The River and the Book (4 page)

We all nodded: we had heard of Tarn from Mizan the Trader. Tarn had once been ruled by a cruel king and his nobles, and all the people were slaves, bought and sold and beaten like livestock. But many years ago there was a great uprising, and the slaves killed the king and his family. After a long war, a soldier called Tariik from the mountains became the new leader, and he decided to rebuild the land, so everyone would be free of the shackles of the old ways. There would be no more nobles, and everyone would have enough to eat.

Mizan had told us that Tariik turned out to be as cruel as the old king, and had made the land of Tarn a giant prison where children were forced to work in the mines or factories or to serve in the enormous army. And it wasn’t true that everyone had enough to eat: there had been dreadful famines, because the soldiers came and took the food away from the farmers, and they died, and then there was no one left to work the land. But even so, many people still thought it was better than being a slave of the nobles. Which showed, said Mizan, how bad the nobles had been.

Tariik was long dead, but Mizan had said that Tarn was still the same. “Now there are new bosses, same as the old bosses,” he had said. “Whoever is in charge, they are always rich.” We remembered Mizan’s words when Kular told us about Tarn. Mizan’s stories had made it seem a strange and frightening place, but we didn’t think it had anything to do with us. Kular’s story made us realize that Tarn wasn’t so far away, after all.

Kular said that a few days’ journey upriver, the River ran through the southern reaches of Tarn. That was arid country, inhabited only by a few villages and herds of small deer and desert foxes. One day, the boss of a big company looked at a map, and he saw the empty spaces of the Upper Pembar Plains and the blue line of the River running through them. And he put his fat forefinger on the map, and said, “We will grow cotton here. There is water. There is space.”

So the company had sent engineers and agriculturalists and workers south to the Pembar, hundreds of them in wagons and trucks, and they built settlements along the River and began to dig a series of canals to irrigate the fields. The workers were white-skinned and spoke a strange tongue, and they were dressed in shabby clothes that didn’t keep them warm. The men in charge wore polished boots and clean grey uniforms, and they carried guns and whips. The locals thought the workers must be prisoners from Tarn.

At first the Pembar people took no notice of the foreigners, since they settled at a distance from the villages. Some even said it might be a good thing, bringing money and trade; but those with foresight prophesied trouble.

The first sign, as always, was the River. The earthworks muddied the drinking water, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Downriver from the cotton fields, animals and crops began to die of mysterious sicknesses that no one could explain. The villagers said the water was poisoned by the chemicals the company used to keep the cotton free of pests. Some villagers rowed upstream to the new settlements and saw the irrigation works with their own eyes. They returned pale with shock: they said that the cotton fields stretched as far as the eye could see, that the earth was scarred with gigantic piles of upthrown yellow earth and that the workers were as numerous as ants. They understood then that the Tarnish were planning to steal their river to feed the cotton. “Cotton is thirsty,” said Kular. “It needs a lot of water.”

When the angry villagers demanded to be paid for their losses, the chief engineer told them to go away, and when they wouldn’t leave, he called up the soldiers, who fired their guns over their heads and set fierce dogs on them. After that, the villagers were afraid, but they were also angry.

The wars didn’t start until the level of the River began to fall. Kular was unsure what had happened next, because there were many different stories. The villagers began to attack the irrigation works, creeping upstream at night to wreak acts of sabotage: a lock broken here, an engine destroyed there. Every time something was broken, the Tarnish took their revenge on the Pembar people. Soldiers would come to a village and arrest young men at random, forcing them to work on the canals with the Tarnish prisoners. That was a harsh sentence, because the Tarnish hated the Pembar people. The Tarnish prisoners stole their food and beat them, and if the young men tried to escape, they were often caught and shot. When they died, their bodies were thrown without ceremony into the River, to be found by their grieving families or to rot, undiscovered and unshriven, far away from home.

