We were behind when Tobik waved his pole and pointed at something ahead. I saw the dark hole of his mouth open but could not hear for a sudden roar as his raft tipped and slid.
Mist towered, swayed, and boiled towards us, but we had just enough time to leap off our raft on to a shingle bank. When we found a way down to the foot of the falls, we found the bodies of Katerin’s baby, one of the boys from Pyke, and enough left of the two rafts for us to lash together a new one. Cautiously, we felt our way down the gorge below the falls, seeing no other sign, and the last hills fell away about us.
This morning Ruka and Peck shouted, “The sea, the sea,” and I remembered that other morning when we reached the inlet. Now Ansik and Jedda are propping up a shelter of driftwood, Ruka and Peck collecting mussels, and Enna is helping me light a fire from the smouldering bracket fungus we carried in a kitful of soil. There is wild spinach and chard to eat with the mussels. Our gear is drying in the first sun in days. Somehow, the ancient knife of Selene has survived. Tonight it will listen as we tell their stories to our dead.
Six of us.
Backed by sandhills and mercy trees, this shallow beach is at the head of a deep harbour, as if the gods had prepared it. Herrings leap ahead of karfish and kingies at the mouth of the river; reefs and tree-covered islands lie further out. Ruka and Peck shout and point at something in the sand, probably pig tracks.
Tomorrow we will look for a spot lying into the north and protected from the south. Water, firewood, flax, and soil for a garden. A place for Jedda to give birth to the child she has carried all this way.
Seven. And if I am, eight.
Enna helps me blow on the fungus till the dry grass flames, catches the dead fern, the splinters of dry wood, and smoke lifts. Her lips move, and I know what she is whispering to the fire, to the sea.
“Without the whale, the tree would fall. Without the tree, the Great House would fall: without the Selene to sing them home, the gods would lose their way: without the gods, the world would fall past the moon and into space.”