Water, page 21
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
The librarian smiled faintly, then frowned. “Damar. I don’t recall—what do you know about it?”
It has eleven Sandpales and a Watcher named Zasharan at the fourth. “Um. It—it has a big desert in it, which used to be ancient forest.” The librarian raised her eyebrows. “It’s—it’s a crossword puzzle clue,” said Hetta, improvising hastily. “It’s—it’s a sort of bet.”
The librarian looked amused. She tapped Damar into the computer in front of her. “Hmm. Try under Daria. Oh yes—Damar,” she said, looking interested. “I remember . . . oh dear. If you want anything recent, you will have to consult the newspaper archive.” She looked suddenly hunted. “There’s a bit of a, hmm, gap . . . up till five years ago, everything is on microfiche, and in theory everything since is available on the computer system but, well, it isn’t, you know. . . . Let me know if I can f ind . . . if I can try to find anything for you.” She looked at Hetta with an expression that said full body armour and possibly an oxygen tank and face-mask were necessary to anyone venturing into the newspaper archive.
“Thank you,” said Hetta demurely, and nearly ran back to the reference room; her half hour was already up.
Daria. The Darian subcontinent in southwestern Asia comprises a large landmass including both inland plains, mostly desert with irregular pockets of fertile ground, between its tall and extensive mountain ranges, and a long curved peninsula of gentler and more arable country in the south. . . . Its government is a unique conception, being both the Republic of Damar under its own people and a Protectorate of the Homeland Empire and legislated by her appointed officers. See text articles. . . .
Damar. It existed.
She had been nearly an hour at the library. She ran out to the car park and banged the old car into gear in a way it was not at all used to. It gave a howl of protest but she barely heard it. Damar. It existed!
The ice cream had started to melt but her father never ate ice cream, and there were scones for tea with the eggs and sausages because scones were the fastest thing she could think of and her father wouldn’t eat store bread. She ignored more easily than usual her mother’s gently murmured litany of complaint when she took her her tray, and in blessed peace and quiet—Dane and his girlfriend, Lara, were having dinner with her parents, Jeff was doing homework in his room, their father was downstairs in the shop, and Hetta had firmly turned the still-resident TV off—began washing up the pots and pans that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. She was trying to remember anything she could about Daria—they had been studying the Near East in history and current events the year her grandmother had died and her mother had first taken seriously ill, and the only thing she remembered clearly was Great Expectations in literature class, because she had been wishing that some convict out of a graveyard would rescue her. This had never struck her as funny before, but she was smiling over the sink when Ruth—whom she hadn’t heard come into the kitchen—put her hand on her arm, and said, or rather whispered, “Hetta, what is with you? Are you okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t been yourself since the storm. I mean, good for you, I think you haven’t been yourself in about eight years, except I was so young then I didn’t know what was going on, and maybe you’re becoming yourself again now. But you’re different, and look, you know Mum and Dad, they don’t like different. It’ll turn out bad somehow if they notice. At the moment Dad’s still totally preoccupied with the storm damage but he won’t be forever. And even Mum—” Ruth shrugged. Their mother had her own ways of making things happen.
Hetta had stopped washing dishes in surprise but began again; Ruth picked up a dish-towel and began to dry. They both cast a wary look at the door; the hum of the dishwasher would disguise their voices as long as they spoke quietly, but their father didn’t like conversations he couldn’t hear, and the only topics he wished discussed all had to do with business and building furniture. “I—I’m embarrassed to tell you,” said Hetta, concentrating on the bottom of a saucepan.
“Try me,” said Ruth. “Hey, I study the sex lives of bugs. Nothing embarrasses me.”
Hetta sucked in her breath on a suppressed laugh. “I—I’ve been having this dream—” She stopped and glanced at Ruth. Ruth was looking at her, waiting for her to go on. “It’s . . . it’s like something real.”
“I’ve had dreams like that,” said Ruth, “but they don’t make me go around looking like I’ve got a huge important secret, at least I don’t think they do.”
Hetta grinned. Hetta had always been the dreamy daughter, as their father had often pointed out, and Ruth the practical one. Their grandmother had teased that she was grateful for the eight-year difference in their ages because telling stories to both of them at the same time would have been impossible. Hetta wanted fairy-tales. Ruth wanted natural history. (The two sons of the house had been expected to renounce the soft feminine pleasures of being tucked in and told stories.) The problem with Ruth’s practicality was that it was turning out to have to do with science, not furniture; Ruth eventually wanted to go into medical research, and her biology teacher adored her. Ruth was fifteen, and in a year she would have to go up against their father about what she would do next, a confrontation Hetta had lost, and Dane had sidestepped by being—apparently genuinely—eager to stop wasting time in school and get down to building furniture ten hours a day. Hetta was betting on Ruth, but she wasn’t looking forward to being around during the uproar.
“Do you know anything about Daria?”
