Memory of Water

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.

The recording on the silver-coloured disc was bothering me. I had always had a relatively clear idea of what the past-world had been like – or rather, of how little was known about the past-world. For all my winter daydreams and snow-longing, I had never questioned what I had been taught at school and what the books said. I had taken for granted that what was generally considered to be true really was the truth, and nothing beyond that mattered. But what if it wasn’t so? What if the stories that remained were just darkened and distorted shards of a mirror – or worse: what if someone had deliberately shattered the mirror in order to change the reflection? I know what you’ve done… And if I have anything to say about it, the whole world will know what really happened, the voice on the disc had said.

After I had spread the books gathered from the house all over the floor, I eventually found two large world maps in them. I placed them next to each other for comparison. One showed the past-world, the world of cold winters and skyscraping cities. The other showed the present-world.

I stared at the outlines of the continents and oceans, changed, barely recognisable.

So much lost to salt and water.

I looked at the places nearest to me. The White Sea, east of my home village and Kuoloyarvi, had not reached as far inland, as close to us as it did now. The lakes and rivers in the Scandinavian Union had merged into wider waters, and the old coastlines were long gone.

That was not all.

Drowned islands, coastal plains, river deltas turned salt-bitten; and large cities, now silent ghosts of lives past in their shroud of sea, everywhere, everywhere.

On the old map North and South Poles were shown in white. I knew this stood for the ice that had sometimes been called eternal ice, until it became clear that it wasn’t eternal after all. Near the end of the past-world era the globe had warmed and seas had risen faster than anyone could have anticipated. Tempests tore the continents and people fled their homes to where there was still space and dry land. During the final oil wars a large accident contaminated most of the fresh-water reserves of former Norway and Sweden, leaving the areas uninhabitable.

The following century was known as the Twilight Century, during which the world, or what remained of it, ran out of oil. With this a major part of the past-world technology was gradually lost. Staying alive became the most important thing. All that wasn’t considered necessary for everyday survival faded away.

I thought about the words recorded on the disc. The male voice had spoken about Trondheim, Trøndelag and Jotunheimen. They belonged to the Lost Lands, as the contaminated areas of the Scandinavian Union were called. If the Jansson Expedition was real, what had they been doing in the Lost Lands during the Twilight Century? How had it even been possible or safe for them to go there? I nearly wanted to believe in Sanja’s claim that the recording on the disc was just a story. It seemed true to me, but I knew that was what the best stories were like: you could believe in them, even if you knew they were imagination. Yet something about the disc didn’t quite convince me. The story on it lacked the structure of a designed, made-up story. It had the shape of reality and truth.

I closed the books and piled them on my desk, but not until I had folded the corners of the map pages.

Six days after the arrival of the soldiers, Sanja appeared unexpectedly at our gate. She had walked all the way from the village, and she carried a pile of empty waterskins strapped on her back. They were the same ones I had used to take water to her as a payment for the repair job a few weeks earlier.

‘Let’s go inside,’ I told her.

‘My father said you have a local invasion going on here,’ Sanja said as we got inside the house. ‘Why on earth?’

She took off her insect hood. I helped her unload the waterskins off her back and hung them from a hat rack on the entrance wall.

‘I guess they think we have a hidden well under the teahouse floor or something,’ I replied. My voice sounded calmer than I would have expected.

‘I should’ve known you’re hiding some dark secret,’ Sanja said and her expression dissolved into one of her lopsided grins. ‘Don’t they really have anything better to do? Maybe someone’s pissed with your dad and dropped them a false lead just to create havoc.’

I smiled, but my face felt stiff. It seemed she had no intention of mentioning our quarrel, and I felt no need to do so, either. Some rifts will close on their own, I thought. There was no reason to force them open again.

‘Are you in a hurry to go back?’ I asked.

Sanja shook her head.

I made ice tea for us in the kitchen. Ice lumps crackled in the earthenware cups, as I poured the pale yellow, lukewarm liquid over them. We sat down at the table, and I got some dried figs out of the cupboard.

‘I wish we had a freezer, too,’ Sanja sighed and sipped her tea. ‘I tried to fix one last year, but it only worked for a couple of weeks before breaking down for good. I’d have needed to go to the city for the spare parts and that would’ve been two months’ food budget gone.’

‘Do you find it weird how much past-world technology there still is in the plastic graves, the kind that is easy to fix?’ I asked.

‘What’s so weird about that?’

‘They always said at school that past-world technology was frail and can’t be manufactured anymore, and that’s what all books say, too.’

‘And it was. Most of the stuff in plastic graves is rubbish.’

‘What about books?’

‘What about them?’

‘Why weren’t more past-world books preserved?’ I knew the tea master’s house had more books than any other in the village, and my parents had told me that they were rare even in cities. Few books were printed because of the price of paper, and past-world volumes were virtually impossible to come by, unless one had access to state libraries or military archives. At school we had only used pod-books.

‘Most were in the big cities that drowned when the oceans changed their shorelines,’ Sanja said.

‘Yes, but have you ever seen a history book that was written before the Twilight Century?’

‘What would be the point of a history book that didn’t contain the Twilight Century and present-world era?’

‘Still, they couldn’t all be lost under water, could they? When the cities drowned, why weren’t more past-world books rescued?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sanja spread her hands. ‘Maybe there was no time. People had to be rescued first. Maybe—’

A shout from outside interrupted her. I got up and walked to the window. I saw one of the soldiers – short, bespectacled – gesturing at two others, who came half-running to him. I didn’t hear what he said, but after exchanging a couple of sentences all three headed towards the teahouse. I couldn’t see the teahouse from the kitchen window, and after a moment they vanished from my view.

‘What is it?’ Sanja asked.

‘I don’t know.’ I couldn’t help wondering if the soldiers had found something. But there wasn’t anything to be found in the house, teahouse or garden, was there?

