A Pool in the Desert a short story by Robin McKinleyA Pool in the Desert
Robin McKinley
A story of Damar



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 Dickinson. 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 Spindles End, based on 
the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. McKinleys 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 McKinleys Damar novels (The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown), though 
readers neednt be familiar with Damar to enjoy this fine work of traditional 
fantasy.
Terri Windling
(intro to entry in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual 
Collection



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 coarse blades of the sand-grass. 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 passed, 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. Suppers 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 partition 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 Hettas hand and said, If theres anything I can 
dothis 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. Dyou 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 chores, and for a while that seemed easier. Sometimes 
months passed 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 wouldnt have. 
Months passed 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 appetite, sweeping the passage 
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 wasnt 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 everyones cellars flooded. 
The wood stored in their cellar had to come up into the parlour, whereupon there 
was nowhere to sit except the kitchen. Everyones tempers grew short with 
crowding, and when the TV was brought in too, there was nowhere to put it except 
on counter space Hetta couldnt 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 
mothers illness took hold and her fathers 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 didnt eat in season. No one else even seemed to notice that the 
view from the rear of the house looked any different than the frontalthough 
Ruth liked bugs, and would sometimes come out to look at the undersides of 
leaves and scrape things into jarsand so long as Hetta wasnt 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 Ruths 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 peoples tiles at her runner-bean teepees and stripping and 
shredding the fleece that protected the brassicas. 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 didnt dare stop long or often, even in the garden; her 
mothers 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 didnt know. But he didnt protest 
when the TV was turned on early and he didnt 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 prickle 
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 fathers 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 wasnt at all as shed 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 multitudes 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 this area? Where was she? There was nothing to tell hernothing but sand and 
wind roar and darkness. And who were they? She could not remembershe would not 
have set out aloneeven a guided party had to take carein the last few years 
the storms had grown more violent and less predictableparties rarely went 
mounted any moresheremembered
Perhaps she slept; perhaps she fainted. But there were hands upon herhands? 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 didnt 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 theyher unknown rescuer and 
herselfwere walking in a tiny rolling cup of sand that was always shallow to 
their feet just a footsteps 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 firmlyAs if I might run off into the sandstorm again, she thought, 
distantly amused. She looked toward the hand, the shouldersand 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 glowingwall? Cliff? For it seemed to loom over them; 
she guessed at something like a ledge or half-roof high above themwhen the 
fingers stiffened and the hand shook itself up in what seemed like a gesture of 
commandand 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 upif indeed any of this was 
wakingEven in this area a storm this severe gave some warning. Wherewhere 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 see 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 dont understand is what you were doing alone. You 
had lost whatever kit and company you came with before I found youI am 
sorrybut there wasnt even a pack animal with you. I may have been 
carelesshis voice sounded strained, as if he were not used to finding himself 
carelessbut 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 fourthWatcher? 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 quietas much as any desert is quietbut 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 are 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 Queens City itself. But II 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 fathers 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 Kalarsham.
 
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 wont be a hand on her shoulder she next feelsit was her 
fathers 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 wouldnt hold her. She would have 
fallen, except Ruth caught herit had been Ruths hand on her shoulder, Ruths 
the first voice she heard.
Are you ill? Are you ill? I have tried to wake you beforeit 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 glass splinters and wood 
shavings everywhereyou could drown in them. Dad says Jeff and I wont 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 others way, but Jeff will somehow manage 
to disappear and be found hours later at his computer, so it hardly matters.
Hettas 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 Ruths hands had held her
As the strange cinnamon-skinned mans 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 yesterdays 
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 alland 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 fathers 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 beenyesterday. 
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 lastno, there was still something wrapped around one 
anklebut 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 Bennys 
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 eitherher gardeners 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 aa 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-grandfathers little town had 
not yet been swallowed up by Mauncesters 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 stories 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 grandmothers 
stories 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 floorthere was a bandage tied around one anklethe 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 sandstormsalthough I admit this one is unusual even in the 
history of this sanctuary.
You dont 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 anyones 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 Heros 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 Damars ancient forest was gone forever, and Geljdreth, 
the sand-god, 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 fathers mothers mothers fathershis voice fell 
into a singsong and she did not count, but she guessed he named fourteen 
forebears exactlymother, who was first called Zasharanth, and installed by Tor 
himself, and kissed by Queen Aerin, who wished her luck forever. And we have had 
luckhe took a deep sigheven tonight, for I did find you, though it was a 
narrow thing. Much too narrow. I would like you to tell me more about Roanshire, 
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 
stitches 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 Aerins 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. Andand I 
have gone awayand come back. The stormyou 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, I know that, and I 
seeI think I seeI 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 I 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 Zasharans 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 
grandmothers, when her grandmother died, but she had always been too busyor 
too aware of herself as interloperto disarrange any of her grandmothers things 
that werent 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 assortment of little lidded boxes and 
jars that had once held such things as bobby pins and cotton balls 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 grans 
dianthus still bloomed in the garden. She lifted the lid to reassure herself 
that the sand was still therethat it hadnt disappeared as soon as she closed 
the boxand for a moment, faint but unmistakable, she smelled the spicy smell of 
Zasharans cave, and tiarhk.
When she dreamt of nothing again that night, she almost didnt 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. Shed 
have barely half an hour at the library, and only if she pelted through the rest 
first.
She didnt go to the library very often any more, since she had had to stop 
school. She didnt have much time for reading, and she couldnt think of any 
book she wanted to read: both fiction and nonfiction only reminded her of what 
she wasnt 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 scraped against the pages that hadnt 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 
didnt have time to queue for a computer. They had added more computes since she 
had been here last, but it hadnt 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. Erhave you ever heard of a place called Damar? The 
librarians eyes went first to the row of computers, all occupied, and she 
sighed. She looked up at Hetta. Yes, said Hetta. Ive tried the encyclopedias 
and atlases.
The librarian smiled faintly, then frowned. Damar. I dont recallwhat do you 
know about it?
It has eleven Sandpales and a Watcher named Zasharan at the fourth. UmItit 
has a big desert in it, which used to be ancient forest. The librarian raised 
her eyebrows. Itsits a crossword puzzle clue, said Hetta, improvising 
hastily. Itsits a sort of bet.
The librarian looked amused. She tapped Damar into the computer in front of her. 
Hmm. Try under Daria. Oh yesDamar, she said, looking interested. I remember 
oh dear. If you want anything recent, you will have to consult the newspaper 
archive. She looked suddenly hunted. Theres 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 isnt, 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-mass 
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
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 wouldnt eat store bread. She ignored 
more easily than usual her mothers gently murmured litany of complaint when she 
took her her tray, and in blessed peace and quietDane 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 offbegan washing up the pots and pans that wouldnt fit in 
the dishwasher. She was trying to remember anything she could about Dariathey 
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 class, 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 
Ruthwhom she hadnt heard come into the kitchenput her hand on her arm, and 
said, or rather whispered. Hetta, what is with you? Are you okay?
What do you mean?
You havent been yourself since the storm. I mean, good for you, I think you 
havent been yourself in about eight years, except I was so young then I didnt 
know what was going on, and maybe youre becoming yourself again now. But youre 
different, and look, you know Mum and Dad, they dont like different. Itll turn 
out bad somehow if they notice. At the moment Dads still totally preoccupied 
with the storm damage but he wont 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 didnt like conversations he couldnt hear, and the only topics he 
wished discussed all had to do with business and building furniture. IIm 
embarrassed to tell you, said Hetta, concentrating on the bottom of a saucepan.
Try me, said Ruth. Hey, I study the sex lives of bugs. Nothing embarrasses 
me.
Hetta sucked in her breath on a suppressed laugh. IIve been having this 
dream She stopped and glanced at Ruth. Ruth was looking at her, waiting for 
her to go on. Its its like something real.
Ive had dreams like that, said Ruth, but they dont make me go around 
looking like Ive got a huge important secret, at least I dont 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 Ruths 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 
genuinelyeager to stop wasting time in school and get down to building 
furniture ten hours a day. Hetta was betting on Ruth, but she wasnt 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, 
didnt 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 wouldnt have seen it at home. 
After a minute Ruth went on: One of my friendswell, shes kind of a space 
caseMelanie, she says that its full of witches and wizards or something and 
they do, well, real magic there, and all us Homelander bureaucrats either cant 
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 shes a space case. Its 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?
Ive been dreaming about it.
About Daria?Damar, I mean. How do you dream about a country?
Not about the whole country. About aa person, who lives on the edge of the-the 
Great Desert. He says he is one of the Watchersthere are eleven of them. Um. 
They sort of keep an eye on the desert. For sandstorms and things.
Is he cute?
Hetta felt a blush launch itself across her face. II hadnt thought about it. 
This was true.
Ruth laughed, and forgot to swallow it, and a moment later there was a heavy 
foot on the stair up from the shop and their father appeared at the kitchen 
door. Hetta can finish the dishes without your help, he said. Ruth, as you 
have nothing to do, you can have a look at these, and he thrust a handful of 
papers at her. Ive had an insulting estimate from the insurance agent today 
and I want something to answer him with. If Hetta kept the files in better 
order, I wouldnt have to waste time now.
She did not dream of Zasharan that night, but she dreamed of walking in a forest 
full of trees she did not know the names of, and hearing bird-voices, and 
knowing, somehow, that some of them were human beings calling to other human 
beings the news that there was a stranger in their forest. She seemed to walk 
through the trees for many hours, and once or twice it occurred to her that 
perhaps she was lost and should be frightened, but she looked round at the trees 
and smiled, for they were friendly, and she could not feel lost even if she did 
not know where she was, nor frightened, when she was surrounded by friends. At 
last she paused, and put her hand on the deeply rutted bark of a particular tree 
that seemed to call to her to touch it, and looked up into its branches; and 
there, as if her eyes were learning to see, the leaves and branches rearranged 
themselves into a new pattern that included a human face peering down at her. It 
held very still, but it saw at once when she saw it; and then it smiled, and a 
branch near it turned into an arm, and it waved. When she raised her own 
handthe one not touching the treeto wave back, she woke, with one hand still 
lifted in the air.
 
