My memories of the days after the Book was stolen are all in fragments. I remember my grandmother’s pale face, her eyes bright with unshed tears, and my father’s mouth, set in a stern, hard line. I remember that a storm blew in from the mountains, and I watched the nut trees thrashing against the luminous yellow sky and the leaves flying off into the darkening night. I remember the endless visitors from the village, a stream of them for days. Everyone wanted to see the empty box, the violated room, everyone wanted to touch the Keeper’s shoulder, as one touches the shoulder of a mourner.
When they heard what had happened, the brothers Yani and Sopli took their motorboat and headed downriver in pursuit of Mizan. “We’ll get the Book back, don’t you worry!” they said to me, grinning, their dark eyes flashing at the challenge. “We have the fastest boat on the river!” And they spat into the brown waves and chugged off, their wake furling behind them in white wings, and my heart rose.
They returned three days later, their hands empty, their faces downcast. They had caught up with Mizan at Kilok, a day downriver, and he had been horrified when he heard what had happened. But Jane Watson, perhaps knowing that she would be pursued, had already left Mizan’s boat. She had met an associate, a bald man with golden spectacles who drove a jeep, and they had gone south over the plains, away from the River.
“I didn’t know,” Mizan told Yani and Sopli. “By the gods, if I had known, I would have beaten that woman within an inch of her life! I would have got it back for you! I am ashamed that I brought such bad luck to your people. But I didn’t know.”
Yani and Sopli had no way of following a jeep overland, and so they came back home and told us what they had found out. When I saw their expressions, I felt something inside me clench like a fist. The brothers looked crushed and humiliated, as if something in their souls had shrivelled in shame at their failure to bring back the Book. But they didn’t steal it, I thought, and they don’t deserve to feel ashamed. Jane Watson should feel ashamed.
I wondered whether she had any human feelings, this woman who I had so foolishly trusted, to whom I had revealed some of my most secret thoughts. I imagined bitterly how she must have laughed at me as she pretended to listen sympathetically, her brows drawn in a straight line of concentration. I thought about the bald man with spectacles she had met in Kilok; it sounded as if Jane Watson had planned to meet him, as if there had been a plot. I wondered if Jane Watson had intended to steal the Book from the beginning.
At first the theft was a wound that went too deep for pain. The Book was our soul, our oracle, our delight and our pride. It was our friend. Without its guidance, who were we? Without its light, how would we see? Jane Watson’s action went beyond betrayal, into the incomprehensible. We simply didn’t understand why she had taken the Book. No one but the Keepers knew how to read it. In her hands it was useless; it would be just an object, inert and dead. And yet she had dared to take it from us. A great anger tore through the village. If Jane Watson had reappeared in those days, the gentle villagers I had known all my life would have torn her to pieces as if they were tigers.
Our anger was partly fear. Jane Watson had casually destroyed hundreds of years of tradition when she took the Book out of the box, just as the Tarnish soldiers were destroying villages that had stood on the River since people had first walked into the Pembar Plains. Things that once had been solid now were uncertain, the ground seemed to echo beneath our feet like a thin layer of rock over a great, measureless hollow that plunged to the centre of the earth. We saw the sun rise each morning with relief, as if we feared in our dreams that it might vanish overnight.
To the last question I ever asked, the Book had answered Change. I hadn’t expected that the change would be the loss of the Book itself.
I thought of the first night Jane Watson had dined with us, when she had begun to win my trust. She had taken off her sunglasses as she stepped inside, holding them loosely in one hand as she greeted our family, and at last I could see her eyes. They were pale blue, large and finely formed, with long fair lashes. Her skin was freckled, her eyebrows broad and straight, and her mouth was set firmly, as if she were always in the process of making a difficult decision. Her face was dour and stubborn, but when she smiled her whole face lit up with an attractive humour. I had never seen anyone like her before.
I could see at once that Grandmother didn’t trust Jane Watson. She was being very polite, and her face was expressionless and wary. It wasn’t only that Jane Watson was a stranger, and a foreigner at that; it was because Grandmother knew, as I knew too once I saw Jane Watson’s eyes, that she was a woman of power. It was a strange power, and heavily veiled; but it was palpable in the charge in my skin as she sat next to me at the table in one of the designated places for honoured guests.
