They rode like that for days. Each day the peninsula became lower, narrower, more stripped of life. The thick mats of dune grass reduced to occasional patches, the tufts of grass as sparse as the hair on a balding man. Each tuft had been blown in every direction by the winds, creating a perfect circle of smoothed hard sand around it, deepest at the outer edge; the dunes became geometrical worksheets, sine waves covered with circles. One sunset walking in this deeply patterned sand Thel looked down at a tuft of grass and the perfect circle around it, and thought, That is your life: a stalk of living stuff blown in every direction, leaving a brief pattern in sand.
They had emptied the facewomen’s bags of food, and went hungry as the beach provided less and less. One morning Garth plucked two of the fruit from his shoulder tree and offered them to Thel and the swimmer. “I can eat grass,” he told them. “More grass, more fruit. Really. Please. We can’t afford to spend all day on the beach foraging.”
Thel said, “If we stopped in the later afternoon instead of at dusk, we could forage more, and you could eat more too.” He scuffed dubiously at the tough dune grass, so sharp-edged you could easily cut skin with it. Garth also spent every evening with his feet buried in the sand; presumably more of that would help too, but it was something Garth didn’t talk about.
He did agree to the early stops, however, and so every morning after that Thel and the swimmer ate one of his bitter electric shoulder apples, and felt the chemical tang of it course through them. It was wonderful how well the apples satisfied their appetites, how long they could subsist on them. And Garth ate dune grass in the evenings, and spent time with his feet buried in the sand, and got thinner; but the apples continued to bloom on his shoulder tree, tiny fragrant white blossoms giving way to hard green nubs, which grew quickly into edible fruit.
Then as they rode down the endless spit of the peninsula, even the grasses disappeared. They were on a desert shore, beach on both sides of a low mound of dunes; even the horses had to be fed from Garth’s tree, and he had to spend the whole of every afternoon with his body stretched out to the sun, and his feet stuck deep in the sand—haggard, exhausted, a small smile playing over his mouth. “I was told tales of this, how one of us could grow enough to sustain his fellows in a time of need. Like having children, they always said, and now I know what they mean.” And he looked at them with a gaze they could scarcely return, so filled was it with a kind of amused maternal affection.
Every morning thunderheads billowed up and sidled across the southern sky, but never hit their stretch of the coast, piling up instead against the mountainous spine far behind them. They found pools of water in holes in the sandstone, proof of storms past, but these had grown brackish with beach dew, and the travelers became thirsty as well.
After many days of this deprivation, they saw in the distance ahead a small knob in the peninsula. Dune grasses returned to the central mound, and they came across more pools of water. Days passed and it seemed they would reach the knob the following afternoon for several days running, but it was bigger than they had first thought, and kept receding.
Finally it loomed up, several hundred feet tall, like a sandstone lighthouse. They skirted it on the wide southern beach, and on the other side discovered a most extraordinary thing: the beach stretched out into the blue sea, and got thinner and lower, until it sank under the water. “It’s the end!” Thel cried.
“No, no,” Garth said. “It’s the water gate. I’ve heard stories about it. Look out there, see that smudge? It’s the other cape, where the peninsula proper begins again. In between is a tidal bar. This is the lowest part of the spine, nothing more. At low tide a strip of sand will emerge as fine as any road, and stay above the waves for half the day.”
It proved to be true. As the afternoon progressed the beach extended farther into the water, which was racing from north to south in a strong current, breaking whitely in a straight line that divided the sea. This stretch of white foam boiled furiously in a line to the horizon and the distant smudge of the farther cape. Then in a matter of moments, it seemed, the whitewater divided and fell away into two sets of waves rolling in from right and left, leaving a strip of wet gray sand and wet brown rock standing between them. The breakers tumbled in over rocky shallows on both sides, but the bar stood clear of them. And the spine trail extended even here; squarish blocks of water-holed rock had been laid in a path over the bar, making a causeway a foot or two higher than the bar itself. “The horses can’t cross that,” Garth said. “The rock would tear up their hooves.”
“But surely it’s more than one tide’s walk across?” the swimmer said.
Garth nodded. “Still we must send the horses back, as we said we would.” And he kicked and shouted at the horses, threw rocks at them until they cantered off, and circled nervously; then regarded each other and broke for home, flowing down the beach like a school of red fish darting through the sea.
Something moved on the side of the knob and they jumped, turned to look. It was a man the same color as the sandstone, his skin the same grainy dark brown. As he approached they saw he was naked, and that his eyes, his hair, everything was the brown of the rock. In his eyes the color seemed darker, the way the rock did when it was wet.
He stopped before them and said, “I am Birsay the guide. It is more than one tide’s walk to cross the brough, as you noted. This is how we do it; there is a rise near the halfway point, and we run to that in one low tide, on a path that I have built. It is just possible, though you get your legs wet. There on the rise I have left several large holed rocks. We tie ropes I have made to those anchors, and as the water rises we rise on it, floated by slings I have made of kelp bladders and wood. The current pushes us out, usually to the south, but we are tied by the ropes to the anchor rocks, and when the tide ebbs, we float down to a landing, and complete the crossing of the brough to the other cape.”
