Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Part One: Watchers of Water

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two: The Silent Space

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Three: The Blue Circle

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Everything is ready now.

Each morning for seven weeks I have swept the fallen leaves from the stone slabs that form the path to the teahouse, and forty-nine times I have chosen a handful among them to be scattered on the stones again, so the path wouldn’t look too much like it had been swept. That was one of the things my father always insisted on.

Sanja told me once the dead don’t need pleasing. Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps I do. Sometimes I don’t know the difference. How could I, when they are in my blood and bones, when all that is left of them is me?

I haven’t dared to go to the spring in seven weeks. Yesterday I turned on the tap in the house and held the mouth of the waterskin to its metal. I spoke to it in pretty words and ugly words, and I may have even screamed and wept, but water doesn’t care for human sorrows. It flows without slowing or quickening its pace in the darkness of the earth, where only stones will hear.

The pipe gave a few drops, perhaps a spoonful, into my waterskin.

I know what it means.

This morning I emptied the rest of the water from the skin into the cauldron, brought some dried peat from the shed into the teahouse and placed the firestarter next to the hearth. I thought of my father, whose wishes I had violated, and my mother, who didn’t see the day I became a tea master.

I thought of Sanja. I hoped she was already where I was going.

A guest whose face is not unfamiliar is walking down the path, offering me a hand I’m ready to take. The world will not spin slower or faster when we have passed through the gate together.

What remains is light on water, or a shifting shadow.

PART ONE
Watchers of Water

‘Only what changes can remain.’

Wei Wulong, ‘The Path of Tea’

7th century of Old Qian time

CHAPTER ONE

Water is the most versatile of all elements. So my father told me the day he took me to the place that didn’t exist. While he was wrong about many things, he was right about this, so I still believe. Water walks with the moon and embraces the earth, and it isn’t afraid to die in fire or live in air. When you step into it, it will be as close as your own skin, but if you hit it too hard, it will shatter you. Once, when there were still winters in the world, cold winters, white winters, winters you could wrap yourself in and slip on and come in to warm from, you could have walked on the crystallized water that was called ice. I have seen ice, but only small, man-made lumps. All my life I have dreamed of how it would be to walk on frozen sea.

Death is water’s close companion. The two cannot be separated, and neither can be separated from us, for they are what we are ultimately made of: the versatility of water, and the closeness of death. Water has no beginning and no end, but death has both. Death is both. Sometimes death travels hidden in water, and sometimes water will chase death away, but they go together always, in the world and in us.

This, too, I learned from my father, but I now believe I would have learned it without him just as well.

I can pick my own beginning.

Perhaps I will pick my own end.

The beginning was the day when my father took me to the place that didn’t exist.

It was a few weeks after I had taken my Matriculation Tests, compulsory for all citizens the year they came of age. While I had done well, there was never any question that I would remain in my current apprenticeship with my father instead of continuing my studies in the city. It was a choice I had felt obliged to make, and therefore, perhaps, not really a choice. But it seemed to make my parents happy, and it didn’t make me miserable, and those were the things that mattered at the time.

We were in our garden behind the teahouse, where I was helping my father hang empty waterskins to dry. A few of them were still draped on my arm, but most were already hanging upside down from the hooks on the metal rack. Sunlight filtered in veils through their translucent surfaces. Slow drops streaked their insides before eventually falling on the grass.

‘A tea master has a special bond with water and death,’ my father said to me as he examined one of the skins for cracks. ‘Tea isn’t tea without water, and without tea a tea master is no tea master. A tea master devotes his life to serving others, but he only attends the tea ceremony as a guest once in his lifetime, when he feels his death approaching. He orders his successor to prepare the last ritual, and after he has been served the tea, he waits alone in the teahouse until death presses a hand on his heart and stops it.’

My father tossed the waterskin on the grass where a couple of others were already waiting. Mending the skins didn’t always work out, but they were expensive, like anything made of durable plastic, and it was usually worth a try.

‘Has anyone ever made a mistake?’ I asked. ‘Did anyone think their death was coming, when it wasn’t time yet?’

‘Not in our family,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of a past-world master who ordered his son to prepare the last ritual, settled to lie down on the teahouse floor and walked into his house two days later. The servants thought he was a ghost and one of them had a heart attack. The tea master had mistaken the servant’s death for his own. The servant was cremated and the master lived for another twenty years. But it doesn’t happen often.’

I slapped a horsefly that had landed on my arm. It darted off just in time with a loud buzz. The headband of my insect hood felt tight and itchy, but I knew taking it off would attract too many insects.

‘How do you know when your death is coming?’ I asked.

‘You know,’ my father said. ‘Like you know you love, or like in a dream you know that the other person in the room is familiar, even if you don’t know their face.’ He took the last skins from me. ‘Go and get two blaze lanterns from the teahouse veranda, and fill them for me.’

I wondered what he needed the lanterns for, because it was only early afternoon, and this time of the year even the nights didn’t drown the sun in the horizon. I went around the teahouse and took two lanterns from under the bench. A stiff-winged blazefly was stirring at the bottom of one. I shook it into the gooseberry bushes. Blazeflies liked gooseberries best, so I kept shaking the branches above the lanterns until there was a handful of sleepily crawling flies inside each. I closed the lids and took the lanterns to my father.

He had lifted an empty waterskin on his back. His expression was closed behind the insect hood. I handed the lanterns to him, but he only took one of them.

‘Noria, it’s time I showed you something,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

We walked across the dried swamp spreading behind our house to the foot of the fell and then up the slope. It wasn’t a long walk, but sticky sweat glued the hair onto my scalp. When we reached the height where the boulder garden began, I took my insect hood off. The wind was so strong that there weren’t as many horseflies and midges here as around the house.

The sky was pure and still. The sun felt tight on my skin. My father had stopped, perhaps to choose his route. I turned to look down. The tea master’s house with its garden was a speckle of floating green in the faded landscape of burned-out grass and bare stone. The valley was scattered with the houses of the village, and on the other side rose the Alvinvaara fell. Far beyond its slopes, where the watering areas were, loomed a stretch of dark-green fir forest. Yet further that way was the sea, but it couldn’t be seen from here even on bright days. In the other direction was the slowly decaying trunk tangle of the Dead Forest. In my childhood there had still been occasional birches that didn’t grow higher than to my waist, and once I had picked a whole handful of lingonberries there.

A path ran along the border of the boulder garden, and my father turned to it. On this side the slope of the fell was full of caves. I had often come here to play when I was younger. I still remembered when my mother had once found me here playing mountain trolls with Sanja and a couple of other kids. She had yelled at my father, who had forgotten to look after me, and dragged me by the arm all the way home. I wasn’t allowed to play with the children from the village for a month. But even after that I had sneaked to the caves with Sanja whenever my mother was on research trips, and we had played explorers and adventurers and secret agents from New Qian in the Mediterranean Desert. There were dozens of caves, if not hundreds, and we had explored them as thoroughly as we thought possible. We had kept looking for secret passageways and hidden treasures, the kind you’d read about in old books or pod-stories, but never found anything more than coarse, dry stone.

My father stopped outside the mouth of a cave that was shaped like a cat’s head, and then passed through it without a word. The entrance was low. My knees rubbed against the rock through the thin fabric of my trousers, and I had trouble bringing the lantern and the insect hood in with me. Inside the cave the air was cool and still. The lanterns began to glow faintly as the yellowish glint of the blazeflies grew in the twilight.

I recognised the cave. We had fought about it one summer with Sanja, when she had wanted to use it for the headquarters of the Central And Crucially Important Explorers’ Society of New Qian. I had insisted that there was too much wasted space, because the cave grew steeply lower towards the back, and that it was too far from home for convenient smuggling of food. Eventually, we had opted for a smaller cave closer to my house.

My father was crawling towards the back of the cave. I saw him stop and push his hand right into the wall – so it seemed to me – and I saw the movement of his arm. The rock above him made a faint screeching sound as a dark hole opened in it. The cave was so low there that when he sat up, his head was already at the level of the hole, and he slipped through it, taking his lantern with him. Then I saw his face, when he looked at me through the hole.

‘Are you coming?’ he said.

I crawled to the back of the cave and felt the wall where I had seen him open the hatch. All I could see in the wavering light of the blaze lantern was the coarse rock, but then my fingers found a narrow shelf-like formation behind which there was a wide crack, and I discovered a small lever hidden in it. The crack was nearly impossible to see because of the way the rock was formed.

‘I’ll explain later how it all works,’ my father said. ‘Now come here.’

I followed him through the hatch.

Above the cave there was another one, or rather a tunnel which seemed to plunge right into the heart of the fell. On the ceiling, right above the hatch, there was a metal pipe and a large hook next to it. I had no idea what they were for. On the wall were two levers. My father turned one of them, and the hatch closed. The glow of the lanterns grew bright in the complete darkness of the tunnel. My father removed his insect hood and the waterskin he had been carrying and placed them on the floor.

‘You can leave your hood here,’ he said. ‘You won’t need it further ahead.’

The tunnel descended towards the inside of the fell. I noticed that the metal pipe ran along its length. I had no space to walk with my back straight, and my father’s head brushed the ceiling at times. The rock under our feet was unexpectedly smooth. The light of my lantern clung to the creases on the back of my father’s jacket and the darkness clung to the dents in the walls. I listened to the silence of the earth around us, different from the silence above the ground: denser, stiller. And slowly I began to distinguish a stretching, growing sound at its core, familiar and yet strange. I had never before heard it flowing free, entirely pushed by its own weight and will. It was akin to sounds like rain knuckling the windows or bathwater poured on the roots of the pine trees, but this sound wasn’t tame or narrow, not chained in man-made confines. It wrapped me and pulled me in, until it was close as the walls, close as the dark.

