What the south bank did with Tuesday afternoon was talk among the older drakes; what no one on the bank could do with it was overhear. Neither circumstance is new. Longer than anyone has bothered to tally, the drakes have settled their matters at the western station, and by a usage that predates the settling, what they settle stays at the station. This correspondent records, as every correspondent before has recorded, the fact of the deliberation and the texture of it, and nothing of the substance, there being no honest way to come by the substance.
Yesterday’s warmth carried over without a break. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice kept the lower gate through the early morning. She went back and forth between the gate and the humidity gauge often enough that one read a forecast off the traffic alone: the spell would hold to the week’s end. Put to her later, through the customary channels, the inference drew no confirmation. It drew no denial. The Warden was not at the sluice.
Today they were four. By mid-afternoon they had drawn in at the western station and settled into the shaded formation that yesterday’s coverage, perhaps ahead of the evidence, named a feature of the season. The naming still holds. Two warm afternoons are a slender footing to build it on.
Low the conversation opened, and across to the watching post, kept a respectful distance east of the station, drifted only the recurring scraps that on past occasions have pointed toward the matter under discussion. The word “Wednesday,” once, early, and never circled back to. The words “the third,” twice, the second carrying a downward turn that in a creature given to inflection might have passed for agreement. And then the phrase “no, the other one,” which pulled the whole party in closer than anything else had in the hour and held them there, after which the four sat mute long enough that a watcher could have counted slowly to forty before the low talk picked up again. Pause ran long and exchange ran short, in the proportion the older drakes keep to at this season. So it ran for the best part of an hour.
What were they settling? It may have been the Channel Sprint run on the eighth, a thing they are reckoned to have chewed over on two afternoons at least since. The rising East Bank crust index has its claim too, word of it having reached them off yesterday’s coverage by the usual means. Or perhaps only the weather. Which of the three, there is no telling, and the older drakes betray no sign of minding that there is none.
Some way out from the station a small disturbance creased the surface, too slight for the sort of ripple now and then thought worth the recording, yet plain enough to halt the drakes a moment while they weighed it. Nothing came of it. The crease smoothed over. The talk went back on.
The hour ran out, no one went near the station, and the watch was folded up. The four kept their places. The shade had slid clear of the western station by then, due back over it tomorrow, and over whatever they had decided, or failed to decide, the water lay flat and surrendered nothing of it.