Water by Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley Page A

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 sweep-men. 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