A Pool In The Desert

A Pool in the Desert.

Robin McKinley.

Robin McKinley was born in Ohio and grew up all over the world because her father was in the army. She now lives in the south of England with her husband, writer Peter d.i.c.kinson. She is the author of several fantasy novels published for young adults but loved by readers of all ages, including Beauty, Rose Daughter, The Blue Sword (a Newbery Honor Book), and The Hero and the Crown (winner of the Newbery Medal). Her most recent novel is Spindle"s End, based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. McKinley"s short fiction has been published in The Door in the Hedge, A Knot in the Grain, and Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits. The latter volume is the first book in a projected series based on the four elements, written in collaboration with her husband.

"A Pool in the Desert" first appeared in Water. The story is loosely connected to McKinley"s "Damar" novels (The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown), though readers needn"t be familiar with Damar to enjoy this fine work of traditional fantasy.

-T. W.

There were no deserts in the Homeland. Perhaps that was why she dreamed of deserts. She had had her first desert dreams when she was quite young, and still had time to read storybooks and imagine herself in them; but deserts were only one of the things she dreamed about in those days. She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular knight and hoped that, when he won the tournament, it would be she to whom he came, and stooped on bended knee, and... and sometimes she dreamed that she was a lady who tied her hair up and pulled a helmet down over it and over her face, and won the tournament herself, and everyone watching said, Who is that strange knight? For I have never seen his like. After her mother fell ill and she no longer had time to read, she still dreamed, but the knights and quests and tournaments dropped out of her dreams, and only the deserts remained.

For years in these desert dreams she rode a slender, graceful horse with an arched neck, and it flew over the sand as if it had wings; but when she drew up on the crest of a dune and looked behind her, there would be the shallow half-circles of hoofprints following them, hummocking the wind-ridges and bending the coa.r.s.e blades of the sand-gra.s.s. Her horse would dance under her, splashing sand, and blow through red nostrils, asking to gallop on, but she would wait for the rest of her party, less wonderfully mounted, toiling behind her. Then she would turn again in the direction they were all going, and shade her eyes with one hand, talking soothingly to her restless horse through the reins held lightly in the other; and there would be the dark shadow of mountains before her, mountains she knew to call the Hills.

As the years pa.s.sed, however, the dreams changed again. She left school at sixteen because her parents said they could spare her no longer, with her mother ill and Ruth and Jeff still so little and her father and Dane (who had left school two years before) working extra hours in the shop because the specialists her mother needed were expensive. When Mrs. Halford and Mr. Jonah came to visit them at home (repeated efforts to persuade her parents to come into the school for a meeting having failed), and begged them to reconsider, and said that she was sure of a scholarship, that her education would be no burden to them, her mother only wept and said in her trembling invalid voice that she was a good girl and they needed her at home, and her father only stared, until at last they went away, the tea and biscuits she had made in honour of so rare an event as visitors in the parlour untouched. Her father finally told her: "See them out to their car, Hetta, and then come direct back. Supper"s to be on time, mind."

The three of them were quiet as they went down the stairs and through the hall that ran alongside the shop. The part.i.tion was made of cheap ply, for customers never saw it, which made the hall ugly and unfriendly, in spite of the old family photos Hetta had hung on the walls. The shop-door opened nearly on the curb, for the shop had eaten up all of what had been the front garden. At the last minute Mrs. Halford took Hetta"s hand and said, "If there"s anything I can do-this year, next year, any time. Ring me."

Hetta nodded, said good-bye politely, and then turned round to go back to the house and get supper and see what Ruth and Jeff were doing. Her father had already rejoined Dane in the shop; her mother had gone to bed, taking the plate of biscuits with her.

Ruth had been told by their father to stay out of the way, it was none of her concern, but she was waiting for Hetta in the kitchen. "What happened?" she said.

"Nothing," said Hetta. "Have you done your homework?"

"Yes," said Ruth. "All but the reading. D"you want to listen while you cook?"

"Yes," said Hetta. "That would be nice."

That night Hetta dreamed of a sandstorm. She was alone in darkness, the wind roaring all round her, the sand up to her ankles, her knees, her waist, filling her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Friendly sand. She snuggled down into it as if it were a blanket; as it filled her ears she could no longer hear the wind, nor anything else. When the alarm went off at dawn, she felt as stiff as if she had been buried in sand all night, and her eyes were so sticky, she had to wash her face before she could open them properly.

