The Memory of Water Page 4

  The World Tree had been installed in the area assigned to the refugee camp when it was first established. A spotlight lit the leaves at night. It was meant to be a beacon to bring all to its base. It was also supposed to represent the global effort to eradicate the Tutu virus—the common name for Septimana Infirmitatem, or Week of Weakness. Week of Weakness had been swiftly shortened to WW. Then some hack of a journalist had reported an interview with a doctor in vernacular, which reduced WW to “Double-double-you.” The swipers and texters shortened that even further to 22U. Or, when they were feeling even less energetic, 22.

  And so the name Tutu had evolved. No one seemed to know there was a formal name for when the virus shifted to the active phase, a year or more after first contracting it. It was only when visitors pointed to the name plate over the front gates of the camp, and asked what Reconstruction Syndrome was, that they learned of it.

  Collectively, the two phases were named the Erra Syndrome. That, too, was misunderstood by the lay. Erra was the Akkadian god of plague and pestilence. Most people assumed that Erra was a misspelling of “error”. In the perverse ways of common English usage, anyone who contracted Erra Syndrome was referred to as Errata. The name might even have been funny if Akkadian gods hadn’t been involved.

  Only, I had little capacity for amusement when dealing with the Errata. Which was all the time. When I first arrived at the camp, if I hadn’t been numb to any emotion, I might have found the sentiment behind the World Tree touching. Now I just found the sight of the damnable thing depressing.

  I was in danger of becoming a cranky old man…and the heat did not help.

  I moved along one of the more beaten and higher traffic paths through the tents to where my own was located. At first, they had given me a tent right next to the white clinic tent, but I asked for one at the farthest reaches of the camp, so I would be forced to walk the quarter mile there and back and at least get some exercise in my average day.

  My usual route back to the tent took me through the quadrangle behind the front gates. It wasn’t the shortest route, but it did take me through most of the common areas where the residents of the camp tended to gather. It was a way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the camp.

  The quadrangle was where all the protesters spent their day, waving signs at the TV vans parked on the other side of the road that serviced the camp, well beyond the closed gates.

  It wasn’t the usual reticence around Errata that kept the TV vans that far away. Some of the Errata—the water leapers and dryads in particular—could fritz electronics if they grew too excited and the protesters were certainly riled up.

  A pair of hobgoblins were hovering in the air, their brown wings beating hard to hold them there. Between them, they suspended a banner over the heads and waving signs of the mob, so that it would be perfectly clear to the camera lenses.

  Give us back our passports! Citizenship is a right for sentients!

  Beneath them, the mob moved like a restless sea, signs rising and falling in waves. I spotted the pointed ears of the fae, their dryads nearby as they usually were. A pair of dragons, thankfully in human form, their powerful shoulders close together to form an impenetrable wall. They frowned, their brow scales bunching up into hard ridges, as they watched the crowd suspiciously…but they were not mixers.

  Even some dwarves were risking the heat to wave their placards, their earthy-colored skin flushing even darker in the heat.

  A salamander had climbed up the one permanent structure in the camp; the observation tower at the entrance. He clung from the side of the tower, his fingers splayed against the walls to anchor him, one bare foot with the toes spread against the wall as his main support, while he waved his other fist at the cameras. The three graduating dots of brown scales over each eye were glowing red with his ire.

  The protesters had been at this for a week. As the camp director, I could have chosen to have the protest dispersed. Or joined it. I had very mixed feelings about the sentiments they were attempting to have the world hear.

  Three weeks ago, Russia had begun to round up the Errata within their borders. A few days later, the first of the survivors had trickled across the borders into Finland and Ukraine and Turkey. There may have been some who escaped into China, but as China interred their Errata in unknown locations, no reports were made of Russian refugees from that nation.

  The refugees from Russia spoke of pogroms and genocide.

  The countries with borders in common with Russia all refused to shelter the refugees. They were put on container ships bound for Spain. The first of that terrible cargo was due to arrive in Toledo in five days time.

  Hence the protests.

  The Toledo camp was meant to be an asylum. Errata chose to come here because they found their natural environment too hostile or simply too uncomfortable. Even those who merely wanted to live among their own kind were welcome. Residency here was voluntary.

  Being forced here, being shipped here, infuriated everyone. Yes, there was no room left in the camp, but yes, we would find some way to build shelters—even if they were blankets strung upon poles to shield against the sun. Food would be found. Or grown—for the dryads and the dwarves had a way with growing things. The Russian Errata would be welcomed, and it would be a genuine welcome.

  The camp was incensed with Russia’s pogroms and just as pissed off with the border countries who had turned the refugees away, taking away any choice they might have had.

  In the fourteenth century, Toledo had welcomed Jews, Christians and Muslims, and allowed them to practice their religions as they wished, which is utterly mind-blowing for that era. If it were not for Toledo’s return to that policy of tolerance in the twenty-first century, thousands of Errata would have nowhere to go and thousands more would not be allowed to live with a modicum of freedom.

