The story of the land-girl and her sea-prince of course got out. But all the big sea-trading merchants had left the two towns long ago, and there was no one nearby who wanted to take up the sea-trade again. Somehow the townsfolk had come to believe in the last three generations that it was not merely the sea-king’s curse but their own blindness that had caused their downfall, which meant that they took the removal of the curse much as the sea-king himself had, as a relief of guilty responsibility. But there were a few farmers who had had fisherfolk as great-grandparents; and some of these came hesitantly down to the harbour again, and set sail in small boats newly and carefully built on the harbour shores. And the small boats sailed beautifully, and caught just enough fish that the fisherfolk’s families were content and well-fed, and not so much that any city merchant came sniffing around to organise them and make a proper profit. And between the breaking of the old curse and the making of this new marriage, the sea-people and the land-people found themselves willingly drawn close; and so the sea-people swam to the surface to say hello when they recognised a familiar hull overhead, and sometimes offered advice about where the fish were; and the land-people greeted them politely, and listened to their advice and were glad of it. But these same land-people, when stories of their friendship with their sea-people brought curiosity seekers to the newly lively towns on either side of the once-haunted harbour, had nothing to say, and turned blank faces and deaf ears to all questions from both casual and prying outsiders.
Jenny’s parents’ farm grew in a long wide strip from its original place on a little rise behind the southern town down to the shore near the harbour mouth. It grew this way in no particular wise except that it was a track used so often that at last Jenny and Dreiad and her family laid a path, a queerly shining grey path, to the water’s edge; and in the clearing they had to do to lay the path, they found earth that the farmers among them decided was too good not to use, and so fields sprang up on either side of that path till the farm really did stretch down to the shore in an odd haphazard way. But the farmers were right about the earth, for crops put in those path-side fields grew easily and abundantly.
Jenny and Dreiad had twelve children. Two of the twelve were sea-people, and had an especial care for the fisherfolk of the harbour their mother had been born near. Two of them were land-people, and took over the farm when Jenny’s parents died, and married land-people who were also farmers; and the farm was held by their family for hundreds of years, and for many generations after Jenny, its members were astonishingly long-lived; although they now produced as many fishers as farmers. Jenny herself lived, while not a long time by sea-people’s standards, still a very long time indeed by land-people’s accounting of such things.
And the other eight were of both land and sea, and could live on either the one or the other; and if on land they did look a little silverier than ordinary land-people, and if in the sea they looked a little rosier than ordinary sea-people, still this made no one think less of them, for all of them had open, honest faces that lit up with gentleness and humour and intelligence when they smiled.
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.”