The Waterstone (21 page)

Then he paused and turned, his bright eyes suddenly solemn.

“It’s our water too,” he said.

Squee! Squee! Squee!

Willem swooped down on them from the air. He was wearing a tight-fitting leather cap that buckled under his chin, and a pair of goggles with round dark lenses that gave him the look of a surprised bug. Skeever, the bat, wore a pair of the dark-lensed goggles, too, fastened with leather straps behind his ears.

“He won’t fly in daylight without them,” Willem explained. He dismounted awkwardly, crawling backward over a pair of bulky saddlebags. The bags made muffled clanking sounds, and one of them had a lot of metal tubes poking out the top.

“What’s that?” Birdie asked, pointing.

“It’s an invention,” Willem said proudly. “I made it myself. It’s a machine for breathing underwater. It —”

He stopped abruptly. The hawk had appeared at the edge of the forest.

“It’s all right,” Tad said hurriedly. “His name is Kral. He’s a friend of ours.”

The hawk advanced slowly, setting his powerful claws down delicately, his head tilted to one side to study the newcomers with a bright amber eye. Tad hurried forward to meet him.

“These are friends of ours, Kral,” he explained. “This is Willem, a Digger. The bat belongs to him, sort of. His name is Skeever.”

The hawk inclined his head politely. Willem, in return, gave an awkward little bow. The fur on the back of his neck, Tad noticed, was standing straight up in a stiff ruff.

“Have you found what you came for, Sagamore?” the hawk asked. His voice was the harsh cry that Tad remembered. At the sound of it, Willem flinched.

“Yes,” Tad said. He patted the leatherleaf pouch at his waist that held the fist-shaped stone. “Yes, I did.”
I hope
, he added to himself.

“It is well,” the hawk said.

“Could you take us back now?” Tad asked. “We need to go to the Wide Clearing in the Piney Forest. There’s going to be a meeting — a Gathering of the Tribes. Could you take us there?”

“By sunset as the hawk flies, little brother,” the great bird answered. “Climb on my back, you and the frog and the young nestling here, and I will carry you where you wish to go. The Burrower may ride or follow.”

Tad turned to the others.

“Kral will take us to the Gathering,” he explained. “He’ll carry you, too, Willem. Or, he says, you can follow him on Skeever.”

“We’ll follow,” Willem said, casting a nervous glance at the towering hawk.

Kral looked back, unblinking. Then he twisted and, with a sharp tug of his hooked beak, pulled a fiery-red feather from his tail. He dropped it at Willem’s feet.

“Tell the young bat-rider to carry that,” he said to Tad, “and no bird of the air will harm him.” He gave a sharp caw that might have been a laugh. “Tell him I do not care for Burrowers. They taste of stone dust.”

Tad turned to Willem.

“He says if you carry the feather, no hunting bird will harm you,” he said. “It’s some sort of sign.”

He decided not to relay the part about the stone dust.
There was no point
, he thought,
in asking for trouble.
Especially since the fur on the back of Willem’s neck was just beginning to subside.

Tad and Birdie, entwined with a clinging Pippit, climbed onto Kral’s back and settled themselves on his shoulders between the great red-brown wings. Willem, clutching the feather, wriggled back into place on Skeever’s back. The hawk tensed. The bat flared its leathery wings. Then both sprang into the air and the wind took them.

The hawk set them down in a forest of pines. Massive black trunks marched away from them into the distance, as far as they could see in every direction. The ground beneath their feet was thick with brown and fallen needles, and the air smelled sharply of turpentine. The drooping branches above their heads were brittle and heavy with dust. Skeever settled beside them, darting swiftly through the trees like a flickering shadow, then plummeting abruptly to the ground. Willem climbed wearily from his back and shoved his dark goggles up onto the top of his head. The sun was just setting and the forest was growing dim.

“I will leave you here,” the hawk said. He gestured with his beak. “The Wide Clearing you seek is a short walk that way.”

Then, solemnly, the great bird dipped his red head toward Tad. “We will meet again, Sagamore,” he said.

