The Book of Water (11 page)

It’s habit that makes him snatch her pack. Normally he’d be on his feet and out of there, with the pack his spoils of the day. But he’s not going to steal from this girl. He can’t even seem to consider it. It would be like stealing from the dragons. But he’ll take food if she’s got it, and he does want some answers, better than the ones she’s been giving him. Maybe the pack has some of them inside.

He dumps it out on the floor, waiting for the girl to squeal and pummel him, like the girl this morning—was it this morning?—with the tomatoes. But this one just watches. Her silence chastises but she makes no move to stop him. N’Doch unfolds the inner bundle and lays out the contents. The wrapping is a thick blanket of some kind. He shakes it out. It’s a cloak, dense and gray. He holds it up to his nose. The smell is strong but indefinable, until he decides it’s what he imagines sheep would smell like. Real wool, then. Amazing. There’s more real wool in the bundle: a knitted cap that looks homemade. It also looks small. He does not try it on. He picks up the leather vest she’d been wearing, now neatly folded. He thinks that might actually fit him, but he lays it aside with the cloak and the cap. Next, a small metal rectangle with a lid. He opens it. Inside, a couple of flat rocks and a bunch of crackly wood shavings. N’Doch holds it up and cocks his head.

“To make fire,” the girl says, as if it should be obvious.

“Why not just carry matches?” Even more obvious. “Or a lighter. Take up less room.” He fingers the flinty rock restlessly. The taste of the cheese is still in his mouth, and the musky smell of the wool. Some things about this girl are beginning to fall into a pattern. He puts the tinderbox down. “Hey, look—are you from one of those nature-freak communes where they don’t allow technology? Where they, like, you know, live in the past?”

He can see she’s thinking it over, which probably means he’s got that one wrong. Finally, she says, “Why would one wish to live in the past?”

“Well, yeah, good question.” In fact, he wonders if he can answer it. “A lotta people think it was better then.”

This time she nods. “When I was little, I always wanted to live back when my ancestors fought with dragons.”

She says it with such conviction, he has to grin and shake his head. “Mars,” he murmurs. “For sure.”

“Then I met Earth.”

“That’s his name, the big guy? Earth?”

She nods.

“Tell me yours again?”

“Earth.”

He remembers he’s hearing it in translation. “Right. Gotcha. Like you said, of course it is.”

He picks up the final object in the pile, a dark box of carved wood. The girls’ eyes flick down at it and away, too quickly, and he thinks,
Okay, the prize is in here, maybe her money or her credit cards
. He studies it at eye level. He’d say the style is old, but the box itself seems pretty new. It looks like a prop from the costume vids his mama watches, but he knows what vid props are like and this box is too well made. The carving is skilled and elaborate, leaves and flowers and the faces of men and women, and on the top—somehow, he is not surprised—is a small figure of a dragon.

N’Doch shakes the box gently. It rattles. “Whadja do, rob a museum?”

When she just keeps watching, he twists the little latch, raises the lid, and pokes at the contents, an old scrap of paper wrapped around something round and hard. He takes it out and the paper unravels neatly on his palm, offering up its contents as if to say,
voila!
N’Doch is taken aback, both by the uncanny presentation and by the beauty of the object exposed. It’s a big red stone, set in silver. Even in the cool flat light of the moon, the stone looks like a drop of blood with a flame shining through it. On top it has, sure enough, another tiny dragon cut into the curving surface. N’Doch stares, astonished by the fineness of the detail. It’s not a sparkling sort of jewel like he’s used to. He can tell it’s old. The weight and warmth of it are heavy on his palm. “Man,” he breathes, with newfound respect. “This is some heist you pulled off, girl.”

“It was my grandmother’s brooch, the dragon brooch of the von Altes. She had it from her father and he from his.”

“Yeah, right.”

She blinks at him. “You do not believe me? Why should you think I would lie to you, Endoch?”

It’s the first time she’s actually used his name, or at least an attempt at it. She’s probably trying to manipulate him. “N’Doch,” he corrects irritably, “And I think so because anybody would and everyone does.”