It had been a relief to quit school, because she was tired all the time. There was more than she could get done even after there was no schoolwork to distract her; but without the schoolwork she found that her mind went to sleep while her body went on with her ch.o.r.es, and for a while that seemed easier. Sometimes months pa.s.sed without her ever thinking about what she was doing, or not doing, or about Mrs. Halford, or about how she might have used that scholarship if she had got it, if her parents had let her accept it, which they wouldn"t have. Months pa.s.sed while her days were bound round with cooking and housekeeping and keeping the shop accounts, looking through cookery books for recipes when her mother thought that this or that might tempt her appet.i.te, sweeping the pa.s.sage from the shop twice a day because of the sawdust, teaching Ruth and Jeff to play checkers and fold paper airplanes. When she had first started keeping the accounts, she had done it in the evening, after supper was cleared away and there were no other demands till morning, and the kitchen was peaceful while everyone watched TV in the parlour. But she found she was often too bone weary to pay the necessary attention, so she had taught herself to do it in the edgy time between breakfast and lunch, when the phone was liable to ring, and her mother to be contemplating having one of her bad days, and her father to call her down to the shop to wait on a customer. One afternoon a week she took the car to the mall and shopped for everything they had to have. After the narrow confines of the house, the car park seemed liberating, the neon-edged sky vast.

The months mounted up, and turned into years.

One year the autumn gales were so severe that ruining the harvest and breaking fences for the stock to get through out in the countryside wasn"t enough, and they swept into the towns to trouble folk there. Trees and TV aerials came down, and some chimney-pots; there was so much rain that everyone"s cellars flooded. The wood stored in their cellar had to come up into the parlour, whereupon there was nowhere to sit except the kitchen. Everyone"s tempers grew short with crowding, and when the TV was brought in too, there was nowhere to put it except on counter s.p.a.ce Hetta couldn"t spare. The only time there was armistice was during programmes interviewing farmers about how bad everything was. Her father watched these with relish and barked "Ha!" often.

That season in spite of the weather she spent more time than ever in the garden. The garden had still been tended by her great-grandfather when she was very small, but after he died, only her grandmother paid any attention to it. As her mother"s illness took hold and her father"s business took off, it grew derelict, for her grandmother had done the work Hetta did now, with a bad hip and hands nearly frozen with arthritis. Hetta began to clear and plant it about a year after she stopped school; gardening, she found, was interesting, and it got her out of the house. Her father grumbled about having to contain his heaps of wood chips and discarded bits too broken to be mended, but permitted it because she grew vegetables and fruit, which lowered the grocery bills, and she canned and froze what they didn"t eat in season. No one else even seemed to notice that the view from the rear of the house looked any different than the front-although Ruth liked bugs, and would sometimes come out to look at the undersides of leaves and sc.r.a.pe things into jars-and so long as Hetta wasn"t missing when someone wanted her, nothing was said about the hours she spent in the garden. Their house was the oldest on the street and had the largest garden. It had been a pretty house once, before the shop destroyed its front, but the shop at least made it look more in keeping with the rest of the row. There were proper walls around their garden, eight foot tall on three sides, and the house the fourth. It was her own little realm.

That autumn there was a heaviness to the air, and it smelled of rain and earth and wildness even on days when the sun shone. Hetta usually left as much as she could standing over the winter, to give shelter to Ruth"s bugs and the birds and hedgehogs that ate them, but this year she brought the last tomatoes and squashes indoors early (where, denied the wet cellar., she balanced them on piles of timber in the parlour), and she cut back and tied in and staked everything that was left. Even with the walls protecting it, the wind curled in here, flinging other people"s tiles at her runner-bean teepees and stripping and shredding the fleece that protected the bra.s.sicas. Sometimes she stopped and listened, as if the whistle of the wind was about to tell her something. Sometimes at sunset, when there was another storm coming, the sky reminded her of her desert. But she didn"t dare stop long or often, even in the garden; her mother"s bedroom window overlooked it, and the sight of Hetta standing still invariably made her hungry. She would open her window and call down to Hetta that she just felt she might eat a little something if Hetta would make it up nice the way she always did and bring it to her.

When the meteorologists began predicting the big storm on its way, the family gathered round the TV set as if the weather report had become a daily installment of a favourite soap opera. Her father snorted; he hated experts in clean business suits telling him things he didn"t know. But he didn"t protest when the TV was turned on early and he didn"t declare the forecast rubbish, and he told Hetta to do her weekly shop early, "just in case."

Two days later the sky went green-yellow, grey-purple; soon, sighed the p.r.i.c.kle of wind against her skin, and for a moment, leaning on her hoe, the sky was some other sky, and the smooth wooden handle in her hands felt gritty, as if sticky with sand. Her fingers, puzzled, rolled it against her palm, and she blinked, and the world seemed to blink with her, and she was again standing in the back garden of the house where three generations of her father"s kin had lived, and there was a storm coming.

