by Steven Gould
Xareed felt a rock under his knee and dug it out of the dried mud. It was bigger than his fist and sharp cornered. He threw it as hard as he could, aiming behind and above the gun.
Light from a flashlight stabbed out and then there was a smacking sound and a cry. The flashlight tumbled to the ground where it shone across the submachine gun lying by itself in the dirt. Then he saw a hand, a white man’s hand, reach into the light and pick up the gun. The flashlight came up and shone down on the man who’d followed them from the camp.
The man was clutching his head with his hands and blood stained the side of his face. He was groaning and Xareed said, “It is deserved.”
The flashlight turned his way and he blinked in the sudden glare. “Ah. You, eh? From the truck? What did Millie say … Jareed?”
“Xareed. Where is Miss Millie?”
The flashlight swept around in a circle. There was no sign of anyone else.
“Ah, well, she’ll be back.” David’s voice didn’t sound puzzled at all by the woman’s disappearance. “What are you doing out here?”
“I saw him follow you from the camp.”
Millie was there, then, wild-eyed, a baseball bat raised high and swinging.
The flashlight moved sideways three meters. No. It was suddenly three meters to the side—there was no movement. Just as Millie had not been there and then she was, the flashlight was one place and then another.
“Whoa, Millie. It’s okay!” David turned the flashlight on himself, then pointed it at the man on the ground, then at Xareed. “Xareed got ’em. With a rock?”
Xareed’s mouth was open and he felt numb. With some effort he said, “Yes. I throwed a rock. How did you do that?”
“Don’t think about it, Xareed. It’ll only make you crazy,” said David.
“I think maybe crazy is what I am.”
Millie lowered the bat. “No. David is the crazy one.” She glared in the light. “You scare me like that again and I’ll…”
“It wasn’t me,” David said in an offended voice.
The man on the ground had stopped moaning and was looking at them all, wide-eyed. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and ran out into the darkness, down the slope into the lake bottom. David swiveled the light to follow his flight but the man didn’t turn back and soon dropped out of sight into one of the gullies below.
“You did not shoot him,” Xareed observed.
David looked down at the submachine gun dangling in hand, as if he were surprised he still held it. “No. Not me.”
“He is a rebel. He may bring back more. Sometimes they hide down there.”
David looked vaguely concerned. “Oh.”
There was a flash from several hundred meters ahead of them followed by a loud noise. Ten seconds later there was an explosion in the camp behind them, followed by distant screams.
Xareed shuddered. “Mortars. They’re firing on the camp. Give me the gun. I will go stop them.”
David looked down at the gun in his hand. Another mortar went off. He shifted the gun in his grip and Millie said, “No! That’s not the way!”
“Then what?”
“Water runs down hill.”
David blinked. “Oh. So it does.”
He handed the flashlight and the gun to Millie and vanished.
Xareed recoiled and fell backwards, then scrambled back to his feet.
Millie gestured with the flashlight. “We need to get up the hill a bit.”
“Why?”
She pulled the clip from the gun and threw it out into the darkness, then worked the slide, ejecting another bullet from the chamber before she threw it in the other direction. “You’ll see.”
They backed up the hill, toward the camp. Another mortar shell exploded in the camp and Xareed thought of his sisters, probably tucked in the corners of the house, their one mattress pulled up around them. The house would be proof against anything but a direct hit or near miss. Then the bricks would go from being protectors to projectiles.
David was back, but then gone, like he’d blinked into existence then left. Then he was back again. Then gone. Then it was as if he was blinking. There, not, there, not, but the time between slowly decreased and then there was a David-shaped hole and water flooded out of it in all directions, fast and furious, like a river torrent after a heavy rain.
Even up the hill, it washed all the way up to Xareed’s knees, warm water, not too cold, and then it flowed away, into the gullies and down the hill.
There was one more mortar flash from the bottom of the old lakebed before the rushing water arrived. The rush of the water drowned out most noise but he thought he heard distant shouts and cries.
He and Millie backed further up the hill until they reached dry ground, then sat. Millie turned the flashlight off but the sound of the water was overwhelming. Xareed could even feel it through the ground, a thrumming vibration against the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands.
The smell of it, wet and rich, permeated the air, turning the normally dry, searing air into a moist and heady mix of half-familiar smells.
“It smells like … like rain.”
“Yes,” agreed Millie. “Like rain after a long dry spell.”
* * *
Xareed woke to the morning light, which, magnified, reflected off wavelets on the surface of a lake stretching two kilometers to the far shore.
He sat up and looked around. He was above the shoreline, barely, and his head had been pillowed on a rolled up jacket. It was Millie’s, he realized, but he did not remember falling asleep.
He wondered if they’d taken him someplace far away, but when he looked around, the sleeping camp was stirring. People stood at the edge of the camp, staring at the water, taking a few tentative steps forward, as if they thought it was a mirage that would vanish when they walked toward it.
Maybe it was. He reached out a hand and trailed his fingers through the water, then held them up and let them trickle into his mouth. An empty mortar casing bobbed on the wavelets, a few feet out from the shore, and he remembered the night before. He imagined the rebels trying to get up the wet slopes weighed down by their guns and mortars and ammunition, and, though he hoped they’d made it out, he felt confident they’d had to leave the heavy metal tools of war behind.
He got up and went to see how his family was.
* * *
It could’ve been far worse. The mortar had hit in the square, a stretch of empty dirt where people with things to trade or sell sat in the morning and where the men sat in the evening discussing the Qur’an. There was a small crater and shrapnel had killed a woman across the way, but the nearest structure was Xareed’s house.
“She’s fine,” his mother said, though she kept her arm around his youngest sister and wouldn’t let her go play with the other girls.
