The Book of Water (16 page)

The notion that she couldn’t ignore was that the world might not go on as it was—as she knew it—forever and ever, that the passage of time might automatically equal change. Therefore, the difference of N’Doch’s world might not be due simply to her having traveled far, far south into exotic lands. Instead, the whole world, from north to south, might have changed, might be like it was here in what he called Afrika: hot, dry, dusty . . . unrecognizable. So if she went back north, there might be nothing familiar there either. This was more frightening than any breakdown in her definitions of Time. She’d always been proud to be able to say that Tor Alte and its surrounding lands had been held in the von Alte name for three hundred years. But
eleven
hundred? Suddenly she wanted more than anything to go there and see.

N’Doch was watching her carefully, as if he’d expected some desperate reaction to his news. But even if she did feel desperate, she’d try not to show it.

“Is . . . uhm . . . German-y . . . like this now?” She gestured around vaguely. She didn’t want to seem to be judging his world too harshly.

“Now? As opposed to when?”

She thought they’d been through that, but maybe he wasn’t listening while she discussed it with the dragons. If he didn’t start making a habit of listening, it was going to be hard to keep track of who understood what.

“As opposed to when I come from.” She liked the sound of that, how easily it came out. Not “where I come from” but “when.”

N’Doch sighed explosively. “All right, look—enough is enough. It’s none of my business but somebody’s got to clue you in sometime, might as well be me. So listen: whoever’s told you the year’s 913, your parents, this King Otto, whoever, they’re just pretending you all live in the past, ’cause they can’t deal with the present. You get it? It’s all a big fat lie. I’m telling you that here and now, and you just gotta accept it. Okay?”

She let him finish and then calm down a bit, for he was getting rather heated about it. She guessed that the fact
that, as young as she was, she’d been born eleven hundred years ago was a hard one to swallow.

“I don’t mean I’ve lived that long,” she reassured him patiently. “That would be impossible. Only dragons and the Wandering Jew live that long. I mean I just came from there yesterday.”

*   *   *

She says it with such simple conviction, it makes his hair stand up on end. Not from Mars after all, but from the past. A time-traveler. And she’s so sure about it, he can’t think of a way to refute her. Especially when he’s asking himself: If dragons can move through Space, why not through Time?

Abruptly, he’s tired of it, all of it. Tired of having his brain crowded with other people’s thoughts and voices and concepts, of having his reality stretched beyond all reasoning. And no wonder. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours, except for being down for the count while they cured his fever, and that can hardly count as rest. It’s only that he’s eaten better than usual that’s kept him going. It doesn’t really matter, he realizes, if she’s from now or whenever. She’s here and so are the dragons, and somehow, he’s got to deal with them.

“Okay, I got it. You’re from the past. Fine. I’m gonna get some sleep now.” He lies back and folds his elbow over his eyes, sealing out girl and dragons, the whole preposterous vision. “When it’s dark, I’ll go talk to Papa Dja.”

E
rde told Earth that she’d never in her life met anyone so badly brought up.

—
Ending a conversation without so much as a by-your-leave!

—
He’s tired. He’s had a lot to think about today.

Water stirred from her doze.

—
I think we could all use some rest.

—
But he was so rude! And we were actually talking about something for the first time ever!

—
Remember, you’re not a baron’s daughter here. He owes you no fealty.

—
What about simple courtesy?

—
His definitions are different from yours.

—
Rest now, child. I feel great things are about to happen here.

—
You do?

—
Rest.

The dragons were the ones who really wanted to rest, Erde decided, so she’d better let them. Forcing her petulance away, she studied N’Doch as he plunged into sleep beside her. He didn’t ever seem to worry about how he
should
behave. He did whatever he felt like at the moment. Erde found this both enviable and infuriating. Did everyone just do what they felt like in this world of 2013? How did they get anything done without fighting about it?

She resisted sleep for a while. She thought she should stay awake and keep watch. But the hot close air in the shadow of the rocks made her drowsy, and neither N’Doch or the dragons seemed concerned any longer about the possibility
of attack. She stared out at the brushy horizon until her eyelids drooped. Then she seated her dagger more comfortably against her waist, laid her head on her pack and fell asleep.

*   *   *

When the dream came this time, it was not like the old ones. It was not on alien ground, or wracked with deafening noise and odious smells. She was home again, not a specifically known location but an easily comprehended one: a wide, frost-seared grassland backed by fog-shrouded mountains, a dark forest of pine and fir flowing over the waves of foothills down to the edge of the plain, a chill, thin river. It was early morning, just coming light, of a dull wet day. Along the meeting line of grass and trees, an army was camped.

Erde found she could approach the camp, slowly, at eye level, as if riding along the rutted path and in among the silent tents on horseback. The illusion was so real that she started in fright, in the dream, when the door flap of a nearby tent was suddenly thrown aside and a man stepped out, not ten feet in front of her.