My father stopped and I saw in the lantern light that we had come to an opening between the tunnel and another cave. The sound thrummed loud. He turned to look at me. The light of the blazeflies wavered on his face like on water, and the darkness sang behind him. I expected him to say something, but he simply turned his back on me and went through the opening. I followed.

I tried to see ahead, but the glow of the lanterns did not reach far. The darkness received us with a rumble. It was like the roar of heated water at the bottom of an iron cauldron, but more like the sound of a thousand or ten thousand cauldrons when the water has just begun to boil and the tea master knows it’s time to remove it from the fire, or it will vanish as steam where it can no longer be caught. I felt something cool and moist on my face. Then we walked a few steps down, and the light of the blazeflies finally hit the sound, and I saw the hidden spring for the first time.

Water rushed from inside the rock in strings and threads and strands of shimmer, in enormous sheets that shattered the surface of the pond at the bottom of the cave when they hit it. It twisted around the rocks and curled in spirals and whirls around itself, and churned and danced and unravelled again. The surface trembled under the force of the movement. A narrow stream flowed from the pond towards the shelf of stone that the doorway we had come through was on, then disappeared into the ground under it. I could see something that looked like a white stain on the rock wall above the surface of the water, and another lever in the wall further away. My father urged me on, to the edge of the pond.

‘Try it,’ he said.

I dipped my fingers in the water and felt its strength. It moved against my hand like breathing, like an animal, like another person’s skin. It was cold, far colder than anything I was used to. I licked my fingers carefully, like I had been taught to do since I was very young: never drink water you haven’t tasted first.

‘It’s fresh,’ I said.

Lantern light folded on his face when he smiled, and then, slowly, the smile ran dry.

‘You’re seventeen, and of age now, and therefore old enough to understand what I’m going to tell you,’ my father said. ‘This place doesn’t exist. This spring dried a long time ago. So the stories tell, and so believe even those who know other stories, tales of a spring in the fell that once provided water for the whole village. Remember. This spring doesn’t exist.’

‘I’ll remember,’ I told him, but didn’t realise until later what kind of a promise I had made. Silence is not empty or immaterial, and it is not needed to chain tame things. It often guards powers strong enough to shatter everything.

We returned through the tunnel. When we came to the entrance, my father picked up the waterskin he had left there and hung it from the hook on the ceiling. After making sure that the mouth of the skin was open, he turned one of the levers on the wall. I heard an electric noise, similar to the noises the cooling appliances in our kitchen made, and a roar yet different from before, as if captured in metal. In a moment a strong jet of water burst from the ceiling straight into the waterskin.

‘Did you make all this?’ I asked. ‘Or mother? Did she plan this? Did you build this together?’

‘Nobody knows for certain who built this,’ my father said. ‘But tea masters have always believed it was one of them, perhaps the first one who settled here, before winters disappeared and these wars began. Now only the water remembers.’

He turned both levers. The rush of water slowed down and died little by little, and the hatch opened again.

‘You first,’ he said.

I dropped myself through the hole. He closed the skin tightly, then lowered it carefully into the cave where I took it from him. When the hatch was closed again, the cave looked like nothing but a cave with no secrets.

The glow of the blazeflies faded swiftly in the daylight. When we walked into the garden, my mother, sitting under the awning, raised her eyes from the notes she was taking from a heavy book on her lap. My father handed his lantern to me. The shadows of leaves swayed on the stone slabs, as he walked towards the teahouse with the waterskin on his back. I was going to follow him, but he said, ‘Not now.’

I stood still, a lantern in each hand, and listened to the blazeflies bouncing against their sun-baked glass walls. It was only when my mother spoke that I thought of opening the lids of the lanterns.

‘You’ve burned again in the sun,’ she said. ‘Where did you go with your father?’

The blazeflies sprang up into the air and vanished into the bushes.

‘To a place that doesn’t exist,’ I said, and at that moment I looked at her, and knew that she knew where we had been, and that she had been there too.

My mother didn’t say more, not then, but calm vanished from her face.

Late that night, when I lay in my bed under an insect net and watched the orange light of the night sun on the pine trees, I heard her speaking with my father in the kitchen for a long time. I couldn’t make out the words they were saying, yet I discerned a dark edge in them that reached all the way to my dreams.

CHAPTER TWO

The ground was still breathing night-chill when I helped my father load the broken waterskins on the low cart at the back of the helicycle. Their scratched plastic surface glinted in the morning sun. I fastened the thick straps around the skins, and when I was certain they were sufficiently steady, I flung my seagrass bag on my shoulder and got up on the seat of the cycle.

‘Use Jukara,’ my father said. ‘He’ll give you a discount.’ Jukara was the oldest plasticsmith in the village and my father’s friend. I hadn’t trusted him since some waterskins he had repaired the year before had broken again after only a few uses, so I said nothing, merely moved my head in a way that could be interpreted as a nod. ‘And don’t take all day,’ my father added. ‘We have guests coming in tomorrow. I need your help with cleaning the teahouse.’

I stepped on the pedal to start the helicycle. One of the solar panels was broken and the motor was acting up, so I had to pedal almost all the way along the dusty pathway through trees of wavering gold-green scattered around our house. Only just before the edge of the woods did the cycle settle into a steady, quiet spin. I steered the cycle and the cart carefully to the wider road, locked the pedals and let my feet rest on them as the cycle moved unhurriedly towards the village. The morning air felt crisp on my bare arms and there weren’t many horseflies yet. I removed my insect hood, letting the wind and sun wash over my face. The sky was a dry, bare blue, and the earth was still, and I saw small animals moving in the dust of the fields in search of water.

After I had passed a few houses at the edge of the village, the road forked. The way to Jukara’s repair shop was to the left. I stopped and hesitated, and then I continued to the right, until I saw the familiar chipped-blue picket fence ahead.

Like most buildings in the village, Sanja’s home was one of the past-world houses, a one-storey with multiple rooms, a garden and a garage from the time when most people still owned fast past-tech vehicles. The walls had been repaired repeatedly, and Sanja’s parents had told me there had once been a nearly flat roof without solar panels, although it was hard for me to imagine.

When I stopped outside the open gate, she was standing in the front yard, emptying the last of a waterskin into a metal tub and cursing. The front door was open and a barely audible flow of pod-news was drifting from inside the house through the insect curtain covering the doorframe. Sanja wasn’t wearing an insect hood, and when she looked at me, I saw that she hadn’t slept.

‘Bloody sham sold me salt water,’ she said, furiously tucking her black hair behind her ears. ‘I don’t know how he did it. I tasted the water first, like I always do, and it was fresh. His prices were atrocious, so I only bought half a skin, but even that was wasted money.’

‘What sort of a container did he have?’ I asked as I steered the cycle through the gate to the yard.

‘One of those old-fashioned ones,’ Sanja said. ‘A large transparent container on top of a dais, and a pipe from which he sold the water.’

‘A double-pipe fraud,’ I said. ‘I saw those in the city last year. Inside the dais there’s a secret container with salt water in it. The pipe has two settings; the first one takes water from the fresh-water container and the second from the hidden one. The seller offers a taste from the drinkable water, but then changes the pipe setting and sells salt water.’

Sanja stared at me for a moment and said then, ‘Stupid idiot.’ I knew she was talking about herself. She must have spent most of her budget for the week on the salt water.

‘It could have happened to anyone,’ I told her. ‘You couldn’t have known. Might still be a good idea to warn others, though.’

Sanja sighed. ‘I saw some other people buying from him at the evening market right before the closing time. He’s probably far away by now, looking for the next idiot.’

I didn’t say aloud what I was thinking: more than once I had heard my parents talk about how seeing lots of frauds on the move usually meant that the times were getting harsher, no matter how often the pod-news repeated that all unrest was temporary and the war was well under control. In the best of times there was sometimes shortage of water, but mostly people were able to do with their monthly quotas and shams didn’t bother to go touring. While travelling water merchants who occasionally stopped in small villages kept high prices, they were also aware of how easily their business could be jeopardised and didn’t treat any rivals selling undrinkable water kindly. Shams weren’t unheard of, but this was the third one in our village within two months. This kind of sudden increase in numbers usually meant that there were strong rumours in the cities about new and stricter quota plans, perhaps even rationing, and some of the water-shams left the overcrowded markets of the cities in search of less competition and more gullible clients.

‘Is your water pipe out of order again?’ I asked.

‘That old piece of rubbish needs to be dug up and replaced with a new one,’ Sanja said. ‘I’d do it myself if I had time. Minja fell sick again last week, and I don’t dare to give her our tap water even if it’s been boiled. Father says it’s perfectly fine, but I think he’s just grown an iron stomach after drinking dirt water for so many years.’

Minja was Sanja’s two-year-old little sister who had been sick constantly since her birth. Lately their mother Kira had also been unwell. I had not told Sanja, but once or twice in the half-light of late evening I had seen a stranger sitting by their door, a dark and narrow figure, not unkind but somehow aware that it wouldn’t be welcomed anywhere it went. It had been still and quiet, waiting patiently, not stepping inside, but not moving away, either.

I remembered what my father had told me about death and tea masters, and when I looked at Sanja, at the shadows of unslept hours on her face that wasn’t older than my own, the image of the figure waiting by their door suddenly weighed on my bones.

Some things shouldn’t be seen. Some things don’t need to be said.

‘Have you applied for permission to repair the water pipe?’

Sanja gave a snort. ‘Do you think we have time to wait through the application process? I have almost all the spare parts that I need. I just haven’t figured out how to do it without the water guards noticing.’

She said it casually, as if talking about something trivial and commonplace, not a crime. I thought of the water guards, their unmoving faces behind their blue insect hoods, their evenly paced marching as they patrolled the narrow streets in pairs, checking people’s monthly use of their water quotas and carrying out punishments. I had heard of beatings and arrests and fines, and whispers of worse things circulated in the village, but I didn’t know if they were true. I thought of the weapons of the guards: long, shiny sabres that I had seen them cut metal with, when they were playing on the street with pieces of an illegal water pipe they had confiscated from an old lady’s house.

