The Book of Water (38 page)

“Hello? Are you there?” Her voice echoed softly among the trees, less like a ricochet than as if her call was actually being repeated over and over. A faint rustle among the leaves made her turn, but there was nothing there. Would it put in an appearance, this presence? If she thought of food, would it feed her as well?—for as her strength began to return, she really was feeling hungry. Ravenous, in fact.

And lo, as she kept turning, there it was: another, larger table, full of food. But this table had a more familiar aspect, as if its mysterious conjuror had plumbed Erde’s own memories to produce a feast such as might have been laid in sunnier days at Tor Alte. For there was the lustrous pewter table service, and the dragon-embossed gold goblets that her grandmother the baroness had used on ceremonial occasions. And there, the tall gold carafe that matched the goblets, a gift of His Majesty King Otto, to whom the baroness always raised a toast whenever the wine was poured.
Erde reached a tentative finger to its rim. Perhaps it would all just disappear. But the carafe remained, smooth and weighty to her touch. She stroked the crisp, brown curve of a rye loaf, still warm as if snatched mere moments ago from the bread ovens and rushed up the long stone stairs to the banquet hall. . . .

No! I am not at Tor Alte. You cannot make me think I am
.

She stared around at the endless progression of copycat trees and identical blades of grass.

“Who are you? What do you want with me?”

The leaves stirred like a sigh. Erde’s short-cropped hair ruffled, as from a gentle caress, and was still. She felt an overpowering urge to eat, and could not come up with a good enough reason to resist.

What a comfort were the familiar smells and tastes and textures of home! Though it was odd that she could eat so much and not feel as stuffed as she did at home every feast day. She wondered, if the dragon was here, would the weird wood produce a brace of sheep for him, or a nice fat goat? He must be very tired of eating fish.

The thought of the dragon brought her out of her reverie. She was much better, much stronger now, really she was, even though the meal felt so strangely light in her stomach. What had made her think of Earth, when she’d been so lost in nostalgia? It was almost as if someone had called his name to remind her.

“Was it you?” she asked rhetorically.

Again came that odd, faint stirring of the leaves. Erde felt it then, the Presence. Calm, huge, unthreatening, but beyond her understanding.

“Please tell me. Who are you?”

There were no words, yet she knew she’d been answered. And what she heard was a call for help.

*   *   *

He wakes with a start and thinks he must still be dreaming: a fireplace, big leather chairs, rich carpet underfoot?
This ain’t my life
. And then he shakes off the rest of his sleep, and remembers. The empty glass is still there on the table beside him.

But it was the noise that woke him. The old, clipped
“wock-wock-wock” of a copter, coming in close. Out in the hall, doors are opening. Habitually hushed voices are heating up to an anxious pitch. A whispered conference convenes right outside the door of the long parlor. N’Doch strains to catch a word over the racket of the copter, but nothing he hears makes any sense. Flappers come and go down the hallway—he hears the nervous snap of their long skirts rather than the soft pad of their footsteps along the carpeted floor.

His first, not-entirely-rational thought is that the copter is coming for him. It’s what he’s always thought, when the pursuit was on and he happened to be nearby, that he was the quarry. And sometimes he was. But he’s been taking a pretty raw look at himself, and he can’t muster that old fantasy anymore. It used to make him feel important, alive. Now he’s had a glimpse of how egotistical paranoia really is.

On the other hand, the copter is damn well coming closer. He can hear it right over the house, hovering, its rotors agitating even the air inside the room, inside his lungs, the very blood in his veins. The paranoia is an old habit. He’ll be caught in a place he does not belong. N’Doch shrinks into his chair and thinks hard about what to do. Break and run is the obvious thing, but it’s probably too late for that. And then, there’s the girl to think about. And the dragons.

The dragons
. It’s like someone stuck out a hand with an offer of help. N’Doch lets a little of the panic go. He’s not alone in this venture. He’s got a couple of powerful friends, after all.

So he feels around in his brain for that still unfamiliar spot. It’s like when he was learning to play, how his hands had to search out the right notes, only it’s harder ’cause he can’t be looking at the inside of his brain like he could cheat and look down at the keyboard. But he knows when he’s found it now, at least. It’s shaped just right, like his inside-self is a key fitting into a lock. Only this time when he tries it, the dragon isn’t there.

