The Reedlands

The land

The Reedlands are more water than land. A great slow river spreads out into a maze of channels, each one walled in by reeds taller than a man. People live on stilts above the shallows, travel by ferry and flat-bottomed boat, and fish with nets, eel traps and long eel spears.

Deep inside the reeds are places only the ferry folk know — pools ringed by old willows whose branches trail into the water, and channels so narrow that the reeds brush both sides of the boat.

The Old Wall and the Flood Bell

Along the river runs the Old Wall: an ancient earthen dike faced with stacked grey stones and rows of timber stakes. Nobody remembers who built it. Below it lie the rice fields and the grain barns; above it, the river. The village lives between the two.

On the Wall hangs the Flood Bell, and the village keeps an elder to keep it. When the river rises, the bell is the last word anybody hears before the water decides.

The people

Reedlanders are ferrymen, fishermen, rice farmers and grain dealers. They dress in undyed and faded indigo hemp, and most of them owe someone money — usually whoever owns the grain barns. In a dry year the grain house decides who eats.

Customs of the marsh

• Storm-night traps. On the night of a great storm, the whole village sets its eel traps — whatever the river gives up that night belongs to whoever finds it.
• Water names. The creatures of the films carry old words for water: rill, a small running stream; mere, a still pool; sedge, the grass that grows on graves.
• Two knocks on the wood. A ferrywoman’s signal. You will hear it in the second film.

A short history

The storm. A young ferrywoman, Suri, pulls an egg out of the river. The River Mother tells what hatched, and what it cost.

Twenty years later. Something hatches in the grave mound on the Old Wall — and a second secret comes up out of a dry pit. The River Mother II: The Other Child.