Free The Book of Water by Marjorie B. Kellogg Page A

dreaming. No wonder his arm is healed and he feels so good. Well, it’s been a nice dream so far, why not go with it? The pictures are like his own private video, playing in his head.
    It starts with a landscape of cold, fog-shrouded mountains. N’Doch likes how the chill of it actually seems to penetrate the sodden heat of the gymnasium, cooling the sweat on his brow and the small of his back. Next he seesa big old castle, perched on a high rocky spur of these mountains, gray and forbidding, with little slit windows and lots of towers like in one of those King Arthur vids. N’Doch has no interest in white guys wearing tin suits—though his mama tunes them in whenever they’re on—so he can’t imagine why he’d be dreaming castles. But then this long-shot p.o.v. changes, zooming in fast on the tall front gate. He’s expecting a moat and piranhas, crocodiles at least, but there’s only dry rock, falling away sheer from the base of the walls and crossed by a built-up stone causeway. A stout iron grille stands between two round towers of stone. There’s carving over the gate, animals of some sort fighting, but he doesn’t spend time on the details because now he sees the girl, the Mars girl. She’s there in his dream, on her belly in the icy mud, squeezing through a narrow slot between the iron gate and the ground. The oboe note slips behind a muffled wash of percussion, and a solo cello appears, low, grinding, urgent. When the girl struggles to her feet, N’Doch can see she is half-frozen, terrified . . . and running away.
    Next thing he knows, he’s in a big dark space, like a cave. He’s never been in a real cave, but he’s seen the pix. This dream is like some virtual reality tour where it’s not his hand on the controls. The girl is there again, still terrified, and this time there’s something sneaking up on her, something really huge and nasty. Only it turns out to be the big brown dragon, and N’Doch thinks he’s looking kind of scared and lost himself. The cello accompaniment turns decidedly plaintive. In the way of dreams, N’Doch understands that the big guy has lost something, and the girl’s supposed to help him find it. He can see how she takes to the critter right off, despite his being a dragon. He sees the awe and dedication in her eyes, as if a dragon is what she’s been waiting for all her life. Like he felt about the blue critter’s music, first time he heard it.
    Then, in a moment of dizzying coincident vision, N’Doch sees himself at the same time he’s seeing the girl. He
is
the girl, and yet he’s himself, staring at the little silver dragon with the same awe and dedication. The vision is too much. The sweetness of it pierces him. It catches in his throat and he has to look away. He’s not used to sweetness, or beauty that shortens his breath. He stands there, shaking in themoonlight, staring at the patterns of bright and dark cutting in such sharp angles across the floor.
    He understands that he has not been dreaming.
    Suddenly there’s an entire story in his head: the girl’s escape from her drunken father’s boondocks castle, the perils of her flight into the countryside with the dragon, the hot pursuit by priests and armies, like something out of a costume drama. Is it true? Has he made it up? He doesn’t know where it came from or what to do with it.
    And still, there’s more. The images keep unraveling. He sees the brown dragon waking to his magic gifts and understands he’s being told it was magic that sealed up his wound as if it had never been. But it’s too devastating to believe such things, or to believe anything with the kind of conviction N’Doch senses is lying in wait inside the silver dragon’s dark stare. In his world, people die when they believe in things. People who might be related to you. They’re gunned down on their doorsteps, or they vanish into prisons and are never heard from again. N’Doch has spent his nearly twenty years learning to