The Waterstone

by Rebecca Rupp

  Tad shook his head. He found to his dismay that his eyes were beginning to sting with tears. Pondleweed knelt down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders.

  “What happened, son?”

  “I dived after my spear,” Tad said, “and I heard something in the pond.” Falteringly he told his story: the search for the lost spear, the sudden terrifying feeling, the strange mind prying about inside his own, the cold hollow voice. Azabel.

  “When I went to look for him, he was just floating there like a dead fish,” Birdie said. She put her arms out to the sides, lolled her head, puffed out her cheeks, and opened her eyes very wide. She managed to look a lot like the foolish rock bass. Tad glared at her. “So I grabbed him and pulled him to shore and dragged him out.”

  “Voices in the water?” Pondleweed ran a worried hand over Tad’s hair. “Are you sure you didn’t bump your head when you dived?”

  “Tad was drowning, wasn’t he?” asked Birdie. “If I hadn’t been here, Tad would have drowned, wouldn’t he?”

  “Thank Great Rune that you were here watching,” Pondleweed said solemnly.

  Birdie raised her right hand and drew a circle in the air in front of her face. That was Great Rune’s sign; Tad had taught it to Birdie himself. He had learned it from their mother, who had died of winterfever when Tad was three and Birdie just a baby. The sign was supposed to keep you safe from danger, though Pondleweed always said it was best to dive in a hidey-hole first and make signs later.

  Birdie doesn’t have to sound so puddleflapping pleased with herself, Tad thought. What about me? I was the one who was in danger, not Birdie. I was the one Azabel spoke to.

  And there was something else, too. She said something else. Something I ought to remember. Memory flickered, like a trout beneath the lily pads, but then darted away again into darkness.

  “Well,” Pondleweed said, “I don’t like the thought of strangers slinking about. You children sit here and dry off. I’m just going to go have a look.” Tad opened his mouth to protest, but Pondleweed shook his head at him reassuringly. “There’s probably nothing there now,” he said. “Look at the frogs — half asleep, the lot of them, the great green lazygullets. They’d all be bellowing if there were an intruder in the pond. But better to take precautions now than to patch up afterward, as my old grandda used to say. Where did you dive in, Tad?”

  Tad told him, pointing, and Pondleweed strode briskly out along the broad moss-furred log. He stood silently for a moment, frowning and studying the surface of the water. Then he dived. His body cut the water so cleanly that there was barely a splash. Tad and Birdie, huddled together on the shore, stared at the quivering ripples where he had disappeared. Long minutes passed. Then, in a fountain of spray, he reappeared, swam in two smooth strokes to the log, and climbed out of the water. In one hand, water dripping from its braided grass tassels, he held Tad’s spear.

  He smiled at the children’s anxious faces. “Nothing there,” he said. “Not so much as a waterflea’s whisper.”

  He sprang down from the log and strode toward them across the grass, water dripping from his brown tunic and silkgrass leggings.

  “Time to go inside, the two of you. You need dry clothes and supper. And I could do with a mug of butternut beer.”

  Birdie leaped up to scamper beside him, but Tad, halfway to his feet, tripped and abruptly sat down again.

  All in a rush, he was filled with a Remember.

  He was diving, diving, deeper than he had ever gone before. He was himself and yet somehow not himself; his body was new and strange, a larger grown-up body dressed in a tunic of glittering fish scales. In one hand, he held a double-bladed sword — a metal sword inlaid with patterns of gold, the kind of weapon made by the Diggers who lived in the distant mountains. Tad knew what it was, even though he had never seen a sword before. His fingers — broader and stronger than Tad’s own fingers — curled around it easily, as though it were familiar and often used.

  He was in a vast submarine world, infinitely larger than the friendly pond, dimly lit with a flickering blue-green light. Great black cliffs and rocky crags arched over him, extending upward for unimaginable distances. All around him was a forest of ropy dark-stemmed plants with long slimy leaves that continually writhed and coiled back upon themselves like squirming nests of snakes. Beyond the underwater forest was a long flat expanse of pale sand, in the middle of which stood a black palace made of carved stones. The stones were stacked into turrets and towers of many different shapes and sizes, some topped with jagged rows of roughly pointed stones, others with conical roofs tiled with colored shells. The walls were richly studded with jewels: emeralds and rubies and deep blue sapphires. There were arched stone windows draped with ropes of creamy pearls and a great front gate made from the white jawbone of some enormous fish.

