The Book of Water (18 page)

“Yes, daughter?”

“Sir, he doesn’t seem to understand much about dragons.”

“Well, now, there don’t seem to be many of them around nowadays, do there?” The old man’s smile hinted at her own imperfect understanding. “But, yes, he has been a reluctant pupil. He’s grown up in a world that has no use for the old knowledge. Yet he absorbed what he needed, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Erde saw the truth in that. She glanced at N’Doch, who had moved away into the moonlight and was staring up into the air. Despite his ignorance and disbelief, he had finally not deserted them. He had gotten them where they apparently needed to be.

“Papa Dja,” he called now from the edge of the light. “That copter’s coming back.”

Prepared
, thought Erde,
but still unpardonably rude.
But instead of scolding the youth for interrupting, the old man turned his way and listened.

“It is indeed.”

“Think it can see us under all these rocks?”

“Heat, son. The warm exhalations of life.”

N’Doch nodded disgustedly. “Damn Baraga anyway. I won’t let him get her.”

Djawara’s smile broadened. “No. I should say not.”

Erde followed this exchange as best she could, but the dragons’ understanding of idiomatic speech was loose at best. “What flies in the night sky that worries you, honored sir?”

“One of Baraga’s hovercopters,” grumped N’Doch.

The old man eyed Erde sympathetically. “She will not be acquainted with that particular type of bird, my boy. We’ll speak of these things later,” he reassured her. “First we must figure out how to get ourselves to safety without being sighted.”

“You think it’s safer at your house?”

“For a while, yes. We can mislead this pursuit.”

“Really?” N’Doch brightened and began to look slyly around. “Well, then, Papa Dja—I think I can handle this. I’ll have you back home in no time at all.”

I
t’s crowded in the courtyard with all five of them there, but the look of approval in his grandfather’s eyes is worth any discomfort. Approval, and just the slightest trace of awe. The old man may know something about practically everything but clearly, he’s never experienced instantaneous transport before. N’Doch begins to think he could get into this dragon business after all.

The dogs set up a choral howl in the house. The girl reaches to reassure the brown dragon. It makes N’Doch grin to think that any critter as well armed and armored as that big guy could be afraid of dogs. He’s glad it’s not
his
dragon putting up such a fuss over nothing. But Djawara goes to the door and hushes the dogs sternly. Then he says something to the girl, gesturing toward the deeper shadow beneath the trees filling the little side yard. Remembering the copter, N’Doch glances upward, then around.

“So, Papa Dja—you got some kind of jamming signal hidden around here that’s gonna disable that copter’s sensors?” He laughs. “Some kind of cloaking device?”

“I said ‘confuse,’ not ‘disable,’ but actually I do. The birds are my cloaking device.”

“Oh, yeah, the birds.” Because of course the trees are full of them. Hundreds, maybe more. “Will it work?”

“Always has before.”

N’Doch wonders how often his grandfather has need of concealment from the likes of Baraga. “What if they leave?”

“I’ll call them back if we need them.”

“Oh.” It doesn’t sound foolproof, but N’Doch is distracted by the big dragon, who is looking unusually squat
and reptilian as he squeezes himself under the low, spreading branches. “He’ll never fit.”

“He will.”

And sure enough, the brown guy slowly drags his bulk inward until he’s disappeared beneath the leaves. N’Doch peers under the branches and sees only shadow, a limitless darkness—and the dragon’s tail vanishing into it. A chill creeps up his spine.

“Papa Dja, how . . . ?”

“Don’t think about it, son. Just don’t.”

“But . . .” He’s not sure he wants the blue dragon swallowed up likewise, but she’s already on her way, leaving a trill of music in his head that sounds like reassurance. When she, too, has vanished, Djawara dusts his palms lightly and gestures N’Doch and the girl into his house. It crosses N’Doch’s mind that maybe Djawara’s neighbors are right to be afraid of him.

