Dreamfisher
Dreamfisher
By Nancy Springer
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print as Perchance to Dream, February 2000.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing
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Dreamfisher
By Nancy Springer
“…except for the inhabitants of a nameless mountain in Barbary, who themselves have no names; nor have they dreams.”
(From a fragment attributed to Herodotus.)
They lived on the mountainside very simply, the men hunting meat, the women gathering nuts and berries, the children playing at being men or women. They spoke names of things, of course, to say “Bring me sticks for the fire,” or “I am going to dig roots,” but these names had come down to them through generations, bestowed by some creator at the beginning of time. Fearing to take upon themselves the function of gods, they did not name one another; they were few enough, and needed only to point. To say “that man” would have been impolite, and to say “the fat man” or “the bent old woman” would have been very rude. Children learned early only to point. They learned early to kill rock rabbits and skin them and cook them and eat them. They learned to throw stones and gather firewood.
All the children learned these straightforward ways readily, except for a certain girl.
She looked no different than the others—dark eyes and shaggy dark hair, tawny skin, bare callused feet—but wrong things came out of her mouth. “Cake!” she cried, pointing at the round russet disc of the setting sun, one edge hitting against scalloped clouds. “Cake! Someone is eating it!”
“No, no!” her mother whispered, glancing around to see whether others had heard. (They had.) “It is the sun.” Sun was sun, not a round flat cake of seed meal baked on the hot stones by the fire.
“It looks like a cake!”
The mother should have punished her then and there, the others declared. But the mother was too tenderhearted, and the girl went on in her wrongheaded ways. “It looks like a flower!” she would declare of a rose-and-white cloud. Or, “See, the shadows in the moon, they look like a rabbit sitting up on its hind legs!” But the moon was the moon, not a rabbit. “See that yellow flower, it looks like a dragon’s head!” And the wrongnesses she said grew more perilous day by day, so frightening that other children stayed away from her, or were ordered away, and adults muttered when they saw her coming.
All too soon the girl began to experience the monthly courses of a woman, and it was time for her to find a mate.
Often this process took care of itself, but not in the case of this girl. Her mother acted on her behalf, arranging matters with an older man who, although respected, had no woman, because—well, it would have been very, very rude to say, but—
“No! He looks like a bear turd on feet!” the girl wailed when her mother brought the man to her by the village spring, where everyone had gathered for the rite of joining. “No, I can’t! I won’t!”
The man’s lumpy brown face flushed even darker with anger. “Be silent,” he ordered.
“No! You
are
a giant turd!”
“Turd,” some boy in the back whispered, snickering.
His mother hit him to hush him, but the damage was done. Folk gabbled with terror; what unknowable craft was in this girl? The man now called Turd picked up a stone from the ground and hurled it at the girl who had named him.
It struck her on the chest hard enough to stagger her. Others roared with echoing wrath and joined in, elder men and women throwing stones the size of their fists. If any had caught the girl on the head they would have felled her, but they cut and bruised her body and legs so that she cried out. Looking for her mother, she saw her standing to one side, weeping but not trying to stop the others as they all joined in. Smaller stones flung by children hit the girl in the face. She turned and fled down the mountainside until she could no longer run. Then she fell to the rocky ground, sobbing.
* * *
She awoke at dawn, shivering from lying on cold stone, stiff and bruised. Blinking, she sat up to rub her eyes, but winced when she touched her sore, swollen face. Then she winced anew at the memories, and her heart hurt worse than her body or her face.
Close at hand lay a deerskin bunched into a bundle. The girl stared at it a moment before she fumbled it open. Inside she found a few rounds of cake and three strips of dried venison. And a stone even larger than a man’s clenched fist.
The girl flung the rock away, but its message stayed with her, all too clear: she was not to return.
At least someone cared whether she might starve. She stared at the flat cakes. They looked like the cakes her mother made. But then, all cakes looked much the same.
Her throat closed against the sight of the cakes, but she felt thirst. Drink. She needed to find drink.
Many nameless shallow waters sprang out of that mountainside, running down over rocks to no one knew where. Taking the deerskin laden with provisions, the girl walked aimlessly until she heard a trickling sound. When she found the stream—it could have been any mountainside rill, perhaps a few fingers deep and no broader than her slender body—she cupped her hands to drink, then splashed water on her face. Its cold touch stung her reddened eyes, yet soothed her soul.
She started downmountain, following the stream.
She had no reason for doing this except that she had to go somewhere, and the water would give her drink.
None of her people ever ventured downmountain.
But they were not her people anymore.
* * *
She walked through days and shivered through nights and saw many deer but no folk, nor did she expect to find any; she presumed no people in the world but those—those who were no longer her people.
