Water (29 page)

She just managed to comprehend that the words were for her, and she stepped through the door

unaided. The hand that was holding hers loosed her, the figure followed her, and this time she

heard another word, half shouted, and she turned in time to see the same stiff-fingered jerk of the

hand that had appeared to open the door: it slammed shut on a gust of sand like a sword-stroke.

The furious sand slashed into her legs and she stumbled and cried out: the hands saved her again,

catching her above the elbows. She put her hands out unthinkingly, and felt collarbones under

her hands, and warm breath on her wrists.

“Forgive me,” she said, and the absurdity of it caught at her, but she was afraid to laugh, as if

once she started, she might not be able to stop.

“Forgive?” said the figure. “It is I who must ask you to forgive me. I should have seen you

before; I am a Watcher, and this is my place, and Kalarsham is evil-tempered lately and lets

Geljdreth do as he likes. But it was as if you were suddenly there, from nowhere. Rather like this

storm. A storm like this usually gives warning, even here.”

She remembered her first thought when she woke up—if indeed any of this was waking—
Even

in this area a storm this severe gave some warning.
“Where—where am I?” she said.

The figure had pulled the veiling down from its face, and pushed the hood back from its head. He

was clean-shaven, dark-skinned, almost mahogany in the yellow light of the stony room where

they stood, black-haired; she could not see if his eyes were brown or black. “Where did you

come from?” he said, not as if he were ignoring her question but as if it had been rhetorical and

required no answer. “You must have set out from Chinilar, what, three or four weeks ago? And

then come on from Thaar? What I don’t understand is what you were doing alone. You had lost

whatever kit and company you came with before I found you—I am sorry—but there wasn’t

even a pack animal with you. I may have been careless”—his voice sounded strained, as if he

were not used to finding himself careless—“but I would have noticed, even if it had been too

late.”

She shook her head. “Chinilar?” she said.

He looked at her as if playing over in his mind what she had last said. He spoke gently. “This is

the station of the fourth Watcher, the Citadel of the Meeting of the Sands, and I am he.”

“The fourth-Watcher?” she said.

“There are eleven of us,” he said, still gently. “We watch over the eleven Sandpales where the

blood of the head of Maur sank into the earth after Aerin and Tor threw the evil thing out of the

City and it burnt the forests and rivers of the Old Damar to the Great Desert in the rage of its

thwarting. Much of the desert is quiet—as much as any desert is quiet—but Tor, the Just and

Powerful, set up our eleven stations where the desert is not quiet. The first is named the Citadel

of the Raising of the Sands, and the second is the Citadel of the Parting of the Sands, and the

third is the Citadel of the Breathing of the Sands .... The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Watchers

are often called upon, for our Pales lie near the fastest way through the Great Desert, from

Rawalthifan in the West to the plain that lies before the Queen’s City itself But I—I have never

Watched so badly before. Where did you come from?” he said again, and now she heard the

frustration and distress in his voice. “Where do you come from, as if the storm itself had brought

you?”

Faintly she replied: “I come from Roanshire, one of the south counties of the Homeland; I live in

a town called Farbellow about fifteen miles southwest of Mauncester. We live above my father’s

furniture shop. And I still do not know where I am.”

He answered: “I have never heard of Roanshire, or the Homeland, or Mauncester. The storm

brought you far indeed. This is the land called Damar, and you stand at the fourth Sandpale at the

edge of the Great Desert we call Kalarsham.”

And then there was a terrible light in her eyes like the sun bursting, and when she put her hands

up to protect her face there was a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, and a voice, a familiar

voice, saying, “Hetta, Hetta, wake up, are you ill?” But the voice sounded strange, despite its

familiarity, as if speaking a language she used to know but had nearly forgotten. But she heard

anxiety in the voice, and fear, and she swam towards that fear, from whatever far place she was

in, for she knew the fear, it was hers, and her burden to protect those who shared it. Before she

fully remembered the fear or the life that went with it, she heard another voice, an angry voice,

and it growled: “Get the lazy lie-abed on her feet or it won’t be a hand on her shoulder she next

feels”—it was her father’s voice.

She gasped as if surfacing from drowning (the howl of the wind, the beating against her body,

her face, she had been drowning in sand), and opened her eyes. She tried to sit up, to stand up,

but she had come back too far in too short a span of time, and she was dizzy, and her feet

wouldn’t hold her. She would have fallen, except Ruth caught her—it had been Ruth’s hand on

her shoulder, Ruth’s the first voice she heard.

“Are you ill? Are you ill? I have tried to wake you before—it is long past sun-up and the storm

has blown out, but there is a tree down that has broken our paling, and the front window of the

shop. There are glass splinters and ‘wood shavings everywhere—you could drown in them. Dad

says Jeff and I won’t go to school today, there is too much to do here, although I think two more

people with dust-pans will only get in each other’s way, but Jeff will somehow manage to

disappear and be found hours later at his computer, so it hardly matters.”

Hetta’s hands were fumbling for her clothes before Ruth finished speaking. She still felt dizzy

and sick, and disoriented; but the fear was well known and it knew what to do, and she was

dressed and in the kitchen in a few minutes, although her hair was uncombed and her eyes felt

swollen and her mouth tasted of ... sand. She went on with the preparations for breakfast as she

had done many mornings, only half-registering the unusual noises below in the shop, habit held

her, habit and fear, as Ruth’s hands had held her—

—As the strange cinnamon-skinned man’s hands had held her.

After she loaded the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, she dared run upstairs and wash her

face and brush her hair .... Her hair felt stiff, dusty. She looked down at the top of her chest of

drawers and the bare, swept wooden floor she stood on and saw ... sand. It might have been

wood dust carried by yesterday’s storm wind; but no tree produced those flat, glinting fragments.