Inside, it’s dark, and Djawara lights a little kerosene lamp. N’Doch is about to explain the boondocks lack of electricity in the house, and then he remembers he’s the only one who’ll be missing it. The dogs leap around them with interest and suspicion. N’Doch makes a quick head count: seven of them this time. Seven scrawny but otherwise healthy-looking, lop-eared, evil-eyed mutts. Most of ’em good-sized ones, too. He expects the girl to freak, since her dragon’s so weird on them. Instead, she reaches out her arms to gather them and gets down on her knees among them like she’s welcoming old friends. They snarl and shoulder each other for her attention, but she speaks stern German to them and calms them. Then she smiles over their hairy backs at the waiting men.

“She tells them they’re beautiful,” Djawara translates. “That she’s never seen such clever dogs. They lap it up. Dogs are fools for flattery.”

“It’s good you speak her lingo, Papa Dja.” N’Doch doesn’t mention his doubts that the dogs speak it also. “I can’t talk to her otherwise, when the dragons aren’t around.”

“Aren’t they around?”

“No, they . . .” He realizes he knows this now, without even looking. He can tell from the silence in his head. He
wonders where they’ve gone, and how they left from that weirdness beneath the trees. “They’re off hunting, probably. They’ll be back.”

“No doubt.” The old man is smiling one of his most complicated smiles. “Why don’t you teach Mademoiselle Erde some French?”

“Well, I will . . . I guess I will, when I get around to it . . . if she’s still here.”

“She will be.” Djawara lights a second lamp and carries it onto the cooking porch at the back of the bungalow. He sets it on a wooden slab beside a basket of vegetables. N’Doch comes to hover over the basket eagerly.

“You grow all this?”

Djawara nods. “Poor shriveled things. I can’t haul as much water for them as I used to be able to. But they’re all safe.”

“Look okay to me.” Squashes, tomatoes, peppers, a few things N’Doch doesn’t recognize. He picks up a long green thing he’s forgotten the name of. “What’s this?”

“A cucumber. Have you never had a cucumber?”

“Not for a real long time, Papa Dja.”

“Hmm. Getting bad in town, is it?”

“Bad to worse.” Actually, N’Doch hasn’t thought about it like that before, that it might be worse now than it was before. He’s prided himself on living in and for the moment, in the cool chaos of the present, where he’s like the flash of the vid image, the instant of pure data always morphing into something else and abandoning its former self in the irrelevant past. But now the past walks beside him, very relevant and immediate, in the form of a young girl and a dragon, and in a surge of childhood memories loosed by this old man and his peculiar house. He’d forgotten how peculiar. All this allows N’Doch a newly parallax view of himself, moving through time, a product not of just now, but then and now, a continuum. Which now includes a silver-blue dragon that the old man used to sing about a long time ago. Standing there thinking all this while he’s staring at the cucumber, it fairly well blows N’Doch’s mind.

“You all right, son?”

“Yeah, sure.” He paces a little, because he has to. “Papa Dja?”

The old man is slicing a squash into a battered pot. “Mmmm?”

“You know that old song you used to sing, about the kid and the sea serpent? How’d that end? I can’t remember.”

Djawara ladles precious water into the pot from a bucket covered with a damp white cloth. “Don’t know. You’d always fall asleep, so I’d always stop singing.”

“But there must be an ending. Every song has an ending.”

Djawara smiles, heading out back with the pot, toward the fire pit. “Then you’d better invent one. You’re the songwriter, after all.”

Outside, the chatter of roosting birds is deafening. N’Doch pursues him. It’s only half a dozen steps, but it feels like he’s lunging after his old grandfather. He’s just realized who he can blame for all this weird shit that’s fallen down around him lately.

“You got me into this, didn’t you! You were . . . prepping me somehow, way back when. What’s the deal? Are you some kind of alien invader or something?”

Djawara rolls his eyes. “Of course not. Where do you get such ideas?”

“I see it on the vid all the time.”

“
All
the time?”

“Lotsa times.”

Djawara grunts. “Consider the source.”

“Whadda ya mean?” N’Doch doesn’t think the idea’s so far-fetched, what with all else that’s been going on. “But it’s you knows what I’m supposed to do, right?”