“Why have you made these things?” Thel asked. “Why do you do this?”
The sandstone-colored man shrugged. “The peninsula extends around the world, and there is no land but it. And this is the only place in its circumference where the sea has chewed the peninsula down almost to its level. And naturally the peninsula must be passable. Traders come through, and circumnavigators on pilgrimages—believers of more religious persuasions than I’d care to recall. It is simply the natural order of things. The land itself calls forth a guide to sustain that order, and I am the forty-ninth reincarnation of that guide, Birsay.”
He led them to a tall cave entrance in the side of the knob, down stone steps to a dry sand floor. Against one wall were circles of coiled rope, made of some sort of animal hair or plantlike fiber—impossible in this world to be sure which, it occurred to Thel as he examined it. It was thick in the hand, and would certainly hold against any current. The floats Birsay had mentioned were there too, made of the big bulbs one saw at the base of kelp tubes, tied by flat cords to a wooden framework that held them under the arms, and around the chest and back. “You spend almost half a day suspended in the tide,” Birsay said. “The water is warm, though by the end it doesn’t feel so. The bath is good for the skin. Then the distance from the rise to the western cape is not as great as the distance from here to the rise.”
The three travelers conferred by eye. Garth said, “When would you have us leave?”
“We’ve wasted too much of this ebb. And they are getting longer every day now, for twenty more days. The next one will begin in the dark before dawn.”
“The next, then,” Thel said, and the other two nodded their agreement.
They spent the night in the cave, around a small warm driftwood fire, the twisted shapes of the wood burning in bright flames tinged with blue, green, salmon. What little smoke there was rose through a blowhole in the roof of the cave. The guide fed them broiled conch, seasoned with wild onions and a gingery seaweed, wonderful after their week of subsistence on Garths bitter apples.
Birsay had a place for everything, and he moved neatl
y and quickly around the fire, catching its light just as the cave walls did, so that sometimes it was hard to see him. He brought out a tray of black loam for Garth to stick his feet into after the regular meal was done, and with a blush and a grateful look, Garth silently buried his feet in the dirt.
“Do you guide all travelers that appear here?” Thel asked.
“I do.”
“You make no distinctions?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those that follow us are murderers, intent on our lives.”
“Is that so?” The wet pebble eyes regarded them with interest. “Well, I wish you all speed. I make no distinctions of that kind, no. Good, evil, right, wrong—they are personal matters, shifting from one to the next. These murderers may regard themselves as righteous folk, and you as great criminals perhaps, thieves of something they cherish, perhaps, who knows?” Though he glanced at Thel’s mirror bag as if he did know. “How am I to judge? By your stories? By the looks on your faces?” He dismissed the idea with a flip of the hand. “My task is to lead travelers across the low point in the world road. Their purposes, their identity-none of my concern. One winter I led death himself across the brough, you can still see his footprints in the rock where a wave splashed him and he got angry….” And as the firelight played over his face he told them stories of travelers who had passed, men and women and creatures it sometimes took him the burning of a branch to describe. One such had had the legs and waist of a man, his chest then rising up into the rounded and feathered body of a giant eagle. This creature had spoken to him in grim croaks, and after a while Birsay had guessed the truth; it walked across the brough because it had had its wing muscles clipped, so that it could no longer fly. The guide laughed at Thel: “How judge that, eh? How judge that?”
FOURTEEN
CROSSING THE BAR
In the middle of the night Birsay crouched by their warm sand beds and roused them. “The brough comes clear soon.” They rose and ate more conch, and at Birsay’s instruction drank from a jug of fresh water until their stomachs were heavy and cold.
The star flood still lit the beach as they walked onto the wet sand. Birsay watched each wave closely, and as one ran up the sand he pointed. “Last high wave,” he said. “From now on they ebb.”
Then more and more of the beach was revealed as each wave sluiced back and hopped over the nonexistent rail where the water regrouped and turned again. A point emerged, wet tan sand with a cross-hatched stippling of black. Then the waves fell back to left and right as they had the afternoon before, and the line of boiling white water appeared. The bar emerged, at first just as an extension of their point of sand, receding away from them at a walking pace: then, in the blue of dawn, the water simply ran away from them to right and left, and they walked on a sandbar that extended all the way to the horizon.
Struck silent at the uncanny sight, the three travelers strode quickly after Birsay, their ropes coiled and hung over their shoulders, their floats hanging on straps tied over their own backpacks and bags. The sun rose and cast long faint shadows ahead of them. The seas rolled up flat wet sand to right and left, the northern and southern seas separated only by their spit of wet sand.
They crunched through patches dense with sea-shells, or squishy with living anemones. It was a blue day, the air clear as glass and the sea and sky darker and lighter shades of the same full blue. The sand and Birsay were a color composed of tan and black sand, mixed thoroughly. A handful of it washed thin by water revealed clear grains, smaller white and brown grains, and tiny floating black flecks.
