Water (16 page)

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.

Where was Jarro? Safe in his bed on the northern shore, but ... was he still dreaming the wave,

following the serpent as it was swept through the tumult of waters? Why no warning from him of

the last attack? Why nothing now? It was only his body in the bed, while his mind ventured

among the spirit waters—dangerous as a tide-rip, Mel had said.

Speak to me, my son!

Nothing. Nothing from Jarro. But again through the dream of his exhaustion, the flicker of the

serpent’s hunt-lust, smelling out the traces his body had left in the water, sensing the feeble

movements of his swimming—all this though his lifetime of dealings with these currents told

him that he was no longer in the lagoon, but over the flats to the east of it, where the serpent

could not come. He shut his mind to it, managed to switch the float beneath his other arm and

forced himself on south, resting longer each time between the feeble strokes.

He was still swimming when his hand hit solid matter, vertical, softish, a wall of wet earth.

Letting his legs sink, he found he could stand chest deep. The footing was too firm for a

mudbank. Turf, a flooded meadow. An old man-made bank to the south of it, built to protect the

fields beyond from such high tides. Half swimming, half hobbling, he felt his way along it until

he came to a stone boundary wall and was able to climb onto that and thence to the top of the

bank. He started to crawl along it. Even if he had had his crutch he could not have walked.

His cousin’s son, not a wave-rider but a farmer, came out to look for him with two of the farm

slaves carrying torches. Mel had sent the man a dream telling him where Iril lay, and had then

woken him and spoken in a clear voice in the dark of his hut, telling him to go and find him.

They carried him home unconscious, and his sons’ wives rubbed him with salves for the rest of

the night in front of a great fire, massaging the life-warmth back into his body.

While he still slept, men came to say that the serpent was raging in the lagoon, trapped by the

falling tide. The wind had died clean away and the next tide barely lapped the bar. Two of Iril’s

crew had come exhausted to the village, one was found unconscious on the shore, and one dead.

The other two “were not seen again.

When Iril woke, they carried him down to the lagoon to watch the serpent die. This it did with

slow, agonised writhings, having threshed the lagoon to stinking mud which it could not breathe.

Dead, it immediately rotted, the skin bursting apart and black, stinking stuff oozing out, smoking

as it reached the air. Those that breathed the smoke dropped to their knees and vomited, while

the gulls that came for the carcass meat fell out of the air and died.

Iril’s eldest son brought a raft over on the next day’s wave, to check that the passage was now

clear. With him came Jarro, who had slept for a day and a night after the storm, with Mel

watching by his bed all that time. He was still almost too weak to stand, and needed to be helped

up to the village. But next morning he insisted on going to see where the serpent had died. Iril

went with him. They stood and looked in silence at the poisoned lagoon. Bubbles still rose to the

oily surface, their vile reek wafting on the wind.

“I was there,” said Jarro quietly. “I was trapped with the serpent. After the first decoy, it

happened. The serpent lost you. It did not follow. I sought its mind. I spoke to it. ‘There!’ I told

it.”

“I heard your thought, my son.”

Jarro nodded.

“The serpent followed you. It came fast. I tried to call to you, but I could not. I was caught up

into the mind of the serpent. I thought with its thought. I felt its hatred. I felt its hunger. I joined

in its hunting. I hunted you, my father.”

“No shame,” said Iril.

“It was trapped in the lagoon,” said Jarro, still in the same quiet, half-dreaming voice. “It raged,

and I raged with it. It suffered, and I knew its pain. It began to die, and I died too. Then Mel

came. He came by the spirit paths and found me and set me loose.”

For a long while Iril said nothing. There was horror in his heart to think how near he had come to

killing his own son. And even though he lived, who could tell what the terrors of the adventure

might have done to the boy? No, not a boy. Not any longer. He could tell, by the tone of his

son’s voice, by the way he had told his story, that in a night and a day Jarro had put his boyhood

behind him, just as Iril himself had, in the squall in which his own father had died. And like Iril,

from now on and for all his life Jarro would carry the scar of the event

“You did well, my son,” he said at last. “No man could have done better. Together we did this,

you and I. We killed the great serpent.”

“No, Father,” said Jarro, “I did little to help.”

“Not so, my son,” said Iril. “You did what no other could have done, venturing along the spirit

paths. The serpent lost me. It did not follow. I would have failed if you had not reached into its

mind and spoken. Who before this has heard of such a deed? Mel himself could not have done it.

