Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter

of the children sang a song in praise of the little mother of the land. The two Pretani boys, who wouldn’t let themselves be excluded, whooped and hollered aggressive hunting songs of their own.
    Zesi thought she could feel everybody’s relief to be off on this adventure after the long winter. Even the dogs ran and yapped in excitement, even Lightning who had spent the winter pining for his owner, Kirike.
    They headed south, making for the valley of the river they called the Little Mother’s Milk. Away from the coast the land rose and became a sandstone fell, bleaker and more exposed. In places huge layered rocks lay tumbled, as if dropped by giants.
    The sun was bright, but a spring mist hung in the air, glowing with light, masking the plains of the far horizon. To either side of the trail, littered with loose, pale sand worn free of the soft underlying rock by footsteps human and animal, the heather had begun to grow, thick and short and green. Zesi found some hawthorn as she walked along, and absently plucked the buds, still early, bright green. They had a rich, nutty flavour when she chewed them. And the first pileworts were out, a bright and early flower with shining yellow petals. She pointed this out to the priest, for it was a good treatment for piles, and worth collecting.
    But the country was troubling her, as she sang her songs with the priest. It had been some years since the last walk, and while the trail was easy to find it seemed to Zesi that in some places the ancient songs of the land, with their lists of landmarks and directions, did not match what she saw before her eyes.
    The ground was boggier than it used to be, and new ponds pooled in hollows. Here was a stand of trees she remembered playing in as a child. Now the birch were leafless and dead, though a couple of alders survived, and where she remembered fern and grass there now grew samphire and cordgrass. When she dipped her finger in the muddy water that pooled around the surviving alders, she tasted salt. Very strange.
    At last the path led them down into the valley of the Milk, steep-sided and cloaked with wood. The pace slowed as people spread out to look for water or to hunt, or bled the birch trees of their sap for resin for rope-making, or inspected fallen trees for flint nodules dragged up out of the earth by the roots.
    Zesi was relieved when Gall ran off into the first dense bit of forest they came to, stabbing spear in his hand.
    The younger Pretani, Shade, however, stayed close by, walking with her. He was taken with the holloways they followed, paths close to the river that had been worn into the earth. They were channels choked with debris, plant growth, tree roots, last year’s leaves, and pools of brackish water. The people kicked them clear as they walked.
    As the sun started to go down they stopped to make shelter for the night, close to the river. People worked busily, collecting wood for lean-tos and for the fires.
    Zesi sat at the edge of a pond and set to work using a flint knife to dig out a stand of bulrushes. Later she would char their thick stems on the fire, and they would suck out the starchy interior.
    Shade was still close by, as he had been all day. He had an endearing awkwardness, as if he was never quite sure what he should be doing.
    They spotted hares chasing each other through the long grass. Two big animals faced each other, their long black-tipped ears bristling, a male and female, and they stood up on their back legs and boxed with their front paws - mad with lust, Zesi thought, for it was that time of year.
    Watching the hares, Shade spoke to her shyly. ‘This land is very old,’ he said. ‘So old your feet have worn tracks into the earth.’
    ‘We follow the tracks our ancestors made when they first walked here, following the little mothers as they made the world. Where’s that brother of yours? He’s been gone a long time.’
    ‘He is a great hunter. Sometimes, at home, he is away for days, alone. He