Ruth frowned briefly. “It got its independence finally, a year or two ago, didn’t it? And has gone back to calling itself Damar, which the Damarians had been calling it all along. There was something odd about the hand-over though.” She paused. International politics was not something their father was interested in, and whatever the news coverage had been, they wouldn’t have seen it at home. After a minute Ruth went on: “One of my friends—well, she’s kind of a space case—Melanie, she says that it’s full of witches and wizards or something and they do, well, real magic there, and all us Homelander bureaucrats either can’t stand it and have really short terms and are sent home, or really get into it and go native and stay forever. She had a great-uncle who got into it and wanted to stay, but his wife hated it, so they came home, and you still only have to say ‘Daria’ to her and she bursts into tears, but he told Melanie a lot about it before he died, and according to her . . . well, I said she’s a space case. It’s not the sort of thing I would remember except that there was something weird about the hand-over when it finally happened and Melanie kept saying ‘well of course’ like she knew the real reason. Why?”
“I’ve been dreaming about it.”
“About Daria?—Damar, I mean. How do you dream about a country?”
“Not about the whole country. About a—a person, who lives on the edge of the—the Great Desert. He says he is one of the Watchers—there are eleven of them. Um. They sort of keep an eye on the desert. For sandstorms and things.”
“Is he cute?”
Hetta felt a blush launch itself across her face. “I—I hadn’t thought about it.” This was true.
Ruth laughed, and forgot to swallow it, and a moment later there was a heavy foot on the stair up from the shop and their father appeared at the kitchen door. “Hetta can finish the dishes without your help,” he said. “Ruth, as you have nothing to do, you can have a look at these,” and he thrust a handful of papers at her. “I’ve had an insulting estimate from the insurance agent today and I want something to answer him with. If Hetta kept the files in better order, I wouldn’t have to waste time now.”
She did not dream of Zasharan that night, but she dreamed of walking in a forest full of trees she did not know the names of, and hearing bird-voices, and knowing, somehow, that some of them were human beings calling to other human beings the news that there was a stranger in their forest. She seemed to walk through the trees for many hours, and once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps she was lost and should be frightened, but she looked round at the trees and smiled, for they were friendly, and she could not feel lost even if she did not know where she was, nor frightened, when she was surrounded by friends. At last she paused, and put her hand on the deeply rutted bark of a particular tree that seemed to call to her to touch it, and looked up into its branches; and there, as if her eyes were learning to see, the leaves and branches rearranged themselves into a new pattern that included a human face peering down at her. It held very still, but it saw at once when she saw it; and then it smiled, and a branch near it turned into an arm, and it waved. When she raised her own hand—the one not touching the tree—to wave back, she woke, with one hand still lifted in the air.
She did not dream of Zasharan the next night either, but she dreamed that she was walking past a series of stables and paddocks, where the horses watched her, ears pricked, as she went by, till she came to a sand-floored ring where several riders were performing a complicated pattern, weaving in and out of each other’s track. The horses wore no bridles, and their saddles, whose shape was strange to her eyes, had no stirrups. She watched for a moment, for the pattern the horses were making (while their riders appeared to sit motionless astride them) was very lovely and graceful. When the horses had all halted, heads in a circle, and all dropped their noses as if in salute, one of the riders broke away and came towards her, and nodded to her, and said, “I am Rohk, master of this dlor, and I should know everyone who goes here, but I do not know you. Will you give me your name, and how came you past the guard at the gate?”
He spoke in a pleasant voice, and she answered with no fear, “My name is Hetta, and I do not remember coming in your gate. Zasharan has mentioned you to me, and perhaps that is how I came here.”
Rohk touched his breast with his closed hand, and then opened it towards her, flicking the fingers in a gesture she did not know. “If you are a friend of Zasharan, then you are welcome here, however you came.”
On the third night she was again walking in a forest, and she looked up hopefully, searching for a human face looking down at her, but for what seemed to be a long time she saw no one. But as she walked and looked, she began to realise that she was hearing something besides birdsong and the rustle of leaves; it sounded like bells, something like the huge bronze bells of the church tower in her town, but there were too many bells, too many interlaced notes—perhaps more like the bells of the cathedral in Mauncester. She paused and listened more intently. The bells seemed to grow louder: their voices were wild, buoyant, superb; and suddenly she was among them, held in the air by the bright weave of their music. The biggest bell was turning just at her right elbow, she could look into it as it swung up towards her, she could see the clapper fall, BONG! The noise this close was unbearable—it should have been unbearable—it struck through her like daggers—no: like sunbeams through a prism, and she stood in air full of rainbows. But now she could hear voices, human voices, through the booming of the bells, and they said: Come down, you must come down, for when the bells stand up and silent, you will fall.
