Keeper of Dreams Read online

  “This is the god that poisoned the little seas,” Zawada explained to him. “This is the god that vomited into them.”

  But Glogmeriss looked at how far the waves came onto the shore and laughed at her. “How could these heavings of the sea reach all the way to those small seas? It took days to get here from there.”

  She grimaced at him. “What do you know, giant man? These waves are not the reason why this is called the Heaving Sea by those who call it that. These are like little butterfly flutters compared to the true heaving of the sea.”

  Glogmeriss didn’t understand until later in the day, as he realized that the waves weren’t reaching as high as they had earlier. The beach sand was wet much higher up the shore than the waves could get to now. Zawada was delighted to explain the tides to him, how the sea heaved upward and downward, twice a day or so. “The sea is calling to the moon,” she said, but could not explain what that meant, except that the tides were linked to the passages of the moon rather than the passages of the sun.

  As the tide ebbed, the tribe stopped playing and ran out onto the sand. With digging stones they began scooping madly at the sand. Now and then one of them would shout in triumph and hold up some ugly, stony, dripping object for admiration before dropping it into a basket. Glogmeriss examined them and knew at once that these things could not be stones—they were too regular, too symmetrical. It wasn’t till one of the men showed him the knack of prying them open by hammering on a sharp wedgestone that he really understood, for inside the hard stony surface there was a soft, pliable animal that could draw its shell closed around it.

  “That’s how it lives under the water,” explained the man. “It’s watertight as a mud-covered basket, only all the way around. Tight all the way around. So it keeps the water out!”

  Like the perfect seedboat, thought Glogmeriss. Only no boat of reeds could ever be made that watertight, not so it could be plunged underwater and stay dry inside.

  That night they built a fire and roasted the clams and mussels and oysters on the ends of sticks. They were tough and rubbery and they tasted salty—but Glogmeriss soon discovered that the very saltiness was the reason this was such a treat, that and the juices they released when you first chewed on them. Zawada laughed at him for chewing his first bite so long. “Cut it off in smaller bits,” she said, “and then chew it till it stops tasting good and then swallow it whole.” The first time he tried, it took a bit of doing to swallow it without gagging, but he soon got used to it and it was delicious.

  “Don’t drink so much of your water,” said Zawada.

  “I’m thirsty,” said Glogmeriss.

  “Of course you are,” she said. “But when we run out of fresh water, we have to leave. There’s nothing to drink in this place. So drink only a little at a time, so we can stay another day.”

  The next morning he helped with the clam-digging, and his powerful shoulders and arms allowed him to excel at this task, just as with so many others. But he didn’t have the appetite for roasting them, and wandered off alone while the others feasted on the shore. They did their digging in a narrow inlet of the sea, where a long thin finger of water surged inward at high tide and then retreated almost completely at low tide. The finger of the sea seemed to point straight toward the land of the Derku, and it made Glogmeriss think of home.

  Why did I come here? Why did the god go to so much trouble to bring me? Why was I saved from the cats and the lightning and the flood? Was it just to see this great water and taste the salty meat of the clams? These are marvels, it’s true, but no greater than the marvel of the castrated bull-ox that I rode, or the lightning fires, or the log that was my brother in the flood. Why would it please the god to bring me here?

  He heard footsteps and knew at once that it was Zawada. He did not look up. Soon he felt her arms come around him from behind, her swelling breasts pressed against his back.

  “Why do you look toward your home?” she asked softly. “Haven’t I made you happy?”

  “You’ve made me happy,” he said.

  “But you look sad.”

  He nodded.

  “The gods trouble you,” she said. “I know that look on your face. You never speak of it, but I know at such times you are thinking of the god who brought you here and wondering if she loved you or hated you.”

  He laughed aloud. “Do you see inside my skin, Zawada?”

  “Not your skin,” she said. “But I could see inside your loincloth when you first arrived, which is why I told my father to let me be the one to marry you. I had to beat up my sister before she would let me be the one to share your sleeping mat that night. She has never forgiven me. But I wanted your babies.”

  Glogmeriss grunted. He had known about the sister’s jealousy, but since she was ugly and he had never slept with her, her jealousy was never important to him.

  “Maybe the god brought you here to see where she vomited.”

  That again.

  “It was in a terrible storm.”

  “You told me about the storm,” said Glogmeriss, not wanting to hear it all again.

  “When the storms are strong, the sea rises higher than usual. It heaved its way far up this channel. Much farther than this tongue of the sea reaches now. It flowed so far that it reached the first of the small seas and made it flow over and then it reached the second one and that, too, flowed over. But then the storm ceased and the water flowed back to where it was before, only so much saltwater had gone into the small seas that they were poisoned.”

  “So long ago, and yet the salt remains?”

