THE ROOM YOU REACH AT THE RIGHT TIDE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the room the water keeps.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a small room at the back of the Stilt & Reed, which is an inn built on poles in a stilt village in the deep Drownings, and I am the room nobody can get to.

Not never. Twice a day. For half an hour each, and not one minute either side.

It is the tide, you see. The Stilt & Reed keeps no clock — a clock would only lie out here, like everything else that pretends to be certain — and where a clock would hang there is a tide-table instead, and the whole inn runs to it. Most of the rooms you can reach whenever you like, by the plank walks. But the plank to me goes under at anything above half-mire, and stands clear only at the top and bottom of the tide, for the half-hour the water is turning and cannot make up its mind which way to pull. Reach me then, or do not reach me at all until the water turns again.

Guests find this alarming. They check in, they cross to me at slack water, and then the tide comes up over my plank and I hold them, snug and dry and utterly cut off from the world and the taproom and the beer, for six hours at a stretch, while the Drownings slosh about beneath the floor. The landlord warns them. Most of them do not listen, and spend the first flood hammering on the window at a village that cannot reach them either, and learn.

I had thought, for years, that this was simply my curse — to be the useless room, the marooned room, the room you could only ever half-have. Until the old woman came to stay in me, and stayed, and taught me what I was for.

She could not go down, you understand. Her legs had finished with her; she could not do the plank at all, not even at slack water, and she took me for good — the one room in the realm where being unable to leave was no different from anyone else, because nobody can leave me except twice a day. In me, for the first time in her failing years, she was not the one being left behind. The tide left everybody behind. It was the fairest thing that had happened to her in a decade.

And every day, twice a day, at the turn of the tide, the old man came.

Her husband. He would time it — the whole village learned to read a tide the way dry folk read a clock, but he read it best, he read it like scripture — and at slack water he would cross my plank with something in his hands. A bit of warm bread. A flower off the one dry bank. Nothing. Himself. And he would sit with her for the half-hour the water allowed, the two of them in me with the light coming up off the mire, and they would not waste it; you do not waste a half-hour you have had to earn off the sea; and then the tide would turn and lift my plank, and he would kiss her, and go, because to stay was to be trapped six hours and there was the goat to see to — and he would be back at the next turn, and the next, and the next.

Twice a day. Every day. For years. Love on a tide-table. Visiting hours set by the moon and kept by an old man with a flower and a good head for water.

And when at last his own legs went, and he could no longer manage my plank even at slack — do you know what they did? The village rowed him. Took it in turns, the neighbours, to punt the old man out to the Stilt & Reed at the turn of the tide so he would not miss his half-hour, because by then the whole village had decided, without a word spoken, that this was simply a thing that must happen, twice a day, tide without fail: the old man delivered to the old woman for the half-hour the water permitted, and fetched away again before it closed.

I held them for every minute of every one of those half-hours. It is the only thing I have ever been good for, and it turns out to be the best thing in the whole inn. The tide decides the visiting hours in the Drownings. And the faithful — the truly faithful, the flower-and-a-good-head-for-water faithful — simply learn to row.

The moral, from the marooned room: out where the water rules, you do not get to choose your hours; the tide chooses them for you, twice a day, and closes them without appeal. But that is no barrier to love — it is only a discipline. The devoted learn the tide, and earn the half-hour, and row out for it in all weathers, twice a day, for as long as it takes — because a love worth having was always going to ask you to learn to row.