  I slid around the back of the assembled Errata, aiming for the lane at the east end of the quadrangle. Everyone had their backs turned to me, and I might have crossed the quadrangle unnoticed, but a dwarf and a salamander decided to have at it, right in front of me.

  They got their fists around each other’s shirts, the salamander clinging tenaciously to the dwarf’s teeshirt fabric with his flattened, Velcro-sticky fingertips. They snarled at each other, the salamander hissing warningly. In that mood, his spit would be highly acidic.

  The yawara I usually carried was back in the tent along with my wallet. I’d emptied my pockets last night. I don’t carry a key ring. One doesn’t when one has no doors to lock.

  I gripped my fist so the middle knuckle extended and held it firmly and went to work. Even the Errata, I’d learned, had pressure points which could be easily numbed. The trick was knowing where the nerve centers were, for they often weren’t where they would be on humans.

  A tap each to the upper arms and shoulders. A swinging knock to the side of a knee each. I was familiar enough with dwarf and salamander anatomy that I was able to send them sprawling, each trying to get their numb arms to work so they could grip their throbbing knees.

  I bent over them and pointed to the crowd around us. “There’s enough fury out there to fill the Pacific. You really want to fight each other as well?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.

  They looked at me, both shamefaced, although dwarves always look grumpy. The ridged brow jutting over their eyes did that.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “I apologize, Dr. Jones,” the salamander said, his accent thick French.

  The dwarf muttered something I didn’t understand.

  “English,” I told him. “You don’t need the handicap of not understanding each other on top of it all.”

  “The Blues do not suck,” the dwarf growled. His accent was Italian.

  Suddenly, I got it. “You’re fighting over football teams?”

  If they had been standing, I suspected they would have been toeing the dirt by now. They both looked embarrassed. At least, I thought the salamander looked sheepish. Their facial scales t
ended to distort human expressions and I was still learning to interpret them.

  I pointed south, to where the rest of the field that had been handed over for us to occupy still stood empty. It had been part of the military academy’s training grounds and was smooth and even, and the grass only calf-high. “Find a football, pick a team each and go sort it out the proper way. Hear me?”

  That caught their attention. The dwarf sat up and brushed off his hands, his arms working once more. “I know a dryad. He’ll find trees for goal posts.”

  I straightened—slowly, for my body ached. Too little sleep.

  The pair’s animosity had faded as they sorted out the logistics of laying out a football field and setting up goals. It would be safe to leave them alone now.

  A tap on my shoulder pulled my attention back around to the edge of the crowd. In the narrow lane left open at the back of the quadrangle stood an arwen. It was Nada. Nada de Phoenix. I happened to know her and her name, because she was the mate of Miurenn de Madagascar, who owned the stretch of the Tagus that ran alongside the camp, before it curved around the south end of the city.

  I stepped over to where Nada stood. Her silver hair, in bright sunlight, looked almost translucent. So did her eyes.

  “Dr. Jones, I wonder…would you mind speaking to Miurenn?” she asked.

  “Is he well?”

  “You should speak to him.” She stepped back and held out her hand in a very human gesture of ‘after you’. Nada was always short on conversation.

  I nodded and moved quickly to the south corner of the quadrangle. A path angled to the south-west from there, following an even older trail which ran straight to the river valley, worn smooth by decades of boots using it.

  As we moved down the lane, the shouting behind us faded.

  The path did not look as it had before. I came to a halt, looking about. “Where did all these trees come from?”

  There were dozens of them. I saw oaks and rowans, willows and conifers. There were varieties among them I didn’t know at all. None of them were saplings. The trees were mature. The oaks spread their canopies for dozens of feet. Trees among the oaks shot up past even those canopies. Even though I couldn’t say for sure, I wondered if the trees were the giant redwoods from northern California.

  None of these trees had any business growing on rocky, dry land in the middle of Spain.

  Not only did the trees look as though they had been here forever, the earth beneath them was dark loam and compacted down as it would have over time. Leaf litter, ferns and weeds covered the ground and roots lifted the earth.

  The trees came right up to the path, but no farther, as if the worn trail was a marked boundary.

  I moved over to the nearest tree and drew one of the hanging leaves near to me for inspection. It seemed quite real.

  I shook my head and made a mental note to ask about it around the camp later. I had a feeling the Errata would know why fully-grown trees had abruptly appeared just south of the camp. I bent and peered through the boles, to see how deep the tree belt ran. I could see sunlight farther in, but there were many trees between me and the daylight on the other side.

  Nada did not seem interested in the trees.

  “Do you know how these got here?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “They just came.”

  Nada was not the one to ask. I tabled my questions and moved on, sliding down the path as it inched down to the river.

  A short pier jutted into the river that I often used when speaking to Miurenn.

  Now I could hear the cicadas announcing the heat of the day. I could also feel the interrupted sleep in the ache of the bones of my face. I would take care of that once I’d spoken to Miurenn.

  There were very few people for whom I would drop everything if they cleared their throat to catch my attention. Miurenn was one of them.

  He was the avanc who had acquired the half-mile stretch of the Tagus that ran from the ancient Alcantara Bridge down to where the Arroyo de la Degollada spilled into the slow-moving river. That also happened to be our south-western border.

