The Book of Water (19 page)

*   *   *

Erde was charmed by the little mage’s courtly manners, and thanked him graciously before eating the first of the choice morsels he’d set aside for her. The food was delicious, and it was an effort to sit up straight and not gobble. N’Doch seemed very shy about eating at first. Perhaps he was just making sure she and Djawara got enough before he started in on it.

It seemed like years since she’d eaten a fresh vegetable, though it was only since Deep Moor. Oddly, this tiny compound reminded her of the women’s secret valley, in essence if not in physical reality. She decided Master Djawara
would feel very much at home in those fertile meadows, as the women would in the heat and dust here. Immediately she felt as protective of the mage and his home as she did about Deep Moor. She studied every detail of his exotic dwelling: the rough yellow walls and baked mud floor; the flat, bright weave of the fabric hangings; the low wide benches, tossed with cushions, that hugged the walls in between shelves crammed with colorful books. Then there were the mage’s alchemical lamps, whose flames rose and fell on command, like the cook fire back in N’Doch’s stronghold, the castle he called a ship. And she knew true magic lurked outside, beneath those modest trees whose shade had swallowed up two full-sized dragons without a trace. When she’d looked for Earth in her mind soon after, he wasn’t there. She hoped they’d gone hunting again, and would bring back a load of fresh fish to swell this good man’s scanty larder. She waited until he’d eaten enough to slake his hunger, then blotted her lips gently with the hem of her linen shirt and told him of the dragon’s dilemma.

He listened through to the end, only nodding now and then. He seemed unsurprised by the dragons’ ignorance of their own Purpose. When she was done, he got up to make tea, a thick, sweet brew that he served in tiny, delicate flagons without handles. Only after the second serving did he return to the subject, with the suggestion that a quest after an unknown grail might be all the more passionate for being fueled by mystery. Erde could see he put great value in uncertainty. To her mind, he revered it rather too much, but she’d never say so, out of courtesy. Just as she was considering how to probe him further, she felt the dragons return, sleepy and sated.

—
Dragon! Welcome! Did you bring food for this good old man?

—
Of course. I am no ungrateful guest.

—
You are the very soul of gratitude, my dragon. Now, we are discussing important things. You must stay awake and listen.

—
We spoke of important things as well. My sister has remembered something further.

“Oh, what is it?” Erde exclaimed aloud. “Oh, Master Djawara! The dragons have news!” She translated as Water explained.

—
I said that there are more of us. Now I recall the others’ names: They are our brother Fire and our sister Air. Air is the one we must find. Air was firstborn. She will know what our Purpose is.

“Great,” said N’Doch. “So now we’re looking for two people.”

“A person and a dragon,” Erde corrected.

“Perhaps they are one and the same,” offered Djawara.

“Why do you say that, Master Djawara?”

“Because it seems likely that the eldest should be the one responsible for gathering the others when the need arises.”

“But what’s the need?” demanded N’Doch.

“Indeed, that seems to be the question,” Djawara agreed.

With their news delivered, the dragons had gone to sleep. Erde wasn’t sure how much help their news had been. “I beg you, honored sir, surely there is some advice you could offer us, to further our Quest, to help us find the Summoner?”

The mage did not hesitate. “You must go to the City.”

The words struck home, and Erde wished Earth had stayed awake to hear them. The City. The idea kept reappearing in different guises, in Gerrasch’s reading of his bones and pebbles, in Rose’s Seeing, even in Erde’s own invented Mage City, with its white towers crowding a green horizon. She’d conjured it first to give a lost and despairing dragon a goal and an image of hope, but perhaps her vision represented a truth after all, guessed at by instinct or sensed by some power of Seeing she didn’t know she possessed.

But N’Doch, hearing this once the old mage remembered to translate, raised a terrible fuss.

*   *   *

“To the City? Are you nuts? We barely got out of
town
alive! How’m I gonna go walking into the City with a dragon on either arm? Might as well send up a flare to Baraga right now!”

“Calm, calm, my boy,” Djawara soothed.

“Then don’t tell her such things! Look, I know you don’t want us here too long, ’cause it’s dangerous for you and we’ll eat you dry, but you gotta have a better idea than that! Mama said you . . .” N’Doch stops dead, hearing an eight-year-old’s whine coming out of his grown-up throat.

Djawara stares him down a while, nodding and pursing his lips.

N’Doch looks away, humiliated. More quietly, he says, “Fâtime said you’d know what to do.”

Djawara lets apology hang unvoiced in the air. Quietly, he pours the third round of tea. Then he replies, “You are all welcome in my house for as long as you care to make it your home. And you would probably be safe. And we would somehow manage to feed ourselves adequately—it’s easier when you have help. But there is a greater need here.”

N’Doch knows this. And sees that he’d hoped to avoid the urgency of it by bringing the dragons to safety in the bush. But safety is not uppermost in the dragons’ minds. Not even in the girl’s, despite her moments of fear and reluctance. He sees that now. He hears the music of dragon presence in his mind, pressing him to action. His shoulders droop. “Okay. So it’s gotta be the City, you say. Got any idea how?”

Djawara looks to the girl, questioning her a bit like he’s checking up on stuff he already knows. She tells him something that surprises him. His eyebrows arch and he nods quickly, pleased. He turns briskly back to N’Doch.

“Well, first of all, since you grew up in the City, a place-image to travel to is not a problem.”

“I don’t know . . . it’s been a while.”

“You’ve been there more recently than you’ve been here, am I right?”

N’Doch nods. Lying to the old man is hopeless.

“If you could bring them here, you can take them there, and you certainly will know your way around when you get there.”

N’Doch has to admit that’s also true.

