Water, page 22
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
That night she woke again in Zasharan’s rocky chamber. She lay again on the bed or pallet where she had woken before; and she turned her head on her pillow and saw Zasharan dozing in a chair drawn up beside her. As she looked into his face, he opened his eyes and looked back at her. “Good,” he said. “I dreamed that you would wake again soon. Come—can you stand? I am sorry to press you when you are weary and confused, but there are many things I do not understand, and I want to take you to my Eye quickly, before you escape me again. If you cannot stand, and if you will permit it, I will carry you.”
“Dream?” she said. “You dreamed I would return?” She was sitting up and putting her feet on the floor as she spoke—bare feet, sandy floor, her toes and heels wriggled themselves into their own little hollows without her conscious volition. For the first time she thought to look at what she was wearing: it was a long loose robe, dun-coloured in the lamplight, very like her nightdress at home—it could almost be her nightdress—but the material was heavier and fell more fluidly, and there seemed to be a pattern woven into it that she could not see in the dimness.
“Watchers often dream,” he said. “It is one of the ways we Watch. No Watcher would be chosen who had not found his—or her—way through dreams many times.” He offered her his hand. “But you—I am not accustomed to my visitors telling me they are dream-things when I am not dreaming.”
She stood up and staggered a little, and he caught her under the elbows. “I will walk,” she said. “I walked here before, did I not? The—the night I came here—nearly a fortnight ago now.” He smiled faintly. “I would like to walk. Walking makes me feel—less of a dream-thing.”
His smile jerked, as if he understood some meaning of her remark she had not meant, and they left the room, and walked for some time through rocky corridors hazily lit by some variable and unseen source. At first these were narrow and low, and the floor was often uneven although the slope was steadily upward; both walls and floor were yellowy-goldeny-grey, although the walls seemed darker for the shadows they held in their rough hollows. The narrow ways widened, and she could see other corridors opening off them on either side. She felt better for the walk—realler, as she had said, less like a dream-thing. She could feel her feet against the sand, a faint ache from the wound on her ankle, listen to her own breath, feel the air of this place against her skin. She knew she was walking slowly, tentatively, when at home she was quick and strong, and needed to be. Perhaps—perhaps they were very high here—had he not said something about hills?—perhaps it was the elevation that made her feel so faint and frail.
They had turned off the main way into one of the lesser corridors, and came at last to a spiral stair. The treads twinkled with trodden sand in the dim directionless light as far up as she could see till they rounded the first bend. “You first, lady,” he said, and she took a deep breath and grasped the rope railing, and began to pull herself wearily up, step by step; but to her surprise the way became easier the higher they climbed, her legs grew less tired and her breath less laboured. They came out eventually on a little landing before a door, and Zasharan laid his hand softly on it and murmured a word Hetta could not hear, and it opened.
There were windows on the far side of the room, curtain-less, with what she guessed was dawn sunlight streaming in; she flinched as the daylight touched her as if in this place she would prove a ghost or a vampire, but nothing happened but that its touch was gentle and warm. The view was of a steep slope rising above them; the room they were in seemed to grow out of the hillside.
There was a round pool in the middle of the floor and Zasharan knelt down beside it on the stone paving that surrounded it. “This is my Eye,” he said softly. “Come and look with me.”
She knelt near him, propping herself with her hands, for she was feeling weary again. Her gaze seemed to sink below the water’s surface in a way she did not understand; perhaps the contents of the pool was not water. And as her sight plunged deeper, she had the odd sensation that something in the depths was rising towards her, and she wondered suddenly if she wanted to meet it, whatever it was.
A great, golden Eye, with a vertical pupil expanding as she saw it, as if it had only just noticed her . . .
