Water, page 12
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
“Then I will leave the day after tomorrow,” replied Tamia.
She hugged the cows and sheep good-bye; they looked at her in mild surprise, and carried on eating. The chickens would be glad to be rid of her, because they would be able to keep more of their eggs to themselves. She said good-bye politely to her mother and her half-siblings; her stepfather had left unusually early that morning to bother the councillors. Then she set off towards the Eagle. The journey would take her a day and a half, and her stepfather had complained so much about the necessity of letting her have a blanket to sleep on that she had promised to send it back again with the first trader who visited Western Mouth after her arrival.
If Western Mouth didn’t simply send her home again, apologising for the mistake.
She made good time on the first day, and was well up into the lower slopes of the mountains by the time she had to stop because it was too dark to see her way. She had nothing to make a fire with, and ate a little cold food, and wrapped herself in the thin blanket, and leaned back against a tree, reminding herself firmly that bears never came this far west, and wolves were only dangerous to humans in the hardest winters. She found a few gaps in the leaves to look up at the stars through. She thought she would not be able to sleep—at this time of night she was usually trying to put children to bed—it was all too strange; but she was tired, and even the tree-roots couldn’t keep her awake, although her dreams were uncanny, and full of water and wind.
She was very stiff in the morning, and cold, and for the first hour or two she walked on with the blanket still wrapped round her shoulders. But she warmed up at last, and began to step out more freely; and it was before noon that she turned off the track that ambled round the inner edge of the Cloudyheads and struck upward towards the Eagle, according to the little trader’s sign scratched by the way. The slope was even worse than it looked, and she had been climbing steadily for over a day already. Soon her lungs felt as if they might burst, and her thundering heart beat against her ribs as if it would break out. She couldn’t imagine how a trader might walk up this path, carrying a heavy pack, nor his pony, carrying even more, toil behind him. She kept her head down, both to watch her footing and to prevent herself from seeing how much too slowly the crest of this hill came towards her; but she did not see any boot- or iron-shod hoof-marks.
She wondered whether her heart pounded so only on account of the steepness of the path, and if some of it were not her fear of the Guardian. She wished she’d thought to ask what the Guardian of Western Mouth was like. But she had had no opportunity; it was not a question she could have asked with her stepfather standing beside her, and by the next morning the trader had gone.
At the point just before most of the side of the mountain sheared away in a deep dangerous cleft, and when you had passed it, you had left the Flock of Crows and now stood upon the Eagle, she stopped, and leant against a tree, and looked back the way she had come. She knew about this place, where one mountain became another, although she had never been here before. It was spectacular, and more than a little frightening, even though the path that bit into the mountainside to run over its head was wide enough to be reassuring in anything but the worst of storms. She thought that the forest she could see at the Eagle’s foot was the far side of the forest her village lay against. The village sat in the bottom of a little valley surrounded by foothills; there were other little valleys north and south and east over the foothills, where there were other villages—it was said that at the centre of the island was some truly flat land several leagues across, but Tamia didn’t know anyone who had been there—and west, still invisible around a swell of mountain, the route to the great and dangerous sea, which the Guardians protected everyone from.
Why had this Guardian chosen her? She could protect no one. She had never done a very good job of protecting herself.
When her heartbeat stopped banging in her ears as if her heart were trying to escape her body, she pushed herself away from her tree with a sigh, and walked on. The last bit, up the Eagle’s side, was much the steepest. Her tiny bundle of personal belongings weighed on her shoulder like a stone, and the roughness of the folded blanket now chafed her where it touched her damp skin; her head ached as much as her legs did; and sweat ran down her forehead and into her eyes, although the day was not warm.
The twisty uneven path spilled out onto a wide flat meadow so abruptly that she staggered. As she put her hand out to balance herself, a hand grasped hers, and steadied her. “Good day,” said the woman who had seized her. “You must be Tamia.”
