The Book of Water Read online

  “Yo! Waterboy!”

  N’Doch grins breathlessly and returns the wave as he passes. He doesn’t mind the nickname. Water seems to him a fine and precious thing to be named after. Had he been named “safe water” or “pure water” or even “cold water” instead of merely “water,” he’d have liked it even better. But his mama preferred names that could be yelled quickly and easily, so “N’Doch” it is, or “Waterboy” to the old geezer who lives in the tug wreck.

  Now, Malimba’s brothers haven’t heard this nickname before, and when they pick up on it, it doesn’t sound so fond or playful. It’s mockery pure and simple.

  “Water boy!” they screech in coarse falsetto. “Waaa-ter boyh! Come heah, boyuh! Yah, boy, yah, yah, yah!”

  N’Doch knows what they’re up to, trying to rile him, slow him down with a little extra burden of rage, maybe even goad him into turning and standing for a fight. But N’Doch has learned to be slow to anger. He’s never been much of a fighter. His speed is his strength. As for Malimba’s brothers, let them ask their silly sister if he’s a boy or not.

  Already he thinks of the girl with the same regret as the lost tomatoes. Silly, perhaps, but pretty enough, clean and healthy and a virgin, he’s sure of it. Not so many of those around, though at almost twenty, N’Doch has had his share. It would have been nicer to lie down with her a while instead of just snatching the fruit and bolting. Then she might have given him one, if he’d pleased her well enough, and there’d be no need for all this sweating and racing about. N’Doch knows he has a gift for pleasing women, even those he doesn’t take to bed. It’s one reason he hasn’t had to fight so much. Whatever trouble he gets into, he can always find a woman or two to take his side. In groups, he has found, women can be very powerful allies. This is maybe his worst miscalculation this time—to attempt such a serious snatch when the aunties and grandmothers and the satisfied widows who might have hidden and protected him are all shut up in the shade of their houses, fast asleep.

  He clears the last chunk of the sea tug and cuts shoreward to skirt the sand-filled hulks of two landing craft left un-claimed after the most recent failed coup. Together, they form a solid wall of rust and bullet holes and peeling camo paint, half in, half out of the water at low tide. N’Doch considers whipping around the hind end and climbing the far side to drop down onto the wash of wet sand inside. But the brothers are too close behind to fall for this ruse. They’re sure to see him fling himself over the top, and then he’ll be trapped and done for. But he can use the great bulk of the landing craft to cover his sprint to the next wreck down, one of the really big ones, a storm-grounded supertanker whose half-submerged stern juts into the water for the length of several soccer fields. N’Doch has a long run over open sand, but if he can reach the tanker before the brothers pass the landing craft, he’ll be home free. He can hide himself forever in the dark and complex bowels of that derelict giant.

  But as he rounds the end of the landing craft, his next disastrous miscalculation is revealed. This time, N’Doch curses himself out loud. The fishing fleet is in, as he’d have known it would be, if he’d given it a moment’s clear thought. Hauled up on the sand between him and his refuge are thirty high-sided, high-prowed, brightly painted boats shaped like hollowed-out melon slices, heavy old wooden boats with galley-sized oars pulled by four men each. They’re as tightly packed as a school of tuna. N’Doch can see no alley through them. A path around will take too long. Over the top, then, it has to be, though even at mid-ships, they’re half again his height. He races at the nearest, leaping to grab for the gunwales. He misses, catches a strand of fishnet instead, then flails and falls back, pulling the load of netting and floaters over on top of himself. By the time he’s struggled free of the web of slimy, stinking rope, the brothers have made it around the landing craft. They slow and walk toward him, with nasty grins on their faces.

  “Hey, water boy . . .”

  “D’ja eat good, water boy?”

  “Time to pay up now . . .”

  They fan out in a semicircle as they approach, cutting off his chance of a last minute end run. The shortest and lightest-skinned of them has picked up a ragged scrap of metal. He swings it casually, like a baseball bat, but there is nothing casual in his eyes. N’Doch shakes off the last of the netting and backs toward the water. Maybe he can outswim them. He knows this is folly. He has hardly a full breath left in his body. His chest is heaving like a bellows, but then, so are theirs.

