The Waterstone

by Rebecca Rupp

  Witherwood leaned forward on his wooden bench, and his old hands flashed and flickered, weaving patterns in the air.

  “Nothing exists without its other half,” Voice said, his eyes fixed on Witherwood’s moving fingers. “There can be no light without dark, no truth without lies, no life without death. No creation without destruction. Everything” — he paused as Witherwood spread his hands out, palms flat, and moved one up and the other down —“balances,” Voice said. “It’s the way the universe is made. Rune and Ohd, Life and Death, Making and Unmaking, Being and Nonbeing.”

  “But” — Tad frowned, puzzled —“everyone knows about Rune.” Birdie and Voice together raised their right hands and drew a circle in the air. “I never even heard of Ohd.”

  Witherwood’s fingers flickered.

  “You have,” Voice said. “The gods have many names and faces. But it is Ohd all the same, though the Diggers have a tale of a Checkered Snake; the Hunters, of a Ghost Weasel, the Fishers —”

  “The Winter Fox,” Tad said suddenly. “He’s the Winter Fox, Birdie. Don’t you remember?” It was one of Pondleweed’s stories.

  “A long, long time ago, our father said, back when the world was young, it was always summertime and nobody ever grew old or died. But then one day a strange animal came to the Ponds, a huge white fox with eyes the color of ice. The Fox called all the Fishers together and said, ‘I will make a bargain with you. Each moon bring me one of your kind to eat so that I will not be hungry, and I will leave the rest of you alone.’

  “But the Fishers wouldn’t do it. ‘How can we choose someone to be eaten?’ they said. ‘If we did that, no one would feel safe. Friends would no longer trust friends, neighbors would be afraid of neighbors, and even families would turn against each other. We must make another bargain.’

  “‘So you shall,’ the Fox said, ‘but you will all be sorry for it. From this day on, then, you will grow old and die, just as the year will die each autumn with the falling of the leaves. You think that you have saved yourselves, but you have chosen a path of heartache and despair. Now,’ said the Fox, ‘sooner or later I will eat you all.’ And with that he turned into mist and vanished.

  “So from that day on, our father said, people grew old and died, just as every sun turn, the year died, too, and became winter. But the Fishers were never sorry for the bargain they had chosen, because all through the Ponds, friends and neighbors trusted one another, and inside each home tree, love of family was always strong and warm.”

  He stopped, out of breath.

  “I remember now,” said Birdie. “The Winter Fox lost and the Fishers won.”

  “I don’t think anybody won,” said Tad. “I don’t think the story’s supposed to be about winning.”

  “They faced the Fox,” said Voice, watching Witherwood’s hands. “They learned what they valued, and chose death rather than lose what they cherished. That is what it is to grow.”

  So it was with the Owl.

  Tad glanced up quickly and found Witherwood’s yellow eye upon him. Witherwood’s hands moved again, a quick cupping gesture, and then pointed toward the cottage doorway. Voice scrambled to his feet and disappeared inside. He returned carrying in both hands a flat bundle the size of a big dinner plate, carefully wrapped in a silkgrass cloth. He laid the bundle reverently in Witherwood’s lap. Slowly the old man undid the wrappings, folding the cloth back to reveal a thick gnarled brown slab, roughly four-sided. It looked like a chip of old bark or an odd slice of stone.

  Birdie drew in a startled breath. “It’s a piece of a turtle’s shell,” she said. “A really old turtle. Why . . . ?”

  Witherwood held the fragment of shell toward Tad, gesturing for him to take it.

  “Take it,” Voice said softly beside him. “You have seen the Owl. Now take this, Fisher boy, and tell me what you see.”

  Tad stretched out his hand. His fingers closed around the fragment of shell. It felt warm to the touch, warm and heavy and ringed and creased with little ridges. Tad ran his hand across its surface, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What am I supposed to see?”

  Witherwood held out a hand, palm up, and then touched his index finger to his eye.

  Wait. See.

  And Tad saw.

  He stood beside a pond — but a pond like none he had ever seen before. Wide white stones formed a ledge all around it, and white stone cliffs towered high above him on all sides. It was as if the pond lay at the bottom of a huge white bowl. There was a scattered litter of fallen white pebbles and toppled boulders. The water of the pond was clear turquoise-blue.

