Water (19 page)

which was no deeper than the length of her fingers—and felt gold flakes swirling up and

adhering to her skin; and then she placed one of her stones in it, wriggling it round till she felt it,

intangibly heard it, go
mmph,
like a well-fitted horse-collar settling against the shoulders it was

made for. There was a tiny burst of light, and the twinkles of gold on her fingers and on the stone

she had chosen disappeared.

Then she did the same to her other stone, and sat back on her heels, and watched as the air and

the water around the two stones changed, and she felt the change float and expand, almost like

scent, and wreath itself around her, almost like smoke. This was the first magic she’d ever done

without the Guardian telling her how. “I—I’ve tried—I’ve done—” she said in a voice rather

higher than her usual one. She swallowed. “I’m ready now. I will—I will now stop waiting for

you to send me home.”

“Thank you,” said the Guardian, and she moved off her chair, and knelt by Tamia, and put her

hands just above the two stones, as if feeling heat rising off them.

Tamia had been with the Guardian nearly a year when the Guardian said one morning, “It’s time

you had a look at the sea. The way I want to go, it’s a long walk, we’ll take lunch—and perhaps

tea.” She tied up food in two bundles, and they set out, towards the Eagle’s peak behind their

small meadow.

They often went for long prowling walks along the shoulders of the mountains, following deer

trails when there were deer trails, and even rabbit trails when there were those; the problem with

rabbit trails was that they were made by and for creatures no more than a foot tall. On some of

their walks there was a good deal of scrambling. But the Guardian showed Tamia what plants

had leaves or berries or roots that were good to eat—or at least nourishing; or possessed healing

properties. And they always looked out for stones that might fit in the water-garden, though they

had to wait for the traders to bring them new supplies of the gold that their magic used. Tamia

now knew the name of the trader with the red feather in his cap—Traetu; and his pony,

Wheatear, for the long curly hair-whorl on his neck, like a stalk of wheat bent by the wind.

Tamia talked to the traders—and their ponies; she also greeted and was friendly with the deer,

and the rabbits, and the foxes, and the hrungus, and the birds that visited their meadow or that

they met on their walks; and the Guardian said to her thoughtfully, “If you were not so suited to

our work, I would wonder if I had called you to the wrong craft; for the wild creatures love you,

and no Guardian in all the long list of our Guardianship has ever had a familiar animal.”

Tamia shook her head. “It is only that my best friend-before you, dear Guardian—was a pony.”

But they had never climbed the peak of the Eagle. Tamia, like many inlanders, had never seen

the ocean; and she had been too busy and too happy in the last year to think about it, although in

the back of her mind she was aware that what she was here for was to learn to protect her land

from the ocean, to become a member of the Guardians, who built and patrolled the boundary that

kept the land safe from the water. She had no very good picture of what the ocean might be like;

she knew that fishermen travelled upon it in boats, like the inlanders sometimes travelled on their

ponds and streams and lakes; but when she thought about it at all, she thought of it as a kind of

nightmare thing, perhaps a little like a sky full of storm-clouds.

When, in the early afternoon, they finally stood on the top of the Eagle and looked around them,

she was amazed. This great, dazzling, every-colour-and-no-colour expanse was like nothing she

had ever imagined, let alone seen; and she thought of the cousin of her mother’s who had

married a fisherman, who described the sea with a shrug as “A lot of water you can’t drink,” and

she could not understand how anyone could think this way. But then, she had probably never

stood on the Eagle’s head with the wind in her face—and the Guardian she was apprenticed to

standing at her side. The salt smell of it was very strong. She knew the smell from her village;

sometimes on wet, foggy mornings when the wind was coming steadily from the west, a faint

tang of it was just noticeable as the fog was pushed farther inland to shred itself on tree-tops. It

had never seemed to her any more interesting than any other smell. But where they stood, with

the wind bucketing around them, this tallest peak of the Eagle seemed to lean out towards the

shore while the Cloudyheads on either side seemed to draw back in alarm, the water was on

nearly three sides of them and the land seemed little more than a memory behind them. Here the

ocean smell was wild and tantalising and full of mysteries.

This is the best, Tamia thought. There is nothing better than this. Not even doing my first magic

by myself—not even meeting Southern Eye and Four Doors when they came to see my

Guardian, or talking to the traders when they come here, not even Traetu, who told me my

Guardian wanted me and will always be my favourite—this is almost as good as being my

Guardian’s friend. She glanced at her Guardian, who looked away from the sea long enough to

meet her apprentice’s eyes, and Tamia was sure, as she had been sure many times before, that the

Guardian knew exactly what she was thinking.

After a little while, the Guardian said thoughtfully, “This island is a strange place; I believe there

is no other place like it in all the wide world, though there must be other places just as strange. It

is our strangeness to be a threshold between land and water; and the boundary between us is

striven for, and fought over, and it shifts sometimes this way, and sometimes that. Perhaps there

are Guardians on the other side of the boundary, as we are the Guardians of this; perhaps it is

only on account of our angle of vision that it seems to us that the forces of water desire to

overwhelm us. Perhaps whatever lives in the deep of the water does not understand that if it

succeeded in bringing the dry lands under its sway, it would kill a great many people and plants

and animals who love their lives, for I assume plants and animals love their lives too; perhaps it

does understand, and does not care, for we are mere land-dwellers. I do not know. But I do know

that it is over this one island that the war is fought, and if once we yielded, then all those lands

behind us—farther from the boundary we protect—would immediately come under threat; and

they have no Guardians. We are the Guardians, and here we hold the line.”