He was solid and blond, with the hard-muscled body of a warrior but sporting a courtier’s close-cropped beard. His breath made smoke in the icy air, a chill Erde could not feel. The man stretched and shivered, shrugging his wool cloak more tightly around his naked chest. He tested the wind, listening intently, then frowned and looked toward Erde. She recognized Adolphus of Köthen, and wondered if he would remember her. But instead, he stared past her, as if surprised by not seeing the something or someone he’d expected. He turned away, then glanced back again, quickly, as if trying to catch that someone in the act of being there after all. Erde knew in her dream that he could sense a presence, maybe even her own specific presence, and that this puzzled him. It puzzled her, too, since they hardly knew each other, and why should she be dreaming about Adolphus of Köthen? But she was glad it was only a dream because this formidable, intelligent man was officially her enemy, the ally of her father and the terrible priest. She wouldn’t want to be this close to him if he could actually see her.

And yet she lingered, because the dream gave her the
power and because, she realized guiltily, she liked looking at him, liked his interesting combination of toughness and reserve, liked how his thick, straw-gold hair bunched along his neck like pinfeathers, liked even his oddly dark brows and eyes. His alert scowl reminded her of her father’s favorite peregrine, Quick, except Köthen carried himself with an easy confidence unlike the posture of any bird of prey. Much else about Köthen reminded Erde of Hal, though this was no surprise since Hal had fostered him as a lad, and by Köthen’s own admission, taught him everything he knew. Erde thought it a great human tragedy that Baron Köthen felt called upon to go to war to usurp the King, thereby pitting himself against his beloved mentor. For there never was a more loyal servant to His Majesty than Heinrich Peder von Engle, Baron Weisstrasse, known to his friends as Hal. Except, now that she thought of it, Köthen had invariably called him Heinrich. A mark of respect, or a way of distancing a man whom he honored far more than was convenient for him?

Now Köthen looked the other way. Armor clanked. There was a stirring of men and horses outside a black-and-green tent flying the von Alte battle standard. Her father’s tent. Past it were a quartet of white pavilions, each guarded by a stout, white-robed monk. Other monks were lugging heavy pails of heated water into the largest pavilion.

Erde felt a chill at last, and a sudden urge to scurry away, as if some roving eye searching a crowd had picked her out with evil intent. She stared with Köthen, then after him, as he turned abruptly, his scowl deepening, and stalked past her, away from her father’s awakening and the tents of the priest, away from the camp and the new smoke rising from cook fires, into the morning darkness under the trees.

*   *   *

When she woke in the thick heat of a far century, she knew it was not precisely a dream that she’d had. A profound sense of home lingered. Somehow she had
been
there, had returned to the preternaturally early winter of 913, and been privy to a true event, however insignificant . . . or probably not. Only time would tell that. But why Köthen? She scanned her mind for the dragon to
tell him the news, but he was still sleeping off his bellyful of fish. She opened her eyes, slitted against the late-afternoon glare, so bright even in the deepest shadow of the rocks. Once again, N’Doch was gone.

O
n the way to Papa Dja’s, N’Doch rehearses his explanation for showing up out of the blue after all these years of ignoring his grandpapa entirely. How long?—he counts backward—eight years, it has to be, and five since Sedou’s funeral, when the old man walked all the way in from the bush to sing the ancient death rituals behind the imam’s back. He wouldn’t take a bush taxi. Wouldn’t even take the public bus.

N’Doch would never admit it out loud, but he misses his older brother. More than, say, his little brother Jéjé who died so young the family hardly had time to get used to him being there. Or Mammoud, the eldest, who was out of the house and into the army at fourteen, when N’Doch was just learning to walk, and dead a year later. With Sedou, he’d actually had a sort of relationship, a rocky one for sure, with Sey always yelling at him to stick around home and mind. Sedou was the righteous one, of all his mama’s sons, the one who did his schoolwork and worked extra hours at odd jobs to help feed the household. Of course that righteousness also made him pigheaded and fanatical, and got him killed for speaking his mind. N’Doch thinks writing songs is a smarter way of saying your piece then getting involved in politics. It’s true he hasn’t written any songs about “issues” yet, but he keeps thinking he might. He hasn’t written any about Sedou either, though he’s got a lot in his mind. Probably the songs about Sedou will end up being about politics, so he figures he’d better just get famous first. If you’re famous enough, they pretty much let you say what you want.

There’s no road the way he’s going. It’s a direct overland
route, a mile and a half across the dry, empty fields waiting for the fall rains that have been coming later and less often every year. The soil is as dry and hot as beach sand beneath his bare feet, and the scattered grass clumps rattle like drum-rolls as he brushes past. N’Doch thinks it’s odd but all the same incredibly cool that he knows exactly in which direction his grandpapa’s house lies.
Exactly
, as if flashing signs or a homing beacon were showing him the way, ’cept it’s right there in his head and he’s sure of it in ways he isn’t about a lot of other things he’s had to do with much more recently and in greater detail. He’s even impatient with the occasional detour around brush thickets or rocks. He can sense the deviation from the straight line as acutely as he would hear a string out of tune.
Pretty weird
, he muses, but then everything is, right about now. Why should this be any different?

He decides he’ll tell Papa Dja that the dragons are research clones escaped from some top secret American zoo, like in that old vid about the dinosaur island. If the old guy questions him too closely, he’ll just say that’s what the girl told him, he doesn’t know any more. How he’ll explain the girl, he’s not sure, with all her bizarro clothes and speaking German. Maybe he’d better make it a German zoo. He’ll just say she showed up on the beach looking for help, which isn’t far from the actual truth. It just ain’t
all
of it. . . .