‘I brought you something to repair,’ I said and began to unfasten the straps from around my load of waterskins. ‘There’s no rush with these. How much will you charge?’

Sanja counted the skins by tracing her finger along the pile. ‘Half a day’s work. Three skinfuls.’

‘I’ll pay you four.’ I knew Jukara would have done the job for two, but I didn’t care.

‘For four I’ll repair one of these for you right away.’

‘I brought something else too.’ I took a thin book out of my bag. Sanja looked at it and made a little sound of excitement.

‘You’re the best!’ Then her expression went dark again. ‘Oh, but I haven’t finished the previous one yet.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve read them many times.’

Reluctantly Sanja took the book, but I could see she was pleased. Like most families in the village, her family had no books. Pod-stories were cheaper and you could buy them at any market, unlike paper.

We carried the skins around the house into Sanja’s workshop, which she had built in the backyard. The roof was made of seagrass and three of the walls consisted of insect nets stretched between supporting wooden poles. The back wall of the house functioned as the fourth wall of the workshop. Sanja pulled the finely-woven wire mesh door closed behind us and latched it so the draught wouldn’t throw it open.

I placed the skins on the wooden planing bench in the middle. Sanja put the rest on top of them and took one to the long table by the solid wall. My father had marked the cut with beetroot colour; it was the shape of an uneven star on the surface of the skin.

Sanja lit the solar burner and its wires began to glow orange-red. She took a box with pieces of patching plastic from under the table and picked one. I watched as she took turns to carefully heat the waterskin and the patch until both surfaces had grown soft and sticky. She fitted the plastic on top of the crack and after making sure that it covered the cut in the skin she began to even the seam out to make it tight.

While I waited, I looked around in the workshop. Sanja had brought in more junk plastic since my last visit a couple of weeks ago. As always, the long tables were filled with tools, brushes, paint jars, wooden racks, empty blaze lanterns and other bits and pieces I didn’t even recognise. Yet most of the space was taken up by wooden boxes spilling over with junk plastic and metal. Metal was more difficult to find, because the most useful parts had been taken to cities for the army to melt down decades ago, and after this people had gathered most of what they could put to good use from metal graves. All you could dig up these days in those places were useless random pieces that had nothing to do with each other.

Junk plastic, on the other hand, never seemed to run out, because past-world plastic took centuries to degrade, unlike ours. A lot of it was so poor in quality or so badly damaged that it couldn’t be moulded into anything useful, but sometimes, if you dug deeper, you could come across treasures. The best finds were parts of the broken technology of the past-world, metal and plastic intertwined and designed to do things that nothing in our present-world did anymore. Occasionally a piece of abandoned machinery could still be fairly intact or easily repaired, and it puzzled us why it had been thrown away in the first place.

In one of the boxes under the table I found broken plastic dishes: mugs, plates, a water jug. Under them there were two black plastic rectangles about the size and shape of the books I had in my room at home, a few centimetres thick. They were smooth on one side, but on the reverse side there were two white, round wheel-like holes with cogs. One of the edges on one of the rectangles was loose and a shredded length of a dark, shiny-smooth tape had unravelled from the inside. There was small print embossed on the plastic. Most of it was illegible, but I could make out three letters: VHS.

‘What are these?’ I asked.

Sanja had finished smoothing the seam and turned to look.

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I dug them up last week. I think they’re changeable parts to some past-tech machine, but I can’t think of what they were used for.’

She placed the skin on a rack. It would take a while for the plastic to seal completely. She picked up a large rucksack from the table and lifted it on her back.

‘Do you want to go scavenging while the skin cools down?’ she asked.

When we had walked a few blocks, I was going to turn to the road we usually took to the plastic grave. But Sanja stopped and said, ‘Let’s not go that way.’

The mark caught my attention at once. There was a wooden house by the road. Its faded, chipped paint had once been yellow, and one of the solar panels on the roof was missing a corner. The building was no different from most other houses in the village: constructed in the past-world era and converted later for the present-world circumstances. Yet now it stood out among the washed-out, colourless walls and faded yards, because it was the only house on the street that had fresh paint on its door. A bright blue circle was painted on the worn wooden surface, so shiny it still looked wet. I hadn’t seen one before.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Let’s not talk here,’ Sanja said, pulling me away. I saw a neighbour step out of the house next door. He avoided looking at the marked house and accelerated his steps when he had to walk past it. Apart from him, the street was deserted.

I followed Sanja to a circuitous route. She glanced around, and when there was no one in sight, she whispered, ‘The house is being watched. The circle appeared on the door last week. It’s the sign of a serious water crime.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My mother told me. The baker’s wife stopped at the gate of the house one day, and two water guards appeared out of the blue to ask what her business was. They said the people living in the house were water criminals. They only let her go after she convinced them that she had only stopped by to sell sunflower seed cakes.’

I knew who lived in the house. A childless couple with their elderly parents. I had a hard time imagining they were guilty of a water crime.

‘What has happened to the residents?’ I asked. I thought of their ordinary, worn faces and their modest garments.

‘Nobody knows for sure if they’re still inside or if they’ve been taken away,’ Sanja replied.

‘What do you think they’re going to do with them?’

Sanja looked at me and shrugged and was quiet. I remembered what she had said about building an illegal water pipe. I glanced behind me. The house and the street had disappeared from sight, but the blue circle was still flashing in front of my eyes: a sore tattoo on the skin of the village, too inflamed to approach safely, and covered with silence.

We continued along a circuitous route.

We crossed a shallow, muddy brook that trickled through the landscape near the plastic grave. As children we had not been allowed here. My mother had said that the ground around it was toxic and the grave dangerous to walk on, a foot could slip at any time and something sharp tear the clothes and the skin. Back then we used to plan our secret excursions to the plastic grave carefully, usually coming between day and night, when it wasn’t dark enough for us to need blaze lanterns yet and not light enough for us to be recognisable from a long way away.

The plastic grave was a large, craggy, pulpy landscape where sharp corners and coarse surfaces, straight edges and jagged splinters rose steep and unpredictable. Its strange, angular valleys of waves and mountain lines kept shifting their shape. People moved piles of rubbish from one place to the next, stomped the plains even more tightly packed, dug big holes and elevated hills next to them in search of serviceable plastic and wood that wasn’t too bent out of shape under layers of garbage. The familiar smell and sight of the grave still brought me back the memory of the long boots I had always worn in the fear of scratching my legs, the coarseness of their fabric, how hot and slippery my feet had felt inside them.

Now I was only wearing a pair of wooden-soled summer shoes that didn’t even cover my ankles, but I was older and the day was bright. Dead plastic crunched under the weight of our steps and horseflies and other insects were whirring loudly around our hooded heads. I had rolled my sleeves down and tied them tight at the wrists, knowing that any stretch of bare skin would attract more insects. My ankles would be red and swollen by the evening.

I kept an eye on anything worth scavenging, but passed only uninteresting items: crumbled, dirty-white plastic sheets, uncomfortable-looking shoes with broken tall heels, a faded doll’s head. I stopped and turned to look behind me, but Sanja wasn’t there anymore. I saw her a few metres away, where she had crouched to dig something out of a junk pile. I went closer when she pulled what looked like a lidded box out from a mishmash of split bowls and twisted hangers and long black splinters.

The box was the shape of a rectangle; I had never seen one like it before. The scratched, black surface looked like it had been smooth and shiny once. At each end of the rectangle there was a round dent covered by a tight metal net.

‘Loudspeakers,’ Sanja said. ‘I’ve seen similar ones on other past-tech things. This was used for listening to something.’

Between the loudspeakers there was a rectangular dent, slightly wider than my hand. It had a broken lid that could be opened from the upper corner. On top of the machine there were some switches, a row of buttons with small arrows pointing at different directions embossed on them, and one larger button. When it was turned, a red pointer moved along a scale marked with numerical combinations that meant nothing: 92, 98, 104 and so on. At the right end of the scale the letters ‘Mhz’ could be seen. In the middle of the top panel there was a round indentation, slightly larger than the one in the front panel and covered by a partially transparent lid.

I knew without asking that Sanja was going to take the machine home with her. Her face revealed that she was already picturing the inside hidden by the cover in her mind and seeing herself opening the machine, memorising the order of the different parts, conducting electricity from a solar generator into it in order to see what happened.

We wandered on the plastic grave for a while longer, but we only found the usual rubbish – broken toys, unrecognisable shards, useless dishes and the endless mouldy shreds of plastic bags. When we turned to return to the village, I said to Sanja:

‘I wish I could dig all the way to the bottom. Perhaps then I’d understand the past-world, and the people who threw all this away.’

‘You spend too much time thinking about them,’ Sanja said.

‘You think about them too,’ I told her. ‘You wouldn’t come here otherwise.’

‘It’s not them I think about,’ Sanja said. ‘Only their machines, what they knew and what they left to us.’ She stopped and placed her hand on my arm. I could feel the warm outline of her fingers through the fabric of my sleeve and the burn of the sun around it, two different kinds of heat next to each other. ‘It’s not worth thinking about them, Noria. They didn’t think about us, either.’

I have tried not to think about them, but their past-world bleeds into our present-world, into its sky, into its dust. Did the present-world, the world that is, ever bleed into theirs, the world that was? I imagine one of them standing by the river that is now a dry scar in our landscape, a woman who is not young or old, or perhaps a man, it doesn’t matter. Her hair is pale brown and she is looking into the water that rushes by, muddy perhaps, perhaps clear, and something that has not yet been is bleeding into her thoughts.