She gave a small gasp, and she heard Zasharan murmuring beside her, but she could not hear what he said; and then the pupil of the Eye expanded till it filled the whole of her vision with darkness, and then the darkness cleared, and she saw—
She woke in her bed, her heart thundering, gasping for breath, having pulled the bed to bits, the blankets on the floor, the sheets knotted under her and her feet on bare ticking. It was just before dawn; there was grey light leaking through the gap at the bottom of the blind. She felt exhausted, as if she had had no sleep at all, and at the same time grimly, remorselessly awake. She knew she would not sleep again. Her right ankle ached, and she put her fingers down to rub it; there was a ridge there, like an old scar.
She got through the day somehow, but she left a pot of soup on the back of the cooker turned up too high, so it had boiled over while she was scraping the seeds out of squashes over the compost heap, and her mother had called out, a high, thin shriek, that the house was burning down, although it was only burnt soup on the hob. Her mother had palpitations for the rest of the evening, was narrowly talked out of ringing the doctor to have something new prescribed for her nerves, and insisted that she might have burned in her bed. Her father complained about the thick burnt smell spoiling his tea, and that Hetta was far too old to make stupid mistakes like that. She went to bed with a headache, remembering that the blanket-weed was still waiting for her to haul it away, and found two aspirin on her pillow, and a glass of water on the floor beside it: Ruth. Their father believed that pharmacology was for cowards. The only drugs in the house were on her mother’s bedside table, and Hetta would much rather have a headache than face her mother again that evening; she had forgotten Ruth’s secret stash. She swallowed the pills gratefully and lay down.
When she opened her eyes she was again by the pool in Zasharan’s tower, but she had moved, or been moved, a little distance from it, so she could no longer look into it (or perhaps it could no longer look out at her), and Zasharan sat beside her, head bowed, holding her hand. When she stirred, he looked up at once, and said, “I have looked, and asked my people to look, in our records, and I cannot find any tale to help us. I am frightened, for you sleep too long—it is longer each time you leave. You have been asleep nearly a day, and there are hollows under your eyes. This is not the way it should be. You live elsewhere—you have been born and have lived to adulthood in this elsewhere—where you should not be; you should be here; my Eye would not have troubled itself to look at any stranger, and my heart welcomes you whether I would or nay. There have been others who have come here by strange ways, but they come and they stay. If you wish to come here and we wish to have you, why do you not stay?”
She sat up and put her other hand on his and said, “No, wait, it is all right. I have found Damar in the atlas at home, and my sister has found out about air flights, and I will come here in the—in the—” She stumbled over how to express it. “In the usual way. And I will come here, and find you.” She heard herself saying this as if she were listening to a television programme, as if she had nothing to do with it; and yet she knew she had something to do with it, because she was appalled. Who was this man she only met in dream to tell her where she belonged, and who was she to tell him that she was going to come to him—even to herself she did not know how to put it—that she was going to come to him in the real world?
“Air flights,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes,” she said. “Where is the nearest airport? I could not find Thaar, or Chin—Chin—” As she said this, her voice wavered, because she remembered how hard it was to remember anything from a dream; and she was dreaming. Remember the sand, her dream-thought told her. Remember the sand that lies in the little box on your chest of drawers. “Oh—you will have to tell me how to find you. I assume there is a better way than . . .” Her voice trailed away again as she remembered being lost in the sandstorm, of being led blindly through the sand-wind, her arm pulled round Zasharan’s shoulders till her own shoulder ached, remembered her curious sense that they were somehow kept safe in a little rolling bubble of air that let them make their way to the door in the cliff. That is why he is a Watcher, said the dream-thought. There is little use in Watching if you cannot act upon what you see.
“I do not know where the nearest airport is. What is an airport?” said Zasharan.
She knew, sometimes, that she spoke some language other than Homelander in her dreams; but then it was the sort of thing you felt you knew while you were dreaming and yet also knew that it was only a trick of the mind. The words she spoke to Zasharan—the words she had heard and spoken to the other Damarians she had met in other dreams—felt different. It was just a part of the dream, as was the different, more rolling, growlier, peaked-and-valleyed sound of the words Zasharan and the other Damarians said to her than what she spoke in Farbellow, when she was awake. (I am awake now, said the dream-thought.) It was only a part of the same mind-trick that when Zasharan said “airport,” it sounded like a word that came from some other language than the one he was speaking.
