Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (58 page)

The name dried up when the water did. I think Papa knew it. I think it was written on the old maps, but we didn’t use the old maps. “It doesn’t have one.”

Enah turned to look at me, and his eyes were as sharp as a carrion bird’s. “That’s sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve brought waters to desert arroyos, Lena. I can make this river flow again. And when the waters flow again, your town will name it.”

He reached out to touch my cheek, and I stepped back. Ordinarily, no one would touch me — I’d have a dog, like Papa’s dogs, to dissuade anyone from coming too close. Not then, though. Papa had killed my dog that morning.

“There will be enough water to grow hyacinths here,” Enah said.

“What are hyacinths?” I asked.

I went to the pumpyard to draw water to pay the guards’ salaries. I hated going to the pumps, but they were locked so the guards couldn’t draw their own. The men who guarded them, with old automatics and new machetes, looked at me as though only my father kept them from leaping on me like wolves.

Only my father. So much in my life was because of my father, or only my father. Because of my father, I would never die of thirst. Only my father aimed to keep life and death in a birdcage on his accounting desk.

When I’d filled the jugs and dragged the heavy handcart back to Papa’s office, I saw Papa yelling at François. Almost-yelling. Papa only barely raised his voice, but it felt like a shot from a cannon.

“By God, they won’t have their way!” Papa was saying.

François, a braver man than most, said “God is not always merciful to our needs.”

I’d never heard him speak back to Papa before.

“I don’t care about God’s mercy,” Papa said. “Who has mercy? He doesn’t. I don’t. And you least of all.” His voice became harder, like stone. “Go find whoever brought this troublemaker to our village. Make sure they don’t bring any more trouble our way.”

François stood with his jaw muscles bulging. He must have been biting down hard.

“Well?” Papa said, and raised his hand as though to strike him. “Go on! Go!”

François turned and walked outside.

Papa turned to me, and I stared at him. Then he sighed, and clicked his fingers twice. One of the dogs perked his ears, ready for commands.

“You should take Brutus,” Papa said, though neither of his dogs will obey anyone but him. “Jaime’s bitch is about to pup; we’ll train up another dog for you soon.”

“I’d rather have Mogul back,” I said.

Papa was not a man who showed sadness, but sometimes, I could catch a softness in his eyes. Only for me. “They never live once the bloody coughs start.”

“You never treat them,” I said.

“We are all dying, Lena,” he said, and started out past me. “If I kill them a week before their time or five years before their time, what does it matter?” He stopped at the doorway to touch my cheek. “You are the only one I will fight to keep alive.”

Papa would fight anything. Fighting was the only life he knew.

When my mother came down with the cough, he fought the doctors. He fought the dust which rolled in through the windows. He even fought my mother’s body. When she died, he seemed like a man who’d lost a public match — pride smarting, eyes burning, looking to prove himself back up.

By that summer, when the dogs were sick, he’d take a machete and lop off their heads. Maybe he thought it was winning if he didn’t watch them dwindle away.

I went to fill the drip-irrigators. I passed the side path leading to the gate, where François was sharpening his machete, his skin gleaming in the sunlight in contrast to my own. François was as strong and dark as Mogul once was, and I was as tan and useless as the dirt on the riverbed.

“Where’s your dog?” he demanded.

“He was sick,” I said.

François said,
huh
, and went back to sharpening.

“What did you mean,” I asked him, “that God is not always merciful?”

“You know what I meant. The world doesn’t work the way we’d like it.”

“But why did you say it?” I asked. “Why God?”

François shrugged one corded shoulder. “A saying came to mind. A story my parents told me.”

Papa never told me stories. Mama had, but Mama was gone. “Tell me,” I said.

François grimaced. I think he wanted to be rid of me. He didn’t speak much, and especially not to me. Still, my father paid him, and paid him twice as much as anyone else on the water farm, so he indulged most things.

“The Prophet Mohammed was told to prove the greatness of God,” François said. “He shook his fist at a mountain and said ‘Come here, mountain, so I may pray on you!’ The mountain didn’t come. The Prophet turned to his people and said ‘If that mountain had come, it would have crushed us. So you see, God is merciful. I’ll go to the mountain and thank God for sparing his foolish children.’”

