Water (31 page)

difference in their ages because telling stories to both of them at the same time would have been

impossible. Hetta wanted fairy-tales. Ruth wanted natural history. (The two sons of the house

had been expected to renounce the soft feminine pleasures of being tucked in and told stories.)

The problem with Ruth’s practicality was that it was turning out to have to do with science, not

furniture; Ruth eventually wanted to go into medical research, and her biology teacher adored

her. Ruth was fifteen, and in a year she would have to go up against their father about what she

would do next, a confrontation Hetta had lost, and Dane had sidestepped by being—apparently

genuinely—eager to stop wasting time in school and get down to building furniture ten hours a

day. Hetta was betting on Ruth, but she wasn’t looking forward to being around during the

uproar.

“Do you know anything about Daria?”

Ruth frowned briefly. “It got its independence finally, a year or two ago, didn’t it? And has gone

back to calling itself Damar, which the Damarians had been calling it all along. There was

something odd about the hand-over though.” She paused. International politics was not

something their father was interested in, and whatever the news coverage had been, they

wouldn’t have seen it at home. After a minute Ruth went on: “One of my friends—well, she’s

kind of a space case—Melanie, she says that it’s full of witches and wizards or something and

they do, well, real magic there, and all us Homelander bureaucrats either can’t stand it and have

really short terms and are sent home, or really get into it and go native and stay forever. She had

a great-uncle who got into it and wanted to stay, but his wife hated it, so they came home, and

you still only have to say ‘Daria’ to her and she bursts into tears, but he told Melanie a lot about

it before he died, and according to her ... well, I said she’s a space case. It’s not the sort of thing I

would remember except that there
was
something weird about the hand-over when it finally

happened and Melanie kept saying ‘well of course’ like she knew the real reason. Why?”

“I’ve been dreaming about it.”

“About Daria?—Damar, I mean. How do you dream about a
country?
”

“Not about the whole country. About a—a person, who lives on the edge of the—the Great

Desert. He says he is one of the Watchers—there are eleven of them. Um. They sort of keep an

eye on the desert. For sandstorms and things.”

“Is he cute?”

Hetta felt a blush launch itself across her face. “I—I hadn’t thought about it.” This was true.

Ruth laughed, and forgot to swallow it, and a moment later there was a heavy foot on the stair up

from the shop and their father appeared at the kitchen door. “Hetta can finish the dishes without

your help,” he said. “Ruth, as you have nothing to do, you can have a look at these,” and he

thrust a handful of papers at her. “I’ve had an insulting estimate from the insurance agent today

and I want something to answer him with. If Hetta kept the files in better order, I wouldn’t have

to waste time now.”

She did not dream of Zasharan that night, but she dreamed of walking in a forest full of trees she

did not know the names of, and hearing bird-voices, and knowing, somehow, that some of them

were human beings calling to other human beings the news that there was a stranger in their

forest. She seemed to walk through the trees for many hours, and once or twice it occurred to her

that perhaps she was lost and should be frightened, but she looked round at the trees and smiled,

for they were friendly, and she could not feel lost even if she did not know where she was, nor

frightened, when she was surrounded by friends. At last she paused, and put her hand on the

deeply rutted bark of a particular tree that seemed to call to her to touch it, and looked up into its

branches; and there, as if her eyes were learning to see, the leaves and branches rearranged

themselves into a new pattern that included a human face peering down at her. It held very still,

but it saw at once when she saw it; and then it smiled, and a branch near it turned into an arm,

and it waved. When she raised her own hand—the one not touching the tree—to wave back, she

woke, with one hand still lifted in the air.

She did not dream of Zasharan the next night either, but she dreamed that she was “walking past

a series of stables and paddocks, where the horses watched her, ears pricked, as she went by, till

she came to a sand-floored ring where several riders were performing a complicated pattern,

weaving in and out of each other’s track. The horses wore no bridles, and their saddles, whose

shape was strange to her eyes, had no stirrups. She watched for a moment, for the pattern the

horses were making (while their riders appeared to sit motionless astride them) was very lovely

and graceful. When the horses had all halted, heads in a circle, and all dropped their noses as if in

salute, one of the riders broke away and came towards her, and nodded to her, and said, “I am

Rohk, master of this dlor, and I should know everyone who goes here, but I do not know you.

Will you give me your name, and how came you past the guard at the gate?”

He spoke in a pleasant voice, and she answered with no fear, “My name is Hetta, and I do not

remember coming in your gate. Zasharan has mentioned you to me, and perhaps that is how I

came here.”

Rohk touched his breast with his closed hand, and then opened it towards her, flicking the fingers

in a gesture she did not know. “If you are a friend of Zasharan, then you are welcome here,

however you came.”

♦ ♦ ♦

On the third night she was again walking in a forest, and she looked up hopefully, searching for a

human face looking down at her, but for what seemed to be a long time she saw no one. But as

she walked and looked, she began to realise that she was hearing something besides birdsong and

the rustle of leaves; it sounded like bells, something like the huge bronze bells of the church

tower in her town, but there were too many bells, too many interlaced notes—perhaps more like

the bells of the cathedral in Mauncester. She paused and listened more intently. The bells seemed

to grow louder: their voices were wild, buoyant, superb; and suddenly she was among them, held

in the air by the bright weave of their music. The biggest bell was turning just at her right elbow,

she could look into it as it swung up towards her, she could see the clapper fall, BONG! The

noise this close was unbearable—it should have been unbearable—it struck through her like

daggers-no: like sunbeams through a prism, and she stood in air full of rainbows. But now she

could hear voices, human voices, through the booming of the bells, and they said:
Come down,

you must come down, for when the bells stand up and silent, you will fall.