I would like to think she turns around and goes home and does one thing differently that day because of what she has imagined, and again the day after, and the day after that.

Yet I see another her, who turns away and doesn’t do anything differently, and I can’t tell which one of them is real and which one is a reflection in clear, still water, almost sharp enough to be mistaken for real.

I look at the sky and I look at the light and I look at the shape of the earth, all the same as theirs, and yet not, and the bleeding never stops.

We spoke little on our way back to Sanja’s house.

She stood in the shadow of the veranda when I fastened the repaired waterskin to the cart and stepped on the pedal of my helicycle. The day around us blazed tall and bright, and she was small and narrow and grey-blue in the dark shadow.

‘Noria,’ she said. ‘About the charge.’

‘I’ll bring you the first two skinfuls later today,’ I said. When I started towards the tea master’s house, I saw her smile. It was thin and colourless, but a smile nevertheless.

My father would not be pleased.

CHAPTER THREE

Late in the following afternoon I climbed the path from the teahouse towards the gate. I stopped on the way by the rock garden to pick some mint. The pale sand rippled around dark-grey boulders like water surrounding abandoned islands. The three tea plants growing just outside the edge of the sand burst towards the clear sky like green flames. I put the mint leaves in my mouth and continued to the small hillock in the shadow of a pine tree by the gate, from where I could see the road through the shadows of the scattered trees. The most burning heat of the day had already passed and the ceremony outfit felt cool and pleasant against my skin. Yet the hard-soled sandals were uncomfortable under my tired feet, and my arms ached.

My father had risen after a few short hours of sleep in the pale-gold light of a white night turning to morning. He didn’t always wake me this early on ceremony days, but this time he knew no mercy. I knew it to be my unspoken punishment for having stayed too late at Sanja’s house on the day before. He gave me one task after another, sometimes three at once, and by the time my mother got up for breakfast, I had already raked the rock garden, carried several skinfuls of water into the teahouse, swept the floor twice, hung decorated blaze lanterns inside and outside, aired the ceremony clothing, washed and dried the teacups and pots, placed them on a wooden tray, wiped dust from the stone basin in the garden and moved the bench on the veranda three times before my father was happy with its exact position.

It was with relief, then, that I walked to the gate to wait for our guests, when he finally released me from my preparation duties. I had eaten hardly anything since breakfast, and I chewed on the mint leaves to chase my hunger away. In the weary sunlight of the afternoon I had trouble keeping my eyes open. The faint tinkling of wind chimes in the garden flickered in my ears. The road was deserted and the sky was deep above, and all around me I sensed small shifts in the fabric of the world, the very movement of life as it waxed and waned.

Wind rose and died down again. Hidden waters moved in the silence of the earth. Shadows changed their shapes slowly.

Eventually I saw movement on the road, and little by little I began to make out two blue-clad figures in a helicarriage driven by a third one. When they reached the edge of the trees, I hit the large wind chime hanging from the pine. A moment later I heard three chinks from the direction of the teahouse and knew that my father was ready to receive the guests.

The helicarriage stopped near the gate in the shadow of a seagrass roof built for guest vehicles and two men in the military uniforms of New Qian stepped down from it. I recognised the older one: his name was Bolin, a regular tea guest who came every few months all the way from the city of Kuusamo and always paid well in water and goods. My father appreciated him because he knew the etiquette of tea ceremony and never demanded special treatment despite his status. He was also familiar with the local customs, being originally from our village. He was a high-ranked official and the ruling military governor of New Qian in the occupied areas of the Scandinavian Union. His jacket carried insignia in the shape of a small silver fish.

The other guest I had not seen before. From the two silvery fish tagged on his uniform I understood that he was of even higher rank than Bolin. Even before I saw his face through the thin veil of the insect hood, his posture and movements gave me the impression that he was the younger of the two. I bowed and waited for them to bow back in response. Then I turned to the garden path. I walked ahead of them at a deliberately slow pace in order to give them time to descend into the unhurried silence of the ceremony.

The grass at the front of the teahouse shimmered in the sun: my father had sprinkled it with water as a symbol of purity, as was the custom. I washed my hands in the stone basin which I had filled before, and the guests followed my example. Then they sat down on the bench to wait. A moment later a bell chimed inside the teahouse. I slid the door of the guest entrance to the side and invited the guests to move inside. Bolin kneeled at the low entrance with some difficulty, then crawled through it. The younger officer stopped and looked at me. His eyes seemed black and hard behind the insect hood.

‘Is this the only entrance?’ he asked.

‘There is another one for the tea master, sir, but guests never use it.’ I bowed to him.

‘In cities one hardly finds tea masters anymore who require their guests to kneel when entering,’ he replied.

‘This is an old teahouse, sir,’ I said. ‘It was built to follow the old idea that tea belongs to everyone equally, and therefore everyone equally kneels before the ceremony.’ This time I didn’t bow, and I thought I saw annoyance on his face before his expression settled into an unmoving polite smile. He said no more, but dropped down on his knees and went through the entrance into the teahouse. I followed him and slid the door closed behind me. My fingers trembled lightly against the wooden frame. I hoped no one would notice it.

The older guest had already settled by the adjacent wall and the younger one sat down next to him. I sat down by the guest entrance. My father was sitting on his knees opposite to the guests, and as soon as we had removed our insect hoods, he bowed.

‘Welcome, Major Bolin. This is a long-awaited pleasure. Too much water has flown since you last visited us.’ He was keeping strictly to the etiquette, but I could hear a slight warmth in his voice, only reserved for friends and longtime customers.

Major Bolin bowed in response.

‘Master Kaitio, I take pleasure in finding myself in your teahouse again. I have brought a guest with me, and I hope he will enjoy your tea as much as I do.’ He turned to his companion. ‘This is Commander Taro. He has only just moved here from a faraway southern province of New Qian, and I wished to welcome him by treating him to the best tea in the Scandinavian Union.’

Now that he wasn’t wearing his insect hood I could see clearly that Taro was younger than Bolin. His face was smooth and there was no grey in his black hair. The expression on his face did not change when he bowed his greeting.

After my father had welcomed Taro with another bow, he went into the water room and returned shortly carrying a cauldron. He placed it into the hearth in the floor on top of dried peat, which he lit with a firestarter. The flintstones crackled against each other. I listened to the rustling of his clothes as he went into the water room again and returned with a wooden tray laden with two teacups and two teapots, a large metal one and a small earthenware one. He placed the tray next to the hearth on the floor and chose his own place so that he could see the water in the cauldron. I knew Major Bolin to favour green tea that required the water not to be too hot. ‘When you can count ten small bubbles at the bottom of the cauldron, it is time to raise the water into the teapot,’ my father had taught me. ‘Five is too few and twenty is too many.’

When the water had reached the right temperature, my father scooped some of it from the cauldron into the large teapot. As a child I had followed his movements and tried to imitate them in front of a mirror until my arms, neck and back ached. I never reached the same smooth, unrestrained flow that I saw in him: he was like a tree bending in wind or a strand of hair floating in water. My own movements seemed clumsy and rigid compared to his. ‘You’re trying to copy the external movement,’ he would say then. ‘The flow must come from the inside and pass through you relentlessly, unstopping, like breathing or life.’

It was only after I began to think about water that I began to understand what he meant.

Water has no beginning and no end, and the tea master’s movement as he prepares the tea doesn’t have them, either. Every silence, every stillness is a part of the current, and if it seems to cease, it’s only because human senses aren’t sufficient to perceive it. The flow merely grows and fades and changes, like water in the iron cauldron, like life.

When I realised this, my movements began to shift, leaving the surface of my skin and my tense muscles for a deeper place inside.

My father poured water from the large teapot into the smaller one, which held the tea leaves. Then he poured this mild, swiftly brewed tea from the smaller pot into the cups in order to warm them up. As a final step of preparation, he filled the small teapot again and drenched it with the tea from the cups, soaking the earthenware sides of the pot while the leaves inside were releasing their flavour. The blaze lanterns hanging from the ceiling sprinkled softly flickering light on the water as it spread on the tray. Breath by breath I let myself sink into the ceremony and took in the sensations around me: the flare of the yellowish light, the sweet, grassy scent of the tea, the crinkle in the fabric of my trousers pressing at my leg, the wet clank of the metal teapot when my father placed it on the tray. They all entwined and merged into one stream that breathed through me, chasing the blood in my veins, drawing me closer and deeper into the moment, until I felt as if I wasn’t the one breathing anymore, but life itself was breathing through me, connecting me to the sky above and earth below.

And then the flow was cut short.

‘Some might say that is quite a waste of water.’ The words were spoken by Commander Taro. His voice was low and surprisingly soft. I had trouble imagining anyone commanding armies with such a voice. ‘It’s rare to find anyone these days who can afford to spend water on a complete, unabridged tea ceremony,’ Taro continued.

Although I wasn’t looking at my father, I could sense that he had frozen, as if an invisible web had tightened under his skin.

One of the unwritten rules of the tea ceremony was that during it conversation was limited to remarks about the quality of the water and tea, the year’s crop in the watering areas, weather, the origins and skilled craftsmanship of the teaware or the decoration of the teahouse. Personal matters were not discussed, and critical remarks were never made.

Bolin shifted as if a blazefly had crawled inside his uniform.

‘As I told you, Taro, Master Kaitio is a most distinguished professional. It’s a matter of honour that he has kept the tea ceremony unchanged for those of us who have the privilege of enjoying it,’ he said without turning to look at Taro. Instead he was staring at my father intently.

‘I understand,’ said Taro. ‘But I couldn’t help expressing my surprise about the fact that a tea master of such a remote village can afford to spend water so openhandedly. And you must know, Major Bolin, that the tea ceremony in all its present-world forms is no more than an impure, confused relic of the original past-world forms that have been long forgotten. Therefore it would be mindless to claim that conserving the tradition requires wasting water.’

