The Book of Water

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  The lead ripping into him at close range blows him off his feet. Or maybe it’s the wind. He expects the agony of having his chest torn open, but there’s only a tingling and a vast roaring. He expects to land hard, in too many pieces.

  But he never lands at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  He comes to consciousness slowly, surreally aware that he is running, has been for a long time. His lungs ache and his ribs are cramped but his long legs keep pumping away, doing what is needed without his having to think about whether he can keep going or not. He just does.

  Being on autopilot lets him check out his surroundings. The air is thick and hot, and the sun’s all wrong, too red and not quite round, like it might be at sunset near the horizon, except it’s straight overhead. The dusty hills around him are too red, too, and pocked with shell craters. He sees he must have imagined all that blood and tearing and having his chest blown open. By some wonderful mistake the bodyguard missed, even at such close range, and N’Doch’s old survival instincts took over: He finally got some sense and ran for it.

  But the landscape isn’t the familiar flat, dry fields surrounding the City. And N’Doch doubts that even the most organized coup could have leveled all the outlying villages and housing projects as completely as the rubble around him indicates. Plus, it all looks like it’s been there a while. Layers of grit have softened the contours of the shattered walls and filled in the crevasses. He searches the hills and horizon for the smoke plumes of fire-bombing, and listens for the clatter of artillery or the wock-wock of the copters in the air.

  Nothing. Just hot, dry landscape and a man running. A man who hasn’t a clue where he is, or even why he’s running. He just knows that he has to, something is after him, but it isn’t behind him, it’s all around him. . . .

  N’Doch wakes abruptly, with a heaving gasp and a need for air so desperate that it’s a long shuddering moment before he can think about anything but breathing. When he gets it under control, he opens his eyes. He still doesn’t know where he is.

  He’s lying in a bed, not just on it but in it, between sheets and under blankets, as far as he can tell. He lets his eyes rove, sees a tall wooden footboard with turned posts at both ends. The blankets are a single thick, airy coverlet. Its soft, coarsely woven fabric makes him think of his mother Fâtime at her loom.

  The bed sits in a shaft of light from a small window. The bright cold light leaves the rest of the room in shadow, so while N’Doch gets his breath and waits for his heart to stop trying to break through his ribs, he studies the window in detail, hoping it will help him understand what’s happening to him.

  The window is square and set well into the wall, so a deep seat is formed by the sill. N’Doch sees a thin, brown cushion and a pile of what might be clothes. He wonders if they are his. The glass in the window is divided into many smaller panes, held together with thin strips of some dull-colored metal. At first N’Doch thinks there’s something wrong with his eyes, but then he sees it’s the glass. It’s all ripply and dotted with minute air bubbles, so that his view of the outside is subtly diffused and diffracted: bare branches, furry-pointed green ones and blue, blue sky. N’Doch has never seen a sky that blue, and he stares at it until he realizes he’s been drifting, probably for a long while, because when he becomes aware of himself again, the angle of the light has shifted and the sky is chased with big white and gray clouds. And now there’s a woman sitting in the window seat, a white woman, paler than the girl even, dressed in white and with white-blonde hair as fine as spider silk. She’s bent over some sort of handwork which she’s holding up to the window in order to see. With the bright, white light, her long white dress and her own shell-like pallor, the woman is almost translucent.

  N’Doch thinks he’s kept still but he must be wrong, ’cause the woman looks up at him with a soft frown of interest and concern, then sets her work aside and comes toward him. Her hands on his cheeks and forehead are cool and professional. He figures he’ll lay low and see what she’s up to. And then it comes to him like a shock that she’s a nurse, maybe a doctor. So he did get blown to bits, and somehow they’ve managed to stick him back together again. Only he’s not sure now of how much of himself he’s got left. He’s forgotten to check.