  “Oh, I think the sea has vomited into them a couple more times since then. Never as strongly as that first time, though. You can see this channel—so much of the seawater flowed through here that it cut a channel in the sand. This finger of the sea is all that’s left of it, but you can see the banks of it—like a dried-up river, you see? That was cut then, the ground used to be at the level of the rest of the valley there. The sea still reaches into that new channel, as if it remembered. Before, the shore used to be clear out there, where the waves are high. It’s much better for clam-digging now, though, because this whole channel gets filled with clams and we can get them easily.”

  Glogmeriss felt something stirring inside him. Something in what she had just said was very, very important, but he didn’t know what it was.

  He cast his gaze off to the left, to the shelf of land that he had walked along all the way on his manhood journey, that this tribe had followed in coming here. The absolutely level path.

  Absolutely level. And yet the path was not more than three or four man-heights above the level of the Heaving Sea, while back in the lands of the Derku, the shelf was so far above the level of the Salty Sea that it felt as though you were looking down from a mountain. The whole plain was enormously wide, and yet it went so deep before reaching the water of the Salty Sea that you could see for miles and miles, all the way across. It was deep, that plain, a valley, really. A deep gouge cut into the earth. And if this shelf of land was truly level, the Heaving Sea was far, far higher.

  He thought of the floods. Thought of the powerful current of the flooding river that had snagged him and swept him downward. And then he thought of a storm that lifted the water of the Heaving Sea and sent it crashing along this valley floor, cutting a new channel until it reached those smaller seas, filling them with saltwater, causing them to flood and spill over. Spill over where? Where did their water flow? He already knew—they emptied down into the Salty Sea. Down and down and down.

  It will happen again, thought Glogmeriss. There will be another storm, and this time the channel will be cut deeper, and when the storm subsides the water will still flow, because now the channel will be below the level of the Heaving Sea at high tide. And at each high tide, more water will flow and the channel will get deeper and deeper, till it’s deep enough that even at low tide the water will still flow through it, cutting the channel more and more, and the water will come faster and faster,
and then the Heaving Sea will spill over into the great valley, faster and faster and faster.

  All this water then will spill out of the Heaving Sea and go down into the plain until the two seas are the same level. And once that happens, it will never go back.

  The lands of the Derku are far below the level of the new sea, even if it’s only half as high as the waters of the Heaving Sea are now. Our city will be covered. The whole land. And it won’t be a trickle. It will be a great bursting of water, a huge wave of water, like the first gush of the floodwater down the Selud River from the Sweetwater Sea. Just like that, only the Heaving Sea is far larger than the Sweetwater Sea, and its water is angry and poisonous.

  “Yes,” said Glogmeriss. “I see what you brought me here to show me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Zawada. “I brought you here to have you eat clams!”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” said Glogmeriss. He stood up and left her, walking down the finger of the sea, where the tide was rising again, bringing the water lunging back up the channel, pointing like a javelin toward the heart of the Derku people. Zawada followed behind him. He didn’t mind.

  Glogmeriss reached the waves of the rising tide and plunged in. He knelt down in the water and let a wave crash over him. The force of the water toppled him, twisted him until he couldn’t tell which way was up and he thought he would drown under the water. But then the wave retreated again, leaving him in the shallow water on the shore. He crawled back out and stayed there, the taste of salt on his lips, gasping for air, and then cried out, “Why are you doing this! Why are you doing this to my people!”

  Zawada stood watching him, and others of the tribe came to join her, to find out what the strange giant man was doing in the sea.

  Angry, thought Glogmeriss. The god is angry with my people. And I have been brought here to see just what terrible punishment the god has prepared for them. “Why?” he cried again. “Why not just break through this channel and send the flood and bury the Derku people in poisonous water? Why must I be shown this first? So I can save myself by staying high out of the flood’s way? Why should I be saved alive, and all my family, all my friends be destroyed? What is their crime that I am not also guilty of? If you brought me here to save me, then you failed, God, because I refuse to stay, I will go back to my people and warn them all, I’ll tell them what you’re planning. You can’t save me alone. When the flood comes I’ll be right there with the rest of them. So to save me, you must save them all. If you don’t like that, then you should have drowned me just now when you had the chance!”

  Glogmeriss rose dripping from the beach and began to walk, past the people, up toward the shelf of land that made the level highway back home to the Derku people. The tribe understood at once that he was leaving, and they began calling out to him, begging him to stay.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me. Even the god can’t stop me.”

  They didn’t try to stop him, not by force. But the chief ran after him, walked beside him—ran beside him, really, for that was the only way he could keep up with Glogmeriss’s long-legged stride. “Friend, Son,” said the chief. “Don’t you know that you will be king of these people after me?”

  “A people should have a king who is one of their own.”

  “But you are one of us now,” said the chief. “The mightiest of us. You will make us a great people! The god has chosen you, do you think we can’t see that? This is why the god brought you here, to lead us and make us great!”

  “No,” said Glogmeriss. “I’m a man of the Derku people.”

  “Where are they? Far from here. And there is my daughter with your first child in her womb. What do they have in Derku lands that can compare to that?”