A day came when she had nothing left to eat except her last half-round of cake. Following the rill, she saw it run through a cleft of stone too narrow for her. A rift of rock stood in her way; she climbed it, as she had climbed many others. But this time, as she reached the top, she stiffened to a halt, dropped to a crouch and stared.
“What is it?” she whispered.
A dark bright bigness filled a hollow of the rocks, gleaming and giving off sparks of white light amid colors, sky stone tree colors all blended. What was this shining mystery? And where had her rill gone?
For a long time she froze like a rabbit, only her nostrils moving to catch any hint of danger. When her fear lessened, she clambered to the cleft where the stream ran. Peering down, she traced the stream’s shadowed course.
“Water?”
The bigness had to be water, it grew out of water and therefore must be water, yet—she stood atop the crags at a cautious distance and stared—yet how was it water? It seemed packed or piled in such a way as she had never seen, so much water in one place that it took on gloss and color, and she could not look through it to whatever lay beneath. Perhaps there was no bottom? But there had to be. Stone held it.
“Like when I hold water in my hands to drink,” she breathed. The mountain held this water in one place?
Slowly she walked forward for a better look—then leaped back, for she had seen the form of a person moving on the sheen of the water. Her knees weakened. She sat trembling atop the rocks.
Yet she did not leave. She whispered, “It looks like—like….”
She had to know what it was, this place that made water look like other things.
Still trembling, she eased forward on her hands and knees. Crouching over the stillwater wonder she gazed, gazed, and in the muchwater she saw intimations of light, dark, shift, change; the personform was only a shadow now, blended with darker green shadow that hinted of tree. After a time fascination put an end to the girl’s trembling, and she sat atop the rocks with her legs dangling over the edge, staring down into wonder.
It looks…like….
Like the surface of night sky, glinting with stars behind which she sensed depths she could not guess. Or like a dusky rainbow—
Hunger pain interrupted her thoughts; she reached for her last half-round of cake and bit into it. A tiny crumb fell from her mouth onto the top of the muchwater—
A flash, a splash, a glimpse of something that shone, and then circle circle circle opening wider and wider like her own eyes.
Circles faded and ceased. Muchwater lay still again. Without giving herself time to be afraid, the girl dropped another crumb.
Flash, splash, an arc gleaming like cold fire. She squeaked with wonder and terror but gazed intently, and she thought she saw something flitting away under the surface. Something that flies in the water, she thought, like birds in the sky, but soaring down in darkness. She felt herself quivering again, but she had to know, she had to know whether there were more than one, she dropped a whole scattering of crumbs, then gasped as the surface was broken by brightnesses flying up like great sparks, glimpsed, gone, and circling ring ring rings and more mysteries skimming just beneath sight.
Such glory, such beauty, gave her blissful calm; muchwater calmed also. She sat still and rapt; muchwater lay still and shining. She gazed down, and from the water a dark-eyed girl gazed up at her. Within the face of that shadowy girlform she saw something scud bright, like thought.
The girl gasped, “It’s like me! It
is
me!”
Something roiled like thunder just below the face of stillwater. Something roiled like thunder and lightning and cataracts after a springtime storm within the girl’s selfhood as she sat looking.
* * *
For days the girl camped nearby and did not quite starve, snaring rock rabbits to char over the fire she cherished on a hearth of stone; it had taken a whole day to start, so she never let it go out. In the chill nights she curled by the fire with her deerskin wrapped around her shoulders. At dawn she would look to the muchwater, awed anew each day to see it breathe mists of steam like a living thing. She grubbed for ground nuts, robbed a rock rat’s nest of its pine seeds, found some sour bunchberries. Then found that a berry dropped onto the surface of wonderwater brought forth a bright swirl out of the darkness. After that, bunchberries were for muchwater, not for her. Day after day, whenever her hungry belly would let her, the girl studied the shadowshining water, in rain and sun and twilight and starlight. Sitting atop the lowest rock she still felt not close enough. There came a blue-sky day when she lay belly down on the rock with her head stretched over the lip, her arms reaching for the water, yearning.
She dropped a bunchberry, watching intently as it made itself a bed on the face of the water, which was also her face, shadowy eyes staring back at her with the berry lying red like a wound in between. A moment later there came the flash, the shining, and this time she glimpsed an eye like the dark of the moon, and a gleaming maw rising out of deep girlself almost close enough to touch. If only she could grasp it, hold it in her hand a moment, then she would—maybe she would know. Maybe she would understand the wrongness in herself.
Maybe she would be able to go home.
Her chest heaved with wanting. Wriggling on her belly like a serpent, she pushed herself closer to the water, head and shoulders and half her body over the lip of the rock, arms stretched down. Almost-near-enough-to-touch—