  This was where he was going. This was where she lived. He had something to do here, something dangerous but terribly important — so important that if only he could accomplish it, it didn’t really matter if he escaped alive.

  What’s happening to me? Tad thought again. This is someone else’s Remember, not mine. Whose? Where did it come from?

  And then he seemed to hear Azabel’s voice again, that cold voice thick with hunger and desire.

  She was saying Water.

  “A palace all covered with jewels?” Birdie said. Her green eyes sparkled with excitement. She was eating a slice of sweet rootbread and there was a dab of blackberry butter on the tip of her nose.

  Tad nodded. Now that he was warm and dry, with two bowls of watercress soup in his belly, the frightening part of the encounter in the pond was beginning to fade away. It was all beginning to feel more exciting somehow, more like an adventure. If it happens again, he thought, I’ll be ready. I won’t just panic like some muckbrained minner. I’ll be bold and dauntless. Like Bog the Weaselkiller. It was a satisfying picture. Boldly, in Bog style, he reached across the table between the soup bowls for another piece of sweet rootbread.

  “Don’t reach, son,” Pondleweed said, in a tone of voice that Tad was sure was never used toward Bog the Weaselkiller. “Your mother would say that you were behaving like wild Hunter. Ask your sister to pass the platter.”

  Birdie passed the platter.

  “Why did she say Water?” she said. “Your pond lady. Didn’t she say anything else?”

  Tad shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Just water. As if it were the thing she wanted most in the whole world.”

  “Water,” Pondleweed said. He pushed back his stool and set down his baked-clay mug. “We could use some more of that ourselves. I’ve never known the water in the pond to be so low.”

  “We haven’t had any rain,” Birdie said. “Not for ages and ages. The rain barrel is empty. I looked just this morning. It’s dry all the way to the bottom.”

  “Well, let’s hope we get some soon,” Pondleweed said. He winked at Birdie, but Tad saw that his forehead was furrowed into little lines that meant that he was worried. “I saw three bluebirds flying in a row this morning. ‘Three birds means times changing,’ your Granny Thimbleberry used to say. And it’s been fine weather for so long that what could change be but rain?”

  Tad could just remember Granny Thimbleberry, a tiny wizened brown woman in a moleskin cloak, surrounded by pots and jars and grinding bowls and bundles of strange-smelling herbs. She had had a mole’s skull on a pole beside her front door, and she kept a grass snake in a covered basket. Tad had been a little afraid of her.

  “Maybe I’ll be a magicker like Granny Thimbleberry when I grow up,” Birdie said. “I’ll be able to read the wind and tell the future, and I’ll learn how to make spells that bring a good harvest and to mix healing potions.” She took another bite of rootbread. “Tad can’t be a magicker, can he, Father? It’s just girls that have the Talent.”

  She wouldn’t be so puddlejumping eager about it, Tad thought, if she could remember that snake.

  “You can’t just decid
e to be a magicker,” Pondleweed said. “You have to be born with the Talent. Granny Thimbleberry — may she rest forever in Great Rune’s garden — had a gift for foretelling and a touch for anything green and growing. Her potions were the finest in the forest, and when she wove a silkgrass cloak, she could whisper every strand of warp and woof so that whoever wore that cloak could walk almost invisible, safe from hawks and owls.”

  Tad, before he could help himself, made a horrible face. He remembered those potions. The very thought of them made his tongue curl.

  Pondleweed was still talking. “Maybe you’ll find that you have the Talent, Birdie, as you get a little older. But the Talent is nothing to joke about. It’s a great responsibility.”

  “Is it really just for girls?” Tad asked jealously.

  Pondleweed grinned at him. “The Talent does seem to favor the female folk,” he said. “But I’ve always thought the menfolk had a touch of it too.”

  Birdie looked crestfallen.

  “What can the male magickers do?” Tad asked.

  Pondleweed pursed his lips and tugged at his chin. “I always thought my old grandda may have had a touch of the Talent,” he said. “The way that man could catch fat minners — just whistle them out of the water, he could, like calling buzzflies to honey. And old Newtfoot at Water-oak Pond — he used to say that his grandda could turn frogs blue.”

