Tribal dragon with spread wings

Long ago, when the reed beds still ran to the horizon, a cutter named Tabni lost his boat in a storm and washed up on a bank where the water lay black and warm. A dragon lay there, its long body coiled through the sedge like a river of its own, its horns sharp as a crown of thorns. Its wings were spread over the young shoots to keep the sun off them. It did not eat him. It asked for one thing: a song sung at the turn of every flood, so it would know people still lived in the marsh and had not fled to the hills.

Tabni sang. He sang badly, and for years, until his voice cracked and his children took over the verses. When the city built its new gate, the priests heard of the dragon and wanted it cut into the brick, so the flood would be held back by its shape. The masons carved every fold of its body with knotted lines, each interlocking band a word of the song, and they spread its wings across the arch as if to gather the whole river in. Tabni asked to cut the last mark himself. He chose the tail, low down, where the carved coils end in a spray of spines that no traveller ever stops to read.

So when the spring water rises black over the quay and the wind comes off the marsh at night, look up at the gate. If you are very still you will hear a cracked old voice moving through the stone, singing the flood down to where the reeds are. That is the whole of it. Now bank the fire, and mind the goat-skins, they are the last of the winter's.