Water (15 page)

When the wave was gone, Iril bent and bawled in Jarro’s ear.

“What did you see or feel?”

“It is there,” said Jarro confidently, his voice suddenly loud in the silence that Mel had made

around them. “It is stronger than the wave.”

Iril turned to Mel.

“Such a wind again, to-morrow night,” he said.

“It will be.”

“The rain? The lightning?”

“As you choose.”

“Then none.”

They returned to the huts and slept. Iril did not climb to the bluff again to watch the day wave,

but while it roared by lay half tranced on his cot, dreaming what those huge tides might have

done to the pattern of mudbanks. By mid-afternoon the rain had ceased and the wind settled to a

steady southwest gale. He woke and went to the landing place to see to the loading and trimming

of the raft. At dusk they ate well—this might be their last meal, ever, so why not?—and talked of

doings on the water long ago, and the astounding idiocies of passengers. Jarro sat with his

brothers, silent, his head bowed, and did not eat at all. Already, though the return tide had barely

begun to flow, and even without the leaf Iril had given him, he was beginning to dream the wave.

Before the meal was over, he rose. Iril heaved himself up on his crutch and hobbled beside him

as he moved like a sleep-walker towards their hut. In the doorway Iril put his a hand on his arm

and stopped him.

“Be with the serpent,” he said. “I will do what I do.”

“I am with it now,” Jarro said in the voice of one muttering in his sleep. “It is far west, waiting in

deep water.” He turned and groped his way into the hut. Next, the pig was slaughtered and its

pieces sealed into pots. Iril and the men he’d chosen smeared their bodies with grease, mixed

with Mel’s salve, and at half tide poled out and well upstream from their usual starting place.

There they put down anchor stones. Iril chewed a little leaf.

They waited, tense but patient. The night was solid dark. Now a yellow light glimmered from the

point below the landing place, where a watcher had fired a pile of dry bracken to signal the

passing of the wave. The men loosed the anchors and poled a little further out while the

sweepmen headed the raft upstream until the polemen, up at the bow, could steady it against a

mudbank as the wave came on. Now above the wind they heard its deep mutter, swelling to a

growl, to a roar.

“Way!” bellowed Iril, and the four men flung their weight on the poles to start the raft moving,

the lead man on either side calling his pace to the one behind so that they could now march

together back along the deck, driving the raft upstream. All this they had practised blindfolded.

They were ready for the sudden heave of the raft as the wave surged against the sternboard, and

the bank against which the poles had been thrusting slid away beneath them. They laid the poles

down and lashed them, their hands knowing the knots without sight or thought, and then crawled

to their stations on either side of Iril and gripped the loops of rope set there for them.

Only now, with the pressure of action over, did they truly sense the force of the thing that drove

them. They had all ridden many, many waves, but none like this, this immense weight of ocean

hauled up by the big moon, piled yet higher by the two-day gale, and now forced to cram itself

into the narrowing funnel between the northern and southern shores. Not even Iril had known

such a wave, this thundering wall, three times the height of a man, curving up behind the sternboard to a crest that hung almost over them, invisible in the starless dark, but heard in the shriek

of the wind that whipped the spray from it, and the wave itself sensed, not only by Iril but by all

of them, as a huge, cold, killing mass, driving them on.

But the raft, lying slant on the wave-foot with light foam creaming along the sternboard, seemed

to move in a pocket of stillness in the lee of that wall, just as Iril had foreseen in his dream

trance. With his left hand he gripped the safety rail, with the signal cords fastened to either side

of it. With his right he managed his sweep, not to guide the raft but to sense the wave that drove

it, feel the angle at which the raft lay to it, as well as any change within it. For a while he kept the

angle low, as he was aiming for a different section of the channel than on his trial venture with

the serpent. When they reached it, then would be the need for speed.

So they swept on in the roaring calm. All knew the dangers of these waters, had seen raft-fellows

washed away and lost. Tension keyed but did not confuse them as the long moments passed. Iril

waited, folly awake, his senses merely sharpened by the morsel of leaf he had taken. The wave

spoke to him through his palm on the sweep shaft, while through the soles of his feet he

understood the slither of waters beneath the raft. As the tremors minutely altered, he charted

channels and mudbanks until he sensed the long curve of the bank that guided the main current.

Almost at once Jarro’s thought flickered into his mind.

It is here. I am with it. It comes!

Iril pulled twice on the cord that led to the loop gripped by the first poleman on his left.

The man tapped his mate on the shoulder. Together they crawled to the decoy rafts, broke open a

pot of pig meat, slipped the skins off the stack of oil-soaked timber on one raft, opened their fire

pot, dipped in a taper and thrust it into the stack. As soon as the flames bit, they slid the decoy

overboard. By the time they were back in their places, the decoy was trailing along the wave-foot

at the end of its cable with the timber blazing.

Now they could see, but at first only the glare of the flames and the glimmer of their reflection

from the wrinkled surface of the wave. Then, as their pupils narrowed, they saw the wave itself,

its towering closeness, the round of its wall curving back and then over to the glittering windshredded crest. The decoy rode lightly, tilted towards the sheer of the wall. Iril watched it only

long enough to check that it was well set, then signalled through the cords to the sweepmen, him

on the left to pull and him on the right to hold water, thus widening the angle of the sternboard to

the wave, spilling more of the impelling force from its back edge and sweeping them faster along

the line of the wave.

Half hypnotised, the crew stared at the light and the endlessly self-renewing wall, but Iril turned

the other way to watch the small, pulsing curl of foam where the fore-end of the sternboard met

the wave, telling him that the balance of the raft against the wave-foot was now at its limit. He

could travel no faster. If he tried, the board would dig into the wall, the wave would crash down

on them and they would be lost.