Damn
, he thinks.
Still out stuffing her gut
.

But the fact that she could be back any minute keeps him from falling back into the panic, lets him listen to the roar of the copter’s descent like he just
knows
it’s coming for
someone else. Like, maybe Lealé hasn’t been keeping up on her protection payments, so the militia’s staging a little raid to teach her a lesson.

Outside, the copter settles, somewhere out back on the grass. The high turbine whine chokes back to a steady growl, then the engine cuts off and it’s only the rhythmic swish-swish as the rotors slow down. N’Doch thinks you could write a whole symphony with the range of sounds that a copter makes. Whoever it is out there is planning to stay for a while.

The bustle out in the hall has quieted down, too, but N’Doch expects that’s because they’ve all run outside to deal with this latest unexpected arrival. Judging from the way they treat him, he guesses the flappers don’t much appreciate random events dropping in on them. Now might be as good a chance as any for him to move around, find a better place to lay low, maybe check on the girl. And he’s just about to do it: he’s bid good-bye to the best chair he’s ever sat in and he’s up with his sandals in his hand, gliding across the dim room like the shadow he’s often been called by both his friends and his enemies, when the front doors burst open, and light and people and noise stream into the hall. N’Doch hightails it back to his tall-sided chair by the fireplace, where he makes his lanky body as small in it as he knows how to do.

*   *   *

“You need help, is that what you’re saying?”

It was like that night above Tor Alte, when her small, quiet life was changing forever and Erde found herself faced with a creature out of ancient myth, demanding to be fed. She felt powerless and ignorant and in no way up to the task.

But the Presence had given her food and drink, and those had revived her, so the least she could do was find out what sort of help it thought it needed. At least she had some experience at this sort of thing now. She thought of Rose and Deep Moor, and Rose’s “Seeings.” She settled herself down on the grass and cleared her mind.

“Speak to me, then, however you can.”

But nothing at all came to fill up the mental space she had cleared. Instead, the leaves rattled, and the wood became suddenly animate. Things began to happen around
her. A tiny brown mouse scuttled across her feet and pounced on a grasshopper. A swallow swooped right past her nose and snatched up a gnat. A spider spun its web in the grass.

Erde took all this in very thoughtfully. Then she ventured, “Something is after you?”

The leaves stirred a bit more loudly. Erde would swear she heard negation in their dry rustle. Then a large ginger cat with yellow eyes bounded out of the woods with the brown mouse held delicately in its jaws. It crouched in front of Erde and set the mouse down between its paws. The poor mouse darted this way and that, desperate for escape, but the cat’s paws were everywhere it looked.

“Ohh, I see,” murmured Erde. “Something already has you.”

Prey and predator vanished. The wood stilled. Calm again. Gratitude. Assent.

Erde couldn’t imagine how anything could hold this Presence a prisoner. It was so huge and open and . . . well, but it was true, she had to admit. It didn’t feel powerful, at least not as she’d learned to define the word. It didn’t feel strong or aggressive or overbearing. Still, it must
have
power. It had conjured up food out of thin air . . . or had it? To Erde’s surprise, she heard her stomach grumbling again. Could it be? Had her wonderful feast been only an illusion?

Around her, the trees lifted their branches and sighed with regret, and then they renewed their wordless plea for rescue.

*   *   *

The front doors hiss shut. The hubbub flows down the hall.

“Jesus H., JP, I can’t see a goddamn thing in this place! Why don’t you people get some light in here?”

It’s the bankroll, N’Doch is sure of it. He remembers the voice from earlier, the sort of voice that’s always louder than anyone else around it, a voice used to giving orders and speaking for attribution. The bankroll himself, heading N’Doch’s way.

“Least you know how to keep a decent temperature! Christ, it’s hot out there!”

N’Doch hears Jean-Pierre, the head flapper, doing an
apologetic tap dance at the same time he’s trying to use all these low, calm tones calculated to make the bankroll shut up and listen. N’Doch can’t believe the idiot thinks it’ll work.

“Of course she’s busy!” the bankroll retorts, “She better be busy! She’s gotta pay for all this! She’s got expenses! One of them is your goddamn salary, and you don’t want to be losing that at a time like this. So get your ass in there and tell her I need to see her . . .” He pauses, and N’Doch can almost hear a sharky grin spreading across his face. “. . . as soon as she can make her charming self available.”