She complimented our house and the meal, speaking haltingly, but without making many mistakes. She had learned our language well, and soon she and I were talking. She said she was very interested in the people of the Pembar. “Nothing has changed here for centuries, because the Pembar Plains are so remote,” she said. “And your traditions and customs can give us some insight into things that have disappeared elsewhere.”
At the mention of change, I looked up sharply. “Nowhere can escape change,” I said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of what’s happening upriver, with the Tarnish cotton fields.”
She nodded. “We have heard of it,” she said. “The refugees are telling terrible stories, which are being told even in my country. That’s partly why I’m making this journey now. Perhaps I can help your people, by showing others what is threatened here.”
“They are stealing our River,” I said. “If the River dies, we cannot stay here. We won’t be able to live.”
“There was already a drought, was there not?” said Jane Watson. “Some things are beyond even the Tarnish. Rivers die in the normal course of nature. The world is changing; the weather is changing. Some things will vanish, no matter what we do.”
Her words gave me a chill in my stomach, and speaking of the death of our River with a stranger seemed disrespectful, so I changed the subject, asking her the first thing that came into my head.
“Are you a Keeper as well?” I asked.
Jane Watson smiled, and her face transformed; she seemed suddenly like a little girl, amused and excited. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You feel like a Keeper. But Mizan said that you don’t have Keepers in your country.”
“We don’t have the same powers that you do,” said Jane Watson. “And yet, among my own people, you might say I am a kind of Keeper.”
I met her clear gaze. “You are clearly a woman of power,” I said.
“Like knows like,” said Jane Watson, smiling again. “Yes, I can see the power in you, just as it is in me. In my homeland we have many kinds of power, but we have lost the way of some ancient arts that you have been wise enough to preserve.” She suddenly looked shy. “I have heard of your Book. I should – I should like very much to see it for myself, if you would show me.”
I felt a flutter of pride that our Book was so famous that a foreigner like Jane Watson had heard of it, and promised to show her the Book later.
After the food had been eaten and the table cleared, she followed me solemnly into the room off the kitchen, and watched alertly as I took it from the box and opened it.
“What would you like to ask it?” I said.
“Do I have to ask a question?” said Jane Watson.
“No,” I said. “But you can if you like.”
“Oh.” She thought for a moment, and then said, “What would the Book like to tell me?”
“That’s your question?”
She nodded. I held the question in my mind and opened the Book. Jane Watson moved close as I opened the covers, and I glanced up. Her eyes were shining, her lips slightly parted, and I noticed that her hands were trembling.
On one page was a picture, an engraving of a lonely, flat landscape wound through by a river, and a flock of cranes were flying over the horizon. On the other page was a single line of text.
“What does it say?” asked Jane Watson.
“The picture is of the Plains of Pembar,” I said. “That’s our River. And it’s one phrase. It says: What profit it a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?”
For a moment Jane Watson looked astonished, and then she covered it with a laugh. “I wonder what that means,” she said. Her voice was shaky, and she was slightly pale. I wondered what the words meant to her.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Only you can know what the words mean. And sometimes it takes a long time to find out. It doesn’t often happen that the reading is alone on the page. It means that it’s important, that the Book wants to make sure you hear.”
I waited, hoping that Jane Watson would explain, as the phrase clearly meant something to her. It was impolite to ask directly. But she didn’t. Instead she reached out with the tip of her finger and gently stroked the page. I flinched and snatched it away: it was forbidden for anyone except the Keepers to touch the Book. A curious expression briefly crossed her face, a kind of lust mixed with frustration or anger, but it passed so swiftly I almost thought I had imagined it. Jane Watson apologized for her rudeness, and I dismissed her gesture as ignorant and clumsy rather than sinister, and forgot all about it.
I remembered that expression after Jane Watson left, when I was tormenting myself with reproaches: I ought to have taken it as a warning, I ought to have been more wary. Back then, it was not my way to be suspicious. When Grandmother told me that Jane Watson had a cold soul and was not to be trusted, I defended her hotly. I said that Jane Watson could help us against the Tarns, and that we should not behave like foolish backward villagers, afraid of the new. I said things that make me blush now when I think of them.
Grandmother shook her head and said nothing more. Later she told me that Jane Watson had enchanted me, and there was nothing more to say until the spell was broken. And when the spell did break, Grandmother did not once rebuke me, not by word nor by glance. That hurt almost more than anything else. I think it was Grandmother’s silence that made me decide to find Jane Watson myself, and to bring the Book back where it belonged.