  The surf pounds. A long wave foams up around his ankles. He hopes there’s nothing too lethal hiding in the sand behind him, or in the water. The beach slants sharply. It drops off fast here, so the waves crest and break close to shore. The undertow is already pulling at his calves, sucking the gravel from beneath his heels, tipping his balance. He feels not so much driven backward into the water by the brothers’ approach, as drawn inexorably into its depths, like he’s being inhaled by the ocean, as if the water itself was alive. It’s a peculiar sensation. It makes him light-headed, and now he’s thinking he hears music in the crashing roar of the surf. He thinks maybe this is how you feel when you know you’re about to die. He doesn’t understand why he isn’t terrified.

  A particularly big wave breaks loudly behind him. The spray flings needles at his back. He braces himself against the hard swirl of water, the boil of foam around his knees. Another big wave coils and crashes, then throws itself at his thighs. And another. N’Doch backs deeper into the water, wondering if there’s a new storm offshore that he hasn’t heard about. Two of the brothers are wading in after him now. The short one is in the lead, brandishing his metal club. He lashes out suddenly. N’Doch ducks. It’s a near miss. The short guy has very long arms. Another monster wave breaks. N’Doch knows he’ll have to swim for it soon. He can’t back out much farther in this high rough surf and keep his footing. The very next wave knocks him off-balance, and the club-wielder lunges after him with such a splashing and buffeting of metal and limbs and water that it isn’t until the swell is pulling back and N’Doch has his feet under him again that he feels the sear along his upper arm. A thin trail of blood slips out with the wave like a coil of brown kelp. He claps his hand to his bicep. The bastard’s cut him!

  Finally N’Doch begins to feel afraid. An open wound in this water? Any number of nasty things he could pick up. And then there are the sharks that cruise the beaches, for lack of prey farther out. The merest whiff of blood will bring them in, and a starving shark is more fearsome than any number of Malimba’s brothers.

  The biggest wave so far thunders into its curl behind him. N’Doch waits to be engulfed. No, he’ll dunk fast just before it hits and let it pummel them into the gravel. He scans the brothers’ faces for a measure of the wave’s size and sees instead a stark and uncomprehending terror. The short one has dropped his club. Suddenly, all three of them are back-stepping through the surging water as fast as they can, heading for shore. N’Doch is sure the sharks have come in with the wave, but he cannot bear to look. He throws himself after the brothers, paddling frantically with his hands. Briefly he worries that it might be a ruse to draw him within range, but he doesn’t believe they’re that gifted as actors. Their terror is pretty convincing. The minute they’re out of the water, they’re pounding away up the beach. They seem to have forgotten him entirely.

  N’Doch struggles against the pull of the undertow. He expects jaws lined with razors to clamp onto his thigh and haul him back again. As he stumbles into ankle-deep water and regains his balance, two of the brothers halt, high up on the beach. The short one is yanking on the taller one’s arm. The tall one shrugs him off. He’s yelling, and pointing toward the water. With his feet safely under him, N’Doch can resist no longer. He turns, and he sees a thing beyond his wildest imaginings.

  It’s not a shark. At first he thinks, Damn, that’s a really big porpoise. Then he thinks, No, it has legs. It’s a giant crocodile. No, the head’s too small, neck’s too long, it’s . . . like something he’s seen
in the movies. The only word he can come up with is dinosaur. Right. Okay. A dinosaur. It can’t be, but there is it. And now he’s sure he’s hearing music. Very strange music, like, inside his head. Maybe that tomato wasn’t so safe after all. It’s poisoned me, he thinks. I’m hallucinating.

  And then, for a moment, he stops thinking anything at all.

  With a flash of wet blue-gray and silver, the creature rises out of the waves in front of him. It has four mammalian legs and a sleek, close-eared head set on a sinuous muscular neck. It stands motionless in waist-deep water but he can feel its liquid grace. He thinks of a big cat inside the skin of a seal. He’s never seen anything so beautiful. Though it seems to tower over him, it’s actually no bigger than a large horse. Its eyes are dark and round, almost level with his own, and they are staring straight at him.

