Water

SEA SERPENT

“I am Mel.”

“I have heard of you.”

“You are Iril.” (Not a question, a statement.)

“Yes.”

“You will take us across the water.” (The same.)

“How many?”

“Twenty and twenty men. Some gear.”

“Eight large coppers.”

Mel took a bracelet from his wrist and tossed it on the ground in front of where Iril sat. The gold was as thick as Iril’s small finger.

“You will come with us into the hills and show us how to build rafts so that we may float the stones downriver to the water,” said Mel. “That done, you will ferry the stones across the water and help us to float them as far as may be up into our own hills.”

“Stones?”

Mel half turned and considered the space before him. A shape made itself, shadowy, like frozen smoke, its height twice that of a man and its width a long pace through each way. Iril measured it with his eye, unsurprised. As he had said, he had heard of Mel. How could he not have, from the travellers he ferried across the estuary? Much of their talk these days was of the great new shrine to Awod, the Fathergod, that this man Mel was building up in the hills to the south. Such a shrine would need huge stones for its central ring. The best stones, the stones with power in them, came from across the water.

“How many such stones?”

“Ten this first year.”

The shape faded. With his crutch Iril hooked the bracelet towards him, picked it up and weighed it in his hand.

“Twenty and twenty men is not enough.”

“You will bring your own people also.”

“How many days into the hills?”

“Three days. Silverspring.”

“Those stones?”

“Those stones.”

Iril tossed the bracelet back at Mel’s feet and looked away. For twenty and twenty and seven years he had carried women north across the estuary on their pilgrimage to the ancient shrine of Tala, the Earth-mother at Silverspring, where Siron was priestess. Tala had been greatest of the Old Gods, just as Awod was greatest of the New. So there was enmity between them. Iril took no side in this contest. He served Manaw, the Sea God, who was both Old and New. The sea does not change.

Mel took another bracelet from his arm and dropped it beside the first. Then a third. All watched 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 sweepmen. 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 sternboard 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 Iril’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 hill-sides, 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 windings, wide as a man’s thigh and many paces long, with the tail still unseen in the cave. The head reared up, weaving from side to side, peering for its target.

Mel gestured with his right hand, held low. Iril sensed a movement close behind him, smelt a sharp reek, but did not flinch as a beast paced close beside him, cat-shaped but large as an ox, its fur yellow-brown blotched with black. Saliva dripped from the yellow, curving fangs, as long as walrus tusks. As it passed Iril, its tail twitched against his thigh, hard, like a rope’s end. By that he knew it was no sending but a thing, itself.

The beast faced the serpent, tense, balanced, watching for the strike. The serpent’s head swayed back and forth, probing. The beast moved, seeming to start its spring, but it was a feint. The forward flash of the serpent’s head was too quick for Iril to follow, as was the beast’s counterstroke, but then they were facing each other again, the beast apparently unharmed but the serpent with dark red blood oozing from a gash behind its head. It resumed its weaving, but the movement now seemed less certain, and when the beast took a half pace nearer it withdrew, turned back on itself and slithered into the cave. Siron followed it without a word, making a gesture as she passed into the darkness. The cave vanished, and the stream now welled directly from the turf.

Mel scratched his beast between the shoulder-blades and dismissed it. It stalked towards a group of grazing sheep, which moved nervously away, all but one that stood waiting blindly. The beast killed it with a blow and dragged its carcass into the trees.

Mel walked up the mound and round the ring of stones, laying a hand on each in turn and marking some with a smear of orange stuff which he took from a small pot. The women had vanished into their huts. Iril watched the men begin to dig, and to set up the tackle they would need to lift the first stone onto its rollers. They knew what they were doing, he decided. He signalled to the litter bearers, who came and carried him back to the pool below the waterfall. The crevice did not close up on them, and the track was clear all the way.

The pool was apparently close enough to Silverspring for the stones to be hauled to it one by one without Mel losing his control, so having seen to the floating of the first of them, Iril returned to his trade. There were others beside Mel who needed to cross the water, and it would be a moon and another moon before all ten stones were ready to float down to the estuary. The problem of how to build and manage a raft large enough to take them all across the water together filled Iril’s spare hours.