The hatred between the Pembar and the Tarnish people grew thick and bloody until at last, in the middle of the previous winter, the chief engineer was murdered. Some said his throat had been cut, others said that he had been shot, some said it was villagers who did it, others that it was his own workers. Whatever happened, the Tarnish men blamed the Pembar people. The army ordered that an entire village a few miles north of Kular’s be burned down, and every grown man shot dead. So that is what the soldiers did. And the workers kept building the canals and farming the cotton just as if nothing had happened.

“After that,” said Kular, “it was open war.” He paused and looked down at the table, his face dark with grief and hatred. “We cannot win,” he said. “They have machine guns and soldiers, and we have a few rifles, a few angry farmers.” For a moment his eyes went blank again. “They shot my wife,” he said. “They came to our village and burned it down, and they murdered women and children. And they shot my wife as we were fleeing in the boat. They don’t care what they do. Yet we have no choice but to fight them. If we have no water, we cannot live.”

We all nodded. This is something River folk understand in their bones. Now we knew why our River had sunk so low this summer.

“But it’s not so bad here,” said my father uncertainly. “Even though there is a drought. We’re a long way from the cotton fields.”

A strange expression crossed Kular’s face. “That was what our village said last spring,” he said. “Do you think they will stop? They are still building the irrigation works. There are already fields of cotton as far as you can see, but they want more. They say they will make the Plains of Pembar look like a snowfield. Every year they will plant more cotton, and every year there will be less water for us. They don’t care if we starve. They don’t care if they poison the water. And they are killing the River. Soon it will die, and so will we.”

There was a silence, and I knew that all of us were afraid. I glanced at my grandmother, and I saw that none of this was news to her. She had already seen it in the Book.

“They will not stop,” said Grandmother. “The only thing that will stop them will be when the River is dead and the plains have turned to desert sands. It will not take so long. But soldiers will not come to this place, even if they send famine before them.”

She turned to Kular. “If you would like to stay, you and your son will be safe here. For a little while.”

I read Kular’s story to Mely this morning, and she asked me what it had to do with anything. “You didn’t leave the village because of the River,” she said. “You left because of the Book. That’s what you told me, anyway.”

It annoyed me, because it was Mely who had said that it was my story to tell how I thought best. And in any case, I told her, what happened to the River is part of what happened to the Book. They are the same thing.

“It’s stupidity,” said Mely darkly. “That is how they are the same. Human beings are selfish and greedy and they think that the world has been put there just for them.”

Mely is always saying that people are stupid. “I’m a human being too,” I said.

“I didn’t say
all
human beings,” said Mely. Before I could answer, she stuck her tail up and went outside to lie in the sun, and that was the end of that. I sighed and sat down at my table in my tiny kitchen, and I looked out of the window at the old fig tree that grows outside. It has dark glossy leaves and beautiful grey branches that are softly curved, like a woman’s arms, and it is always full of birds that squabble and court in its deep shade. The fig tree was the reason why I rented this flat, and looking at it always makes me feel better.

We live in the Old Quarter, in the middle of a tangle of alleyways that are always strung with washing. When it rains, the alleys flood and the whole quarter stinks of sewage, and so I am glad we live on the first floor, where we escape most of the mud. Many of the buildings were once grand houses, with wide courtyards and graceful windows covered in iron grilles and carved wooden shutters, but they have long since lost their grandeur: the bright paint has faded on the shutters, and the stucco has fallen off the bricks, and their gardens are gone wild with tangles of brambles and prickly pear. They have been divided up into rooming houses or small flats, like the one I live in.

The Old Quarter has a bad reputation. Several notorious gangs are based here, and every now and then a war breaks out that makes big headlines in the newspaper. When that happens, locals stay away from known gang territories like the fish market, and they never linger in the streets. Although the gangs are mainly interested in shooting each other, it is always possible for someone to get in the way of a bullet accidentally. I suppose it is the same wherever you live. River folk never go swimming where there are currents that pull you down, and they know that you don’t take the boat out in storms, and that you stay away from water snakes.