“Thank you, Kral,” Tad said simply. “Thank you for everything.”

The amber eyes looked upward briefly, toward the sky through the branches high above their heads. “Avenge my Lady, Sagamore,” he said in his harsh cry. “End the Drying.”

Then, with a thunderous sweep of wings, the great bird leaped into the air. The branches of the pines trembled with his passing, and a spattering of dead needles fell.

Willem whistled through his teeth. “You have a strange taste in friends, Fisher,” he said.

Tad grinned at him. “So the pond folk will say, Digger,” he retorted meaningfully. “And the Hunters, too, beyond a doubt, when they see your furry face.”

Willem grinned back. “My friends call me Will,” he said.

“Do Diggers really eat earthworms?” Birdie asked.

Willem began to laugh. “All the time,” he said. “Roasted. On sticks.”

“Gick,”
Birdie said.

Tad pointed through the trees. “The Wide Clearing is that way. A short walk, Kral said, whatever a short walk is to a hunting bird. We might as well get on with it. What should we do about Skeever?”

“He’ll be around,” Willem said. “Bats go anywhere. He’ll probably spend the night hunting. But we should take the saddlebags.”

The bird’s short walk was long. They followed a narrow path through the tree trunks, winding in and out among clumps of dead and crumbling ferns. They passed the shallow bowl of what must once have been a little pond. Nothing was left in it but a thin layer of bilious-colored slime and the dried body of a dead frog. Pippit gave a distressed whimper and Birdie turned her head away from it, biting her lip.

By the time they reached the Wide Clearing, the sun had nearly vanished below the horizon and evening was falling. The clearing glimmered with the lights of campfires. There was a smell of cooking in the air and a babble of many voices.

“Look, Tad,” Birdie said, pointing. “There are the Fishers. They’re all camped together. And that must be the Hunters over there, where all the wagons are.”

Each of the tribes had its own encampment. The Fishers had built a cluster of little lean-tos, cobbled together from sticks and dry leaves, one for each family group. Each lean-to had an open front, and all seemed to contain a cramped muddle of moss sleeping pallets, leaf-wrapped packs, and baskets. A fire, carefully corralled in a circle of stones, burned before each campsite. Barefoot children in fringed tunics ran back and forth between them, dodging in and out behind the lean-tos, squealing with the excitement of seeing so many people and being allowed to stay up at night. Just last year at the Gathering, Tad thought, he and Birdie had run exactly like that, shouting and kicking fat brown puffballs, while Pondleweed chatted with friends around a wooden keg of butternut beer. Tad felt a sudden terrible pang of homesickness.

The Hunters, on the opposite side of the clearing, had drawn their painted wagons into a circle. A single great fire burned in the middle of the circle, and beside it, there was a row of people dancing. Tad could see the swirl of blue and scarlet skirts and hear the beat of skin drums, the twanging of lutegourds, and a high piping of reed flutes. The tune seemed to be one that everybody knew, since there was a lot of rhythmic clapping and every once in a while, everybody, all together, shouted, “Ho-mon-ro!”

One thing was different. The bark water buckets that usually stood by each campsite, filled to brimming, were missing. Water was too precious now to risk spilling. The camp was dry and gritty with dust, and the surrounding forest was dull and brown, ugly with the skeletons of dead trees.

“What about the Diggers?” Birdie asked Willem. “Will your family come? When will the Diggers get here?”

Willem shrugged miserably. “They might not come at all,” he said. “There was a meeting last night — late, after all of us had gone to bed. My mother and father were talking about it this morning.” He scuffed his feet uncomfortably, kicking at the dusty ground. “Grandfather believes in your story, Tad, and so does old Pegger, but some of the others weren’t so sure. And most of the High Councilors didn’t think much of this Gathering. They don’t like to have much to do with the other Tribes. They say that they’re all too —” He stopped abruptly, looking shamefaced.

“Too what?” Birdie demanded.

