The Book of Water

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “The roof, over there?” N’Doch pointed.

  “Likely.”

  “We’ll go around the other side, then, out of their line of fire.”

  “Why are they shooting at us?” Erde asked. “We are not their enemies.”

  “They don’t know that,” N’Doch retorted. “They’re shootin’ at anything that moves. You ready? Let’s go.”

  Erde crept after him in the shadow of the bushes until they reached the front corner of the house. N’Doch stopped to reconnoiter. Erde saw the “guests” all huddled up against the compound wall in groups, or crouching singly behind the wide stone bases of the planters.

  “Good.” N’Doch chewed his lip nervously. “They’ve left the doors open a crack in case anyone’s brave enough to make a run for the house.”

  Wasser said quietly, “Looks like someone already tried.”

  Out on the little grass plot in the center of the gravel drive, a woman lay sprawled on her face, moaning. Blood leaked from her upper back. Erde moved instinctively to help her, but N’Doch caught her and yanked her back hard. “No!”

  “But she’s down, she’s hurt. Surely they’ll let us retrieve the wounded?”

  His look seemed to pity and envy her simultaneously. “What kinda wars you been fighting in, girl?”

  Just then, the front doors opened wide, and two of Lealé’s white clad acolytes raced out across the gravel and grass to haul the woman to safety.

  “Now!” N’Doch grabbed Erde’s elbow, dragging her with him as he leaped up onto the columned porch and shoved through the open doorway. “In, woman, in!” he yelled at Lealé, who was standing beside the door. “You’re in range!” He bundled Erde and Wasser inside after her, then held the door as the acolytes retreated inside with their bloodied burden.

  * * *

  N’Doch is impressed with Lealé’s calm. No womanish fainting away at the sight of blood. For that matter, the girl’s not either, though she does look a little shell-shocked by the sudden violent turn of events, all blown up around her like a thunderstorm. Probably she’s not used to stuff happening this fast.

  Lealé hovers over them briefly. “Children! Children! I looked and you were gone! Are you all right? I’m so glad you’re safe!” And then she’s off down the hall, directing the flapper rescue team into the dining room. “In here. Lay her on that other table! Quickly! Call Millet!”

  “Stick close,” N’Doch warns the kid and the girl. He trails after Lealé, moving through milling knots of anxious flappers and guests who have fled inside. The cool perfumed indoor air is heating up with the rank smells of sweat and fear. He passes the doorway to the long parlor and shoots a glance inside. More guests, crowds of them, some talking in frightened whispers, most of them huddled around vid screens that were hidden before behind the fancy wood paneling.

  For the second time in one day, N’Doch entertains the wild fantasy that what they’re so riveted to is the news of the coup, and once again, he’s proved wrong. The late afternoon series is playing on all screens. He studies the faces of the watchers for a moment. The Watchers. Their eyes stare like they’re drinking in the screen, like if they stared hard enough, they could be in there, a part of somebody else’s story instead of their own. Why aren’t they worried about what’s going on at home, whether their house is being ransacked, whether their wives or husbands or children are being shot in the streets? Probably they are, N’Doch thinks, but it’s like they’ve forgotten how to do anything about it. All they know how to do is watch.

  Suddenly he knows there’s something he’s gotta do, and he drags the kid and the girl back down the crowded hall to the office. The door is closed but not locked. He ducks inside, hauling the other two with him. “Close the door,” he whispers to the girl.

  This seems to be the only room that hasn’t been invaded by “guests” and panic. The head flapper Jean-Pierre is there with a few others, all of them busily clicking away at various keypads, muttering figures and names at each other. They barely glance up as N’Doch comes in. A last-ditch effort, he imagines, to reroute Lealé’s business dealings around changes resulting from the coup. He sees there’s PrintNews scattered everywhere. It’s overflowed the output bin at the terminal. The service is working overtime, and here are a group of people who may actually read it. The business people. The money people. The people who know the real meaning of power. N’Doch is amazed he hasn’t understood this before.

