Water (32 page)

back into the pond; and then she would barrow into 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.

That night she woke again in Zasharan’s rocky chamber. She lay again on the bed or pallet where

she had woken before; and she turned her head on her pillow and saw Zasharan dozing in a chair

drawn up beside her. As she looked into his face, he opened his eyes and looked back at her.

“Good,” he said. “I dreamed that you would wake again soon. Come—can you stand? I am sorry

to press you when you are weary and confused, but there are many things I do not understand,

and I want to take you to my Eye quickly, before you escape me again. If you cannot stand, and

if you will permit it, I will carry you.”

“Dream?” she said. “You
dreamed
I would return?” She was sitting up and putting her feet on

the floor as she spoke—bare feet, sandy floor, her toes and heels wriggled themselves into their

own little hollows without her conscious volition. For the first time she thought to look at what

she was wearing: it was a long loose robe, dun-coloured in the lamplight, very like her nightdress

at home—it could almost be her nightdress—but the material was heavier and fell more fluidly,

and there seemed to be a pattern woven into it that she could not see in the dimness.

“Watchers often dream,” he said. “It is one of the ways we Watch. No Watcher would be chosen

who had not found his—or her—way through dreams many times.” He offered her his hand.

“But you—I am not accustomed to my visitors telling me they are dream-things when I am not

dreaming.”

She stood up and staggered a little, and he caught her under the elbows. “I will walk,” she said.

“I walked here before, did I not? The—the night I came here—nearly a fortnight ago now.” He

smiled faintly. “I would like to walk. Walking makes me feel—less of a dream-thing.”

His smile jerked, as if he understood some meaning of her remark she had not meant, and they

left the room, and walked for some time through rocky corridors hazily lit by some variable and

unseen source. At first these were narrow and low, and the floor was often uneven although the

slope was steadily upward; both walls and floor were yellowy-goldeny-grey, although the walls

seemed darker for the shadows they held in their rough hollows. The narrow ways widened, and

she could see other corridors opening off them on either side. She felt better for the walk—

realler, as she had said, less like a dream-thing. She could feel her feet against the sand, a faint

ache from the wound on her ankle, listen to her own breath, feel the air of this place against her

skin. She knew she was walking slowly, tentatively, when at home she was quick and strong, and

needed to be. Perhaps—perhaps they were very high here—had he not said something about

hills?—perhaps it was the elevation that made her feel so faint and frail.

They had turned off the main way into one of the lesser corridors, and came at last to a spiral

stair. The treads twinkled with trodden sand in the dim directionless light as far up as she could

see till they rounded the first bend. “You first, lady,” he said, and she took a deep breath and

grasped the rope railing, and began to pull herself wearily up, step by step; but to her surprise the

way became easier the higher they climbed, her legs grew less tired and her breath less laboured.

They came out eventually on a little landing before a door, and Zasharan laid his hand softly on

it and murmured a word Hetta could not hear, and it opened.

There were windows on the far side of the room, curtain-less, with what she guessed was dawn

sunlight streaming in; she flinched as the daylight touched her as if in this place she would prove

a ghost or a vampire, but nothing happened but that its touch was gentle and warm. The view

was of a steep slope rising above them; the room they were in seemed to grow out of the hillside.

There was a round pool in the middle of the floor and Zasharan knelt down beside it on the stone

paving that surrounded it. “This is my Eye,” he said softly. “Come and look with me.”

She knelt near him, propping herself with her hands, for she was feeling weary again. Her gaze

seemed to sink below the water’s surface in a way she did not understand; perhaps the contents

of the pool was not water. And as her sight plunged deeper, she had the odd sensation that

something in the depths was rising towards her, and she wondered suddenly if she wanted to

meet it, whatever it was.

A great, golden Eye, with a vertical pupil expanding as she saw it, as if it had only just noticed

her ...

She gave a small gasp, and she heard Zasharan murmuring beside her, but she could not hear

what he said; and then the pupil of the Eye expanded till it filled the whole of her vision with

darkness, and then the darkness cleared, and she saw—

She woke in her bed, her heart thundering, gasping for breath, having pulled the bed to bits, the

blankets on the floor, the sheets knotted under her and her feet on bare ticking. It was just before

dawn; there was grey light leaking through the gap at the bottom of the blind. She felt exhausted,

as if she had had no sleep at all, and at the same time grimly, remorselessly awake. She knew she

would not sleep again.

Her right ankle ached, and she put her fingers down to rub it; there was a ridge there, like an old

scar.

She got through the day somehow, but she left a pot of soup on the back of the cooker turned up

too high, so it had boiled over while she was scraping the seeds out of squashes over the compost

heap, and her mother had called out, a high, thin shriek, that the house was burning down,

although it was only burnt soup on the hob. Her mother had palpitations for the rest of the

evening, was narrowly talked out of ringing the doctor to have something new prescribed for her

nerves, and insisted that she might have burned in her bed. Her father complained about the thick

burnt smell spoiling his tea, and that Hetta was far too old to make stupid mistakes like that. She

went to bed with a headache, remembering that the blanket-weed was still waiting for her to haul

it away, and found two aspirin on her pillow, and a glass of water on the floor beside it: Ruth.

Their father believed that pharmacology was for cowards. The only drugs in the house were on

her mother’s bedside table, and Hetta would much rather have a headache than face her mother

again that evening; she had forgotten Ruth’s secret stash. She swallowed the pills gratefully and

lay down.