  Everything was utterly silent. Nothing moved, not so much as a waterskater or a dragonfly. Tad had never seen a place so bare, so scoured clean, so empty.

  Then a voice spoke, a deep hoarse whisper of a voice that seemed to come out of the white stones themselves.

  I have been waiting for you, Sagamore.

  Tad turned his head. A huge gray boulder — at least at first it looked like a boulder — had opened its eyes and moved its head. It was an ancient turtle. Its shell was thick and worn as weathered stone; its heavy legs and feet ended in heavy cracked claws; and its mouth was a fierce bony beak. Tad had never seen a creature so massive, so silent, so old. The turtle looked as old as the very world itself. Tad moved closer. The turtle’s hooded eyes were filmed over, milky pale. Tad realized with a shock that it was blind.

  Who are you? he whispered. Do I know you?

  The old turtle made a breathy sound that might have been reptilian laughter.

  You do, young one, it murmured. We have met before. I wear many faces. But that is not what you need to learn here. Better to ask me “Who am I?”

  Tad sank down at the old turtle’s feet.

  Who am I, then? he asked. What’s happening to me? His thoughts stumbled over themselves in his eagerness to know. I have these Remembers. They come in bits and pieces. Sometimes they’re like pictures in my mind, and sometimes it’s as if I’m someone else, somewhere else, in some other time. And the Remembers are all scrambled up somehow, so they’re hard to understand. It’s like knowing just the middle of a story, with no beginning and no end. It’s as if I’m not me anymore. Or only partly me.

  The old turtle shifted its claws, scraping restlessly against the warm rocks.

  Time passes, it said. Time passes, but the Mind and the Magic only rest, waiting to wake again. And this time they awake in you.

  In me? Tad asked.

  You were born here, the old turtle said.

  It paused for a minute, breathing in and out with a sound like wind in leafy branches.

  He came long ago and drank from my pool. He was the first. You have much yet to learn, but even now you are growing. You are only at the beginning.

  The beginning? Tad echoed.

  The turtle nodded its heavy head.

  Think, Sagamore, and remember.

  Tad racked his brains.

  He was kneeling at the edge of the pond. He could feel the slabs of rock beneath him, hot against his knees. He bent over, farther, farther, dipping his hands in the turquoise water. He drank and felt the blue liquid, cool and sweet, slide down his throat. Then something happened. An explosion of stars within his mind. He looked up, astonished. . . .

  Yes, said the turtle. Yes. That was the beginning. The birth of the power. And the power, once awakened, does not die; it merely rests, waiting for the next to bear the Gift. Now, as you reach manhood, the Mind opens. It is a Gift, young one. A great Gift and a terrible burden.

  Burden?

  Burden, the old turtle said. For in this great world of ours, your lot is to watch and worry, to battle the wrongs, comfort the sorrows, and right the ills. And more than that — to do it all unknown, for the Great Conflicts are not for the little folk of pond and wood. Their concerns must be for their own time and place, and for happenings close at hand. They will forget you, Sagamore, time out of mind, and your name will fade away.

  It was too
much to take in. Tad felt ready to burst with questions.

  But what will happen to me? He struggled to understand. What am I supposed to do? Set things to rights, Treeglyn said, but I don’t know what to do. Or how.

  Almost imperceptibly the old turtle shook its heavy head.

  You will, it murmured. It will come. You will grow.

  But who am I? Tad thought to himself, frightened and dismayed. Am I me anymore? With this Mind inside me, swallowing me up?

  You and more than you, the turtle said. You are you and more than you.

  It had closed its eyes. Its face was wrinkled and gray, like a weathered piece of driftwood.

  You are the Sagamore, it whispered. Use the Gift wisely, Tadpole of the Fisher Tribe.

  The turquoise pond was gone. Tad was sitting on dry grass again, still clutching in his hands the fragment of ancient turtle shell. How long had it been? The others — Witherwood, Voice, and Birdie — were staring at him. Birdie’s mouth was open. When she did that at home, Pondleweed always asked her if she was waiting to catch buzzflies.

