Water (12 page)

in silence, the men of Iril’s kin to his right, the women to his left, and Mel’s own followers

behind him.

There was a half-built hut behind Iril’s men. Mel gestured and they moved aside. He considered

the hut. Between a breath and a breath it burst into flames, not shadows of flame as the stone had

been shadow. The hut burnt and became embers and did not remake itself.

Iril nodded. He had heard of Mel.

“No man can find the path to Silverspring,” he said.

“I will open the path,” said Mel. “If I fail, you will keep one bracelet. But I shall not fail. Those

times are over.”

Iril looked to his left, at his eldest son’s first wife. She met his gaze but gave him no sign. He

looked back to Mel.

“No,” he said.

Mel turned and studied the men of Iril’s kin. He beckoned one forward. Jarro came like a

sleepwalker. He was Iril’s third son, ten and five years old only, barely a man, but he could

dream the wave. Iril’s two elder sons, Farn and Arco, were expert raftmen. They could take a raft

north on the ebb, even in rough weather, and then bring it smoothly back, riding the flood-wave.

But neither of them, as children, had ever shown the signs. Neither of them now, however much

leaf they chewed, could fall into a half trance and then dream the wave, become part of the

moving water, know it as a man knows where his own limbs are in the dark. Almost as soon as

he could talk, Jarro had prattled on waking about the wash of the tides along the estuary. Then he

had lost the gift, as growing children did. But one day, when he was a man, he would chew leaf

and dream the wave again. If he had been a distant cousin, he would still have been more

precious to Iril than any of his own sons. Mel had never seen him before.

“Shall I show you what he will become if you refuse me?” he said. “Now in shadow, as I showed

you the stone? But if I choose, in truth, as I burnt the hut?”

Iril did not look at Jarro, nor at the women. He dragged one bracelet towards him and put it on

his arm.

“My terms are these,” he said. “When the stones float, I will take the second. When they leave

my care, the third. Furthermore, we bear no weapons. We take no side between tribe and tribe.

We carry and deliver. All that has to do with water is in my charge and at my command. All that

is on land is in yours.”

“So it shall be,” said Mel. “My terms are these. You will float the stones to this shore, and then

up our river as far as may be, so that I may have them in place by Seed-in. They have powers

that I will lay asleep, but for this they must travel all together.”

“That will take thought,” said Iril.

“It must be done.”

“These stones weigh many, many men. Are you able to make them less?”

“They are what they are. They will weigh their own weight.”

“The river from Silverspring. How wide? How deep?”

Mel considered. The air around him wavered as if heat were rising through it, and then he was

standing on untrodden grass beside a small river running along a mountain valley. Iril could see

the shapes of huts through the left-hand mountain. The slopes of the valley were clothed with

ancient woods. He nodded and the scene vanished.

“We will cut timber for the rafts there,” he said. “Cable and thongs we will need more than we

have, and also twenty and twenty and ten float-skins for each stone.”

Mel considered.

“I have sent for this stuff,” he said. “Do we cross to-day?”

“I have one raft waiting, unloaded. On the morning ebb I can take over ten and six men, and

some gear, and return for another party on the evening wave. Thus we could all cross in five

ebbs, which is three days. If we must all travel together we must wait for rafts to come

downriver, or build new. Either will take many days.”

“We start this morning,” said Mel.

It was an easy passage. Iril, propped on the low platform at the centre of the raft, scarcely needed

to gesture to the two sweep-men. They knew their work, using the curve of the main current that

touched the southern shore of the estuary just below Iril’s village and then, guided by the

intricate and endlessly shifting pattern of mudbanks beneath the water, swung almost all the way

across to the northern shore. Not that a stranger, however skilled a raftman, would have been

safe if he had tried it. This was no ordinary ocean tide, falling steadily from high to low. Here

twice a day the waters of the outer sea were hauled into the estuary between the narrowing arms

of land and held there by the weight of the tide behind them. Then, when the tide reversed itself,

they were sucked swirling out, often falling within the space of a milking time by the height of

six grown men. On the stillest day the race of the main outflow was a muddle of hummocked

waves, but if a raft was set rightly among them, the current would carry it clean across to the

other shore, with only an occasional stroke of the sweeps to hold it true. But if Iril had misjudged

his course—in places by no more than the width of the raft itself—he might well have been

caught in an eddy which would have carried him half way back to the southern shore and then

perhaps out to sea, or at least left him stranded on a mudbank in mid-estuary.

Iril made no such mistakes. He had been riding the ebb tide and the in-wave for more than the

lifetime of most men. He walked with a crutch since his leg had been caught between two logs

when he was a boy, as his father’s raft had broken up in a freak squall. His father had been lost,

with all who were on that half of the raft, but Iril had brought his half safely home.

They landed and ate. Then Iril, helped by his middle son, Arco, hobbled up to a low red bluff

from which he could see right across the estuary to the mist-blurred shore beyond. Mel came

with them. The tide had gone, leaving a waste of glittering grey mudbanks patterned with

channels through which the river waters still flowed to the sea. Iril pointed and said a few words.

Arco grunted and returned to the landing place, but Iril took a leaf from his pouch, chewed it,

settled down on the grass, curling up like a dog, and slept. Mel stood in silence. Sometimes he

was there, watching the raft being readied as the waters began to return. Sometimes he was

elsewhere.

Towards sunset Iril snorted in his sleep and woke. Hauling himself upright on his crutch, he

touched Mel’s elbow and pointed down the estuary, without apparently having looked to check

that what he was pointing at was indeed there. The leaden waters glimmered with the gold

leavings of the day. Across their surface ran a level line, as if they had been ice which had

cracked from shore to shore. Iril hallooed down to the raft, already waiting in the shallows. The

men poled it clear of the shore.

