Stone Spring Read Online Free

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 the southern beaches. Fires burned all along the shore, the tanners and knappers and fisherfolk working, brilliant human sparks in the drab darkness of the night. The moon’s cold white light glimmered from stretches of open water, on the ocean, in the bay of Etxelur, and across the boggy landscape. At times, Ana thought, Etxelur seemed more water than land.
    Once over the causeway they headed north towards the islands, following a trail through low, rounded hills that, under sparse snow, were coated with dry, brown, fallen bracken, lying like lank hair, with here and there the stubborn green of grass. As they broke out at the shore the wind hit them, a hard steady gust coming off the sea, and white-capped waves growled. They clambered down the last line of dunes to the beach. Their boots crunched over gravel eroding from the dunes, fringing the level sand. On the beach itself the tide was low, and rock formations glistened, exposed to the air, dark with clinging weed and barnacles. There was much wrack gathered up in bands, strips and tubes of seaweed, bits of driftwood pushed high up the beach, relics of a winter storm. Ana’s footstep stirred the blanched, disarticulated remnants of a crab.
    They came to the middens. These were heaps of mollusc shells and fishbone and other detritus, tall and long, each curving gracefully like the crescent