu pointed. "Look. I think it"s going down."
As rapidly as it had risen the sea level was dropping, as if draining through a hole in the world. The water ran back down the beach towards the ocean, or it pooled in hollows in the sand and the rock banks, creating smooth ponds bright in the sun.
People tentatively emerged from the dunes. They showed each other marvels - seaweed heaps high on the dunes, a dolphin stranded and gasping.
Arga tugged Ana"s hand. "Do you think it"s over?"
"No," Dreamer said. "Look. It"s still going out. Too far . . ."
The strange tide kept drawing back, far beyond the usual low water mark, and Ana saw a plain of glistening sand emerge, and strange rock formations she was sure she"d never seen before. All over the exposed floor there was movement, silvery wriggling.
People started walking, then running, down the beach towards the new strand.
"Look!" Arga said, excited now, pointing. "Fish! There"s fish everywhere! We can just go and take it. Come on." She tugged Ana"s hand.
Dreamer said, "No. This is very wrong. We should stay-"
"What"s that?" Novu, shielding his eyes, was pointing out to sea.
And now Ana saw what the retreating sea had exposed, far from the usual sh.o.r.e: an earthwork of raised ridges, circular, their flanks draped with the deep green of seaweed. Water glimmered in the ditches between the circles.
"It"s like something from a priest"s story," Arga said. "Is it real?"
Ana said, "Let"s go see. Come on!" Hand in hand they ran down the dune.
Dreamer called, "No! Come back! Something is wrong - oh, please come back!"
But Ana only ran faster. Soon she and Arga were running on sticky mud that only moments ago had been sea floor.
40.
Ice Dreamer, running with Novu, struggled to keep up with Ana and Arga. She was burdened with her baby, a precious warm bundle sleeping in her sling, and she had yet to recover her full strength from her hard winter. Novu was slow too. His pack of stones, a self-imposed burden, was heavy on his back, and he was tiring quickly. The wet clinging mud of this exposed seabed, pulling at every footstep, wasn"t helping.
The sun"s light poured down from a misty washed-out sky.
"Everything is wrong," Dreamer said in her own tongue.
"What? Oh, this heat! It"s like being baked. And this sand, sticky as snot."
"It"s going to be just as difficult to run back."
He frowned. "Do you think we"ll have to?"
"I don"t know. But then, I don"t know why the sea has suddenly gone away."
The girls were mercifully slowing, distracted by wonders.
Water poured off rock formations that were thick with life. Exotic plant-like creatures, brightly coloured, withered as they dried - sponges and sea serpents, the girls said. A fish dangled from a rock, clinging to it with its mouth. Crabs stirred, their flat bodies pale orange and pink, burdened by huge claws. Even the sea-bottom mud was dense with living things, mussels and c.o.c.kles, the casts of worms, and strange fish that clung to the mud with flattened bodies and both eyes on one side of their heads. Everything was draped with seaweed, dark vivid green, that steamed and gave off a rich salty stink. It was difficult to walk without stepping on something squirming for life, or dead already.
Dreamer stared down at extraordinary animals with no heads but five pointed limbs, stirring in the mud at her feet. Dreamer had never seen such beasts in her life. "The G.o.ds were at play when they made these."
"It"s so strange," Arga said. "It"s as if it all fell down from the sky."
"In a way it did," Ana said. "We"re walking on the sea bottom. The fish swim in the water as birds fly in the air."
"And if the air went away," Dreamer said grimly, "we too would be lying in the dirt, gasping for breath like these fish."
Ana glanced at Arga. "Dreamer, you"re frightening her."
"Good! Then listen-"
"Tell it to my father." Ana twisted away and ran off after Arga, further from the sh.o.r.e.
There was no choice but to go on after them. "Come," Novu said grimly to Dreamer. "Look, take my arm."
They continued their plod across the clinging sand, following the girls.
