Water by Robin Mckinley & Peter Dickinson

Author:Robin Mckinley & Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780142402443
Publisher: Firebird
Published: 2002-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Tamia had been with the Guardian nearly a year when the Guardian said one morning, “It’s time you had a look at the sea. The way I want to go, it’s a long walk, we’ll take lunch—and perhaps tea.” She tied up food in two bundles, and they set out, towards the Eagle’s peak behind their small meadow.

They often went for long prowling walks along the shoulders of the mountains, following deer trails when there were deer trails, and even rabbit trails when there were those; the problem with rabbit trails was that they were made by and for creatures no more than a foot tall. On some of their walks there was a good deal of scrambling. But the Guardian showed Tamia what plants had leaves or berries or roots that were good to eat—or at least nourishing; or possessed healing properties. And they always looked out for stones that might fit in the water-garden, though they had to wait for the traders to bring them new supplies of the gold that their magic used. Tamia now knew the name of the trader with the red feather in his cap—Traetu; and his pony, Wheatear, for the long curly hair-whorl on his neck, like a stalk of wheat bent by the wind.

Tamia talked to the traders—and their ponies; she also greeted and was friendly with the deer, and the rabbits, and the foxes, and the hrungus, and the birds that visited their meadow or that they met on their walks; and the Guardian said to her thoughtfully, “If you were not so suited to our work, I would wonder if I had called you to the wrong craft; for the wild creatures love you, and no Guardian in all the long list of our Guardianship has ever had a familiar animal.”

Tamia shook her head. “It is only that my best friend—before you, dear Guardian—was a pony.”

But they had never climbed the peak of the Eagle. Tamia, like many inlanders, had never seen the ocean; and she had been too busy and too happy in the last year to think about it, although in the back of her mind she was aware that what she was here for was to learn to protect her land from the ocean, to become a member of the Guardians, who built and patrolled the boundary that kept the land safe from the water. She had no very good picture of what the ocean might be like; she knew that fishermen travelled upon it in boats, like the inlanders sometimes travelled on their ponds and streams and lakes; but when she thought about it at all, she thought of it as a kind of nightmare thing, perhaps a little like a sky full of storm-clouds.

When, in the early afternoon, they finally stood on the top of the Eagle and looked around them, she was amazed. This great, dazzling, every-colour-and-no-colour expanse was like nothing she had ever imagined, let alone seen; and she thought of the cousin

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