  “They have the womb where I was formed,” said Glogmeriss. “They have the man who put me there. They have the others who came from that woman and that man. They are my people.”

  “Then go back, but not today! Wait till you see your child born. Decide then!”

  Glogmeriss stopped so abruptly that the chief almost fell over, trying to stop running and stay with him. “Listen to me, father of my wife. If you were up in the mountain hunting, and you looked down and saw a dozen huge cats heading toward the place where your people were living, would you say to yourself, Oh, I suppose the god brought me here to save me? Or would you run down the mountain and warn them, and do all you could to fight off the cats and save your people?”

  “What is this story?” asked the chief. “There are no cats. You’ve seen no cats.”

  “I’ve seen the god heaving in his anger,” said Glogmeriss. “I’ve seen how he looms over my people, ready to destroy them all. A flood that will tear their flimsy reed boats to pieces. A flood that will come in a single great wave and then will never go away. Do you think I shouldn’t warn my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, the friends of my childhood?”

  “I think you have new brothers and sisters, a new father and mother. The god isn’t angry with us. The god isn’t angry with you. We should stay together. Don’t you want to stay with us and live and rule over us? You can be our king now, today. You can be king over me, I give you my place!”

  “Keep your place,” said Glogmeriss. “Yes, a part of me wants to stay. A part of me is afraid. But that is the part of me that is Glogmeriss, and still a boy. If I don’t go home and warn my people and show them how to save themselves from the god, then I will always be a boy, nothing but a boy, call me a king if you want, but I will be a boy-king, a coward, a child until the day I die. So I tell you now, it is the child who dies in this place, not the man. It was the child Glogmeriss who married Zawada. Tell her that a strange man named Naog killed her husband. Let her marry someone else, someone of her own tribe, and never think of Glogmeriss again.” Glogmeriss kissed his father-in-law and embraced him. Then he turned away, and with his first step along the path leading back to the Derku people, he knew that he was truly Naog now, the man who would save the Derku people from the fury of the god.

  Kemal watched the lone man of the Engu clan as he walked away from the beach, as he conversed with his father-in-law, as he turned his face again away from the Gulf of Aden, toward the land of the doomed crocodile-worshippers whose god was no match for the forces about to be unleashed on them. This was the one, Kemal knew, for he had seen the wooden boat—more of a watertight cabin on a raft, actually, with none of this nonsense about taking animals two by two. This was the man of legends, but seeing his face, hearing his voice, Kemal was no closer to understanding him than he had been before. What can we see, using the TruSite II? Only what is visible. We may be able to range through time, to see the most intimate, the most terrible, the most horrifying, the most inspiring moments of human history, but we only see them, we only hear them, we are witnesses but we know nothing of the thing that matters most: motive.

  Why didn’t you stay with your new tribe, Naog? They heeded your warning, and camped always on higher ground during the monsoon season. They lived through the flood, all of them. And when you went home and no one listened to your warnings, why did you stay? What was it that made you remain among them, enduring their ridicule as you built your watertight seedboat? You could have left at any time—there were others who cut themselves loose from their birth tribe and wandered through the world until they found a new home. The Nile was waiting for you. The grasslands of Arabia. They were already there, calling to you, even as your own homeland became poisonous to you. Yet you remained among the Engu, and by doing so, you not only gave the world an unforgettable story, you also changed the course of history. What kind of being is it who can change the course of history, just because he follows his own unbending will?

  It was on his third morning that Naog realized that he was not alone on his return journey. He awoke in his tree because he heard shuffling footsteps through the grass nearby. Or perhaps it was something else that woke him—some unhearable yearning that he nevertheless heard. He looked, and saw in the fai
nt light of the thinnest crescent moon that a lone baboon was shambling along, lazy, staggering. No doubt an old male, thought Naog, who will soon be meat for some predator.

  Then his eyes adjusted and he realized that this lone baboon was not as close as he had thought, that in fact it was much bigger, much taller than he had thought. It was not male, either, but female, and far from being a baboon, it was a human, a pregnant woman, and he knew her now and shuddered at his own thought of her becoming the meal for some cat, some crocodile, some pack of dogs.

  Silently he unfastened himself from his sleeping tree and dropped to the ground. In moments he was beside her.

  “Zawada,” he said.

  She didn’t turn to look at him.

  “Zawada, what are you doing?”

  Now she stopped. “Walking,” she said.

  “You’re asleep,” he said. “You’re in a dream.”

  “No, you’re asleep,” she said, giggling madly in her weariness.

  “Why have you come? I left you.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’m returning to my own people. You have to stay with yours.” But he knew even as he said it that she could not go back there, not unless he went with her. Physically she was unable to go on by herself—clearly she had eaten nothing and slept little in three days. Why she had not died already, taken by some beast, he could not guess. But if she was to return to her people, he would have to take her, and he did not want to go back there. It made him very angry, and so his voice burned when he spoke to her.