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

dies, we cannot stay here. We won’t be able to live.”
    “There was already a drought, was there not?” said Jane Watson. “Some things are beyond even the Tarnish. Rivers die in the normal course of nature. The world is changing; the weather is changing. Some things will vanish, no matter what we do.”
    Her words gave me a chill in my stomach, and speaking of the death of our River with a stranger seemed disrespectful, so I changed the subject, asking her the first thing that came into my head.
    “Are you a Keeper as well?” I asked.
    Jane Watson smiled, and her face transformed; she seemed suddenly like a little girl, amused and excited. “Why do you ask?”
    “I don’t know. You feel like a Keeper. But Mizan said that you don’t have Keepers in your country.”
    “We don’t have the same powers that you do,” said Jane Watson. “And yet, among my own people, you might say I am a kind of Keeper.”
    I met her clear gaze. “You are clearly a woman of power,” I said.
    “Like knows like,” said Jane Watson, smiling again. “Yes, I can see the power in you, just as it is in me. In my homeland we have many kinds of power, but we have lost the way of some ancient arts that you have been wise enough to preserve.” She suddenly looked shy. “I have heard of your Book. I should – I should like very much to see it for myself, if you would show me.”
    I felt a flutter of pride that our Book was so famous that a foreigner like Jane Watson had heard of it, and promised to show her the Book later.
    After the food had been eaten and the table cleared, she followed me solemnly into the room off the kitchen, and watched alertly as I took it from the box and opened it.
    “What would you like to ask it?” I said.
    “Do I have to ask a question?” said Jane Watson.
    “No,” I said. “But you can if you like.”
    “Oh.” She thought for a moment, and then said, “What would the Book like to tell me?”
    “That’s your question?”
    She nodded. I held the question in my mind and opened the Book. Jane Watson moved close as I opened the covers, and I glanced up. Her eyes were shining, her lips slightly parted, and I noticed that her hands were trembling.
    On one page was a picture, an engraving of a lonely, flat landscape wound through by a river, and a flock of cranes were flying over the horizon. On the other page was a single line of text.
    “What does it say?” asked Jane Watson.
    “The picture is of the Plains of Pembar,” I said. “That’s our River. And it’s one phrase. It says:
What profit it a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?
”
    For a moment Jane Watson looked astonished, and then she covered it with a laugh. “I wonder what that means,” she said. Her voice was shaky, and she was slightly pale. I wondered what the words meant to her.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Only you can know what the words mean. And sometimes it takes a long time to find out. It doesn’t often happen that the reading is alone on the page. It means that it’s important, that the Book wants to make sure you hear.”
    I waited, hoping that Jane Watson would explain, as the phrase clearly meant something to her. It was impolite to ask directly. But she didn’t. Instead she reached out with the tip of her finger and gently stroked the page. I flinched and snatched it away: it was forbidden for anyone except the Keepers to touch the Book. A curious expression briefly crossed her face, a kind of lust mixed with frustration or anger, but it passed so swiftly I almost thought I had imagined it. Jane Watson apologized for her rudeness, and I dismissed her gesture as ignorant and clumsy rather than sinister, and forgot all about it.
    I remembered that expression after Jane Watson left, when I was tormenting myself with reproaches: I ought to have taken it as a warning, I ought to have been more wary. Back then, it was not my way to be suspicious. When Grandmother told me that Jane Watson had a cold soul