When the storm came in the deep night, Hetta was asleep. She knew she was asleep, and yet she knew when the storm wind picked her up... no, it did not pick her up, it plunged her down, forced her down, down into darkness and roaring and a great weight against her chest, like a huge hand pressing her into...

She was drowning in sand. It wasn"t at all as she"d imagined it, a peaceful ending, a giving up: she did not want to die, and what was happening hurt. She gasped and choked, nearly fainting, and the sand bit into her skin, sharp as teeth. She could feel the tiny innumerable grains hissing over her, offering no apparent resistance as she beat at them, pouring through her fingers, down her body, into her eyes and mouth, the unimaginable mult.i.tudes of them covering her till they weighed as heavy as boulders, a river, an avalanche...

Where were the others? Had they set out knowing a storm was on the way? Even in this area a storm this severe gave some warning...

In thin area? Where was she? There was nothing to tell her-nothing but sand and wind roar and darkness. And... who were they? She could not remember- she would not have set out alone-even a guided party had to take care-in the last few years the storms had grown more violent and less predictable-parties rarely went mounted any more-she-remembered- Perhaps she slept; perhaps she fainted. But there were hands upon her- hands? Had her party found her again? She tried to struggle, or to cooperate. The hands helped her up, held her up, from her wind-battered, sand-imprisoned crouch. The wind still shouted, and she could see nothing; but the hands arranged the veil over her face and she could breathe a little more easily, and this gave her strength. When the hands lifted her so that one of her arms could be pulled around a set of invisible shoulders, and one of the hands gripped her round her waist, she could walk, staggering, led by her rescuer.

For some time she concentrated on breathing, on breathing and keeping her feet under her, tasks requiring her full attention. But her arm, held round the shoulders, began to ache; and the ache began to penetrate her brain, and her brain began to remember that it didn"t usually have to occupy itself with negotiating breathing and walking...

It was still dark, and the wind still howled, and there was still sand in the heaving air, but it pattered against her now, it no longer dragged at and cut her. She thought, The storm is still going on all round us, but it is not reaching us somehow. She had an absurd image that they-her unknown rescuer and herself-were walking in a tiny rolling cup of sand that was always shallow to their feet just a footstep"s distance before and behind them, with a close-fitting lid of almost quiet, almost sandless air tucked over them.

When the hand clutching her wrist let go, she grabbed the shoulder and missed, for her hand had gone numb; but the hand round her waist held her. She steadied herself, and the second hand let go, but only long enough to find her hand, and hold it firmly-As if I might run off into the sandstorm again, she thought, distantly amused. She looked toward the hand, the shoulders-and now she could see a human outline, but the face was turned away from her, the free hand groping for something in front of it.

She blinked, trying to understand where the light to see came from. She slowly worked out that the hand was more visible than the rest of the body it was attached to; and she had just realised that they seemed to be standing in front of a huge, rough, slightly glowing-wall? Cliff? For it seemed to loom over them; she guessed at something like a ledge or half-roof high above them-when the fingers stiffened and the hand shook itself up in what seemed like a gesture of command-and the wall before them became a door, and folded back into itself. Light fell out, and pooled in the sand at their feet, outlining tiny pits and hummocks in shadows.

"Quickly," said a voice. "I am almost as tired as you, and Geljdreth does not like to be cheated of his victims."

She just managed to comprehend that the words were for her, and she stepped through the door unaided. The hand that was holding hers loosed her, the figure followed her, and this time she heard another word, half-shouted, and she turned in time to see the same stiff-fingered jerk of the hand that had appeared to open the door: it slammed shut on a gust of sand like a sword-stroke. The furious sand slashed into her legs and she stumbled and cried out: the hands saved her again, catching her above the elbows. She put her hands out unthinkingly, and felt collarbones under her hands, and warm breath on her wrists.

"Forgive me," she said, and the absurdity of it caught at her, but she was afraid to laugh, as if once she started, she might not be able to stop.

"Forgive?" said the figure. "It is I who must ask you to forgive me. I should have seen you before; I am a Watcher, and this is my place, and Kalarsham is evil-tempered lately and lets Geljdreth do as he likes. But it was as if you were suddenly there, from nowhere. Rather like this storm. A storm like this usually gives warning, even here."

She remembered her first thought when she woke up-if indeed any of this was waking-Even in this area a storm this severe gave some warning. "Where- where am I?" she said.

