Robin McKinley - Water

“Hmm,” said the librarian, and scrolled quickly to the top of the document. An Introduction to the Legendary History of Damar:

All countries have their folk tales and traditions, but Damar is unusual in the wealth of these, and in the inextricable linkage between them and what western scholars call factual history. Even today. . . .

Hetta closed her eyes. Then she opened them again without looking at the computer screen, made a dramatic gesture of looking at her watch, and did not have to feign the start of horror when she saw what it was telling her. “Oh dear—I really must go—thank you so much—I will come back when I have more time.” She was out the door before she heard what the librarian was asking her. Probably whether she wanted to print out any of what they had found.

No.

For three nights she did not dream at all, and waking was cruel. The one moment when her spirits lifted enough for her to feel a breeze on her face and pause to breathe the air with pleasure was one sunny afternoon when she went back to her pool and scrubbed the encircling paving. She scrubbed with water only, not knowing what any sort of soap run-off might do to the pond life, and she saw newts wrinkle the water with their passing several times. When she stopped to breathe deep, she thought she saw a newt with a red back hovering at the edge of the pond as if it were looking at her, and it amused her for another moment to imagine that all the newts she saw were just the one newt, swimming back and forth, keeping her company.

That night she dreamed again, but it was a brief and disturbing dream, when she sat at the edge of Zasharan’s pool where the Watcher’s Eye lay, and she strained to look into the water and see it looking out at her, but the water was dark and opaque, though she felt sure the Eye was there, and aware of her. She woke exhausted, and aching as if with physical effort.

She dreamed the same the next night, and the oppression and uselessness of it were almost too much to bear. Her head throbbed with the effort to peer through the surface of the water, and she fidgeted where she sat as if adjusting her body might help her to see, knowing this was not true, and yet unable to sit still nonetheless. There was a scratchy noise as she moved and resettled, and grit under her palms as she leaned on them. Sand. The ubiquitous Damarian desert sand; Zasharan had told her that usually there was no sand in the Watcher’s chamber but that this year it had blown and drifted even there. She dragged her blind gaze from the water and refocussed on the sand at the edge of the pool: the same glittery, twinkly sand that had first given her her cruelly unfounded hope when she had woken at home with grains of it in her hands and nightdress.

She shifted her weight and freed one hand. Help me, she wrote in the sand at the edge of the pool, and as she raised her finger from the final e, the dream dissolved, and she heard the milk float in the street below, and knew she would be late with breakfast.

A fortnight passed, and she dreamed of Damar no more. She began to grow reaccustomed to her life above the furniture shop, housekeeper, cook, mender, minder, bookkeeper, dogs-body—nothing. Nobody. She would grow old like this. She might marry Ron or Tim; that would please her father, and tie one of them even more strongly to the shop. She supposed her father did not consider the possibility that she might not be tied to the shop herself; she supposed she did not consider the possibility either. She had raised no protest when her parents had sent Mrs Halford and Mr Jonah and the possibility of university and a career away; she could hardly protest now that she had a dream-world she liked better than this one and wished to go there. The paperback shelves at the grocery store testified to the popularity of dream-worlds readers could only escape to for a few hours in their imaginations. She wondered how many people dreamed of the worlds they read about in books. She tried to remember if there had been some book, some fairy-tale of her childhood, that had begun her secret love of deserts, of the sandstorm-torn time of Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, of a landscape she had never seen with her waking eyes; she could remember no book and no tale her grandmother told that was anything like what she had dreamed.

It took three weeks, but Ruth finally managed to corner her one Saturday afternoon, hoeing the vegetable garden. “No you don’t,” she said as Hetta picked her hoe up hastily and began to move back towards the garden shed. “I want to talk to you, and I mean to do it. Those dreams you were having about Damar lit you up, and the light’s gone off again. It’s not just the price of the ticket, is it? We’d get the money somehow.”

Hetta dropped the hoe blade back behind the cabbages, but left it motionless. “No,” she muttered. “It’s not just the money.” Her fingers tightened on the handle, and the blade made a few erratic scrapes at the soil.

“Then what is it?”

Hetta steadied the blade and began to hoe properly. Ruth showed no sign of going away, so at last she said: “It doesn’t matter. It was a silly idea anyway. Doing something because you dreamed about it.”

Ruth made a noise like someone trying not to yell when they’ve just cracked their head on a low door. She stepped round the edge of the bed and seized Hetta’s wrist in both hands. Ruth was smaller than Hetta, and spent her spare time in a lab counting beetles, but Hetta was surprised at the strength of her grasp. “Talk to me,” said Ruth. “I have been worrying about you for years. Since Grandma died. You’re not supposed to have to worry about your older sister when you’re six. Don’t you think I know you’ve saved my life? Father would have broken me like he breaks everyone he gets his hands on if I’d been the elder—like he broke Mum, like he’s broken Dane, like he’s broken Tim and Ron and they were even grown-ups—and Lara’s going, for all that she thinks she just wants to marry Dane. You are the only one of us who has been clever enough, or stubborn enough, to save a little bit of your soul from him—maybe Grandma did, when she was still alive I wasn’t paying so much attention, maybe you learned it from her—and I learned from you that it can be done. I know it, and Jeff does too—you know, with that programming stuff he can do, he’s already got half his university paid for. When the time comes, nobody’ll be able to say no to him. We’re going to be all right—and that’s thanks to you. It’s time to save yourself now. That little bit of your soul seems to live in that desert of yours—if I were a shrink instead of a biologist, I’m sure I could have a really good time with that metaphor—I’ve wondered where you kept it. But you’re going to lose it, now, after all, if you’re not careful. What are you waiting for? Lara can learn to do the books—I’ll tell Dane to suggest it, they’ll both think it’s a great idea—I’ll teach her. We’ll eat like hell, maybe, but there’s only a year left for me and two for Jeff, and the rest of ’em are on their own. Who knows? Maybe Mum will get out of bed. Hetta. My lovely sister. Go. I’ll visit you, wherever you end up.”

Hetta stood trembling. In her mind’s eye she saw Zasharan, sand, trees, bells, horses, tree-framed faces, the Eye, the pool. For a moment they were more real to her than the garden she stood in or the bruising grip on her wrist. She realised this—realised it and lost it again as she recognised the landscape of her real life—with a pain so great, she could not bear it.

She burst into tears.

She was only vaguely aware of Ruth putting an arm round her shoulders and leading her back behind the storm-broken sunflower screen and sitting her down at the pool’s edge, vaguely aware of Ruth rocking her as she had many times rocked Ruth, years ago, when their mother had first taken to her bed and their father shouted all the time. She came slowly to herself again with her head on Ruth’s breast, and Ruth’s free hand trailing drops of cold water from the pond against her face.