When she opened her eyes she was again by the pool in Zasharan’s tower, but she had moved, or

been moved, a little distance from it, so she could no longer look into it (or perhaps it could no

longer look out at her), and Zasharan sat beside her, head bowed, holding her hand. When she

stirred, he looked up at once, and said, “I have looked, and asked my people to look, in our

records, and I cannot find any tale to help us. I am frightened, for you sleep too long—it is longer

each time you leave. You have been asleep nearly a day, and there are hollows under your eyes.

This is not the way it should be. You live elsewhere—you have been born and have lived to

adulthood in this elsewhere—where you should not be; you should be here; my Eye would not

have troubled itself to look at any stranger, and my heart welcomes you whether I would or nay.

There have been others who have come here by strange ways, but they come and they stay. If

you wish to come here and we wish to have you, why do you not stay?”

She sat up and put her other hand on his and said, “No, wait, it is all right. I have found Damar in

the atlas at home, and my sister has found out about air flights, and I will come here in the—in

the—” She stumbled over how to express it. “In the usual way. And I will come here, and find

you.” She heard herself saying this as if she were listening to a television programme, as if she

had nothing to do with it; and yet she knew she had something to do with it, because she was

appalled. Who was this man she only met in dream to tell her where she belonged, and who was

she to tell him that she was going to come to him—even to herself she did not know how to put

it—that she was going to come to him in the real world?

“Air flights,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes,” she said. “Where is the nearest airport? I could not find Thaar, or Chin—Chin—” As she

said this, her voice
wavered,
because she remembered how hard it was to remember anything

from a dream; and she was dreaming.
Remember the sand,
her dream-thought told her.

Remember the sand that lies in the little box on your chest of drawers.
“Oh—you will have to tell

me how to find you. I assume there is a better way than ...” Her voice trailed away again as she

remembered being lost in the sandstorm, of being led blindly through the sand-wind, her arm

pulled round Zasharan’s shoulders till her own shoulder ached, remembered her curious sense

that they were somehow kept safe in a little rolling bubble of air that let them make their way to

the door in the cliff
That is why he is a Watcher,
said the dream-thought.
There is little use in

Watching if you cannot act upon what you see.

“I do not know where the nearest airport is. What is an airport?” said Zasharan.

She knew, sometimes, that she spoke some language other than Homelander in her dreams; but

then it was the sort of thing you felt you knew while you were dreaming and yet also knew that it

was only a trick of the mind. The words she spoke to Zasharan—the words she had heard and

spoken to the other Damarians she had met in other
dreams—felt
different. It was just a part of

the dream, as was the different, more rolling, growlier, peaked-and-valleyed sound of the words

Zasharan and the other Damarians said to her than what she spoke in Farbellow, when she was

awake.
(I am awake now,
said the dream-thought) It was only a part of the same mind-trick that

when Zasharan said “airport,” it sounded like a word that came from some other language than

the one he was speaking.

She looked around, and saw a table in the corner, and books upon it (were these the records he

had been searching for stories like hers?), and several loose sheets of paper, and a pen. She stood

up—carefully, prepared to be dizzy—and gestured towards the table. Zasharan stood up with her.

“May I?” she said. He nodded as anyone might nod, but he also made a gesture with his hand

that was both obviously that of hospitality and equally not at all—she thought; her dreamthought thought—like the gesture she would have made if someone had asked her to borrow a

sheet of paper.

She took a deep breath, and picked up the pen (which was enough like an old-fashioned fountain

pen that she did not have to ask how to use it) and drew an airplane on the top sheet of paper.

She was not an artist, but anyone in the world she knew would have recognised what she drew at

once as an airplane.

Zasharan only looked at it, puzzled, worried, both slightly frowning and slightly smiling, and

shook his head, and made another gesture, a gesture of unknowing, although not the shoulders

raised and hands spread that she would have made (that she thought she would have made) in a

similar situation.

Frustrated, she folded the sheet of paper, lengthwise in half, then folding the nose, the wings—

she threw it across the room and it flew over the round pool where the Eye waited, bumped into

the wall on the far side and fell to the ground. “Paper airplane,” she said.

“Paper glider,” he agreed. He walked round the pool, and picked her airplane up, and brought it

back to the table. He unfolded it, carefully, pressing the folds straight with his fingers, smoothing

and smoothing the wrinkles the bumped nose had made—as if paper were rare and precious, she

thought, refusing to follow that thought any farther—and then, quickly, he folded it again, to a

new pattern, a much more complex pattern, and when he tossed his glider in the air it spun up

and then spiralled down in a lovely curve, and lit upon the floor as lightly as a butterfly.

She looked at him, and there was a sick, frightened feeling in her throat. “When you travel—long

distances,” she said, “how—how do you go?” She could not bring herself to ask about cars and

trucks and trains.

“We have horses and asses and ankaba,” he said. “You may walk or ride or lead a beast loaded

with your gear. We have guides to lead you. We have waggoners who will carry you and your

possessions. There are coaches if you can afford them; they are faster—and, they say, more

comfortable, but I would not count on this.” He spoke mildly, as if this were an ordinary

question, but his eyes were fixed on her face in such a way that made it plain he knew it was not.

Slowly she said, “What year is it, Zasharan?”

He said, “It is the year 3086, counting from the year Gasthamor came from the east and struck