She did not dream of Zasharan the next night either, but she dreamed that she 
was walking past a series of stables and paddocks, where the horses watched her, 
ears pricked, as she went by, till she came to a sand-floored ring where several 
riders were performing a complicated pattern, weaving in and out of each others 
track. The horses wore no bridles, and their saddles, whose shape was strange to 
her eyes, had no stirrups. She watched for a moment, for the pattern the horses 
were making (while their riders appeared to sit motionless astride them) was 
very lovely and graceful. When the horses had all halted, heads in a circle, and 
all dropped their noses as if in salute, one of the riders broke away and came 
towards her, and nodded to her, and said, I am Rohk, master of this dlor, and I 
should know everyone who goes here, but I do not know you. Will you give me your 
name, and how came you past the guard at the gate?
He spoke in a pleasant voice, and she answered with no fear, My name is Hetta, 
and I do not remember coming in your gate. Zasharan has mentioned you to me, and 
perhaps that is how I came here.
Rohk touched his breast with his closed hand, and then opened it towards her, 
flicking the fingers in a gesture she did not know. If you are a friend of 
Zasharan, then you are welcome here, however you came.
 
On the third night she was again walking in a forest, and she looked up 
hopefully, searching for a human face looking down at her, but for what seemed 
to be a long time she saw no one. But as she walked and looked, she began to 
realise that she was hearing something besides birdsong and the rustle of 
leaves; it sounded like bells, something like the huge bronze bells of the 
church tower in her town, but there were too many bells, too many interlaced 
notesperhaps more like the bells of the cathedral in Mauncester. She paused and 
listened more intently. The bells seemed to grow louder: their voices were wild, 
buoyant, superb; and suddenly she was among them, held in the air by the bright 
weave of their music. The biggest bell was turning just at her right elbow, she 
could look into it as it swung up towards her, she could see the clapper fall, 
BONG! The noise this close was unbearableit should have been unbearableit 
struck through her like daggersno: like sunbeams through a prism, and she stood 
in air full of rainbows. But now she could hear voices, human voices, through 
the booming of the bells, and they said: Come down, you must come down, for when 
the bells stand up and silent, you will fall.
She looked down and saw the faces of the ringers, hands busy and easy on the 
ropes, but the faces looking up at her fearful and worried. I do not know how, 
she said, but she knew she made no sound, any more than a rainbow can speak. And 
then she heard the silence beyond the bells, and felt herself falling past the 
music and into the silence; but she woke before she had time to be afraid, and 
she was in her bed in her fathers house, and it was time to get up and make 
breakfast. That afternoon when Ruth came home from school, she bent over Hettas 
chair and dropped a kiss on the top of her head, as she often did, but before 
she straightened up again, she murmured, I have something for you. But Lara, 
on the other side of the table, was peeling potatoes with a great show of being 
helpful, and Ruth said no more. It was a busy evening, for both the hired 
cabinetmakers from the shop, Ron and Tim, had been invited to stay late and come 
for supper, which was one of Hettas fathers ways of avoiding paying them 
overtime, and it was not until they had gone to bed that Ruth came creeping into 
Hettas room with a big envelope. She grinned at Hetta, said, Sweet dreams, 
and left again, closing the door silently behind her. Hetta listened till she 
was sure Ruth had missed the three squeaky stairs on her way back to her own 
room before she dumped the contents of the envelope out on her bed.
Come to Damar, land of orange groves, said the flier on top. She stared at the 
trees in the photo, but they were nothing like the trees she had seen in her 
dream two nights before. She shuffled through the small pile of brochures. As 
travel agents propaganda went, this was all very low-key. There were no girls 
in bikinis and no smiling natives in traditional dress; just landscape, desert 
and mountains and forestsand orange plantations, and some odd-looking 
buildings. What people there were all seemed to be staring somewhat dubiously at 
the camera. Some of them were cinnamon-skinned and black-haired like Zasharan.
There were also a few sheets of plain stark print listing available flights and 
pricesthese made her hiss between her teeth. Her father gave her something 
above the housekeeping money that he called her wages, which nearly covered 
replacing clothes that had worn out and disintegrated off their seams; she had 
nonetheless managed to save a little, by obstinacy; she could probably save more 
if she had to. Most of her grandmothers clothes still hung in the cupboard, for 
example; she had already altered one or two blouses to fit herself, and a skirt 
for Ruth. The difficulty with this however was that while her father would never 
notice the recycling of his mothers old clothes, Hettas mother would, and 
would mention it in her vague-seeming way to her husband, who would then decide 
that Hetta needed less money till this windfall had been thoroughly used up. But 
over the years Hetta had discovered various ways and means to squeeze a penny 
till it screamed, her garden produced more now than it had when she began as she 
learnt more about gardening, and the butcher liked her
Perhaps. Just perhaps.
 