Tamia knew the words were merely courtesy. Only someone invited by a Guardian would dare visit a Guardian; Tamia was now near the top of the Eagle, where Western Mouth lived, and Guardians—except for their apprentices—lived alone, so this person must be the Guardian she had come to meet; and while she had never met this or any other Guardian, this one must have known who she was, to have asked her to come . . . her thoughts tailed away in a muddle. There was that inconvenient question again, pressing up to the front of her mind and making her stupid, making her incapable of so much as saying “Good day” in return: Why had the Guardian chosen her?
She had not expected the Guardian to be small and round—a full half-head shorter than Tamia, who was not yet grown to her full height—nor to have short charcoal-and-chalk-white-striped hair that flew wildly round her head like the clouds Tamia knew as mares’-tails, and black eyes bright as a bird’s. But she knew at the same time, without any doubt, once she had looked into those eyes, that this woman was Western Mouth, the Guardian who had called Tamia to apprentice, and that she had been waiting for her.
The woman smiled—a smile just for Tamia, as the trader’s nod had been just for her—and Tamia, not accustomed to smiling, smiled back. “Since you want to know so badly, my dear,” the Guardian said, “it is for many of those things you are worrying about that I chose you. I want someone whose worth is plain to me, but not to everyone else, so she will not pine for what she has lost; and I want someone who has your cleverness, and deftness, and perception, and who is accustomed to looking around for things to do, and finding them.” She said this half-laughing, as if it were a joke of no importance, or as if it were so obvious it did not need repeating, like that cheese was good to eat or the man who raised spotted ponies could also make love-charms. She added more seriously, “Perhaps you would like to sit down and rest, and have a cup of tea and look around you, and we could have the rest of this conversation later.”
Tamia barely heard the end of this. Of course she could not sit down and rest, and drink the Guardian’s tea, on false pretences, when the Guardian—for some reason—thought she was welcoming her new apprentice, and Tamia knew she was not. Tamia thought, The things I am accustomed to looking for are floor-sweeping and child-minding and animal-tending things. Not Guardian things. And no one has ever called me clever, or deft, or perceptive.
Perhaps the Guardian saw some of this in her face, for after it seemed that Tamia would make no answer, the Guardian went on: “I have been here alone for a long time, and I have forgotten that some of the things I know not everyone knows. Oh, the high, grand Guardiany things—I know you don’t know them yet. But you will have to notice the other things for me, because I will not, and tell me to teach them to you. My first command to you is that you must tell me when you don’t know something. There is no shame to not knowing something—no, not even after the fifth time of asking and being told! There are many things much too hard to learn in one telling, or in five. Even in the beginning. And even the easiest of the easy ones, there are so many easy ones, you will forget some of them sometimes too. You won’t be able to help it. But you are to learn to be Guardian after me. You do understand that, do you not?”
Tamia gulped, and nodded.
The Guardian looked away from Tamia for a moment, and Tamia thought sadly, Now it comes. Now she will tell me the thing that I know I cannot do, and I will have to tell her so. But the Guardian only said: “And—are you willing?” The woman seemed suddenly smaller, and less round, and her eyes were not so bright, and her hair fell against her skull, like ordinary hair. “I will not keep you against your will. If you would prefer to return to your village, you may go—and with my thanks for making this long walk to speak to me yourself, instead of sending your answer with the trader. I might have come to you, but I have never liked mountain-climbing, and I’m getting old for it besides; and I did want to see you face-to-face—even if your decision went against me.”
Tamia blinked, and listened to the woman’s words again in her head, cautiously, and realised she meant them, meant just what she had said. “Oh, no! No, I do not want to go back.” She did not mean to add, “They are glad to be rid of me! Especially since I have been called to the Guardian, which is a great thing for them to be able to say,” but she did, because there seemed to be no way not to tell this woman the whole truth.
The woman was looking at her thoughtfully, the faintest line of a frown between her eyes. “I could send you to another village—I could send you with enough of a dowry, a dowry from a Guardian, that you would be able to marry comfortably.”