  N’Doch takes the obvious step backward but that odd absence of fear has taken hold of him again. He feels no need to run. The music fills his inner ears and mostly he’s thinking how absolutely fucking weird this whole thing is, and could the brothers have poisoned the tomato on purpose? Were they only chasing him to be there watching and laughing when he freaked out? Well, he isn’t going to give them the satisfaction. Besides, they’re the ones who’re freaking out. Which means either they’re pretending to see something terrifying, or they really are seeing something terrifying, which means . . .

  N’Doch notices his legs have given up supporting him. He sits down hard on the sand and stares dumbfounded into a pair of round, dark eyes that are beginning to show signs of impatience.

  Behind him, he hears someone coughing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At first she was sure he’d landed them in the middle of a fire. The hot light was so hazed and the air so thick with soot and fetid odor. She shrank against him, pressing her shoulder to the dragon’s side to take comfort from his girth and solidity, from the hard geometry of his leathery hide, retreating into his shadow from the glare of this sun, this searing angry red-faced sun so unlike the sun she knew. Even in the dragon’s shade, she felt heat radiating upward from the scorched sand. Her nose tickled and her lungs hurt. She coughed, tried not breathing, then realized why that couldn’t work, so drew a breath and coughed again.

  —Dragon? Where are we?

  —I have no idea. But . . . look!

  Abandoning the language of words that he’d only recently learned, he poured into her head a quick reminder, images culled from the dark and noisome dreams they’d shared of late. Erde had to agree this could be the very place, the landscape of their recurrent nightmares, a place of horror. There was the same burnt yellow sky striated with gray, the same acid smells, the constant roll of thunder. Despite the heat, Erde shivered. It had been night when they’d left Deep Moor, mere seconds before. Here, everything was suddenly too bright. Her eyes burned. She squeezed them shut. She didn’t want to see this place anyway.

  —Look!

  —I don’t want to look! It’s ugly! Why have you brought us here?

  She hoped her voice in his head did not sound as querulous as it did in her own. Yet maybe he would reconsider, and spirit her back to the meadows of Deep Moor where she could breathe again.

  —Here am I Called. Here the Quest will truly begin.

  He sounded very sure, but Erde could detect in his formality just the faintest hint of false bravado. This place they’d come to wasn’t exactly what the dragon had hoped for either.

  Which meant he would need her to be strong. No time for girlish hearts or a lady’s refined sensibilities. Not that she was ever very refined. Erde thought of Hal, who had yearned so to be a part of the dragon’s Quest. He hadn’t even minded that the dragon could not identify the object of that Quest. She wished the elder knight was with them now, to apply his skills and discipline to this unfamiliar situation, and all the equally unforeseen ones likely to come out of it. But he was back at Deep Moor with Rose and the others, up to his elbows once more in the game of king-making. Of course, he didn’t consider it a game, and Erde knew she shouldn’t either. No more a game than the dragon’s Quest, which she’d taken seriously from the moment she’d been faced with it. Therefore, she must follow Sir Hal’s example. If he was not there to tell her what to do, she must imagine his advice and be guided by it. The child in her complained that she was too young to shoulder such a burden, too exhausted from the upheaval of the past two months of fear and constant flight to face an even greater uncertainty. The adult, so recently come to consciousness, reminded her she had no choice.

  —So, Dragon. What shall we do?

  —Wait. Watch.

  The dragon eased himself down on his great haunches, claws and head forward like an alert guard dog, and evidently just as willing to sit still forever until what he waited for came to him.

  Watch. Erde remembered Hal’s habit of observation. Wherever they’d camped on their long journey from Tor Alte, his first task before any was to take careful stock of the area, not only to search out ambush or pursuit, but to learn which local resources were available and which were not. Water, firewood, food perhaps. Shelter from the weather, cover from their enemies. There were always enemies.

  At least, Erde thought, we’ve escaped from them this time. To this dry landscape, alien yet familiar, not just from the dragon’s dreams but her own as well, she realized. The dreams where her father and Rainer fought, and their swords clashed and sparked in a harsh and smoky place was more like this place than the one she’d left behind.

