“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.
“I do not take you,” he told Jarro. “It is not good to cram a young head with old memories.”
He did not tell him that he was afraid, afraid for his son in a way that he had never been for himself.
Farn built a small fire, on which Iril threw leaf. He told his son to feed the fire and see that no one, not even Mel, came near. Then he sat down, cross-legged, and, breathing the smoke, put himself into a waking trance. His eyes gazed out across the estuary but he did not see the shining mudbanks, nor the tide that crept over them, nor the passing wave, nor the level flood, nor the rush and tumble of its going. All day he remembered moons and seasons, mudbanks and channels and currents that had come and gone and made themselves again. Between dawn and sundown he remembered twenty and twenty and seven years of tides. In the evening he woke himself, and his sons carried him down and set him by a roaring fire and rubbed the life-warmth back into his limbs.
Mel came.
“Can it be done?”
“With the right wave, perhaps. That may come at the new moon, if a strong south-westerly should blow.”
“There will be that wind.”
Iril stared at the fire, but his mind saw the dead lagoon on the southern shore where the whale had stranded. That had happened at a new moon, with a gale from the southwest. So, then, a raft, of normal length, but narrower, its sternboard shaped thus . . . no platform, but rails to grip . . . a third sweep, over the stern . . . small decoy rafts, and fire and oil and kindling . . . fresh-killed pig in small pots . . .
Mel had seen into his mind.
“I can give you a salve to hide the odour of your own bodies,” he said. “And a cordial against the cold.”
“Good,” said Iril, and in a louder voice, “I need six men. Perhaps none will live, but there will be great praise.”
The ring of listeners stood, every man. Iril chose from among the older ones, who had less of their lives to regret, but none of his own sons. If he died, they would be needed, each in turn, to take on his contract with Mel, and try to defeat the serpent.
Mel left next day, and Iril set about building his new raft, longer than the first, but again with the inner corner weighted and then buoyed with extra floats, and again with a strange-shaped sternboard. As each wave surged up the shoreline, he experimented with small decoy rafts. When the main raft was finished, he blindfolded his six crew and made them learn various tasks by touch, and rigged cords to each of them from the place where he would stand so that he could signal to them in the dark. He talked long with his sons about other possible devices against the serpent, and also about how the great raft to carry the stones, already being built, should be finished, and its sections linked to flex with the water surface and yet move all of a piece so that the full moon wave could float the immense weight over.
Most nights he chewed leaf, but gave Jarro no more. Yet still as he slept and the flood-wave moved through his mind, he heard and from time to time the flicker of Jarro’s mind, telling him the serpent’s doings.
Three days before new moon Mel returned, bringing a salve and a cordial, neither magical, because he could not tell how much his powers would be diminished on water. Next morning he went up to the bluff and stood and considered until a gale blew up from the southwest, with sheeting rain and thunder. Iril watched the day wave pass, a whitely churning wall, curled over into spume at the crest. He could remember few taller. He watched the outrush of the tide, its torrent piled into ugly shapes by the contrary wind. At the rising half tide his sons carried him up in the dark to the bluff. He made Jarro stand by his side, and this time gave him a little leaf to chew. Mel came too, and by the almost continual lightning they watched the wave go by, huger yet, roaring above the roar of the storm, its crest streaking away before it under the lash of the wind. It was hard to sense anything through such tumult, but yes, perhaps, two or three pole-lengths behind the wave, like a huge shadow . . .
When the wave was gone, Iril bent and bawled in Jarro’s ear.
“What did you see or feel?”
“It is there,” said Jarro confidently, his voice suddenly loud in the silence that Mel had made around them. “It is stronger than the wave.”
Iril turned to Mel.
“Such a wind again, to-morrow night,” he said.
“It will be.”
“The rain? The lightning?”
“As you choose.”
“Then none.”
They returned to the huts and slept. Iril did not climb to the bluff again to watch the day wave, but while it roared by lay half-tranced on his cot, dreaming what those huge tides might have done to the pattern of mudbanks. By mid-afternoon the rain had ceased and the wind settled to a steady southwest gale. He woke and went to the landing place to see to the loading and trimming of the raft. At dusk they ate well—this might be their last meal, ever, so why not?—and talked of doings on the water long ago, and the astounding idiocies of passengers. Jarro sat with his brothers, silent, his head bowed, and did not eat at all. Already, though the return tide had barely begun to flow, and even without the leaf Iril had given him, he was beginning to dream the wave. Before the meal was over, he rose. Iril heaved himself up on his crutch and hobbled beside him as he moved like a sleep-walker towards their hut. In the doorway Iril put his a hand on his arm and stopped him.
“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.