Involuntarily Tamia heard her stepfather saying, Magic does not have a mouth to put food into, a back to shelter from storms! She shook her head to clear it of her stepfather, and looked around. There were trees surrounding the meadow, and the final peak of the Eagle rose above them, and the clouds overhead looked like galloping horses, as clouds often did to Tamia, and what Tamia had left yesterday was lost behind the many windings of the narrow path. She thought about what the Guardian was offering her—she stopped herself wondering why she was offering it to her, or she would stick there and never go any further in her thinking. She raised her hand and tapped herself on the breast, feeling the solidity of her own body, the faint hollow echo when she struck high on her breastbone; and she thought, No, I am not dreaming. The sweat of her climb still prickled down her back, and stuck her hair to her forehead.
She thought of being able to marry someone like Bjet, or Grouher; of having a house of her own; she thought about having yelling babies of her own; she thought about washing-day in her mother’s home. She thought about having her own smallholding, and a pony to plough it that did not have to be hired out to other farmers for the money it would bring.
It would be a great thing, to come from somewhere else with a dowry a Guardian had given her. It would be a great thing, and perhaps, if she were lucky, it would make her great with it. But she would never belong to the place that took her in. Better, perhaps, to be a Guardian; and for the first time since the trader had brought the news to her stepfather’s door, her heart lifted a little, and her mind sat up and looked around and thought, Hmm, to be a Guardian, how interesting. How . . . exciting.
Something odd was happening to her face; her mouth couldn’t seem to decide whether to turn up or turn down. The small round woman was smiling at her quite steadily. “It’s beginning to sink in, is it, my dear? You bring it all back to me, looking at your bright young face—I was where you were once, you know. I couldn’t begin to imagine why the Guardian had chosen me, and I thought it must be some mistake. It isn’t, you know. We Guardians make mistakes—are you too young to remember what happened to poor White North and Stone Gate?—but we don’t make mistakes about picking apprentices. You might say we can’t, any more than you can wake up in the morning without having a yawn and a stretch and going to look for breakfast. Which isn’t to say that you can always demand or predict what breakfast is going to be. Will you tell me what you are thinking, my dear? I might be able to help.”
Tamia looked round again, and this time she saw the little house with a peaked roof close to the edge of the clearing nearest the Eagle’s final summit; a great hollow yew twisted around one corner of the house, cradling a dark invisible haven in its bent limbs; and there were stones of various sizes laid out in a pattern in a wide, shallow pool of water that lay round both it and the house. The water glittered, and something like tiny stars twinkled on the biggest stones. “I am frightened,” Tamia said to the Guardian. “But I would rather stay here, with you.”
The Guardian’s smile turned a little wistful. “It is wise of you to be frightened. Being a Guardian is . . . well, it is hard work, but you are not afraid of hard work. It is things other than hard work too, and you will learn them; and some of them are frightening.” She patted Tamia’s shoulder. “That’s a hard thing to hear right off, isn’t it? But it’s as well you should know at once. Mind you, many more things are not frightening, and I’m afraid I must tell you that very many of these are no more—and no less—than boring. Appallingly, gruesomely boring. As boring as washing-day, and cleaning out chicken-houses.
“But oh! I am glad you have chosen to stay. It does not happen often that an apprentice refuses the position, but it has happened. Four Doors, who is the oldest of us, remembers it happening once when he was an apprentice. It has taken me a long search—and fourteen years’ further waiting—to find one someone who would suit me. I am grateful not to have to begin the search again.” She laughed at the blank look on Tamia’s face, and took her arm. “Come see the house. I have your room half-ready; I thought you would like to do the other half yourself. And perhaps you will finally let me make you that cup of tea? It is true that I have forgotten much of what it is like to be fourteen, but I think you need a rest.”
