Water, page 23
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
“Hmm,” said the librarian, and scrolled quickly to the top of the document. An Introduction to the Legendary History of Damar:
All countries have their folk tales and traditions, but Damar is unusual in the wealth of these, and in the inextricable linkage between them and what western scholars call factual history. Even today. . . .
Hetta closed her eyes. Then she opened them again without looking at the computer screen, made a dramatic gesture of looking at her watch, and did not have to feign the start of horror when she saw what it was telling her. “Oh dear—I really must go—thank you so much—I will come back when I have more time.” She was out the door before she heard what the librarian was asking her. Probably whether she wanted to print out any of what they had found.
No.
For three nights she did not dream at all, and waking was cruel. The one moment when her spirits lifted enough for her to feel a breeze on her face and pause to breathe the air with pleasure was one sunny afternoon when she went back to her pool and scrubbed the encircling paving. She scrubbed with water only, not knowing what any sort of soap run-off might do to the pond life, and she saw newts wrinkle the water with their passing several times. When she stopped to breathe deep, she thought she saw a newt with a red back hovering at the edge of the pond as if it were looking at her, and it amused her for another moment to imagine that all the newts she saw were just the one newt, swimming back and forth, keeping her company.
That night she dreamed again, but it was a brief and disturbing dream, when she sat at the edge of Zasharan’s pool where the Watcher’s Eye lay, and she strained to look into the water and see it looking out at her, but the water was dark and opaque, though she felt sure the Eye was there, and aware of her. She woke exhausted, and aching as if with physical effort.
She dreamed the same the next night, and the oppression and uselessness of it were almost too much to bear. Her head throbbed with the effort to peer through the surface of the water, and she fidgeted where she sat as if adjusting her body might help her to see, knowing this was not true, and yet unable to sit still nonetheless. There was a scratchy noise as she moved and resettled, and grit under her palms as she leaned on them. Sand. The ubiquitous Damarian desert sand; Zasharan had told her that usually there was no sand in the Watcher’s chamber but that this year it had blown and drifted even there. She dragged her blind gaze from the water and refocussed on the sand at the edge of the pool: the same glittery, twinkly sand that had first given her her cruelly unfounded hope when she had woken at home with grains of it in her hands and nightdress.
She shifted her weight and freed one hand. Help me, she wrote in the sand at the edge of the pool, and as she raised her finger from the final e, the dream dissolved, and she heard the milk float in the street below, and knew she would be late with breakfast.
A fortnight passed, and she dreamed of Damar no more. She began to grow reaccustomed to her life above the furniture shop, housekeeper, cook, mender, minder, bookkeeper, dogs-body—nothing. Nobody. She would grow old like this. She might marry Ron or Tim; that would please her father, and tie one of them even more strongly to the shop. She supposed her father did not consider the possibility that she might not be tied to the shop herself; she supposed she did not consider the possibility either. She had raised no protest when her parents had sent Mrs Halford and Mr Jonah and the possibility of university and a career away; she could hardly protest now that she had a dream-world she liked better than this one and wished to go there. The paperback shelves at the grocery store testified to the popularity of dream-worlds readers could only escape to for a few hours in their imaginations. She wondered how many people dreamed of the worlds they read about in books. She tried to remember if there had been some book, some fairy-tale of her childhood, that had begun her secret love of deserts, of the sandstorm-torn time of Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, of a landscape she had never seen with her waking eyes; she could remember no book and no tale her grandmother told that was anything like what she had dreamed.
It took three weeks, but Ruth finally managed to corner her one Saturday afternoon, hoeing the vegetable garden. “No you don’t,” she said as Hetta picked her hoe up hastily and began to move back towards the garden shed. “I want to talk to you, and I mean to do it. Those dreams you were having about Damar lit you up, and the light’s gone off again. It’s not just the price of the ticket, is it? We’d get the money somehow.”