It was as if cold water was poured over my heart. I understood, perhaps for the first time, how little my parents had told me. Was there a map indicating the location of the spring hidden in the teahouse that the soldiers had found? Was there something about the spring written in the current tea master’s book, the thick and pale brown pages filled with my father’s accurate handwriting of which he had only let me read parts while he was watching closely? Or perhaps in one of the other books, neatly locked in a glass case in the living room, in which late tea masters described ceremonies meticulously? I did not know, and my imagination wove swiftly a thousand stories, none of which ended well.

‘You don’t need to come if you don’t want to,’ I told Sanja. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

She followed anyway, when I placed my cup on the table, pulled the insect hood over my head and walked out. The lawn was full of holes and mounds of earth that we avoided, but I noticed that the rock garden and the tea plants next to it remained untouched save for boot prints crossing the sand. Amid the overturned ground my footsteps felt unsteady and the route unfamiliar.

As I walked around the corner of the teahouse, I saw my parents standing on the edge of a large hole opened in the grass. They stood side by side, and although they were not looking at or touching each other, at that moment they belonged seamlessly together, like stone pillars of some old building or the intertwined trunks of two trees I had seen in the Dead Forest years ago. Commander Taro was standing on the opposite side of the excavation, and the other soldiers had gathered around the hole. I stopped a few steps away from my parents. Sanja stepped to my side, and although I wasn’t looking at or touching her, I knew she was close.

The hole was deep and steep-edged, and the slated sun of the late afternoon didn’t reach to the bottom of it. Nevertheless, I could clearly see some kind of man-made, hard wall at the bottom, and even deeper, dark water glinted like a teardrop in the eye of the earth. I tried to read the expressions on my parents’ faces, and for a second time within a short period I felt that they were strangers to me. I didn’t know everything they knew, and I didn’t know how much they had told me.

One of the soldiers drew water from the hole with a glass dish attached to a metal telescope rod. It was murky with mud, but Taro took the dish, lifted his insect hood, dipped his fingers in the water and licked his fingertips.

‘It seems there is drinkable water on your grounds,’ he said, gazing at my father. ‘I assume you weren’t aware of its existence?’

‘If I had known, would I have kept the knowledge from you?’ my father replied, not averting his eyes.

‘You and your family can go now, Master Kaitio,’ Taro said. ‘Rest assured we will keep you informed on further developments.’

Slowly, my father turned to leave. He looked at my mother, and he looked at me, and his expression changed. He turned back to face Taro and then walked calmly to the commander along the edge of the excavation. A couple of soldiers tried to stop him, but Taro gestured at them to leave him alone. My father stopped in front of Taro. They stood there against the earth and the sky and the torn wreck of the teahouse, a tall official in a blue military uniform and a man whose hair was already brushed with grey in the simple linen garments of a tea master.

‘You believe everything can be owned,’ my father said, ‘that your power reaches everywhere. Yet there are things that will never yield to man-made chains. I will dance on your grave one day, Taro. If my body is here no longer, my spirit will do it, free from the cage of my bones.’

Taro turned his head slightly, but did not take his eyes off my father.

‘On second thought,’ he said, ‘now that we have searched the grounds, it’s a good time to move on to the house. Liuhala, Kanto,’ he directed his words to two of the soldiers. ‘Escort Master Kaitio and his family back and begin the search. Make sure to be thorough.’

The two soldiers stepped towards my father. He made no attempt to move. I thought he was going to hit Taro, but eventually, after staring at him for a long time, my father turned and started towards the house without looking back again. The soldiers followed close behind him. My mother, who had been observing the scene in silence, took my arm and went after them, pulling me with her.

She walked slowly, and once we were outside the hearing range, she whispered to me, ‘We have nothing to be afraid of, Noria. I’ve searched the grounds several times, and I know there’s no spring here. It’s just rain water in an old well filled with concrete.’

‘Why didn’t you tell them that?’ I asked.

‘It’s better if they realise it themselves. It will humiliate them and chase them away. Someone might even apologise.’

‘Not Taro, though,’ I said and thought about the expression on the Commander’s face, the unyielding quality behind it.

‘No, not him,’ my mother admitted.

When we entered the house, the soldiers had already begun to open cupboards and drawers, pulling things out and throwing them to the floor. I saw my father bent down at the kitchen door. He was holding his chest with one hand and his breathing was troubled.

‘Are you all right?’ my mother asked. My father didn’t reply immediately. A moment later he straightened his back, banished the pain from his face and said, ‘It’s nothing. I just felt a little short of breath.’

I have tried to remember what my mother did, find a confirmation in her tone of voice or her gestures that she did not understand more than she said then. At other moments I have tried to overturn this notion, find something to give me certainty that she did understand and knew that my father had begun to turn away from life. I cannot find either, no sign to verify this one way or the other. There is a distance between us that I can never cross, the distance of time and change and irreversible endings, the past that never shifts its shape. Because I cannot bridge the ravine, I must walk along its edge and let it be a part of my life, one of those shadow-filled cracks that I cannot deny and into which I can never bring light.

My mother knew. My mother did not know.

I remembered Sanja, who had been sauntering a few steps behind us and stayed outside the door. I left my parents at the entrance to stare at the soldiers turning the rooms inside out and went to walk Sanja to the gate.

I stopped on the veranda. I didn’t see Sanja right away, but then I spotted her. She was standing on the path to the teahouse. A blond-haired soldier I had often seen in Taro’s company and therefore assumed to be his closest petty officer was talking to her. I couldn’t hear their words and I didn’t see Sanja’s face clearly behind the insect hood, but her limbs were tense. The soldier told her something and Sanja moved uncomfortably. I walked to them. Sanja gave a start when she noticed me.

‘I should go,’ she said to me, or perhaps to the soldier.