She did not dream of Zasharan that night either, but she smelled the desert 
wind, and for a moment she stood somewhere that was not Farbellow or her 
fathers shop, and she held a cup in her hands, but when she raised it to taste 
its contents, it was only water.
She thought about the taste of desert water that afternoon as she raked the pond 
at the back of the vegetable garden. She wore tall green wellies on her feet and 
long rubber gloves, but it was still very hard not to get smudgy and 
bottom-of-pond-rot-smelling while hauling blanket-weed and storm detritus out of 
a neglected pond. She didnt get back here as often as she wanted to because the 
pond didnt produce anything but newts and blanket-weed and she didnt have time 
for it, although even at its worst it was a magical spot for her, and the only 
place in the garden where her mother couldnt see her from her window.
She had wondered all her life how her great-grandmother had managed to convince 
her great-grandfather to dig her a useless ornamental pond. Her 
great-grandfather had died when she was four, but she remembered him clearly: in 
his extreme old age he was still a terrifying figure, and even at four she 
remembered how her grandmother, his daughter, had seemed suddenly to shed a 
burden after his deathand how Hettas own father had seemed to expand to fill 
that empty space. Hettas father, her grandmother had told her, sadly, quietly, 
not often, but now and again, was just like his grandfather. Hetta would have 
guessed this anyway; there were photographs of him, and while he had been taller 
than her father, she recognised the glare. She couldnt imagine what it must 
have been like to be his only child, as her grandmother had been.
But his wife had had her pond.
It was round, and there was crazy paving around the edge of it. There was a 
little thicket of coppiced dogwood at one end, which guarded it from her mother, 
which Hetta cut back religiously every year; but the young red stems were very 
pretty and worthwhile on their own account as well as for the screen they 
provided. She planted sunflowers at the backs of the vegetable beds, and then 
staked them, so they would stand through the winter: these sheltered it from 
view of the shop as if, were her father reminded of it, it would be filled in at 
once and used for potatoes. It was an odd location to choose for a pond; it was 
too well shaded by the apple tree and the wall to grow water lilies in, for 
example, but the paving made it look as though you might want to set chairs 
beside it and admire the newts and the blanket-weed on nice summer evenings; 
nearer the house you would have less far to carry your patio furniture and 
tea-tray. Maybe her great-grandmother had wanted to hide from view too. Hettas 
grandmother had found it no solace; she called it eerie and stayed away. She 
was probably just one of these smooth, dry humans with no amphibian blood, Ruth 
had said once, having joined Hetta poolside one evening and discovered, upon 
getting up, that she had been sitting in mud. Ruth had also told Hetta that her 
pond grew rather good newts: Turners Greater Red-Backed Newt, to be precise, 
which was big (as newts go) and rare.
Hetta paused a moment, leaning on her rake. She would leave the blanket-weed 
heaped up on the edge of the pond overnight, so that anything that lived in it 
had time to slither, creep, or scurry back into the pond; and then she would 
barrow it to the compost heap behind the garage. She looked down at her feet. 
The blanket-weed was squirming. A newt crept out and paused as if considering; 
it had a jagged vermilion crest down its back like a miniature dragon, and eyes 
that seemed to flash gold in the late-afternoon sunlightshe fancied that it 
glanced up at her before it made its careful way down the blanket-weed slope and 
slid into the pond with the tiniest chuckle of broken water.
 
That night she woke again in Zasharans rocky chamber. She lay again on the bed 
or pallet where she had woken before; and she turned her head on her pillow and 
saw Zasharan dozing in a chair drawn up beside her. As she looked into his face, 
he opened his eyes and looked back at her. Good, he said. I dreamed that you 
would wake again soon. Comecan you stand? I am sorry to press you when you are 
weary and confused, but there are many things I do not understand, and I want to 
take you to my Eye quickly, before you escape me again. If you cannot stand, and 
if you will permit it, I will carry you.
Dream? she said. You dreamed I would return? She was sitting up and putting 
her feet on the floor as she spokebare feet, sandy floor, her toes and heels 
wriggled themselves into their own little hollows without her conscious 
volition. For the first time she thought to look at what she was wearing: it was 
a long loose robe, dun-coloured in the lamplight, very like her nightdress at 
homeit could almost be her nightdressbut the material was heavier and fell 
more fluidly, and there seemed to be a pattern woven into it that she could not 
see in the dimness.
Watchers often dream, he said. It is one of the ways we Watch. No Watcher 
would be chosen who had not found his-or her-way through dreams many times. He 
offered her his hand. But youI am not accustomed to my visitors telling me 
they are dream-things when I am not dreaming.
She stood up and staggered a little, and he caught her under the elbows. I will 
walk, she said. I walked here before, did I not? Thethe night I came 
herenearly a fortnight ago now. He smiled faintly. I would like to walk. 
Walking makes me feelless of a dream-thing.
His smile jerked, as if he understood some meaning of her remark she had not 
meant, and they left the room, and walked for some time through rocky corridors 
hazily lit by some variable and unseen source. At first these were narrow and 
low, and the floor was often uneven although the slope was steadily upward; both 
walls and floor were yellowy-goldeny-grey, although the walls seemed darker for 
the shadows they held in their rough hollows. The narrow ways widened, and she 
could see other corridors opening off them on either side. She felt better for 
the walkrealler, as she had said, less like a dream-thing. She could feel her 
feet against the sand, a faint ache from the wound on her ankle, listen to her 
own breath, feel the air of this place against her skin. She knew she was 
walking slowly, tentatively, when at home she was quick and strong, and needed 
to be. Perhapsperhaps they were very high herehad he not said something about 
hills?perhaps it was the elevation that made her feel so faint and frail.
They had turned off the main way into one of the lesser corridors, and came at 
last to a spiral stair. The treads twinkled with trodden sand in the dim 
directionless light as far up as she could see till they rounded the first bend. 
You first, lady, he said, and she took a deep breath and grasped the rope 
railing, and began to pull herself wearily up, step by step; but to her surprise 
the way became easier the higher they climbed, her legs grew less tired and her 
breath less laboured. They came out eventually on a little landing before a 
door, and Zasharan laid his hand softly on it and murmured a word Hetta could 
not hear, and it opened.
There were windows on the far side of the room, curtainless, with what she 
guessed was dawn sunlight streaming in; she flinched as the daylight touched her 
as if in this place she would prove a ghost or a vampire, but nothing happened 
but that its touch was gentle and warm. The view was of a steep slope rising 
above them; the room they were in seemed to grow out of the hillside.
There was a round pool in the middle of the floor and Zasharan knelt down beside 
it on the stone paving that surrounded it. This is my Eye, he said softly. 
Come and look with me.
She knelt near him, propping herself with her hands, for she was feeling weary 
again. Her gaze seemed to sink below the waters surface in a way she did not 
understand; perhaps the contents of the pool was not water. And as her sight 
plunged deeper, she had the odd sensation that something in the depths was 
rising towards her, and she wondered suddenly if she wanted to meet it, whatever 
it was.
A great, golden Eye, with a vertical pupil expanding as she saw it, as if it had 
only just noticed her
She gave a small gasp, and she heard Zasharan murmuring beside her, but she 
could not hear what he said; and then the pupil of the Eye expanded till it 
filled the whole of her vision with darkness, and then the darkness cleared, and 
she saw
 