Weeks passed in a kind of enchanted blur. Tamia had never worked so hard in her life—but she had never eaten so well, dressed so well, slept so well—been so interested in everything—nor so noticed in her life either. The good food and the clothing, and the knowledge that she could go to bed early any evening she was too tired to stay awake—and in her very own room, shared with no one!—were merely glorious; the being noticed was rather odd, and unsettling. She wasn’t used to it; and then, to be noticed by a Guardian . . .
She loved the Guardian almost at once; but that also meant she wanted, that much more than if she had only liked or admired her, to please her, and so she went in terrible fear of doing something wrong, of making her unhappy—it was too hard to imagine her angry to fear making her angry. And she couldn’t believe that she didn’t daily, hourly, prove to the Guardian that she was not as clever or as quick or as hard-working as the Guardian needed her apprentice to be.
“How long, d’you think,” the Guardian said matter-of-factly one day at lunch, “before you will stop waiting for me to realise I’ve made a dreadful mistake and send you away? I told you that first afternoon that this is not the sort of mistake Guardians make, and I have seen nothing since to make me suspect that I’ve just erred in a new, tradition-confounding way, and will go down in the annals of history as the only—well, the first, anyway—Guardian to have made a mistake in choosing her apprentice.”
Tamia kept her eyes on her plate.
“Eh?” said the Guardian. “How long?”
Tamia raised her eyes slowly, but kept her face tipped down. She knew that tone of voice; it meant the Guardian wasn’t just talking to make conversation. She was really waiting for an answer. Tamia didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know,” she said, very quietly, to her plate.
“Well, I would like you to find out, and give me a date. Because it is very tedious to me, and I can’t imagine it is giving you much pleasure either. Try assuming that you belong here—just as an exercise, if you like. Like making rainbows or slowing down every thousandth rain-drop or turning clouds into horse-shapes is an exercise.”
Tamia grinned involuntarily at this last reference to her new favourite game. She glanced over at the water-garden that lay around the house and the old yew. It was a beautiful bright day, and warm in the little pocket of valley where the Guardian’s house stood, although there were mare’s-tail wisps blowing overhead, and the tree-tops were singing in the wind. The Guardian and her apprentice were having their lunch outdoors. Ordinary flat grey stepping-stones led through the water from the foot of the house-stairs, and next to the yew tree stood a tiny table and two chairs. Making rainbows and tweaking rain-drops and doing things with clouds began with rearranging the stones in the water-garden, in their shining bed of gold grains, fine as sand, and strangely shaped gold pebbles.
Tamia stood up slowly, and walked to the edge of the pool. There were a lot of stones she still did not know the uses of, but she was beginning to develop a feel for the ones that had uses; it wasn’t quite a hum, like a noise you heard in your ears, and it wasn’t quite a touch or vibration you felt against your hand when you held it near them, but it was a little like both together. She walked slowly round the edge of the water-garden, looking at various stones, and the way the tiny irregular fragments of their bed caught the shadows and turned them golden. Near the corner of the house she came to an area where there was no pressure at all against her ears or her skin or her thought from any of the stones. She knelt down and, after a moment of holding her open hands above the surface of the water, picked up two. The water was cool, as it always was, although the sun had been on the water-garden most of the morning. She held the two stones quietly for a moment. These would do. No, better than that. These were good ones. They gleamed with atoms of gold too small to see; only their twinkle gave them away.
She came back round the corner of the house, and knelt down near the little table where lunch was laid, in a curve of the pond-edge that allowed them their island. She ran her fingertips along the pebbly edge, drew them into the water; then she made a tiny hollow in the pond-bottom—which was no deeper than the length of her fingers—and felt gold flakes swirling up and adhering to her skin; and then she placed one of her stones in it, wriggling it round till she felt it, intangibly heard it, go mmph, like a well-fitted horse-collar settling against the shoulders it was made for. There was a tiny burst of light, and the twinkles of gold on her fingers and on the stone she had chosen disappeared.