  The pale woman reaches her arms around him and with the impossible strength of mothers and doctors, bundles him up into a sitting position, supported by pillows and bolsters. N’Doch takes inventory and finds himself complete. Not quite like himself, and as weak as a newborn, but entirely as whole as one, too. It just doesn’t make sense. The woman pats his shoulder, then reaches to a low wooden table beside the bed and fills a small clay cup with water from a stoneware jug. The crisp trickle of water inflames a vast thirst he wasn’t aware of a moment before, and he drinks without worrying if the water’s safe. It’s cold and clear and more delicious than he ever imagined water could be. She’s holding a third cupful to his lips when his next big revelation hits him, so hard he almost chokes. They did it once, they could do it again. He’s been doctored by dragons.

  Which means it really did happen. The shock of the impact and the ripping and tearing of his vital organs, it’s not all a sweat-drenched nightmare. The bullets took him, then the dragons came and took him back, and carried him off somewhere . . . here. . . .

  Revelation clicks in once more, and N’Doch understands where he is.

  The woman sets the cup down and moves away through the shaft of light toward a shadowy door. She leans out and calls softly down the hall, and N’Doch knows he’s figured right. She’s speaking the girl’s antique Kraut. For cryin’ out loud, he’s in 913!

  He lets that explanation settle for a while to see how its logic suits him. He knows he’s not thinking real fast or straight quite yet, but mostly he’s just grateful to be thinking at all.

  I died, he tells himself. Or almost. And they fixed me.

  The miracle implied makes him shiver, and the woman comes back to the bed and pulls the covers up around his chest and shoulders. His entirely unmarked, unventilated chest.

  “Kalt?” she murmurs. Her eyes look away from him, as if she lets her hands do her talking.

  And he is cold, he realizes, not just from shock and revelation. It’s cold in the room, and it’s probably real cold outside. Now that he’s upright, he has a wider view through the window, and he sees why the light streaming in is so hard and white. There’s snow on the ground out there.

  Snow. Real snow. He’s never seen it before, except on the vid. He shivers again, and the woman goes to the corner where a small fire is burning in a narrow stone fireplace. She prods it with a metal poke and throws more wood on. She looks up at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, light and steady, accompanied by the creak of floorboards. A second white woman comes into the room, shorter and older than the first, and rich with autumnal color in her short, graying hair and layered clothing. She has a brisk, direct presence that makes N’Doch feel obscurely chastised even though as far as he knows he hasn’t done anything wrong except die and be resurrected.

  “Hello,” she says. Her voice is warmly resonant. Immediately N’Doch is thinking how much he’d like to hear her sing. Her French is odd and deeply accented but it’s French nonetheless, and he can understand her. “My name is Rose. Welcome to Deep Moor.”

  Deep Moor. He recalls the name. The girl’s back when haven with all the women. But she’d always described it as a paradise of perpetual summer. It doesn’t much feel like summer in this room.

  He wonders if his own voice will work. “I am N’Doch N’Djai.”

  Rose smiles. “Yes, I know. I know all about you, so you needn’t tire yourself with explanations.”

  N’Doch is fairly sure now, but he could use some confirmation. “Am I alive?”

  “Certainly. But there was doubt there for a while. The dragons worked long and hard. How do you feel?”

  “Uh . . . okay.” But what he really feels is different. If he had to describe this diff
erence, he’d say he feels bigger, not taller or fatter, but bigger inside. He’s been too distracted so far to search his mind for the dragon presence. Now that he does, he cannot raise them.

  “The dragons,” he asks Rose. “Where are they?”

  “They went back, as soon as they recovered from the great effort of the Healing. They went back to rescue the mage Erde called . . .” She stumbles over the name. “. . . Jarara?”

  “Djawara?”

  “That’s it. Did she say he was your grandfather?”

  N’Doch nods, exhales, and lays his head back. He wonders if the old man will come. He’s been worried about Djawara ever since going off and leaving him alone out there in the bush, never mind what Lealé says about him being a man of power. . . .

  Lealé.

  “Excuse me, madame . . .”

  “Rose. Just Rose.”

  “Rose. There was a woman who helped us. Did they say . . . ?”

  Rose shook her head gently. “The Dreamer was already gone when they got to her. The spark of life had fled.” For some reason, her gaze flicked outward, toward the window. “Even dragons cannot make miracles.”

  N’Doch is not sure she’s right. Mostly to keep her talking so he can hear that wonderful voice whose undertones tickle the insides of his lungs, he asks, “There’s a war here, too, right? How’s that going?”

