“No no,” Garth said. “It’s the water gate. I’ve heard stories about it. Look out there, see that smudge? It’s the other cape, where the peninsula proper begins again. In between is a tidal bar. This is the lowest part of the spine, nothing more. At low tide a strip of sand will emerge as fine as any road, and stay above the waves for half the day.”
It proved to be true. As the afternoon progressed the beach extended farther into the water, which was racing from north to south in a strong current, breaking whitely in a straight line that divided the sea. This stretch of white foam boiled furiously in a line to the horizon and the distant smudge of the farther cape. Then in a matter of moments, it seemed, the Whitewater divided and fell away into two sets of waves rolling in from right and left, leaving a strip of wet gray sand and wet brown rock standing between them. The breakers tumbled in over rocky shallows on both sides, but the bar stood clear of them. And the spine trail extended even here: squarish blocks of water-holed rock had been laid in a path over the bar, making a causeway a foot or two higher than the bar itself.
“The horses can’t cross that,” Garth said. “The rock would tear up their hooves.”
“But surely it’s more than one tide’s walk across?” the swimmer said.
Garth nodded. “Still we must send the horses back, as we said we would.” And he kicked and shouted at the horses, threw rocks at them until they cantered off, and circled nervously, then regarded each other and broke for home, flowing down the beach like a school of red fish darting through the sea.
Something moved on the side of the knob and they jumped, turned to look. It was a man the same color as the sandstone, his skin the same grainy dark brown. As he approached they saw he was naked, and that his eyes, his hair—everything—was the brown of the rock. In his eyes the color seemed darker, the way the rock did when it was wet.
He stopped before them and said, “I am Birsay the guide. It is more than one tide’s walk to cross the brough, as you noted. This is how we do it; there is a rise near the halfway point, and we run to that in one low tide, on a path that I have built. It is just possible, though you get your legs wet. There on the rise I have left several large, holed rocks. We tie ropes I have made to those anchors, and as the water rises we rise on it, floated by slings I have made of kelp bladders and wood. The current pushes us out, usually to the south, but we are tied by the ropes to the anchor rocks, and when the tide ebbs, we float down to a landing, and complete the crossing of the brough to the other cape.”
“Why have you made these things?” Thel asked. “Why do you do this?”
The sandstone-colored man shrugged. “The peninsula extends around the world, and there is no land but it. And this is the only place in its circumference where the sea had chewed the peninsula down almost to its level. And naturally the peninsula must be passable. Traders come through, and circumnavigators on pilgrimages—believers of more religious persuasions than I’d care to recall. It is simply the natural order of things. The land itself calls forth a guide to sustain that order, and I am the forty-ninth reincarnation of that guide, Birsay.”
He led them to a tall cave entrance in the side of the knob, down stone steps to a dry sand floor. Against one wall were circles of coiled rope, made of some sort of animal hair or plantlike fiber—impossible in this world to be sure which, it occurred to Thel as he examined it. It was thick in the hand, and would certainly hold against any current. The floats Birsay had mentioned were there too, made of the big bulbs one saw at the base of kelp tubes, tied by flat cords to a wooden framework that held them under the arms and around the chest and back. “You spend almost half a day suspended in the tide,” Birsay said. “The water is warm, though by the end it doesn’t feel so. The bath is good for the skin. Then the distance from the rise to the western cape is not as great as the distance from here to the rise.”
The three travelers conferred by eye. Garth said, “When would you have us leave?”
“We’ve wasted too much of this ebb. And they are getting longer every day now, for twenty more days. The next one will begin in the dark before dawn.”
“The next, then,” Thel said, and the other two nodded their agreement.
They spent the night in the cave, around a small warm driftwood fire, the twisted shapes of the wood burning in bright flames tinged with blue, green, salmon. What little smoke there was rose through a blowhole in the roof of the cave. The guide fed them broiled conch; seasoned with wild onions and a gingery seaweed, wonderful after their week of subsistence on Garth’s bitter apples.
Birsay had a place for everything, and he moved neatly and quickly around the fire, catching its light just as the cave walls did, so that sometimes it was hard to see him. He brought out a tray of black loam for Garth to stick his feet into after the regular meal was done, and with a blush and a grateful look, Garth silently buried his feet in the dirt.
“Do you guide all travelers that appear here?” Thel asked.
“I do.”
“You make no distinctions?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those that follow us are murderers, intent on our lives.”
“Is that so?” The wet-pebble eyes regarded them with interest. “Well, I wish you all speed. I make no distinctions of that kind, no. Good, evil, right, wrong—they are personal matters, shifting from one to the next. These murderers may regard themselves as righteous folk, and you as great criminals perhaps, thieves of something they cherish, perhaps, who knows?” Though he glanced at Thel’s mirror bag as if he did know. “How am I to judge? By your stories? By the looks on your faces?” He dismissed the idea with a flip of the hand. “My task is to lead travelers across the low point in the world road. Their purposes, their identity—none of my concern. One winter I led Death himself across the brough, you can still see his footprints in the rock where a wave splashed him and he got angry…” And as the firelight played over his face he told them stories of travelers who had passed, men and women and creatures it sometimes took him the burning of a branch to describe. One such had had the legs and waist of a man, his chest then rising up into the rounded and feathered body of a giant eagle. This creature had spoken to him in grim croaks, and after a while Birsay had guessed the truth; it walked across the brough because it had had its wing muscles clipped, so that it could no longer fly. The guide laughed at Theclass="underline" “How judge that, eh? How judge that?”
14. Crossing the Bar
In the middle of that night Birsay crouched by their warm sand beds and roused them. “The brough comes clear soon.” They rose and ate more conch, and at Birsay’s instruction drank from a jug of fresh water until their stomachs were heavy and cold.
The star flood still lit the beach as they walked onto the wet sand. Birsay watched each wave closely, and as one ran up the sand he pointed. “Last high wave,” he said. “From now on they ebb.”
Then more and more of the beach was revealed as each wave sluiced back and hopped over the nonexistent rail where the water regrouped and turned again. A point emerged, wet tan sand with a crosshatched stippling of black. Then the waves fell back to left and right as they had the afternoon before, and the line of boiling white water appeared. The bar emerged, at first just as an extension of their point of sand, receding away from them at a walking pace: then, in the blue of dawn, the water simply ran away from them to right and left, and they walked on a sandbar that extended all the way to the horizon.
Struck silent at the uncanny sight, the three travelers strode quickly after Birsay, their ropes coiled and hung over their shoulders, their floats hanging on straps tied over their own backpacks and bags. The sun rose and cast long faint shadows ahead of them. The seas rolled up flat wet sand to right and left, the northern and southern seas separated only by their spit of wet sand.