A horn brayed. Lutha shoved the baby at the girl who took it tenderly. “Tell them I must know now!” She ran up a flight of steps to a platform connected with the upper storey of the Roundhouse. I went to follow, still wondering about the baby’s father, but the bodyguard of young women crossed spears to bar my way.
Another of those shrieks. Nobody else seemed to have heard its agony. Lutha stared towards the hills behind. I followed her gaze: tiny figures filed from the hills and on to a causeway. The Headland was almost an island.
I shaded my eyes with both hands as if to see better, but closed my ears with my thumbs against another shriek. On three sides of the Headland the palisade was built along the tops of cliffs. A fourth wall of posts closed off the beach. Fighting platforms at intervals and over the lake and causeway gates meant attackers came under fire before they could get close enough to shoot their own arrows.
Thatch-roofed wooden huts, each with its stack of firewood, lined the terraces below the Roundhouse. Steam rose from earth ovens. The Roundhouse was elaborately roofed – wooden shingles. Water from a spring stepped down through pools. Storehouses on tall legs – spike-fringed against rats. Within a stockade, its high gate defended by guards, were two long, low, windowless huts. Canoes were drawn up under the causeway and on the beach.
At the far end of the causeway: gardens, orchards, and a glint of blue, a stream. I had wanted to be a Farmer and Gardener, to settle in one place. Old Hagar argued Travellers did not have such a thing. Lutha had found a place of her own.
The tiny figures had grown to a patrol filing between pole fences this end of the causeway. Attackers would have to run a gauntlet between defenders protected by trenches and platforms. A tall figure leading the patrol seemed to spring rather than just walk. Now they were being admitted, trotting up.
I took my thumbs out of my ears. The air shook with a dying gibberish shriek like blood painted on the air. As the patrol formed a line below Lutha, a young woman ran from behind the Roundhouse. She climbed halfway up the steps, whispered something urgent.
The patrol leader was followed by a dog who lifted his great head and stared at Nip, looked from her to me, lifted an ugly lip, showed fangs. The man saluted Lutha, smiled. The flicker of a look at me, and he stared at Lutha’s emblem around my neck.
“Three lots of Salt Men camped in the hills, Lutha.” His voice lilted, amused, musical. “More on the beach behind Hekkat. Two canoes and seven rafts. They’re ready for an attack, but when? We tried to catch one on his own, but had no luck.”
Restless, even as he spoke, he moved his weight from foot to foot. His least movement had a quality of litheness, of balance. Straight-backed, head poised, elegant. Smiling.
Lutha smiled back. Physical attraction hung between them, almost visible. I gaped at their beauty. Hurt, confused, I had to admit the sense of her choice.
Her bodyguard moved uneasy. A couple whispered. Lutha’s face changed, a sudden expression of superiority. The man’s face changed, too, so brief I almost missed it. He looked dashed. Then his smile was fixed back in place.
“When will they attack?” said Lutha. “First light tomorrow morning.”
The shrieks! The captured Salt Men tortured. Why was it so important to Lutha, to know first?
She swung down the steps. My eyes staring at her legs beneath the jig of her short skirt, its red hem dancing above her knees. I looked away.
“See everything is ready! They must think we are asleep.”
A sweeping bow and gesture from the patrol leader dismissed his own information, recognised Lutha’s. His humility was convincing, the movement as graceful as all his others, but Nip nudged against my hand. I glanced down, saw what she was watching: the man’s toes tightened, clenched the ground, relaxed.
“This is Ish,” said Lutha. “Kalik!” She explained my appearance with her father, and his death.
Lutha signalled to the young women who surrounded an open-walled shelter beside the Roundhouse. We followed her towards it, Kalik questioning me.
“You came under the mountain with Lutha’s father? What did you call him? The Shaman!” And I found myself wanting to impress Kalik, to tell him about the things I had kept secret. Such was his charm, he would have had me talking about the Library, the Carny, the Droll. Something stopped me just in time.
The girl holding the baby stood beside the shelter. We were walking by them: the baby squealed: Lutha struck the girl. Kalik talked on as if he had seen nothing. The armed young women impassive.
A red weal across her face, the girl rocked the baby, patting, distracting it. And Lutha strode into the shelter ahead of Kalik dancing behind her, talking. I heard a private note to their voices. A tear trickled down the girl’s cheek, across the raised red blotch. Impassive, she made no move to wipe it away. “Ish!” Lutha called and, Nip at my heel, I followed Kalik and his menacing dog.
In baskets of plaited flax, the bodyguard brought steaming fish, potatoes, green-leaved vegetables. Lutha passed her hands above. “Thanks to the Mother,” she intoned. I thought of the last time I had seen food cooked in earth ovens and put the memory out of mind.
About the shelter, the young women sat and ate. I saw Raka, the jealous one, slip into the outside of the circle. The others drew away from her. At last, somebody offered her food, but she sat face lowered.
Several times Kalik made the slightest gesture, a movement of his hand, his head, and I knew by Lutha’s smile he was mimicking somebody. The girls watched him, too. Once or twice Kalik stood, took a couple of steps in someone’s manner. Even his voice changed as he became other people, so I began to hear as well as see them.
When he described the Salt Men on the beach behind Hekkat, he leapt, paced and gestured until I saw their leader. I knew the way the Salt Men held themselves, how they strode, how their leaders spoke. Kalik revealed so much of others through their movements – yet kept so much of himself hidden.
A picture formed in my mind. Something I had seen while drifting on an ice island across the strait from the North Land. Taur lying senseless in the shelter, I looked outside into the cold silence.
Our island was in an open patch of water walled by fog – like a flat clearing in a dense white forest. Above the fog, glistening white blue green in thin sun, an icy peak reared. Carried on some invisible current, the iceberg loomed sudden, silent, inexorable. Our floating island of ice fragile in its path.
As I wondered how I might drag Taur aboard the iceberg, ponderous its white castle tilted. Turrets, towers, spires leaned, creaked, groaned. And the huge submerged base rolled itself into sight: vast, dark, and sluggish. I had not known so much of the iceberg was hidden below water. Booming, it crashed down, righting itself.
Its wave ran up our ice island, divided either side of the ice shelter I had built for Taur, spilled off, dribbled to silence. The white horror invisible again in fog.
Something, intuition, warned me that Kalik, too, showed little of his real self on the surface. That image of the iceberg’s hidden mass saved me from saying too much. I took its warning and was grateful, then and later.
If Lutha was the leader of the Headland People, why had she bothered to outsmart him with information? Had she ordered the Salt Men tortured to death? Why were we sitting under the shelter, instead of inside the Roundhouse? I looked closer at Kalik.
His tunic of deerskin fitted him closely. He was brown-skinned, black-eyed. Sprawled gracefully on cushions. Fine-boned arms and legs. Long narrow fingers on shapely hands. I had noticed one or two of the bodyguards stare at him, remind themselves, and look away. The supercilious look again. Were they supposed to ignore men?
Even without knowing who he was talking about, I laughed as Kalik mimicked this one and that. No wonder Lutha loved him. A glance passed between them. A look of complicity, a question from Kalik, a reply from Lutha. My fingers found the emblem at my throat.