Water (14 page)

“Nothing directly. I will think what else. Let us see if it appears again to-day.”

It did not, nor the next, though both Iril and Jarro, dreaming the forming wave, sensed strongly

on all four tides that the same large thing was following close behind it. The attack of the serpent

had not been seen from the southern shore, so on the third day Farn brought a raft over on the

ebb to find what was amiss that none had returned on the wave. Fortunately for him and his

crew, the tide was still high, so the monster had the whole estuary to patrol, and missed him.

With him came Iril’s nephew. This man, always a boaster, insisted that he would test the passage

by crossing back on the wave, and persuaded two others to go with him. The serpent rose as

before in the main channel, coiled round the raft, and smashed it to pieces with hammer blows of

its head. None of the men came ashore.

Farn said, “This thing cannot come into the shallows. We can pole the stones singly up along the

shore as far as the river mouth, cross there on a low tide, and return down the southern shore.”

“How many days?” said Mel.

“Two moons or more. We could move at high tide only. The water must cover the mudbanks

each time.”

“Too long. The powers I have laid asleep in the stones will begin to stir at bud-break. I must

have them in place by then.”

“If you were to take them back to Silverspring and wait another year ...” suggested Farn.

“No,” said Iril. “We have a contract. And something else. This serpent, if we sneak the stones

round by the water’s edge or take them back to their place, will it leave these waters, do you

think?”

“Not while Siron chooses to keep the way barred,” said Mel.

“We live by this water,” said Iril. “It is our field. The wave is the ox with which we plough it.

How shall we live if these are taken from us? If people fear that the serpent may return, will they

use our rafts to save a few days’ journey? What are a few days out of a life? By the axe of

Manaw, I will take the stones over, or else die. And I will also overcome and destroy this serpent

that has killed my sister’s son, and my men and passengers. I, Iril, say this.”

The men sitting around the fire muttered praise. Nobody asked how it should be done.

Iril gave orders and worked all night with the men while they built a light raft, buoyed with

skins, with no platform, so that it would float either way up. For the moment it did not lie level in

the water, having extra float-skins on one side, near the sternboard, with a slip rope up to the post

where Iril would stand. Jarro crouched by his side to watch as with his own hands Iril shaped the

inner edge of the sternboard. When the raft was on the water, he levelled it with a net of boulders

lashed above the extra floats. The sun rose over the glistening mudbanks of low tide.

“Give me leaf,” said Jarro. “Let me dream the wave as you go.”

“You are too young,” said Iril. “You dream well without it.”

“No,” said Jarro. “There is something more to dream. I do not know what. Give me leaf, Father.”

Iril passed him the little leather pouch and watched the boy retire to their hut.
Yes,
he thought.

To-day may well be the last time I ride the wave. If so, Jarro must see how I fail.

With two sweepmen, heavily greased against the cold, and with safety lines round their waists,

he took the raft out on the morning wave.

Being so light it travelled fast, and Iril sped it along, slanting the sternboard to its limit against

the wave-foot. All rafts had different quirks, and he had only this short stretch over the shallows

to learn this one’s bad habits. For the moment his mind was wholly on that, but just before they

swept into the main channel, he experienced a sort of internal blink, a flicker, as if something

voiceless had spoken to him.
It is there. It waits.

There was no time for astonishment or wonder. As the raft lurched into the rougher waters of the

channel the serpent reared behind them and arched over as before. Seen this close, its hugeness

and speed were not the worst of it. There was a ferocity about it, a malice, an unstoppable

focussed power as it performed the single act for which it was made. Iril watched in silence.

When its head plunged back into the water, he yelled. The sweepmen flung their weight against

the shafts. Iril tugged at the slip rope, releasing the extra floats, then clung to his post. The

sweepmen crouched and gripped the loops that had been tied in the deck, ready for this moment.

The raft spun. The weight of the boulders tilted the shaped edge of the sternboard into the Wave.

The raft dipped further under the mass of water, stood on its side, was swallowed by roaring

foam, and finally rose clear of the coiling body and well behind the wave, floating in the long

side-eddy for which Iril had been racing.

The sweepmen loosed the net of boulders and heaved them over, levelling the raft once more.

Then they took their sweeps and worked with all their strength to use the flow of the tide behind

the wave to carry them over the mudbank on the upstream side of the channel. Iril twisted to and

fro, watching his course and studying what the serpent did.

Its head had emerged while the raft had been buried in the wave. By the time he could see it

again, it had completed its second coil, and only as it now reemerged discovered that it had

caught nothing. Still it lashed down at the place where the raft should have been, several blows,

before it started to look around. Even then it did not seem to perceive the raft and for a while

continued to search the water close around it. At last it withdrew its neck and disappeared.

Another of those flickers—
It comes back!

A
sudden ruffling of the surface confirmed that the serpent was racing back along the channel to

where the raft had come out of the wave.

By now the men had laid their sweeps aside and were poling their way across shallows. The

serpent’s head emerged and peered round. It saw the raft and turned. When it felt the check of

the mudbank, it reared high out of the water and struck forward, but still fell a good pole-length

short of the raft. Iril told the sweepmen to back water, and then tempted it, judging his distance.

Once it almost stranded itself and needed violent wallowings to get clear, but the tide was still

rising and he dared not stay long. It continued to rage up and down, looking for a way round the

obstacle, long after

Iril had guided the raft over the next channel and into the more regular shallows along which

they could pole their way home, using where they could the secondary currents of inflow and

ebb. It was a weary distance, but every now and then that secondary awareness flickered into

Iril’s mind and showed him the serpent patrolling the deeper—water. Now that he had leisure to

think about it, he understood what had been happening to him, and his heart lightened with the

knowledge that the task he had set himself was a little less impossible.