  I stepped out onto the pier, Nada beside me. She kneeled on the old boards and lowered her hand into the crystal-clear water—which looked to be only a few inches deep here—and moved it about in a way I might have thought was random.

  After a moment, the surface of the water rippled outward from a spot close to the center of the river.

  Miurenn rose from the center of that ripple.

  I had seen him and other avanc rise from their water many times, but it never lost its fascination.

  When his feet were level with the surface, he walked over to the pier. Avancs did not wear the nearly universal Errata uniform of jeans and a generic teeshirt. Clothes permanently immersed in water rotted and they impeded the avanc’s sinuous movement through the water, too.

  An avanc’s seemingly human form was covered in iridescent scaling, so fine and flexible that it moved just as human flesh did, but it did little to preserve their modesty. That was why most avancs spoke to humans and others while still half-submerged. I had grown used to the sight of a naked avanc, through speaking with Miurenn so often. He no longer bothered to cater to my sensibilities in that regard. I took it as a sign of trust and was careful to avoid breaking that trust.

  “Miurenn,” I said in acknowledgement, as he stopped right next to the pier. He needed to always be in contact with his water. A few seconds away from it was like a few seconds without oxygen for humans. Yet he did not breathe in the water, I’d learned. Like dolphins, he took in oxygen, but could stay submerged for a very long time before needing to surface and breathe.

  “Dr. Jones.” His voice rippled. “Thank you for coming to see me.” The rippling quality, which all avanc shared, didn’t quite hide his accent. He had been born in Madagascar, he had told me some time ago, but the island had forcibly ejected everyone who had survived the initial Tutu infection, as soon as the world realized that the virus was just the first stage of the disease—when we were confronted with our first hobgoblin and our first six goblyns.

  I suspected it was the video of goblyns bunched together, with their black, thick hides, red-rimmed eyes and tusks, which had tipped the fate of the Errata on Madagascar.

  Miurenn had made his way here to Toledo while still in human form. When he had emerged from his change he acquired this stretch of the river. He had owned the river before I arrived here myself, making him one of the very first Errata to emerge.

  “It is my pleasure, always, Miurenn. What can I do for you? Nada did not explain.”

  Nada didn’t react to my subtle nudge. She stared at Miurenn, as if she waited for his cue. Her hand, I noticed, remained in the water.

  Miurenn clasped his hands together. “I thought you should know. I have tasted…” He paused and frowned, which made the scales over his brow stand up. “I have sensed something coming along the river from upstream…it is odd.”

  “Toxic?” I asked sharply, my attention caught.

  “Unpleasant,” he replied. “At least, to my taste. Nada also does not like it.”

  Nada grimaced.

  “You cannot…clear it from the water?” I asked. “As you did last year?”

  Avancs were particular about the quality of their home environment. When they formally adopted a lake or a stretch of river, or a piece of an ocean in some way I had yet to discover, they took great pains to make the environment habitable and pleasant.

  Which was a small bonus for humans, because an avanc preferred clear water, free of impurities and toxins. Once an avanc had spring-cleaned his home, the water was potable for humans and of such quality that the best water purifiers in the world could not match it. It tasted delicious, too; oxygenated and cool.

  The camp used the river water with Miurenn’s permission. He did not charge us for the privilege, as he did the city of Toledo.

  The first time he had requested that the city compensate him for the improvements in their water syste
ms, the city had ignored him.

  Then, mysteriously, the river water had run muddy for two weeks. Toledo residents who had grown accustomed to the pure water available at the turn of a tap, screamed in outrage.

  Miurenn swore he had not caused the muddy run, that it was purely a coincidence. “Mud irritates me,” he’d told me in a confiding moment. “But it was a well-timed coincidence,” he added, with a smile that made his cheeks shine with the colors of the rainbow.

  Toledo officials had agreed to financial compensation and faithfully deposited their payments into a bank account which Nada controlled for him.

  I had once carefully asked why he bothered to collect money that he couldn’t use.

  “Because humans measure each other by how they collect money,” Miurenn replied. “Now, I am a contractor with the City of Toledo. I am an advisor on their Water Commission. I am respected.”

  I’d held back my own opinion on the quality of the respect he had earned. He was one of only a small fraction of Errata who had learned to use their new states to earn a living, to do more than simply survive. It deserved commendation and respect.

  Miurenn glanced up the river toward the Alcantara Bridge, which was just visible from here, with the daily human traffic heading into the city for their office jobs and work.

  “It is unpleasant, but not quite toxic,” Miurenn said. “You should monitor the camp, though. I do not know how others may respond to it.”

  “I will. Thank you for warning me.” A rash of sickness from impure water would not help with morale. “You are cleaning it up?” I added.

  “There is no need. It is not a continuous flow. I am watching it, to see that it continues downstream.”

  Shepherding water. “And your fellow avanc, downstream, is aware of it?” I had never met the avanc who owned the next stretch of the river.

  “Frang Kai de Munich is angry about the mess,” Miurenn said. “But he will also see it depart safely.”

  “Should I pass your concern onto the city?”