Xareed nodded. Awrala really was fine. She’d woken from the loud noise and the weight but it really hadn’t even frightened her. She’d been far more worried by her mother’s frantic cries and when her mother and grandfather had pulled her from under the pile of collapsed bricks, her mother had run her hands over and over her arms and legs and back and front, looking for some hurt, some wound.
Awrala was fine but it would take some time for his mother to believe it.
They were making bricks. They’d separated out the unbroken ones from the collapsed wall and the rest they’d thrown into the mortar crater. Xareed spent his time walking back and forth to the lake, carrying water and mud for the crater. His sisters trod and stirred the sludge and his grandfather formed the bricks and set them out in neat rows. It would take a few weeks but the wall would be good as ever and they were making enough bricks to add another room.
He was on his way back to the lake, his back sore and the buckets light and empty, when Millie fell into step beside him, looking cool and comfortable in the heat, her eyes shaded by gleaming sunglasses. “Hallow,” she said, trying to say it like they did locally, but she still sounded foreign-alien.
“Hello.” He tried to act relaxed but he couldn’t help looking at her from the corners of very wide eyes.
“I wanted to thank you, for the other night. For helping us.”
He shrugged. “I have been thinking that maybe, perhaps, you did not need help.”
She smiled. “You didn’t know that. I don’t know that, for that matter. Who knows what would have happened?”
Xareed snorted. He knew what he thought. “You are kind.”
“We are grateful. We could take you out of here. There is a large community of your people in Minnesota. In the United States.”
He had heard this. It was cold there. “How many could you take? Could you take my sisters? My mother and grandfather?”
Millie licked her lips. “Yes.”
“How long would it take? The journey?”
She half-smiled. “No time, really. A few minutes for all of you and your things.”
“Then you could take all of us, yes?” He sketched his arm around in a large circle, encompassing the entire camp.
She frowned. “No. I don’t think we could. People would come and stop us. We have enemies.”
“The rebels? The government troops?”
She shook her head. “Ah … no. That’s local. Our enemies have a very long reach. We could take your family, though.”
He looked around. The water had changed things. There were waterfowl on the lake. Someone had seen fish. An NGO had gotten a food convoy through and, hearing of the lake, they’d included seeds: maize, beans, and wheat. All over the camp people had started gardens, putting children to work scaring off the birds who might eat the seed. The wells were no longer dry as the water from the lake seeped into the water table.
“We are here. This is where we have come and, thanks to you, there is hope now. As long as the lake does not dry up again.” He glanced at her again and raised his eyebrows.
She looked at the lake, her hands on her hips, and smiled. “Perhaps that can be avoided.”
She flicked away and he blinked, surprised. He thought she would’ve said goodbye.
He bent down to drag the buckets through the water and she was back. She had a Chinese parasol, bamboo and bright blue paper with a sprinkling of red and pink flowers, and she held it out to him. “To replace your old parasol.”
He took it without thinking, then said, “No.” He tried to hand it back to her but she stepped back and put her hands behind her back.
“No, it’s yours.”
His face contorted. He wanted the parasol with all his heart. He ran up over the rise and handed it to the first person he saw, a young girl carrying a baby on her hip.
He went back to the water buckets and Millie looked at him, then disappeared again, coming back immediately with another umbrella.
This one was pink with white hyacinths. He took it from her and gave it to an old woman washing clothes at the water’s edge. He began walking with the buckets back toward the center of camp.
Millie walked out from behind a tent and held out a green umbrella. Xareed gave it to a boy chasing a grasshopper. Millie stepped out from another corner with another parasol and Xareed gave it to a woman weaving mats out of plastic and cardboard. By the time they reached Xareed’s house, he’d given away twenty-three umbrellas and a long line of people was following them.
Millie shook her head. “You are very stubborn.”
He smiled.
“All right, you win,” she said.
“No more umbrellas?”
“Not exactly.”
* * *
The word spread quickly and the lines formed at the edge of the square. There was much scrambling to keep the new bricks from being ground into the dirt. His entire family stood there, taking the umbrellas out of the cardboard boxes and handing them out and giving the boxes away, too, when they were empty. Then they would go into the mud brick house and bring out more boxes.
“Where are they coming from?” asked his friend, Yahay. “Your house could not hold a tenth of those boxes.”
“Where did the water in the lake come from? Where did the water in the tanks come from?” he asked back. “It is as the poet said, God’s Blessing are more numerous than those growing trees.”
* * *
He saw Millie one more time after the crowds had been shown that the “miracle house” was empty once more. She was sitting by his grandfather, helping him pat the bricks into shape, accepting feedback; laughing as the old man make invisible corrections to every brick she’d formed.
Xareed crouched on his heels and watched.
Millie looked sideways at him, “Did you take one for yourself?” She lifted her arm and gestured around. As far as you could see, the camp had blossomed with color. People were laughing, people were singing, and people were dancing, bright canopies of color twisted and whirled.
Xareed smiled and stepped into the house and then came back. The shaft was from one of the broken umbrellas—you open enough crates and you run across some breakage—but the top was a circle of cardboard, cut from one of the boxes.
Millie stared at it, her mouth dropping open. Then she fell onto her back and laughed and laughed.
He stood there and watched, dignified.
In the shade.
Copyright © 2008 by Steven Gould
Cover art copyright © 2008 by Eric Fortune
Books by Steven Gould
Wildside (Tor, 1996)
Greenwar (with Laura J. Mixon) (Tor, 1997)
Helm (Tor, 1998)
Blind Waves (Tor, 2000)
THE JUMPER SERIES
Jumper (Tor, 2007)
Reflex (Tor, 2004)
Jumper: Griffin’s Story (Tor, 2007)