  Rainer. Ah, Rainer. But it did not do to think of Rainer, not in any way except as lost, as she’d thought he was until mere hours ago, hours that now seemed like years. He was lost again anyhow, even before she’d left Deep Moor. Erde raised her head from her crouch at the dragon’s side and turned her mind to her surroundings.

  She’d felt the hot sand underfoot but had not realized there was so much of it, more than she’d ever seen in one place. It stretched behind her like a dry riverbed toward a long line of trees, impossible trees with tall, curving trunks as slim as needles and a pincushion of leafy branches sticking out on top. There was lots of stuff in the sand, broken stuff. Some of it was wood, sun-bleached and weatherworn, but most of it was shiny or glittery, materials she couldn’t identify. Erde pushed off the dragon’s shoulder for a better look, teetering along his forearm and grasping one long ivory horn for support. Balanced on his right paw, her eyes were level with his own golden orbs, each one as big as her head. She peered over his stubby snout.

  First she saw a mass of huge bright boats crowding the sand off to the left. They were nothing like the flat-bottomed scows that plied the rivers of the lowlands back home but they were surely boats, none the less. She’d seen such boats sewn into the tapestries that softened the stone walls of Tor Alte. But she could put no label to the square dark hulks looming to the right like a range of hills. They could be buildings, she supposed, but she saw no doors or windows, only seams and slits in the rusted metal. Fortifications of some sort, she decided. And then, between that grim and faceless wall and the rainbowed hulls of the boats, there was the water. So much water! Now Erde understood the source of the continuous rolling sound of thunder. She knew without being told that she was looking at the sea.

  The sight of it lifted her spirits. She had always dreamed of visiting the sea. But the dragon regarded the roaring, tumbling water with evident trepidation. Erde patted his bony nose reassuringly. Moving water was not his favorite thing. She thought this odd, since in the bard tales, it was the uncharted seas from which the dragons of legend arose to swallow unfortunate sailing ships and their crews. But Erde had learned to think differently about dragons since meeting this one. Her dragon was definitely earthbound, and unlikely to swallow up anything without first asking its permission.

  Then, over the din of the waves, she heard shouting. Male voices, several of them. She couldn’t make out the words, but there was no mistaking the high-pitched tone of derision. Around the end of the dark unknown hulk, a m
an came running. At least, she thought it was a man. It was shaped like one, though he ran with the rangy sure grace of a young colt. But there was something wrong with his skin. It was unnaturally dark, darker than a farmer’s after a summer in the fields, darker even than the gypsies who sometimes pulled their wagons up to Tor Alte’s gates to barter for food and shelter with their exotic trinkets.

  The dark man pulled up short when he spotted the bright fleet hauled up in front of him on the sand. Even from a distance, his dismay was obvious. Beside Erde, the dragon tensed. She could feel him stilling, preparing to make himself invisible. He sent her an image of hiding behind the nearest boat. But it wasn’t the running man who was shouting. It was the three others behind him, as dark as he but shorter and thicker. When they spotted the first man, one stooped to snatch up a club. Erde thought they looked terrifying.

  —Now, Dragon! Before they see us!

  Erde prepared to dash for cover among the boats. But the dragon was no longer watching the events unfolding on the beach. He sat up very tall, intent on the churning water. A sort of thrumming sang through his body, like the vibrations of lute strings after the music has ended.

  —Dragon, what is it?

  —There! She comes!

  —Who?

  —The one who Calls me!

  Erde squinted at the line of dirty froth. Was there someone else approaching along this crowded shore? Then she saw it, the snakelike neck and narrow head, lifting above the cresting waves. The body was slim and streamlined and surprisingly small, but Erde had grown up with legends. She had no trouble recognizing one when she saw it.

  Another dragon was rising out of the waves.

  CHAPTER THREE

  N’Doch decides he can’t be hallucinating. Instead of the usual speed buzz, there’s music in his head. And it’s pretty interesting music, too. He’s tempted just to give in and listen, when suddenly, he figures it out. He laughs with relief, and right away starts looking around for the hidden lights and camera crews.