‘Say hello to your father,’ the soldier said and started towards the teahouse.

‘An old school pal of my dad’s,’ Sanja told me as we were walking towards the gate. ‘He asked all sorts of weird stuff.’

Now that I think of Sanja, after all that has happened, this is one of the two images that emerge before my eyes uninvited, brighter than others that I have invited in vain: she is standing outside the gate, her black hair spilling to her forehead and cheeks, her body narrow and angular inside the rough linen fabric. The shadow of the insect hood is sharp on her face, and the tangled shapes of branches all around us are whisper-soft as they slowly carry her away from me.

I do not raise my hand.

I do not speak a word to forestall her.

I stand and watch the shadow-dance of the trees on her back, on her arms, I stand silent and still, and she walks away and doesn’t look behind.

Two days later the soldiers finally took their equipment and left our grounds. The short, bespectacled soldier came to give us a scant-worded explanation: the water had been found to be rain water gathered in an old underground well that hadn’t been used in decades. As the search continued, it became clear that there was no running water in the house or garden, other than the legal water pipe.

The last thing they did was to break the lock of the bookcase in the living room and pull out the three dozen or so leather-bound tea masters’ books. When they began to carry them out of the house, my father protested.

‘You won’t find anything important in them,’ he said. ‘They’re just personal family diaries. Besides, I could have given you the key, if you had asked,’ he added bitterly.

The soldiers carrying the books didn’t even stop to listen.

They left the garden full of holes, and their attempt at repairing the damage caused to the teahouse was nominal. My father marched to Taro.

‘Are you really going to leave the teahouse in this state?’ he asked. ‘Do you realise how difficult it will be to find someone to restore it?’

Taro’s eyes were black and hard and unmoving.

‘Master Kaitio,’ he said, ‘as the representative of New Qian I have the duty to investigate all possibilities that might lead to discovery of fresh water. It is not my fault if they turn out to be misleading.’

And so they left, without apologies, without compensation.

I had imagined that once the soldiers were gone, things would go back to the way they were, but the strange silence we had assumed persisted, an unnaturally calm surface of water around us.

I waited for a stone to shift.

When it did, it was in a way I didn’t see coming.

A couple of weeks after the investigation, I heard my parents talking to each other again in the kitchen.

‘They will come back,’ my mother said. ‘They’re not going to give up.’

‘They no longer have any reason,’ my father replied.

My mother was silent for a long time and said eventually, ‘I’ve made my decision.’

‘We must talk to Noria,’ my father said.

I had no time to get back to my room, so I pretended I was on my way out. My father came from the kitchen. I didn’t need to turn to look. I recognised his footsteps, and I knew he had stopped behind me.

‘Noria,’ he called softly. I stopped and looked at him. In the twilight of the hallway a web of shadows was lying on his face, a blue-grey dusk sifting through the windows. ‘Your mother wants to talk to you.’

I walked after him to the kitchen, where my mother was sitting at the table with an empty teacup in front of her. It was as if the shadows followed us and entwined around the large blaze lantern hanging above the table, dimming its light. I saw them on my mother’s face.

‘Sit down, Noria,’ she said.

I did. My father took a seat next to my mother. They were a unified front again, like on the edge of the excavation, two stone pillars, two tree-trunks intertwined.

‘Your father and I have talked,’ my mother said. ‘We both want to give you a secure life, but we have different opinions on how it should be.’ She was silent and looked at my father, who spoke in his turn.

‘Noria, if you don’t want to be a tea master, now is the time to say it. I’m convinced Taro will leave us alone now that he has searched the grounds. I doubt it will even cross his mind to look for the spring in the fell, and if it did, the spring is so well hidden that finding it is unlikely. We’re safe here. Unfortunately your mother believes differently.’

‘Taro will see through what he’s started,’ my mother said. ‘Life here cannot go back to the way it was. They got closer than you think already, Noria.’

‘But they didn’t go anywhere near the fell,’ I said.

‘There’s something you don’t know,’ my mother replied. ‘Tell her, Mikoa.’

‘You know we use more water than most families,’ my father began. ‘And you know that some of it is quota water, but some comes from the spring. You must have noticed the difference.’

The water used in tea ceremonies always tasted fresh, as if had been just drawn from the spring. It was part of the art of tea. My father had taught me to always taste the water used for tea and to choose the freshest, cleanest, if there was a choice. Otherwise we used the water coming from the water pipes, which at the beginning of the month always tasted stale and slightly fishy, as was the case with purified sea water. Near the end of the month there was a clear improvement in the taste. Unlike in most homes, we did not save water, and we never ran out of it or needed to buy overpriced water from merchants.

‘Do we use our water quota for the first few weeks of each month, and switch to the water of the spring when we run out?’ I asked. ‘But how do they come from the same pipe?’

‘It would be too hard to carry all the water from the fell to the house,’ my mother said. ‘It would also be suspicious. One would need a helicarriage and large water containers and frequent visits. Someone would notice sooner or later the tea master returning from the fell several times a week with full barrels. We weren’t the first ones to realise the impracticality of it. We don’t know when the water pipe was built, but it was already there in Mikoa’s father’s time. It’s not been recorded in any of the tea masters’ books. Whoever built it understood that it would be too dangerous to leave a written record of it. The pipe is skilfully constructed: it comes from deep inside the fell, is hidden in the earth and connects to the legal water quota pipe so far from the house that it can’t be traced by searching the tea master’s grounds. The only risk is that it needs to be opened and closed manually from the fell. We were lucky that it happened to be closed when the soldiers came.’

‘The pipe is hidden as well as the spring,’ my father remarked. ‘Finding it is nearly impossible without knowing its location.’

‘They’re used to searching, and their machines are intricate.’

‘They have no reason to come back.’

‘They have no reason not to come!’

