Robin McKinley - Water

“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.