Shale couldn't control himself well enough to risk speaking. He wanted desperately to please this man who had saved him. Who had such expectations. And yet…
"Shale," Taquar continued, more gently this time, "we who are rainlords or stormlords, we have to make sacrifices. For without us, thousands of people would die of thirst and hunger. We have to put them before our selfish needs. What I ask of you-what the Quartern asks of you-will never be easy. If I appear hard or unfeeling, that is the reason. You are one of us and must grow up to be a man of honour."
Shale wasn't quite sure that he understood the meaning of the word "honour," but he nodded anyway.
He was glad when Taquar changed the subject and returned to his lessons on moving water. He tried. He worked at it all day, trying to send the water from one bowl to another. For the first two hours, nothing happened, except that he became frustrated and helpless. He didn't know how he was supposed to do it, and the water never budged.
Halfway through the morning, Taquar came to sit at the table. "Close your eyes, Shale, for a moment," he said.
Shale did as he was asked.
"What am I doing with the water?"
"You're pourin' it into that plate thing."
"Not into the other bowl?"
"Nah."
"No, not nah. And yes, you are right. How do you know?"
He thought about that. "I can feel the shape of the water."
"Good. You can open your eyes." Taquar poured the water back into the bowl. "From now on I want you to think of the water as a shape, not as something in a container. I want you to change the shape, with your mind. Change it so that it will come out of this bowl and drop into the other."
Shale sighed and tried again.
He still had not raised as much as a ripple on the surface of the water by lunchtime.
When Taquar once again approached him, he cringed.
"It will come," Taquar said. "You can't expect to have it happen all at once. It takes years to learn how to be a rainlord, years more to be stormlord. One step at a time."
Shale looked at him in wonderment.
Taquar must have understood something of his surprise because he added, "You won't get beaten by me, lad. Not when you do your best to please. Anyway, take a rest. Here, eat this." He handed him food in a bowl.
Shale stirred the mixture and tasted it carefully. "That's real good. Highlord, what's-what's Scarcleft like?"
"Large. Larger than anything you've ever seen."
Shale reduced the idea of large to something he could understand. "Twice as large as Wash Drybone Settle?"
Taquar threw up his hands. "Waterless heavens, lad, but you are ignorant." He rose and went into the storeroom and came back with a book. He undid the ties that kept the parchment pages in place between the end-boards, and turned the first pages over to find what he was looking for. "Here, this is Scarcleft." He pushed the page over to Shale. It had a woodcut picture and some writing underneath.
Shale studied it but had trouble understanding the drawing. Finally he realised he was looking at a settle of enormous proportions, tipped down a hill slope that was many times higher than the banks of the wash back home. He had seen slopes like that only on his journey to the waterhall. "Whassit say unnerneath?"
"What does it say underneath?" Taquar corrected.
Carefully Shale repeated the words.
"It says that this is Scarcleft, a city of the Scarpen Quarter."
Shale wanted to ask more, but he sensed that there was a limit to the amount he could pester Taquar at any one time and have him remain pleasant. The rainlord was already beginning to sound bored. He abandoned the idea of another question and said instead, "I wanna-"
"I want to-"
"I… want… to learn how t'read."
Taquar stared for a moment, considering. "That's an excellent idea. It will give you something else to keep you occupied while I am gone. It's easy enough." He indicated some of the writing on the open page. "Each one of these marks is the sign for a sound. We call them letters. There are forty-eight of them. Learn them all, and you can read. Look." He dipped a finger in one of Shale's bowls of water and drew a letter in water on the table. "This is the letter we call 'shi.' It says the first sound in your name. And this symbol is the second sound, and this the third. Sh… ay… el. Shale."
Shale's mind blossomed with the concept. So that's what reading was! Suddenly something that had always seemed so arcane was within his reach. He pointed to the words under the picture. "Which one says Scarcleft?"
"That one," Taquar said, pointing. "There are quite a few books in the storeroom. You may look at them while I am gone. Make sure your hands are always clean, and always tie the end-boards back on when you finish." Quickly he sketched four more letters on the table and explained the sounds they represented. "I'll teach you some more tomorrow before I leave, if you can remember these," he said. "Now, finish your meal." The next morning, when Taquar left, Shale watched him ride away with a growing sense of disbelief. The rainlord really was leaving, taking his ziggers with him. And he, Shale, was going to have to spend his time alone, unprotected.
It felt strange.
It wasn't that he had never been alone. He had, often-whenever he went into the Gibber to collect resin. The open space of the Gibber he had regarded as friendly; even its trackless and waterless nature had not scared him. He could always sense where the settle and the wash were. He could sense the water in the cisterns, in the ground. The familiar had never been far away. Sometimes he had worried about the people he might meet out there, but he'd never feared the place itself or the loneliness of it.
But now he felt trapped.
The grille was closed and he had no idea how to open it. What if Taquar never came back? The food would not last forever, and he had nothing he could use to force open the grille.
And what if his enemies came? What if Davim came?
He stood at the grille and watched as the speck that was Taquar and his pede grew smaller and finally vanished into the stony soil and dry gullies of the Scarpen.
I have got to find the way out of here, he thought. He considered the pipes into the-what was it called? Tunnel?-and shivered. If he tried that and got stuck halfway… No, I have to find out how to lift that grille.
But as hard and as long as he studied it, he couldn't see how it was done. All he knew was that it had something to do with moving water. Controlling water, that was the key. He had to learn, and learn quickly.
He went back to the table and the two bowls, one full, one empty. Taquar had actually not given him good advice: he had told him to concentrate, but in concentrating, he lost his affinity with water. It was not until he realised that the secret was focus and relaxation, not concentration and stress, that he could ripple the water at will. The next day, he slopped some of it from one bowl into the other, and he smiled for the first time since Citrine had died.
After that he relaxed still more. No one came to threaten him; there was no pressure from anyone to perform. Taquar was not there to watch his every move; he could advance at his own pace, to suit himself.
He was lonely. Without Mica he was bereft, and the pain of loss was welded onto him, part of his being. He knew what Taquar had said was true: the horror at Wash Drybone Settle had not been his fault. Yet it was still a tragedy that was undeniably linked to his gift, and that motivated him. If he could become a stormlord, then he could undo some of the damage. He could free Mica.