And the inverted world got stranger yet. They came to the wreck of a boat, a huge one, much bigger than Kirike"s, or any Dreamer had seen in this place. Little survived but its wooden frame, blackened, and rotted, with barnacles clinging thickly. The remains of a reindeer-bone harpoon was still attached to a loop by a strip of rotted hide. Ana and Arga stared as they hurried past, at wooden ribs like the skeleton of some vast animal.
Then they came to a stand of trees, bare of leaves and with their roots exposed, standing drunkenly in the mud. They were big heavy oaks, perhaps centuries old when they died. They stood beside what looked like a river valley, a broad stripe in the muddy landscape, populated now only by remnant puddles of sea water. Dreamer saw neat heaps of wreckage, posts and pits and what looked like sewn skins. They might easily once have been houses, just like those Ana and her family lived in now.
Giddy with the heat, Dreamer shook her head and tried to think. Did sea creatures build houses? Did oaks grow underwater? Surely not. She remembered Kirike"s talk of the precious lode of flint, creamy and flawless, lost under the risen waters of the bay south of Flint Island. Maybe, then, today was not the first time the sea had behaved strangely. Maybe before, perhaps long ago, it had risen up and covered over these trees, these houses, like that precious flint lode.
Ana and Arga were slowing again.
Ana said, "It"s still far away. The earthwork, the curving ridges. They must be bigger than we thought, and further away."
"Good," Dreamer snapped as she came up, panting. "At last you"re talking sense."
"If the sea hasn"t come back by tomorrow, we"ll come out again and explore properly."
Arga looked doubtful. Sea-bottom mud coated her lower legs, brown-black and clinging. "But it might not be here tomorrow. After all, it wasn"t here yesterday," she said reasonably.
Ana pointed. They were close to a dune-like feature, a ripple of sand on the wet seabed. "Look - let"s climb up here. We"ll be able to see, even if we can"t reach it today."
"All right." Arga sounded relieved. Maybe under all the bravery she too had been scared by the strangeness of the day. She ran over to the dune and immediately began to climb, getting down on all fours to scramble up the muddy slope.
Ana followed her, and then Novu and Dreamer, more cautiously. If crossing the plain had been hard, this was twice as difficult, for the mud was slick and sticky. By the time they reached the crest they had all fallen more than once, and were smeared with black mud down their fronts.
From the dune"s narrow crest, panting hard, Dreamer could see the sweep of the sea-bottom plain. The true sh.o.r.e was far behind them, frighteningly far, blurred by mist, with those big arcs of the holy middens standing proud. All over the exposed seabed people worked, hauling away fish and crustaceans and seaweed. Children were playing, splashing and rolling in the mud, using huge dead silvery fish to play-fight. All this on a plain that had been deep under the sea this morning.
Ana and Arga were peering further north. And in this day of strangeness and wonder, a new marvel revealed itself to Dreamer.
The earthwork ridges were sweeping circular arcs that curved away from her view - cupped one inside another, like the rings in a tree trunk. She tried to count them - one, two, were there three? She was not high enough to see clearly. Water glinted, pooled in the ditches between the ridges. Though the walls were streaked with mud and draped with seaweed and fish corpses, they were too regular to be natural, no work of wind or rain or ice.
All of this Dreamer saw from afar, through a blurring curtain of heat haze that made it seem unreal, a vision in a dream.
"It"s like your town," Ana said to Novu. "It"s like Jericho. The way you talked about it."
"It"s as big as Jericho," he murmured. "But people live in Jericho. They live in houses - not houses like yours . . . I don"t see where people would live here."
"I can see one house," Arga said. "I think so, anyway. See at the middle of the big rings, there"s a sort of hill? And there"s something near the top of the hill. A kind of white box, like a big skull."
Dreamer strained to see. "Your eyes are sharper than mine, Arga-"
Ana said, "That"s North Island! The hill in the middle. I recognise it - I was taken there for my blood tide, when the sea lowers and reveals it . . . I never knew all this lay hidden by the water."