She stared a moment, her hairbrush in her hand, and then laid the brush down, turned, and threw

the sheets of her bed back.

Sand. More pale, glittery sand. Not enough to sweep together in a hand, but enough to feel on a

fingertip, to hold up in the light and look again and again at the flash as if of infinitesimal

mirrors.

She fell asleep that night like diving into deep water, but if she dreamed, she remembered

nothing of it, and when she woke the next morning, there were no shining, mirror-fragment

grains in her bedding. I imagined it, she thought. I imagined it all—and it was the worst thought

she had ever had in her life. She was dressed and ready to go downstairs and make breakfast, but

for a moment she could not do it. Not even the knowledge of her father’s certain wrath could

make her leave her bedroom and face this day, any day, any day here, any other person, the

people she knew best. She sat down on the edge of her bed and stared bleakly at nothing: into her

life. But habit was stronger: it pulled her to her feet and took her downstairs, and, as it had done

yesterday, led her hands and feet and body through their accustomed tasks. But yesterday had

been—yesterday. Today there was nothing in her mind but darkness.

She struggled against sleep that night, against the further betrayal of the dream. It had been

something to do with the storm, she thought, twisting where she lay, the sheets pulling at her like

ropes. Something to do with the air a storm brought: it had more oxygen in it than usual, or less,

it did funny things to your mind .... Some wind-roused ancient street debris that looked like sand

had got somehow into her bed; some day, some day soon, but not too soon, she would ask Ruth

if there had been grit in her bed too, the day after the big storm.

She took a deep breath: that smell, spicy, although no spice she knew; spice and rock and earth.

She was lying on her back, and had apparently kicked free of the tangling sheets at last—no,

there was still something wrapped around one ankle—but her limbs were strangely heavy, and

she felt too weak even to open her eyes. But she
would
not sleep, she would not. A tiny breeze

wandered over her face, bringing the strange smells to her; and yet her bedroom faced the street,

and the street smelled of tarmac and car exhaust and dead leaves and Benny’s Fish and Chips on

the opposite corner.

She groaned, and with a great effort, managed to move one arm. Both arms lay across her

stomach; she dragged at one till it flopped off to lie at her side, palm down. What was she lying

on? Her fingertips told her it was not cotton sheet, thin and soft from many launderings. Her

fingers scratched faintly; whatever this was, it was thick and yielding, and lay over a surface

much firmer (her body was telling her) than her old mattress at home.

An arm slid under her shoulders and she was lifted a few inches, and a pillow slid down to

support her head. Another smell, like brandy or whisky, although unlike either—her gardener’s

mind registered steeped herbs and acknowledged with frustration it did not know what herbs.

She opened her eyes but saw only shadows.

“Can you drink?”

She opened her mouth obediently, and a rim pressed against her lips and tilted. She took a tiny

sip; whatever it was burned and soothed simultaneously. She swallowed, and heat and serenity

spread through her. Her body no longer felt leaden, and her eyes began to focus.

She was in a—a cave, with rocky sides and a sandy floor.

There were niches in the walls where oil lamps sat. She knew that smoky, golden light from

power cuts at home. When she had been younger and her great-grandfather’s little town had not

yet been swallowed up by Mauncester’s suburbs, there had been power cuts often. That was

when her mother still got out of bed most days, and her grandmother used to read to Hetta during

the evenings with no electricity, saying that stories were the best things to keep the night outside

where it belonged. Cleaning the old oil lamps and laying out candles and matches as she had

done the night before last still made her hear her grandmother saying
Once upon a time ....
The

only complaint Hetta had ever had about her grandmother’s stories was that they rarely had

deserts in them. Hetta had to blink her eyes against sudden tears.

A cave, she thought, a cave with a sand floor. She looked down at glinting mirror-fragments, like

those she had found in the folds of her sheets two nights ago.

/
have never heard of Roanshire or the Homeland, or Mauncester. The storm brought you jar

indeed. This is the land called Damar, and you stand at the fourth Sandpale at the edge of the

Great Desert we call Kalarsham.

Her scalp contracted as if someone had seized her hair and twisted it. She gasped, and the cup

was taken away and the arm grasped her more firmly. “You have drunk too much, it is very

strong,” said the voice at her ear; but it was not the liquor that shook her. She sat up and swung

her feet round to put them on the floor—there was a bandage tied around one ankle—the

supporting arm allowed this reluctantly. She turned her head to look at its owner and saw the

man who had rescued her from the sandstorm two nights ago, in her dream. “Where am I?” she

said. “I cannot be here. I do not want to go home. I have dreamed this. Oh, I do not want this to

be a dream!”

The man said gently, “You are safe here. This is no dream-place, although you may dream the

journey. It is as real as you are. It has stood hundreds of years and through many sandstorms—

although I admit this one is unusual even in the history of this sanctuary.”

“You don’t understand,” she began, and then she laughed a little, miserably: she was arguing

with her own dream-creature.

He smiled at her. “Tell me what I do not understand. What I understand is that you nearly died,

outside, a little while ago, because your Watcher almost failed to see you. This is enough to

confuse anyone’s mind. Try not to distress yourself. Have another sip of the
tiarhk.
It is good for

such confusions, and such distress.”

She took the cup from him and tasted its contents again. Again warmth and tranquility slid

through her, but she could feel her own nature fighting against them, as it had when the doctor

had prescribed sleeping pills for her a few years ago. She had had to stop taking the pills. She

laced her fingers round the cup and tried to let the
tiarhk
do its work. She took a deep breath. The

air was spicy sweet, and again she felt the little stir of breeze; where was the vent that let the air