The figure had pulled the veiling down from its face, and pushed the hood back from its head. He was clean-shaven, dark-skinned, almost mahogany in the yellow light of the stony room where they stood, black-haired; she could not sec if his eyes were brown or black. "Where did you come from?" he said, not as if he were ignoring her question but as if it had been rhetorical and required no answer. "You must have set out from Chinilar, what, three or four weeks ago? And then come on from Thaar? What I don"t understand is what you were doing alone. You had lost whatever kit and company you came with before I found you-I am sorry-but there wasn"t even a pack animal with you. I may have been careless"-his voice sounded strained, as if he were not used to finding himself careless-"but I would have noticed, even if it had been too late."

She shook her head. "Chinilar?" she said.

He looked at her as if playing over in his mind what she had last said. He spoke gently. "This is the station of the fourth Watcher, the Citadel of the Meeting of the Sands, and I am he."

"The fourth-Watcher?" she said.

"There are eleven of us," he said, still gently. "We watch over the eleven Sandpales where the blood of the head of Maur sank into the earth after Aerin and Tor threw the evil thing out of the City and it burnt the forests and rivers of the Old Damar to the Great Desert in the rage of its thwarting. Much of the desert is quiet-as much as any desert is quiet-but Tor, the Just and Powerful, set up our eleven stations where the desert is not quiet. The first is named the Citadel of the Raising of the Sands, and the second is the Citadel of the Parting of the Sands, and the third is the Citadel of the Breathing of the Sands... The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Watchers arc often called upon, for our Pales lie near the fastest way through the Great Desert, from Rawalthifan in the West to the plain that lies before the Queen"s City itself. But I-I have never Watched so badly before. Where did you come from?" he said again, and now she heard the frustration and distress in his voice. "Where do you come from, as if the storm itself had brought you?"

Faintly she replied: "I come from Roanshire, one of the south counties of the Homeland; I live in a town called Farbellow about fifteen miles southwest of Mauncester. We live above my father"s furniture shop. And I still do not know where I am."

He answered: "I have never heard of Roanshire, or the Homeland, or Mauncester. The storm brought you far indeed. This is the land called Damar, and you stand at the fourth Sandpale at the edge of the Great Desert we call Kalar-sham."

And then there was a terrible light in her eyes like the sun bursting, and when she put her hands up to protect her face there was a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, and a voice, a familiar voice, saying, "Hetta, Hetta, wake up, are you ill?" But the voice sounded strange, despite its familiarity, as if speaking a language she used to know but had nearly forgotten. But she heard anxiety in the voice, and fear, and she swam towards that fear, from whatever far place she was in, for she knew the fear, it was hers, and her burden to protect those who shared it. Before she fully remembered the fear or the life that went with it, she heard another voice, an angry voice, and it growled: "Get the lazy lie-abed on her feet or it won"t be a hand on her shoulder she next feels"-it was her father"s voice.

She gasped as if surfacing from drowning (the howl of the wind, the beating against her body, her face, she had been drowning in sand), and opened her eyes. She tried to sit up. to stand up, but she had come back too far in too short a span of time, and she was dizzy, and her feet wouldn"t hold her. She would have fallen., except Ruth caught her-it had been Ruth"s hand on her shoulder, Ruth"s the first voice she heard.

"Are you ill? Are you ill? I have tried to wake you before-it is long past sunup and the storm has blown out. but there is a tree down that has broken our paling, and the front window of the shop. There are gla.s.s splinters and wood shavings everywhere-you could drown in them. Dad says Jeff and I won"t go to school today, there is too much to do here, although I think two more people with dust-pans will only get in each other"s way, but Jeff will somehow manage to disappear and be found hours later at his computer, so it hardly matters."

Hetta"s hands were fumbling for her clothes before Ruth finished speaking. She still felt dizzy and sick, and disoriented; but the fear was well known and it knew what to do, and she was dressed and in the kitchen in a few minutes, although her hair was uncombed and her eyes felt swollen and her mouth tasted of... sand. She went on with the preparations for breakfast as she had done many mornings, only half-registering the unusual noises below in the shop, habit held her, habit and fear, as Ruth"s hands had held her- -As the strange cinnamon-skinned man"s hands had held her.

After she loaded the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, she dared run upstairs and wash her face and brush her hair... Her hair felt stiff, dusty. She looked down at the top of her chest of drawers and the bare, swept wooden floor she stood on and saw... sand. It might have been wood dust carried by yesterday"s storm wind; but no tree produced those flat, glinting fragments. She stared a moment, her hairbrush in her hand, and then laid the brush down, turned, and threw the sheets of her bed back.

