Water (22 page)

Horse so vast and powerful that she could run up that slope; and then she had to remind herself

again that she could not let her hands tremble. She put the bowl down, and then sat down beside

it, and rested her head in her hands. She wished she had thought to bring herself something more

to eat; and then she realised she was too tensely expectant to be hungry.

And so she sat, and waited for dawn, but as she waited, she began to be aware of a curious noise,

a little behind and below her. It was a low, rhythmic noise, with a kind of gasp or grunt in it. At

first she had thought it was the pre-dawn breeze, moving suspiciously up and down the crags and

disliking what it found, but it was too regular for that; nor was it like any birdsong she had ever

heard, not even the korac, whose family groups all talking together sounded like tiny axes

chipping rock. At the same time it reminded her of something-some memory of the time before

she had lived with her Guardian. Just to give herself something to do for the last few appalling

moments before dawn and doom, she went to investigate.

The moment before she saw the mare, she knew what she was hearing. She was accustomed to

watching over, and occasionally helping, her stepfather’s sheep birth, though only once had she

watched a foal being born, at a farm next to one of the smallholdings that hired Columbine. That

mare had made this same noise.

But it wasn’t the same noise. The farm birth had gone just as it was supposed to, and the foal had

been born in one long slippery rush after the mare had lain and shoved and strained and grunted

for not more than half an hour. Tamia knew, without ever having seen or heard it before, that this

mare had been trying to push her foal out into the world for a long, long time, and was very near

the end of her strength.

The mare’s eye was glazed, and her neck and sides were black with matted dirt and sweat; but

even Tamia’s untutored gaze took in that she was a valuable animal who had been well cared for.

“My poor lovely,” murmured Tamia, kneeling beside her head, “why are you here, in the wild,

instead of at home being tended to? Did the Water Horse break your fence, your wall, and drive

you away, up into the mountains where you could not find your way home?” It was unlikely

there was anything Tamia could do, now, and alone, but seeing the painful, waning struggle of

this gallant animal troubled Tamia deeply, even though the end of the world would come striding

up the steep crag in another moment. Tamia forgot all that, and searched in her memory of lamb

midwifery.

She moved round behind the labouring mare. She could see one little hoof sticking out of the

mare’s vagina; it appeared and disappeared in rhythm to the mare’s weakening thrusts. Tamia

knew what she would have done with a ewe, although she had never had to do it without

someone else nearby who knew much more than she did; and she wouldn’t even know that

much, except that sheep tend all to lamb at once, and sometimes the only extra pair of hands

belongs to a little girl.

There was not even any water to wash in first. She knelt down, and slowly began to thrust her

arm and hand up inside the mare’s body, feeling along the slender foreleg of the foal, till she

found the second, bent leg, the knee shoved implacably against the wall of the mare’s birth canal.

Slowly she shoved the foal back towards the womb again—the mare tried to resist her, but she

was too weak. Slowly, slowly,
slowly,
her arm very nearly not long enough, trying to guess at

what she could only erratically and incompletely feel, she rearranged the foal’s legs, felt that its

little head was still pointed in the right direction, and began to drag it towards air and daylight

and life. The mare’s contractions were only sporadic now; Tamia could no longer hear her groan

through the noise of her own rasping breath.

Tamia was covered in blood and slime and mud; it was hard to keep a grip on the foal’s forelegs,

and her knees and her other hand kept losing their purchase on the muddy ground; there was a

stinging cut on the palm of her other hand where she had slipped on a sharp rock. Her neck and

shoulder and back were on fire with cramp. She had stopped thinking about what she was doing,

merely automatically pulling harder when the mare’s muscles helped her, pulling and pulling,

awkwardly jammed against the mare’s hip, her other hand at first scrabbling for a better hold on

the unsympathetic ground, and then, as the foal’s two forelegs emerged together, pulling with the

hand that had been inside the mare. She had first knelt down trying to be aware of where the

mare’s potentially lethal hind legs were; she remembered nothing now but pull—pull—pull.

The foal was out. She looked at it numbly, briefly unable to recall that this was what she had

been fighting for. The second sac had broken some time before; now she wiped its nose and

mouth free of mucus, but it lay unmoving. I knew—I knew—said Tamia to herself but she took

her skirt off for lack of anything better, and began to rub the foal dry. She knelt over it, and

rubbed it as if it were a bit of dirty laundry on a washboard; only to dirty laundry she had never

whispered, “Breathe. Breathe.
Breathe.
”

The foal gave a little gasp and choke, and then a long shudder. Its head came up off the ground,

and then fell back with a thud, as if dropped. Tamia held her own breath; it could still have been

too exhausted—or too injured—by its long struggle for what it needed to do next; and she was at

the end of her own dubious expertise. It thrashed a bit with its legs, and stopped. And then

suddenly, with a surprising, almost violent energy, it half-rolled up on its side, looking wildly

around, as if it couldn’t imagine what had happened to it. Shakily it extended a foreleg; had a

quick heave and flounder, and fell down. It lay gasping; and then rolled up again, and began to

rearrange its forelegs. Tamia took a long breath ... and thought to look at the mare.

The mare was still breathing, but only just. Her dim eye looked blind when Tamia bent over her;

the spume around her lips and tongue had dried and was beginning to crack. Tamia cautiously

stroked her rough neck; there was no quiver of skin, no flick of ear, no roll of eye—nothing.

“Oh, no, not you!” said Tamia. “You’ve had a fine foal! You must wake up now and see him.

You must lick him all over, so that you know you belong to each other, and then show him how

to nurse. Oh, mare, don’t leave him!”

The mare’s breathing was so shallow, Tamia had to put a hand to her nostrils to feel it. She

looked around distractedly; she already knew there was no water nearby.

