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.”