Now!
whispered Jarro.

Out of the corner of his eye Iril saw the mouth of a pole-man open in a cry unheard above the

roaring. The man pointed, up and beyond. Iril grabbed and jerked the cord that led to him—he’d

told them that if the serpent appeared, they must not move. The man froze. Carefully Iril turned

his head.

Directly over the decoy, black as the night but iridescent where the flame-light touched it, the

serpent’s body arched from above the wave crest. The head was already plunging to encircle the

decoy. As it reached the water, the poleman there loosed the anchor-stone that held the tow rope

and flung it overboard. The two rafts swept apart. For the space of three heartbeats they saw the

flame recede, and then the stone reached the cable end and dragged the decoy under, and they

were in darkness again.

Now Iril could only guess how long it might be before the serpent stopped hunting among the

ruins of the decoy and came after them again, as he was sure it would. This was why Siron had

sent it. He waited for Jarro’s flash of thought, but it did not come. Half way along the southward

sweep of the main channel, he signalled for the second decoy to be launched. As before, the glare

of the flame seemed at first too much to bear, but eased and became the centre of a sphere of

light with the raft at its edge, sliding in that weird stillness along the wave-foot with the roaring

black waters behind and below.

Yet again they waited, tenser than before, but still the serpent did not appear. Iril began to fear

that they had too thoroughly tricked it and they would have faced this danger for nothing. The

crossing itself was pointless. They could never in this way bring over the great raft that was to

carry the stones. That must come by day, with twenty and twenty men with poles and sweeps,

who could be called to or signalled to by sight. It must come slowly too, on a moderate wave,

easy prey ...

No. The serpent must come now. It must know that its true target was still upon the water.

Before the timber was half-burnt, some flaw in the wind let a dollop of spray fall and quench it.

Iril signalled for the tow rope to be loosed and the third decoy readied, but now there was a delay

as the men had not expected the order so soon. A poleman came to check, bellowing above the

wave-roar. Then he had to go back and tell the others, not hurrying, so as not to become

entangled in the signal cords. Time passed that could not be spared. Any moment now, the

channel would start its eastward curve, and shortly after that, it would be too late. At last, as the

light flared and the decoy drifted away, a flicker from Jarro.

There!

One sharp cry, like a yell of sudden pain. And then something else, flickering still but continuing

like the reverberations of that yell, not in the language of thought, but pure feeling, a furious cold

lust, a hunting rage, hunting him, Iril, smelling him through the blind dark, sensing him by the

tremors of the water round the raft. The mind of the serpent. And then it came.

It attacked this time along the line of the wave. Its head rose from the upcurve beyond the decoy,

arched forward and plunged back in, close behind the main raft. As it did so, it struck the tow

rope hard enough to jar the whole structure. Water foamed over the sternboard as its angle

against the wave faltered. Iril and the sweepmen wrestled with the bucking sweepshafts to set it

true. The man who had been waiting to loose the towrope kept his head and heaved the anchor

rock over. For a moment the raft teetered on the edge of foundering, but as the wave drowned the

decoy, it regained its angle and swept on in the dark.

This time Iril was sure that the serpent must have seen them, lit by the flames of the decoy only

just beyond where its head struck down. Even as it went through its pattern of coiling round its

prey, crushing it, hammering it to bits, some thing in its slow brain was telling it that this was not

what it had been sent for. By the flicker in his mind he could sense the process, the lust of

destruction turning to disappointment, to hatred and pursuit renewed. Well, if it came, it came,

and who chooses to die in the dark? The moment was almost right. Down the grain of his sweep

Iril could sense an alteration in the layer where the wave’s root moved against the steadier

underlying water, telling him that the raft had now reached a point where it would never have

been on any normal, slower crossing, still well down from the landing place and close against the

outer edge of the eastward curve of the main channel. He twitched his signal cords for the last

time. The man with the firepot crawled to the timber stacked at the forward end, peeled the skins

from it and set it blazing. Now, once again, they could see. So, when it came, would the serpent.

The raft itself was the final decoy.

The sweepmen stayed at their posts. Two polemen tied spare floats to their waists and clutched

them under an arm, then waited ready. The other two brought floats to Iril and the sweepmen and

tied them on for them, then went and took their own and also waited, one of them where Iril

could see him, to keep watch back along the wave. One-handed, Iril eased a small flask from his

belt, unstoppered it with his teeth, and gulped at the burning liquid. Mel’s cordial. He had not

dared touch it till now, not knowing how it would interact with the leafjuice and muddle his

perceptions. It seemed to run through his veins like midsummer sunlight. He was grinning with

the joy of conflict as he tossed the flask away.

There was no warning from Jarro. The serpent’s head rose close behind the raft, shooting up in a

low, tight arch and plunging immediately down. Iril yelled to the sweepmen, but before they

could react to bury the sternboard in the wave, the raft jarred against the serpent’s neck, slewed,

and stood on its side. Its upper edge slammed into the arching body. By the last light of the fire

Iril saw a man’s body, arms and legs spread, sailing across the black sky with his float dangling

behind, and then the wave came crashing over him and he was smothered in the hurl of water.

He made no effort to fight it, but found and gripped the neck of his float and dragged it under his

arm. His head shot into air, was buried again, twice, and rose clear. The darkness was absolute,

the water a violent churning chaos across which the gale roared, whipping the wave-tops to

lashing spume.

He clung fiercely to his float but let the rest of his body relax and move where the water willed.