Water, page 9
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
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.