A silence fell between them. After a moment my father spoke, directing his words only to me.

‘Your mother believes the tea master’s house is no longer a safe place to live.’ He glanced at her and waited. I saw her choose her words carefully.

‘Noria, I’ve been offered a post as a researcher at the University of Xinjing. I’ve accepted.’

‘Are we moving to Xinjing?’ I asked. I didn’t know for sure how far it was, but I knew the journey to the southern coast of New Qian was long. The trip across the continent must take weeks even on the fastest trains. My father and my mother glanced at each other.

‘You’re of age and therefore we can’t make the decision for you,’ my mother said. ‘Do you wish to go to Xinjing with me, or do you want to stay here with your father? You don’t need to decide right now, but I will need to leave before Moonfeast, so it’s only a month away.’

I looked at my mother. I looked at my father. My throat felt thick. In the direction of the village, as close as the marked house, the soldiers were sharpening their weapons and didn’t listen to pleas. At any time they might turn their attention towards us again, if they ever had turned it away at all. I had no way of knowing which one of my parents was right, and I couldn’t both stay and go.

My choice wasn’t clear to me, and I worried that the words I chose would set it in stone. Yet the silence was worse somehow.

I opened my mouth and told them what I would do.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Early in the morning of the eighth day of the eighth month we lifted my mother’s trunk and seagrass bags onto the helicarriage my father had borrowed from Jukara in exchange for some fresh water. My parents climbed to the front seat and I sat down in the back under the half-open roof, and we started the drive towards Kuoloyarvi.

The scent of Jukara’s helicarriage triggered a strange feeling of recurrence in me. I felt a lot younger, as if this was one of those rare, wonderful days when my parents took me to the city with them. I looked at the purple-blue stain on the coarse, worn fabric of the seat. I had dropped melted blueberry ice cream on it on one return trip home when I was eleven. My parents had been upset with me, and I had scrubbed the seat until it was clear that it would never be quite clean again.

For a moment I felt like a multi-layered Qianese box or a hollow wooden past-world doll fitted with many smaller dolls, one inside the other. A younger version of myself, or perhaps several, nested under my skin, swinging her feet that didn’t reach to the floor from the seat, not imagining the day when her parents would not be safely within arm’s reach – or if she did, she closed it quickly out of her mind.

The journey to Kuoloyarvi lasted nearly three hours. As we approached the sea, the landscape changed slowly. Once the village and the Alvinvaara fell were behind us, we passed the forests of the watering areas, their jagged, dark-green edge cutting the sky far on our left. This had always been my favourite stretch of the road on the way to the city. As a child I had dreamed of steering the carriage into the woods and driving among the tall trees, their cool shadow around me a welcome shelter from the scorching sun. But I learned early I could never do such a thing: the forests were guarded and closed from civilians, just like food plantations and the few remaining lakes.

Later, when the glinting, wavy skyline of Kuoloyarvi with its vault-shaped buildings and solar panels began to loom ahead, I saw the water desalination plants on the horizon, at the edge of the sea. They were stark and solid and huge, like a row of ancient, blind stone giants. Their security was notorious. Even the roads that led to them were watched, and I had heard stories of travellers being arrested just for walking too close to one of them.

It was mid-morning when we arrived at the border of the city. I saw from far away that there were more soldiers than usual. Normally the gates were only guarded for the sake of appearances, and not all travellers were stopped. This time, however, there was a long queue of helicarriages slowly crawling into the city, and beside it two slightly faster-moving lines for those who travelled on foot. We took our place at the end of the helicarriage queue. When we reached the gate, a guard in a blue uniform stopped us.

‘What is your business in the city?’ he asked.

‘I’m on my way to Xinjing,’ my mother said. ‘My family is seeing me to the train station.’

‘All the way to Xinjing? Are you on state business?’

‘Yes, I’ve accepted a job at the University of Xinjing.’

‘May I see your train tickets, your passpod and the letter that proves your connection to the university?’

My mother found in her bag the secondhand message-pod that had been assigned to her by the university. She placed her finger on the display in order to activate the passpod feature. The screen lit up and my mother’s ID information emerged, including her ticket reservation. She handed the message-pod to the guard, who examined it. She also produced the paper letter sent from Xinjing. The guard seemed almost impressed at the sight of real paper, but didn’t say anything. He nodded to my father and me. ‘And you, do you have any proof of your identity?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ my father said. ‘One used not to need a passpod in order to enter the city. Is there a particular reason for this?’

‘We have our orders,’ the guard said and did not elaborate. ‘May I have your fingerprints, please.’

He handed his multi-pod to us and we pressed our fingers to the display. Our names and some code numbers emerged, and my father gave the pod back. I saw the guard scribble a couple of sentences on the screen with his pod-pen.

‘You and your family can go, Master Kaitio,’ he said after taking a careful and lengthy look at my mother’s passpod and letter. It sounded more like an order than a permission. ‘You and your daughter must notify the guards when leaving the city,’ he remarked to my father.

My father nodded, his mouth a tight line in his face, and steered the helicarriage through the gate.

I had only been to the train station a few times before. Kuoloyarvi was not a big city, and most of the traffic coming to the Scandinavian Union arrived by ships further south, to the ports of the Ladoga Bay in the Baltic Sea. There were only four tracks. The long train stood at the platform with its doors open. The name ‘Brilliant Eel’ was painted on the side of the locomotive with decorative characters. There were solitary travellers, couples and families lifting trunks on board and saying goodbyes. We helped my mother carry her luggage inside the railcar compartment. There was still time before the train would leave, but she said, ‘Don’t stay and wait. I’ll send you a message when I get to New Piterburg.’