She looked down and saw the faces of the ringers, hands busy and easy on the ropes, but the faces looking up at her fearful and worried. I do not know how, she said, but she knew she made no sound, any more than a rainbow can speak. And then she heard the silence beyond the bells, and felt herself falling past the music and into the silence; but she woke before she had time to be afraid, and she was in her bed in her father’s house, and it was time to get up and make breakfast. That afternoon when Ruth came home from school, she bent over Hetta’s chair and dropped a kiss on the top of her head, as she often did, but before she straightened up again, she murmured, “I have something for you.” But Lara, on the other side of the table, was peeling potatoes with a great show of being helpful, and Ruth said no more. It was a busy evening, for both the hired cabinetmakers from the shop, Ron and Tim, had been invited to stay late and come for supper, which was one of Hetta’s father’s ways of avoiding paying them overtime, and it was not until they had gone to bed that Ruth came creeping into Hetta’s room with a big envelope. She grinned at Hetta, said, “Sweet dreams,” and left again, closing the door silently behind her. Hetta listened till she was sure Ruth had missed the three squeaky stairs on her way back to her own room before she dumped the contents of the envelope out on her bed.
Come to Damar, land of orange groves, said the flier on top. She stared at the trees in the photo, but they were nothing like the trees she had seen in her dream two nights before. She shuffled through the small pile of brochures. As travel agents’ propaganda went, this was all very low-key. There were no girls in bikinis and no smiling natives in traditional dress; just landscape, desert and mountains and forests—and orange plantations, and some odd-looking buildings. What people there were all seemed to be staring somewhat dubiously at the camera. Some of them were cinnamon-skinned and black-haired like Zasharan.
There were also a few sheets of plain stark print listing available flights and prices—these made her hiss between her teeth. Her father gave her something above the housekeeping money that he called her wages, which nearly covered replacing clothes that had worn out and disintegrated off their seams; she had nonetheless managed to save a little, by obstinacy; she could probably save more if she had to. Most of her grandmother’s clothes still hung in the cupboard, for example; she had already altered one or two blouses to fit herself, and a skirt for Ruth. The difficulty with this however was that while her father would never notice the recycling of his mother’s old clothes, Hetta’s mother would, and would mention it in her vague-seeming way to her husband, who would then decide that Hetta needed less money till this windfall had been thoroughly used up. But over the years Hetta had discovered various ways and means to squeeze a penny till it screamed, her garden produced more now than it had when she began as she learnt more about gardening, and the butcher liked her. . . .
Perhaps. Just perhaps.
She did not dream of Zasharan that night either, but she smelled the desert wind, and for a moment she stood somewhere that was not Farbellow or her father’s shop, and she held a cup in her hands, but when she raised it to taste its contents, it was only water.
She thought about the taste of desert water that afternoon as she raked the pond at the back of the vegetable garden. She wore tall green wellies on her feet and long rubber gloves, but it was still very hard not to get smudgy and bottom-of-pond-rot-smelling while hauling blanket-weed and storm-detritus out of a neglected pond. She didn’t get back here as often as she wanted to because the pond didn’t produce anything but newts and blanket-weed and she didn’t have time for it, although even at its worst it was a magical spot for her, and the only place in the garden where her mother couldn’t see her from her window.
She had wondered all her life how her great-grandmother had managed to convince her great-grandfather to dig her a useless ornamental pond. Her great-grandfather had died when she was four, but she remembered him clearly: in his extreme old age he was still a terrifying figure, and even at four she remembered how her grandmother, his daughter, had seemed suddenly to shed a burden after his death—and how Hetta’s own father had seemed to expand to fill that empty space. Hetta’s father, her grandmother had told her, sadly, quietly, not often, but now and again, was just like his grandfather. Hetta would have guessed this anyway; there were photographs of him, and while he had been taller than her father, she recognised the glare. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be his only child, as her grandmother had been.
But his wife had had her pond.
It was round, and there was crazy paving around the edge of it. There was a little thicket of coppiced dogwood at one end, which guarded it from her mother, which Hetta cut back religiously every year; but the young red stems were very pretty and worthwhile on their own account as well as for the screen they provided. She planted sunflowers at the backs of the vegetable beds, and then staked them, so they would stand through the winter: these sheltered it from view of the shop as if, were her father reminded of it, it would be filled in at once and used for potatoes. It was an odd location to choose for a pond; it was too well shaded by the apple tree and the wall to grow water lilies in, for example, but the paving made it look as though you might want to set chairs beside it and admire the newts and the blanket-weed on nice summer evenings; nearer the house you would have less far to carry your patio furniture and tea-tray. Maybe her great-grandmother had wanted to hide from view too. Hetta’s grandmother had found it no solace; she called it “eerie” and stayed away. “She was probably just one of these smooth, dry humans with no amphibian blood,” Ruth had said once, having joined Hetta poolside one evening and discovered, upon getting up, that she had been sitting in mud. Ruth had also told Hetta that her pond grew rather good newts: Turner’s Greater Red-Backed Newt, to be precise, which was big (as newts go) and rare.
Hetta paused a moment, leaning on her rake. She would leave the blanket-weed heaped up on the edge of the pond overnight, so that anything that lived in it had time to slither, creep, or scurry back into the pond; and then she would barrow it to the compost heap behind the garage. She looked down at her feet. The blanket-weed was squirming. A newt crept out and paused as if considering; it had a jagged vermilion crest down its back like a miniature dragon, and eyes that seemed to flash gold in the late-afternoon sunlight—she fancied that it glanced up at her before it made its careful way down the blanket-weed slope and slid into the pond with the tiniest chuckle of broken water.