They came ashore late in the afternoon. Jarro was Availing on the jetty, dizzy with exhaustion

and unaccustomed leaf.

“You spoke in my head,” said Iril.

“You heard?” muttered Jarro. “I was not sure. I was with the serpent in the water. I felt his anger.

With its eyes I saw you on the raft. I called to you in your mind but I heard no answer.”

“You did well,” said Iril. “I give you great praise, my son.”

He turned to Mel.

“This is your gift?” he asked.

“Not mine,” said Mel, “but we have loosed strong powers in this place, I and Siron. Look ...” He

gestured towards the estuary. “You have seen when two strong currents meet in your water, how

the lesser waters around them shift and change. So with the boy. He has dream-powers. He is

young. Those powers have not hardened. He is changed.”

“Such waters are very dangerous,” said Iril. “Not even I can tell how they will flow.”

“No more can I,” said Mel.

The men feasted and praised Iril and the sweepmen for their deed, but Iril shook his head and

turned to Mel.

“What do you know of serpents?” he said.

“Let everyone be silent and still,” said Mel.

He considered, and after a little while a viper came gliding into the firelight. The men shrank

back, but Mel picked the snake up and loosed it into his lap, where it shaped itself into coils and

lay still. He stroked its head with a fingertip.

“A small mind,” he murmured. “A simple pattern. What it does, it does, that being its pattern.”

“I think it does not see very clearly,” said Iril.

“What moves close by, it sees well. Things still, or at a distance, hardly at all. It hears ill also, but

its smelling is very keen. And it feels the tremors of the earth with its body, a footfall, or prey

moving close by.”

“What smells arouse it?”

“Warm flesh.”

“How is its seeing in the dark?”

“Very dim. I speak only of this viper. Other serpents maybe otherwise.”

Mel put the snake down and it slid away into the dark.

Iril went to his cot and slept, dreaming whatever dreams were sent. He felt the wave go by, but

his mind did not move with its onrush. Next morning he climbed with Farn to the bluff above the

landing place.

“I do not take you,” he told Jarro. “It is not good to cram a young head with old memories.”

He did not tell him that he was afraid, afraid for his son in a way that he had never been for

himself.

Farn built a small fire, on which Iril threw leaf. He told his son to feed the fire and see that no

one, not even Mel, came near. Then he sat down, cross-legged, and, breathing the smoke, put

himself into a waking trance. His eyes gazed out across the estuary but he did not see the shining

mudbanks, nor the tide that crept over them, nor the passing wave, nor the level flood, nor the

rush and tumble of its going. All day he remembered moons and seasons, mudbanks and

channels and currents that had come and gone and made themselves again. Between dawn and

sundown he remembered twenty and twenty and seven years of tides. In the evening he woke

himself, and his sons carried him down and set him by a roaring fire and rubbed the life-warmth

back into his limbs.

Mel came.

“Can it be done?”

“With the right wave, perhaps. That may come at the new moon, if a strong south-westerly

should blow.”

“There will be that wind.”

Iril stared at the fire, but his mind saw the dead lagoon on the southern shore where the whale

had stranded. That had happened at a new moon, with a gale from the southwest. So, then, a raft,

of normal length, but narrower, its sternboard shaped thus ... no platform, but rails to grip ... a

third sweep, over the stern ... small decoy rafts, and fire and oil and kindling ... fresh-killed pig in

small pots ...

Mel had seen into his mind.

“I can give you a salve to hide the odour of your own bodies,” he said. “And a cordial against the

cold.”

“Good,” said Iril, and in a louder voice, “I need six men. Perhaps none will live, but there will be

great praise.”

The ring of listeners stood, every man. Iril chose from among the older ones, who had less of

their lives to regret, but none of his own sons. If he died, they would be needed, each in turn, to

take on his contract with Mel, and try to defeat the serpent.

Mel left next day, and Iril set about building his new raft, longer than the first, but again with the

inner corner weighted and then buoyed with extra floats, and again with a strange-shaped

sternboard. As each wave surged up the shoreline, he experimented with small decoy rafts. When

the main raft was finished, he blindfolded his six crew and made them learn various tasks by

touch, and rigged cords to each of them from the place where he would stand so that he could

signal to them in the dark. He talked long with his sons about other possible devices against the

serpent, and also about how the great raft to carry the stones, already being built, should be

finished, and its sections linked to flex with the water surface and yet move all of a piece so that

the full moon wave could float the immense weight over.

Most nights he chewed leaf, but gave Jarro no more. Yet still as he slept and the flood-wave

moved through his mind, he heard and from time to time the flicker of Jarro’s mind, telling him

the serpent’s doings.

Three days before new moon Mel returned, bringing a salve and a cordial, neither magical,

because he could not tell how much his powers would be diminished on water. Next morning he

went up to the bluff and stood and considered until a gale blew up from the southwest, with

sheeting rain and thunder. Iril watched the day wave pass, a whitely churning wall, curled over

into spume at the crest. He could remember few taller. He watched the outrush of the tide, its

torrent piled into ugly shapes by the contrary wind. At the rising half tide his sons carried him up

in the dark to the bluff He made Jarro stand by his side, and this time gave him a little leaf to

chew. Mel came too, and by the almost continual lightning they watched the wave go by, huger

yet, roaring above the roar of the storm, its crest streaking away before it under the lash of the

wind. It was hard to sense anything through such tumult, but yes, perhaps, two or three polelengths behind the wave, like a huge shadow ...