  “There was an old turtle,” he began, but Voice put a quieting hand on his arm. Witherwood’s hands were spelling a message.

  The old man rose painfully from the bench, reaching for his wooden crutch. Voice sprang to help him, but Witherwood waved him away. He grasped the crutch, thrust it under his arm, and, leaning upon it, turned to face the little group on the grass. Then he bowed his head toward Tad.

  “My master says,” said Voice — he paused and cleared his throat. “My master says that you are indeed he who is called the Sagamore.”

  Perhaps the help they were seeking, Voice told them, could be found in Witherwood’s Books.

  “What books?” asked Birdie.

  “The Books,” said Voice, trying to sound impressive. He tripped over the cottage threshold as he said it, which spoiled the effect.

  The Books, he explained, rubbing his toe, were the history of the Tribes, a long record reaching back for hundreds of sun turns. The earliest books were difficult to read, since they were written in strange alphabets and archaic languages. Some of the books had been damaged. Several had been burned in a long-ago fire; nothing was left of them but blackened spines and the crumbling remains of illegible pages, but they were still faithfully preserved. The Books, Voice said in shocked tones when Birdie asked, were never discarded, never.

  “Are we in them?” Birdie asked. “The Fishers?”

  “All the Tribes,” Voice said, “and a lot more too. But even when you can read them, the books can be hard to understand. Some of the book keepers must have been muddle-headed. Or maybe they just couldn’t write very well. Come in and I’ll show you.”

  Inside, the walls of the stone cottage were covered with books. The books were arranged in order, Voice explained, from the very oldest to the newest, the book that Witherwood himself was writing in now. The oldest books were rolled scrolls of birch bark. Next came books with carved wooden covers tied with brittle ribbons of ancient silkgrass, and finally rows of thick volumes bound in snakeskin or mouseleather. Some of them were held together with blackened metal clasps. The latest book lay on a wooden table next to an open window. A square clay bottle of walnut-hull ink stood beside it, carefully corked, and a neat row of goldfinch-quill pens.

  Tad and Birdie gaped at the shelves in awe. They had never seen so many books before. Books were rare among the Fishers, and few of the woodland Tribes could read. Tad had always cherished a secret hope that someday he could learn.

  Voice helped his master to his chair and placed a wooden footstool under his feet. Then he ran his finger along the shelves until, at a nod from Witherwood, he pulled out one volume, carried it across the room, and laid it gently in the old man’s lap. The book was bound in red-dyed leather with an incised border of black and gold. The pages — brown at the edges and crumbling, fragile as dry leaves — were covered with cramped slanted handwriting. It looked to Tad like the twisted patterns engraver beetles sometimes made under the bark of trees. Witherwood turned page after page, running his fingers along the lines, searching. Then, halfway through the book, the handwriting on the pages changed. It became bigger and bolder, punctuated with loops and sweeping swirls, and the ink was now a deep cranberry-red.

  “A new writer,” Voice murmured. “Many have kept the Books, and this volume is very old.”

  Witherwood’s hands hovered over the page.

  “This is the place,” Voice said. He cleared his throat importantly and began to read.

  “A time came when the Nixies, the Witches of the Waters, turned against the Tribes and used their power to take all water for their own. And so the world dried. And these were the names of the faithless ones: Adrielle and Umbellene, Graella and Damia, Cedra and Selena, and foremost of them all, Azabel.”

  “Azabel,” Tad said. “She told me her name was Azabel. That first time in the pond.”

  Voice stopped reading and looked pointedly at Tad. Birdie poked Tad with her foot.

  “Go on,” she said to Voice. “Please keep reading.”

  “In the third year of the Drying,” Voice continued, louder, “the streams and ponds were empty and the forest burned. The Fishers were driven from their homes and the Hunters from their hunting grounds. The Diggers in the mountains starved as the land above them turned to dust. And so there was called a Gathering of the Tribes.”

  Tad’s nostrils tingled suddenly with the smell of burning.

  There before him was a clearing, brown with dead leaves. A cluster of grimy caravans, their bright ribbons tattered and their skin covers black with soot and smoke. Cooking fires. A row of furred faces, solemn, leather boots and jerkins dusty and travel-stained. Thin barefoot children.