Sand. More pale, glittery sand. Not enough to sweep together in a hand, but enough to feel on a fingertip, to hold up in the light and look again and again at the flash as if of infinitesimal mirrors.

She fell asleep that night like diving into deep water, but if she dreamed, she remembered nothing of it, and when she woke the next morning, there were no shining, mirror-fragment grains in her bedding. I imagined it, she thought. I imagined it all-and it was the worst thought she had ever had in her life. She was dressed and ready to go downstairs and make breakfast, but for a moment she could not do it. Not even the knowledge of her father"s certain wrath could make her leave her bedroom and face this day, any day, any day here, any other person, the people she knew best. She sat down on the edge of her bed and stared bleakly at nothing: into her life. But habit was stronger: it pulled her to her feet and took her downstairs, and, as it had done yesterday., led her hands and feet and body through their accustomed tasks. But yesterday had been- yesterday. Today there was nothing in her mind but darkness.

She struggled against sleep that night, against the further betrayal of the dream. It had been something to do with the storm, she thought, twisting where she lay, the sheets pulling at her like ropes. Something to do with the air a storm brought: it had more oxygen in it than usual, or less, it did funny things to your mind... Some wind-roused ancient street debris that looked like sand had got somehow into her bed; some day, some day soon, but not too soon, she would ask Ruth if there had been grit in her bed too, the day after the big storm.

She took a deep breath: that smell, spicy, although no spice she knew; spice and rock and earth. She was lying on her back, and had apparently kicked free of the tangling sheets at last-no, there was still something wrapped around one ankle-but her limbs were strangely heavy, and she felt too weak even to open her eyes. But she would not sleep, she would not. A tiny breeze wandered over her face, bringing the strange smells to her; and yet her bedroom faced the street, and the street smelled of tarmac and car exhaust and dead leaves and Benny"s Fish and Chips on the opposite corner.

She groaned, and with a great effort, managed to move one arm. Both arms lay across her stomach; she dragged at one till it flopped off to lie at her side, palm down. What was she lying on? Her fingertips told her it was not cotton sheet, thin and soft from many launderings. Her fingers scratched faintly; whatever this was, it was thick and yielding, and lay over a surface much firmer (her body was telling her) than her old mattress at home.

An arm slid under her shoulders and she was lifted a few inches, and a pillow slid down to support her head. Another smell, like brandy or whisky, although unlike either-her gardener"s mind registered steeped herbs and acknowledged with frustration it did not know what herbs. She opened her eyes but saw only shadows.

"Can you drink?"

She opened her mouth obediently, and a rim pressed against her lips and tilted. She took a tiny sip; whatever it was burned and soothed simultaneously. She swallowed, and heat and serenity spread through her. Her body no longer felt leaden, and her eyes began to focus.

She was in a-a cave, with rocky sides and a sandy floor. There were niches in the walls where oil lamps sat. She knew that smoky, golden light from power cuts at home. When she had been younger and her great-grandfather"s little town had not yet been swallowed up by Mauncester"s suburbs, there had been power cuts often. That was when her mother still got out of bed most days, and her grandmother used to read to Hetta during the evenings with no electricity, saying that stones were the best things to keep the night outside where it belonged. Cleaning the old oil lamps and laying out candles and matches as she had done the night before last still made her hear her grandmother saying Once upon a time... The only complaint Hetta had ever had about her grandmother"s stones was that they rarely had deserts in them. Hetta had to blink her eyes against sudden tears.

A cave, she thought, a cave with a sand floor. She looked down at glinting mirror-fragments, like those she had found in the folds of her sheets two nights ago.

I have never heard of Roanshire or the Homeland, or Mauncester. The storm brought you far indeed. This is the land called Damar, and you stand at the fourth Sandpale at the edge of the Great Desert we call Kalarsham.

Her scalp contracted as if someone had seized her hair and twisted it. She gasped, and the cup was taken away and the arm grasped her more firmly. "You have drunk too much, it is very strong," said the voice at her ear; but it was not the liquor that shook her. She sat up and swung her feet round to put them on the floor-there was a bandage tied around one ankle-the supporting arm allowed this reluctantly. She turned her head to look at its owner and saw the man who had rescued her from the sandstorm two nights ago, in her dream. "Where am I?" she said. "I cannot be here. I do not want to go home. I have dreamed this. Oh, I do not want this to be a dream!"

The man said gently, "You are safe here. This is no dream-place, although you may dream the journey. It is as real as you are. It has stood hundreds of years and through many sandstorms-although I admit this one is unusual even in the history of this sanctuary."