She looked around, and saw a table in the corner, and books upon it (were these the records he had been searching for stories like hers?), and several loose sheets of paper, and a pen. She stood up—carefully, prepared to be dizzy—and gestured towards the table. Zasharan stood up with her. “May I?” she said. He nodded as anyone might nod, but he also made a gesture with his hand that was both obviously that of hospitality and equally not at all—she thought; her dream-thought thought—like the gesture she would have made if someone had asked her to borrow a sheet of paper.
She took a deep breath, and picked up the pen (which was enough like an old-fashioned fountain pen that she did not have to ask how to use it) and drew an airplane on the top sheet of paper. She was not an artist, but anyone in the world she knew would have recognised what she drew at once as an airplane.
Zasharan only looked at it, puzzled, worried, both slightly frowning and slightly smiling, and shook his head, and made another gesture, a gesture of unknowing, although not the shoulders raised and hands spread that she would have made (that she thought she would have made) in a similar situation.
Frustrated, she folded the sheet of paper, lengthwise in half, then folding the nose, the wings—she threw it across the room and it flew over the round pool where the Eye waited, bumped into the wall on the far side and fell to the ground. “Paper airplane,” she said.
“Paper glider,” he agreed. He walked round the pool, and picked her airplane up, and brought it back to the table. He unfolded it, carefully, pressing the folds straight with his fingers, smoothing and smoothing the wrinkles the bumped nose had made—as if paper were rare and precious, she thought, refusing to follow that thought any farther—and then, quickly, he folded it again, to a new pattern, a much more complex pattern, and when he tossed his glider in the air it spun up and then spiralled down in a lovely curve, and lit upon the floor as lightly as a butterfly.
She looked at him, and there was a sick, frightened feeling in her throat. “When you travel—long distances,” she said, “how—how do you go?” She could not bring herself to ask about cars and trucks and trains.
“We have horses and asses and ankaba,” he said. “You may walk or ride or lead a beast loaded with your gear. We have guides to lead you. We have waggoners who will carry you and your possessions. There are coaches if you can afford them; they are faster—and, they say, more comfortable, but I would not count on this.” He spoke mildly, as if this were an ordinary question, but his eyes were fixed on her face in such a way that made it plain he knew it was not.
Slowly she said, “What year is it, Zasharan?”
He said, “It is the year 3086, counting from the year Gasthamor came from the east and struck the Hills with the hilt of his sword, and the Well of the City of the Kings and Queens opened under the blow.”
“Gasthamor,” said Hetta, tasting the name.
“Gasthamor, who was the teacher of Oragh, who was the teacher of Semthara, who was the teacher of Frayadok, who was the teacher of Goriolo, who was the teacher of Luthe,” said Zasharan.
Gasthamor, she repeated to herself. Goriolo. She doubted that the encyclopedia would tell the tale of the warrior-mage who struck the rock with the hilt of his sword and produced a flow of water that would last over three thousand years, but an encyclopedia of legends might. “You—you said the Queen’s City, once before,” she said. “What is the name of your queen?”
“Fortunatar,” he said. “Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.”
She woke to the sound of her own voice, murmuring, Gasthamor, Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, the year 3086. Her heart was heavy as she went about her chores that day, and she told herself that this was only because it was two more days before she could go to the library again, and look up the kings and queens of Damar.
