Soon she had had no choice but to keep to the pathetic remnants of the thorny scrub. The lower land had turned to rolling expanses of sandy dunes bare of food or water. For the first time she had seen the endless waves and realised that the painted men had been speaking the truth. Finally she had looked down on a vast plain where there was nothing but sand and rocks. Great boulders were
scattered across it, catching dead drifts of crumbling wood and the strange stone plants that occasionally washed up in the waves here.
The old woman had kept on walking. She had had no reason to stop. Not until she had reached this thrusting point where the land doubled back on itself and the great waters stretched out to the horizon. There was nowhere further she could go. Then she had found this place and had learned that she could both feed herself from the creatures living in the rocks and not die of thirst as she had half-expected. As she laid herself down to sleep each evening, she found herself hoping for the first time in a long while that she might wake to see the new dawn.
She wondered, not for the first time, if anyone else had ever walked all this way to see such a marvel as the great water. Did anyone besides her know of this empty shore? None of the caves along this shore were painted with anything more than bird droppings. Quaking with fear, she had been into each and every hollow beneath the overhang of the shallow sandy cliffs when she had first reached this unforeseen end of the land. If she wasn't alone here, there was nowhere else to go. But there were no painted caves and she had seen no sign of anyone else, not even a footprint in the sand.
Her fears had gradually eased and she had come to hug the knowledge of her solitude to herself. Of course, one day she would lay herself down to sleep in the small cave in the back of this crease in the cliff and not wake up to see the sun again. Still, that was a better death than being fodder for some beast. She had escaped that fate. The painted men had said the land was ringed with endless waves so there was no point in trying to escape their domination. But she had found one remote corner where their feet did not tread, where their followers did not swing their heavy clubs and beat lesser men and women into submission.
The painted men did not come here, even though that great green beast lived down in the waters below. She looked out beyond the line of foaming rocks running parallel with the shore. She hadn't seen the green beast in some days. She had stopped fearing it would come ashore and sniff her out, reaching into her meagre cave with its lurid talons to skewer her and drag her out to crunch her aged bones. She only ever saw it in the water, ducking its ferocious head to dive, its dark-green back vanishing in the depths, or floating idly on the rolling waves, sunning its pale and shining belly.
The closest it had come to the land was climbing out onto the line of jagged rocks to devour the monstrous, gasping serpent that had unexpectedly washed up there in a surge of frighteningly green-tainted foam. The painted men had never made any mention of creatures like that. The beast had broken the scarlet-finned serpent's spine with a single crushing bite of its glaucous fangs and ripped gory chunks from its writhing flesh. It had come back to feast for several days before leaving the carcass to the exultant birds. Now all that was left was a black smear of dried blood and a few white bones wedged among rocks out of the water's reach.
She looked to see if the black stain had been washed away yet and quickly shuffled backwards into the darkness of her rocky niche. There was something out on the water beyond the rocks. Not a beast, nor yet one of the giant serpents. This thing was riding on the water, not swimming in it. The old woman frowned and shaded her faded eyes with one wrinkled hand, squinting to try to see more clearly.
The apparition came closer into the shore. The old woman struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. This strange thing was floating on top of the waves. What could ride on these waters? Painted men could bring down
tall trees with fire or lightning, so that their followers could hollow them out. They used them to float through the flooded forests and out onto the broad expanses of the swollen rivers, spearing the biggest lizards and fat snakes as thick as a man's thigh that thought themselves safe beyond the sodden shallows. Sometimes the hunters lashed their logs together and floored them with sheets of bark to make rafts to carry a raiding party across the floods. The painted men summoned shadows and mist to hide their warriors until they fell on some hapless village, to plunder and enslave whoever could not lose themselves in the forest's gloom fast enough. She had not been fast enough, when she was a girl, when her village had fallen to such raiders.
The old woman thrust away all recollection of those horrors and concentrated on the curious thing coming closer still. This was no hollow log nor yet a raft, but all the same, the old woman could see something of the same idea in the thing. It was made of split lengths of wood, though she had never seen a blue tree. There looked to be some kind of hut built on one end of it, though that was also made from pieces of solid timber, not the woven laths and grass thatch that usually made a dwelling.
In front of the hut, tree trunks stood upright, branches stripped of leaves but draped with massive lengths of hide hung out to cure in the sun. What creature had given up so vast a hide? A great beast might be big enough, but who could kill a beast for its skin? And anyway, a beast's hide was coarse with scales and spines. Was this the skin of some monstrous serpent like the one the green beast had killed? How could men hope to kill such a creature?
Because there were men on this wondrous raft. They were standing on the roof of the hut. The old woman gazed at them, astounded. They had made this thing to ride across the great water. Who could do such a thing?
Who were these men? She strained to see them more clearly as the raft turned with unexpected purpose to come closer to the shore.
They looked strangely pale and misshapen. One was wearing a headdress of bright feathers, golden in the sunlight. Another had a more muted cap of paler brown, with a long plume dangling down his white back. Yet another looked pied, like a black-bellied lizard with its white legs. She realised with a start that she had edged out of her niche onto the ledge to get a better view of this curiosity. She crouched lower. She didn't want to be seen. Painted men adorned themselves with feathers and smeared themselves with coloured clays.
Perhaps they had come from the sunset side of the island, beyond the central mountains. The painted men of the green forest had said there was nothing beyond the heights but an arid desert of lethal heat by day and murderous cold by night. But she had already decided that the painted men didn't know everything. She frowned and looked at her wrinkled hands. This point of land thrust into the water almost exactly half-way between sunset and sunrise and this strange raft was coming from the sunrise side of the island.
Had these strange people come from the lands beyond the green forest that she had turned her back on when she had fled the old man's village? What manner of strange creatures lived in whatever unknown lands opened out beyond the vast tracts of tall trees and mighty rivers there?
The pounding of her heart slowing, she concluded she was safe enough. The line of rocks barred the strange blue raft's way to the shore for as far as she could see up the coast. She watched it nosing along, coming closer to the rocks below her cliff. Were the pale men looking for a gap?