"You don"t understand," she began, and then she laughed a little, miserably: she was arguing with her own dream-creature.

He smiled at her. "Tell me what I do not understand. What I understand is that you nearly died, outside, a little while ago. because your Watcher almost failed to see you. This is enough to confuse anyone"s mind. Try not to distress yourself. Have another sip of the tiarhk. It is good for such confusions, and such distress."

She took the cup from him and tasted its contents again. Again warmth and tranquility slid through her, but she could feel her own nature fighting against them, as it had when the doctor had prescribed sleeping pills for her a few years ago. She had had to stop taking the pills. She laced her fingers round the cup and tried to let the tiarhk do its work. She took a deep breath. The air was spicy sweet, and again she felt the little stir of breeze; where was the vent that let the air in and kept the dangerous sand-tides out?

"Tell me a little about this place," she said.

He sat back, willing to allow her time to compose herself. "This is the fourth of the Eleven Sandpales that King Tor the Just and Powerful set round the Great Desert Kalarsham some years after the battle of the Hero"s Crown and the second and final death of Maur, when it became evident that no easy cure for the desert would be found and that Damar"s ancient forest was gone forever, and Geljdreth, the sand-G.o.d, would rule us if we let him. This Fourth Pale is called Horontolopar in the Old Tongue, and I am its Watcher, Zasharan, fifteenth of that line, for it was my father"s mother"s mother"s father"s"-his voice fell into a singsong and she did not count, but she guessed he named fourteen forebears exactly-"mother, who was first called Zasharanth, and installed by Tor himself, and kissed by Queen Aerin, who wished her luck forever. And we have had luck"-he took a deep sigh-"even tonight, for 1 did find you, though it was a narrow thing. Much too narrow. I would like you to tell me more about Roan-shire, and Mauncester, where you are from, and how you came to be in such state, for no guide would have led or sent you so, and my eye tells me you were alone."

"Your eye?" she said.

"My Eye," he replied, and this time she heard. "I will show you, if you wish. The Eye may see more to this puzzle that you are: how it is that a sandstorm should have come from nowhere to bring you, and yet pursue you across my doorstep so viciously that the wound it laid open on your leg took eight st.i.tches to close. My Eye lies in the place where I Watch, and it is much of how I do what I am here to do. It is only Aerin"s Luck that I looked tonight, for this is an unsettled season, and no one has set out from Thaar in weeks. Perhaps you did not come from Thaar."

She laughed, although it hurt her. "No, I did not come from Thaar. And- and I have gone away-and come back. The storm-you brought me here two nights ago."

He looked at her calmly. "You have not been here above an hour. You fainted, and I took the opportunity to dress your leg. Then you woke."

She was silent a moment. Her head swam, and she did not think another sip of tiarhk was advisable. "Are you alone here?"

He looked astonished. "Alone? Certainly not. Rarely does anyone else come to this end of the citadel, for I am the Watcher, and no other has reason to know of the desert door I brought you through. But there are some few of us, and the caves run far up into the Hills, and where they come out there is the filanon town Sunbarghon, although you would not find it unless they decided to allow you to, and Ynorkgindal, where they ring the Border, that the music of their bells may help keep us safe from the North, and the dlor Gzanforyar, which is mastered by my good friend Rohk. Perhaps you will meet him one day-" He blinked and gave a tiny shiver, and said, "Forgive me, lady, that was presumptuous."

She shook her head. "I should like to meet him," she said, but she heard in her voice that she believed there would be no such meeting. Zasharan heard it too, and turned his face a little away from her, and she saw how stiffly he sat. Her first thought was that she had offended him, but she remembered, Forgive me, lady, that was presumptuous, and before she could think, had reached to touch his arm. "But I would like to meet your friend, and see the caves, and your Eye, and-" She stopped. How long would the dream last this time?

He turned back to her. "There is something strange about you, 1 know that, and I see-I think I see-I-" He looked down at her hand on his arm, which she hastily removed. "You trouble me, lady. May I have your name?"

"Hetta," she said.

"Hetthar," he said. "Do you think you can stand, and walk? Do you wish food first? For I would like you to come to the place of my Eye, where 1 think you and I may both be able to see more plainly."

"I am not hungry," she said, and tried to stand; but as she did, her head swam, and Zasharan and the room began to fade, and she began to smell wood shavings and wet tarmac. "The sand!" she cried. "The sand!" And just before she lost consciousness, she flung herself on the floor of Zasharan"s cave, and scrabbled at the sand with her hands.

