“So it shall be,” said Mel. “My terms are these. You will float the stones to this shore, and then up our river as far as may be, so that I may have them in place by Seed-in. They have powers that I will lay asleep, but for this they must travel all together.”
“That will take thought,” said Iril.
“It must be done.”
“These stones weigh many, many men. Are you able to make them less?”
“They are what they are. They will weigh their own weight.”
“The river from Silverspring. How wide? How deep?”
Mel considered. The air around him wavered as if heat were rising through it, and then he was standing on untrodden grass beside a small river running along a mountain valley. Iril could see the shapes of huts through the left-hand mountain. The slopes of the valley were clothed with ancient woods. He nodded and the scene vanished.
“We will cut timber for the rafts there,” he said. “Cable and thongs we will need more than we have, and also twenty and twenty and ten float-skins for each stone.”
Mel considered.
“I have sent for this stuff,” he said. “Do we cross to-day?”
“I have one raft waiting, unloaded. On the morning ebb I can take over ten and six men, and some gear, and return for another party on the evening wave. Thus we could all cross in five ebbs, which is three days. If we must all travel together we must wait for rafts to come downriver, or build new. Either will take many days.”
“We start this morning,” said Mel.
It was an easy passage. Iril, propped on the low platform at the centre of the raft, scarcely needed to gesture to the two sweepmen. They knew their work, using the curve of the main current that touched the southern shore of the estuary just below Iril’s village and then, guided by the intricate and endlessly shifting pattern of mudbanks beneath the water, swung almost all the way across to the northern shore. Not that a stranger, however skilled a raftman, would have been safe if he had tried it. This was no ordinary ocean tide, falling steadily from high to low. Here twice a day the waters of the outer sea were hauled into the estuary between the narrowing arms of land and held there by the weight of the tide behind them. Then, when the tide reversed itself, they were sucked swirling out, often falling within the space of a milking time by the height of six grown men. On the stillest day the race of the main outflow was a muddle of hummocked waves, but if a raft was set rightly among them, the current would carry it clean across to the other shore, with only an occasional stroke of the sweeps to hold it true. But if Iril had misjudged his course—in places by no more than the width of the raft itself—he might well have been caught in an eddy which would have carried him half way back to the southern shore and then perhaps out to sea, or at least left him stranded on a mudbank in mid-estuary.
Iril made no such mistakes. He had been riding the ebb tide and the in-wave for more than the lifetime of most men. He walked with a crutch since his leg had been caught between two logs when he was a boy, as his father’s raft had broken up in a freak squall. His father had been lost, with all who were on that half of the raft, but Iril had brought his half safely home.
They landed and ate. Then Iril, helped by his middle son, Arco, hobbled up to a low red bluff from which he could see right across the estuary to the mist-blurred shore beyond. Mel came with them. The tide had gone, leaving a waste of glittering grey mudbanks patterned with channels through which the river waters still flowed to the sea. Iril pointed and said a few words. Arco grunted and returned to the landing place, but Iril took a leaf from his pouch, chewed it, settled down on the grass, curling up like a dog, and slept. Mel stood in silence. Sometimes he was there, watching the raft being readied as the waters began to return. Sometimes he was elsewhere.
Towards sunset Iril snorted in his sleep and woke. Hauling himself upright on his crutch, he touched Mel’s elbow and pointed down the estuary, without apparently having looked to check that what he was pointing at was indeed there. The leaden waters glimmered with the gold leavings of the day. Across their surface ran a level line, as if they had been ice which had cracked from shore to shore. Iril hallooed down to the raft, already waiting in the shallows. The men poled it clear of the shore.
“Small wave, this season,” explained Iril.
He felt no anger against Mel for the burning of the hut and the threat of horror to his son, nor fear of him either. He had been threatened before, by kings among others, and had when necessary given in to their threats, but both he and they had known that there were limits to their power over him, because in the end they could not do without him and his kin. Who else could dream the wave? Who else could ride it?
This wave, which he had called small, was about half a man’s height. As the tide returned, the narrowing estuary forced it to hummock up, because there was nowhere else for the mass of water to go. It came silently, foaming only where it rummaged along the shoreline. At one point the water surface was at this level, at the next it was at that. The difference was the wave.
When it reached the raft, it pushed it ahead while the sweepmen paddled gently to keep the carefully shaped sternboard at the exact angle to spill the propelling water away on the near side and so nudge the raft sideways along the wave. The raft was picked up and swept towards the southern shore in a sweet easy movement, like that of a skinning knife lifting the hide from the flesh beneath. For a while it followed the course of the main channel, but the underlying current made little difference. Only the wave mattered, as it carried the raft across the estuary on an almost straight diagonal that re-crossed the main channel at the end of its long curve and finished up a little below Iril’s village. There the raft would be beached to let the wave go by, wait for the still-rising tide to refloat it and be poled up to the landing stage on the last of the inflow. When it was well set on its course, Iril’s middle son came up the hill and helped him down to the huts, but Mel stayed where he was, gazing south. Sometimes he was watching the dwindling raft. Sometimes he was elsewhere.
They made a litter for Iril and carried him inland, leaving his sons to manage the regular crossings. Mel led them not by the pilgrim’s road, but along minor tracks and across bare hill-sides, always making good speed. At evening he brought deer to the camp, which stood blank-eyed, trance-held, waiting for the knife. On the third morning they crossed a ridge and came down through dense autumnal woods to the valley and river that Mel had shown Iril when they had first met. With a pole Iril measured the depth of the clear, brownish water, repeating the process as they travelled along the bank until they reached a waterfall with a pool below it. Feeder streams tumbled down from either side above the fall, and beyond them the river was much less.
“Overland to this pool,” said Iril.
“Good,” said Mel. “The first stones will be here in three noons, the last stone not for four more. You may stay and make ready.”
“My people will fell timber,” said Iril. “I will come with you and see Silverspring while its stones still stand.”
“You are not afraid?”
“No man has seen Silverspring. I have lived more than a life.”
“Come, then.”
Above the fall the forest closed right down to the stream. The track along which they had travelled ended in a wall of brambles. Mel considered the barrier for some while, until part of it became shadowy and vanished, and the trees beyond wavered and vanished also, leaving a clear path that ran on a ledge above the stream. In places boulders had been rolled aside, or piled to level the way. The slopes on either side became steadily steeper until track and stream ran through a defile which ended in a sheer cliff with the river welling out into a pool at its foot. Mel considered the cliff, again for some while, until it opened a crack in itself, a crevice not four paces wide, with cloudy sky beyond.