The train journey would continue from New Piterburg to Ural and from there across New Qian to Xinjing. I thought of all the things I wouldn’t see because I wasn’t going with her, things I had only heard about: algae cultivation areas in the coastal seas and factories turning it to fuel, rubber tree plantations and blazefly farms, sea-ships and the large, lavishly decorated tearooms of the cities. And somewhere, under the waves, arching like an ever-clouded sky, the ghost cities of the past-world, sharp-edged and mute as memories.

My mother kissed me goodbye.

‘I’ll write to you,’ she said. ‘And the New Year is only a few months away. I’ll come for a visit then.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I held her for a long time.

When she finally released me, I walked out to wait and through the window I saw her talking to my father. Their lips were moving and their expressions were changing, but the thick glass muffled the words, making them inaudible. They embraced, and I couldn’t understand why they wanted to tear their lives apart.

I turned away.

A grey-faced man walked inside the station building with a large seagrass bag on his shoulder.

A group of soldiers walked near the entrance, their boots heavy on the stones, their hands resting on the hilts of their long sabres.

A little girl in a blue summer dress was skipping rope and humming a shapeless sing-song. Her mother was eating roasted sunflower seeds and kept glancing at her watch.

Eventually my father descended from the train.

‘Shall we go?’ he asked.

I looked at my mother, who was sitting behind the window, colourless, faint as a faded picture in an old book in the middle of the bright day. She looked at me while we walked away, looked even when I was no longer looking back, I am certain of it. If she wished to change her mind and step off the train and return to the tea master’s house with us, she did not act upon it.

Before starting the journey towards home, we went shopping at the Qianese market. As soon as we got there, I knew our destination was a stand where a tall, dark-skinned, slightly crooked woman sold items. Her name was Iselda, and I remembered her from my childhood. My father asked her to present us with her best-quality teas. Iselda placed three small knots of fabric on the sales table and opened them. I expected my father to examine them one by one, but instead he nodded to me. I had never before been allowed to choose the type of tea without his directions.

I took each knot of fabric in turn in my hand. The leaves of the first tea were green-black and oblong, and it smelled slightly sweet. The second tea was a brighter green in colour, its leaves tied up in large buds that would open into flowers once hot water was poured on them. Its scent was fresh and light – I could imagine that combined with the water of the fell spring it would produce an extraordinary aroma. The greenness of the third tea was silver-brushed and its leaves were twisted into the shape of drops. What determined it, however, was the scent. The scent of the third tea flowed. That is the only way I could describe it. It was the scent of freshly picked tea, but it was also the scent of humid earth and of wind sweeping shrubs, and it wavered like light wavers on water, or shadow: one moment it was strong in my nostrils, the next it fled nearly out of reach only to return again.

‘This one,’ I said and handed the tea to my father.

‘How much?’ he asked the tradeswoman.

Iselda mentioned the price of one liang, as was customary when trading tea. When I heard it, I was sure my father would refuse. Yet his expression didn’t even stir. He told Iselda a lower price. I prepared myself for a bargaining that would take its time, but Iselda only looked at him for a moment and then nodded.

‘We are taking half a liang,’ my father said. ‘That should be enough for the graduation ceremony.’

He dug an empty fabric pouch from his bag, and Iselda measured the tea into it. We also bought a couple of liang of another, cheaper tea for everyday use, and some spices and groceries that couldn’t be found in the village.

On the way home I tried not to look at the empty front seat of the helicarriage. I looked back towards the city, at the dusty plain and the narrow thread of the sea on the horizon, radiant in the late-afternoon sun like the scale coat of a giant dragon disappearing slowly from sight.

After my mother was gone, my father occupied himself entirely with the preparations of Moonfeast. He had hired a few men from the village to help restore the teahouse and the garden, Sanja’s father Jan among them. I’d noticed Jan spending a lot of time looking at the expensive wood and the few fine furnishings my father had ordered from the cities; Jan was a skilled builder, but he rarely had good materials to work with. While my father was busy supervising the repairs, cleaning the house and collecting the harvest were left to me. The berry bushes and cherry trees had suffered somewhat from the turmoil caused by the water searching, and the soldiers had overturned part of the root vegetable patch. Nevertheless, not all had been lost, and I was kept busy cooking gooseberry jam and drying cherries and plums for the winter, tapping seeds from sunflowers and amaranth into sacks, picking almonds and pulling carrots from the soil. On top of these things I had to order feastcakes from the baker, check the waterskins, get my tea master’s outfit from the village tailor and go through the ceremony with my father once a day.

He seemed to have decided he wouldn’t speak of my mother’s departure. On the fifth day after she left I was cleaning the house vigorously. My father saw me carrying a water bucket, a scrubbing-brush and some wet cloths towards my mother’s study. When I placed them on the floor and pushed the door open, he said, ‘Don’t.’

I looked at him, and then I looked away, because I didn’t want to see his face.

‘Leave it the way it is,’ he said.

‘If you say so,’ I replied, but I thought: it cannot remain that way. Not if you want it, and not if I want it. Dust will gather around the legs of the shelves and spiders will weave their webs in the corners, and mute book pages will grow yellow between the covers. The glass of the windows slips downwards like slow rain, even if we don’t see it, and the landscape outside is different every day: the light falls from another angle, the wind tugs at the trees slower or faster, the greenness of the leaves draws away and one ant more or less walks on the trunk. Even if we don’t see it right away, it is all happening; and if we look away long enough, we will no longer recognise the room and the landscape, when we eventually look at them again. This house is different since she left, and we both know it.

My mother sent messages from along her journey. They had a light, in-awe-of-the-big-world tone to them.

I’ve never seen such a huge port in my life, she wrote from New Piterburg. It has grown so much in the past fifteen years. And you should see the people who travel on these trains! Yesterday I sat at dinner with a family of five who had come all the way from the Pyrenees by boat and were on their way to Ural. I swear the only thing preventing their noisy kids throwing the train off the tracks was the presence of soldiers. I’m thinking of you. Hugs, L.