Tamia listened to her Guardian, because she always did; but she was still in thrall to the great

beauty of the ocean, and did not understand. It was not until half way through her second year as

the Guardian’s apprentice that she saw her first great storm.

There were dangerous storms every winter, storms where people and animals might be lost, if

they were unlucky. But she had only seen one or two storms as great as this one when she lived

in the valley, storms that uprooted trees and drowned sheep in the fields, that levelled houses,

and might occasionally do the same to whole villages. “Island weather,” everyone called it, and

the old people nodded sardonically after it was all over and the losses were never as great as first

they appeared, and said to people like Tamia’s stepfather, “Are you so sure the Guardians do not

earn their tokens?”

But she could not have guessed how much wilder and more fearful such a storm would be near

the crest of the Eagle, and, as a Guardian’s apprentice, what it would be like to be one of the

people trying to help throw back the deluge that threatened to drown their land like a fishing-boat

in a sudden squall. She knew about rain and wind, about the prying fingers of storm under the

eaves, the whiplash of sleet and the terrifying lift of a strong wind, if you were so unfortunate as

to be caught outdoors in it; she did not know, when she lived in the valley, about the high mad

voices in it, and the faces that almost shaped themselves from the roiling mists, nor the clinging

of wetness that looked like rain, and first ran down your body like rain, but then seemed to wrap

itself about you like a bolt of heavy cloth, and pull you under.

She did not know that the stones in their own water-garden would hide in the cloud—and fogshadows scudding across on the pool’s surface, would elude them by the rain in their eyes and

the pounding of the wind against their bodies, by the sudden inexplicable water-spouts in the

garden itself, which created deep scoured trenches in the sandy floor of the pool, where the

stones they had so painstakingly placed then rolled and tumbled. She did not know that the flakes

of gold that lay in the sand or floated in the water would become sharp as flints, and cut at her,

that the golden pebbles would become dazzling, dizzying, vertiginous, that the rainbows that

often hung round the water-garden would turn a muddy, treacherous brown, and twist around

her, hampering her, tangible as vines. Tamia knelt and crawled at her Guardian’s side, straining

to hear her Guardian’s shouted words through the shriek of the wind, knowing without being told

that the water was being called to rebel, to rise up in mastery and dominion over the land, and

that while the stones in their own garden dodged away from them, shifted in their places and slid

into unexpected holes, that the water was warming.

Several hours they waded and crept and floundered through the water-garden, the gritty stones

slipping through Tamia’s cold fingers, her forearms and forehead sore from sand rubbing against

skin when she tried, uselessly, again and again, to wipe the wet from her eyes, while she

expected at any moment to discover that
she
had become the tiny gap in the wall through which

the conquering water would at first seep, and then trickle, and then blast and roar.

But storms like these were very rare. And Tamia, who had nightmares for months after this one,

was glad of it; because for the first time since she had made her first magic in the water-garden,

she wondered again if perhaps her Guardian had made a mistake about her after all, that she was

not strong enough to be a Guardian. But there were no more savage storms, and Tamia’s other

lessons went well, for she was not, as her Guardian had said on their first meeting, afraid of hard

work.

The second year passed more quickly than the first, and the third quicker yet. She saw Southern

Gate again, and Four Doors several times—“Four Doors is always a wanderer, whoever it is; the

Four Doors when I was an apprentice was just the same, and my Guardian told me that the two

she could remember before that one were wanderers too”—and White North once took Tamia

away for three days, on one of those Guardians’ walks through the villages of more ordinary

folk. “I should take you myself,” said Tamia’s Guardian, “but I told you I’d grown too old for

mountain-climbing. White North will look after you. You should see the people you guard

occasionally, and remind yourself of what their lives are like, especially when you’re still young

and unused to this work; it makes what we do here more real.” Tamia hadn’t liked being away

from her Guardian—and had not enjoyed the looks on the faces of the villagers they met—but

White North was a pleasant travelling companion, and her Guardian was right, the experience

had made her feel for the water-garden much keener. She had gone walking once more, this time

with Four Doors, early in her fourth year as apprentice.

But some time during that fourth year Tamia began to notice, although she fought against

noticing, that her Guardian was slowing down. She went to bed earlier in the evenings, and while

she rose a^ early as she had when Tamia first came, it seemed to take her longer to wake up, and

Tamia took over more of the ordinary checks and guards and sightings and alignings of the

Guardian’s tasks, and she bid the old
yew
good-day and good-evening, and when she went for

walks—or rather, when she was sent on them, for she would not voluntarily leave her Guardian

alone—she went by herself. But when the Guardian spoke, she was the same Guardian she had

always been, and so Tamia tried to ignore the rest.

Soon after the beginning of Tamia’s fifth year as apprentice, her Guardian fell ill.

Tamia found her, one afternoon, returning from gathering mushrooms on the gentle slopes of the

Dove, slumped by the water-garden. She had fallen into the edge of the pond, and the first,

horrifying thing Tamia noticed was that she had fallen with her cheek propped against one of the

stones

Tamia had placed during the first magic she had ever done by herself; and because of this, her

Guardian’s nose and mouth had been held just clear of the surface of the water.

Tamia did not allow herself to think about this for long. Her Guardian’s face was a strange,

chalky-grey colour, her breath rasped, and her body lay in a twisted huddle. Furthermore, the

wind down the mountain was cold today, and her left side lay in the pond. Tamia had dropped

her basket halfway across the meadow, and had run to her Guardian; but even when she raised

her head and shoulders onto her own lap, she could not waken her; and the sound of her