“Secondly, Baraga’s not the big man in the City that he is in town.”

“So? It’ll just be someone else after us.”

Djawara dips his head doggedly. “Thirdly, your Visitors’ gifts will allow them access as free as any.”

“What gifts?”

“The Visitor Earth’s great Gift of Stillness, which renders him invisible.”

“More like a big rock. I’ve seen that one.”

“A rock to you, who can sense his presence. Invisible to most of the world.”

N’Doch shrugs. He has no way to deny this. “And the other one?”

“The Visitor Water is a shape-shifter. Didn’t you know?”

“What’s a shape-shifter?” But already, he does know. He sees the blue dragon in his mind, slimming to fit the close passages of the derelict tanker, lengthening to reach the high clerestory windows. “How much can she shift?”

Djawara spreads his hands in front of him, seeming to inspect each finger carefully. “Why don’t you ask her?”

S
he’s waiting for him when he slouches out into the dark front courtyard, full of cheb and sweet tea and questions he’s not sure he wants to ask.

She’s crouched catlike, facing the door, and the big brown guy is nowhere to be seen. N’Doch can’t decide whether he feels like he’s on some kind of weird first date or like he’s facing the Mother Superior of his Catholic grammar school. He’s never been alone with her before. The dragon, Water—he forces himself to think of her by name—is both winsome and officious, both animal and somehow more than human, and the real problem is not so much that he doesn’t want to relate to her but that he doesn’t know how.

He stares at her and she stares back. He wonders if he should think of her as a woman, if that would be a healthy thing to do, or for that matter, if it’s what she would want. He’s had friendships with women before, though not many, a few older women musicians he wanted to learn from. Mostly, sex got in the way. Either he wanted it, or they did, or both did but not for long. And then, the relationship was blown. It’s okay with the girl—she’s way too young and anyway, she wants to be his sister. With her, he’s already put sex from his mind. But Water is a grown-up, and definitely feminine. So what kind of relationship are they supposed to have? He tries to imagine having sex with a dragon. Pretty kinky all right.

He’s still staring at her when she begins to sing to him. Not out loud, and he’s glad of that. Any song this hot would alert Baraga’s sensors immediately. The beauty of it lays him out. Even the raucous birds have quieted. In the
back of his mind, the bizarre thought is born that it’s the dragon who should be the big pop star. And he could make it happen, if he could just get her into a studio. . . .

But in his heart, he knows this is music for his ears only.
His
music. Someday he might remember it and write it down, polish it up for public consumption. But for now, he’ll just listen.

When she’s done, she’s still staring at him. He feels awkward, reading expectancy in her bottomless gaze. He wonders why she isn’t talking to him, then realizes he’s the one who’s withholding. He hasn’t allowed that inner letting-go that lets her voice into his head alongside the music that seems to invade willy-nilly with a power all its own. He decides he’ll wait a while yet, and sing her some of his songs. It’ll be like foreplay.

He starts with a lightweight piece, about a man trying to discover if his wife’s been unfaithful. It’s his usual opener when he plays in the market square. The shoppers don’t want anything too serious while they’re busy bargaining. It’s better when he has his ’board hooked up, though he’s done it plenty of times without, since he can’t always afford to recharge his battery pack. But he likes the melody even without. It has a certain plaintive comic sweetness to it, especially the chorus, which he’s really getting into, singing away with his eyes closed, when he happens to steal a glance at the dragon to see how she’s taking it. He nearly stops breathing.

There, right in front of him in his grandpapa’s courtyard, in place of a silver-blue dragon, is a pathetic crumb of a man, big-nosed, stooped, a little pudgy, a lovesick nerd casting his droopy eyes about in helpless suspicion exactly as N’Doch had imagined the guy when he wrote the song. He’s speechless. He doesn’t understand what’s happening.

The image dissolves, or rather, re-forms before his very eyes into a silver-blue dragon. The process is not instantaneous and watching it makes him definitely queasy. When she’s fully herself and staring at him again, he’s still speechless, and without a defense left in the world.

—
Did I get it right?

It’s all he can do to nod.

—
Let’s do another one.

Her voice in his head is light and brisk, oddly familiar.
Not unlike his own, but with an added undertone of Well-it’s-about-time-we-got-down-to-business.

“Umm,” says N’Doch, mostly to see if he can still produce a human sound.

—
It feels pretty good. Hardly tires me out at all.

“Umm,” he says again, then clears his throat. “Feels good?”

—
You don’t have to speak to me out loud, you know.

“Maybe not, but you know, I’m sort of used to it, okay?”

—
Certainly. For now.

“Yeah. For now. So, um, then you’re not used to doing this, is that what you’re telling me?”

—
How could I be, without you around to sing the songs?

N’Doch is rendered inarticulate again.

—
I knew it from the moment I first breathed air. I’ve been trying to explain it to you, but you just wouldn’t listen.

“Ummm. Oh.” He knows now why her voice is familiar. She sounds a lot like his mother used to, before she gave up on him. “Sorry.”

—
Oh, I understand how hard it is at first. It’s hard for me, too, figuring all this out by myself. My brother’s not much help, you know.

“Your brother?” Oh, the big guy. “Really? Why not?”

—
Well, he’s very gifted, of course, and he has a very great heart. But he’s still so young and he’s like, hopelessly old-fashioned.

Deep inside N’Doch, absurdity finally brims over. He starts to laugh. First it’s a chuckle, then a snort, then an outright belly laugh. It’s what he’s been needing and he lets it build and peak and still go on, like he’s gonna laugh his guts out and with them, all the confusion and resentment and tension he’s choked back since he first felt the dragon’s hold on him. When he’s finally done, he’s breathless and gasping.