Hetta dropped the hoe blade back behind the cabbages, but left it motionless. “No,” she muttered. “It’s not just the money.” Her fingers tightened on the handle, and the blade made a few erratic scrapes at the soil.
“Then what is it?”
Hetta steadied the blade and began to hoe properly. Ruth showed no sign of going away, so at last she said: “It doesn’t matter. It was a silly idea anyway. Doing something because you dreamed about it.”
Ruth made a noise like someone trying not to yell when they’ve just cracked their head on a low door. She stepped round the edge of the bed and seized Hetta’s wrist in both hands. Ruth was smaller than Hetta, and spent her spare time in a lab counting beetles, but Hetta was surprised at the strength of her grasp. “Talk to me,” said Ruth. “I have been worrying about you for years. Since Grandma died. You’re not supposed to have to worry about your older sister when you’re six. Don’t you think I know you’ve saved my life? Father would have broken me like he breaks everyone he gets his hands on if I’d been the elder—like he broke Mum, like he’s broken Dane, like he’s broken Tim and Ron and they were even grown-ups—and Lara’s going, for all that she thinks she just wants to marry Dane. You are the only one of us who has been clever enough, or stubborn enough, to save a little bit of your soul from him—maybe Grandma did, when she was still alive I wasn’t paying so much attention, maybe you learned it from her—and I learned from you that it can be done. I know it, and Jeff does too—you know, with that programming stuff he can do, he’s already got half his university paid for. When the time comes, nobody’ll be able to say no to him. We’re going to be all right—and that’s thanks to you. It’s time to save yourself now. That little bit of your soul seems to live in that desert of yours—if I were a shrink instead of a biologist, I’m sure I could have a really good time with that metaphor—I’ve wondered where you kept it. But you’re going to lose it, now, after all, if you’re not careful. What are you waiting for? Lara can learn to do the books—I’ll tell Dane to suggest it, they’ll both think it’s a great idea—I’ll teach her. We’ll eat like hell, maybe, but there’s only a year left for me and two for Jeff, and the rest of ’em are on their own. Who knows? Maybe Mum will get out of bed. Hetta. My lovely sister. Go. I’ll visit you, wherever you end up.”
Hetta stood trembling. In her mind’s eye she saw Zasharan, sand, trees, bells, horses, tree-framed faces, the Eye, the pool. For a moment they were more real to her than the garden she stood in or the bruising grip on her wrist. She realised this—realised it and lost it again as she recognised the landscape of her real life—with a pain so great, she could not bear it.
She burst into tears.
She was only vaguely aware of Ruth putting an arm round her shoulders and leading her back behind the storm-broken sunflower screen and sitting her down at the pool’s edge, vaguely aware of Ruth rocking her as she had many times rocked Ruth, years ago, when their mother had first taken to her bed and their father shouted all the time. She came slowly to herself again with her head on Ruth’s breast, and Ruth’s free hand trailing drops of cold water from the pond against her face.
She sat up slowly. Ruth waited. She began to tell Ruth everything, from the first dream. She stumbled first over saying Fortunatar’s name: Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing. And she paused before she explained what had happened in the library the day before. “It’s all imaginary. It’s not only not real, it’s not even history—it’s just legends. I might as well be dreaming of King Arthur and Robin Hood and Puck of Pook’s Hill and Middle Earth. If—if you’re right that a little of my soul lives there, then—then it’s an imaginary soul too.” Nothing, whispered her mind. Nothing but here, now, this. She looked at the walls around the garden; even from this, the garden’s farthest point, she could hear the electric buzz of woodworking tools, and the wind, from the wrong direction today, brought them the smell of hot oil from Benny’s Fish and Chips.
Ruth was silent a long time, but she held on to one of her sister’s hands, and Hetta, exhausted from the effort of weeping and explaining, made no attempt to draw away. She would have to go indoors soon, and start supper. First she had to pull the fleece back over her exposed cabbages; there was going to be a frost tonight. Soon she had to do it. Not just yet.
