“The serpent followed you. It came fast. I tried to call to you, but I could not. I was caught up into the mind of the serpent. I thought with its thought. I felt its hatred. I felt its hunger. I joined in its hunting. I hunted you, my father.”
“No shame,” said Iril.
“It was trapped in the lagoon,” said Jarro, still in the same quiet, half-dreaming voice. “It raged, and I raged with it. It suffered, and I knew its pain. It began to die, and I died too. Then Mel came. He came by the spirit paths and found me and set me loose.”
For a long while Iril said nothing. There was horror in his heart to think how near he had come to killing his own son. And even though he lived, who could tell what the terrors of the adventure might have done to the boy? No, not a boy. Not any longer. He could tell, by the tone of his son’s voice, by the way he had told his story, that in a night and a day Jarro had put his boyhood behind him, just as Iril himself had, in the squall in which his own father had died. And like Iril, from now on and for all his life Jarro would carry the scar of the event.
“You did well, my son,” he said at last. “No man could have done better. Together we did this, you and I. We killed the great serpent.”
“No, Father,” said Jarro, “I did little to help.”
“Not so, my son,” said Iril. “You did what no other could have done, venturing along the spirit paths. The serpent lost me. It did not follow. I would have failed if you had not reached into its mind and spoken. Who before this has heard of such a deed? Mel himself could not have done it. He cannot dream the wave. That is our gift, ours alone, yours and mine. By the axe of Manaw, I say again, we killed the great serpent.”
Normal traffic resumed. The ten stones were rafted down from Silverspring and the rafts linked together into the structure Iril had planned. He crossed the water to see that all was well, and to make any necessary adjustments and adaptations, but he let Farn take command when the full moon came and the whole great raft was floated over. Iril came as a passenger, saying he was still too weak for the work, though to others he seemed as strong as he had been before. It was a simple crossing on a big, clean wave. Siron sent nothing to hinder it. Once across, the raft was taken apart and the separate stones floated along the shoreline and upriver.
That done, they held a praise feast for Iril. Mel himself came, not a shadow or sending, and spoke marvellous praise, and praise for Jarro too, telling what he had done among the spirit paths. It was praise such as would be told for many generations. He left next day for the high ritual that would inaugurate the stones in their new home, and all the men except Iril went with him.
Iril’s sons came to him, and stood side by side before him.
Farn said, “Come. There will be a place of honour for you, a place among the Major Chieftains.”
Iril said, “I am too old and weak for such a journey, and my leg is very painful.”
Arco said, “Perhaps Mel will heal it.”
Iril shook his head.
“A contract is a contract,” he said. “But I have done a thing no man ought to have done.”
He took from his arm the three gold bracelets that Mel had paid him and gave one to each son.
“Go with my blessing,” he said. “And take my place among the Chieftains.”
He watched them walk away, noticing with pleasure how his two elder sons, mature men with wives and children, now accepted Jarro as their equal.
The day after they left, the women gathered in a long line, Farn’s first wife leading, and danced solemnly though the village, three times, with many twists and windings. They sang in grieving voices, words Iril did not know, their secret language. Then they gathered in silence into a circle. One after another round the circle each took a pace forward, and knelt for a while, as if listening, then rose and went at once to her own hut.
That evening Farn’s first wife came to Iril’s hut with a salve.
“This is for your leg,” she said. “It will ease the pain.”
“Nothing can ease the pain. All has been tried.”
“This is new. Siron showed it to me. She said, ‘Say this to Iril. No curse of mine is on him.’”
“When did you see Siron?”
“This morning. Did you not see her? We danced and sang for her and she said farewell.”
“Farewell?”
“Yes. She has gone. Those times are over.”
WATER HORSE
When the Guardian of Western Mouth chose Tamia for her apprentice, no one was more surprised than Tamia herself.
The Guardian’s choice was surprising in more ways than one. Everyone in Tamia’s inland village paid the Guardians’ token as all the islanders did, and “please the Guardians” and “as the Guardians hold back the sea” were sayings as common there as anywhere. But Guardians’ apprentices came from the fishing villages, or at least from the villages that lay near the shore, outside the ragged ring of the Cloudyhead Mountains, with a view of the sea. Many inlanders never saw the sea at all; “Mountains are the right horizon for me” was a common inlander remark.
Every islander, inland and seaward, had heard that the Guardian of Western Mouth was growing old, and that she still had taken no apprentice. Although of course the Guardians always knew what they were doing (it was one of the things they learned in the process of becoming Guardians), still, it was very odd, how long Western Mouth had put off taking an apprentice. Some of the voices saying this rang and echoed on the phrase very odd, with a curious, intent, almost greedy intonation. But no one in Tamia’s village had been interested in contemplating who might finally be chosen, as it would not be one of them.
Tamia was her mother’s eldest child, and the only one by her first husband, who had died in a hunting accident. Her second husband, Tamia’s stepfather, tolerated Tamia’s presence in his household because she was quiet and useful. Tamia had never asked her mother what she thought about her husband’s attitude towards his stepdaughter. She had been afraid to ask since she had seen the look on her mother’s face when the midwife put her second husband’s first child in her arms. Tamia had been six. She had spent the year since her mother remarried trying to be helpful. She had known that her stepfather didn’t want her, but she had hoped he might change his mind. After Dorlan’s birth—followed by Coth, Sammy, Tinsh, Issy and Miz—she grew accustomed to the idea that he would not. At least, with so many little ones to look after, there was never any shortage of work for Tamia to do.
Tamia was happiest looking after her family’s animals. They had two cows, one to provide milk for themselves, and the second for her mother to make cheeses to sell; and six sheep, whose fleeces they sold to the weaver and whose lambs they sold to the butcher. As soon as Tamia was tall enough to steady the most phlegmatic of the ewes between her legs, she began learning to shear; but her stepfather took the lambs to the butcher. They also had a small flock of chickens, and only when Tamia was collecting the eggs were none of them missed.
And, until Tamia was twelve, they had had a pony, Columbine, who pulled a plough over their little quarter-hectare of cropland, and who was hired out, with her plough, to other farmers of smallholdings. Columbine had been bought and trained to her work by Tamia’s father, but it was the money on Columbine’s hiring that enabled Tamia’s stepfather to spend so much of his time arguing with the local council over how the town should be run, and how much the Guardians’ token should be. “I feed and house seven children on the tiniest fraction of what we pay one Guardian every year! Magic is magic! It has no mouth to put food into, no back to be sheltered from storms!” was one of his favourite protests.