She woke lying on her back again, her hands upon her stomach, but her hands were shut into fists, and the backs of them hurt up into her forearms., as if she had been squeezing them closed for a long time. With some difficulty she unbent the fingers, and two tiny palmfuls of sand poured out upon her nightdress. Slowly, slowly she sat up, pulling up folds of her nightdress to enclose the sand. She stood, clutching the front of her nightdress together, and went to her chest of drawers. She had been allowed to move into this room, which had been her grandmother"s, when her grandmother died, but she had always been too busy- or too aware of herself as interloper-to disarrange any of her grandmother"s things that weren"t actively in her way. But they were friendly things, and once the first shock of grief was over, she liked having them there, reminding her of her gran, and no longer wondered if it might be disrespectful to keep them as they were. On the top of the chest there was an a.s.sortment of little lidded boxes and jars that had once held such things as bobby pins and cotton b.a.l.l.s and powder, and were now empty. She chose one and carefully transferred the sand into it. She stood looking at its lid for a moment. She had chosen this one because it had a pretty curl of dianthus flower and leaf painted on its surface; her gran"s dianthus still bloomed in the garden. She lifted the lid to rea.s.sure herself that the sand was still there-that it hadn"t disappeared as soon as she closed the box-and for a moment, faint but unmistakable, she smelled the spicy smell of Zasharan"s cave, and tiarhk.

When she dreamt of nothing again that night, she almost didn"t care. When she woke up, she looked in the tiny box on her chest of drawers and the sand was still there on this second morning, and then she went downstairs to get breakfast. Today was her day to drive to the mall. Usually, if her list was not too long, she could spare an hour for herself. And today she wanted to go to the library.

It took more time to get to the mall than usual; she had had to go the long way round their block because of the fallen tree that still lay in the broken remains of their front paling, and there were other trees down elsewhere that the exhausted and overburdened county council had not yet cut up and hauled away. In one place the road had caved in where a flash flood had undermined it. There were detours and orange warning cones and temporary stoplights, and when she finally got there, some of the car park at the mall was blocked off. She"d have barely half an hour at the library, and only if she pelted through the rest first.

She didn"t go to the library very often any more, since she had had to stop school. She didn"t have much time for reading, and she couldn"t think of any book she wanted to read: both fiction and nonfiction only reminded her of what she wasn"t doing and might never do. She did read seed catalogues, intensely, from cover to cover, every winter, and the off-beat gardening books and even more bizarre popular science books Ruth bought her every birthday and Christmas, which, because Ruth had bought them, were friendly instead of accusing. The library felt like a familiar place from some other life. There were calluses on her hands that sc.r.a.ped against the pages that hadn"t been there when she had been coming here several times a week.

None of the encyclopedias had any listings for Damar, nor the atlases, and she didn"t have time to queue for a computer. They had added more computes since she had been here last, but it hadn"t changed the length of the queue. She went reluctantly to the help desk. Geography had never been a strong suit., and by the time she was standing in front of the counter, she felt no more than ten and a good six inches shorter. "Er-have you ever heard of a place called Damar?" The librarian"s eyes went first to the row of computers, all occupied, and she sighed. She looked up at Hetta. "Yes," said Hetta. "I"ve tried the encyclopedias and atlases."

The librarian smiled faintly, then frowned. "Damar. I don"t recall-what do you know about it?"

It has eleven Sandpales and a Watcher named Zasharan at the fourth. "Urn-It-it has a big desert in it, which used to be ancient forest." The librarian raised her eyebrows. "It"s-it"s a crossword puzzle clue," said Hetta, improvising hastily. "It"s-it"s a sort of bet."

The librarian looked amused. She tapped Damar into the computer in front of her. "Hmm. Try under Daria. Oh yes-Damar," she said, looking interested. "1 remember... oh dear. If you want anything recent, you will have to consult the newspaper archive." She looked suddenly hunted. "There"s a bit of a, hmm, gap... up till five years ago, everything is on microfiche, and in theory everything since is available on the computer system but, well, it isn"t, you know... Let me know if I can find... if I can try to find anything for you." She looked at Hetta with an expression that said full body armour and possibly an oxygen tank and face-mask were necessary to anyone venturing into the newspaper archive.

"Thank you," said Hetta demurely, and nearly ran back to the reference room; her half hour was already up.

Daria. The Darian subcontinent in southwestern Asia comprises a large land-ma.s.s including both inland plains, mostly desert with irregular pockets of fertile ground, between its tall and extensive mountain ranges, and a long curved peninsula of gentler and more arable country in the south... Its government is a unique conception, being both the Republic of Damar under its own people and a Protectorate of the Homeland Empire and legislated by her appointed officers. See text articles... V Damar. It existed.