Women travelled to Silverspring for the midwinter rite. Iril said nothing to them but took no fees. They came back shaken and disconsolate, saying that they had been unable to find the way, even those who had made the journey often before. The night after the last of them had gone, Iril chewed leaf and lay down in his cot to dream the wave, as he had done many nights since his return from Silverspring, trying to set his great raft on it in his dream, and feel how the inert thing might move in response to the moving waters. In the small hours of the dark the wave swept through his mind as it swept up the estuary. After a lifetime of practice he could direct his dream to any part of its passage, and know why the currents and eddies and cross-currents flowed as they did, and why they changed and reformed through the seasons, so that he and his sons could ride both ebb and flow through the year.

This night as he travelled with the surging tide in his dream, and set his dream raft upon it, he sensed something else close by, a great mass that was neither raft nor water, but moved easily in the current, of its own will, as a bird does in the wind. Many, many years earlier, a whale had stranded in a lagoon below the village after a wild high tide, and when it had died, there had been prodigious feasting. Never had any man seen so great a beast. Could this be another such? It seemed yet larger. Though he had merely sensed it, and in a dream only, Iril knew it was there.

He was not the only one. He woke and saw Jarro squatting by his bedside, waiting for him to open his eyes. He grunted, enquiringly.

“Something behind the wave,” said Jarro. “Big. It came in the dream.”

“Who gave you leaf?”

(It was not good to get the habit too young, as Iril himself had been forced to do.)

“I ate no leaf,” said Jarro. “The dream came, like when I was a child. The thing was there. It was not wide, but long, long.”

Iril frowned. His own easy childhood dreamings were lost beyond recall. But he felt he could remember every moment of the night, a few nights after his father had died, when he had first chewed leaf and lain down to dream the wave. How clearly that dream had come, and with what a mixture of terror and exultation. Leaf was rare and expensive. Wealthy men chewed it for their own pleasure. Chieftains gave it to their warriors before battle. But for Iril, as for other dream-workers and seers, it was a necessary tool because it freed the hidden dream. Yet Jarro had dreamed the wave without it, and seen the thing behind the wave more clearly than Iril had himself.

Next ebb, though there was no need, he crossed the water, taking Jarro with him, and climbed to the bluff. Iril chewed leaf.

“Watch,” he said, and as Jarro settled cross-legged, he wrapped himself in furs against the thin, sleety north-easter and lay down to dream. As he slept, the water sifted seaward in his mind, dwindling through its channels until the mudbanks emerged to reek in the sun. Then the tide returned and crept back over them until it lay level from shore to shore.

All this time Iril sensed nothing strange or new. The water was mere water. But shortly before half tide, when the main surge came and the wave was formed, Jarro woke him.

“It is there, Father,” he said. “It waits.”

“You also slept?”

“No, Father. Waking, the dream came.”

Without leaf? Without sleep? Iril had had both, but already for him the dream was weakening. Vaguely the forming wave stirred in his mind, with something even vaguer beyond it. He hauled himself up and stood, watching the water. A raft was waiting to cross, with his sister’s son in charge. A large load for this slack season: a horse dealer with five ponies, still half wild; a pot merchant from Hotpool, returning with empty panniers; two cousins journeying to the oracle at Glas, hoping to settle an argument that might otherwise turn into a blood feud. The estuary was ruffled by the crosswind, but the moon was well into its wane, so it should be an easy crossing on a middling wave.

The wave, imperceptible lower down, reached the sudden narrowing at Owl Point and hummocked itself up. Its hairline formed across the grizzled surface. Iril called, his sister’s son waved, and the men poled the raft out. The close-tethered horses bucked and squealed. The wave neared, a good steady one, barely flecked with foam. It picked the raft up, moving it forward and sideways so evenly that the horses calmed a little. Nevertheless Iril’s tension rose. He had chewed leaf too often since his return from Silverspring, and its power had built up in his bloodstream until even fully awake he was dimly aware of a continuing dream, and of the tide flowing in his mind. With the same uncertainty he now sensed the thing that was not water, huge, unknown, coming invisibly up behind the wave. He could not tell where, but because of its size, he guessed it must be in the main channel. Even at half flood, nowhere else was deep enough.

The raft slid on. Before and behind the wave the wrinkled water remained unchanged. Iril shook his head and muttered. He was old, he had chewed too much leaf, he was starting to dream untruths. That had happened to his grandfather. He must ease off, or he would build his great raft amiss and so fail in his contract. He was shaking his head again, as if trying to shake the fraudulent dream out of it, when Jarro spoke. In the grip of the trance, Iril had forgotten he was there.