  Again, her gaze drifts to the window. He sees the strain in her then, the worry and exhaustion in her eyes. “The King’s forces are in retreat, the barons are fighting among themselves and the mad priest is burning every witch in sight, and a few that aren’t. The only good news is that Baron Köthen has gone over to Otto’s side. About time, I say. But the war is the least of our problems.”

  Rose seems to lose herself to the view for a moment. Then she shakes herself out of her reverie. “Still, we’re safe for a while yet, and we’ve food enough in the cellars, so you are to rest and eat and await the dragons’ return. You’re in good hands.” She reaches and draws the younger woman within the circle of her arm. “This is Linden. She is Deep Moor’s healer. Unfortunately, she speaks no Frankish, but then, she normally prefers not to speak at all.” Rose smiles at Linden as if this was some long-standing joke between them.

  “How come you speak French?” Instantly N’Doch regrets his bluntness. He’s trying to recall how the girl acts with strangers, so he can do like she would at home, but he sees he just didn’t pay close enough attention.

  But Rose laughs, a throaty, complex reply to the unspoken parts of his question. “I’ve . . . traveled. Now—would you like to get up and move about? Here are garments on the sill. I’d say let’s go for a walk outside, but it’s frigid with this . . . unseasonable cold. We aren’t meant to have weather like this in Deep Moor, and I doubt you’re recovered enough for it. But come downstairs and join us for supper when you’re ready.”

  The women leave him to dress, but at first, even getting up is a problem. N’Doch has a moment of terror where he convinces himself he’s paralyzed. But it’s more like his body’s forgotten how to work, like he needs to apply conscious effort and teach it all over again how to sit up, stand up, and walk.

  Different, he keeps thinking. I feel different. Newly made. Dragon made.

  They know. These witchy women know, and they left me alone to deal with it privately. N’Doch appreciates their consideration. He gets the clothes on, pulling them over the longish linen shirt they’d put him to bed in. They’re odd clothes, hanging loose and heavy on his slim body, yet meant for a shorter person. When he stands up next to these women, he’s gonna tower over them. He has a hard time not thinking of the clothes as a costume, like when he first saw the girl on the beach, when he still thought this whole deal was a vid shoot. It makes him laugh now, but it’s a hard laugh, full of unaccustomed irony aimed mostly at himself. He wishes he had a mirror.

  But the clothes are clean and warm and comfortable, and he knows now that to ask for his own clothes back would be indulging in the macabre. Maybe their remaining bloodied shreds would make this death and resurrection thing somehow realer to him. But he didn’t die, it seems, not quite. Because Lealé did.

  He takes an experimental walk around the room. It’s a small square white room with a dark, beamed ceiling just inches above his head, and a wide-boarded floor that complains musically of his every step. There’s a wind outside now. He hears it howling in the rough stone chimney. The light at the window has gone gray and flat, and there’s actually some of that snow flying in the air. N’Doch watches it for a while but it only makes him feel desolate. His limbs have remembered how to walk in time with each other, and he’s chilled and hungry and thinks he’d prefer the company of strange women to the burden of trying to understand what’s already happened to him, and what’s supposed to happen next. He heads downstairs.

  He’s halfway down the narrow, steep steps, gripping the railing with both hands, when he feels the dragons’ return. Her return.

  His whole being lifts toward her, and the dragon-shaped emptiness inside him fills with her welcome. But the bright joy that sweeps through him like a searchlight is still freighted with denial, and N’Doch knows he will never fully accept this role that Fate has cast him in without his approval.

  But somehow, he tells himself, he’ll keep this from her. He owes them now. He owes them Big Time. So for the time being, he’ll see this dragon thing out. He’ll go off with her, with them, and find this bad dude Fire and see what they can do to settle his hash. N’Doch has a bone or two to pick with the guy himself. Then he’ll be free to think about what comes next.

  The dream swims up, as vivid as a vid running right there in his mind. He knows where to go now. He doesn’t know where it is, or even when, but he knows how to get there.

  N’Doch pulls his clumsy, new-made body together and goes on downstairs to play along with Destiny.

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