No water. None except ...
Do not spill a drop of the water ....

She ran back to her bowl, scooped a few drops on her fingertips, and threw them into the mare’s

face. She just saw the light come on again in the mare’s eyes, saw her nostrils flare, saw her raise

her head and look round for her foal—

And then the dawn came up over the rim of the mountains, and as the first rays of the sun struck

her face, Tamia heard the great challenging bell of the Water Horse’s neigh, and felt the earth

shake underfoot with her hoofs. Tamia stood at the head of the narrow cleft in the mountains,

with the tears streaming down her face, because she had thrown away her world’s last chance of

survival against the sea on account of her inability to let one ordinary mortal mare die, who

would probably now die under the Water Horse’s trampling hoofs, even as Tamia herself was

going to die.

She waited, holding her bowl. The absence of the few drops she had wasted on the mare was not

even visible; the bowl still looked full to the brim. But then again, perhaps it was not, because

Tamia’s arms were so tired and strained that she could not quite keep her hands steady, and the

surface of the water peaked in many tiny wrinkles which moved and ran in all directions, and yet

no drop fell over its edge.

She could see the Water Horse now, see the great, glorious, shining silver cloud of her, for she

was very beautiful, even more beautiful than she was terrible. Rocks cracked under her great

strides; trees split and fell when she lashed her tail; her hoofs were as big as boulders, her belly

as tall as a roof-top, her tail as long as the road to the sea. She moved almost as quickly as

thinking; almost Tamia did not have time to raise her bowl as the Water Horse ran up the valley

towards her, her tail streaming rainbows behind her. Tamia clutched her bowl to her breast, to

hold it level, and she loosed one hand from it, and felt in her pocket for the seventh stone she had

placed and then removed from her Guardian’s water-garden, the one that was slightly kidneyshaped; one of the stones that had, perhaps, invited the Water Horse into the world. Tamia

slipped the small stone into the bowl of water, and the water’s surface bulged up to meet

perfectly the brim of the bowl.

She saw just a glint of the mad, glaring, beautiful blue eye of the Water Horse, and then she

threw her bowl’s contents at her.

There was a crash like thunder, and a wind came from nowhere and struck Tamia so hard that

she staggered, dropped the bowl into the chasm, and almost fell after it. On hands and knees, she

began to crawl away from the edge; and then the rain began, and drenched her in a moment.

When she found herself unable to go any farther, pressed up against a shoulder of rock some

distance from the cliff-edge, she merely hunkered down where she was, and waited. I thought it

would be all over at once, she thought, I didn’t realise I would have to be drowned by inches.

Never mind. In the roar of the wind and under the burden of her own exhaustion and despair, as

she waited, she fell asleep.

She woke to blue skies and birdsong. At first she thought she had already died, and that by some

mistake she had been sent to the Place of Joy—for surely people who fail at some great task

entrusted to them are sent to live cold below ground forever. But she sat up, and discovered that

this hurt so much she hardly could, and thought perhaps this meant she was still alive after all.

She used the rock she was next to to help lever herself to her feet. Then she heard the whinny,

and looked down at herself, and saw that she was only dressed in her sodden shirt and petticoat.

As she stood up, there was a tiny pattering shower of water around her feet. She sneezed.

There was her mare—she didn’t mean to think of her as hers, the possessive just slipped into her

mind—and a beautiful black colt with a few grey hairs around his eyes and muzzle peeked round

his mother’s rain-soaked rump at the strange object that had just turned itself from a rock into a

something else. But his mother whinnied at it again, and walked towards it, so he decided to

come along too, trying to prance, and very nearly falling down for his pains. He was still only a

few hours old; all legs with a bony, bulgy little head at one end and a miniature-besom tail at the

other, and a few knobbly ribs to bind them all together. The mare came straight up to Tamia, and

pushed her face into Tamia’s breast; and Tamia laid her forehead against the mare’s poll, and

cradled her nose in her hands, and burst into tears.

It was only after this that Tamia thought to look into the abyss where the Water Horse had raced

up towards them, neighing challenge and destruction. A great long ribbon of water shone there,

arched and sparkling like the gay silky threads of a grey mare’s tail, and rainbows played

beneath it, and the rocks on either side of the valley were green with moss, and there was a great

pool at the foot of the cataract which was very slightly kidney-shaped, from which a stream ran

singing along the bottom of the valley. The water sprang out of a cleft in the rock at the very

peak of the crag, where the Flock of Crows became the Eagle; where Tamia had stood with her

bowl pressed against her breast to keep it steady, and had wept, knowing that what she was about

to do was no use, because she had disobeyed her Guardian, and spoilt everything.

Tamia turned slowly away from the valley, back towards the meadow where her Guardian

waited. The mare turned too, and fell in behind her. It was not a long journey, but the way was

steep, and all three were still very, very tired. All of them stumbled, and Tamia and the mare

leant on each other, and the foal took turns leaning on first the one and then the other, although

when he leant against Tamia, he tended to step on her feet, and then he didn’t seem so little after

all.

It was nearer sunset than tea-time when they reached the Guardian’s meadow, but Tamia saw the

little hummock that the teapot in its tea-cosy made, sitting on the table in front of the house,

between the water-garden and the old yew. And then she saw her Guardian emerging from the

shadow of the yew, limping heavily and leaning on a stick, but coming straight and steadily

towards them.

“Oh, Guardian!” said Tamia, and ran forward, and threw her arms around her. “Oh, I don’t know

why I’m here! I did it all wrong! I am so glad to see you!”

“Yes, you did do it all wrong,” agreed her Guardian, with great self-restraint, saying nothing

about the odd-smelling dampness of Tamia’s shirt-front now transferred to her own, “and I don’t