My father’s face seemed made of unmoving stone that hides forceful underground currents. He spoke very quietly.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I assure you that I practise tea ceremony exactly as it has been passed on through ten generations since the first tea master moved into this house. Not the slightest detail in it has been altered.’

‘Not the slightest detail?’ Taro asked. ‘Has it always been customary, then, for tea masters to accept women as apprentices?’ He nodded towards me and I felt the heat of blood colouring my face, as often happened when strangers paid attention to me.

‘It has always been customary for fathers to pass their skill on to their children, and my daughter here will make a fine tea master that I can be proud of,’ my father said. ‘Noria, why don’t you serve the sweets with the First Tea?’

The first cup of the brewed tea, or the First Tea, as it was known, was regarded as the most important part of the ceremony, and any inappropriate conversation at that point would have been a serious offence not only against the tea master, but against other guests as well. Taro remained silent as I held out a seagrass bowl of small tea sweets I had prepared that morning using honey and amaranth flour. My father’s face remained mute and unreadable as he apportioned the tea into the cups and offered the first one to Major Bolin, then the second one to Commander Taro. Bolin breathed in the scent of the tea for a long moment before tasting it and closing his eyes while he let the tea remain in his mouth in order to sense its full flavour. Taro, for his part, lifted the cup to his lips, drank a long sip and then raised his gaze. A strange smile was on his face.

‘Bolin was right,’ he said. ‘Your skill is truly amazing, Master Kaitio. Not even the tea masters of the capital, who are regularly provided with natural fresh water from outside the city, are able to prepare such pure-tasting tea. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that this tea was made with spring water instead of purified, desalinated sea water.’

The air in the room seemed not to stir when my father put the tray down, and something cold and heavy shifted below my heart. I thought of the secret waters running deep inside the still stone of the fells.

I didn’t know who this man was or what was the real reason for his visit; and yet I felt as if in his footsteps, where his shoes had worn the stones of the path and moved grass stalks so subtly that only the air knew, a dark and narrow figure had fitted its feet into his steps and followed him through the garden, all the way to the veranda of the teahouse. It was patient and tireless, and I did not want to look towards it, or open the sliding door and see it under the trees or by the stone basin, waiting. I didn’t know if my father had felt the same, because he wouldn’t let his thoughts show on his face.

Major Bolin drank from his cup and said, ‘I’m glad your tea has impressed Commander Taro. He has been transferred to supervise the local government and is now working in close association with me.’

Taro wiped his mouth.

‘I’m particularly invested in bringing water crime under control,’ he said. ‘You may have heard that it has increased lately in the Scandinavian Union.’ He took a pause that filled the room. ‘I feel certain that we will see each other often in the future.’

‘How delightful,’ my father said and bowed. I followed his example.

‘He is highly regarded in the capital,’ Bolin continued. ‘I would say that anyone who has his protection is privileged, but I don’t wish to suggest that New Qian isn’t an equal place to live for everyone.’ He gave a laugh at his own statement, and my father and I smiled obediently.

My father served another round of tea. I offered more sweets, and Bolin and Taro took one each. Taro spoke to my father again.

‘I couldn’t help but admire your garden, Master. It’s highly unusual to see such verdancy so far away from the watering areas. How do you stretch your water quota to suffice not only for your family, but for all your plants too?’

‘Due to professional reasons, the tea master’s water quota is naturally somewhat larger than that of most citizens,’ Bolin remarked.

‘Naturally,’ said Taro, ‘but I still must wonder what kind of sacrifices keeping such a garden requires. Do tell me, Master Kaitio, what is your secret?’

Before my father had a chance to say anything, Bolin spoke.

‘Haven’t we spent enough time on superfluous chitchat, when we could be enjoying the tea in silence and forget about the sorrows of the world outside for a short while?’ He was looking at Taro, and although his voice was not sharp, I could hear a hidden edge within it. Taro gazed at him for a brief mute moment, then slowly turned to look at my father and didn’t take his eyes off him while he spoke.

‘Perhaps you’re right, Major Bolin. Perhaps I will spare my questions for another visit, which I hope to be able to make soon.’ And then he was quiet.

After that, only a few superficial sentences were exchanged, and none of them had anything to do with water, the taste of the tea or the garden. For most of the time silence spread through the teahouse and wrapped us like slow smoke from hidden fires.

The sweets were finished.

The large teapot ran empty, then the cauldron.

The ceremony is over when there is no more water.

Eventually the guests bowed in order to take their leave and placed the insect hoods over their heads. I led the way through the same low sliding door we had used to enter. Outside, the thin web of the summer evening had grown between the day and the night. Blazeflies glowed faintly in their lanterns hanging from the eaves. Major Bolin and Commander Taro followed me to the gate where the helicarriage driver raised his gaze from his portable mahjong solitaire, took a swig from a small waterskin, straightened his back and prepared to leave. The guests stepped into the carriage and spoke their formal goodbyes.

I returned to the teahouse. Around the burn of the late-evening sun the sky was the colour of the small bellflowers growing by the house. The air was still and the grass stalks were turning towards the night.

I carefully wiped and stored the cups, pots and other utensils, then helped my father clean the teahouse. My limbs were heavy, when I finally began to empty the lanterns. The blazeflies disappeared into the bushes, where I saw their glow flittering among the leaves. My father came out of the teahouse in his master’s outfit, carrying his insect hood in his hand. The molten light of the night-sky drew lines across his face.

‘I think you’ve learned enough to become a tea master this Moonfeast.’ That was all he said before he started towards the house, and while I was surprised at his statement, the following silence made me far more uneasy than any words might have.

I took the empty blaze lanterns back into the teahouse, wrapped them in fabric one by one and packed them inside the wooden chest in which they were kept. I poured the blazeflies from the last one into an undecorated lantern for my own night light.

I walked around the teahouse, among the trees and on the grass for a long time. The night dew soothed the burning, stinging insect bites on my ankles. I did not see the dark and narrow figure under the pine trees, crossing the rock garden or sitting on the tearoom veranda, but I couldn’t tell if this was only because I wasn’t looking in the right direction.

CHAPTER FOUR

I lay on my bed and listened to the occasional slow clicking of the blazeflies against the glass walls of the lantern. There was no real need for the lantern, for the sun was still an orange-gold globe hanging in the horizon, heavy with late evening. The sky around it was translucent, and light trickled into my room through the insect net on the window. At the other end of the house I could hear my parents’ faint voices, their words hidden, stifled; obscured by the distance. I had heard them speak like this nearly every night since Major Bolin and Commander Taro had visited us, and afterwards my mother stayed up much later than she usually did. She tried to be quiet, but I heard her movements as she wandered between her study and the kitchen, and I saw the soft glow of her lantern through the crack under my door when she passed back and forth.

I was holding in my hand one of the old books that remained in the house, a tale of a journey through winter. I knew it by heart, and the words flowed elusive across the pages before my eyes, evading the grip of my thoughts. I wasn’t thinking of the story. I was thinking of the world in which it had been written.

I had often tried to imagine how winters had been in the past-world.

I knew the darkness: every autumn around Moonfeast, night met day in order to swap places and the year turned towards winter. During the six twilight months, large blaze lanterns burned in each room of the house at all hours, and solar lamps were lit beside them in the ink-deep black of the evening. From the top of the fell one could see the glow of the cities in the dark skies: the distant but clear halo of Kuoloyarvi in the east, where the watering areas and the sea lay, and the near-invisible spark of Kuusamo far in the southern horizon. The ground lost its scant greenness. The garden waited for the return of the sun, mute and bare.

Imagining the coldness, on the other hand, was hard. I was used to wearing more layers of clothing during the dark season and carrying peat from the drained swamp for the fireplaces and braziers once the solar power ran out, usually soon after the Midwinter celebrations. But even then the temperature outside rarely dropped below ten degrees, and on warm days I walked in sandals, just like in summer.

When I’d been six years old, I had read in a past-world book about snow and ice, and asked my mother what they were. She had picked one of her thick and serious-looking volumes from a shelf that was too tall for me at the time, shown me the pictures – white, shimmering, round and sharp shapes in strange landscapes, luminous like crystallised light – and told me that they were water that had taken a different form in low temperatures, in circumstances that could only be artificially produced in our world but that had once been a natural part of seasons and people’s lives.

‘What happened to them?’ I had asked. ‘Why don’t we have snow and ice anymore?’

My mother had looked at me and yet through me, as if trying to see across thoughts and words and centuries, into winters long gone.

‘The world changed,’ she had said. ‘Most believe that it changed on its own, simply claimed its due. But a lot of knowledge was lost during the Twilight Century, and there are those who think that people changed the world, unintentionally or on purpose.’

‘What do you believe?’ I had asked.

She had remained quiet for a long time and said then, ‘I believe the world wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for people.’

In my imagination snow glowed with faint, white light, as if billions of blazeflies had dropped their wings, covering the ground with them. The darkness turned more transparent and lighter to bear in my mind when I thought of it against the silvery-white shimmer, and I longed for the past-world I had never known. I pictured fishfires flashing on the sky above radiant snow, and sometimes in my dreams lost winters shone brighter than summer.

I once did an experiment. I filled a bucket with water and emptied all the ice I found in the freezer into it, sneaked it into my room and locked the door. I pushed my hand into the icy wrap of water, closed my eyes and summoned the feel of past-world winters about which I had read so many stories. I called for white sheets of snow falling from the sky and covering the paths my feet knew, covering the house that held the memory of cold in its walls and foundations. I imagined the snowfall coating the fells, changing their craggy surfaces into landscapes as soft as sleep and as ready to drown you. I called for a glass-clear crust of ice to enclose the garden, to stay the greenness of the blades of grass and stall the water in barrels and pipes. I imagined the sound frozen branches of trees would make, or stiff waterskins hanging from the rack, when wind beat them against each other.

