Not in our family, no! We’d lost my brother – why did we now have to put up with this?
‘If that’s how it is,’ said my father, ‘then for the sake of all our kin we must accept it. That’s why we must stay here for now, and let her be.’
So my father had the last word, and after that we let the days go past when we would have launched the boat and gone downriver. Soon my mother went away again. We waited for her to come back.
I’d never seen spring at River Mouth before. The first crumpled hazel leaves unfurled. The birches turned from purple to pale green, and the sallows put out stiff little catkins. Only the oaks still stretched their empty twigs towards the sky, while the ivy clinging to their trunks looked dusty under the new Sun. When we dug for roots the brown marshwater was almost warm against our legs. We chewed fresh garlic leaves as we walked through the woods, and when we pushed aside the scrub with our digging sticks we found violets hiding under the birches like little bits of sky. We gathered sorrel and silverweed, while all along the River toads basked in the first heat and mayflies danced above eddies of still water. Our winter fire seemed to dwindle in the Sun, and when I went inside the tent everything was dark and green as if I’d dived into deep water.
The heat on my back was like the touch of a spirit; all day the good light fell round me in a shower of birdsong. Winter was past: we’d all lived. Esti was born – she had a name – she lived. In spite of these good things I was unhappy. Even when everything has gone well for a small family, it’s good to see the others after the long cold Moons when the family is splintered into little pieces at the winter Camps. It’s like being made whole again. That was the hardest winter I ever lived through. I felt the loss of my brother. I wanted my little daughter to find her kin as soon as possible. That was all the more important because she was Esti, and came from her father’s People. It couldn’t be too soon to plait the careful threads that would bind her to the Auk People. But my father had decided, and so we stayed on at River Mouth Camp.
Haizea and I fished for the brown trout that were beginning to rise from the bottom of the pools. At first we lay on the banks upriver and caught them in our hands. When the Sun grew warmer we grew wary of fishing the upland pools, because these were given to the bears, not us, in Moon of Rushes. Amets killed a young bear that came out to fish in High Tarn. He set the skull in the tree next to the boar skull, so we had both Bear and Boar to watch over us.
Haizea and I scraped the bear hide clean, and stretched it on a frame. We rubbed it with the bear’s brains and ashes, and propped it downwind of a smoky fire. We kept on rubbing it every day until the hide was as soft and white as a swan’s feather on the inside. It’s a beautiful pale-brown pelt – that winter cloak should last me all my life. Once the bears were on the move, hungry after their long sleep, Haizea and I went downstream and fished for trout with lines and baited juniper hooks, though sometimes we sneaked upriver in the early mornings and took the headless bodies of the fish the bears had thrown away. We cut hazel wands and willow withies, and made more eel traps. Every day we walked the shoreline at low tide, taking turns to carry Esti on our backs, and dug for sea-roots. Once the sap began to rise we collected strips of birchbark for tents and baskets. We scraped all the inner bark clean and mashed it up with the sea-roots. We weren’t hungry – I can’t say any better than that.
At last my mother came back. She came into River Mouth Camp at twilight. Haizea and I had caught enough trout to fill a small basket. We were rolling them in sea-root paste, and roasting them on twigs at the outside hearth. As fast as they were cooked we were all eating them, burning our fingers and then licking the juice off them. Esti lay against my heart, eyes half open, watching the firelight flicker, suckling sleepily while I turned the fishes. She was growing firm and round, alert as a wagtail. Haizea was never far from my side, watching over her.
Haizea said:
I was the first to see Mother come back. I just looked up from the fire and there she was, standing at the edge of the clearing. She looked white like a dead person. I screamed. Everyone looked round. Alaia leaped to her feet, holding Esti to her heart.
My father didn’t get up. He said in his usual voice, ‘Welcome back, wife. There’s not much to eat – these girls have managed very badly without you – but we can offer you a small fish if you’re hungry enough.’
My mother smiled and stepped forward. The fire shed its warm light on her and she stopped looking so pale. I hadn’t seen my mother smile since my brother was lost. She said, ‘They look like fine fish to me, a very good catch for the hungry Moons. You should be grateful for your clever daughters. And grateful to the woman who taught them, too!’
I hadn’t heard my mother speak with a laugh in her voice since my brother went away. I felt as if my real mother had been dead all this while and now she’d suddenly come alive. I jumped up and ran into her arms and hugged her. I’d missed her so much. I was only a child, remember. My mother was hugging me, and I was laughing and crying all at once. She spoke to me in the old way: ‘Yes, yes, little one. I’ve come home. It’s all right. Everything is changed and it’s going to be all right.’
I didn’t know what she meant by ‘changed’. I don’t know if she had any idea then of the troubles that lay ahead, or of how she was going to deal with them. But this I can say: although Nekané has travelled so far and done so many things for our People, although she became Go-Between and could never be with us in quite the way she was before, she’s never again rejected her children or been unfaithful to them. After she came back she couldn’t be the sort of mother I’d had before. But that was all right: I was growing older myself, and I had Alaia, and later on Osané. So no one can say I’ve ever been short of a mother, except in that bad winter after Bakar was lost. I don’t even like to remember it. I think we should pass over all that now, and go on to what happened two Moons later, in Egg Moon, when we were at White Beach Camp.
Nekané said:
Before we do that, I’ll tell you how I left behind the woman I’d been before, and how I was born into a world that was new to me. I can’t say everything because it would destroy you to hear it. But the story I’m about to tell won’t hurt you, so there’s no need to look afraid.
I’d wandered far inland, past the Long Loch and the Boat Crossing Path, and by hunters’ paths into the hills around our Mother Mountain. At River Mouth Camp the Year was already beginning to grow strong and green, but it was too young to have reached the hills. I walked back into the old Year, right up into the high snows. I climbed beyond the oaks, through the birch and scrub willow, past juniper and myrtle, up into the empty places where People are not meant to go until the Year has opened the way for them. There was no food up there. It was very cold. I didn’t care. I was thinking only of Bakar. It was in the old Year that he went away, so only by returning to the old Year could I follow him.
When I reached the bare rock, Mother Mountain was hidden in mist and I couldn’t go any further. I squatted down, leaning forward with my arms between my knees to rest my aching back. I stayed there in the shelter of a little cliff while the cloud swirled above my head, sometimes dipping down to smother me. It was too wet and cold to sleep much. I had no food. If I’d had no purpose I’d have died, but my purpose burned inside my ribs and kept me from freezing.
I waited for days and nights and then a dawn came when everything came clear. The cold Sun struck the rocks and made them gleam. I looked at the little cliff above me and saw a place where I could climb up. Lichen and mosses grew among the boulders, but the bloom of the new Year wasn’t on them. I was glad of that, because my purpose lay in the past. I came to the top of the hill. The air was still and cold. A greater world than I had ever seen glimmered at my feet. I saw beyond the lands of our People and the lands of our People’s kin. I saw range upon range of hills, from our own lands which we know, into the far blue where there are no more names.
I saw the Sun cross the sky and set behind an unknown horizon. I saw the stars move through the circling Year. Yet again I saw the Sun cross the sky. I watched it travel through the high paths of summer and the small paths of winter. I saw the Moons wax and wane. I