“No,” she says back, straight as a bullet, as if she expects that’ll clear it up, just like that.

“You think I’m a fool, right?”

“Of course not.”

What’s weird is that N’Doch does believe her, but he can’t let her see that. “Like for instance, you’d lie to me if you stole it.”

Now she looks perplexed. “But I wouldn’t have to steal it. It’s mine. It was in my family. Besides, it wouldn’t let itself be stolen. It belongs to the Dragon Guide.”

“The what?”

“The Dragon Guide. That’s me. You.
Us
. Like I told you.” She peers at him. “You really don’t know, do you.”

And that’s what finally riles him, her sympathy so close to condescension. He tosses the big stone down and springs to his feet. “No! I don’t! And you know what? I don’t care! I’ve had enough of this shit!”

The girl looks down at her hands while his snarled words ricochet around the room. He feels rather than hears the dragons stirring behind him.

“I am sorry, Endoch. It is difficult at first,” she concedes softly, “But you get used to it.”

“I don’t have to get used to anything!”

“But you do, Endoch. It’s your destiny.”

“There’s no such thing! My life is what I make it! No rich girl with family jewels tells me what to do! I do what I want, you hear?”

N’Doch’s pacing brings him face-to-face with the sea dragon, shimmering blue and silver in the moonlight. Her calm, intent stare stops him cold, fills him with dread. Actually, he does believe in Destiny, but he’s always said his destiny is to sing songs and be famous. This dragon business
would put a serious crimp in his plans. The beast wants him, wants everything he has or is to be put to her service. He’ll be a slave to her. He sees a lifetime of being bonded in some weird-ass mystical way he doesn’t understand to a creature he doesn’t want to believe in, pursuing some mysterious “purpose” that sounds like a wild goose chase with a crazy white girl he has the misfortune to feel protective about. If anything is proof that this dragon stuff is dangerous, that is. If he was his normal self, he’d have seduced this girl long ago. It scares him that he can’t even bring himself to fantasize about taking off all those layers she’s wearing and laying her down on one of the gym mats. The thought stirs nothing down there, only a chill nausea in his belly. He feels like a stranger to himself and it frightens him, more than hunger or the mob, even the sharks off the beach. More than anything. He can think of only one way out, and in his panic, he takes it.

He whirls, snatches up the red jewel from where he’s tossed it down in front of her. He’s at the door in a second, through it in two, and is racing down the corridors to freedom.

T
he stone is hot in his clenched fist. N’Doch slams the hatch behind him, shifts the stone from hand to hand distractedly, then shoves it into the pocket of his shorts as he bolts soundlessly down the dark passageway. At the verge of the shark tank, he halts to catch his breath and survey the black, still stretch of water, his protection and his nemesis. A faint clank and rustle floats across from the far side. N’Doch freezes, cursing inwardly. In his desperate need to be free of the dragons, he’s forgotten the mob of fishermen. He listens, squinting into the dark. He hears a low murmur, spots a dim, quick flickering. Okay, they’ve posted a watch, and the watcher is lighting up a joint.

Actually, N’Doch is glad for an excuse not to brave the shark tank twice in one day. At least he thinks it’s one day. He hasn’t a clue how long the fever had him down and out. How long would this mob bother to lie in wait for him, once they’ve had their fun? He’s not that big a deal. Maybe the watcher is one of Malimba’s brothers. N’Doch sucks his teeth and grins. Let ’em wait. The shark tank may be the quickest way out of this rust bucket, but it’s not the only one.

He backs up along the passage, feeling behind him for the stack of metal rungs he knows are there, climbing the right-hand wall. The lowest two or three are slimy with the nameless ooze that coats most of the tanker’s lower surfaces. It feels toxic and nasty, but it’s never harmed him so far. N’Doch grabs hold and hauls himself upward, through the torso-sized opening, past the hatch cover blown against the side of a narrow shaft peppered with shrapnel scars. He feels the hot draft moving through the holes, but no moonlight
penetrates to the shredded upper decks. It gets hotter as he climbs.