I chewed on that. “So if the river comes, God won’t stop the water from flooding our home?”

François shrugged.

“Why aren’t you Muslim?” I asked. “You still remember those Islamic stories. Weren’t your parents Muslims?”

François put the finishing edge on his machete and stood up. “You’ll learn one day that you can’t always do what your parents want you to,” he said. He looked over at the edge of the river, up toward the village on the lip. “My parents would be disappointed in what I do. Besides.” He rested his machete on his shoulder. “It’s not right to profess what you don’t believe.”

I didn’t believe in a God, either. My father prayed, but never told me who he prayed to. Mama had been a Catholic from an old sect. I usually found François the most sensible of all of them.

I took two gallons of water, separated into quarts, up the bank to the market. The people there watched me, many of them angry, but not as hungry as the guards we kept sweating and rich on the farm. Papa said people resented the rich, and that it shouldn’t bother me.

François had followed me up and I wondered if my father had told him to be my dog until I had a new one, but then he went on his way and I put him out of my mind.

The noise of the market quieted as I passed by, and resumed again in pitched whispers, and the stares were more furtive. Because I didn’t have my dog, or because of Enah?

I found Jaime, who was at least kind to me, under a frayed sunshade, fixing small electronics. A rickety contraption of rods and wires with a metal dish in the middle was perched on the edge of his table, with a radio tied into it.

“What is that?” I asked, and he flashed me a grin.

“Listen to that,” he said, and turned the radio on.

There weren’t many stations nearby — there was the Christ Channel, and the staticky weather for a city climates away. And then there was this, a violin, a channel I’d never heard before.

I strained forward into the music. “Is it a new station?”

“Just far away,” Jaime said. “But with that antenna, I can focus in on it.” He turned up the volume as high as it would go. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

The song ended, and someone spoke in a foreign tongue. “Papa says you have a dog ready to pup,” I said.

Jaime nodded. “Any day now. The best of my stock.”

“We’ll want to buy a boy,” I said. “If there’s one you don’t keep back for breeding, reserve it for us.”

He looked at me quizzically. “I noticed you didn’t have Mogul with you.”

He didn’t ask,
What happened?
And so I didn’t tell him, even as the words pressed on the back of my tongue. I didn’t say how his entire body had shaken when he sneezed, how blood had sprayed out from his nostrils to paint the living room walls. “He was sick,” I said.
And they never live once the coughing starts.

Jaime understood. “Tell your Papa that these dogs are companions and workers, not pieces of equipment he can use up and replace.” There was no heat to his tone. We were his best customers, and sometimes his only customers for months at a time.

Beside him, the man on the radio stopped talking and a new song started up. “Jaime,” I asked. “Why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

Jaime shook his head. “What do you mean? Don’t you see the soapstone carvings Elise does? Hear Luc singing to his rabbits? See the mats Camille weaves out of the grasses? There are beautiful things all over the village.”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, but my head was full of the violin, my mind’s eye captured by the curves of its wood. I had only seen pictures in old books. “But why don’t we make anything
that
beautiful?”

Jaime sighed. “Because beautiful flowers don’t grow on dry clay, girl,” he said, and I felt myself drop in his estimation. “When we’re not too busy scraping by, we’ll go to another city just to buy a violin. Or perhaps you should ask your father to buy one for you.”

The words stung, so I turned to leave.

I bought rabbit meat from Luc, and wild garlic and scrawny tubers from strange old Abed. Traded water for soap, for thread, for a tin of white paint to cover the blood I hadn’t been able to scrub away. Then I started back down toward the water farm, but Enah caught my eye.

He was sitting on the edge of his cart, at the lip of the river bank, leaning down to draw pictures in the dirt with a stick. He was surrounded by villagers, and all of them watched him like a prophet. I drew nearer.

“. . . and when that is done,” he was saying, “there will be water to last you between rains, and we can turn our attention to healing the river. We’ll dig percolation trenches, to let water return to the aquifer.”

