The boat-driver (I never did learn his proper title) poled us carefully between. The low sun glinted red and copper on the water, all striped with reed shadows.
Out of this somehow-mournful picture, a building rose, not very cheery either. Black stone, with pillars and a strange up-pointing roof.
Nemian told me it was a shrine. Ah. I knew about shrines. (?) This one was in honour of the marsh god.
But when we landed at the water-steps, and climbed cautiously – they were slippery and very old – up them, there was an image of the god on a black slab. I thought at first it was another clock, but it wasn’t. They worship the moon, to which, they say, there, the marshes belong.
‘Why?’ I said. I’ve never stopped asking questions. If that stops, frankly I think I’m done for.
‘The Wide River lies over beyond the marshes. It’s tidal, and so are they.’
‘Tidal. Like seas?’
Apparently so. They drain and fill, affected by the pull of the moon. So, the moon’s a god, in the marshes.
Later, when we were in the hall of the shrine, a gloomy old place and no mistake, eating some gloomy bread and bitter crumbly (gloomy) cheese, I spoke to Nemian about this thing of God and gods.
‘God is everything,’ he said. ‘Gods, individual gods, I mean, are expressions of God. As we are.’
‘We’re part of God?’ I goggled. I’d begun to have great respect for this (unknown) and super-astonishing Being.
‘God gave us life,’ said Nemian, simply.
He looked so special, and so quiet and sad, and what he said, the way he’d explained or tried to, (God may be inexplicable, I somehow guess) I could see Argul in Nemian. Just for a second. So different, like the voice, the accent. But.
I put my hand on his. I hadn’t been very nice to him. Not affectionate or flattered, after he’d gone down on his knees. (Well, one knee anyway.)
He glanced at me. And he smiled. He seemed suddenly very pleased, delighted, excited.
And I was flattered after all.
Perhaps it might be all right?
‘Claidi, can I ask you a favour?’
Cautious as on the stairs, I nodded.
‘I’d like to get back to calling you by your full name.’
‘Oh.’
‘When we reach my City, they’ll expect it. In public. You’ll be treated as you should be, as someone important, vital. And Claidi is a bit – not quite dignified enough, is it.’
‘Really.’
‘Don’t be angry, Claidi – Claidissa, may I?’
‘All right. But, I’ll have to get used to it.’
It isn’t me. So, more confusion. Who’s this Claidissa woman?
We were at the shrine of the moon until moonrise, when one of the shadowy people there told us the Riders had come.
Out we went, and there below the water-steps I saw this:
Over the dark marshes, the dark sky and the moon. And in the water between the reeds, enormous lizards, coloured the dark red of a Garden-bred rose. Some just lay there, wallowing, as the hippos had done in the Garden river. But others had openwork cages strapped on their backs, and men were sitting in these.
What I’d expected I can’t say. I wouldn’t have got it right, whatever it was.
‘What are—?’
‘They’re alligators, Claidissa. And those things on their backs are riding-jadaja.’
‘Jadaja. I see.’
The alligators, some of them, flickered their tails. All their red scales skittered moonlight. They were very beautiful, but their eyes were cold and shone a moonish green.
The moon did have a green tinge too. A sort of vapour was wisping up the sky, wrapping over it. The moon in a cloud – lost in the cloud of the moon. Or just lost in the marshes of the moon.
‘What fun,’ I depressedly said.
But then the Riders were slipping off, all agile, on to the steps. They carried things to offer the moon-god. Things they’d shot with arrows mostly, in the marsh.
People have to eat. I suppose they have to make offerings, too. But it looked pretty dismal.
Nemian, to my amazement, couldn’t speak the language of the Alligator Riders. Someone from the shrine had to help. At last, something was agreed, and then an alligator was guided by its Rider up to the steps, and somehow we stepped on it, and got into the quite-big cage, and sat down on its padded floor.
I wondered if these people used money. Decided they might not. Their hair was unevenly cut short and they wore reed-woven garments. (Nemian told me after, at the time I could only see they looked rough and ready.) Their jewellery consisted of polished pebbles, alligator claws and teeth.
The cage jadaja thing was also made from reeds.
Our Rider didn’t seem to mind not calling in at the shrine. Perhaps they consider it part of their worship of the moon, to assist travellers who meet them by moonlight.
As he guided his beast away, by gentle kicks and pats on its sides, the Rider began to sing, raising his eyes to the moon.
The moon was green in its veil. Mists rose from the marshes. The water glimmered like old glass.
His miserable-sounding song, with its no-doubt-miserable unknown words, made me want to howl like one of the Hulta’s dogs, only they seldom had.
We were in the marshes a few days and nights. We stopped off at tiny villages of reed houses, where people sat fishing or mending nets, and the women wove cloth from reeds, at reed-built looms.
A silent people. They didn’t say much to each other. Nemian communicated by signals. They gave us fish and edible leaves and unpleasant-tasting water that must have been all right.
The mouth of an alligator is one man-length long. Or a little longer. They have about three million teeth, or so it looked. But I saw Rider children swimming around with them, diving under the water with them. Even toddlers.
Alligators smell fishy. Or these did.
We did, soon.
One sunset, I must describe it. Some salts in