Willem scuffed a toe in the dust. “Backward,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “They think you’re too primitive to consult with. It’s just that you don’t use machines, you know, or have any kind of central government. . . .” His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

“If you think you’re so much better, just because you have mechanical crossbows and dragon steam engines,” Birdie began hotly.

Willem took a hasty step back, the fur on the back of his neck flaring up nervously. “It’s not what
I
say,” he protested. “I’m just telling you what the High Council said.”

“Tad!”

Tad whirled around. Ditani was running across the clearing toward them.

“Tad!” Ditani called again. “We’ve been looking for you, eh? When did you get here? Where are you camped?”

She paused, skirts swirling around her slim ankles, dark eyes wide, staring at Willem.

“Are the Diggers here then?” she asked in a startled voice.

Tad shook his head. “Just Willem here — Will,” he corrected himself. “He came with us.” He decided not to explain just
how
they had come. He turned toward Willem. “This is Ditani, a friend of ours. She’s a Hunter.”

Willem put his right hand over his heart and dipped his head in a polite bow. Ditani blushed and swept back her skirt in an awkward curtsey. Tad found himself feeling annoyed. What was she blushing for?

“Is Uncle Czabo here?” he asked.

Ditani shook her head. “He comes and goes as he pleases, eh? We watch, but his wagon is not here yet.

“You’re just in time for the meeting,” Ditani went on. “They’re planning to have an open parley — right there in the middle of the clearing next to the Speaking Rock — where those boys are putting up torches.”

Several boys in fur-edged leather vests — Hunters, by the looks of them, and all a few years older than Tad — were setting torches in the ground in a wide semicircle around a low rock on the flat ground between the two encampments. Lit, the torches burned with a flickery orange flame and gave off a pleasant toasty smell of roasting nuts.

Slowly the clearing began to fill with people. They came alone or in pairs or in little family groups, drifting in quietly and settling down on mats or blankets spread out on the ground. Tad, followed by Birdie, Willem, Ditani, and a persistent Pippit, skirted the edges of the crowd, looking for a place to sit where they all would have a good view of the Speaking Rock. Finally they settled at the far left-hand end of the front row.

The first speaker was already climbing onto the Rock. It was a Fisher named Eelgrass, a tall thin man with a heavily lined face and a mouth that pulled down droopily at the corners. He held up his hand for silence and, as the voices slowly died away, began to speak.

“The ponds are drying,” he began. “Doom and disaster are upon us. The Earth itself is turning to dust.”

At the word
dust
, someone began to cough dustily in the front row and somebody else began to pound the cougher on the back. Eelgrass paused, looking annoyed.

Tad leaned over to whisper in Willem’s ear. “I remember him,” he muttered. “He always sees doom and disaster, even when everything is perfectly fine. He’s the sort who can’t see the blackberries for the thorns.”

“I have had a vision!” Eelgrass continued, his voice growing louder. “A vision that came to me in a dream! I saw great trees, broken and falling; and the ponds, dead and empty. I heard the wind blowing across a barren land and its voice told me that this was the Great Drying, the End of All Things. Then above me in the sky, I saw the sun itself grow dim and flicker like a candle flame” — Eelgrass dropped his voice to an ominous whisper —“until at last it blinked out and all was dark forever.”

A murmur of horror swept over the Fisher side of the crowd.

“Eh, it sounds like you’ve been eating bad mushrooms to me!” a voice called out from the center of the Hunter assembly.

As the speaker moved forward, Tad thought at first that it was Ditani’s mother, Branica, but as she clambered onto the Speaking Rock, he saw that this woman was older and stouter and her braid was flecked with gray. She wore an orange dress belted with red and green, and heavy dangling necklaces of carved bone beads.

“I am Enelda of the Hunter Tribe,” she announced, “and I have seen more summers and winters than many, some dry and some in floodtime, some fat and rich, some poor and thin. There are good years and bad years, eh? This Dry, it too will pass over, no matter this Fisher doomsaying about the end of days. You pond folk take the dismal view, no?”