She woke in her bed, her heart thundering, gasping for breath, having pulled the 
bed to bits, the blankets on the floor, the sheets knotted under her and her 
feet on bare ticking. It was just before dawn; there was grey light leaking 
through the gap at the bottom of the blind. She felt exhausted, as if she had 
had no sleep at all, and at the same time grimly, remorselessly awake. She knew 
she would not sleep again. Her right ankle ached, and she put her fingers down 
to rub it; there was a ridge there, like an old scar.
She got through the day somehow, but she left a pot of soup on the back of the 
cooker turned up too high, so it had boiled over while she was scraping the 
seeds out of squashes over the compost heap, and her mother had called out, a 
high, thin shriek, that the house was burning down, although it was only burnt 
soup on the hob. Her mother had palpitations for the rest of the evening, was 
narrowly talked out of ringing the doctor to have something new prescribed for 
her nerves, and insisted that she might have burned in her bed. Her father 
complained about the thick burnt smell spoiling his tea, and that Hetta was far 
too old to make stupid mistakes like that. She went to bed with a headache, 
remembering that the blanket-weed was still waiting for her to haul it away, and 
found two aspirin on her pillow, and a glass of water on the floor beside it: 
Ruth. Their father believed that pharmacology was for cowards. The only drugs in 
the house were on her mothers bedside table, and Hetta would much rather have a 
headache than face her mother again that evening; she had forgotten Ruths 
secret stash. She swallowed the pills gratefully and lay down.
 
When she opened her eyes she was again by the pool in Zasharans tower, but she 
had moved, or been moved, a little distance from it, so she could no longer look 
into it (or perhaps it could no longer look out at her), and Zasharan sat beside 
her, head bowed, holding her hand. When she stirred, he looked up at once, and 
said, I have looked, and asked my people to look, in our records, and I cannot 
find any tale to help us. I am frightened, for you sleep too longit is longer 
each time you leave. You have been asleep nearly a day, and there are hollows 
under your eyes. This is not the way it should be. You live elsewhereyou have 
been born and have lived to adulthood in this elsewherewhere you should not be; 
you should be here; my Eye would not have troubled itself to look at any 
stranger, and my heart welcomes you whether I would or nay. There have been 
others who have come here by strange ways, but they come and they stay. If you 
wish to come here and we wish to have you, why do you not stay? She sat up and 
put her other hand on his and said, No, wait, it is all right. I have found 
Damar in the atlas at home, and my sister has found out about air flights, and I 
will come here in thein the She stumbled over how to express it. In the 
usual way. And I will come here, and find you. She heard herself saying this as 
if she were listening to a television programme, as if she had nothing to do 
with it; and yet she knew she had something to do with it, because she was 
appalled. Who was this man she only met in dream to tell her where she belonged, 
and who was she to tell him that she was going to come to himeven to herself 
she did not know how to put itthat she was going to come to him in the real 
world?
Air flights, he said thoughtfully.
Yes, she said. Where is the nearest airport? I could not find Thaar, or 
ChinChin As she said this, her voice wavered, because she remembered how hard 
it was to remember anything from a dream; and she was dreaming. Remember the 
sand, her dream-thought told her. Remember the sand that lies in the little box 
on your chest of drawers. Ohyou will have to tell me how to find you. I assume 
there is a better way than Her voice trailed away again as she remembered 
being lost in the sandstorm, of being led blindly through the sand-wind, her arm 
pulled round Zasharans shoulders till her own shoulder ached, remembered her 
curious sense that they were somehow kept safe in a little rolling bubble of air 
that let them make their way to the door in the cliff. That is why he is a 
Watcher, said the dream-thought. There is little use in Watching if you cannot 
act upon what you see.
I do not know where the nearest airport is. What is an airport? said Zasharan.
She knew, sometimes, that she spoke some language other than Homelander in her 
dreams; but then it was the sort of thing you felt you knew while you were 
dreaming and yet also knew that it was only a trick of the mind. The words she 
spoke to Zasharanthe words she had heard and spoken to the other Damarians she 
had met in other dreamsfelt different. It was just a part of the dream, as was 
the different, more rolling, growlier, peaked-and-valleyed sound of the words 
Zasharan and the other Damarians said to her than what she spoke in Farbellow, 
when she was awake. (I am awake now, said the dream-thought.) It was only a part 
of the same mind-trick that when Zasharan said airport, it sounded like a word 
that came from some other language than the one he was speaking.
She looked around, and saw a table in the corner, and books upon it (were these 
the records he had been searching for stories like hers?), and several loose 
sheets of paper, and a pen. She stood upcarefully, prepared to be dizzyand 
gestured towards the table. Zasharan stood up with her. May I? she said. He 
nodded as anyone might nod, but he also made a gesture with his hand that was 
both obviously that of hospitality and equally not at allshe thought; her 
dream-thought thoughtlike the gesture she would have made if someone had asked 
her to borrow a sheet of paper.
She took a deep breath, and picked up the pen (which was enough like an 
old-fashioned fountain pen that she did not have to ask how to use it) and drew 
an airplane on the top sheet of paper. She was not an artist, but anyone in the 
world she knew would have recognised what she drew at once as an airplane.
Zasharan only looked at it, puzzled, worried, both slightly frowning and 
slightly smiling, and shook his head, and made another gesture, a gesture of 
unknowing, although not the shoulders raised and hands spread that she would 
have made (that she thought she would have made) in a similar situation.
Frustrated, she folded the sheet of paper, lengthwise in half, then folding the 
nose, the wingsshe threw it across the room and it flew over the round pool 
where the Eye waited, bumped into the wall on the far side and fell to the 
ground. Paper airplane, she said.
Paper glider. he agreed. He walked round the pool, and picked her airplane up, 
and brought it back to the table. He unfolded it, carefully, pressing the folds 
straight with his fingers, smoothing and smoothing the wrinkles the bumped nose 
had madeas if paper were rare and precious, she thought, refusing to follow 
that thought any fartherand then, quickly, he folded it again, to a new 
pattern, a much more complex pattern, and when he tossed his glider in the air 
it spun up and then spiralled down in a lovely curve, and lit upon the floor as 
lightly as a butterfly.
She looked at him, and there was a sick, frightened feeling in her throat. When 
you travellong distances, she said, howhow do you go? She could not bring 
herself to ask about cars and trucks and trains.
We have horses and asses and ankaba, he said. You may walk or ride or lead a 
beast loaded with your gear. We have guides to lead you. We have waggoners who 
will carry you and your possessions. There are coaches if you can afford them; 
they are fasterand, they say, more comfortable, but I would not count on this. 
He spoke mildly, as if this were an ordinary question, but his eyes were fixed 
on her face in such a way that made it plain he knew it was not.
Slowly she said, What year is it, Zasharan?
He said, It is the year 3086, counting from the year Gasthamor came from the 
east and struck the Hills with the hilt of his sword, and the Well of the City 
of the Kings and Queens opened under the blow.
Gasthamor, said Hetta, tasting the name.
Gasthamor, who was the teacher of Oragh, who was the teacher of Semthara, who 
was the teacher of Frayadok, who was the teacher of Goriolo, who was the teacher 
of Luthe, said Zasharan.
Gasthamor, she repeated to herself. Goriolo, She doubted that the encyclopedia 
would tell the tale of the warrior-mage who struck the rock with the hilt of his 
sword and produced a flow of water that would last over three thousand years, 
but an encyclopedia of legends might. Youyou said the Queens City, once 
before, she said. What is the name of your queen?
Fortunatar, he said. Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.
 