I thought of water, ever-changing, and I thought of the suspended moment, the movement stopped in a snow crystal or a shard of ice. Stillness, silence. An end, or perhaps a beginning.

The blunt, heavy blade of the chilled slush cut into my bones. I opened my eyes. The day outside the window burned with a tall, bright flame, turning the earth slowly into dust and ashes. I pulled my hand out of the water. My skin was red and numb, and my fingers ached, but the rest of my body felt warm, and I was no closer to past-world winters. I couldn’t imagine a cold so comprehensive, so all-encompassing. Yet it had once existed, perhaps existed somewhere still. My mother had told me that in the midst of the Northern Ocean, where the day lasted six months and the night governed the other half of the year, where the bloodiest battles of the oil wars had taken place, there might still be small islets of ice, floating across the deserted sea, quiet and lifeless, carrying the memories of the past-world locked within, slowly giving in to water and melting into its embrace. They were the last remnants of the enormous ice cap that had once rested on the topmost peak of the world, like a large, unmoving animal guarding the continents.

As I grew older, I often sought more books on the tall shelves in my mother’s study, hungry for anything that might help me understand and imagine the lost winters. I spent days and weeks studying their unfamiliar maps and pictures and strange old calendars that measured time by the cycles of the sun, rather than by the moon. Many of them spoke of temperatures and seasons and weather, drowned land and oceans that had pushed their shorelines inland, and all of them spoke of water, but the books didn’t always agree on everything. I asked my mother once what this meant. She called herself a scientist. If scientists didn’t agree with each other, I asked, did this mean that nobody really knew? She thought about this for a while and then said that there were different ways of knowing, and sometimes it was impossible to say which way was the most reliable.

Little by little I learned that for all their diagrams and strange words and detailed explanations, my mother’s books did not tell everything. I wondered how snow would feel on my palm just before melting into water, or what ice would look like on a winter’s day in a sun-glazed landscape where the outlines of shadows are sharp-drawn, but those stories I had to seek in other books. I was disappointed with the tall bookshelf and its contents, which promised so much and yet ignored what was most important. What good was it to know the composition of a snow crystal, if one couldn’t resurrect the sensation of its coldness against one’s skin and the sight of its glimmer?

The conversation of my parents drifted into my ears louder than before. My mother was using her sensible voice and my father’s answers were concise. I got up to close the door. The wooden floor creaked under my footsteps. I could smell the scent of pines in the cooling air streaming through the window. A large horsefly was buzzing between the glass and the insect net.

Just as I was pulling the door closed, I heard the message-pod beep my own identification sound further down the hallway. I walked to the entrance, where the light of the pod was flashing red. To: Noria, the text on the screen read. I lifted the message-pod from the wall rack and placed my finger on the screen in order to log in. Sanja’s family name appeared: Valama. I was slightly surprised. Sanja seldom used the message-pod. Her family had only one shared account, and their pod had been bought secondhand. It was out of order more often than not despite Sanja’s persistent tuning attempts, or possibly partly as their result. I chose the Read option on the screen and waited for the message written in Sanja’s bouncy handwriting to appear. Come tomorrow, she wrote, and bring all the TDKs with you. Possible DISCOVERY!!

‘Discovery’ was one of the most important expressions in Sanja’s vocabulary. It usually meant she had come up with a use for something looted from the plastic grave. I wasn’t always entirely convinced that the uses she invented were in accord with the original purposes of the things, but I was nevertheless curious to see what she had discovered. I picked the pod-pen up from the wall rack, wrote Before noon in reply on the screen and sent the message.

I was closer to my parents’ voices now. They rattled behind the gap of the kitchen door. A faint smell of seaweed stew floated in the air. As I was turning to go back into my room, my mother’s words caught my attention.

‘… If you told them now, when it’s not late yet?’

I couldn’t make out my father’s murmured reply.

‘He’d see to it that we’d be left alone,’ my mother continued. ‘If the military learns about—’ She lowered her voice and the end of the sentence faded away.

I heard my father pacing back and forth in the kitchen. When he replied, his voice was tight and unflinching.

‘I only trust Bolin as much as one can trust a soldier.’

This was not unexpected. My father believed most army officers were thieves, and I didn’t think he was wrong. Yet my mother’s reply surprised me.

‘You trusted him more once,’ she said.

My father was quiet for a moment before answering, ‘That was a long time ago.’

I only had an instant to wonder about the meaning of those words before my mother said something in a soft voice, and then I caught my own name.

‘It is her I’m thinking about,’ my father replied. ‘Would you rather she became one of the tea masters of the cities? They’re nothing more than sell-outs, pets of the military. Besides, many still believe it’s against the teachings to let women practise as tea masters. She belongs here.’

‘She could learn another profession,’ my mother said.

What about me, is anybody asking what I want?

‘Are you suggesting that I break our family line of tea masters?’ My father’s voice was sharp with disbelief.

I couldn’t hear the words in my mother’s response, but her tone was harsher.

‘This isn’t really about Noria, or even the spring.’ My father sounded angry now. ‘This is about your research. You need their funding.’

I took a slow step closer to the kitchen door, taking care not to make a sound. This was getting interesting.

‘I’m not on their side. But perhaps I need them to believe that I am,’ my mother said. ‘The water resources of the Lost Lands haven’t been properly investigated since the disaster. This project, if it were to be successful—’ The words lost their shape again as she lowered her voice, and I only heard the end of the sentence: ‘… less important than your age-old beliefs and empty customs?’

My breathing sounded so loud in my ears that I was afraid they might hear it. I tried to exhale slowly and soundlessly.

‘They may seem empty to you, because you are not a tea master,’ my father said quietly, and every word fell heavy through the air. ‘Yet some things run so deep we can’t stop their flow. It’s ignorance to think that earth and water can be owned. Water belongs to no one. The military must not make it theirs, and therefore the secret must be kept.’

The silence stretched through the still, dusky air, between the two of them and me standing on the other side of the door. When my mother spoke again, there was no crack in her glass-clear voice.

‘If water belongs to no one,’ she said, ‘what right do you have to make the hidden waters yours exclusively, while whole families in the village risk building illegal water pipes in order to survive? What makes you different from the officers of New Qian, if you do what they would?’

My father said nothing. I heard my mother’s footsteps and turned hastily towards the message-pod as she walked through the kitchen door. When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks.

‘I was just reading my message and some pod-news,’ I said. Without looking back I turned, walked through the house into my room and closed the door behind me. Outside the sun was brushing the horizon among golden shreds of light on the smoke-blue sky. I had barely made it back to bed when the floorboards creaked in the hallway, and then there was a knock on my door. My mother peeked in, a questioning look on her face. I nodded to her and she stepped into the room.

‘There’s no need to pretend you didn’t hear us talking, Noria,’ she said and sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s a conversation we should have had with you in the first place. I sometimes don’t know.’ She seemed weary. ‘You know what we were talking about, don’t you?’ She pulled a wooden stool for herself from under my desk and sat down on it.

‘It was about the hidden spring,’ I said. She nodded.

‘The times are getting harsher,’ she said. ‘But whatever happens, whatever decisions we take with your father, you must always remember that we’re doing everything with your best interests in mind.’ I wasn’t looking at her. I pretended to be searching in my book for the paragraph I had been reading. The pages felt stiff and reluctant.

‘How would you feel about living in one of the cities?’ asked my mother. ‘In a place like New Piterburg, or Mos Qua, or even as far as Xinjing?’

I thought of the only two cities I had seen: Kuoloyarvi in the east, and Kuusamo in the south. I remembered my initial excitement at the crowded streets, vault-shaped, large buildings covered with solar panels and whole building tops turned to giant blaze lanterns with transparent glass walls and greenery inside. I had been fascinated by the Qianese market stalls on the narrow alleys selling strange foods and drinks, their strong, spicy and sometimes unpleasant scents perceptible from several blocks away. I had wandered with my mother through the Danish quarters of Kuusamo, buying small bags of coloured sweets to take home with me, and the day I had taken my Matriculation Test I had been treated by my father to a meal in an expensive restaurant with a selection of imported natural waters from around the world.

Excitement flared in me again, but then I remembered the high walls and checkpoints dividing the streets, the ever-present soldiers and curfews. I remembered the exhaustion that had settled on me after only a couple of days, the pressing need to get away from the crowds, the longing for space and silence and emptiness. I could see myself loving visiting the cities, and I could see myself loathing living in one.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. My mother was looking at me intently.

‘And how would you feel about not becoming a tea master?’ she asked. ‘You could study languages, or mathematics, or assist me with my research.’

I thought about it, but not for long, and answered truthfully.

‘I know the tea ceremony; I’ve studied it all my life. I wouldn’t know what else to be.’

My mother remained quiet for a long time, and I could tell that her thoughts were running restless; she was much worse at concealing her feelings than my father. Eventually I broke the silence.

‘You know that house in the village, the one with the mark of water crime on the door?’

‘The blue circle?’ Something stirred in her. It took me a moment to understand it was fear. ‘What about it?’

‘What happened to the people who lived there?’

My mother looked at me. I saw her searching for words.

‘Nobody knows.’ She stepped to me and squeezed my hand. ‘My dear Noria,’ she said, and then paused, as if changing her mind and not saying what she had been about to say. ‘I wish we could have given you a different world.’ She stroked my hair. ‘Try to sleep now. The time for decisions will come later.’

‘Good night,’ I said. With that, she smiled. It was a quick smile, and not at all happy.

‘Good night, Noria,’ she said, and left.

After she had gone, I got up, kneeled in front of the book cabinet and took a wooden box from the bottom shelf. Through the thin layer of lacquer I could feel the grain of the undecorated wood against my fingertips. I turned the key in the lock and lifted the lid.