Dreamer was feeling giddy with the heat and the exertion, and with the extraordinary sights around her. "You"re missing it," she mumbled.
Ana turned to her. "Dreamer? Are you all right?"
"You"re missing the most obvious thing. Look!" She pointed to the sh.o.r.e of Flint Island, beyond the exposed sea plain. "Look at the middens, where you celebrate the Giving, where you buried your own grandmother at midwinter. Your most sacred sites. Now look at these circles in the mud. What do you see?"
Ana turned her head from one to the other. "The middens, their shapes - they match the curves of the shining walls. Like ripples on a pond."
"Yes," Arga said, excited. "All with the same centre where you threw your stone."
"And that"s not all." Dreamer grabbed Ana"s tunic and lifted it, exposing her belly. And there, above the cloth she wore over her loins, was Ana"s blood-tide tattoo. Dreamer traced it with a trembling finger. "Can you see? Three circles, cut to their common centre by this tail. You have this symbol scrawled over your bodies, your tools and weapons, your clothes, your houses. And look!" She gestured at the earthwork. "Three circles . . ."
Arga and Ana jabbered to each other in their own rapid tongue, barely comprehensible to Dreamer. "The Door to the Mothers" House! This is it! She must be right."
There was a dull roar in Dreamer"s ears. The heat, the exhaustion were draining her. She clung to Novu"s arm, determined not to faint.
Novu looked out to sea. "Can you hear something?"
"Only the blood pounding in my head."
"Something else. A rumbling."
The girls jumped, excited. Dreamer, growing dizzier, was losing her ability to translate the girls" words, and their prattle blurred in her mind as they repeated their name for the earthwork, over and over. "The Door to the Mothers" House. Door, mothers, house . . . Ate, l"ami, nt"etxe . . . Att-lann-tiss . . ."
There was a scream, from far away. Shouting voices.
Novu pointed north. "What"s that?"
Dreamer peered, and saw a band of blue-black, flecked with white, racing over the exposed mud. The sea, returning.
Ana cried, "Run!"
[image]
The four of them scrambled down the dune slope, slithering, half-sliding to the bottom. But Arga landed awkwardly on her ankle, and cried out.
Down on the plain, Dreamer, gasping for breath, couldn"t run. She couldn"t even lift her feet out of the mud. "I can"t - I can"t-"
"You have to." Novu held her arm, urging her on.
"Let me take the baby," Ana said. Dreamer felt hands working at the sling on her back. "I can carry her, and run faster than you."
Dreamer made an instant decision. "Go, then."
Ana held the baby in one arm, and grabbed Arga"s hand with her free hand. "Come on, Arga!" She began to run to the sh.o.r.e, but Arga limped badly, crying out.
Novu said, "You too, Dreamer. Come on." He pulled at Dreamer, his arm around her shoulders.
They began hobbling towards a sh.o.r.e that seemed a terribly long way away. Ahead she saw people fleeing, abandoning the fish they had gathered, running from the advancing sea.
Novu, trying to support her, tripped and fell heavily in the mud. They had gone only a few paces. He rose, filthy, cursing loudly in his own tongue. And he shucked the bag of stones off his back and dropped it in the mud. "There will be other treasures." He leaned over, got his shoulder under Dreamer"s belly and hoisted her up, holding her legs.
Her head and upper body flopped over his back. It was shocking, suddenly to be carried like a child.
He began running. His back was drenched with sweat where it had been under the pack. His strides jarred and winded her.
She strained to lift her head. That wall of returning ocean looked terribly close. She looked for Ana - and there she was, cradling the baby, and trying to drag Arga. But the younger girl was crying and stumbling, her ankle obviously damaged. No matter how hard Ana pulled her hand, Arga could run no faster than a hobble.
Ana seemed to be calling to Dreamer, but her voice was drowned by the water"s gathering roar. Then Ana stood still, panting hard. She looked at the baby in her arms, and the limping, weeping Arga. It might only have been a heartbeat. It seemed an eternity to the watching Dreamer.