THAT NIGHT, Unar climbed down to the pool for her first lesson.
It was different in darkness. She couldn’t see its depths. Shapes she thought looked like fish in the moonlight were the long, shining leaves of neighbouring trees.
“Sawas?” she whispered as loudly as she dared.
Streams of dirty wash water falling from the edges of the Garden splashed into hollows that were lined with the purifying pith of fiveways fruit. The pith strained and sweetened the water before it joined the main pool. Unar paced along the path. Somewhere below her, a baby cried.
The slaves slept in small hollows in the branches. Some of them would have smoke holes bored through to the branch-top paths, but Unar couldn’t smell any smoke. It was a mild winter and a still evening.
“Sawas,” she whispered again.
“I’m here, Warmed One,” Sawas said cheerfully, scrambling up from underneath onto the path. “Let’s go to the pool.”
She had something like a wooden turtle shell on her back. When they reached the water, where an Airak-lit brazier was reflected, blue-white and blazing, Unar saw that the shell was a shallow, smooth, baby’s sleeping-bowl, one that could be rocked with a foot to settle a bundled child. Sawas set her clothes beside it.
“Are you cold?” Sawas asked. “Are you going to swim with your clothes on? They won’t keep you warm, and they’ll grow heavy. It’s dangerous.”
“Aren’t you going to show me some swimming movements first? Can’t I practice the movements? Build the correct muscles?”
“You can’t build the correct muscles without the resistance of the water.”
Unar took her clothes off. There was nobody to see her but Sawas. Had Aoun looked at her, the day she’d woken in the Temple? Or on the day of Audblayin’s death? Or had he only looked forward, towards the Temple? She should’ve only looked at the Temple, too. Maybe then she’d be a Servant, like him.
“Hold the bowl with both hands,” Sawas said. “It floats. It’ll hold you up. Don’t let go. The first action you must practice is kicking. Don’t use your magic.”
Unar’s skin crawled as she slid into the cool water. She gritted her teeth to stop from reaching for the power and found that her body did float without it, after a fashion; feet deep down and flailing, her back bent and her eyes upwards, clutching the wooden bowl to her chest.
“Your teeth are chattering,” Sawas observed, laughing. “You must be cold. Look what happens to you, away from sunlight. Gardeners must be a little bit like lizards. You can only move about in the heat of the day.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Unar said. “I feel like I’m falling!”
Sawas swam around her in circles.
“Everybody is falling,” she said. “Everybody grows old and dies and is born again. The water will catch you. The water will hold you up.”
Unar waited. She floated. The fear ebbed from her.
“I don’t like fish,” she said at last, to break the silence.
“I’ve never tasted one,” Sawas replied.