She looked down and saw the faces of the ringers, hands busy and easy on the ropes, but the

faces looking up at her fearful and worried.
I do not know how,
she said, but she knew she made

no sound, any more than a rainbow can speak. And then she heard the silence beyond the bells,

and felt herself falling past the music and into the silence; but she woke before she had time to be

afraid, and she was in her bed in her father’s house, and it was time to get up and make breakfast

♦ ♦ ♦

That afternoon when Ruth came home from school, she bent over Hetta’s chair and dropped a

kiss on the top of her head, as she often did, but before she straightened up again, she murmured,

1 have something for you.” But Lara, on the other side of the table, was peeling potatoes with a

great show of being helpful, and Ruth said no more. It was a busy evening, for both the hired

cabinetmakers from the shop, Ron and Tim, had been invited to stay late and come for supper,

which was one of Hetta’s father’s ways of avoiding paying them overtime, and it was not until

they had gone to bed that Ruth came creeping into Hetta’s room with a big envelope. She

grinned at Hetta, said, “Sweet dreams,” and left again, closing the door silently behind her. Hetta

listened till she was sure Ruth had missed the three squeaky stairs on her way back to her own

room before she dumped the contents of the envelope out on her bed.

Come to Damar, land of orange groves,
said the flier on top. She stared at the trees in the photo,

but they were nothing like the trees she had seen in her dream two nights before. She shuffled

through the small pile of brochures. As travel agents’ propaganda went, this was all very lowkey. There were no girls in bikinis and no smiling natives in traditional dress; just landscape,

desert and mountains and forests—and orange plantations, and some odd-looking buildings.

What people there were all seemed to be staring somewhat dubiously at the camera. Some of

them were cinnamon-skinned and black-haired like Zasharan.

There were also a few sheets of plain stark print listing available flights and prices—these made

her hiss between her teeth. Her father gave her something above the housekeeping money that he

called her wages, which nearly covered replacing clothes that had worn out and disintegrated off

their seams; she had nonetheless managed to save a little, by obstinacy; she could probably save

more if she had to. Most of her grandmother’s clothes still hung in the cupboard, for example;

she had already altered one or two blouses to fit herself, and a skirt for Ruth. The difficulty with

this however was that while her father would never notice the recycling of his mother’s old

clothes, Hetta’s mother would, and would mention it in her vague-seeming way to her husband,

who would then decide that Hetta needed less money till this windfall had been thoroughly used

up. But over the years Hetta had discovered various ways and means to squeeze a penny till it

screamed, her garden produced more now than it had when she began as she learnt more about

gardening, and the butcher liked her .... Perhaps. Just perhaps.

She did not dream of Zasharan that night either, but she smelled the desert wind, and for a

moment she stood somewhere that was not Farbellow or her father’s shop, and she held a cup in

her hands, but when she raised it to taste its contents, it was only water.

She thought about the taste of desert water that afternoon as she raked the pond at the back of the

vegetable garden. She wore tall green wellies on her feet and long rubber gloves, but it was still

very hard not to get smudgy and bottom-of-pond-rot-smelling while hauling blanket-weed and

storm-detritus out of a neglected pond. She didn’t get back here as often as she wanted to

because the pond didn’t produce anything but newts and blanket-weed and she didn’t have time

for it, although even at its worst it was a magical spot for her, and the only place in the garden

where her mother couldn’t see her from her window.

She had wondered all her life how her great-grandmother had managed to convince her greatgrandfather to dig her a useless ornamental pond. Her great-grandfather had died when she was

four, but she remembered him clearly: in his extreme old age he was still a terrifying figure, and

even at four she remembered how her grandmother, his daughter, had seemed suddenly to shed a

burden after his death—and how Hetta’s own father had seemed to expand to fill that empty

space. Hetta’s father, her grandmother had told her, sadly, quietly, not often, but now and again,

was just like his grandfather. Hetta would have guessed this anyway; there were photographs of

him, and while he had been taller than her father, she recognised the glare. She couldn’t imagine

what it must have been like to be his only child, as her grandmother had been.

But his wife had had her pond.

It was round, and there was crazy paving around the edge of it. There was a little thicket of

coppiced dogwood at one end, which guarded it from her mother, which Hetta cut back

religiously every year; but the young red stems were very pretty and worthwhile on their own

account as well as for the screen they provided. She planted sunflowers at the backs of the

vegetable beds, and then staked them, so they would stand through the winter: these sheltered it

from view of the shop as if, were her father reminded of it, it would be filled in at once and used

for potatoes. It was an odd location to choose for a pond; it was too well shaded by the apple tree

and the wall to grow water lilies in, for example, but the paving made it look as though you

might—want to set chairs beside it and admire the newts and the blanket-weed on nice summer

evenings; nearer the house you would have less far to carry your patio furniture and tea-tray.

Maybe her great-grandmother had wanted to hide from view too. Hetta’s grandmother had found

it no solace; she called it “eerie” and stayed away. “She was probably just one of these smooth,

dry humans with no amphibian blood,” Ruth had said once, having joined Hetta poolside one

evening and discovered, upon getting up, that she had been sitting in mud. Ruth had also told

Hetta that her pond grew rather good newts: Turner’s Greater Red-Backed Newt, to be precise,

which was big (as newts go) and rare.

Hetta paused a moment, leaning on her rake. She would leave the blanket-weed heaped up on the

edge of the pond overnight, so that anything that lived in it had time to slither, creep, or scurry