The River and the Book (6 page)

She complimented our house and the meal, speaking haltingly, but without making many mistakes. She had learned our language well, and soon she and I were talking. She said she was very interested in the people of the Pembar. “Nothing has changed here for centuries, because the Pembar Plains are so remote,” she said. “And your traditions and customs can give us some insight into things that have disappeared elsewhere.”

At the mention of change, I looked up sharply. “Nowhere can escape change,” I said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of what’s happening upriver, with the Tarnish cotton fields.”

She nodded. “We have heard of it,” she said. “The refugees are telling terrible stories, which are being told even in my country. That’s partly why I’m making this journey now. Perhaps I can help your people, by showing others what is threatened here.”

“They are stealing our River,” I said. “If the River dies, we cannot stay here. We won’t be able to live.”

“There was already a drought, was there not?” said Jane Watson. “Some things are beyond even the Tarnish. Rivers die in the normal course of nature. The world is changing; the weather is changing. Some things will vanish, no matter what we do.”

Her words gave me a chill in my stomach, and speaking of the death of our River with a stranger seemed disrespectful, so I changed the subject, asking her the first thing that came into my head.

“Are you a Keeper as well?” I asked.

Jane Watson smiled, and her face transformed; she seemed suddenly like a little girl, amused and excited. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. You feel like a Keeper. But Mizan said that you don’t have Keepers in your country.”

“We don’t have the same powers that you do,” said Jane Watson. “And yet, among my own people, you might say I am a kind of Keeper.”

I met her clear gaze. “You are clearly a woman of power,” I said.

“Like knows like,” said Jane Watson, smiling again. “Yes, I can see the power in you, just as it is in me. In my homeland we have many kinds of power, but we have lost the way of some ancient arts that you have been wise enough to preserve.” She suddenly looked shy. “I have heard of your Book. I should – I should like very much to see it for myself, if you would show me.”

I felt a flutter of pride that our Book was so famous that a foreigner like Jane Watson had heard of it, and promised to show her the Book later.

After the food had been eaten and the table cleared, she followed me solemnly into the room off the kitchen, and watched alertly as I took it from the box and opened it.

“What would you like to ask it?” I said.

“Do I have to ask a question?” said Jane Watson.

“No,” I said. “But you can if you like.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment, and then said, “What would the Book like to tell me?”

“That’s your question?”

She nodded. I held the question in my mind and opened the Book. Jane Watson moved close as I opened the covers, and I glanced up. Her eyes were shining, her lips slightly parted, and I noticed that her hands were trembling.

On one page was a picture, an engraving of a lonely, flat landscape wound through by a river, and a flock of cranes were flying over the horizon. On the other page was a single line of text.

“What does it say?” asked Jane Watson.

“The picture is of the Plains of Pembar,” I said. “That’s our River. And it’s one phrase. It says:
What profit it a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?
”

For a moment Jane Watson looked astonished, and then she covered it with a laugh. “I wonder what that means,” she said. Her voice was shaky, and she was slightly pale. I wondered what the words meant to her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Only you can know what the words mean. And sometimes it takes a long time to find out. It doesn’t often happen that the reading is alone on the page. It means that it’s important, that the Book wants to make sure you hear.”

I waited, hoping that Jane Watson would explain, as the phrase clearly meant something to her. It was impolite to ask directly. But she didn’t. Instead she reached out with the tip of her finger and gently stroked the page. I flinched and snatched it away: it was forbidden for anyone except the Keepers to touch the Book. A curious expression briefly crossed her face, a kind of lust mixed with frustration or anger, but it passed so swiftly I almost thought I had imagined it. Jane Watson apologized for her rudeness, and I dismissed her gesture as ignorant and clumsy rather than sinister, and forgot all about it.

I remembered that expression after Jane Watson left, when I was tormenting myself with reproaches: I ought to have taken it as a warning, I ought to have been more wary. Back then, it was not my way to be suspicious. When Grandmother told me that Jane Watson had a cold soul and was not to be trusted, I defended her hotly. I said that Jane Watson could help us against the Tarns, and that we should not behave like foolish backward villagers, afraid of the new. I said things that make me blush now when I think of them.

