Water (33 page)

the Hills with the hilt of his sword, and the Well of the City of the Kings and Queens opened

under the blow.”

“Gasthamor,” said Hetta, tasting the name.

“Gasthamor, who was the teacher of Oragh, who was the teacher of Semthara, who was the

teacher of Frayadok, who was the teacher of Goriolo, who was the teacher of Luthe,” said

Zasharan.

Gasthamor,
she repeated to herself.
Goriolo.
She doubted that the encyclopedia would tell the

tale of the warrior-mage who struck the rock with the hilt of his sword and produced a flow of

water that would last over three thousand years, but an encyclopedia of legends might. “You—

you said the Queen’s City, once before,” she said. “What is the name of your queen?”

“Fortunatar,” he said. “Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.”

She woke to the sound of her own voice, murmuring,
Gasthamor, Fortunatar of the Clear

Seeing, the year 3086.
Her heart was heavy as she went about her chores that day, and she told

herself that this was only because it was two more days before she could go to the library again,

and look up the kings and queens of Damar.

She made time to finish cleaning the pool at the back of the garden, hauling the blanket-weed—

now a disgusting sticky brown mat—two heaped barrowloads of the stuff—to the compost heap.

When she was done, she knelt on the crazy paving that edged the pool, and dipped her dirty

hands in the water. The sting of its coolness was friendly, energising; her head felt clearer and

her heart lighter than it had in several days. She patted her face with one wet hand, letting the

other continue to trail in the water, and she felt a tiny flicker against her palm. She looked down,

and there was a newt, swimming back and forth in a tiny figure eight, the curl of one arc inside

her slightly cupped fingers. She turned her hand so that it was palm up, and spread her fingers. It

swam to the centre of her palm and stopped. She thought she could just feel the tickle of tiny feet

against her skin.

She raised her hand very, very slowly; as the newt’s crested back broke the surface of the water,

it gave a frantic, miniature heave and scrabble, and she thought it would dive over the little rise

made by the web between her forefinger and thumb, but it stilled instead, seeming to crouch and

brace itself, as against some great peril. Now she definitely felt its feet: the forefeet at the pulsepoint of her wrist, the rear on the pads at the roots of her fingers, the tail sliding off her middle

finger between it and the ring finger. She found she was holding her breath.

She continued to raise her hand till it was eye level to herself; and the newt lifted its head and

stared at her. Its eyes were so small, it was difficult to make out their colour: gold, she thought,

with a vertical black pupil. The newt gave a tiny shudder and the startling red crest on its back

lifted and stiffened.

They gazed at each other for a full minute. Then she lowered her hand again till it touched the

pond surface, and this time the newt was gone so quickly that she stared at her empty palm,

wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.

She heard bells ringing in her dreams that night, but they seemed sombre and sad. On the next

night she thought she heard Zasharan’s voice, but she was lost in the dark, and whichever way

she turned, his voice came from behind her, and very far away.

She stormed around the supermarket the next day, and when she found herself at the check-out

behind someone who had to think about which carefully designated bag each item went into, she

nearly started throwing his own apples at him. She arrived at the library with less than half an

hour left, but her luck had found her at last, for there was a computer free.
Queens of Damar,
she

typed. There was a whirr, and a list of web sites which mentioned (among other things)

internationally assorted queens apparently not including Damarian, paint varnishes, long

underwear, and hair dressing salons, presented itself to her hopefully. She stared at the screen,

avoiding asking something that would tell her what she feared. At last she typed:
Who is the

ruler of Damar today?

Instantly the screen replied:
King Doroman rules with the Council of Five and the Parliament of

Montaratur.

There was no help for it.
Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing,
she typed.

There was a pause while the computer thought about it. She must have looked as frustrated and

impatient as she felt, because a librarian paused beside her and asked in that well-practised

ready-to-go-away-without-taking-offense voice if she could be of service.

“I am trying to find out some information about the queen of Damar,” she said.

“Damar? Oh—Daria—oh—Damar. Someone else was just asking about Damar a few weeks ago.

It’s curious how much we
don’t
hear about a country as big as it is. They have a king now, don’t

they? I seem to remember from the independence ceremonies. I can’t remember if he had a wife

or not.”

The computer was still thinking. Hetta said, finding herself glad of the distraction, “The queen I

want is Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.”

The librarian repeated this thoughtfully. “She sounds rather, hmm, poetical, though, doesn’t she?

Have you tried myths and legends?”

The computer had now hung itself on the impossible question of a poetical queen of Damar, and

Hetta was happy to let the librarian lean over her and put her hands on the keyboard and wrestle

it free. The librarian knew, too, how to ask the library’s search engine questions it could handle,

and this time when an answering screen came up, there was a block of text highlighted:

Shortly after this period of upheaval, Queen Fortunatar, later named of the Clear Seeing for the

justice of her rulings in matters both legal and numinous, took her throne upon the death of her

half-brother Linmath. Linmath had done much in his short life, and he left her a small but sound

queendom which flourished under her hand. The remaining feuds were settled not by force of

arms (nor by the trickery that had caught Linmath fatally unaware) but by weaponless

confrontation before the queen and her counsellors; and fresh feuds took no hold and thus shed

no blood. The one serious and insoluble menace of Fortunatar’s time were the sandstorms in the

Great Desert which were frequent and severe.

“Hmm,” said the librarian, and scrolled quickly to the top of the document.
An Introduction to

the Legendary History of Damar:

All countries have their folk tales and traditions, but Damar is unusual in the wealth of these,

and in the inextricable linkage between them and what western scholars call factual history.