Not as much as we are thinking of you, I replied to her in my mind. You have in your reach the whole world unmarred by our footprints; they cannot wear away quietly under your eyes. All we have is this house and its lack of you, and we protect the imprint you left behind, so it would stay here a little longer, so you would still recognise it as your own, when you come back. If you do.

I got up early on the morning of Moonfeast day. The tea master’s outfit was hanging from the curtain pole in front of the slightly open window, swaying in the draft. It wasn’t yet time to wear it. My father had told me the day before we would take a walk to the fell after breakfast. I guessed we were going to fetch water from the spring for my graduation ceremony, but I knew there was something else, too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me to go with him. I dressed in simple everyday clothes and sturdy trekking shoes, and had the rest of the millet porridge he had left on the table for me. I filled a small waterskin, hung it on my shoulder and shoved a couple of sunflower-seed cakes into my pocket. I picked the insect hood up from the clothes rack at the entrance on my way out.

I found my father raking the rock garden. The builders and gardeners he had hired had done a surprisingly good job. There were only small traces of the grass having been disturbed, and the rock garden was exactly as it used to be, save for the unmoving ripples of sand that had been brushed away.

The teahouse had taken the heaviest damage. Part of its floor had needed to be replaced with a different type of wood, and the contrast between the old and new boards was distinctive. Yet now the hut was whole and usable again. I’d reminded my father that imperfection and change belonged to the art of tea, and they must be given the same value as perfection and permanence. He’d looked at me and I’d seen the surprise in him.

‘You’ll be a better tea master than I know how to be anymore,’ he’d said.

He stepped off the rock garden and raked his own footsteps away. The sand rested in the middle of coarse stones like a deserted seafloor.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have a long day ahead of us.’

We walked to the fell along the same route as the first time, when he had taken me to the spring. On the side of the fell, just before reaching the boulder garden, we turned in a different direction. A little later my father stopped and pointed further down the slope. It was split by a long, ditch-like furrow, smooth-worn with stones and sand gathered at the bottom. Its rocky walls were smeared with lichen.

‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked.

I knew, of course. I had seen many enough before.

‘The channel of a dried stream,’ I said. ‘There’s been no water in it in decades, because so much lichen has grown on top of the rocks.’

‘You read the landscape well,’ my father said. ‘But there’s more you must learn. I should perhaps have told you about the secret essence of the tea master’s work much earlier. But it’s customary that the wisdom isn’t passed from master to apprentice until the day the apprentice becomes the new master. When we reach the spring, you’ll find out what I’m talking about.’

We turned back and my father asked me to show if I could find the way to the cave mouth shaped like a cat’s head without his help. The route was familiar to me from my childhood, so I found it easily. Again, on my father’s prompting, I sought the hidden lever at the back of the cave, opened the hatch on the ceiling and climbed ahead of him into the tunnel going to the spring. My father followed and handed me one of the two blaze lanterns, their light glowing in the dark. As we walked towards the roar of the spring, I saw humidity concentrated on the walls of the tunnel.

We reached the cave, where water sprang from the dark wall in bright threads into the pond before vanishing again inside the fell. I stopped at the edge of the pond. My father walked to the other side and lowered his blaze lantern close to the water. I saw on the stones the pale stain I vaguely remembered having noticed on my first visit. About half a meter above the throbbing surface of the water, a stout metal wedge covered in a worn layer of white paint was driven into the rock. It shone faintly in the half-light.

‘This is the side of the tea master’s work that remains invisible to everyone else,’ my father said. ‘Since ancient times, tea masters have been watchers of water. It is said that in the past-world each tea master had a spring they took care of on their grounds. The springs had different qualities: one produced water with healing powers, the water of another granted a longer life, the third spring gave you peace of mind. There were also differences in the taste of the water. People would come from far away to enjoy tea that was made with the water of a well-respected spring. It was the duty of the tea master to see that the spring remained clean and wasn’t overused.’ My father’s face was like sun-brittled paper on which the shadows of the cave and the light of the lantern fought for space. ‘As you know, in the present-world nearly all springs have dried up, and the rest have been claimed by the military. It’s possible there are secret springs such as this elsewhere, but I don’t know of them. It’s possible that this is the last one.’

The weight of his words and everything buried in them lay between us. He brought his lantern right to the surface of the spring and pointed at the water. Under the surface, near the bottom of the pond, I saw another white-painted wedge, nearly blurred invisible by the water.

‘Do you see that mark?’ my father asked.

I nodded.

‘If the surface of the water sinks lower than that, it means too much water has been drawn. The spring will need to rest and gather its strength. It’s the tea master’s task to see that it happens.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Several months,’ my father said. ‘The longer, the better. The spring hasn’t been pushed too far in my time, but it happened twice in my father’s time. Both times he let it rest for nearly a year before it recovered completely.’

‘What about the other mark?’ I pointed at the wedge in the rock above the water surface.

‘It’s equally important at the very least, and requires constant monitoring,’ my father said. ‘If the water rises that high, more of it must be directed into the water pipe than usual, and fast, because it’s in danger of rising from underground into the dry channel we saw outside. This hasn’t happened in my time, either, but if we didn’t use water from the spring every month, it might.’

‘How quickly?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but I believe it would take about two months.’

I understood now why he came to the fell so frequently.

‘You need to learn to control the water levels and to use the pipe, Noria. I’ll not pass the task to you entirely yet, because from this day on we’ll be sharing the tea master’s responsibility in this village. But one day it will be placed in your hands, and therefore I’m teaching it to you now.’

My father took a few steps towards the cave wall. When he lifted his lantern, I saw a lever that had been turned to point to the left. He gestured for me to come closer.