Grandmother shook her head and said nothing more. Later she told me that Jane Watson had enchanted me, and there was nothing more to say until the spell was broken. And when the spell did break, Grandmother did not once rebuke me, not by word nor by glance. That hurt almost more than anything else. I think it was Grandmother’s silence that made me decide to find Jane Watson myself, and to bring the Book back where it belonged.

When I think back, I can’t quite believe that I made the choice to leave my village so casually. I didn’t consult anyone, not even Grandmother. I just decided, and then I left. I suppose it was partly a question of pride: without the Book, I had no place in the village. I knew that my family didn’t need me: there were my brothers and sisters to care for my grandmother and father as they aged. I was a Keeper of the Book, and so had my place, an important place. When the Book was stolen, I had nothing. I couldn’t face my loss of status. Writing it down, I realize how vain my decision was. I suspect I didn’t speak to my grandmother about it because she would have pointed out my vanity, and underneath I was slightly ashamed of it – although I don’t know whether she would still have approved of my seeking the Book. But at the time I didn’t think about any of this. I just decided, and then I acted.

I took the dinghy that had belonged to my mother and that had become mine when she died, and I packed it with supplies – flatbreads, smoked fish, dried fruits, a big bag of walnuts, drinking water. I filled a purse with my hoarded cache of coins, squirrelled away from my weaving, along with some small things that were precious to me – the gold earrings my grandmother had given me when I was presented at the temple, a bracelet of amber that had belonged to my mother – and tied it around my belly, where it would be safe and hidden. I had a little more money than usual, because Jane Watson’s arrival had meant that I hadn’t spent as much as I normally would at Mizan’s stall. I packed two blankets and some spare clothes and a small, very sharp clasp knife that I kept in a sheath on my belt.

Then I wrote a note for my family, saying that I was going to find the Book, and would send word. I left one morning before first light, a week after Jane Watson. By now it was late summer, but there was as yet no sign of the chills of autumn. I unmoored the dinghy from the pier behind our house and rowed out to the centre of the River; then I shipped the oars and drifted downstream, watching the sun rise. It was a beautiful, clear summer dawn; the air brightened until it was like liquid light, and the River rippled molten gold. Somewhere very high overhead I could hear the lonely twittering of a lark, but that served only to deepen the silence that filled the world.

I realized it was the first time I had been properly alone for many days. Then I thought, with a thrill of excitement that was not unmixed with fear, that I was more alone than I had ever been in my life. I lay back in the dinghy and stared up at the sky. Even though I had just made the most momentous decision of my life, I felt deeply peaceful. I had given my destiny to the River, and for that moment all the guilt and anger and sorrow that had filled me for days melted away.

I had no clear idea what I would do. I thought I’d travel to Kilok and ask if anyone had seen Jane Watson. Yani and Sopli had come back because they couldn’t travel overland, but I thought that Jane Watson would have to come back to the River at some point, because it was still the major road in this part of the world. Beyond Kilok, I really hadn’t thought much. This was partly because Kilok was as far from home as I had ever been. I didn’t know what the world was like beyond it, and I didn’t have the Book to ask. I missed it most fiercely in those early days, when I so needed its advice.

I made one sensible decision: to dress as a boy. Jane Watson had told me that it could be dangerous for women to travel alone. She kept a gun, which she wore on a shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket when she was travelling. She showed it to me once: it was quite small, a revolver, which she said was standard issue for city traffic police, and which she had bought on the black market when she had arrived in our country. I weighed it in my hand briefly before giving it back to her with a shudder; it was surprisingly heavy and the metal felt cold and deadly. I had no idea how to fire a gun, and had never thought to learn. Now I wished I had taken the trouble. It wouldn’t have been so hard; Sopli had a gun and would have taught me, if I had asked him. But now it was too late, and all I had to protect me was my knife.