Then the sand began to grow thin over bedrock of the same color, which broke through as if it were a little model of the spine, here worn to ankle-high knobs and nubs, split by the sea down its grain of stratification, running across the bar from sea to sea. Eventually they walked on bare rock, sharp ribs of brown that ran out under the white waves, which grumbled toward them to nothing in hundreds of parallel grooves. Eventually the shallow faults turned the brough into a stretch of pitted knife edges, set across their way. Walking over these edges would have devastated first sandals and then feet, but Birsay or his predecessors had filled a rough narrow path through the faults with blocks of loose stone—an old path, it seemed, for the blocks were worn in their settings, and in places had been washed away.
They hurried over this low causeway, until when they looked behind they could see no sign of Birsay’s knob, or the low peninsula beyond it; ahead they saw no sign of the knob at the halfway point, nor the farther cape. The brough extended all the way to the horizon in both directions, a horizon nearly at eye level, so that it seemed they crossed the bottom of a flattish bowl of ocean, which would sooner or later rush in on them. It was a strange sight.
In late mid-afternoon they came to Birsay’s knob, first seen as a bulge in the bar, a widening of the white water to the sides. “We’ve made good time,” Birsay said, “but it’s always a close thing. By sunset we’ll be floating.”
Once on the knob it seemed not much different from the rest of the brough: slightly wider, minutely taller, pocked and runneled like all the rest of the rock they had traversed. In the largest potholes were big blocks of rock that had had holes chiseled through them, and following Birsay’s instructions they tied the ends of their ropes through these holes. Birsay chose the anchor rocks very carefully, after observing the surging mush and the wind, and his charges’ bodies; he spread them out at intervals along the bar, Thel, Birsay, Garth, the swimmer. Their few possessions they placed in other potholes, with stones placed over them.
They sat on the damp rock, and waited. The tide began to come in.
It was impossible not to be frightened at the sight. Each broken wave rushed at them, at first as thick as the wave had been high, and boiling over the reef below; it thinned as it made its furious rush, until it was bubbling water trickling up the furrows in the rock, and then receding. But each final gurgle was closer than the last.
“Usually the south reaches us first,” Birsay said, “because that’s where the prevailing winds come from. But today”— he frowned, sniffing—”the wind is from the east. And the north side is closing faster.” He turned and turned again on the knob’s highest point, sniffing. “It may be windy tonight.”
Then, in the surge of just a few waves, the four of them were sitting on a tiny rock island in a sea of boiling white water, waves from the two seas running together and slapping up into the air, in lines of wind-tossed spray. Then a big wave from the north ran up the rock and right over their feet and backs. Quicker than Thel would have believed possible, every wave rolled over the rock and their lower legs. They stood around Birsay on the peak, and then waves from the south sea piled in as well, and up and down the brough to east and west they could see long sheets of white water squirting up into the air, underneath them a chaos of wave and backwash, the sea white with foam, millions of bubbles hissing out their lives, sending a fine rain into the air and creating a tremendous loud roar, a roar made of glugs and hisses that individually would scarcely be heard across a room.
When the water got waist high they were shoved hard this way and that, and Birsay told them in a loud voice to hang on—that this was the only tricky part—and that they should soon cast off and get away from the knob, trusting to their floats and anchors. When the waves were chest high they were forced to take his advice, and they swam off after him to the south, floating easily on their miniature rafts and spreading out as they were pushed straight out from their anchors.
As the tide rose the water grew calmer, until the only signs of the brough were long snaking lines of crusty foam floating away to the south, and an occasional brief mushy break at the top of the largest waves as they crossed the bar. The waves, and the current that pushed them, were from the northwest. So they floated to the southeast of the knob, connected to it like kites flying in the wind of the tidal current. If they rested they were some thirty feet from each other, and they were about two hundred feet from th
e submerged knob, so that Thel and the swimmer, on the outsides, could easily paddle over to talk to the middle two. Garth’s shoulder tree looked odd indeed sticking up out of the water, like the last remnant of a deluged land. Garth’s face was sputtering and apprehensive beside it; he couldn’t swim and had to trust his float, clearly a difficult act of faith.
It was a strange sunset. Now the horizon was closer and higher than ever, the dome of the sky taller: all as blue as they had been at dawn. The sun dropped through the air yellow as a daisy and sunk without fanfare, turning green at the end as if the last rays had shone through water. During the long dusk a line of puffy white clouds appeared to the northwest, so tall they redefined the height of the sky. These clouds eventually took on copper and iron hues, and cast their color over everything else, so that the sea took on a coppery sheen, and the air was dark and metallic.
Birsay watched this development nervously, and when the wind shifted and picked up suddenly, he swam to Thel’s side and said, “It may be a cold night. The northerlies are hard.”
Thel swallowed salt and nodded. Already the water felt warmer than the air, so that his head was cold, and it was warming to duck it into the brine. Birsay said the southern current was warmer still; Thel was content with the northern one, which felt just a touch below body temperature.
But the northwest wind was cold, and the swells rolling by began to steam a little. In the last light of the dusk they saw the line of tall clouds approaching, blocking out the stars that were just popping into salt-blurred existence. The travelers rose and fell on dark swells that steamed whitely. They rose and fell, rose and fell.