in their own guttural language. To Ana it was as if two bear cubs had wandered into the house.
For her part Sunta didn’t even look up. ‘Pretani,’ she murmured.
Fourteen years old, Ana had only a blurred memory of the last time Pretani had come to Etxelur, a memory of big men who smelled of leather and tree sap and blood. ‘What are they doing in our house? I thought the snailheads were coming for the midwinter gathering.’
Sunta, sitting cross-legged, was stick-thin inside a bundle of furs. She was forty-seven years old, one of the oldest inhabitants of Etxelur, and she was dying. But her eyes were sharp as flint. ‘Arses they are, like the last time they were here, like all Pretani, like all men. But it is custom for the chief Pretani to lodge in my house, the house of the Giver’s mother, and here they are. Oh, just ignore them.’ She continued working on the design on Ana’s belly, her clawlike finger never wavering in the smooth arcs it drew.
But Ana couldn’t take her eyes off the Pretani. She tried to remember what her mother had told her about them before she died. They were younger than they had looked at first. Boy-men, from the forests of Albia.
Under tied-back mops of black hair, both of them wore beards. The older one had a thick charcoal-black line tattooed on his forehead. But the younger one, who was probably not much older than Ana, had a finer face, a strong jaw, thin nose, high brow, prominent cheekbones. No forehead scars. He peered into the stone-lined hole in the ground where they kept limpets for use as bait in fishing, and he studied the way the house had been set up over a pit dug into the sand, knee deep, to give more room. These were features you wouldn’t find in houses in the woods of Albia, she supposed, where nobody fished, and drainage would always be a problem. The younger boy was similar enough to the other that they must be brothers, but he seemed to have a spark of curiosity the other lacked.
He glanced at Ana, a flash of dark eyes as he caught her watching him. She looked away.
His brother, meanwhile, raised his fur-boot-swathed foot and swung a kick at the wall, not quite opposite where the women sat. Brush snapped, and layers of dried kelp fell to the floor. Even a little snow fell in.
At last Sunta rose to her feet. She wore her big old winter cloak, sealskin lined with gull down, and as she rose stray wisps of feathers fluttered into the air around her. She wasn’t much more than two-thirds the size of the Pretani, but she looked oddly grand. ‘Stop that.’ She switched to the traders’ tongue. ‘I said, stop kicking my wall, you big arse.’
The man looked down at her, directly for the first time. ‘What did you call me?’
‘Oh, so you can see me after all. Arse. Arse.’ She bent stiffly and slapped her bony behind, through the thickness of her cloak.
Ana sought for the words in the unfamiliar tongue. ‘But then,’ she said, ‘grandmother calls all men arses.’
The Pretani’s gaze flickered over her body, like a carrion bird eyeing up a piece of meat. She realised she was still holding open her tunic, exposing her throat and breasts and belly. She fumbled to close it.
Her grandmother snapped, ‘Leave that. You’ll smudge the paint.’ In the traders’ tongue she said, ‘You. Big fellow. Tell me your name.’
The man sneered. ‘Get out of my way.’
‘You get out of my way.’
‘In my country the women get out of the way of the men, who own the houses.’
‘This isn’t your country, and I thank the mothers for that.’
He looked around. ‘Where is the Giver? Where is the man who owns this house?’
‘In Etxelur the women own the houses. This is my house. I am the oldest woman here.’
‘From the shrivelled look of you, I think you are probably the oldest woman in the world. My name is Gall. This is my brother Shade. In our country our father is the Root. The most powerful man. Do you understand? We have come to this scrubby coastal place to hunt and to trade and to let you hear our songs of killing. Every seven years, we do this. It is an old custom.’
Sunta said, ‘And did you travel all this way just to kick a hole in my wall?’