She made time to finish cleaning the pool at the back of the garden, hauling the blanket-weed—now a disgusting sticky brown mat—two heaped barrowloads of the stuff—to the compost heap. When she was done, she knelt on the crazy paving that edged the pool, and dipped her dirty hands in the water. The sting of its coolness was friendly, energising; her head felt clearer and her heart lighter than it had in several days. She patted her face with one wet hand, letting the other continue to trail in the water, and she felt a tiny flicker against her palm. She looked down, and there was a newt, swimming back and forth in a tiny figure eight, the curl of one arc inside her slightly cupped fingers. She turned her hand so that it was palm up, and spread her fingers. It swam to the centre of her palm and stopped. She thought she could just feel the tickle of tiny feet against her skin.
She raised her hand very, very slowly; as the newt’s crested back broke the surface of the water, it gave a frantic, miniature heave and scrabble, and she thought it would dive over the little rise made by the web between her forefinger and thumb, but it stilled instead, seeming to crouch and brace itself, as against some great peril. Now she definitely felt its feet: the forefeet at the pulse-point of her wrist, the rear on the pads at the roots of her fingers, the tail sliding off her middle finger between it and the ring finger. She found she was holding her breath.
She continued to raise her hand till it was eye level to herself; and the newt lifted its head and stared at her. Its eyes were so small, it was difficult to make out their colour: gold, she thought, with a vertical black pupil. The newt gave a tiny shudder and the startling red crest on its back lifted and stiffened.
They gazed at each other for a full minute. Then she lowered her hand again till it touched the pond surface, and this time the newt was gone so quickly that she stared at her empty palm, wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.
She heard bells ringing in her dreams that night, but they seemed sombre and sad. On the next night she thought she heard Zasharan’s voice, but she was lost in the dark, and whichever way she turned, his voice came from behind her, and very far away.
She stormed around the supermarket the next day, and when she found herself at the check-out behind someone who had to think about which carefully designated bag each item went into, she nearly started throwing his own apples at him. She arrived at the library with less than half an hour left, but her luck had found her at last, for there was a computer free. Queens of Damar, she typed. There was a whirr, and a list of web sites which mentioned (among other things) internationally assorted queens apparently not including Damarian, paint varnishes, long underwear, and hair dressing salons, presented itself to her hopefully. She stared at the screen, avoiding asking something that would tell her what she feared. At last she typed: Who is the ruler of Damar today?
Instantly the screen replied: King Doroman rules with the Council of Five and the Parliament of Montaratur.
There was no help for it. Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, she typed.
There was a pause while the computer thought about it. She must have looked as frustrated and impatient as she felt, because a librarian paused beside her and asked in that well-practised ready-to-go-away-without-taking-offense voice if she could be of service.
“I am trying to find out some information about the queen of Damar,” she said.
“Damar? Oh—Daria—oh—Damar. Someone else was just asking about Damar a few weeks ago. It’s curious how much we don’t hear about a country as big as it is. They have a king now, don’t they? I seem to remember from the independence ceremonies. I can’t remember if he had a wife or not.”
The computer was still thinking. Hetta said, finding herself glad of the distraction, “The queen I want is Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.”
The librarian repeated this thoughtfully. “She sounds rather, hmm, poetical, though, doesn’t she? Have you tried myths and legends?”
The computer had now hung itself on the impossible question of a poetical queen of Damar, and Hetta was happy to let the librarian lean over her and put her hands on the keyboard and wrestle it free. The librarian knew, too, how to ask the library’s search engine questions it could handle, and this time when an answering screen came up, there was a block of text highlighted:
Shortly after this period of upheaval, Queen Fortunatar, later named of the Clear Seeing for the justice of her rulings in matters both legal and numinous, took her throne upon the death of her half-brother Linmath. Linmath had done much in his short life, and he left her a small but sound queendom which flourished under her hand. The remaining feuds were settled not by force of arms (nor by the trickery that had caught Linmath fatally unaware) but by weaponless confrontation before the queen and her counsellors; and fresh feuds took no hold and thus shed no blood. The one serious and insoluble menace of Fortunatar’s time were the sandstorms in the Great Desert which were frequent and severe.