  A Gathering with no dancing!

  It was a rueful voice, touched with bitter laughter. A young woman’s voice.

  “Who are you?” Tad whispered. “Did I know you?”

  There was no answer.

  Voice spoke past him. “And to the Gathering came Waterleaf of the Fisher Tribe, the Sagamore. It was he who told us of the Waterstone, the source of all the Witches’ magic, and then he swore that he would find and steal away the Stone and hide it for safekeeping, so that the Witches’ power would be broken and the water would return to the Earth. And with him also swore his boon companions, Burris, of the Diggers, and Vondo, of the Hunter Tribe.”

  Tad caught his breath. They stood before the crowd, the three of them together, upraised hands clasped. A mass of faces, friends and strangers, cheering, shouting. Two of them would not come back. Vondo, the gambler, the joker, the teller of too-tall tales, drowned, pulled by the singing beneath the black water. Burris — Burris — felled on the shore by a Greller spear.

  Tad doubled over suddenly and clutched his stomach. They hurt, these Remembers, hurt terribly, even though he, Tad, had not been there, had never met that dark Hunter or that bright-eyed Digger with his love of loud tuneless singing, his clever fingers, his unshakable loyalty, his reckless bravery in battle.

  “What’s the matter, Tad?” Birdie had her arms around his shoulders. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m all right,” Tad said. “It’s all right.”

  “But first,” Voice continued, worriedly watching Tad, “the three journeyed to the Kobolds of Stone Mountain, who gave them —”

  He stopped. Witherwood had turned the page. The old hands froze. Voice, Birdie, and Tad craned anxiously forward. The page beneath Witherwood’s fingers was empty. Or rather not empty, but washed away, the words blurred to a crimson smear as if a great splash of water had fallen on the paper and dissolved the ink.

  They were outside in the sun. Witherwood sat again on his wooden bench, his eye closed. Voice and the two children sat cross-legged beside him on the ground, Voice as far away from Blackberry, the weasel, as he could possibly get.

  Birdie was chattering cheerfully, but Tad had seldom felt more dismal and downcast.

  “So now we understand,” Bir
die said brightly. She began to check things off on her fingers. “The voice in the stone circle that the Grellers called the Lady — it’s Azabel, the greatest of the Nixies. She’s awake again after all this time, and the Nixies must have gotten the Waterstone back somehow, because they’re taking all the water. But the Sagamore and his two friends beat her, all that long time ago. They got the Waterstone away from her. . . .”

  She paused, looking puzzled.

  “Why hasn’t anybody ever heard of the Sagamore?” she asked. “Why isn’t there a Sagamore in any of the stories? There are all kinds of tales about heroes. Like Bog and Frostwort and Ula the Diggermaid who showed her Tribe how to defeat the Firefoxes. Why don’t people tell about the Sagamore?”

  “Perhaps,” Voice translated, “perhaps the Sagamore did not wish to be remembered.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Tad said. Who could be a hero and not want anyone to talk about it?

  “Well, he was remembered in the Book, anyway,” said Birdie practically. “Just not very well. What did he do? And how did he do it? All the important parts were on the next page, the page that was all washed away.”

  Voice stirred restlessly. “There’s something wrong with that,” he said. “How could water wash just one page — one page — without touching anything else, before or after? I think it’s the Nixies at work, doing their wickedness. Throwing brambles in your path.”

  “Well,” Birdie said, “even with the brambles, we did learn something. We found out where to go next. To the Kobolds of Stone Mountain. Whatever they gave him must have helped, mustn’t it? I mean, the Sagamore won, all that time ago. Maybe it was a weapon. Or a secret potion.” Her voice grew more excited. “Or a great magic spell.”

  “It would take us months to get to the mountains, Birdie,” Tad said. “And then we’d have to find the Kobolds once we got there.” He sighed dejectedly. “And even if we managed to do that, how do we know they can still help us? Or that they’d be willing to?”

  “We could take the weasel,” Birdie said. Her lower lip stuck out. “He could get us to the mountains, couldn’t you, Blackberry?”