She had been nearly an hour at the library. She ran out to the car park and banged the old car into gear in a way it was not at all used to. It gave a howl of protest but she barely heard it. Damar. It existed!

The ice cream had started to melt but her father never ate ice cream, and there were scones for tea with the eggs and sausages because scones were the fastest thing she could think of and her father wouldn"t eat store bread. She ignored more easily than usual her mother"s gently murmured litany of complaint when she took her her tray, and in blessed peace and quiet-Dane and his girlfriend, Lara, were having dinner with her parents, Jeff was doing homework in his room, their father was downstairs in the shop, and Hetta had firmly turned the still-resident TV off-began washing up the pots and pans that wouldn"t fit in the dishwasher. She was trying to remember anything she could about Daria-they had been studying the Near East in history and current events the year her grandmother had died and her mother had first taken seriously ill, and the only-thing she remembered clearly was Great Expectations in literature cla.s.s, because she had been wishing that some convict out of a graveyard would rescue her. This had never struck her as funny before, but she was smiling over the sink when Ruth-whom she hadn"t heard come into the kitchen-put her hand on her arm., and said, or rather whispered. "Hetta, what is with you? Are you okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"You haven"t been yourself since the storm. I mean, good for you, I think you haven"t been yourself in about eight years, except I was so young then I didn"t know what was going on, and maybe you"re becoming yourself again now. But you"re different, and look, you know Mum and Dad, they don"t like different. It"ll turn out bad somehow if they notice. At the moment Dad"s still totally preoccupied with the storm damage but he won"t be forever. And even Mum-" Ruth shrugged. Their mother had her own ways of making things happen.

Hetta had stopped washing dishes in surprise but began again; Ruth picked up a dish-towel and began to dry. They both cast a wary look at the door; the hum of the dishwasher would disguise their voices as long as they spoke quietly, but their father didn"t like conversations he couldn"t hear, and the only topics he wished discussed all had to do with business and building furniture. "I-I"m embarra.s.sed to tell you," said Hetta, concentrating on the bottom of a saucepan.

"Try me," said Ruth. "Hey, I study the s.e.x lives of bugs. Nothing embarra.s.ses me."

Hetta sucked in her breath on a suppressed laugh. "I-I"ve been having this dream-" She stopped and glanced at Ruth. Ruth was looking at her, waiting for her to go on. "It"s... it"s like something real."

"I"ve had dreams like that," said Ruth, "but they don"t make me go around looking like I"ve got a huge important secret, at least I don"t think they do."

Hetta grinned. Hetta had always been the dreamy daughter, as their father had often pointed out, and Ruth the practical one. Their grandmother had teased that she was grateful for the eight-year difference in their ages because telling stories to both of them at the same time would have been impossible. Hetta wanted fairy-tales. Ruth wanted natural history. (The two sons of the house had been expected to renounce the soft feminine pleasures of being tucked in and told stories.) The problem with Ruth"s practicality was that it was turning out to have to do with science, not furniture; Ruth eventually wanted to go into medical research, and her biology teacher adored her. Ruth was fifteen, and in a year she would have to go up against their father about what she would do next, a confrontation Hetta had lost, and Dane had sidestepped by being- apparently genuinely-eager to stop wasting time in school and get down to building furniture ten hours a day. Hetta was betting on Ruth, but she wasn"t looking forward to being around during the uproar.

"Do you know anything about Daria?"

Ruth frowned briefly. "It got its independence finally, a year or two ago, didn"t it? And has gone back to calling itself Damar, which the Damarians had been calling it all along. There was something odd about the hand-over though." She paused. International politics was not something their father was interested in, and whatever the news coverage had been, they wouldn"t have seen it at home. After a minute Ruth went on: "One of my friends-well, she"s kind of a s.p.a.ce case-Melanie, she says that it"s full of witches and wizards or something and they do, well, real magic there, and all us Homelander bureaucrats either can"t stand it and have really short terms and are sent home, or really get into it and go native and stay forever. She had a great-uncle who got into it and wanted to stay, but his wife hated it, so they came home, and you still only have to say "Daria" to her and she bursts into tears, but he told Melanie a lot about it before he died, and according to her... well, I said she"s a s.p.a.ce case. It"s not the sort of thing I would remember except that there was something weird about the hand-over when it finally happened and Melanie kept saying "well of course" like she knew the real reason. Why?"