第6章 The Skein Gate

The punt was flat-bottomed and pieced together from three kinds of wood, and Godwin Grike stood in the stern of it with his pole and did not ask her why she had come. He had been at the chapel. He had said Kept with the rest of them and afterward had not, like the others, looked at Eudora. That was why she had chosen him. A man who does not look at you at the Reading is a man who might tell you the truth about the Reading. "Out to the gate," she said at the water's edge. "You set it every night. I want to see it by day." "It is no prettier by day." "I am a midwife. I want to know where the water goes." That made him look at her, and something in his weathered face moved, and he nodded and told her to mind her boots and stepped aside to let her down into the punt. The Skaithe opened around them as he poled out from the landing. From the village it had looked like a flat brown plain with threads of water in it. Close to, it was a country; reed beds to the height of a man's shoulder, and beyond them open water the colour of weak tea, and channels threaded through the whole like veins through the back of a hand, some deep and some no more than wet places in the mud, and it changed every hour as the tide moved. Grike knew it the way a rider knows a horse. He never once checked his course or paused to think. He poled and the punt went where he meant it to go, and gulls stood on the mud and did not move for them, and as they went out the sound of the village fell away behind them until it was only the wash of the pole and the reeds talking against one another, a dry papery sound that never quite stopped. "Loveday used to come out here," Grike said at last. "In her last year. She would make me bring her, and she would sit where you are sitting, and she would look at the gate, and she would ask me questions I did not answer." "What did she ask?" "She asked how long the gate had been there, and I told her nobody knows, and she said she would find out, and I said she would not." He poled once, hard, and the punt slid forward. "Then she stopped asking and started doing, and that was worse." The gate was a low dark line across the channel at the far edge of the Skaithe, where the fresh water of the Skein met the salt coming in from the sea. It was old. It was older than the chapel, older than the village, and Eudora could see that at a glance, because the stone of it had been cut in a way nobody in Grithfen cut stone anymore. A channel twenty feet across ran through it, and in the channel were heavy timber boards in slots, boards that could be raised and lowered to hold the tide in or let it out, and each board was black with age and banded with iron gone the same brown as the marsh mud. Beside the gate, in the lee of it, a small stone hut stood with its door open, and inside the hut, half full of rainwater, lay a boat. The boat had no bottom. Its ribs curved up out of the water, and its sides were built and tarred and sound as a farmer's bucket, and where its floorboards should have been there was a dark space through which the shallow water under the ribs showed the mud below. It held a foot of the rain that had got in under the open door, and it was moored to nothing, and it was the most terrible thing Eudora had ever seen in daylight, and she could not have said why. "What is that?" "That is the hollow boat." Grike said it the way a man names his own dog. "Do not look in it. Do not put your hand in it. Do not ask what it is for." "I am asking." "Then I will not answer, and you will be no worse off." He set the pole down across the punt and stood with his hands on it. "I will tell you what everybody in the village knows and nobody in the village says, and then you will get back in this punt and I will take you home and you will not come out here again without me. Once a year the hollow boat is floated in the channel with something in it, and the gate is opened on the ebb, and the boat goes out with the water, and it does not come back with anything in it. That is all. Don't look in it." "And the something in it?" He looked out at the gate and did not answer for a long time. Then he said, "It is small, and it is wrapped in salt, and there is a woman of this village in the room when it is put in the boat, and she does not sleep for a week after, and she is never the same woman again. If you are asking me to name it, I will not. If you are asking me to tell you whether it is alive when it goes into the boat, I will tell you that it cries, and that God help me I have heard it cry, and that I have heard it stop." Eudora put her hands flat on the wet boards of the punt to stop them shaking, and she found that they were shaking anyway, and she made them stop, because she had spent fifteen years learning to make her hands do what was needed in rooms where things were going wrong, and it turned out that the skill did not care what room it was in. "Whose children go into the boat," she asked, "and who decides?" "The Bride decides," Grike said. "We only keep count. That is all the Bond has ever asked of us. To keep count, and to hand the count back when the water comes for it." "Who is the Bride?" "Ask the woman who signs the book." He took up the pole. "I am a ferryman. I take people across. I do not tell them what is on the other side." He poled them back, and on the way he set the gate for the night flood as she watched, lowering the boards one by one into their slots, and when the last went down the water behind them began to change its level almost at once, the whole Skaithe breathing up by an inch, and Eudora sat in the punt and watched a country of water adjust itself to a rule that had been kept a long time. On the way back he told her one more thing, without being asked, and she understood afterward that he had spent the whole crossing deciding whether to say it. "The last woman who came out here with me before she went," he said, "she asked me to take her to Oxmarsh. Not to see the gate. To Oxmarsh. And I would not, because the causeway was under and there is no other way, and she sat where you are sitting and told me I was as much a part of it as any of them, and she was right, and I have been carrying that the way I carry the bread." He poled in silence for a while. "If you ever ask me the same, I will tell you the same thing I told her, and you will hate me for it the same way, and I will have kept my word to the parish all the same." ---