Water (13 page)

windings, wide as a man’s thigh and many paces long, with the tail still unseen in the cave. The

head reared up, weaving from side to side, peering for its target.

Mel gestured with his right hand, held low. Iril sensed a movement close behind him, smelt a

sharp reek, but did not flinch as a beast paced close beside him, cat-shaped but large as an ox, its

fur yellow-brown blotched with black. Saliva dripped from the yellow, curving fangs, as long as

walrus tusks. As it passed Iril, its tail twitched against his thigh, hard, like a rope’s end. By that

he knew it was no sending but a thing, itself.

The beast faced the serpent, tense, balanced, watching for the strike. The serpent’s head swayed

back and forth, probing. The beast moved, seeming to start its spring, but it was a feint. The

forward flash of the serpent’s head was too quick for Iril to follow, as was the beast’s

counterstroke, but then they were facing each other again, the beast apparently unharmed but the

serpent with dark red blood oozing from a gash behind its head. It resumed its weaving, but the

movement now seemed less certain, and when the beast took a half pace nearer it withdrew,

turned back on itself and slithered into the cave. Siron followed it without a word, making a

gesture as she passed into the darkness. The cave vanished, and the stream now welled directly

from the turf.

Mel scratched his beast between the shoulder-blades and dismissed it. It stalked towards a group

of grazing sheep, which moved nervously away, all but one that stood waiting blindly. The beast

killed it with a blow and dragged its carcass into the trees.

Mel walked up the mound and round the ring of stones, laying a hand on each in turn and

marking some with a smear of orange stuff which he took from a small pot. The women had

vanished into their huts. Iril watched the men begin to dig, and to set up the tackle they would

need to lift the first stone onto its rollers. They knew what they were doing, he decided. He

signalled to the litter bearers, who came and carried him back to the pool below the waterfall.

The crevice did not close up on them, and the track was clear all the way.

The pool was apparently close enough to Silverspring for the stones to be hauled to it one by one

without Mel losing his control, so having seen to the floating of the first of them, Iril returned to

his trade. There were others beside Mel who needed to cross the water, and it would be a moon

and another moon before all ten stones were ready to float down to the estuary. The problem of

how to build and manage a raft large enough to take them all across the water together filled

Iril’s spare hours.

Women travelled to Silverspring for the midwinter rite. Iril said nothing to them but took no fees.

They came back shaken and disconsolate, saying that they had been unable to find the way, even

those who had made the journey often before. The night after the last of them had gone, Iril

chewed leaf and lay down in his cot to dream the wave, as he had done many nights since his

return from Silverspring, trying to set his great raft on it in his dream, and feel how the inert

thing might move in response to the moving waters. In the small hours of the dark the wave

swept through his mind as it swept up the estuary. After a lifetime of practice he could direct his

dream to any part of its passage, and know why the currents and eddies and cross-currents

flowed as they did, and why they changed and reformed through the seasons, so that he and his

sons could ride both ebb and flow through the year.

This night as he travelled with the surging tide in his dream, and set his dream raft upon it, he

sensed something else close by, a great mass that was neither raft nor water, but moved easily in

the current, of its own will, as a bird does in the wind. Many, many years earlier, a whale had

stranded in a lagoon below the village after a wild high tide, and when it had died, there had been

prodigious feasting. Never had any man seen so great a beast. Could this be another such? It

seemed yet larger. Though he had merely sensed it, and in a dream only, Iril knew it was there.

He was not the only one. He woke and saw Jarro squatting by his bedside, waiting for him to

open his eyes. He grunted, enquiringly.

“Something behind the wave,” said Jarro. “Big. It came in the dream.”

“Who gave you leaf?”

(It was not good to get the habit too young, as Iril himself had been forced to do.)

“I ate no leaf,” said Jarro. “The dream came, like when I was a child. The thing was there. It was

not wide, but long, long.”

Iril frowned. His own easy childhood dreamings were lost beyond recall. But he felt he could

remember every moment of the night, a few nights after his father had died, when he had first

chewed leaf and lain down to dream the wave. How clearly that dream had come, and with what

a mixture of terror and exultation. Leaf was rare and expensive. Wealthy men chewed it for their

own pleasure. Chieftains gave it to their warriors before battle. But for Iril, as for other dreamworkers and seers, it was a necessary tool because it freed the hidden dream. Yet Jarro had

dreamed the wave without it, and seen the thing behind the wave more clearly than Iril had

himself.

Next ebb, though there was no need, he crossed the water, taking Jarro with him, and climbed to

the bluff. Iril chewed leaf.

“Watch,” he said, and as Jarro settled cross-legged, he wrapped himself in furs against the thin,

sleety north-easter and lay down to dream. As he slept, the water sifted seaward in his mind,

dwindling through its channels until the mud-banks emerged to reek in the sun. Then the tide

returned and crept back over them until it lay level from shore to shore.

All this time Iril sensed nothing strange or new. The water was mere water. But shortly before

half tide, when the main surge came and the wave was formed, Jarro woke him.

“It is there, Father,” he said. “It waits.”

“You also slept?”

“No, Father. Waking, the dream came.”

Without leaf? Without sleep? Iril had had both, but already for him the dream was weakening.

Vaguely the forming wave stirred in his mind, with something even vaguer beyond it. He hauled

himself up and stood, watching the water. A raft was waiting to cross, with his sister’s son in

charge. A large load for this slack season: a horse dealer with five ponies, still half wild; a pot

merchant from Hotpool, returning with empty panniers; two cousins journeying to the oracle at

Glas, hoping to settle an argument that might otherwise turn into a blood feud. The estuary was

ruffled by the crosswind, but the moon was well into its wane, so it should be an easy crossing

on a middling wave.