Even today ....

Hetta closed her eyes. Then she opened them again without looking at the computer screen,

made a dramatic gesture of looking at her watch, and did not have to feign the start of horror

when she saw what it was telling her. “Oh dear—I really must go—thank you so much—I will

come back when I have more time.” She—was out the door before she heard what the librarian

was asking her. Probably whether she wanted to print out any of what they had found. No.

For three nights she did not dream at all, and waking was cruel. The one moment when her

spirits lifted enough for her to feel a breeze on her face and pause to breathe the air with pleasure

was one sunny afternoon when she went back to her pool and scrubbed the encircling paving.

She scrubbed with water only, not knowing what any sort of soap run-off might do to the pond

life, and she saw newts wrinkle the water with their passing several times. When she stopped to

breathe deep, she thought she saw a newt with a red back hovering at the edge of the pond as if it

were looking at her, and it amused her for another moment to imagine that all the newts she saw

were just the one newt, swimming back and forth, keeping her company.

That night she dreamed again, but it was a brief and disturbing dream, when she sat at the edge

of Zasharan’s pool where the Watcher’s Eye lay, and she strained to look into the water and see

it looking out at her, but the water was dark and opaque, though she felt sure the Eye was there,

and aware of her. She woke exhausted, and aching as if with physical effort.

She dreamed the same the next night, and the oppression and uselessness of it were almost too

much to bear. Her head throbbed with the effort to peer through the surface of the water, and she

fidgeted where she sat as if adjusting her body might help her to
see,
knowing this was not true,

and yet unable to sit still nonetheless. There was a scratchy noise as she moved and resettled, and

grit under her palms as she leaned on them. Sand. The ubiquitous Damarian desert sand;

Zasharan had told her that usually there was no sand in the Watcher’s chamber but that this year

it had blown and drifted even there. She dragged her blind gaze from the water and refocussed on

the sand at the edge of the pool: the same glittery, twinkly sand that had first given her her

cruelly unfounded hope when she had woken at home with grains of it in her hands and

nightdress.

She shifted her weight and freed one hand.
Help me,
she wrote in the sand at the edge of the

pool, and as she raised her finger from the final
e,
the dream dissolved, and she heard the milk

float in the street below and knew she would be late with breakfast.

A fortnight passed, and she dreamed of Damar no more. She began to grow reaccustomed to her

life above the furniture shop, housekeeper, cook, mender, minder, bookkeeper, dogsbody—

nothing. Nobody. She would grow old like this. She might marry Ron or Tim; that would please

her father, and tie one of them even more strongly to the shop. She supposed her father did not

consider the possibility that she might not be tied to the shop herself; she supposed she did not

consider the possibility either. She had raised no protest when her parents had sent Mrs Halford

and Mr Jonah and the possibility of university and a career away; she could hardly protest now

that she had a dream-world she liked better than this one and wished to go there. The paperback

shelves at the grocery store testified to the popularity of dream-worlds readers could only escape

to for a few hours in their imaginations. She wondered how many people dreamed of the worlds

they read about in books. She tried to remember if there had been some book, some fairy-tale of

her childhood, that had begun her secret love of deserts, of the sandstorm-torn time of Queen

Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, of a landscape she had never seen with her waking eyes; she

could remember no book and no tale her grandmother told that was anything like what she had

dreamed.

It took three weeks, but Ruth finally managed to corner her one Saturday afternoon, hoeing the

vegetable garden. “No you don’t,” she said as Hetta picked her hoe up hastily and began to move

back towards the garden shed. “I want to talk to you, and I mean to do it. Those dreams you

“were having about Damar lit you up, and the light’s gone off again. It’s not just the price of the

ticket, is it? We’d get the money somehow.”

Hetta dropped the hoe blade back behind the cabbages, but left it motionless. “No,” she

muttered. “It’s not just the money.” Her fingers tightened on the handle, and the blade made a

few erratic scrapes at the soil.

“Then what is it?”

Hetta steadied the blade and began to hoe properly. Ruth showed no sign of going away, so at

last she said: “It doesn’t matter. It was a silly idea anyway. Doing something because you

dreamed
about it.”

Ruth made a noise like someone trying not to yell when they’ve just cracked their head on a low

door. She stepped round the edge of the bed and seized Hetta’s wrist in both hands. Ruth was

smaller than Hetta, and spent her spare time in a lab counting beetles, but Hetta was surprised at

the strength of her grasp. “
Talk to me,
”
said
Ruth. “I have been worrying about you for
years.

Since Grandma died. You’re not supposed to have to worry about your older sister when you’re

six. Don’t you think I know you’ve saved
my
life? Father would have broken me like he breaks

everyone he gets his hands on if I’d been the elder—like he broke Mum, like he’s broken Dane,

like he’s broken Tim and Ron and they were even grown-ups—and Lara’s going, for all that she

thinks she just wants to marry Dane. You are the only one of us who has been clever enough, or

stubborn enough, to save a little bit of your soul from him—maybe Grandma did, when she was

still alive I wasn’t paying so much attention, maybe you learned it from her—and I learned from

you that it can be done. I know it, and Jeff does too—you know, with that programming stuff he

can do, he’s already got half his university paid for. When the time comes, nobody’ll be able to

say no to him. We’re going to be all right—and that’s thanks to
you.
It’s time to save
yourself

now.
That little bit of your soul seems to live in that desert of yours—if I were a shrink instead of

a biologist, I’m sure I could have a really good time with
that
metaphor—I’ve wondered where