He cannot dream the wave. That is our gift, ours alone, yours and mine. By the axe of Manaw, I

say again,
we
killed the great serpent.”

Normal traffic resumed. The ten stones were rafted down from Silverspring and the rafts linked

together into the structure Iril had planned. He crossed the water to see that all was well, and to

make any necessary adjustments and adaptations, but he let Farn take command when the full

moon came and the whole great raft was floated over. Iril came as a passenger, saying he was

still too weak for the work, though to others he seemed as strong as he had been before. It was a

simple crossing on a big, clean wave. Siron sent nothing to hinder it. Once across, the raft was

taken apart and the separate stones floated along the shoreline and upriver.

That done, they held a praise feast for Iril. Mel himself came, not a shadow or sending, and

spoke marvellous praise, and praise for Jarro too, telling what he had done among the spirit

paths. It was praise such as would be told for many generations. He left next day for the high

ritual that would inaugurate the stones in their new home, and all the men except Iril went with

him.

Iril’s sons came to him, and stood side by side before him.

Farn said, “Come. There will be a place of honour for you, a place among the Major Chieftains.”

Iril said, “I am too old and weak for such a journey, and my leg is very painful.”

Arco said, “Perhaps Mel will heal it.”

Iril shook his head.

“A contract is a contract,” he said. “But I have done a thing no man ought to have done.”

He took from his arm the three gold bracelets that Mel had paid him and gave one to each son.

“Go with my blessing,” he said. “And take my place among the Chieftains.”

He watched them walk away, noticing with pleasure how his two elder sons, mature men with

wives and children, now accepted Jarro as their equal.

The day after they left, the women gathered in a long line, Farn’s first wife leading, and danced

solemnly though the village, three times, with many twists and windings. They sang in grieving

voices, words Iril did not know, their secret language. Then they gathered in silence into a circle.

One after another round the circle each took a pace forward, and knelt for a while, as if listening,

then rose and went at once to her own hut.

That evening Farn’s first wife came to Iril’s hut with a salve.

“This is for your leg,” she said. “It will ease the pain.”

“Nothing can ease the pain. All has been tried.”

“This is new. Siron showed it to me. She said, ‘Say this to Iril. No curse of mine is on him.’”

“When did you see Siron?”

“This morning. Did you not see her? We danced and sang for her and she said farewell.”

“Farewell?”

“Yes. She has gone. Those times are over.”

Water Horse

by Robin McKinley

When the Guardian of Western Mouth chose Tamia for her apprentice, no one was more

surprised than Tamia herself

The Guardian’s choice was surprising in more ways than one. Everyone in Tamia’s inland

village paid the Guardians’ token as all the islanders did, and “please the Guardians” and “as the

Guardians hold back the sea” were sayings as common there as anywhere. But Guardians’

apprentices came from the fishing villages, or at least from the villages that lay near the shore,

outside the ragged ring of the Cloudyhead Mountains, with a view of the sea. Many inlanders

never saw the sea at all; “Mountains are the right horizon for me” was a common inlander

remark.

Every islander, inland and seaward, had heard that the Guardian of Western Mouth was growing

old, and that she still had taken no apprentice. Although of course the Guardians always knew

what they were doing (it was one of the things they learned in the process of becoming

Guardians), still, it was very odd, how long Western Mouth had put off taking an apprentice.

Some of the voices saying this rang and echoed on the phrase
very odd,
with a curious, intent,

almost greedy intonation. But no one in Tamia’s village had been interested in contemplating

who might finally be chosen, as it would not be one of them.

Tamia was her mother’s eldest child, and the only one by her first husband, who had died in a

hunting accident. Her second husband, Tamia’s stepfather, tolerated Tamia’s presence in his

household because she was quiet and useful. Tamia had never asked her mother what she thought

about her husband’s attitude towards his stepdaughter. She had been afraid to ask since she had

seen the look on her mother’s face when the midwife put her second husband’s first child in her

arms. Tamia had been six. She had spent the year since her mother remarried trying to be helpful.

She had known that her stepfather didn’t want her, but she had hoped he might change his mind.

After Dorian’s birth—followed by Coth, Sammy, Tinsh, Issy and Miz—she grew accustomed to

the idea that he would not. At least, with so many little ones to look after, there was never any

shortage of work for Tamia to do.

Tamia was happiest looking after her family’s animals. They had two cows, one to provide milk