Ruth said at last: “Well, they thought for hundreds of years that bumblebees couldn’t fly, and the bumblebees went on flying while they argued about it, and then they finally figured it out. It never made any difference to the bumblebees. And I met Melanie’s great-uncle once and he was no fool, and Melanie and I are friends because she’s not really a space case, it’s just that if she pretends to be one, she can tell her uncle’s stories. Haven’t you ever thought that legends have a lot of truth in them? History is just organised around facts. Facts aren’t the whole story or the bumblebees would have had to stop flying till the scientists figured out how they could.”
Hetta said wearily, “That’s a little too poetical for me. Legends and poetry don’t change the fact that I have to go get supper now.”
Ruth said, “Wait. Wait. I’m still thinking. I’ll help you with supper.” Her head was bowed, and the hand that wasn’t holding Hetta’s was still trailing in the pool, and she flicked up water drops as if her thoughts were stinging her. “You know, I think there’s a newt trying to get your attention. One of these big red fellows.”
“Yes, I’ve met him before,” said Hetta, trying to sound light-hearted, trying to go with Ruth’s sudden change of subject, trying to accept that there was nothing to be done about Damarian dream-legends, and that this was her life.
“Not very newt-like behaviour,” Ruth said. “Look.” There was a newt swimming, back and forth, as it—he or she—had swum before. “Watch,” said Ruth. She dabbled her fingers near the newt and it ducked round them and continued its tiny laps, back and forth, in front of the place where Hetta sat. Ruth dabbled again, and it ducked again, and came straight back to Hetta. “Put your hand in the water,” said Ruth.
Hetta was still in that half-trance mood of having told her secret, and so she put her hand into the water without protest. The newt swam to her and crept up on the back of her hand. She raised her hand out of the pond, slowly, as she had done once before; the newt clung on. She stared into the small golden eyes, and watched the vertical pupil dilate as it looked back at her.
“Maybe Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing is trying to send you a message,” said Ruth.
Hetta dreamed again that night. She came through the door she had first entered by, when Zasharan had saved her from the storm. She came in alone, the sand swirling around her, and closed the door against the wind with her own strength. She felt well and alert and clear-headed. She dropped the scarf she had wrapped around her face, and set off, as if she knew the way, striding briskly down the corridors, the sand sliding away under her soft-booted feet, and then up a series of low stairs, where the sand grated between her soles and the stair-stone. The same dim light shone as it had shone the night that Zasharan had guided her, but she often put her hand against the wall for reassurance, for the shadows seemed to fall more thickly than they had done when she was with him. She was not aware of why she chose one way rather than another, but she made every choice at every turning without hesitation.
She came to the spiral stair, and climbed it. When she put her hand to the door of the Eye’s chamber, it opened.
Zasharan was standing on the far side of the pool. Hetta raised her hands and pushed her hair back from her face, suddenly needing to do something homely and familiar, suddenly feeling that nothing but her own body was familiar. She let her palms rest against her cheekbones briefly. The sleeves of the strange, pale, loose garment she was wearing fell back from her forearms; there was a shift beneath it, and loose trousers beneath that, and the soft boots with their long laces wrapped the trousers around her calves. Her right ankle throbbed.
Zasharan made no move to approach her. From the far side of the pool of the Eye, he said, “I thought you would not return. It has been a sennight since you disappeared. If there had not been the hollow in the sand beside the pool where you had lain, I might have believed I had dreamed you. I went back to the little room by the lowest door where I first brought you, and the dressings cabinet still lay open, and the needle lay beside it with the end of the thread I had used on your ankle, and one bandage was missing; and I could see where your blood had fallen in the sand, for no one goes there but me, and I had not swept nor put things to rights. I—when you first came, I—I thought I knew why you were here. I thought—I thought I had read the signs—not only in the sand, but in your face. I was glad. But you do not wish to come here, do you? That is what I missed, when I searched the records. That is why your story is different. Sandstorms are treacherous; I knew that; I just did not see what it meant here. It is only the blood you shed here that brings you back, the blood you shed by the treachery of the sand. That is all. I must let you go. I am glad you have come back once more, to let me say good-bye, and to apologise for trying to hold you against your will.”
