The River and the Book by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online Page A

Watson should feel ashamed.
    I wondered whether she had any human feelings, this woman who I had so foolishly trusted, to whom I had revealed some of my most secret thoughts. I imagined bitterly how she must have laughed at me as she pretended to listen sympathetically, her brows drawn in a straight line of concentration. I thought about the bald man with spectacles she had met in Kilok; it sounded as if Jane Watson had planned to meet him, as if there had been a plot. I wondered if Jane Watson had intended to steal the Book from the beginning.
    At first the theft was a wound that went too deep for pain. The Book was our soul, our oracle, our delight and our pride. It was our friend. Without its guidance, who were we? Without its light, how would we see? Jane Watson’s action went beyond betrayal, into the incomprehensible. We simply didn’t understand why she had taken the Book. No one but the Keepers knew how to read it. In her hands it was useless; it would be just an object, inert and dead. And yet she had dared to take it from us. A great anger tore through the village. If Jane Watson had reappeared in those days, the gentle villagers I had known all my life would have torn her to pieces as if they were tigers.
    Our anger was partly fear. Jane Watson had casually destroyed hundreds of years of tradition when she took the Book out of the box, just as the Tarnish soldiers were destroying villages that had stood on the River since people had first walked into the Pembar Plains. Things that once had been solid now were uncertain, the ground seemed to echo beneath our feet like a thin layer of rock over a great, measureless hollow that plunged to the centre of the earth. We saw the sun rise each morning with relief, as if we feared in our dreams that it might vanish overnight.
    To the last question I ever asked, the Book had answered
Change
. I hadn’t expected that the change would be the loss of the Book itself.
    I thought of the first night Jane Watson had dined with us, when she had begun to win my trust. She had taken off her sunglasses as she stepped inside, holding them loosely in one hand as she greeted our family, and at last I could see her eyes. They were pale blue, large and finely formed, with long fair lashes. Her skin was freckled, her eyebrows broad and straight, and her mouth was set firmly, as if she were always in the process of making a difficult decision. Her face was dour and stubborn, but when she smiled her whole face lit up with an attractive humour. I had never seen anyone like her before.
    I could see at once that Grandmother didn’t trust Jane Watson. She was being very polite, and her face was expressionless and wary. It wasn’t only that Jane Watson was a stranger, and a foreigner at that; it was because Grandmother knew, as I knew too once I saw Jane Watson’s eyes, that she was a woman of power. It was a strange power, and heavily veiled; but it was palpable in the charge in my skin as she sat next to me at the table in one of the designated places for honoured guests.
    She complimented our house and the meal, speaking haltingly, but without making many mistakes. She had learned our language well, and soon she and I were talking. She said she was very interested in the people of the Pembar. “Nothing has changed here for centuries, because the Pembar Plains are so remote,” she said. “And your traditions and customs can give us some insight into things that have disappeared elsewhere.”
    At the mention of change, I looked up sharply. “Nowhere can escape change,” I said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of what’s happening upriver, with the Tarnish cotton fields.”
    She nodded. “We have heard of it,” she said. “The refugees are telling terrible stories, which are being told even in my country. That’s partly why I’m making this journey now. Perhaps I can help your people, by showing others what is threatened here.”
    “They are stealing our River,” I said. “If the River