The Ferryman woke in the middle of the Sallow with a rope in its hands that it had not known it had.
It had been waiting in the mud for the crossing, as a mooring waits for a boat, and the crossing had come. There had been no pain in it. The waking was like the moment a river finds its level after a flood, when all the bank-water that has been standing in the reeds for a month drains back into the channel at once and the current is suddenly, unarguably, a current. The Ferryman was the current. It knew that before it knew anything else. The river went under its keel and it took the river’s weight, and the weight was its trade, and its trade was the whole of what it was.
It was a Hand because the ferry crossed under it. That was the whole of its reason. It did not have a name yet, and it did not need one. It had a seat in the body, which had been Tamsin’s seat until the goats went over the crest and the Herder went quiet on the rim of her trough, and which had been empty since then, and which had now been filled by the only thing on the Sallow that knew how to carry a cart across it.
