Robin McKinley - Water

“Well, I would like you to find out, and give me a date. Because it is very tedious to me, and I can’t imagine it is giving you much pleasure either. Try assuming that you belong here—just as an exercise, if you like. Like making rainbows or slowing down every thousandth rain-drop or turning clouds into horse-shapes is an exercise.”

Tamia grinned involuntarily at this last reference to her new favourite game. She glanced over at the water-garden that lay around the house and the old yew. It was a beautiful bright day, and warm in the little pocket of valley where the Guardian’s house stood, although there were mare’s-tail wisps blowing overhead, and the tree-tops were singing in the wind. The Guardian and her apprentice were having their lunch outdoors. Ordinary flat grey stepping-stones led through the water from the foot of the house-stairs, and next to the yew tree stood a tiny table and two chairs. Making rainbows and tweaking rain-drops and doing things with clouds began with rearranging the stones in the water-garden, in their shining bed of gold grains, fine as sand, and strangely shaped gold pebbles.

Tamia stood up slowly, and walked to the edge of the pool. There were a lot of stones she still did not know the uses of, but she was beginning to develop a feel for the ones that had uses; it wasn’t quite a hum, like a noise you heard in your ears, and it wasn’t quite a touch or vibration you felt against your hand when you held it near them, but it was a little like both together. She walked slowly round the edge of the water-garden, looking at various stones, and the way the tiny irregular fragments of their bed caught the shadows and turned them golden. Near the corner of the house she came to an area where there was no pressure at all against her ears or her skin or her thought from any of the stones. She knelt down and, after a moment of holding her open hands above the surface of the water, picked up two. The water was cool, as it always was, although the sun had been on the water-garden most of the morning. She held the two stones quietly for a moment. These would do. No, better than that. These were good ones. They gleamed with atoms of gold too small to see; only their twinkle gave them away.

She came back round the corner of the house, and knelt down near the little table where lunch was laid, in a curve of the pond-edge that allowed them their island. She ran her fingertips along the pebbly edge, drew them into the water; then she made a tiny hollow in the pond-bottom—which was no deeper than the length of her fingers—and felt gold flakes swirling up and adhering to her skin; and then she placed one of her stones in it, wriggling it round till she felt it, intangibly heard it, go mmph, like a well-fitted horse-collar settling against the shoulders it was made for. There was a tiny burst of light, and the twinkles of gold on her fingers and on the stone she had chosen disappeared.

Then she did the same to her other stone, and sat back on her heels, and watched as the air and the water around the two stones changed, and she felt the change float and expand, almost like scent, and wreath itself around her, almost like smoke. This was the first magic she’d ever done without the Guardian telling her how. “I—I’ve tried—I’ve done—” she said in a voice rather higher than her usual one. She swallowed. “I’m ready now. I will—I will now stop waiting for you to send me home.”

“Thank you,” said the Guardian, and she moved off her chair, and knelt by Tamia, and put her hands just above the two stones, as if feeling heat rising off them.

Tamia had been with the Guardian nearly a year when the Guardian said one morning, “It’s time you had a look at the sea. The way I want to go, it’s a long walk, we’ll take lunch—and perhaps tea.” She tied up food in two bundles, and they set out, towards the Eagle’s peak behind their small meadow.

They often went for long prowling walks along the shoulders of the mountains, following deer trails when there were deer trails, and even rabbit trails when there were those; the problem with rabbit trails was that they were made by and for creatures no more than a foot tall. On some of their walks there was a good deal of scrambling. But the Guardian showed Tamia what plants had leaves or berries or roots that were good to eat—or at least nourishing; or possessed healing properties. And they always looked out for stones that might fit in the water-garden, though they had to wait for the traders to bring them new supplies of the gold that their magic used. Tamia now knew the name of the trader with the red feather in his cap—Traetu; and his pony, Wheatear, for the long curly hair-whorl on his neck, like a stalk of wheat bent by the wind.

Tamia talked to the traders—and their ponies; she also greeted and was friendly with the deer, and the rabbits, and the foxes, and the hrungus, and the birds that visited their meadow or that they met on their walks; and the Guardian said to her thoughtfully, “If you were not so suited to our work, I would wonder if I had called you to the wrong craft; for the wild creatures love you, and no Guardian in all the long list of our Guardianship has ever had a familiar animal.”

Tamia shook her head. “It is only that my best friend—before you, dear Guardian—was a pony.”

But they had never climbed the peak of the Eagle. Tamia, like many inlanders, had never seen the ocean; and she had been too busy and too happy in the last year to think about it, although in the back of her mind she was aware that what she was here for was to learn to protect her land from the ocean, to become a member of the Guardians, who built and patrolled the boundary that kept the land safe from the water. She had no very good picture of what the ocean might be like; she knew that fishermen travelled upon it in boats, like the inlanders sometimes travelled on their ponds and streams and lakes; but when she thought about it at all, she thought of it as a kind of nightmare thing, perhaps a little like a sky full of storm-clouds.

When, in the early afternoon, they finally stood on the top of the Eagle and looked around them, she was amazed. This great, dazzling, every-colour-and-no-colour expanse was like nothing she had ever imagined, let alone seen; and she thought of the cousin of her mother’s who had married a fisherman, who described the sea with a shrug as “A lot of water you can’t drink,” and she could not understand how anyone could think this way. But then, she had probably never stood on the Eagle’s head with the wind in her face—and the Guardian she was apprenticed to standing at her side. The salt smell of it was very strong. She knew the smell from her village; sometimes on wet, foggy mornings when the wind was coming steadily from the west, a faint tang of it was just noticeable as the fog was pushed farther inland to shred itself on tree-tops. It had never seemed to her any more interesting than any other smell. But where they stood, with the wind bucketing around them, this tallest peak of the Eagle seemed to lean out towards the shore while the Cloudyheads on either side seemed to draw back in alarm, the water was on nearly three sides of them and the land seemed little more than a memory behind them. Here the ocean smell was wild and tantalising and full of mysteries.

This is the best, Tamia thought. There is nothing better than this. Not even doing my first magic by myself—not even meeting Southern Eye and Four Doors when they came to see my Guardian, or talking to the traders when they come here, not even Traetu, who told me my Guardian wanted me and will always be my favourite—this is almost as good as being my Guardian’s friend. She glanced at her Guardian, who looked away from the sea long enough to meet her apprentice’s eyes, and Tamia was sure, as she had been sure many times before, that the Guardian knew exactly what she was thinking.