Stone Spring Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 - The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 - The Year of the Great Sea: Spring Equinox

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 - The Year of the Great Sea: Summer Solstice

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Two

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Three

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48 - The Year of the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51 - The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54 - The First Year After the Great Sea: Late Winter

  Chapter 55 - The First Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox

  Chapter 56 - The First Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice

  Chapter 57

  Four

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59 - The Fifteenth Year After the Great Sea: Late Spring

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65 - The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70 - The Sixteenth Year After the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72 - The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74 - The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Summer Solstice

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76 - The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Late Summer

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81 - The Seventeenth Year After the Great Sea: Autumn Equinox

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Five

  Chapter 86 - The Thirty-third Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Afterword

  Other Books by Stephen Baxter

  Other Books by Stephen Baxter

  FROM ROC BOOKS

  Flood

  Ark

  FROM ACE BOOKS

  Time’s Tapestry

  Book One: Emperor

  Book Two: Conqueror

  Book Three: Navigator

  Book Four: Weaver

  ROC

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  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Gollancz trade paperback edition. For information contact Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St. Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA.

  Copyright © Stephen Baxter, 2010 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Baxter, Stephen.

  Stone spring/Stephen Baxter.

  p. cm.—(Northland trilogy; bk. 1)

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54546-1

  1. Mesolithic period—Fiction. 2. Climatic changes—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6052.A849S86 2011

  823’.914—dc23 2011031874

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Robert Holdstock

  One

  1

  The comet swam out of the dark. Its light bathed the planet that lay ahead, reflecting from a hemisphere that gleamed a lifeless bone-white. Vast ice caps covered much of North America and central Asia. In Europe a single monstrous dome stretched from Scotland to Scandinavia, in places piled kilometers thick. To the south was a polar desert, scoured by winds, giving way to tundra. At the glaciation’s greatest extent Britain and northern Europe had been abandoned entirely; no human had lived north of the Alps.

  At last, prompted by subtle, cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit, the climate had shifted—and with dramatic suddenness. Over a few decades millennia-old ice receded north. The revealed landscape, scoured to the bedrock, was tentatively colonized by the gray-green of life. Migrant herds and the humans who depended on them slowly followed, taking back landscapes on which there was rarely a trace of forgotten ancestors.

  With
so much water still locked up in the ice, the seas were low, and all around the world swathes of continental shelf were exposed. In northern Europe, Britain was united with the continent by a bridge of land that, as it happened, had been spared the scouring of the ice. As the thaw proceeded, this north land, a country the size of Britain itself, became rich terrain for humans, who explored the water courses and probed the thickening forests for game.

  But now, in the chill nights, eyes animal and human were drawn to the shifting light in the sky.

  The comet punched into the atmosphere. It disintegrated over North America and exploded in multiple airbursts and impacts, random acts of cosmic violence. Whole animal herds were exterminated, and human survivors, fleeing south, thought the Sky Wolf was murdering the land they had named for him. One comet fragment skimmed across the atmosphere to detonate over Scandinavia.

  In time the skies cleared—but the remnant American ice caps had been destabilized. One tremendous sheet had been draining south down the Mississippi river system. Now huge volumes of cold water flowed through the inland sea that covered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, chilling the north Atlantic. Around the world the ice spread from the north once more, and life retreated to its southern refuges. This new winter lasted a thousand years.

  But even as the ice receded again, even as life took back the land once more, the world was not at rest. Meltwater fueled rising seas, and the very bedrock rebounded, relieved of the weight of ice—or it sank, in areas that had been at the edge of the masses of ice and uplifted by its huge weight. In a process governed by geological chance, coastlines advanced and receded. The basic shape of the world changed around the people, constantly.

  And to north and south of the rich hunting grounds of Europe’s north land, generation on generation, the chill oceans bit at the coasts, seeking a way to sever the land bridge.

  2

  The Year of the Great Sea: Winter Solstice

  The day of Ana’s blood tide, with her father missing and her mother dead, was always going to be difficult. And it got a lot worse, early that very morning, when the two Pretani boys walked into her house.

  Sunta, Ana’s grandmother, sat with Ana opposite the door. Ana was holding open her tunic, the skin of her exposed belly prickling in the cold air that leaked in around the door flap. Sunta dipped her fingertips in a thick paste of water, menstrual blood and ochre, carefully painting circles around Ana’s navel. The sign, when finished, would be three big concentric circles, the largest spanning Ana’s ribs to her pubis, with a vertical tail cutting from the center down to her groin. This was the most ancient mark of Etxelur, the sign of the Door to the Mothers’ House—the land of ancestors. Later this painting would be the basis of a tattoo Ana would carry through her life.

  Thus they sat, alone in the house, when the two Pretani boys pushed through the door flap.

  They looked around. They just ignored the women. There was snow on their shoulders and their boots. Under fur cloaks they wore tunics of heavy, stiff hide, not cloth as the Etxelur women wore. The boys dumped their packs on the floor’s stone flags, kicked at pallets stuffed with dry bracken, walked around the peat fire in the big hearth, tested the strength of the house’s sloping wooden supports by pushing at them with their shoulders, and jabbered at each other 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. “Asses 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 ass.”

  The man looked down at her directly for the first time. “What did you call me?”

  “Oh, so you can see me after all. Ass. Ass.” 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 asses.”

  The Pretani’s gaze flickered over her body, like a carrion bird eyeing up a piece of meat. She realized 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 shriveled 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?”

  “I was making a new door.” He pointed. “That door is in the wrong place.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Ana said. “In all our houses the door faces north.”

  The younger boy, Shade, asked, “Why? What’s so special about north? There’s nothing north of here but ocean.”

  “That’s where the Door to the Mothers’ House lies. Where our ancestors once lived, now lost under the sea—”

  Gall snorted. “We have doors facing southeast.”

  “Why?” Sunta snapped at him.

  “Because of the light—it goes around—something to do with the sun. That’s the priest’s bu
siness. All I know is I’m not going to stay in a house with a door in the wrong place.”

  Sunta smiled. “But this is the Giver’s house. It is the largest in Etxelur. If you don’t stay here you’ll have to stay in a smaller house, and it would not be the Giver’s house. What would your father think of that?”

  Gall scowled. “I ask you again—if this is the Giver’s house, where is the Giver?”

  Ana said, “In the autumn my father went to sea to hunt whale.”

  Shade looked at her. “He has not come back?”

  “No”

  Gall sneered. “Then he’s dead.”

  “No!”

  “He’s dead and you have no Giver.”

  “Kirike is not dead,” Sunta said quietly. “Not until the priest says so, or his body washes up on the beach, or his Other, the pine marten, says so in a human tongue. Anyhow we don’t need a Giver until the summer. And even if he returns, even if he were standing here now—”

  “What?”

  “Even then, Pretani ass, you would do as I say, here in my house.”

  Enraged, he ran a dirty thumbnail along the line on his forehead. “See this? I got this scar when I first took a man’s life. I was fourteen years old.”

  Sunta smiled. “If you like I’ll show you the scars I got when I first gave a woman her life. I was thirteen years old.”

  Complicated, baffled expressions chased across Gall’s face. He was evidently grasping for a way out of this while saving his pride. “This house is evidently the least unsuitable in this squalid huddle for sons of Albia. We will stay here. We will discuss the issue of the door later.”

  “As you wish,” Sunta said, mocking. “And we will also discuss how you are going to fix my wall.”

  He was about to argue with that when Lightning burst in. The dog’s tail was up, his eyes bright, tongue lolling, his fur covered in snow. Excited by the presence of the strangers, the dog jumped up at them, barking.