So Tahl joined him and they sat side by side in silence, with bowed heads. After a little while they started to sing, the same sort of quiet, wavering, almost tuneless chant Alnor had used to control that other raft when they had left the Valley. Tilja strapped Axtrig safely onto her arm, crawled back to the side and scooped water into her mouth. There were old stories in the Valley, going back to the times before it had been closed off, and some of them were about the sea. They all said that seawater was too salty to drink, but this had only a faint refreshing tang to it. She got a mug from her bedroll and gave Meena a drink, then she ate one of the flat cakes Tahl had bought on the sandspit outside Goloroth.
After that she lay down, pulled her head scarf over her eyes, and for a short while listened to the song as it mingled with the rippling whisper of the waves brushing along the timbers of the raft. The sound filled her with a sort of vague amazement. They were so far from home, out in the blank ocean, where there was no magic at all and all waters are lost in the end, but Alnor and Tahl could still persuade the current to carry them where they wanted to go. Then the great wave of tiredness took her again.
This time she woke and knew where she was as soon as Tahl shook her shoulder.
“We’re moving out of the current,” he said. “We may have been doing a bit of good, but we can’t keep it up now. Can we have another fix?”
With a groan Tilja sat up, crawled to the edge of the raft and rinsed her face. The water was now too salty to drink. To judge by the sun, it seemed to be about midafternoon.
She untied Axtrig and wrapped her in a fold of her skirt so that she could keep her grip on her without touching her when she let go with her other hand. When she did so, the shock of the spoon’s attraction to her unseen target was so strong that it felt that if Tilja had let her she would have slithered across the raft and gone swimming off sidelong across the slow, rolling swell. The direction was unmistakable. So was the need, and the power behind the need.
“There,” she said, pointing.
“Not too good,” said Tahl. “We’re still in some kind of current, but far as I can make out we’re heading well south of that. Not much we can do about it, either.”
They tried twice more as the afternoon wore on. Each time the line Axtrig longed for slanted slightly more across that of the waves, so that they all could tell that if the current carried them on as they were going they wouldn’t ever come to the place they had journeyed so far to reach.
By the time the sky was red in the west the waves had eased, and Meena was feeling better and sitting up.
“We’re not doing much good so far,” she said. “We’re going to go sailing right past unless we try something else. What about if I say the man’s name? Then maybe he’ll hear us and give us a hand or something.”
So Tilja knelt with her back to the sunset, facing the way Axtrig seemed to want to go. Her left arm was already numb to the shoulder, as if the spoon understood what was happening and was readying herself for the moment, and when Tilja took her in her hand she was like a living force. Tilja shifted her grip so that the bowl was toward her, and with her other hand wound the end of her shawl round the handle as Meena counted, “One. Two. Three . . .”
Tilja let go of the bowl of the spoon and grabbed for the handle, so that she had it in both hands. She heard the whispered name begin. A violent jerk pulled her flat on her face against the timbers of the raft, almost jarring the spoon free, but she managed to wedge the handle down into the cleft between two of the logs and pin it there. The whole raft seemed to be shuddering. She realized that she had heard cries from the other three, and looked round.
Both Meena and Alnor had tumbled onto their sides, and Tahl was on his hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick dog.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“Magic . . . the raft . . .”
He collapsed on his face.
Tilja stared around. Nothing else had changed in the huge emptiness of ocean. Behind her the fuzzy orange disk of the sun seemed to rest on flame-streaked wave tops, and ahead lay the darkness of night. She was helpless, trapped by the need to keep Axtrig pinned in place. It took her a while to discover that that need was gone.
The first inkling came from the feel of the raft when she tried to shift her position. She had been kneeling on her skirt, but now her left shin touched timber. For a moment the familiar numbness spread along it, and she realized that every timber of the raft, infected with Axtrig’s desperate need, had been faintly quivering with eager life, until her touch had stilled it. When she tucked her skirt back under her knee she felt the life reawaken.
Cautiously she raised her other hand an inch above the cleft, ready to grab again, but Axtrig lay content. Even so, careful to keep the spoon in contact with the raft all the time, she managed to shift her along the cleft and wedge the shaft tight under one of the cords that bound the logs together, then knelt up and looked around.
The sun was down and night looming ahead. Ahead. No longer directly into the waves, but slanting across their northward march, slanting in a rush of foam down the back of each one, across the hollow, and up the slope of the next one to its crest, and then slowly down again.
In the last light she made the others as comfortable as she could, drawing their clothes around them and wedging the garments in place, trying to see that no flesh came into contact with the magic-infected timber. When she lay down herself she did the same for herself, but for the opposite reason—to keep the magic active in the timber, and so carry them all wherever it was that Axtrig was determined to go.
Light woke her, stiff and cold. The sky in the east was pale with dawn. Dark against it rose an island, ringed with cliffs.
The other three lay as she had left them, but when she tried to wake them they didn’t stir. She couldn’t find their pulses, or hear their breathing above the sound of the waves. And yet their bodies were still as warm as hers beneath their clothes, so she tried to hope they weren’t dead. She was too worried to eat, but simply sat, watching the island draw nearer. There was nothing to see but the cliffs and a rocky shore, with waves breaking gently against it. The top was hidden.
Slowly her fear for Meena and the others left her, and she began to feel strangely calm, confident that whatever had brought them so far would see them safe to the end. A kindness was in the air. She seemed to smell it in each breath she drew, and to sense that even in their tranced sleep the other three were blessed by the same faint sweetness. There was peace in their faces. So as the dangerous-seeming shore drew nearer, with the long ocean swell being tumbled and shredded by jagged rocks, she felt no tension, but rose and watched, ready.
The raft headed for a sloping shingle beach lying in a fold of the cliffs. It was moving—Tilja could now see, with the motionless island for comparison—as fast as a cantering horse. At the last moment a wave added to that speed, lifting the whole raft up, laying it with a heavy crunch far up the beach, and withdrawing down the shingle in a pother of foam.
Tilja knelt and worked Axtrig out from beneath the lashing and tied her to her forearm. Faint numbness flowed into her flesh, but the spoon now felt peaceful, with the calm of a cat sleeping by its own hearth. When she laid her hand on the timber of the raft she could tell that the magic was gone from there. Hopeful, she waited for the others to wake, but they slept on and neither her voice nor touch would wake them. Still with that strange sense that all was well she left them and looked for a way up the cliffs.
She had been half expecting to find a stair, so easily had the last few hours gone for her, but there seemed to be only one possible place in the sheer rock, where a thin dribble of water trickled down a kind of slot, with a few juts and crannies on either side for handholds and toeholds.