There are two gangsters who keep an eye on my street. They are young men with sharp haircuts and expensive leather jackets, and they stand on the corner smoking expensive foreign cigarettes. I have lived here long enough for the men to nod when I walk past, and I nod back. The strange thing is that I don’t feel threatened by them. Perhaps I ought to be afraid, but I am not important enough to interest them. The truth is that I feel much less safe near the Financial District, where the businessmen go to the nightclubs and stagger out with crooked ties and bloodshot eyes and leer at me as I hurry home from a late appointment.

I never see my customers at home. I hire a stall in the tourist market four days a week. Sometimes people ask me where I live, and when I tell them they open their eyes wide and tell me I must be very brave to live in such a dangerous area by myself. Sometimes they ask if they can visit me, because they think it will be an adventure, but I always refuse. My home is private.

Anyway, I sat on my chair and stared at the fig tree and thought about what Mely had said. She is right: I haven’t spoken much about the Book, although it was the reason I left the village. I suspect that’s because it hurts to think about it. Sometimes, when I feel lost or I don’t know what to do, I still think to myself that I must ask the Book, momentarily forgetting that it has gone. And then I remember with a jolt, and I feel that terrible emptiness all over again.

To question the Book was very simple. You just took it out of the box and laid it on the table, and held the question in your mind as you opened it. There was no ritual or ceremony, but it was important to be respectful, both to the question and to the Book, and to have a clear and open mind. Some questions were more significant than others, and with those ones – we always knew if they were big questions – we would prepare ourselves with meditation and fasting. But questions of that kind were rare.

You knew the answer at once when you saw it. Sometimes it was on the first page you opened, but sometimes you had to leaf through page after page before you found it. It’s hard to describe how you knew: it was as if the words shone out of the page, although they never actually looked any different from the words around them. And when you found the answer, there was no guarantee that anyone would understand it, at least at first. Most often the answer became clear in time, but sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes, my grandmother used to say, people just ask the wrong question.

Whenever I opened the Book, whether for a question or just to read it, I felt a faint tingle in the tips of my fingers. And no matter how many times I did it, I felt a flutter of excitement in my stomach. The Book always had the same black and red lettering and the same thick, fragrant paper, but the words were always different. I don’t know how often I read it through from cover and cover and then returned to the beginning, to start again with an entirely different Book.

Inside the Book, as my grandmother often told me, was written everything that had been, everything that was and everything that was to come. And all these things changed all the time.

When I looked into the Book for my own interest and pleasure, it usually told me stories. I found in the Book some of the stories that Grandmother told us, and I knew that she had discovered them here too. When my duties were done, I would spend hours in the room with the Book, devouring its endless treasury. Some stories were funny, some were tragic, some were frightening and some I didn’t understand at all; but I thought all of them were beautiful.

The Book didn’t only contain stories. My mother most often found poems. Grandmother usually got recipes (some very good ones, she said). There could be instructions on how to build a cupboard or how to gut a fish, or a table of the phases of the moon, or the names of the major constellations in five different languages, or there could be lists of the properties of precious stones or herbs or sacred trees, or a description of the habits of animals I had never heard of, or a history of a realm that had fallen a thousand years ago in a land thousands of miles away, or a lexicon of a forgotten language.

Sometimes, although not very often, there were pictures – intricate drawings like the one I saw the first time I looked at the Book with my mother. Grandmother told me that once she had opened the Book to find that every page was blank, but that had never happened to me. I often wondered what question the Book refused to answer, but of course, she couldn’t say.

The day after Kular told us about the cotton fields, I asked the Book a serious question. I was afraid in a way I hadn’t been before. There had always been things to fear – accident, famine, drought, disease – but they were part of the texture of life as I knew it. The things Kular spoke of came from a world I didn’t understand. I remembered my grandmother’s face after she had asked the Book her own questions. I didn’t dare ask her what she had read there. Since my mother had died, Grandmother seemed shrunken. She was still kindly most of the time, and she did her duties as the head woman of the house, but for the first time I understood that she was old.