  Birdie giggled.

  Tad felt disappointed. Whistling minners and turning frogs blue didn’t sound like the sorts of things a magicker should do.

  “But it’s the rare boy is born with so much as a finger-pinch of the Talent,” Pondleweed said, “so I wouldn’t close my nose flaps waiting.” He poured himself a mug of mint tea and took a deep drink. “Not that a magicker with special powers wouldn’t be welcome. Especially if this dry spell keeps up much longer. If things keep on the way they are, it could become a Drying Time.”

  Tad paused with his slice of rootbread partway to his mouth.

  “What’s a . . . Drying Time?” he asked.

  “Times have come when the world dries,” Pondleweed answered. His face was suddenly very serious in the yellow light of the beeswax candles, and the worry lines across his forehead grew deeper. “The weather changes. No one knows why. Some say it happens when the winds blow from the wrong direction. Others say it happens when Great Rune goes off on a journey and leaves the world for a time with no god to watch over it. In a Drying Time, no rain falls. The trees die and the grass turns brown and the ground turns to dust. Slowly, one by one, the ponds dry up and disappear. The small ponds vanish first, then the larger ponds, and finally even the biggest ponds of all.”

  Tad had a sudden awful vision of the pond, an empty bowl of caked and cracking mud, the lily pads brown and withered, the frogs and the turtles dead or gone. It didn’t seem possible.

  “All the ponds?” he asked incredulously. “Even Deep Pond?”

  Deep Pond was a half day’s journey to the south. Plumrose and Wallow lived there, in a tunnel-house in the pond bank, with their twin sons, Pickerel and Sticklepod. Deep Pond was said to be so deep that it had no bottom at all but instead went all the way through the earth and came out on the other side. “Even Deep Pond?” Tad repeated.

  Birdie interrupted him. “The trees die?” she said in a horrified voice. “Our tree could die?”

  Tad and Birdie and their father lived in the hollow base of the old willow tree that grew near the edge of the pond, a tree so gnarled and massive that it seemed to be as old as the world itself. Its broad yellow trunk soared so high that it almost touched the blue skin of the sky, and its yellow branches, thick with narrow green leaves, cascaded downward like a green-and-golden waterfall.

  Tad looked around him in dismay. The little house had always seemed so safe and so secure. His eyes took in the solid mud-and-pebble fireplace with its bread oven and drying racks; the family beds with their moss-stuffed mattresses, built into cavelike hollows in the willow-trunk walls; the open door to the storeroom with its comforting stock of jam and honey pots, barrels of acorn and lilyroot flour, crocks of wild radish pickles, baskets of nuts, and strings of dried crab-apple slices and cloudberries.

  “But where would we live?” Birdie’s voice was a frightened wail. “Where would we go?”

  “Now, Birdie,” Pondleweed said, “the Drying Time hasn’t happened yet. No sense in worrying about tomorrow’s problems before we finish with today’s. You and Tad wash up the supper dishes. Then, if you can stay awake, we’ll have a story when you’re in bed.”

  He crossed the room and lifted his spear — a longer, heavier spear than Tad’s, with a worn wooden handgrip — from its brackets above the fireplace. “I’m going out for one last look around,” he said. He was frowning.

  He’s still worried, Tad thought, with a prickle of alarm. He thinks there’s still something wrong at the pond.

  Tad squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, picturing the pond: the cattail thicket heavy with fuzzy brown-velvet flower heads, the bright patches of bellflowers and fairy-slippers, the water lilies with their flat floating leaves and rosy-pink blossoms. And the clear green water. The water level was lower, Tad realized suddenly. A lot lower. He turned and padded across the room to where Birdie, dripping soapy water on the floor, was scrubbing the clay mugs and acorn-shell bowls with a handful of scourweed.

  “You can dry,” Birdie said.

  Tad took a linenleaf towel and reached for a wet bowl.

  “Birdie? Those flat rocks that we were fishing from yesterday . . . didn’t they used to be underwater?”

  Birdie nodded.