They’re right there at the parlor doorway. N’Doch curls deeper into his chair.

“You know, monsieur, I’ll do everything I can but when the call is on her, she . . .”

“I know, I know. She’s ‘apart from this world.’ Isn’t that what you always tell them? Kind of like being asleep, isn’t it?”

“Not unlike that, monsieur.”

“Fine. If she was asleep when I came, what would you do?”

“I’d wake her up, monsieur, of course.”

“Well . . . ?”

“Monsieur, I’m only doing . . .”

“Your job, I know. Look, JP, here’s the story. I’m a good boy. I make appointments. I come here on time, when I’m scheduled. I could just as easily make her come to me—I’m a busy man and the world’s in crisis. But I don’t do that, do I?”

“No, monsieur . . .”

“So when something exceptional comes up, I expect a little respect, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, of course, monsieur. I’ve sent . . .”

The bankroll sighs. “Don’t send, JP. Go. You go. Now. You get me?”

N’Doch can’t hear Jean-Pierre’s reply. He figures the guy’s mouth’s gone too dry to manage even a syllable. N’Doch has about zero sympathy for the flapper flunky.
You get
, he quips silently,
what you get paid for
. He hears the bankroll come into the parlor, trailed by placating voices.

“Please have a seat, monsieur.”

“Would you like a drink, monsieur?”

“Perhaps you are hungry, monsieur?”

“The PrintNews is right here, monsieur.”

The bankroll snorts. “Get it away from me. I got enough problems already without having to read about ’em. Give me a big brandy and a little privacy. I don’t plan to be staying long. Come to think of it, I’ll take the privacy first. Get out of here, all of you. I’ll see to myself.”

A flat, deep voice says, “Sasha and me’ll be right outside, sir.”

The bodyguard, N’Doch surmises.

“Thank you, Nikko. Sasha, if Marco calls, I’ll take it in here.”

The bowing and scraping and whining dies down until all N’Doch can hear is the bankroll pacing about at the other end of the parlor.

“Jesus Christ!” he exclaims again, and lets out an explosive sigh.

N’Doch smiles, picturing the bankroll’s tension dissipating into the room in radiating lines of cuss words and insults to the staff. This dude he can almost feel sorry for. Then the pacing turns purposeful and heads N’Doch’s way. He tenses. But it stops partway, replaced by sounds of glass clinking and liquid being poured. N’Doch’s just dying for a peek at this guy. He figures he could sneak a look now, while the dude’s busy at the bar. He eases his body forward just enough to peer around the high winged back of the chair, but the leather creaks and he’s gotta make like a statue before he’s moved far enough for the full view. All he sees is half a dark, slick-haired head on the well-tailored, medium height shoulder of a man in a business suit. European or mixed. Ordinary enough, as far as it goes.

Finally, there’s Lealé’s voice, trilling down the hall. The bankroll moves back toward the door with his brandy to meet her.

“Oh, hello, Nikko. Is he in there?” She rounds the corner. “Ah, darling! Back so soon? You should have warned me—I’d have sent the car.” It sounds to N’Doch like Lealé’s thrown herself bodily into the bankroll’s arms.

“Stow the car. Haven’t you heard what’s going on? Food riots at the Ziguinchor, right outside your door!”

Lealé takes on a pouting tone. “Oh, dear. Again?”

“Your man out front was smart enough to lock the gates.”

“I hate that! You know I hate that!”

“This is no joke, Glory. Word got out somehow about the next price hike, and the shit hit the fan. Why’d you have to pick this neighborhood, right in the middle of everything? There’re plenty of safer places.”

“Oh, darling, it couldn’t be any other place! You know what the dream told me. It’ll be over soon out there, like it always is. I come from there, remember? People must just stand up and shout about things every once in a while, but they’ll settle down again, once they remember that shouting doesn’t do any good.”

“This time, I’m not so sure . . .”

“Ooo, you’re so grumpy! You didn’t come all this way to be grumpy. Come here. Oh!” Lealé giggles. There’s the small clink of a glass being set down, then the rustle of her robes and a moment of heavy breathing. “See? You just couldn’t wait to hold your Glory again. Here, let me close the door.”