Water (17 page)

for themselves, and the second for her mother to make cheeses to sell; and six sheep, whose

fleeces they sold to the weaver and whose lambs they sold to the butcher. As soon as Tamia was

tall enough to steady the most phlegmatic of the ewes between her legs, she began learning to

shear; but her stepfather took the lambs to the butcher. They also had a small flock of chickens,

and only when Tamia was collecting the eggs were none of them missed.

And, until Tamia was twelve, they had had a pony, Columbine, who pulled a plough over their

little quarter-hectare of cropland, and who was hired out, with her plough, to other farmers of

smallholdings. Columbine had been bought and trained to her work by Tamia’s father, but it was

the money on Columbine’s hiring that enabled Tamia’s stepfather to spend so much of his time

arguing with the local council over how the town should be run, and how much the Guardians’

token should be. “I feed and house seven children on the tiniest fraction of what we pay one

Guardian every year! Magic is magic! It has no mouth to put food into, no back to be sheltered

from storms!” was one of his favourite protests.

But Columbine had been old when Tamia’s mother had remarried, and one cold winter morning

when Tamia was twelve, the pony had lain down in the shed she shared with the cows, and

refused to get up again. She died that night, with Tamia’s tears wet on her neck, because Tamia

had refused to leave her. Tamia caught a severe head-cold as a result, and had to go to bed for a

sennight, and her stepfather was very angry. But Tamia had lost her best friend, even if she had

been only a pony. It had been Tamia who fed and brushed her, and tended her tack, and led her

to her other jobs, and fetched her home again. Columbine settled down, as soon as she saw her

work ahead of her, but she could be positively balky if anyone but Tamia tried to lead her

through street traffic.

When Tamia had been a little girl, she had thought the Guardians must be gods, or at least like

gods; by the time she entered her teens, she knew they were enough like ordinary people to need

to eat and sleep and protect themselves against the winter, and that certain traders brought them

what they needed, paid for by the token levied against every islander from birth. (The Guardians

had simple tastes—so went the stories—in food and clothing; in everything, in fact, except their

desire for gold; but it was considered bad luck to discuss this. Even Tamia’s stepfather was

carefully unspecific about where most of the yearly token went.) She also knew that occasionally

some Guardian descended from the mountains to one or another of the seaside villages and

wandered among its inhabitants for a day, for reasons known only to themselves, frightening

everyone they said “Good morrow” to, even members of the local council. Tamia wondered how

you recognised a Guardian. She had seen Guardians’ traders occasionally, had seen how they

seemed to carry silence and mystery with them; but then, in a village as small as hers, every

stranger was recognisable as a stranger, and treated as such.

But Tamia hadn’t liked listening to her stepfather speak against the Guardians’ token, nor to her

neighbours debating when Western Mouth would choose an apprentice. It seemed to her rude. So

she stopped listening. She had almost forgotten about Western Mouth’s apprentice when the

trader came to their door one evening.

Tamia knew him and his pony by sight, but she had never exchanged words with him—though

she had, once or twice, with the pony. He knocked on their door at twilight, when Tamia and her

mother had their hands fullest, putting children to bed. Tamia heard her stepfather open the door,

and speak sharply to whoever stood there, and spared a fragment of her attention to wonder who

it was, as she sought nightgowns crushed into dark corners, faced torn-to-bits beds, and grabbed

small shrieking bodies attempting to flee the inevitable. Her stepfather would welcome any of his

friends, and her mother’s friends knew better than to stop by at this time of day. Who could it

be?

Her stepfather had to say her name twice before it registered, and then Tamia found she had no

voice to respond with. “Yes, Stepfather?” she managed at last; and the child in her arms stopped

struggling in surprise. Everyone in the family, even the littlest, knew that Tamia was of no

importance.

“This man has a message for you.”

Tamia set Miz on her own legs, and stepped timidly forward. “Good evening,” said the trader. “I

beg pardon for disturbing you. I have a message for you from the Guardian of Western Mouth:

that if you are willing, she would have you to apprentice. She would be glad to see you as soon

as you are able to come.”

The trader paused, but Tamia was having trouble taking it in. Her fourteenth birthday had been

last week, but little attention had been paid to it; her mother had wished her happy birthday, and

given her a kiss. Fourteen was traditionally the age that Guardians took their apprentices. She

stared at the trader’s hat, and the long curling red feather that hung down from it. His pack

leaned against the door-post, and she could see the pony in the door-yard. Its ears were pricked

towards her, as if waiting for her to speak. The trader went on, gently, softly, as if his words were

only for her, and it did not matter if any of the rest of her family heard him or not. “Do you know

the way to Western Mouth?”

Tamia’s village lay at the edge of the foothills of the Cloudyheads. It was the last village on one

of the main traffic routes from the centre of the island to the sea, reached through a narrow gap in

the mountains about half a day’s brisk walk distant. It was not a very promising gap—there were

better routes both north and south, but they were much farther away—and it was passable

enough that Tamia’s village had a good trade in dried ocean-fish and seaweed for finished

lumber and hides, and what surplus crops the steep flinty farmland produced, and that Tamia’s

mother’s cousin, who had married a fisherman, could come for a visit now and again.

A little north of that route was a narrow path that broke off from the main way and darted

fiercely uphill, joining the long trail or series of trails that finally linked all the mountains in a

ragged circle, but here made its way along the eastern edge of the Flock of Crows towards the

Eagle, the tallest of the western Cloudyheads. Tamia had never seen anyone use that track, nor

did she remember anyone telling her where it went, but she knew that it would lead to Western

Mouth the way she knew that cheese was good to eat, or that the old man who lived at the edge

of town and raised spotted ponies could give you a love-charm if you asked, and if he felt like it.