  “We used to be able to swim right over them,” she said. “And the stream’s drying too, Tad. It’s gotten so quiet that you can’t hear it anymore. I keep thinking every day that it will come back and be the way it was, but it hasn’t.”

  Tad’s prickle of alarm grew sharper. Now that he thought of it, he had known that something was wrong with the stream. The stream entered the pond at its northern end, a place half hidden by a tumbled fall of rock and a green curtain of leafy vines. Ordinarily the stream bubbled and chattered, tumbling frothily downhill to feed the pond. But now the stream’s music was silenced. How long has it been? Tad wondered. I haven’t been paying attention. All this has been happening, and I’ve been fooling around with that stupid spear.

  By the time Pondleweed returned, Birdie, a motionless mound under her silkgrass comforter, was already asleep, making a rhythmic purring noise into her pillow. Tad, from the bed above her, lifted his head at the sound of the opening door and peered down past the twig ladder at his father on the floor below. It was always strange seeing him from this angle, looking down at the top of his head.

  “Is everything all right?” he whispered.

  “The water’s still dropping,” Pondleweed said, carefully replacing his spear on its wooden brackets. “It’s falling faster than ever. I set out a marker stick at the water’s edge this morning and already the water level is down a full frog’s leap. I can’t understand it. And the stream is running slower and slower. If it continues to dry at this rate . . .”

  The last words were lost in a grating sound as Pondleweed dragged the heavy wooden bar across the door, shutting the family safely inside for the night.

  “. . . be gone for a few days,” Pondleweed was saying. “I’ll take the boat out tomorrow and see if I can find anything blocking the flow upstream. Maybe there’s been a cave-in somewhere along the banks. Or a tree that came down in just the wrong place.”

  “You’re taking the boat?” Tad said. He sat up in bed. “Can I go too?”

  He had always wanted to travel, to see what the world was like beyond the homely green circle of the pond. The farthest he had ever gone was to the yearly Gathering, when all the Fishers left their ponds and traveled to the Wide Clearing in the Piney Forest. Even Pondleweed, who always seemed to know everything, was vague about what lay beyond the forest. There were more forests beyond their forest, Pondleweed thou
ght, filled with strange trees and animals — and with strange people too, people who belonged to none of the Tribes. The Hunters went there sometimes — or at least they said they did, but then Hunters would say anything, and you were lucky if even half of it were true. Then there were mountains somewhere, a vast distance away. The Diggers lived there, but not even the Hunters claimed to have been that far. Mountains were huge heaps of rock and stone piled up higher than a hawk could fly, and in places the water poured down off of them in great roaring falls, louder than the bellow of an angry black bear.

  “Can I go too?” Tad repeated.

  Pondleweed tilted back his head and looked up at him quizzically. “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. Safe night, son. Bright dreams.”

  “Safe night,” Tad said. There was a sleepy mumble from Birdie.

  Tad closed his eyes. He could hear the shifting creak as Pondleweed settled himself in the rocking chair beside the fireplace. The chair had a seat of woven pea vines that stretched complainingly whenever someone sat down on it. Pondleweed was humming softly, an old lullaby that their mother used to sing, a song about the silver moonfish who come out to swim at night when all the children are fast asleep. Tad sank deeper into his pillow. Nothing could really be very wrong, he thought, with his bed so warm and comfortable and his father near.

  Sleep closed over his head like pond water, and he fell into a confusing dream full of silver moonfish, sunken stone palaces, and big blue frogs.

  The birchbark boat slid smoothly across the glassy surface of the pond. Sunlight flashed and glittered on the water like a flickering host of bright-tailed golden fish. Tad and Pondleweed, on moss-padded seats in the bow and stern, bent rhythmically, dipping their carved wooden paddles in the water. Birdie sat in the middle with the blanket bundles and the luncheon basket. She was clutching her paddle, but she hadn’t started paddling yet.

  Birdie had insisted on coming along, and Tad was cross about it. He was also ashamed of himself for being cross. After all, Birdie had saved him from a watery death just yesterday. If it weren’t for Birdie, Tad knew, he would be lying there right now, all cold and pale in a coffin-basket, with his family weeping over him and saying what a fine young man he would have grown up to be. He dwelt pleasurably for a while on all the nice things they would have said about him while he lay there, heroic, tragic, and dead.