The shaft empties into the remains of Engineering and Navigation, just below the Bridge. Plenty of moonlight here. N’Doch shoves aside a pile of concealing rubble and lifts himself onto the jury-rigged boardwalk of charred plastic paneling that threads a crooked path across the intermittent floor. He has spent envious hours imagining the wealth of equipment and high-tech wonders once housed within this deck. Now it’s an empty, cubicled wilderness of hanging cables and shattered glass, the usual wake of the scavengers. The Toe Bone Gang claimed this prize and refused to share it, just to make a point, even though there was plenty to go around. N’Doch recalls watching hungrily from the beach with the lesser gangs, while the Boners carried armload after armload to their waiting trucks.

He pads past a mad sculpture of twisted metal, all that’s left of the forward companionway to the deck below. He tosses more rubble aside and uncovers the second emergency access shaft. All this time, he refuses to think about what’s in his pocket or what he’s left behind. He closes the ears of his mind to the siren music playing in his head. It’s the blue dragon calling him, he knows that now, and he’s told himself he doesn’t care. She’s calling him back and promising him nothing. Like he said, what’s in it for him?

As best he can, he ignores the faint voice inside him that’s offering an outrageous suggestion: “How ’bout a reason to live?” Up till now, N’Doch has thought life was its own reason, which is why he’s a good survivor. And it would be inconvenient to admit he’s been thinking that just surviving is getting real old. So he hears, but tells the voice to shut the hell up.

He lowers himself into the second shaft, pulling the debris back to hide the opening as he descends. He’s careful on the ladder where it starts to get slippery. The bottom of this shaft ends in a watery pit that’s too far up the beach to get washed clean by the tide. The stench makes him retch and hold his breath. The air itself could be contagious. N’Doch figures if the dead do walk the tanker, it’s out of this dank and fetid shaft bottom that they’d rise. He leaves it at the galley level, where a small breach in the outer hull offers
escape through the tanker’s far side. But first he decides he’d better scope out the beach.

From a broken-out porthole a few decks above the big gap on the port side, he can survey the sand below. He peers out carefully. To his disgust, the mob is still there. In fact there seem to be even more of them. They’ve built a bonfire out of palm fronds and turned his pursuit into a party. A few of the men are roasting fish over the blaze. One idiot’s using his precious gas ration to power a vid set with a portable generator so no one’ll miss the soccer match. Jugs of home brew are being surreptitiously passed. Even out there, far from the imam’s watchful gaze, the men are cautious. N’Doch’s mouth waters. The thing about being a fisherman is you can just go out and catch something more or less edible, as long as you avoid the bottom feeders. He’d have learned the trade himself if they’d let him, but he didn’t have the family connections. These days, you can’t even surf cast on a Saturday without them getting after you, protecting their territory. N’Doch doesn’t blame them, really. There’s so few fish left to catch.
I’d protect mine, too
, he muses,
if I had any
.

Now there are voices raised around the fire, over the yells and catcalls from the soccer game. He hears his name being tossed about, so he settles in to listen. It seems the fishermen are annoyed. They haven’t yet laid eyes on these sea monsters supposedly in the act of gobbling up their boats. Where’s all the excitement they were promised? Some are calling the brothers liars. Others had clearly reached N’Doch’s first conclusion, that the whole thing was a vid shoot, so they’d rushed off to the beach to take part and are sullen about missing their chance to be on camera.

The brothers—all five of them now (one has his foot heavily bandaged and keeps checking it worriedly)—are busy tapdancing, tossing out this tale and that excuse to keep the mob from turning on them. They have to shout to be heard over the game, and must have been doing this for a while, ’cause they’re all going hoarse. N’Doch would enjoy this drunken spectacle, were it not that their most successful tactic seems to be exaggerating the heinousness of his own crime and hyping him into a threat big enough to throw the mob’s rage back in his direction. So now, in
the short brother’s mouth, N’Doch the tomato thief becomes N’Doch the vandalizer, the armed looter and hostage-taker, N’Doch the violator of innocent young women.