She woke to the sound of her own voice, murmuring, Gasthamor, Fortunatar of the 
Clear Seeing, the year 3086. Her heart was heavy as she went about her chores 
that day, and she told herself that this was only because it was two more days 
before she could go to the library again, and look up the kings and queens of 
Damar.
She made time to finish cleaning the pool at the back of the garden, hauling the 
blanket-weednow a disgusting sticky brown mattwo heaped barrowloads of the 
stuffto the compost heap. When she was done, she knelt on the crazy paving that 
edged the pool, and dipped her dirty hands in the water. The sting of its 
coolness was friendly, energising; her head felt clearer and her heart lighter 
than it had in several days. She patted her face with one wet hand, letting the 
other continue to trail in the water, and she felt a tiny flicker against her 
palm. She looked down, and there was a newt, swimming back and forth in a tiny 
figure eight, the curl of one arc inside her slightly cupped fingers. She turned 
her hand so that it was palm up. and spread her fingers. It swam to the centre 
of her palm and stopped. She thought she could just feel the tickle of tiny feet 
against her skin.
She raised her hand very, very slowly; as the newts crested back broke the 
surface of the water, it gave a frantic, miniature heave and scrabble, and she 
thought it would dive over the little rise made by the web between her 
forefinger and thumb, but it stilled instead, seeming to crouch and brace 
itself, as against some great peril. Now she definitely felt its feet: the 
forefeet at the pulse-point of her wrist, the rear on the pads at the roots of 
her fingers, the tail sliding off her middle finger between it and the ring 
finger. She found she was holding her breath.
She continued to raise her hand till it was eye level to herself; and the newt 
lifted its head and stared at her. Its eyes were so small, it was difficult to 
make out their colour: gold, she thought, with a vertical black pupil. The newt 
gave a tiny shudder and the startling red crest on its back lifted and 
stiffened.
They gazed at each other for a full minute. Then she lowered her hand again till 
it touched the pond surface, and this time the newt was gone so quickly that she 
stared at her empty palm, wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.
She heard bells ringing in her dreams that night, but they seemed sombre and 
sad. On the next night she thought she heard Zasharans voice, but she was lost 
in the dark, and whichever way she turned, his voice came from behind her, and 
very far away.
She stormed around the supermarket the next day, and when she found herself at 
the check-out behind someone who had to think about which carefully designated 
bag each item went into, she nearly started throwing his own apples at him. She 
arrived at the library with less than half an hour left, but her luck had found 
her at last, for there was a computer free. Queens of Damar, she typed. There 
was a whirr, and a list of web sites which mentioned (among other things) 
internationally assorted queens apparently not including Damarian, paint 
varnishes, long underwear, and hair dressing salons, presented itself to her 
hopefully. She stared at the screen, avoiding asking something that would tell 
her what she feared. At last she typed: Who is the ruler of Damar today?
Instantly the screen replied: King Doroman rules with the Council of Five and 
the Parliament of Montaratur.
There was no help for it. Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing, she typed.
There was a pause while the computer thought about it. She must have looked as 
frustrated and impatient as she felt, because a librarian paused beside her and 
asked in that well-practised ready-to-go-away-without-taking-offense voice if 
she could be of service.
I am trying to find out some information about the queen of Damar, she said.
Damar? OhDariaohDamar. Someone else was just asking about Damar a few weeks 
ago. Its curious how much we dont hear about a country as big as it is. They 
have a king now, dont they? I seem to remember from the independence 
ceremonies. I cant remember if he had a wife or not.
The computer was still thinking. Hetta said, finding herself glad of the 
distraction, The queen I want is Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing.
The librarian repeated this thoughtfully. She sounds rather, hmm, poetical, 
though, doesnt she? Have you tried myths and legends?
The computer had now hung itself on the impossible question of a poetical queen 
of Damar, and Hetta was happy to let the librarian lean over her and put her 
hands on the keyboard and wrestle it free. The librarian knew, too. how to ask 
the librarys search engine questions it could handle, and this time when an 
answering screen came up, there was a block of text highlighted:
Shortly after this period of upheaval, Queen Fortunatar, later named of the 
Clear Seeing for the justice of her rulings in matters both legal and numinous, 
took her throne upon the death of her half-brother Linmath. Linmath had done 
much in his short life, and he left her a small but sound queendom which 
flourished under her hand. The remaining feuds were settled not by force of arms 
(nor by the trickery that had caught Linmath fatally unaware) but by weaponless 
confrontation before the queen and her counsellors; and fresh feuds took no hold 
and thus shed no blood. The one serious and insoluble menace of Fortunatars 
time were the sandstorms in the Great Desert which were frequent and severe.
Hmm, said the librarian, and scrolled quickly to the top of the document. An 
Introduction to the Legendary History of Damar:
All countries have their folk tales and traditions, but Damar is unusual in the 
wealth of these, and in the inextricable linkage between them and what western 
scholars call factual history. Even today
Hetta closed her eyes. Then she opened them again without looking at the 
computer screen, made a dramatic gesture of looking at her watch, and did not 
have to feign the start of horror when she saw what it was telling her. Oh 
dearI really must gothank you so muchI will come back when I have more time. 
She was out the door before she heard what the librarian was asking her. 
Probably whether she wanted to print out any of what they had found.
No.
 