‘This controls the flow of the water into the pipe we use in the house. It is currently closed, because we still have some of this month’s water quota left, and the water in the spring isn’t unusually high. Now is a good time to open the pipe, because we’ll need natural water for your graduation ceremony, and the month is in half. You do it.’

I took the lever and turned it to point to the right. The water in the pond stirred like a restless animal, and although I didn’t see much difference in its swirls, it seemed to me that alongside the roar there appeared another, slightly different one.

‘Water from the fell will now be flowing into the house pipe until this end is closed again. I usually close it after about two weeks, wait for two to three weeks and then open it again. The most important thing is to come here every week to check the water level and control the consumption of water accordingly. Next week it’ll be your turn.’

My father filled the two waterskins he had brought directly from the spring, and we each strapped a skin on our backs.

‘What would happen, if the spring dried and wouldn’t go back to normal? If it stopped giving water altogether?’ I asked when we had made it out of the cave and were walking towards the house.

‘We’d live by the water quota, like everyone else,’ my father replied. ‘It would be enough for us. The garden would suffer somewhat, but we’d be fine.’

He was quiet for a moment. The sun had crawled to the sky, already languid with autumn, but still hot. I rolled my sleeves down so the insects would have less to bite. My father was looking into the horizon and I saw that he wanted to tell me something.

‘Past-world tea masters knew stories that have mostly been forgotten,’ he said quietly. ‘But one is recorded in every tea master’s book we kept in our house. The story tells that water has a consciousness, that it carries in its memory everything that’s ever happened in this world, from the time before humans until this moment, which draws itself in its memory even as it passes. Water understands the movements of the world, it knows when it is sought and where it is needed. Sometimes a spring or a well dries for no reason, without explanation. It’s as if the water escapes of its own will, withdrawing into the cover of the earth to look for another channel. Tea masters believe there are times when water doesn’t wish to be found because it knows it will be chained in ways that are against its nature. Therefore the drying of a spring may have its own purpose that must not be fought. Not everything in the world belongs to people. Tea and water do not belong to tea masters, but tea masters belong to tea and water. We are the watchers of water, but first and foremost we are its servants.’

We walked on in silence. Pebbles crunched under my feet. The scent of burning fires rose from the direction of the village.

‘You look happy,’ my father noted, when we reached the house. ‘That’s good. Today it’s time for you to be happy.’ He smiled at me. ‘It looks like the baker’s errand boy has left the feastcakes at the gate while we were away. Would you get them and bring them to the kitchen, please?’

I nodded and walked towards the gate, where three boxes of cakes were piled upon each other. When I turned to look, I saw my father had stopped and bent down. There was something rigid and painful about his posture, but the day was bright, and my mind was elsewhere, and I smelled the freshly-baked cakes in the wind. I did not look twice in his direction.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Memory has a shape of its own, and it’s not always the shape of life. When I think back now, I look in that day for omens and signs of what was to come, and sometimes I believe I see them. It’s a strange and hollow comfort, one that never carries me for long. Past-world seers used to read tea leaves to tell the future. But they are only tea leaves, dark residue of things gone by, and they spell no pattern except their own. Yet memory slips and slides and shatters, and its patterns are not to be trusted.

I remember standing in my room, my hair still dripping wet from the bath I’d had, water trickling down my chest and between my shoulder blades in narrow rivulets. My graduation outfit, which I would be wearing in tea ceremonies until its seams came apart, lay on the bed, empty like a skin not yet worn or perhaps already shed, waiting to be filled with meaning and movement, or else buried. The sharpest edge of this memory is the radiance of the day on the other side of the window: a blazing core of fire brimming with light, more brilliant than any day before or after, as if the sky was bursting to full flame before being glazed over by nightfall, before my world changed. I know this is not possible. I have seen radiant days before and after, and the brilliance I remember has an unnatural, blinding blade to it. But that day of my life has taken the shape of memory, and that is the only shape in which I can conjure it now. Its true, unchanged form is no longer within my reach.

I remember putting the tea master’s outfit on. It felt new and stiff around me.

I remember pulling my hair back with a large needle. It was heavy with moisture caught between the long strands.

I don’t remember walking to the teahouse, but I must have. There was nowhere else I could have gone.

Something was bothering my father. I had known it as soon as he crawled into the teahouse through the visitors’ entrance and looked around him. I suspected I had made some mistake I couldn’t recognise, but the ceremony had already begun and could no longer be interrupted. Master Niiramo, who had been invited from Kuusamo, had taken his place on a cushion by the back wall and removed his insect hood. I had no choice but to wait for my father to sit down next to him and carry on.

Niiramo had been invited for reasons of protocol. There were always two older tea masters present at the graduation ceremony, the teacher of the graduating apprentice and another master, an outsider. Niiramo performed tea ceremonies in Kuusamo and was on good terms with the local military regime. My father didn’t think much of him, but it was difficult to get tea masters to leave cities during Moonfeast, which was traditionally a popular time for ceremonies, and Niiramo had been easy enough to persuade with some help from Bolin.

Slanted light fell through the skylight above the hearth, casting a sharp shadow across my father’s face. I breathed in the smell of smoke and wood and water. I saw the seam where my knees touched the floor: next to an old, darkened, smooth-worn pine board there was a fresh, paler one, yet unscratched and unbattered by time. I was aware of my father’s and Niiramo’s gazes on me. They were not here as my guests, but as my judges. Niiramo had seemed surprised when he had first seen me, and was now staring at me with an expression I could only decipher as mild disapproval.

My movements felt cast in stone when I began to prepare the First Tea.

I looked at the teaware I had chosen for the occasion: simple, worn earthenware cups and plates with cracks in the glazing and no decorations whatsoever. They were among the oldest in the tea master’s house, another remnant of the past-world; possibly used by our ancestors in their faraway home, long before sea began claiming islands and coasts. Their muted colour of leaves turning into earth gave me comfort, caught me in a web of something far older and stronger than myself. I was standing on a path that reached across centuries unchanged, yet always attuned to shifts in the texture of life, steady as breathing or heartbeat.