  He parks the girl by the door to keep watch, for what he’s not sure, but it makes him feel better as he ventures into this cool, white, alien space. The apparition shadows him as he goes straight to the PrintNews terminal and takes the latest sheet as it peels out of the slot. As he reads, the apparition reads over his shoulder.

  What he sees shocks him. It makes denial rise up in him like the instinct to run, but he guesses he’s got to believe what he’s reading. If this ain’t the truth, the truth ain’t to be had. But it tears away the foundation of a notion he didn’t even know he’d relied upon until he sees it crumbling. He knows things are bad. It’s all around him, every day. But still, there’s this notion he’s buried inside himself, that things aren’t really as bad everywhere else in the world as they are where he is. That somewhere, even though he can’t get there, things are better, there’s still hope.

  If PrintNews tells true, there isn’t. It’s just another fantasy like every other fantasy he’s been sold, ’cause there’s bad shit coming down everywhere. He’s got it right in front of him in black and white.

  Half of Europe underwater, for instance, and the Amazon basin, and parts of Asia he’s never even heard of. Huge storms everywhere, and crop failures, item after item, a long list of national emergencies and requests for relief, desperate cries for help muffled by the dry news service prose. He sees stuff about countries moving their capitals to higher ground, about the tides of refugees rolling inland, about governments collapsing under the strain. Revolution, violence, repression, anarchy. The weight of this steady progression of disaster bears down on N’Doch until he has to look away.

  “Jeez . . .” breathes the apparition.

  N’Doch’s impulse is to grab the nearest responsible person and shake them until their bones rattle. He wants to scream, “Why didn’t you tell us?” But there’s no one in this room worth grabbing. The responsibility lies much higher up than skinny head flapper Jean-Pierre, and what’s worse, it lies within himself as well. N’Doch sees he’s been wrong all this time to think of himself as one of the Watched, or even Watched-in-Waiting. He’s a Watcher, just like everyone else, taking what he’s given as information and image, and buying right into it, same as his mama does. His particular fantasy is different from hers, is all. It’s still a fantasy.

  He leans his forehead against the terminal and lets out an explosion of breath. It seems to come from the bottom of his feet, an exhalation of pure rage and frustration.

  “I used to razz Sedou,” he tells the apparition. “Say he was living in a fantasy world if he thought he could change things by messing in politics.” N’Doch saw himself as the pragmatic realist, the artist and independent loner, out for what he could get from the world. But what’s coming clear is how he’s been taught to want only what the world thinks is good business to sell him, assuming he ever gets rich enough to be able to afford it. The world, and by “the world” he’s beginning to mean Baraga and those like him, the real power brokers—they don’t want him to want freedom, they want him to want things, comfort, fame. They’d rather he didn’t have a true awareness of how fucked up things really are, so they trained him not to want it.

  But knowledge is power, or so it seems to N’Doch as he stands with just that sort of information held slack in his hand. What burns him the most is that this realization has probably come too late. He’s never sidestepped the current of life like he thought he had, not even for a moment. He’s right there in the torrent, caught up in the tide of events, tumbling head over heels along with everyone else.
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br />   “Hey, bro?” murmurs the apparition. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he replies curtly, but he isn’t. His mind is a seething mess. He’s blind with rage and panic and humiliation.

  “I think you’re not . . .”

  N’Doch thrusts the paper in the kid’s face. “Well, look at this!”

  “I know. I did.”

  “Doesn’t it make all your ‘quest’ shit look pretty silly when laid up beside the end of the world as we know it?”

  The apparition blinks at him with the dragon’s bottomless dark eyes. “Not if preventing the end of the world is the object of that Quest.”

  N’Doch thinks, Man, haven’t we been through this already? “‘Saving the world’ is just a phrase, kid. It means you’re a do-gooder, which I know you are, and that’s fine. But you can’t take it literally.”

  “I can. I do.”

  “I mean, it doesn’t mean you gotta try to do it single-handedly.”

