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.
There!
One sharp cry, like a yell of sudden pain. And then something else, flickering still but continuing like the reverberations of that yell, not in the language of thought, but pure feeling, a furious cold lust, a hunting rage, hunting him, Iril, smelling him through the blind dark, sensing him by the tremors of the water round the raft. The mind of the serpent. And then it came.
It attacked this time along the line of the wave. Its head rose from the upcurve beyond the decoy, arched forward and plunged back in, close behind the main raft. As it did so, it struck the tow rope hard enough to jar the whole structure. Water foamed over the sternboard as its angle against the wave faltered. Iril and the sweepmen wrestled with the bucking sweepshafts to set it true. The man who had been waiting to loose the towrope kept his head and heaved the anchor rock over. For a moment the raft teetered on the edge of foundering, but as the wave drowned the decoy, it regained its angle and swept on in the dark.
This time Iril was sure that the serpent must have seen them, lit by the flames of the decoy only just beyond where its head struck down. Even as it went through its pattern of coiling round its prey, crushing it, hammering it to bits, something in its slow brain was telling it that this was not what it had been sent for. By the flicker in his mind he could sense the process, the lust of destruction turning to disappointment, to hatred and pursuit renewed. Well, if it came, it came, and who chooses to die in the dark? The moment was almost right. Down the grain of his sweep Iril could sense an alteration in the layer where the wave’s root moved against the steadier underlying water, telling him that the raft had now reached a point where it would never have been on any normal, slower crossing, still well down from the landing place and close against the outer edge of the eastward curve of the main channel. He twitched his signal cords for the last time. The man with the firepot crawled to the timber stacked at the forward end, peeled the skins from it and set it blazing. Now, once again, they could see. So, when it came, would the serpent. The raft itself was the final decoy.