“I know what my grandfather had from his grandfather and told to me so that I could pass it on to you.”

“But why me?”

Djawara kicks up the coals of his cook fire and tosses on a few handfuls of twigs. Then he straightens and faces N’Doch directly. “There is no why. Don’t you see? It just
is.
You’re the newest link in the unbroken chain. The why is to be ready when the time comes, which appears to be now, so you’re elected. Why
not
you?”

N’Doch can think of a billion why-nots, but he knows not a one of them will satisfy Papa Djawara. “But you got me into it,” he repeats in helpless frustration.

“You got into it by getting born.”

“But you got to at least have an idea!” He remembers the girl’s red jewel, what she called her ‘dragon brooch.’ “Don’t you have some, uh, magic sword for me or something? Some kind of, what’s it, a rune book, like in the fantasy vids?”

“This is not a fantasy vid.”

“Damn right! And it’s no dream either, like I kept hoping!”

A few weak flames start up and Djawara sets the pot to boil on the iron grate. “Besides, if I gave you a book or a sword, you wouldn’t believe in it.”

“I might.”

“Inanimate objects bear only the power you yourself in-vest them with. You’re having trouble believing in a living dragon.”

“Oh, I believe in her all right. I got no choice. I’m stuck with her, and you ain’t got a clue to offer me!” He’s shouting now but even over his own outraged squall, he hears the familiar sound. Both men freeze and fall silent.

Whock-whock-whock-whock.

Djawara points toward the sound. N’Doch spots the five swaying pillars of light, bright pendulums slicing the night sky. He imagines a huge, long-legged spider, stalking him through the dark bush. He ducks back under the porch roof. Inside the house, the dog patter stills. The girl comes to the door, and he waves her back urgently.

In the yard, Djawara murmurs, “Don’t worry.” But N’Doch sees he must be a little worried or he wouldn’t be whispering or listening so hard himself.

The search beams swing here, there, then approach, like sharks swimming through the darkness, pulling the copter behind them. The light flows up over the compound walls and flares across the treetops, setting off a loud chorus of bird protest. The birds lift and settle, lift and settle. One roving beam slides over the cook fire and beyond, then reverses itself and returns, blasting Papa Djawara with its icy glare. N’Doch shrinks into the shadowed corner of the cooking porch. Djawara looks up, shielding his eyes against the light, and is no longer N’Doch’s mysteriously powerful relative but a pathetic old man, blinking and staring up out of the bush, caught in the innocent preparation of his evening meal. The light passes by, circles the empty
courtyard, scrapes slowly across the bird-cloaked trees, and moves on.

Djawara waits until the sound has faded. Then he bends to stir his pot. “I didn’t say I didn’t have a clue. . .”

*   *   *

The old man spoons out cold rice while the vegetables are cooking, then sends the dogs outside the walls to hunt, telling them to be careful, strange things are abroad in the night. N’Doch digs into his pack and presents Djawara with some of the fish he’s dried back on the tanker. The girl looks puzzled when Djawara lays out a square yellow oilcloth on the floor, places the big flat bowl of rice and dried fish and squash in the center, then settles himself down in front of it.

N’Doch is embarrassed. He doesn’t mind the old style cooking so much—in fact, this rice dish called chebboujin is one of his favorites. But why can’t the old coot have plates and forks and a table, like folks do in town? Some old traditions are just stupid. What’s the girl gonna think?

But Djawara slides a cushion toward her feet and invites her to sit. When she does, he goes about picking out bits of fish and squash with his fingers, stacking them along the rim of the bowl nearest her. He chatters away in German all the while, explaining himself, N’Doch figures, since the girl nods and reaches with the correct hand to begin the meal. He thinks it’s gross, and he’s amazed that she accepts the old man’s word without question, like she just doesn’t know any better about old people and their uncool ways and notions. Nevertheless, he drops cross-legged beside them, knowing he’d better eat the old man’s way or he likely won’t eat at all.