  “It might.”

  “What?” N’Doch really has to laugh. “You?”

  “Us. Not as we are but as we will be.”

  N’Doch feels the conversation spinning off from the crisis at hand back toward the realm of the unreal, where as far as he sees it, no solution lies. These dragons are as bad as Baraga. “And what will we be?”

  “Eight, eventually. Four dragons, four companions. A synergy of power.”

  “Great. One dragon you can’t find and the other one’s trying to kill you.”

  The kid’s brow furrows like he’s having a complicated thought. “That must be part of the Work.”

  “What is?”

  “Overcoming the obstacles. Solving the mysteries. All leading toward the awakening to power.”

  “We don’t have time for all that!” N’Doch grabs up another sheet of PrintNews and shakes it like a club. “What’s it got to do with today and tomorrow and how we’re gonna get ourselves out of this mess?”

  “Everything! Have you been listening to me at all?”

  In his head, N’Doch hears/feels a blast of music, a gale that almost knocks him flat. He sags against the PrintNews terminal. He’s breathless and shaking. He understands that the dragon has just lost her patience with him. “Okay, okay. Okay. We’ll do whatever you want.”

  The apparition sighs. “I want to do what you said, before you let revelation sidetrack you.”

  N’Doch is exhausted. He glances at the girl, still guarding the door. She watching him, and her eyes are soft with sympathy. “And what was that? Remind me.”

  “Lealé.”

  “Oh, right. Lealé.” His brain feels pummeled, but another piece of his new analysis has just clicked into place, and he sees a direction, at least, in which a solution might lie.

  They collect the girl and shove their way back along the long hallway, more crowded even than it was before, and into the dining rom. A group of flappers, plus an older woman N’Doch hasn’t seen before, are gathered around a long table at one end, working on the gunshot wound. He sees another “guest” lying on the floor, wrapped in a tablecloth. He can’t tell if the guy’s dead or alive, but he figures no one would’ve risked life and limb to drag him in if he was gone already.

  Lealé’s pacing in small circles at the other end, talking rapidly into a phone like the one Baraga’d had with him. N’Doch is glad she’s smart enough to stay clear of the windows. Above the drawn draperies, the windows arch in a clear half-moon of divided glass. He sees thick sunset colors in the light, and gathering darkness in the sky above. He has a momentary inspiration for a song he could write about darkness gathering all around the world.

  Lealé finishes her call when she sees them coming. Her eyes land on the apparition and stay there, so N’Doch lets him take the lead. It’s his party, anyway.

  The kid doesn’t beat around the bush. “Mother Lealé, your help is needed. We must return immediately to your ‘Dream Haven.’”

  She waves her arms as if warding him off. “There’s no time for dreams now. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

  “I do. All the more reason.”

  “No! He’ll find out! You’ll ruin me!”

  “Events outside seem to be conspiring to do that already.”

  Lealé turns away, a Glory turn, and shakes her mane of beaded hair. “Nonsense. This goes on all the time. Once the new leaders have settled in, everything will be business as usual.”

  “Mother Lealé.” The kid’s tone is low, almost conspiratorial. “Do you really believe that?”

  Panic flares into Lealé’s eyes. N’Doch can see her trying to dampen it, but it still makes her hands flutter around too much and her voice unsteady. “Of course I do.”

  The kid takes her arm. “We need to talk.”

  Probably because he’s so small and childlike, Lealé doesn’t resist as he leads her toward the alcove. N’Doch beckons to the girl, and follows. As he draws the curtains behind them, he sees another shooting victim being carried in. This time, it’s a head wound, and it looks like a bad one. The snipers’ aim is improving.

  The kid sits Lealé down on a couch, then sits beside her, holding her hand. “Now listen. You had a dream, Mother Lealé, that caused you to write to an old friend you hadn’t seen in years. That dream told you to expect travelers. Was it a good dream?”

  Both his formality and his question seemed to puzzle her. Lealé considered. “Yes . . . I recall being very excited. I felt something wonderful was going to happen.”