“Now!” he gasped, horror in the single word, startling Iril into full awareness.

And then the thing happened. They saw it sooner than the men on the raft. Iril’s sister’s son, up on the platform, had his eyes on the line he must travel, while crew and passengers were below the wave crest and the thing began a pole-length behind it.

A shape like a branchless tree shot out of the water, rushing in on the raft and at the same time curving forward and over until the men there saw it suddenly towering above them. Heads tilted, arms were thrown up, the raft lost its footing on the wave and slewed as the thing struck down, not at the raft itself but into the water beyond it. Now the arch spanned the raft and closed on it. The head emerged behind the sternboard, shooting on and over to make a second coil, now gripping the raft, hauling it back through the wave, tilting it, spilling all that was loose into the churning water, while the head emerged for the third time, hovered a moment and hammered down onto the timbers, blow after blow, smashing the structure apart in an explosion of sunlit foam.

Iril, appalled, whispered prayers to Manaw for his men and passengers, though he knew that no one would live long in such water at this season, whether the serpent found them or not. But the shock had cleared the dream vagueness away and he watched with steady eyes, studying the thing as he might have studied an unexpectedly altered sandbank. Its head was much like the head of the serpent that had come from Siron’s cave, only enormously larger. Its body too was much like the body of that serpent, but as thick as the trunk of a large tree. Its length was hidden, but Iril could see how the water was churned for many pole-lengths along the main channel, and how in places solid humps arose as the hinder end threshed in response to the writhings up front.

When the raft was demolished the thing swam on up the channel and doubled back, with a pole-length or so of its neck held clear of the water. From time to time it struck down at something it saw. At one point it rose with a man’s body caught round the waist between its jaws. It thrashed him to and fro, like a dog killing a rat, and swallowed him whole. It continued to cruise the channel for a while, but at last slid under the surface and disappeared.

Mel had said, “If you strike trouble, send for me.” Iril sat on the grass, bowed his head and made a mind picture of Silverspring, of Mel standing beside the now broken ring of stones. When he looked up, Mel was in front of him, with the estuary and the snow-mottled hills of the far shore just visible through his cloak and body. Iril told him aloud what he had seen. Mel whispered in his mind, “I will come.” The shape vanished.

Only the horse dealer came living to the land. When the serpent had struck, one of the ponies had managed to tangle itself with its neighbour, so the dealer had loosed its tethers and had looped its halter rope round his wrist. The impact had tossed both man and beast into the water, still tied to each other. The horse in panic had struck out for the shore, and the man had managed to haul himself up alongside it and cling to its neck, where its body heat had perhaps helped keep him alive a little longer. The luck of the secondary currents behind the wave had carried them shorewards. Watchers at the jetty had seen this, and four of them had taken a light raft out and reached them. By this time the man was unconscious and trailing again at the rope end, but they’d cut him free and brought him ashore, with the horse still swimming beside the raft, and dried and wrapped and warmed him at the fire, and he had revived.

When he could talk, he confirmed what Iril, seeing it from a distance, had thought. The thing was like a land serpent, but unimaginably huge. It was not smooth-skinned, like an eel, but had dark, blue-grey scales and vertically slitted eyes. That was all he had had time to see, hearing the yells of alarm and looking up over his shoulder as the head struck down.

That night Iril took no leaf. He made Jarro move his bedding closer to his own, and as the wave formed, woke himself and reached out and felt for Jarro’s arm. The flesh was stiff and shuddering with nightmare, so Iril woke the boy and held him in his arms like a baby as the wave went by, and again in the faint light of dawn as the ebb began and the monster returned to the sea.

Jarro slept late, and when he rose he was heavy-eyed and pale, but he said, “To-night do not wake me, Father. It is better that I watch this thing, and learn its ways.”

Mel was there in the morning in his own body, though it was three days’ march to Silverspring.

“Siron caused this,” he said. “I did not think she had the power.”

“Can you counter it?” asked Iril.

“My power is from the Fathergod. It is of air and fire, the creatures of daylight. Hers is from the old Earth-mother. It is of water and under-earth. I have wondered why she has made no move to delay our taking the stones, though she would have known that I could overcome her.”

“She could perhaps have dried out the river.”

“She would not do that. The river is holy.”

“Then you can do nothing about this serpent.”

“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 waiting 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 may be 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 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 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. 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.”