Inside the box was a random collection of past-world things excavated from the plastic grave. A handful of smooth-polished, multicoloured stones and a small, twisted metal key with almost no teeth left lay on top. Under them were three partially translucent plastic rectangles with slightly rounded edges and two wheel-shaped holes in the middle. The same three letters were visible on each one: TDK. Dark, thin tape that was broken had unravelled from inside the rectangles. I had always liked the feeling of TDK tape between my fingers: it was light and smooth as a strand of hair, as air, as water. I had no idea what Sanja wanted with the TDKs. Neither of us had any inkling what they had been used for in the past-world, and I had only kept them because I liked to stroke the tape every now and then.

At the bottom of the box glinted a silver-coloured, thin disc that I had once brought home because I found it beautiful. I picked it up in order to admire it once again. The shiny side was slightly scratched, but still so bright that I could see my own reflection in it. When it caught the light of the blaze lantern, it reflected all colours of the rainbow. On the matte side were traces of the text that had once run across it, and a few combinations of letters still remained: COM CT DISC.

I placed the disc and the TDKs back in the box, locked it and stuffed it into my seagrass bag that was hanging from the hook on the wall next to the cabinet, ready for the morning.

When I closed my eyes, I saw the distance that separated our house from the village and from another house, more weather-worn than ours. On its door a blue circle stared into the white night with outlines sharp enough to wound. The distance was not great, and if I looked at it long enough, it would grow narrower, until I’d be able to touch the door of the other house, to listen to the movements behind it.

Or the silence.

I wrapped the image away and pushed it from my mind, but I knew it did not disappear.

CHAPTER FIVE

I passed through the open gate of Sanja’s house and stopped the helicycle by the fence. Sanja’s mother Kira was standing in the middle of a patch of tall sunflowers, cutting a heavy flower head off the thick stem. At her feet there was a large basket, into which she had already gathered several flower heads, ripe with chubby seeds. Sanja’s little sister Minja was sitting on the sandy ground, trying to make a flat stone stay on top of three wooden blocks piled upon each other. The insect hood she had inherited from Sanja swayed on her head, oversized, and the stone kept slipping off her fingers time after time.

‘Noria!’ Minja said when she saw me. ‘Look!’ The flat stone rested forgotten in her hand for a moment as she pointed towards her construction site with her other hand. ‘A well.’

‘Pretty,’ I said, although the assembly did not resemble a well in any shape or form that I knew.

Kira turned around. The dust-coloured front of her dress was scattered with the yellow of dry sunflower petals. Her face was weary and pale in the frame of black hair that looked unwashed under the insect hood, and the clothes hung loose on her narrow figure, but she was smiling. At that moment she looked a lot like Sanja.

‘Hi, Noria,’ she said. ‘Sanja’s been waiting for you all morning.’

‘My mother baked a pile of amaranth cakes yesterday,’ I said and pulled a seagrass box out of my bag. It felt heavy in my hand. ‘She sent these. There’s no rush with returning the box.’

I caught the momentary stiffness on Kira’s face before her smile returned.

‘Thank you,’ she said and took the box. ‘Send my best to your mother. I’m afraid we don’t have anything to give back.’ She dropped the freshly-cut flower head on top of the pile in the basket. The lush, dark-green scent of the stems wafted in the air.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Kira didn’t look at me when she took Minja’s hand. I felt awkward.

‘Sponge-bath time, Minjuska,’ she said. ‘You’ll get to play with the pirate ship if you’re good.’

Minja squealed, got up to her feet and dropped the flat stone on top of her well construction site. The blocks crashed to the ground, sending dust flying around them. Kira started towards the house, holding the cake box in one hand and Minja’s hand in the other.

‘See you later, Noria,’ she said. I waved goodbye to Minja, but she was only interested in the promise of the pirate ship.

I walked around the house. Through the insect-net walls of the workshop I saw Sanja sitting on a stool at the table and fiddling with something. When I knocked on one of the pillars supporting the roof, she looked up and waved her hand. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me and took off my insect hood.

The machine on the table in front of Sanja was the same she had found in the plastic grave a few weeks earlier. I recognised its angular shape, the dent embedded in the front panel, the strange numerical combinations and another dent on top. Two power cables ran from the machine to the solar generator sitting at the corner of the table.

‘Did you bring them?’ she asked. She had pulled hair back from her face with a worn scarf and two red spots were burning on her cheeks. I thought she must have woken early out of sheer excitement and fluttered restlessly around the workshop all morning. I placed my bag on the table and dug out my wooden box, from which I produced the TDKs.

‘I don’t understand what you want these for,’ I said.

Sanja disappeared under the table to rummage around. She emerged a moment later, holding a black plastic rectangle. I remembered seeing it a few weeks earlier when I had come to get the waterskins repaired. When she picked up a TDK from the table, I realised how much the objects resembled each other. The biggest difference was in their size.

‘I tried to think of what on earth this thing had been used for,’ she said. ‘I knew it must have been for listening to something, because it had loudspeakers, just like a message-pod – completely different size and much older, of course, but the basic principle is the same. As I was fashioning a new lid for that rectangular dent in the front, I noticed that there were two spindles inside it, and one of them turned. Those plastic blocks,’ she pointed at the larger rectangle, ‘were lying about next to it, and as I kept looking at them, it occurred to me that it was as if the dent was made for such a piece, with the spindles fitting in the cogged wheels in the middle. Even the shape was right … but the size wasn’t.’ She tapped with her finger the plastic block that bore the letters ‘VHS’. ‘It’s as if these were made for a similar but far bigger machine. Bloody bad luck: the right machine and the right changeable part, but wrong scale. But then I remembered you tend to keep all sorts of peculiar things, and I realised you had the TDKs!’

I began to understand what she was getting at. She smoothed one creased TDK tape as much as she could, knotted the shredded ends together and rolled the tape back inside the plastic shell until it no longer hung loose.

Then she tried the TDK in the dent of the loudspeaker machine.

‘It doesn’t fit,’ I said, disappointed, but Sanja turned the TDK upside down and it clicked into place.

‘Ha!’ she said, and I, too, felt a smile growing on my face.

Sanja closed the lid and turned the switch on the solar generator. A small, yellow-green light that made me think of glow-worms was lit on the top panel of the machine, next to the numerical combinations.

‘Now we just need to figure out what to do with all these switches,’ she said and pressed a button with a square on it. The lid on the front panel opened. Nothing else happened. Sanja closed the lid again and tried a button with two arrowheads on it. The machine began to rustle. Sanja brought her face close to the rectangular dent and her eyes narrowed as she stared at it, alert.

‘It’s rolling!’ she said. ‘Look!’

I peeked and saw that she was right: the machine was spinning the tape inside the plastic TDK so fast it was difficult to tell its direction. After a while it clicked and churned in place for a moment before clicking again and turning mute.

‘Did it break?’ I enquired cautiously. Sanja creased her brow.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Maybe there’s just no more tape left.’ She pressed another button with only one arrowhead on it. The machine began to buzz faintly. Then the loudspeakers crackled. Sanja jumped and turned to look at me.

‘Listen!’ she said.

The speakers rustled and hummed and then continued to hum.

And hummed some more.

The smile peeled off Sanja’s face like paint chipping in the sun while time stretched on between us, and the humming reached further, into another age and world whose secrets it wasn’t ready to reveal. Eventually Sanja pressed the square button again and the tape stopped. She opened the lid, took the TDK out and replaced it with another one after tying the broken ends of the tape together.

There was still nothing but warbled whirring from the loudspeakers.

She tried all three TDKs several times, spinning the tapes back and forth and turning the TDKs from one side to the other, but all we heard were ghosts of sounds sunken in time and distance, a near-silence that was more frustrating than complete soundlessness. If the tapes had once held something comprehensible, earth, air, rain and sun had worn the past-world echoes thin a long time ago.

Sanja stared at the machine and turned one of the TDKs in her hands.

‘I’m sure I’m right,’ she said. ‘These parts fit in the machine, and it translates sounds from them into the loudspeakers. The device and the TDKs must have been used exactly like this. If only we could find a TDK that still had sound left on it …’

Sanja’s fingers were tapping the plastic surface of the TDK. I heard Minja’s shrieks from inside the house, and Kira’s faint voice soothing Minja. I followed with my gaze a small black spider that was spinning a web in the corner above the solar generator.

‘Perhaps … perhaps there are more somewhere in the plastic grave?’ I offered. ‘Or maybe they weren’t meant to last in the first place. Past-world technology was fragile.’

Sanja’s expression changed, as if the outline of her face had become more focused. She lifted the square lid on the top panel of the machine and felt the round indentation under it with her fingers. Then she looked at my wooden storage box that was open on the worktop. Her eyes were fixed on the silver-coloured disc with a hole in the middle. The disc looked exactly the right size for the round indentation of the listening-device. Sanja looked at me and I saw my own thoughts on her face.

‘May I?’ she asked.

I nodded.

Sanja took the disc from the wooden box and fitted it into the indentation. It seemed made for the machine. The round knob in the middle of the indentation fit right into the hole in the middle of the disc. Sanja pressed the disc into it, and it clicked lightly into place. She closed the lid and pressed the arrow button. Through the plastic window I saw the disc starting to turn.

We waited.

There was no sound from the loudspeakers.

I saw Sanja’s expression and felt disappointed myself. Then she reached out her hand to fiddle with the switches on the top panel. The first one she touched caused the glow-worm light to go off and the rotation of the disc to slow down, so she switched it back to the original position. Another one did nothing at all. When she moved the third switch, the loudspeakers gave such a loud crackle we both jumped. It was followed by a short stretch of silence, and then a male voice which said clearly in our language:

‘This is the log of the Jansson expedition, day four. Southern Trøndelag, near the area previously known as the city of Trondheim.’