It was just something everyone knew. “I—I think so,” she said to the trader, although her voice

did not sound like her own. “It is the path running up towards the Eagle, is it

“Yes,” replied the trader, and nodded his head to her respectfully, making his red feather gambol

across his forehead. “At the last turn you must make to reach the Eagle, there is a trader’s

sign”—and here he took a bit of wood out of his pocket and showed her the sign scratched on it.

And then he turned and picked up his pack and left them. That brief nod of his head seemed to

hang in the air of the cottage after the man had left, as if a pole had been stuck in the floor at that

place, and a banner tied to its top, declaring Tamia’s emancipation. Tamia ducked round that

place, as if something there blocked her way; she half-imagined the sparkle of a tiny pennoncel

there, out of the corner of her eye. It was long and curly and red. In the silence she returned to

Miz, who had stood staring, mouth open, one arm half in its sleeve and the other hand caught

under her chin by her nightgown’s collar, and began to pull her straight. The other children

sighed and moved; there was a wail from Issy, who often wailed. “When will you go?” were her

mother’s first words. “Tomorrow is washing-day.”

“Then I will leave the day after tomorrow,” replied Tamia.

She hugged the cows and sheep good-bye; they looked at her in mild surprise, and carried on

eating. The chickens would be glad to be rid of her, because they would be able to keep more of

their eggs to themselves. She said good-bye politely to her mother and her half siblings; her

stepfather had left unusually early that morning to bother the councillors. Then she set off

towards the Eagle. The journey would take her a day and a half, and her stepfather had

complained so much about the necessity of letting her have a blanket to sleep on that she had

promised to send it back again with the first trader who visited Western Mouth after her arrival.

If Western Mouth didn’t simply send her home again, apologising for the mistake.

She made good time on the first day, and was well up into the lower slopes of the mountains by

the time she had to stop because it was too dark to see her way. She had nothing to make a fire

with, and ate a little cold food, and wrapped herself in the thin blanket, and leaned back against a

tree, reminding herself firmly that bears never came this far west, and wolves were only

dangerous to humans in the hardest winters. She found a few gaps in the leaves to look up at the

stars through. She thought she would not be able to sleep—at this time of night she was usually

trying to put children to bed—it was all too strange; but she was tired, and even the tree-roots

couldn’t keep her awake, although her dreams were uncanny, and full of water and wind.

She was very stiff in the morning, and cold, and for the first hour or two she walked on with the

blanket still wrapped round her shoulders. But she warmed up at last, and began to step out more

freely; and it was before noon that she turned off the track that ambled round the inner edge of

the Cloudyheads and struck upward towards the Eagle, according to the little trader’s sign

scratched by the way. The slope was even worse than it looked, and she had been climbing

steadily for over a day already. Soon her lungs felt as if they might burst, and her thundering

heart beat against her ribs as if it would break out. She couldn’t imagine how a trader might walk

up this path, carrying a heavy pack, nor his pony, carrying even more, toil behind him. She kept

her head down, both to watch her footing and to prevent herself from seeing how much too

slowly the crest of this hill came towards her; but she did not see any boot—or iron-shod hoofmarks.

She wondered whether her heart pounded so only on account of the steepness of the path, and if

some of it were not her fear of the Guardian. She wished she’d thought to ask what the Guardian

of Western Mouth was like. But she had had no opportunity; it was not a question she could have

asked with her stepfather standing beside her, and by the next morning the trader had gone.

At the point just before most of the side of the mountain sheared away in a deep dangerous cleft,

and when you had passed it, you had left the Flock of Crows and now stood upon the Eagle, she

stopped, and leant against a tree, and looked back the way she had come. She knew about this

place, where one mountain became another, although she had never been here before. It was

spectacular, and more than a little frightening, even though the path that bit into the

mountainside to run over its head was wide enough to be reassuring in anything but the worst of

storms. She thought that the forest she could see at the Eagle’s foot was the far side of the forest

her village lay against. The village sat in the bottom of a little valley surrounded by foothills;

there were other little valleys north and south and east over the foothills, where there were other

villages—it was said that at the centre of the island was some truly flat land several leagues

across, but Tamia didn’t know anyone who had been there—and west, still invisible around a

swell of mountain, the route to the great and dangerous sea, which the Guardians protected

everyone from.

Why had this Guardian chosen her? She could protect no one. She had never done a very good

job of protecting herself.

When her heartbeat stopped banging in her ears as if her heart were trying to escape her body,

she pushed herself away from her tree with a sigh, and walked on. The last bit, up the

Eagle’s side, was much the steepest. Her tiny bundle of personal belongings weighed on her

shoulder like a stone, and the roughness of the folded blanket now chafed her where it touched

her damp skin; her head ached as much as her legs did; and sweat ran down her forehead and

into her eyes, although the day was not warm.

The twisty uneven path spilled out onto a wide flat meadow so abruptly that she staggered. As

she put her hand out to balance herself, a hand grasped hers, and steadied her. “Good day,” said

the woman who had seized her. “You must be Tamia.”

Tamia knew the words were merely courtesy. Only someone invited by a Guardian would dare

visit a Guardian; Tamia was now near the top of the Eagle, where Western Mouth lived, and

Guardians—except for their apprentices—lived alone, so this person must be the Guardian she

had come to meet; and while she had never met this or any other Guardian, this one must have

known who she was, to have asked her to come ... her thoughts tailed away in a muddle. There