Robin McKinley - Water

The mare was still breathing, but only just. Her dim eye looked blind when Tamia bent over her; the spume around her lips and tongue had dried and was beginning to crack. Tamia cautiously stroked her rough neck; there was no quiver of skin, no flick of ear, no roll of eye—nothing. “Oh, no, not you!” said Tamia. “You’ve had a fine foal! You must wake up now and see him. You must lick him all over, so that you know you belong to each other, and then show him how to nurse. Oh, mare, don’t leave him!”

The mare’s breathing was so shallow, Tamia had to put a hand to her nostrils to feel it. She looked around distractedly; she already knew there was no water nearby.

No water. None except . . . Do not spill a drop of the water. . . .

She ran back to her bowl, scooped a few drops on her fingertips, and threw them into the mare’s face. She just saw the light come on again in the mare’s eyes, saw her nostrils flare, saw her raise her head and look round for her foal. . . .

And then the dawn came up over the rim of the mountains, and as the first rays of the sun struck her face, Tamia heard the great challenging bell of the Water Horse’s neigh, and felt the earth shake underfoot with her hoofs. Tamia stood at the head of the narrow cleft in the mountains, with the tears streaming down her face, because she had thrown away her world’s last chance of survival against the sea on account of her inability to let one ordinary mortal mare die, who would probably now die under the Water Horse’s trampling hoofs, even as Tamia herself was going to die.

She waited, holding her bowl. The absence of the few drops she had wasted on the mare was not even visible; the bowl still looked full to the brim. But then again, perhaps it was not, because Tamia’s arms were so tired and strained that she could not quite keep her hands steady, and the surface of the water peaked in many tiny wrinkles which moved and ran in all directions, and yet no drop fell over its edge.

She could see the Water Horse now, see the great, glorious, shining silver cloud of her, for she was very beautiful, even more beautiful than she was terrible. Rocks cracked under her great strides; trees split and fell when she lashed her tail; her hoofs were as big as boulders, her belly as tall as a roof-top, her tail as long as the road to the sea. She moved almost as quickly as thinking; almost Tamia did not have time to raise her bowl as the Water Horse ran up the valley towards her, her tail streaming rainbows behind her. Tamia clutched her bowl to her breast, to hold it level, and she loosed one hand from it, and felt in her pocket for the seventh stone she had placed and then removed from her Guardian’s water-garden, the one that was slightly kidney-shaped; one of the stones that had, perhaps, invited the Water Horse into the world. Tamia slipped the small stone into the bowl of water, and the water’s surface bulged up to meet perfectly the brim of the bowl.

She saw just a glint of the mad, glaring, beautiful blue eye of the Water Horse, and then she threw her bowl’s contents at her.

There was a crash like thunder, and a wind came from nowhere and struck Tamia so hard that she staggered, dropped the bowl into the chasm, and almost fell after it. On hands and knees, she began to crawl away from the edge; and then the rain began, and drenched her in a moment. When she found herself unable to go any farther, pressed up against a shoulder of rock some distance from the cliff-edge, she merely hunkered down where she was, and waited. I thought it would be all over at once, she thought. I didn’t realise I would have to be drowned by inches. Never mind. In the roar of the wind and under the burden of her own exhaustion and despair, as she waited, she fell asleep.

She woke to blue skies and birdsong. At first she thought she had already died, and that by some mistake she had been sent to the Place of Joy—for surely people who fail at some great task entrusted to them are sent to live cold below ground forever. But she sat up, and discovered that this hurt so much she hardly could, and thought perhaps this meant she was still alive after all. She used the rock she was next to to help lever herself to her feet. Then she heard the whinny, and looked down at herself, and saw that she was only dressed in her sodden shirt and petticoat. As she stood up, there was a tiny pattering shower of water around her feet. She sneezed.

There was her mare—she didn’t mean to think of her as hers, the possessive just slipped into her mind—and a beautiful black colt with a few grey hairs around his eyes and muzzle peeked round his mother’s rain-soaked rump at the strange object that had just turned itself from a rock into a something else. But his mother whinnied at it again, and walked towards it, so he decided to come along too, trying to prance, and very nearly falling down for his pains. He was still only a few hours old; all legs with a bony, bulgy little head at one end and a miniature-besom tail at the other, and a few knobbly ribs to bind them all together. The mare came straight up to Tamia, and pushed her face into Tamia’s breast; and Tamia laid her forehead against the mare’s poll, and cradled her nose in her hands, and burst into tears.

It was only after this that Tamia thought to look into the abyss where the Water Horse had raced up towards them, neighing challenge and destruction. A great long ribbon of water shone there, arched and sparkling like the gay silky threads of a grey mare’s tail, and rainbows played beneath it, and the rocks on either side of the valley were green with moss, and there was a great pool at the foot of the cataract which was very slightly kidney-shaped, from which a stream ran singing along the bottom of the valley. The water sprang out of a cleft in the rock at the very peak of the crag, where the Flock of Crows became the Eagle; where Tamia had stood with her bowl pressed against her breast to keep it steady, and had wept, knowing that what she was about to do was no use, because she had disobeyed her Guardian, and spoilt everything.

Tamia turned slowly away from the valley, back towards the meadow where her Guardian waited. The mare turned too, and fell in behind her. It was not a long journey, but the way was steep, and all three were still very, very tired. All of them stumbled, and Tamia and the mare leant on each other, and the foal took turns leaning on first the one and then the other, although when he leant against Tamia, he tended to step on her feet, and then he didn’t seem so little after all.

It was nearer sunset than tea-time when they reached the Guardian’s meadow, but Tamia saw the little hummock that the teapot in its tea-cosy made, sitting on the table in front of the house, between the water-garden and the old yew. And then she saw her Guardian emerging from the shadow of the yew, limping heavily and leaning on a stick, but coming straight and steadily towards them.

“Oh, Guardian!” said Tamia, and ran forward, and threw her arms around her. “Oh, I don’t know why I’m here! I did it all wrong! I am so glad to see you!”

“Yes, you did do it all wrong,” agreed her Guardian, with great self-restraint, saying nothing about the odd-smelling dampness of Tamia’s shirt-front now transferred to her own, “and I don’t know why either of us is still here either. Perhaps because I am the one who gave you the water, and I would have done exactly the same in your position—except that I would not have known how to birth a foal.” And in her Guardian’s eyes Tamia saw what she had known for a long time, although she had not let herself know she knew it: that part of the reason her Guardian had chosen her as apprentice was because she would make just that sort of wrong decision, and if it lost them the world, then so it did. “We can only do what we can do,” said her Guardian softly. “Sometimes it is enough, despite all.” More briskly she added: “And that valley needed a waterfall, don’t you think? Although I hadn’t realised it till you did it. The Grey Mare’s Tail. There will be stories about it, you know.”