Water Read online

  “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 pole-lengths behind the wave, like a huge shadow . . .

  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, fully 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 wind-shredded 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 poleman 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, something 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 leaf-juice 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 c
ame 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. Below the confusions of the surface he sensed a steadier movement, a strong, persistent surge, and knew that he was once again being carried by a wave, a secondary one, set up by the mass of moving water behind the main advance. Soon he could tell from the lash of the wind-blown spume that he was no longer travelling up channel, but slantwise across to the southern shore. So he, at least, was where he had intended they should come, being swept between the series of mudbanks that funnelled in towards the dead lagoon. Before long this wave would crash across the bar, flood the lagoon, surge on to swamp the low meadows beyond, and then withdraw. Well, if he was on it, so might the serpent be, still absorbed in its destruction of the raft and its hunt among the wreckage. Iril adjusted the float under his left arm and with his right arm and legs began to work himself lengthways along the wave, away from the serpent’s searching, and clear of the main surge as it thundered over the bar.

  The moment came in a battering and bellowing of water. Iril thought he heard a man’s voice cry out in the tumult, but had no breath to answer. He had lost his grip on his float, but the cord had held and he regained it with a struggle he could not afford. He surfaced behind the wave and could hear its dwindling roar as it left him.

  Well, the thing was done. It was over. Either he had trapped the serpent, or he had failed. There was nothing more he could do.

  Realising that, the spirit seemed to leave him. For all this last moon he had driven his old carcass, both mind and body, beyond what it could bear. He had chewed too much leaf, breathed too much leaf-smoke, slept too little, dreamed the wave too often. Perhaps Mel’s cordial had tipped him over the edge. It had at any rate lost its potency. His whole body was becoming inert with cold. The wind seemed less. Mel had said it would be so, but it was no help. He had no strength left, no will. His damaged leg had left off aching and was dragging numbly, like a log. Still he tried to swim, muttering prayers to Manaw, losing his sense and starting again, like a man praying in his dreams.