While the voice went on to record the day, month and year, Sanja cheered and I laughed. The voice continued:

‘We started the day by measuring the microbe levels of the Dovrefjell waters. The results are not complete yet, but it seems that there is no discrepancy with the Jotunheimen results. If this turns out to be the case, our estimations about the spontaneous biological recovery and reconstruction process taking place in the area have been far more modest than the reality. Tomorrow we are going to plant purifying bacteria in the waters and then we’ll continue towards Northern Trøndelag …’

The day outside grew into a thick, burning shell that surrounded the workshop, and horseflies climbed on the insect web walls, and we listened to the voice of the past-world. At times it would wither almost entirely, jump a little, or get stuck, until the sound found its flow again. Sanja didn’t stop it, and didn’t try to skip the boring bits. It had waited on the disc through generations. It was a part of a story that had nearly been lost in the plastic grave. We didn’t speak, and I don’t know what Sanja was thinking; but I thought of silence and years and water that ran ceaselessly, wearing everything away. I thought of the inexplicable chain of events that had brought this voice from a strange landscape and a lost world into this dry morning, into our ears that understood its words, yet comprehended little.

The voice spoke of exploration of waters, microbe measurements, bacterial growth, landforms. There was an occasional lengthy break in the speech, and we began to discern separate sections. At the beginning of each one the voice announced a new date: the recording moved from day four to day five and so on. After day nine the voice stopped altogether. We waited for a continuation, but it didn’t come. Minutes passed. We looked at each other.

‘Too bad there wasn’t more,’ Sanja said. ‘And too bad it wasn’t more exciting.’

‘I’m sure my mum would disagree,’ I said. ‘She’s crazy about all sorts of scientific—’

The speakers made a loud noise. We stiffened, listening. A female voice spoke now.

‘The others don’t think I should do this,’ it said. ‘But they don’t need to know.’ The woman paused and cleared her throat. Then: ‘Dear listener,’ she continued. ‘If you’re military, you may rest assured that I did everything in my power in order to destroy these recordings instead of letting you get your hands on them. The fact that you’re hearing this probably means I failed miserably.’ The voice took a moment to think. ‘But that won’t happen until later. Right now I have a story to tell and you’re not going to like it one bit. I know what you’ve done. What you’re going to do. And if I have anything to say about it, the whole world will know what really happened, because—’

The talk was cut unexpectedly short. The disc continued to turn, but now the past-world voice was irrevocably gone. The recording was over.

Sanja and I stared at each other.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

Sanja tried to move the recording back and forward, she even tried the other side of the disc, but it was clear we had heard everything there was to hear.

‘What year did the man mention at the beginning?’ I asked.

Neither of us had paid attention to the year. Sanja started the disc from the beginning again. As we listened, I could see on her face that she had realised what I had. Without giving any more thought to it, we had imagined that the disc was from the past-world.

We had been wrong.

‘It’s from the Twilight Century,’ I said.

‘It can’t be for real,’ Sanja claimed, but she sounded unconvinced. ‘It’s just a story, like one of your books, or those suspense stories that one can buy to listen to on the message-pod, one chapter at a time.’

‘Why would it have an hour of dull science stuff first, and the interesting bit only after that?’

Sanja shrugged.

‘Maybe it’s just badly written. Those pod-stories aren’t always that great, either. My dad has a few.’

‘I don’t know.’ I was trying to think feverishly where in the plastic grave I had found the disc.

Sanja took the disc from the machine with determination, placed it in the wooden box and snapped the lid closed.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘We’ll never know what that woman had to say. At least we got the machine to work.’

But I was thinking of unknown winters and lost tales, I was thinking of the familiar language and the strange words that were left smouldering in my mind. I thought of rain and sun falling on the plastic grave and slowly gnawing everything away. And of what might still remain.

I was almost certain I could remember where the disc had come from.

‘We could look for more discs where we found that one,’ I suggested. I was getting excited about the idea. ‘We could try to make the story whole. Even if it’s just a story, wouldn’t you still want to know how it ends?’

‘Noria—’

‘We could go for all day tomorrow, take some food with us and—’

‘Noria,’ Sanja interrupted me. ‘You might not have anything better to do than serve tea and poke around the plastic grave,’ she said. ‘But I do.’

Somewhere inside the house Minja had started to cry.

The distance had grown between us unexpectedly. We had known each other since we were learning to walk on the village square, holding our mothers’ hands as we took our first tentative steps. If someone had asked, I would have told them Sanja was closer to me than anyone else, save for my parents. And yet she sometimes withdrew into her shell, turned away from me, slipped out of my reach, like a reflection or an echo: a mere trace of what was only a moment ago, gone already, beyond words and touches. I didn’t understand these moments, and I couldn’t deny them.

She was far away from me now, far as hidden waters, far as strange winters.

‘I have to go,’ I said.

I shoved the wooden box into my bag. The feeling that we had found a secret passageway through time and space into an unknown world had faded away. The day had burned it to cinders.

I pulled the insect hood over my head and stepped out into the blazing heat.

On my way home the strap of the bag gnawed on my shoulder and I was weary. Sweat trickled down to my neck and my back, and my hair clung to my skin under the insect hood. The words recorded on the disc were bothering me. The Jansson expedition. It sounded like something out of my mother’s old books. And the woman from across all this time – unexpected, hidden in the travel log – had considered her story so important that she had dictated it in secret and been ready to destroy the whole recording rather than letting the military have it.

I wanted to know what had meant so much to her.

I could see from far away that there were unfamiliar transport carriages outside our house. I wondered if we had received tea guests on short notice, and hoped this wasn’t the case. My father hated visits for which he had no time to prepare well, and was cranky for days afterwards.

I turned the helicycle towards the woods from the road, and I tried to see between the tree trunks into the garden.

Breath curled into a knot between my throat and chest when I saw the blue military uniforms. There weren’t just one or two, but many more.

A familiar helicarriage was parked outside the gate under the seagrass roof. When I came to the front yard, I saw approximately ten soldiers who were carrying complex-looking machinery to and fro. Some of the instruments reminded me of pictures I had seen in my mother’s books. A makeshift fence had been raised around the teahouse, and in front of it a soldier with a sabre hanging from his belt kept watch. My parents stood on the veranda of our house, and a tall soldier wearing an official’s uniform was talking to them, his back turned towards me. When he heard my footsteps, he turned and I recognised the face behind the insect hood.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Kaitio. It is a pleasure to meet you again,’ Commander Taro said and waited for me to bow.

CHAPTER SIX

They called it a routine investigation, but we knew there was nothing routine-like about it. Routine investigations were carried out by two soldiers and they lasted a few hours at most. Instead, a highly ranked official stayed on our grounds for nearly two weeks with six soldiers, two of whom took turns to guard the teahouse while four were exploring the house and its surroundings. They walked carefully planned, slow routes from one end of the garden to the other, back and forth, examining each centimetre. They carried flat display screens in their hands. The multicoloured patterns that took shape on them bore a slight resemblance to maps, with their ragged edges and varying, overlapping forms.

From my mother’s books I had a vague idea of how the machines worked. They sent radio waves to the ground that the screen interpreted, with the patterns indicating the density and humidity of the soil. The soldiers also carried different drilling and measuring devices. One of them, a woman whose expression I rarely saw change, walked with two long metal wires crossed in her hands. Occasionally, she would stop with her eyes closed, then stare at the wires for a long while, as if waiting for something. My parents told me that the teahouse was isolated and an intensive search was being executed there because the metal rod of the wire woman had on the first day twitched to point at the ground on the veranda.

My father stared sadly at the plank pile growing in front of the teahouse while the soldiers were taking the floor apart.

‘It will never be the same again,’ he muttered, his lips tense. ‘Wood like that is hard to find nowadays, and the expertise for building a teahouse doesn’t exist in any old village.’

In those days a silence wavered between my parents, dense with stirring, well-hidden fear and nameless, unspoken things. It was like a calm surface of water, extreme and unnatural: a single word dropped on it, a single shifting stone at the bottom would change it, create a circle and yet another circle, until the reflection was warped, unrecognisable with the force of the movement. We avoided talking about any but the most everyday things, because the presence of the soldiers grew invisible walls between us that we had no courage to shatter.

In the evenings I did not go to bed until I had privately checked that the soldiers hadn’t taken their screen-devices towards the fell, and in the mornings my heart was thick and heavy in my throat when I woke up to the thought that they might have expanded their search outside the house and garden. I couldn’t eat breakfast until I was certain this wasn’t the case. In my dreams I saw the waters hidden in stone, and in the middle of the night I would wake to the strangling feeling in my chest that somehow, impossibly, the sound of the spring carried all the way from the fell to the house. I listened to the unmoving silence for a long time, until sleep sank me again.

At first I thought my mother was faking an interest in the equipment of the water seekers to keep up appearances and to cover her nervousness. As the days passed, I came to understand that behind her behaviour there was a real interest that she had a hard time concealing. She was aching to know more about the equipment, to try it for herself, to learn the mechanisms and applications. It had been over fifteen years since she had worked as a field researcher for the University of New Piterburg, and military technology was more developed than anything civilians could access. She walked with the soldiers, asking questions about their machinery, and I could see on her face how she was making mental notes on things so she could write them down in the quiet of her study. My father noticed this, too, and his manner became curt and distant towards her. Everything that was left unsaid during those days tightened around us like a web that might suffocate and crush us, if we didn’t find a way out soon enough.

I wanted to talk to Sanja. I wished I hadn’t left her workshop so abruptly. I had sent her three messages and asked her to come over, but she hadn’t replied. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, because she didn’t tend to reply that often anyway. While my mother walked around studying the equipment of the soldiers, and my father stood by the teahouse, apparently hoping his presence would limit the damage caused by them, I carried books into my room and set up camp by them.

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