By then people had noticed me, and they were muttering. I’d decided it was time to go when Enah looked up and motioned me forward.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Come up and see.” He looked to the villagers, and before they could say anything he said, “The water we’ll bring is for everyone; go ahead and let her in.”

“She’ll just tell her father,” one of them said. I didn’t look to see who.

“I’d tell him myself if he asked me,” Enah said. “Come up, Miss Wolfe.”

I looked around at the faces of the people who hated my family. They seemed foreign, and at first I didn’t know why; of course I had little interaction with them, but I knew their faces. I saw their houses on the hill.

Then it struck me. I had never seen the flicker of hope in their eyes, and now they watched Enah as though he were the word of God. I thought back to François, and felt that I was standing on the edge of a cliff. I stepped up.

“Have you ever heard the words ‘watershed management,’ Miss Wolfe?” Enah asked. I shook my head. “Do you know what a water table is? A kund?”

“I know the aquifer is drying,” I said. A rumble passed from mouth to mouth in the crowd.

“That’s because this place,” Enah said, and gestured over the village, “is designed to waste water. It rains, and the water evaporates again. With bunds and kunds and ditches, we can train it to go back into the aquifer, and capture it from this whole land surrounding your village—”

He was interrupted by screaming.

Enah seemed confused, but the villagers knew their screams. They broke and ran, ready to help someone bit by a snake or trapped under an ancient, crumbled wall, but what they found was Jaime, his wife crouched over him and keening, his radio smashed. My heart caught and I stepped forward, knowing what I would see — and I saw that his head was lying separately to his body, the two of them connected by a sweep of bright blood.

Then it was my turn to break away from them and run. It took the villagers a moment to work through why I was running away from them, and then a yell went up. I heard Enah’s voice, nasal and rising, and then a rock crashed into the ground by my ankle. I ran faster, down into the riverbed, to the safety of the guards and Papa’s dogs.

They came to the house in numbers that night, carrying fire. I could taste their anger on my skin. From the pumpyard the guards readied their weapons, unsure whether to run to the defense of the house or to protect the water, and Papa flogged the dogs to get them growling. “Where is François? That worthless man! He can put down what he’s stirred up or I’ll have his hide nailed to my wall!”

Something crashed against our window, and I jumped back. Papa grabbed his rifle and checked it, then made it ready to fire.

Papa had had people murdered before. We never talked about it, but there was no secret. When I was ten, he had François kill the bonesetter’s son, and everyone knew it was him. Papa had guards and dogs and Papa had the water; the whole village hated him, but no one dared cross him. Now they dared.

Outside the window, something was happening in the crowd. Enah ran in front of them, raising his hands. I couldn’t hear his words but the just his voice was beautiful, melodic like a violin, fanning the fires and banking the coals until the entire mob was singing their agreement with him, and the chant started up:
Enah! Enah! Bring the river! Flood them out!

When the crowd was his, he turned to our house and waved his hand until I stepped up and opened the window.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he called. “It’s true that Jaime raised me on the radio, but you’ll have to do more than kill him to drive me off. You’ll have to kill me. And you’ll have to kill all the people I am teaching, and you’ll have to teach them not to kill you. Invite me in, Mr. Wolfe.”

Quite a thing to say, for someone who had just told my father to kill him. But Papa walked to the door, and — quickly, as though the doorknob was a snake — yanked it open. He invited Enah in.

No ancient and carefully-maintained gun from the crowd shot him. No fist-sized rocks came hurtling at his head. Enah approached and the mob behind him rumbled like a single, huge beast, with fire in its many claws.

Enah walked in, and Papa shut the door behind him.

They stood watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah strange and unworldly with fire glowing on his skin, Papa holding his ground like the rocks on the riverbed. Then Enah spoke.

“All the corpses you’ve planted by your pumps,” Enah said. “How long, tell me, will it take them to bloom? Will they feed your family when they do?”

Papa frowned, confused. He wasn’t a good man to confuse — he got angry. But instead of striking Enah or taking him by the neck, he showed his hands.