  “But later, you had visits from your spirit guide directing you to . . . well, disable the travelers . . . permanently.”

  Nervous, she answers, “Yes.”

  The apparition nods, and N’Doch sees the nod of an old wise woman, slow and serene. “And you also dreamed of a particular place, a house that the dream led you to acquire. What was that dream like?”

  Lealé looks around her like she’s costing out the furniture. “I didn’t dream of the house, actually. I dreamed of that grove of trees out back and felt I had to have them. When I inquired, I found the house came with them.”

  “A dream of trees.” The apparition has a triumphant gleam in his eyes. “And then the idea to make a business there was . . .”

  “Suggested by my . . . my investor, who I had helped so much by bringing him dreams in the past.” She frowns, remembering. “He told me I should cut the trees down, build a new wing on the house to quarter my staff. It was our first argument ever.”

  “Why would he want you to destroy something so lovely? Surely it adds to the value of the property?”

  “It is peculiar. He spends huge sums planting trees around his own house and grounds.”

  “So it must be something about this particular grove of trees. That he doesn’t like.”

  “I don’t know. Why does it matter?”

  “Because I think I do know.” He urges N’Doch and the girl in closer with his eyes. “You are a gifted receptor, Mother Lealé. There are not many such available. So, more than one entity wishing to communicate might be led to take advantage of your gifts. I believe that not all your dreams come from your spirit guide. The two we mentioned, for example: They came from somewhere else, and later your dream guide saw to it that you reinterpreted their instructions.”

  N’Doch is sure Lealé wouldn’t appreciate the image he has of her now, as some sort of psychic ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “Dreams from someone else?” she asks, right on cue.

  “Someone I have seen and Erde has seen, and you have seen as well, and been told to deny. The presence in the wood.”

  Lealé gazes at the apparition unhappily, then stands up and begins to pace.

  “We must try to contact it,” he continues, letting his voice follow her around the alcove. “It has been your true Work, which your spirit guide has tried to disrupt, to bring us here for that Purpose. And we must accomplish it quickly, before he succeeds in stopping us. Even this fighting now, I believe, is part of his plan.”

  N’Doc
h moves into the archway, so he can stop Lealé in case she decides to pace herself right out of the room. He wants to get this act over with and be on to finding a place for them all to lay low that isn’t ground zero. He sees her eyes flick up to the top of the arch, just a flick and back, he almost didn’t catch it. But now he knows he’s missed a camera port in his initial survey of the alcove. He checks it out. Sure enough. Damn! But he doubts, with all this chaos going on, that anyone’s bothering to keep an eye on the monitors.

  * * *

  Watching Lealé pace and wring her hands, Erde felt sorry for her. Unlike herself and N’Doch, Lealé had a perfectly good life that she was putting at risk. Or at least she did until the fighting broke out.

  Erde considered that coincidence. War here, war at home. Could the fighting at home also be part of someone’s dire plan, a someone that Water insisted must be the dragon Fire? Why would Fire wish to disrupt the Work, whatever it was, that all the dragons were being called to perform?

  “Think of Djawara,” little Wasser was saying, “who sent us to you in trust and full faith that you would do what was needed. . . .”

  “But I don’t know what that is!”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “All right! But I won’t go in there with you this time. I won’t face him if he comes to punish me!”

  “I don’t think,” replied Wasser, “that he will dare show his face while I’m around.”

  N’Doch bent his head to Erde’s ear as Lealé palmed the wall and the paneling hissed open. “Don’t forget to tell the big guy we’re going off the radar.”

  Wasser led the way this time, down the unlighted passageway. Because he could move so surely in the dark, they were there before Erde had time to admit to herself how scared she was. What if it was Fire, and he did dare to show himself?

  The dim little room was the same as it had been before, only warmer. The air was thick and close, and tinged with smoke. Wasser sniffed thoughtfully. “My brother leaves his calling card.”

  N’Doch grinned. “Trying to scare us off?”