There were tears under Hetta’s palms. She smeared them away and dropped her hands. “I—I dream you.” She meant to say I only dream you, you are just a dream.
Zasharan smiled; it was a painful smile. “Of course. How else could we meet? You have told me of Roanshire, in a land I do not know. I should have realised . . . when you never invited me to come to you in your dreams . . .”
“I only dream you! You are just a dream!” Hetta put her hands to her face again, and clawed at her hair. “I looked up Queen Fortunatar in the library! She is a legend! She is not real! Even if she were real, she would have been real hundreds of years ago! We have airports now, and cars, and electric lights and television and computers!”
Zasharan stepped forward abruptly, to the very edge of the pool. “Queen Fortunatar is in your library?” he said. “You have read about her—you sought to read about her in your waking Roanshire?”
“Yes, yes,” said Hetta impatiently. “But—”
“Why?”
“Why? Why did I?—because I wanted her to be real, of course! Because I want you to be real! You do not want to waste your dreaming on my life—you do not want to visit me there!—although I wish Ruth could meet you—oh, this is absurd! I am dreaming, and Queen Fortunatar is a myth, a fairy-tale—she is not real.”
“Everything that is, is real,” murmured Zasharan, as if his mind were on something else. Then he walked round the pool and held his hand out towards her. “Am I real? Take my hand.”
Hetta stared at him and his outstretched hand. This was only a dream; she had touched him, dreaming, many times on her visits here; he had half-carried her out of the sandstorm, he had dressed her ankle, he had held a cup for her to drink from, he had led her to this room.
She raised her hand, but curled it up against her own body. What if, when she reached out to him, her hand went through his, as if he were a ghost? As if he were only imaginary, like a legend in a book?
Like a dream upon waking?
She held out her hand, but at the last moment she closed her eyes. Her fingers, groping, felt nothing, where his hand should be. She felt dizzy, and sick, and there was a lumpy mattress against her back, and sheets twisted uncomfortably round her body, and a fish-and-chips-and-wood-shavings smell in her nostrils.
And then it was as if his hand bloomed inside of hers; as if she had held a tiny, imperceptible kernel which the heat of her hand had brought suddenly to blossoming; and her feet in their boots were standing on sand-scattered stone, and she opened her eyes with a gasp, and Zasharan drew her to him and he let go her hand only to put both arms round her.
He said gently, “You must find your own way to come. The way is there. I do not know where; I do not know your world, your time, with the cars and the electricithar. If you wish to come, you must find the way. I will wait for you here.”
She turned her head as it lay against his shoulder, and stared at the water of the pool at their feet. Somewhere deep within it, she thought a golden eye glittered up at her.
She woke feeling strangely calm. It was just before dawn. The first birds were trying out the occasional chirp, and the chimneys across the street were black against the greying sky. She climbed out of bed and put her dressing gown on and crept down the first flight of stairs, careful of the creaking boards, to Ruth’s room. Ruth woke easily; a hand on her shoulder was enough. She put her lips to Ruth’s ear. “Will you come with me?”
They made their way noiselessly downstairs, past the shop, into the back room and the garden door. There they paused briefly, baffled, for that door could not be opened silently. Hetta stood with her hand on the bolt, and for a moment she thought she saw Zasharan standing beside her, his hand over her hand. He was looking at her, but then looked up, over her shoulder, at Ruth; then he looked back at Hetta, and smiled. I thank you, he said: she did not hear him, but she saw his lips move. My honour is yours, she said, formally. Then she pulled the bolt and opened the door, and it made no sound. “Whew!” Ruth sighed.
When they reached the pool at the end of the garden, Hetta pulled Ruth into a fierce hug and said softly, “I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted someone here when I—left. I wanted to thank you. I—I don’t think I will see you again.”
