Free Gathering the Water by Robert Edric

for him to have lived.’
    â€˜Then he was no Paul of Thebes, your hermit.’
    She laughed. ‘No, nor an Antony of Egypt come to us on a quest for the spiritual alembic from which he would emerge purified and beatified.’
    â€˜Ah, then if there is any connection between the man and the present place, then it is between him and me.’
    She laughed again at this. ‘You are no hermit, Mr Weightman, merely alone and lonely and a very long way from where you think of as home. You expected much more, and everything you are now forced to confront here only disappoints you further.’
    The words struck me like blows, and I could not understand how we had come so swiftly from one path to the other. She saw their effect on me and reached out, as though she were about to touch me and comfort me.
    â€˜I don’t deny any of it,’ I said.
    â€˜But it was still unthinking of me to have put it so bluntly. I apologize.’
    I turned away from her, back to the quarry. ‘My employers are worried about the effect of so large and deep a structure on the flow beneath the dam.’
    Water was already being released to provide for those manufactories and other concerns downriver which had come to private terms with the Board to maintain their own supplies. It was something I had hoped not to have to explain to her, being yet another weight placed upon thescales of loss and gain, where the loss was all here and the gain all elsewhere.
    â€˜Excavate a new channel,’ she said. ‘Make simple that which others strive to complicate.’ Then, in a further gesture of reconciliation, she said, ‘Martha was speaking this morning about Noah’s ark. I imagine others have already made some comparison.’
    â€˜What would I take? Sheep, rabbits, crows? Not much of a new beginning.’
    â€˜No. But it was comforting to me to hear her talk about it. Another of your connections.’
    â€˜She must have understood or remembered sufficient of my visit, of why I am here, to have raised the subject.’
    â€˜Yes. She occupied herself by making a list of all you would need.’
    â€˜I daresay there are others here who would be only too happy to assist her.’
    â€˜And who would then draw up the gang-plank and bar your entry as you approached through the rising water.’
    â€˜It seems a fitting enough punishment for all I have destroyed here, for the Perpetual Spring I have ended.’
    â€˜I have to return to her,’ she said.
    You are as lonely and as alone and as disappointed as I am . It was beyond me to even suggest the thought. Unnecessary, also, for her own understanding of these things – of what she called my ‘connections’ – far surpassed my own.
    She shook my hand and then returned to the river-bed below. She was lost briefly in the impenetrable shadow of the dam, but then I watched as she re-emerged on the far bank. I waited where I stood, but it was her habit, once walking, neither to pause nor to look back.
    I made my own way homewards after that, searchingaround me for everything I had so far passed unseen. I added sparrows and starlings and mud-caked pigs to my list of saved creatures. A fluttering white dove, I saw, would have been asking the impossible.
    It was dark before I reached my door. Lights like the glowing bodies of insects drifted along the path beneath me, and, high above, patches of starlit sky were fleetingly revealed to me amid the coursing night cloud.

Part Two
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21
    I have made my first significant error. I daresay there have been inadvertent others – countless small miscalculations and misjudgements that the rising water has quickly erased, leaving that mirror in which only perfection is reflected – but I call this the first of my significant errors – perhaps ‘deceit’ would be more honest – because I was complicit in its making, by which I mean it was the result of a decision on