“Small wave, this season,” explained Iril.

He felt no anger against Mel for the burning of the hut and the threat of horror to his son, nor fear

of him either. He had been threatened before, by kings among others, and had when necessary

given in to their threats, but both he and they had known that there were limits to their power

over him, because in the end they could not do without him and his kin. Who else could dream

the wave? Who else could ride it?

This wave, which he had called small, was about half a man’s height. As the tide returned, the

narrowing estuary forced it to hummock up, because there was nowhere else for the mass of

water to go. It came silently, foaming only where it rummaged along the shoreline. At one point

the water surface was at
this
level, at the next it was at
that.
The difference was the wave.

When it reached the raft, it pushed it ahead while the sweepmen paddled gently to keep the

carefully shaped stern-board at the exact angle to spill the propelling water away on the near side

and so nudge the raft sideways along the wave. The raft was picked up and swept towards the

southern shore in a sweet easy movement, like that of a skinning knife lifting the hide from the

flesh beneath. For a while it followed the course of the main channel, but the underlying current

made little difference. Only the wave mattered, as it carried the raft across the estuary on an

almost straight diagonal that re-crossed the main channel at the end of its long curve and finished

up a little below Mi’s village. There the raft would be beached to let the wave go by, wait for the

still-rising tide to refloat it and be poled up to the landing stage on the last of the inflow. When it

was well set on its course, Iril’s middle son came up the hill and helped him down to the huts,

but Mel stayed where he was, gazing south. Sometimes he was watching the dwindling raft.

Sometimes he was elsewhere.

They made a litter for Iril and carried him inland, leaving his sons to manage the regular

crossings. Mel led them not by the pilgrim’s road, but along minor tracks and across bare

hillsides, always making good speed. At evening he brought deer to the camp, which stood

blank-eyed, trance-held, waiting for the knife. On the third morning they crossed a ridge and

came down through dense autumnal woods to the valley and river that Mel had shown Iril when

they had first met. With a pole Iril measured the depth of the clear, brownish water, repeating the

process as they travelled along the bank until they reached a waterfall with a pool below it.

Feeder streams tumbled down from either side above the fall, and beyond them the river was

much less.

“Overland to this pool,” said Iril.

“Good,” said Mel. “The first stones will be here in three noons, the last stone not for four more.

You may stay and make ready.”

“My people will fell timber,” said Iril. “I will come with you and see Silverspring while its

stones still stand.”

“You are not afraid?”

“No man has seen Silverspring. I have lived more than a life.”

“Come, then.”

Above the fall the forest closed right down to the stream. The track along which they had

travelled ended in a wall of brambles. Mel considered the barrier for some while, until part of it

became shadowy and vanished, and the trees beyond wavered and vanished also, leaving a clear

path that ran on a ledge above the stream. In places boulders had been rolled aside, or piled to

level the way. The slopes on either side became steadily steeper until track and stream ran

through a defile which ended in a sheer cliff with the river welling out into a pool at its foot. Mel

considered the cliff, again for some while, until it opened a crack in itself, a crevice not four

paces wide, with cloudy sky beyond.

Iril was surprised by none of this. It was known that no man could find the way through to

Silverspring. But he had also heard of Mel.

Beyond the crevice the valley widened into a huge volcanic crater in the heart of the hills. Its

bowl was rimmed by bare black cliffs, with steep woods below them, but the bottom was a wide

clearing of sheep-nibbled grass and strips of ploughland. At the centre rose a gentle mound,

ringed half way up by a circle of standing stones. Below this circle, directly facing the crevice,

was a dark opening from which the stream flowed.

Beside the woods on the left were a dozen huts, in front of which a group of women waited,

some with babies in their arms. There were no older children and no men. They watched Mel and

his party emerge from the crevice as if they had known they were coming. Mel ignored them and

walked towards the mound. When he was about twenty and ten paces from the cave, a woman

came out of its darkness and faced him.

She was short and plump, but moved with grace. Her face was pale, round, soft, her hair a

greying black. She wore a dark green cloak which fell to the ground all around her. She was not

what Iril had expected, and at first he thought she must be a servant, but then he saw that she

must be Siron.

At her appearance Mel’s people had halted, but Mel walked forward until he was a few paces

from her. Iril growled to his bearers to follow, but they would not, so he slid himself down, took

his crutch and hobbled on alone. Siron’s gaze left Mel and caught him. He was aware that she

could have stopped him but she let him come. As he neared, she considered him, considered his

leg, the half foot that twisted sideways at the ankle. The years-long ache vanished. The foot

straightened. Wasted muscle and smashed bone grew whole. For five paces Iril walked level, like

other men.

Siron stopped him a little behind Mel’s shoulder. Her eyes asked a question. He shook his head

and tapped the bracelet on his arm. Many of her pilgrims came across the water. She would

know that the wave-riders did not break a contract for any threat or gift. She looked away and his

leg was as it had always been.

Mel spoke. Iril did not know the words but could hear the tone of command. Siron answered

with a question. Mel spoke again, shortly, and then Siron for some while, a dignified pleading,

mixed with some anger and much grief, until Mel cut her short with one flat sentence. She did

not reply, but considered, and moved to one side.

Out of the darkness of the cave, low down, close by the stream, a head appeared, flat, scaly, dark

green patterned with black, wider than a man’s two spread hands. A forked tongue flickered

from its mouth. The jaws gaped, showing fine white fangs. The body emerged in slithering