For three nights she did not dream at all, and waking was cruel. The one moment 
when her spirits lifted enough for her to feel a breeze on her face and pause to 
breathe the air with pleasure was one sunny afternoon when she went back to her 
pool and scrubbed the encircling paving. She scrubbed with water only, not 
knowing what any sort of soap run-off might do to the pond life, and she saw 
newts wrinkle the water with their passing several times. When she stopped to 
breathe deep, she thought she saw a newt with a red back hovering at the edge of 
the pond as if it were looking at her, and it amused her for another moment to 
imagine that all the newts she saw were just the one newt, swimming back and 
forth, keeping her company.
That night she dreamed again, but it was a brief and disturbing dream, when she 
sat at the edge of Zasharans pool where the Watchers Eye lay, and she strained 
to look into the water and see it looking out at her, but the water was dark and 
opaque, though she felt sure the Eye was there, and aware of her. She woke 
exhausted, and aching as if with physical effort.
She dreamed the same the next night, and the oppression and uselessness of it 
were almost too much to bear. Her head throbbed with the effort to peer through 
the surface of the water, and she fidgeted where she sat as if adjusting her 
body might help her to see, knowing this was not true, and yet unable to sit 
still nonetheless. There was a scratchy noise as she moved and resettled, and 
grit under her palms as she leaned on them. Sand. The ubiquitous Damarian desert 
sand; Zasharan had told her that usually there was no sand in the Watchers 
chamber but that this year it had blown and drifted even there. She dragged her 
blind gaze from the water and refocussed on the sand at the edge of the pool: 
the same glittery, twinkly sand that had first given her her cruelly unfounded 
hope when she had woken at home with grains of it in her hands and nightdress.
She shifted her weight and freed one hand. Help me, she wrote in the sand at the 
edge of the pool, and as she raised her finger from the final e, the dream 
dissolved, and she heard the milk float in the street below, and knew she would 
be late with breakfast.
 
A fortnight passed, and she dreamed of Damar no more. She began to grow 
reaccustomed to her life above the furniture shop, housekeeper, cook, mender, 
minder, bookkeeper, dogsbodynothing. Nobody. She would grow old like this. She 
might marry Ron or Tim; that would please her father, and tie one of them even 
more strongly to the shop. She supposed her father did not consider the 
possibility that she might not be tied to the shop herself; she supposed she did 
not consider the possibility either. She had raised no protest when her parents 
had sent Mrs. Halford and Mr. Jonah and the possibility of university and a 
career away; she could hardly protest now that she had a dream-world she liked 
better than this one and wished to go there. The paperback shelves at the 
grocery store testified to the popularity of dream-worlds readers could only 
escape to for a few hours in their imaginations. She wondered how many people 
dreamed of the worlds they read about in books. She tried to remember if there 
had been some book, some fairy-tale of her childhood, that had begun her secret 
love of deserts, of the sandstorm-torn time of Queen Fortunatar of the Clear 
Seeing, of a landscape she had never seen with her waking eyes; she could 
remember no book and no tale her grandmother told that was anything like what 
she had dreamed.
It took three weeks, but Ruth finally managed to corner her one Saturday 
afternoon, hoeing the vegetable garden. No you dont, she said as Hetta picked 
her hoe up hastily and began to move back towards the garden shed. I want to 
talk to you, and I mean to do it. Those dreams you were having about Damar lit 
you up, and the lights gone off again. Its not just the price of the ticket, 
is it? Wed get the money somehow.
Hetta dropped the hoe blade back behind the cabbages, but left it motionless. 
No, she muttered. Its not just the money. Her fingers tightened on the 
handle, and the blade made a few erratic scrapes at the soil.
Then what is it?
Hetta steadied the blade and began to hoe properly. Ruth showed no sign of going 
away, so at last she said: It doesnt matter. It was a silly idea anyway. Doing 
something because you dreamed about it.
Ruth made a noise like someone trying not to yell when theyve just cracked 
their head on a low door. She stepped round the edge of the bed and seized 
Hettas wrist in both hands. Ruth was smaller than Hetta. and spent her spare 
time in a lab counting beetles, but Hetta was surprised at the strength of her 
grasp. Talk to me, said Ruth. I have been worrying about you for years. Since 
Grandma died. Youre not supposed to have to worry about your older sister when 
youre six. Dont you think I know youve saved my life? Father would have 
broken me like he breaks everyone he gets his hands on if Id been the 
elderlike he broke Mum, like hes broken Dane, like hes broken Tim and Ron and 
they were even grown-upsand Laras going, for all that she thinks she just 
wants to marry Dane. You are the only one of us who has been clever enough, or 
stubborn enough, to save a little bit of your soul from himmaybe Grandma did, 
when she was still alive I wasnt paying so much attention, maybe you learned it 
from herand I learned from you that it can be done. I know it, and Jeff does 
tooyou know, with that programming stuff he can do, hes already got half his 
university paid for. When the time comes, nobodyll be able to say no to him. 
Were going to be all rightand thats thanks to you. Its time to save yourself 
now. That little bit of your soul seems to live in that desert of yoursif I 
were a shrink instead of a biologist, Im sure I could have a really good time 
with that metaphorIve wondered where you kept it. But youre going to lose it, 
now, after all, if youre not careful. What are you waiting for? Lara can learn 
to do the booksIll tell Dane to suggest it, theyll both think its a great 
ideaIll teach her. Well eat like hell, maybe, but theres only a year left 
for me and two for Jeff, and the rest of em are on their own. Who knows? Maybe 
Mum will get out of bed. Hetta. My lovely sister. Go. Ill visit you, wherever 
you end up.
Hetta stood trembling. In her minds eye she saw Zasharan, sand, trees, bells, 
horses, tree-framed faces, the Eye, the pool. For a moment they were more real 
to her than the garden she stood in or the bruising grip on her wrist. She 
realised thisrealised it and lost it again as she recognised the landscape of 
her real lifewith a pain so great, she could not bear it.
She burst into tears.
She was only vaguely aware of Ruth putting an arm round her shoulders and 
leading her back behind the storm-broken sunflower screen and sitting her down 
at the pools edge, vaguely aware of Ruth rocking her as she had many times 
rocked Ruth, years ago, when their mother had first taken to her bed and their 
father shouted all the time. She came slowly to herself again with her head on 
Ruths breast, and Ruths free hand trailing drops of cold water from the pond 
against her face.
She sat up slowly. Ruth waited. She began to tell Ruth everything, from the 
first dream. She stumbled first over saying Fortunatars name: Queen Fortunatar 
of the Clear Seeing. And she paused before she explained what had happened in 
the library the day before. Its all imaginary. Its not only not real, its 
not even historyits just legends. I might as well be dreaming of King Arthur 
and Robin Hood and Puck of Pooks Hill and Middle Earth. Ifif youre right that 
a little of my soul lives there, thenthen its an imaginary soul too. Nothing, 
whispered her mind. Nothing but here, now, this. She looked at the walls around 
the garden; even from this, the gardens farthest point, she could hear the 
electric buzz of woodworking tools, and the wind, from the wrong direction 
today, brought them the smell of hot oil from Bennys Fish and Chips.
Ruth was silent a long time, but she held on to one of her sisters hands, and 
Hetta, exhausted from the effort of weeping and explaining, made no attempt to 
draw away. She would have to go indoors soon, and start supper. First she had to 
pull the fleece back over her exposed cabbages; there was going to be a frost 
tonight. Soon she had to do it. Not just yet.
Ruth said at last: Well, they thought for hundreds of years that bumblebees 
couldnt fly, and the bumblebees went on flying while they argued about it, and 
then they finally figured it out. It never made any difference to the 
bumblebees. And I met Melanies great-uncle once and he was no fool, and Melanie 
and I are friends because shes not really a space case, its just that if she 
pretends to be one, she can tell her uncles stories. Havent you ever thought 
that legends have a lot of truth in them? History is just organised around 
facts. Facts arent the whole story or the bumblebees would have had to stop 
flying till the scientists figured out how they could.
Hetta said wearily, Thats a little too poetical for me. Legends and poetry 
dont change the fact that I have to go get supper now.
Ruth said, Wait. Wait. Im still thinking. Ill help you with supper. Her head 
was bowed, and the hand that wasnt holding Hettas was still trailing in the 
pool, and she flicked up water drops as if her thoughts were stinging her. You 
know, I think theres a newt trying to get your attention. One of these big red 
fellows.
Yes, Ive met him before, said Hetta, trying to sound lighthearted, trying to 
go with Ruths sudden change of subject, trying to accept that there was nothing 
to be done about Damarian dream-legends, and that this was her life.
Not very newt-like behaviour, Ruth said. Look. There was a newt swimming, 
back and forth, as ithe or shehad swum before. Watch, said Ruth. She dabbled 
her fingers near the newt and it ducked round them and continued its tiny laps, 
back and forth, in front of the place where Hetta sat. Ruth dabbled again, and 
it ducked again, and came straight back to Hetta. Put your hand in the water, 
said Ruth.
Hetta was still in that half-trance mood of having told her secret, and so she 
put her hand into the water without protest. The newt swam to her and crept up 
on the back of her hand. She raised her hand out of the pond, slowly, as she had 
done once before; the newt clung on. She stared into the small golden eyes, and 
watched the vertical pupil dilate as it looked back at her.
Maybe Queen Fortunatar of the Clear Seeing is trying to send you a message, 
said Ruth.
 