On the other hand, it would take a sharp eye to pick me as a girl. As I floated downriver, I cut my braid off at the nape of my neck with my clasp knife. Although the blade was sharp, it took a while to saw through my thick hair, and when I had finished I held the severed plait in my hands for some time, breathing heavily, before I threw it in the water. The air felt cold on the back of my neck. The plaited hair twirled on the ripples for a while and then drifted off to the bank, where it snagged on some reeds. I watched its fate with a curious mixture of sadness and liberation. It was as if, with that gesture, I had thrown away my childhood.

Now my hair was short, it would be easier to look after, and no one would think I was a girl. I have always been skinny, and my small breasts were easily hidden in a baggy shirt. With my worn sandals, shin-length trousers and sun-bleached shirt, I looked exactly like a water rat, one of the ragged orphan boys who hustle a living up and down the water, making deliveries, running errands, catching fish or freshwater crabs.

I let the current take me for the rest of the day, only exerting myself to ensure that I didn’t ground on any shoals. I listened to the many voices of the River and watched the banks drift by, raising my hand occasionally when I passed farmers hoeing their fields or cleaning out the irrigation channels on the banks. I didn’t think about my family, who by now would have discovered my letter. I didn’t want to think about them, because it would hurt: they would be bewildered, grieving, worried; they might even be angry with me. I didn’t think about the Book, or where I was going. I just lay back in my boat and squinted up at the sky and let myself be empty. For the first time in my life, I was no one: I had left behind everything that I knew and everyone who knew me. I didn’t feel sad or lost or confused, or anything that I might have expected. I think what I felt more than anything else was relief.

When I read Mely the last chapter this morning, she stood up and stretched from her nose to the tip of her tail. Then she yawned delicately, showing every one of her white, sharp teeth. Finally, after all that pantomime, she deigned to tell me what she thought.

“That,” Mely said, “is a pack of lies.”

I should be used to Mely by now, but this offended me.

“Lies?” I said. “I am trying to be as truthful as I possibly can. And how can you know, anyway? I haven’t met you yet. You weren’t even there.”

“I met you very soon after that,” said Mely. “And you didn’t seem at all relieved to me. You were lost and confused and sad, all the things that you say you weren’t.”

I sighed. “That was
afterwards
,” I said. “I felt all those things
afterwards
. Not on the first day…”

“That’s why I felt sorry for you,” said Mely. “Because you were so lost.”

“You felt sorry for me? As I remember, it was
me
who took pity on
you
.
You
were the one without anywhere to live and with no food…”

Mely scratched her ear, pretending that she hadn’t heard me. She doesn’t like to be reminded about that.

“And,” I added, “I’m still the one who buys the fish heads. So it might be a good idea to be polite to me.”

“You said you wanted me to be honest,” said Mely. “And look what happens when I tell you what I think! You threaten to starve me!”

“You can be honest without being rude,” I said.

“I told you a cat doesn’t know anything about storytelling. So why do you ask me? It’s your fault if you get offended.”

“You like listening to Blind Harim as much as I do,” I said. “So you must know something about telling stories.”

“Anyway, you might tell lies about me,” said Mely, who wasn’t listening. “I’m not a story, I’m your friend. What if you say things that aren’t true? Won’t you be changing how things are?”

So now I understand that Mely is worried about this book, because she is part of the story. When I think about it, she’s right. Books
do
change things. My Book changed things all the time: people took its advice and lived better lives (or didn’t take its advice, and lived worse lives; but they knew what they should have done). It’s hard to see how this book I’m writing will change things, really; it’s a different sort of book, for a start. But I can see why Mely might not want to be a story cat in a story book.

In the end, I promised to be as truthful as I possibly could, especially when I wrote about Mely, because being truthful would change things the least. Mely looked suspicious, but thought that would probably be all right. There are two problems with this: the first is that I suspect that being truthful changes things more than lying does. The Book was powerful, my grandmother told me, because it was always truthful; there might be another kind of power in distorting reality with words, but it will always prove weaker than truthfulness.