The wave, imperceptible lower down, reached the sudden narrowing at Owl Point and

hummocked itself up. Its hairline formed across the grizzled surface. Iril called, his sister’s son

waved, and the men poled the raft out. The close-tethered horses bucked and squealed. The wave

neared, a good steady one, barely flecked with foam. It picked the raft up, moving it forward and

sideways so evenly that the horses calmed a little. Nevertheless Iril’s tension rose. He had

chewed leaf too often since his return from Silverspring, and its power had built up in his

bloodstream until even fully awake he was dimly aware of a continuing dream, and of the tide

flowing in his mind. With the same uncertainty he now sensed the thing that was not water, huge,

unknown, coming invisibly up behind the wave. He could not tell where, but because of its size,

he guessed it must be in the main channel. Even at half flood, nowhere else was deep enough.

The raft slid on. Before and behind the wave the wrinkled water remained unchanged. Iril shook

his head and muttered. He was old, he had chewed too much leaf, he was starting to dream

untruths. That had happened to his grandfather. He must ease off, or he would build his great raft

amiss and so fail in his contract. He was shaking his head again, as if trying to shake the

fraudulent dream out of it, when Jarro spoke. In the grip of the trance, Iril had forgotten he was

there.

“Now!” he gasped, horror in the single word, startling Iril into full awareness.

And then the thing happened. They saw it sooner than the men on the raft. Iril’s sister’s son, up

on the platform, had his eyes on the line he must travel, while crew and passengers were below

the wave crest and the thing began a pole-length behind it.

A shape like a branchless tree shot out of the water, rushing in on the raft and at the same time

curving forward and over until the men there saw it suddenly towering above them. Heads tilted,

arms were thrown up, the raft lost its footing on the wave and slewed as the thing struck down,

not at the raft itself but into the water beyond it. Now the arch spanned the raft and closed on it.

The head emerged behind the sternboard, shooting on and over to make a second coil, now

gripping the raft, hauling it back through the wave, tilting it, spilling all that was loose into the

churning water, while the head emerged for the third time, hovered a moment and hammered

down onto the timbers, blow after blow, smashing the structure apart in an explosion of sunlit

foam.

Iril, appalled, whispered prayers to Manaw for his men and passengers, though he knew that no

one would live long in such water at this season, whether the serpent found them or not. But the

shock had cleared the dream vagueness away and he watched with steady eyes, studying the

thing as he might have studied an unexpectedly altered sandbank. Its head was much like the

head of the serpent that had come from Siron’s cave, only enormously larger. Its body too was

much like the body of that serpent, but as thick as the trunk of a large tree. Its length was hidden,

but Iril could see how the water was churned for many pole-lengths along the main channel, and

how in places solid humps arose as the hinder end threshed in response to the writhings up front.

When the raft was demolished the thing swam on up the channel and doubled back, with a polelength or so of its neck held clear of the water. From time to time it struck down at something it

saw. At one point it rose with a man’s body caught round the waist between its jaws. It thrashed

him to and fro, like a dog killing a rat, and swallowed him whole. It continued to cruise the

channel for a while, but at last slid under the surface and disappeared.

Mel had said, “If you strike trouble, send for me.” Iril sat on the grass, bowed his head and made

a mind picture of Silverspring, of Mel standing beside the now broken ring of stones. When he

looked up, Mel was in front of him, with the estuary and the snow-mottled hills of the far shore

just visible through his cloak and body. Iril told him aloud what he had seen. Mel whispered in

his mind, “I will come.” The shape vanished.

Only the horse dealer came living to the land. When the serpent had struck, one of the ponies had

managed to tangle itself with its neighbour, so the dealer had loosed its tethers and had looped its

halter rope round his wrist. The impact had tossed both man and beast into the water, still tied to

each other. The horse in panic had struck out for the shore, and the man had managed to haul

himself up alongside it and cling to its neck, where its body heat had perhaps helped keep him

alive a little longer. The luck of the secondary currents behind the wave had carried them

shorewards. Watchers at the jetty had seen this, and four of them had taken a light raft out and

reached them. By this time the man was unconscious and trailing again at the rope end, but

they’d cut him free and brought him ashore, with the horse still swimming beside the raft, and

dried and wrapped and warmed him at the fire, and he had revived.

When he could talk, he confirmed what Iril, seeing it from a distance, had thought. The thing was

like a land serpent, but unimaginably huge. It was not smooth-skinned, like an eel, but had dark,

blue-grey scales and vertically slitted eyes. That was all he had had time to see, hearing the yells

of alarm and looking up over his shoulder as the head struck down.

That night Iril took no leaf. He made Jarro move his bedding closer to his own, and as the wave

formed, woke himself and reached out and felt for Jarro’s arm. The flesh was stiff and

shuddering with nightmare, so Iril woke the boy and held him in his arms like a baby as the wave

went by, and again in the faint light of dawn as the ebb began and the monster returned to the

sea.

Jarro slept late, and when he rose he was heavy-eyed and pale, but he said, “To-night do not

wake me, Father. It is better that I watch this thing, and learn its ways.”

Mel was there in the morning in his own body, though it was three days’ march to Silverspring.

“Siron caused this,” he said. “I did not think she had the power.”

“Can you counter it?” asked Iril.

“My power is from the Fathergod. It is of air and fire, the creatures of daylight. Hers is from the

old Earth-mother. It is of water and under-earth. I have wondered why she has made no move to

delay our taking the stones, though she would have known that I could overcome her.”

“She could perhaps have dried out the river.”

“She would not do that. The river is holy.”

“Then you can do nothing about this serpent.”