Hetta dreamed again that night. She came through the door she had first entered 
by, when Zasharan had saved her from the storm. She came in alone, the sand 
swirling around her, and closed the door against the wind with her own strength. 
She felt well and alert and clear-headed. She dropped the scarf she had wrapped 
around her face, and set off, as if she knew the way, striding briskly down the 
corridors, the sand sliding away under her soft-booted feet, and then up a 
series of low stairs, where the sand grated between her soles and the 
stairstone. The same dim light shone as it had shone the night that Zasharan had 
guided her, but she often put her hand against the wall for reassurance, for the 
shadows seemed to fall more thickly than they had done when she was with him. 
She was not aware of why she chose one way rather than another, but she made 
every choice at every turning without hesitation.
She came to the spiral stair, and climbed it. When she put her hand to the door 
of the Eyes chamber, it opened.
Zasharan was standing on the far side of the pool. Hetta raised her hands and 
pushed her hair back from her face, suddenly needing to do something homely and 
familiar, suddenly feeling that nothing but her own body was familiar. She let 
her palms rest against her cheekbones briefly. The sleeves of the strange, pale, 
loose garment she was wearing fell back from her forearms; there was a shift 
beneath it, and loose trousers beneath that, and the soft boots with their long 
laces wrapped the trousers around her calves. Her right ankle throbbed.
Zasharan made no move to approach her. From the far side of the pool of the Eye, 
he said, I thought you would not return. It has been a sennight since you 
disappeared. If there had not been the hollow in the sand beside the pool where 
you had lain, I might have believed I had dreamed you. I went back to the little 
room by the lowest door where I first brought you, and the dressings cabinet 
still lay open, and the needle lay beside it with the end of the thread I had 
used on your ankle, and one bandage was missing; and I could see where your 
blood had fallen in the sand, for no one goes there but me, and I had not swept 
nor put things to rights. Iwhen you first came, II thought I knew why you were 
here. I thoughtI thought I had read the signsnot only in the sand, but in your 
face. I was glad. But you do not wish to come here, do you? That is what I 
missed, when I searched the records. That is why your story is different. 
Sandstorms are treacherous; I knew that; I just did not see what it meant here. 
It is only the blood you shed here that brings you back, the blood you shed by 
the treachery of the sand. That is all. I must let you go. I am glad you have 
come back once more, to let me say good-bye, and to apologise for trying to hold 
you against your will.
There were tears under Hettas palms. She smeared them away and dropped her 
hands. II dream you. She meant to say I only dream you, you are just a dream.
Zasharan smiled; it was a painful smile. Of course. How else could we meet? You 
have told me of Roanshire, in a land I do not know. I should have realised when 
you never invited me to come to you in your dreams
I only dream you! You are just a dream! Hetta put her hands to her face again, 
and clawed at her hair. I looked up Queen Fortunatar in the library! She is a 
legend! She is not real! Even if she were real, she would have been real 
hundreds of years ago! We have airports now, and cars, and electric lights and 
television and computers!
Zasharan stepped forward abruptly, to the very edge of the pool. Queen 
Fortunatar is in your library? he said. You have read about heryou sought to 
read about her in your waking Roanshire?
Yes, yes, said Hetta impatiently. But
Why?
Why? Why did I?because I wanted her to be real, of course! Because I want you 
to be real! You do not want to waste your dreaming on my lifeyou do not want to 
visit me there!although I wish Ruth could meet youoh, this is absurd! I am 
dreaming, and Queen Fortunatar is a myth, a fairy-taleshe is not real.
Everything that is, is real, murmured Zasharan, as if his mind were on 
something else. Then he walked round the pool and held his hand out towards her. 
Am I real? Take my hand.
Hetta stared at him and his outstretched hand. This was only a dream; she had 
touched him, dreaming, many times on her visits here; he had half-carried her 
out of the sandstorm, he had dressed her ankle, he had held a cup for her to 
drink from, he had led her to this room.
She raised her hand, but curled it up against her own body. What if, when she 
reached out to him, her hand went through his, as if he were a ghost? As if he 
were only imaginary, like a legend in a book?
Like a dream upon waking?
She held out her hand, but at the last moment she closed her eyes. Her fingers, 
groping, felt nothing, where his hand should be. She felt dizzy, and sick, and 
there was a lumpy mattress against her back, and sheets twisted uncomfortably 
round her body, and a fish-and-chips-and-wood-shavings smell in her nostrils.
And then it was as if his hand bloomed inside of hers; as if she had held a 
tiny, imperceptible kernel which the heat of her hand had brought suddenly to 
blossoming; and her feet in their boots were standing on sand-scattered stone, 
and she opened her eyes with a gasp, and Zasharan drew her to him and he let go 
her hand only to put both arms round her.
He said gently, You must find your own way to come. The way is there. I do not 
know where; I do not know your world, your time, with the cars and the 
electricity. If you wish to come, you must find the way. I will wait for you 
here.
She turned her head as it lay against his shoulder, and stared at the water of 
the pool at their feet. Somewhere deep within it, she thought a golden eye 
glittered up at her.
 
