She looked down to her favourite scatter of rocks jutting up from the shallows. It wouldn't be too much longer before she could climb carefully down and walk over the rapidly drying sands to reach them. There would be the tiny black spiral shells she could empty with a twist of a stone splinter and the larger brown ones that clasped such sweet yellow flesh tight in their twin halves. She decided she would gather some of the frilled green weeds today and bring them back up here to dry, held secure with a rock. She had small stones to spare for shying at the pink and black birds who would steal her food given half a chance.
The painted men had never mentioned the strange burning taste of this vast blue water. Why was that? She picked up her gourd and shook it. It was less than half-full. She would have to make her way to the grudging seep of sweet water that darkened the rocks where an outcrop banded with brown and black like a lizard's back rose above the shore. She had burrowed into the flaking stone a little way with her digging stick and that useful shoulder-blade bone she had carried with her but it still took an interminable time for the precious trickle to fill the gourd. Though she didn't have anything else to do, for the first time that she could recall in all her long life. Better fetch water first, she decided, so she didn't have to leave whatever food she might gather exposed to the scavenging birds.
She reminded herself to watch for any birds gathering around one of the pools left in the hollows of the rocks. That meant trapped fish, left behind by the retreating waters. She looked thoughtfully at her bundle of mottled scurrier skin faded to an indeterminate colour somewhere between grey and brown. She needed a sharp edge to slice into a fish and she had precious little of her black stone left. Was there none to be found anywhere on this exposed shore? She had looked, time and again. She certainly didn't want to retrace her steps back inland in search of cutting stones.
The band of thorny scrub between the lower lands and the barren heights had proved remarkably persistent. It had sheltered her long after the green forests of mighty trees below had given way to lush grasslands that had reached out almost as far as this water before her. She had walked on with no expectations, with no wish beyond surviving each day uncaptured, sustained by the faint, unquenchable hope of finding sufficient food and water to stem the worst pangs of hunger and thirst. And as the days had passed, she had managed to keep herself alive and to slip unnoticed along the well-trodden trails that alerted her to the presence of some nearby village. She had stayed on the slopes as the dry scrub grew thinner and sparser and any signs of hunters or women foraging had grown fewer and further between. After all, where there was no other prey, she should surely be safer, she had reasoned.
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.