She woke feeling strangely calm. It was just before dawn. The first birds were 
trying out the occasional chirp, and the chimneys across the street were black 
against the greying sky. She climbed out of bed and put her dressing gown on and 
crept down the first flight of stairs, careful of the creaking boards, to Ruths 
room. Ruth woke easily; a hand on her shoulder was enough. She put her lips to 
Ruths ear. Will you come with me?
They made their way noiselessly downstairs, past the shop, into the back room 
and the garden door. There they paused briefly, baffled, for that door could not 
be opened silently. Hetta stood with her hand on the bolt, and for a moment she 
thought she saw Zasharan standing beside her, his hand over her hand. He was 
looking at her. but then looked up, over her shoulder, at Ruth; then he looked 
back at Hetta, and smiled. I thank you, he said: she did not hear him, but she 
saw his lips move. My honour is yours, she said, formally. Then she pulled the 
bolt and opened the door, and it made no sound. Whew! Ruth sighed.
When they reached the pool at the end of the garden, Hetta pulled Ruth into a 
fierce hug and said softly, I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted someone here 
when Ileft. I wanted to thank you. II dont think I will see you again.
You are going to go live in a legend, said Ruth. IIll remember the 
bumblebees. Imake up a legend about me, will you?
Hetta nodded. She knelt by the pool. Its surface was still opaque in the grey 
dawn light, but when she put her hand to the surface of the water, the newt 
crept up immediately into her cupped palm. As she knelt, an edge of her dressing 
gown slipped forwardYoure bleeding! said Ruth.
Hetta looked down. The scar on her ankle had opened, and a little fresh blood 
ran down her leg. The first drop was poised to fall
She jerked upright to her knees and thrust her foot out over the pool. The blood 
fell into the water: one drop, two, three. The newt was still clinging to her 
hand. Ruth
Go, said Ruth harshly. Go now.
Hetta slipped forward, into the water, and it closed over her head.
 
It was a long journey, through water, through sand, through storms and darkness. 
She often lost track of where she was, who she was, where she was going and why; 
and then she felt a small skipping sensation against the palm of one hand, or 
the weight of a small clawed thing hanging to the hair behind her ear, or saw a 
goldy-black glint of eye with her own eye, and she remembered. She swam through 
oceans, and through deserts. She was swallowed and vomited up by a green dragon 
in a great stinking belch of wet black smoke. She eluded sea serpents by 
drifting, for, like sharks, they respond to movement; and water goblins by 
hiding in mud, because water goblins, being ugly themselves, are determined to 
notice only beautiful things, even if this means missing dinner. She was guided 
on her way by mer-folk, who have a strong liking for romance and adventure, and 
in whose company she sang her first songs, although they laughed at her for only 
being able to breathe air, and said that her little gold-eyed friend should 
teach her better. She spoke to sand-sprites, who have small hissing voices like 
draughts under doors, and she listened to the desert feys, who rarely speak to 
humans but often talk to the desert. She was almost trampled by the sand-gods 
great armoured horses till her little friend showed her how to hide in the 
hollow behind their ears and cling to their manes; but Geljdreth stood between 
her and what she sought and longed for, and at last she had to face him with 
nothing but her own determination and wit and the strength of her two hands, and 
a little friend hanging over one ear like an ear-ring. And, perhaps because she 
was from Roanshire in the Homeland where there were no deserts, and she had not 
lived her life in fear of him, she won out against him, and loosed his horses, 
and crippled his power.
At last her head broke the surface in a small calm pool; and there was Zasharan, 
waiting to pull her out, and wrap her in a cloak, and give her tiarhk to drink, 
as he had done once before, though he had wiped her face free of grit then, not 
of water. She turned to look back into the pool, and she saw a gold eye looking 
back at her. and she could not tell if it were a very large eye or a very small 
one. Thank you, she said. I thank you.
Somewherenot in her ear; in her heart or her belly or the bottoms of her 
feetshe heard My honour is yours.
Welcome home, said Zasharan.
 
Ruth had grown up, married, had two children, and written three best-selling 
books of popular science concerning the apparent impossibilities the natural 
world presents that scientists struggle for generations to find explanations 
for, before she found herself one day tapping the legends of Damar on her 
computer. Her search engine produced few relevant hits; after a brief flurry of 
interest for a few years following independence, Damar had again drifted into 
the backwaters of international attention.
It only took her a few minutes to find a reference to Queen Fortunatar of the 
Clear Seeing. It described her half-brother, her success as an adjudicator, and 
the sandstorms that particularly plagued her reign. After a few compact 
paragraphs the article ended:
One of the most famous Damarian bards also began telling stories during 
Fortunatars reign. Hetthar is an interesting figure, for part of her personal 
legend is that she came out of time and place to marry Fortunatars Fourth 
Sandpale Watcher, Zasharan, and it was said that after she came, no one was ever 
again lost to the storms of the Kalarsham, and that the sand-god hated her for 
this. But her main fame rests on the cycle of stories she called The Journeying, 
and whose central character has the strangely un-Damarian name of Ruth.

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[found in feral rtf, updated, reproofed from tiff of original publication, 
formatting restored]
[A 3S Release v2, html]
[September 16, 2007]