Echoes of tea masters that had come before rippled through me as I counted the bubbles at the bottom of the cauldron and poured water into the pots and cups. I thought of their imprint on the memory of the world: the flow of their movements I mirrored with my own, their words I quoted as I spoke, the water that had run through earth and air when they walked on stones and grass-stalks, the same water that pushed sands to the seashore and brushed across the sky still. Their wave coiled across time and memory, spreading like rings on the surface of a pond, eternally repeating the same pattern. This curious feeling carried and confined me at once.

I kneeled before Master Niiramo with my tray. As he reached out a hand to pick up a cup, a strong scent of perfumed balm mixed with sweat oozed from him. His skin was well kept. His suit was simple, but I recognised the fabric as expensive and the buttons as valuable metal work I hadn’t seen often. He clearly had extra meat on his bones. I bowed my head and offered the next cup to my father.

My eyes swept across the empty corner where my mother would have been sitting if she were here. She had sent a voice message earlier wishing me luck and saying her train would be passing the Aral Bay soon. I tried to imagine the landscape she was crossing, and for a moment it was as if I could feel the dusty smell of the cushioned seats in the train compartment, hear the voices and footsteps of children running down the narrow corridor and feel the constant movement of the floor under me. But when I tried to see outside, the colour of the plain was unclear and the forms of the horizon blurred into a strange sky. The landscape remained unexplored, and the empty space in the room took my mother’s shape, persistent as a shadow.

The graduation ceremony was longer than the standard one. In addition to tea and sweets, it also included a light meal, and it could last several hours. There was little conversation. I settled into a strange, unhurried rhythm into which the drowned must settle when the sea takes the weight off their limbs.

I imagined the room filled with a soft wrap of water that slowed down all movements and muffled all sounds, washed me clean inside and out, made everything fade and crumble.

My father’s face made of water-soaked wood, Niiramo’s shape of stone dissolving into sand. My own body an undulating stalk of seaweed in the waves moving back and forth. All this already out of my reach, something I couldn’t stop and forestall even if I tried.

I let them drift away.

Slowly, like the moon gathers and turns the tides, my muscles relaxed, the tightness withdrew from my face and my breathing flowed more freely. The tenseness was still there, but it was at a distance now, no longer armour on my skin, locking me down.

The room simmered with the heat radiating from the hearth and the steam rising from the cauldron. The air was completely still. My hairline was moist and I felt the fabric of the graduation outfit sticking to my armpits and thighs. Sweat glistened in beads on Niiramo’s brow. My father’s face was flushed. I had left the small window on the entrance wall open before the beginning of the ceremony, but the fresh air outside seemed to have packed itself into a block against the opening, not knowing how to stream in. I got up from my cushion and opened the slightly larger window on the opposite wall. Even though the day was calm, draught blew in immediately and the air began to flow through the room again.

Niiramo placed his cup down and looked at me.

‘Miss Kaitio, are you sure that both windows need to be open?’

From the corner of my eye I saw my father stirring restlessly.

‘It is much more pleasant in the room with some fresh air, don’t you think?’ I replied.

‘Noria, Master Niiramo expressed his wish that the window should be closed,’ my father remarked. The shadow crossing his face had shifted slightly. It fell over his bare neck now.

Niiramo stared at me, and I wasn’t sure if I should interpret his expression as a smile.

‘Miss Kaitio can do as she sees best,’ he said.

I left the window open, bowed to Niiramo and took my place next to the hearth again. Niiramo said nothing more, but I was now certain of the smile: the kind that a rich merchant smiles when he catches a messenger boy stealing goods. The dark mood didn’t pass from my father’s face during the meal, and it seemed to me he was stealing secret glances at Master Niiramo.

I waited until they had finished eating and collected the plates. I took them into the water room, removed a linen cloth from the top of a bowl of sweets and brought the sweets into the main room. I served yet another round of tea with them.

There was no more water in the cauldron.

I knew it was time for the evaluation.

‘Noria Kaitio,’ Niiramo said and bowed. ‘Take your place, please.’

I bowed in response, walked into the water room and pulled the sliding door closed after myself.

The room had no windows. It was used for storing water, trays, ladles, cauldrons and teapots. If I reached my hand in any direction, it would meet the wall, or some of the tea utensils. Hair-narrow strands of light framed the sliding door and the tea master’s entrance on the opposite wall. Inside a blaze lantern hanging from the ceiling, blazeflies were flittering languidly against the confines of their glass prison. Shadows hovered on the walls, opening and closing like floating nets, curling closer and withdrawing again. I heard Niiramo and my father talking in low voices.

I thought of my mother again, her journey that could have been mine: another life in which I had buried my tea master’s outfit instead of accepting it as my second skin. Bright as a reflection in a clear mirror, I saw myself, walking and learning the scent and twists of the unfamiliar streets between the buildings of a strange city like one learns a new language. And beyond that, a landscape of my own, for me to discover and make my home.

I heard some shuffling from the tearoom, then footsteps on the veranda outside, and then a soft noise as the sliding door of the visitors’ entrance was pushed closed. I could guess either Niiramo or my father – or both of them – had gone to get something from the veranda.

The city and the landscape shrivelled away. There was only darkness at the bottom of the mirror, and no other life but this.

A soft ring of a bell sounded from the tearoom. It was time for me to enter again. I swept the hair from my face and opened the sliding door. I had been right: at least one of them had gone to the veranda. Niiramo was holding a scroll, and my father had a thick, leather-bound book in his hands.

‘Noria Kaitio,’ Niiramo said.

I bowed.

‘As the evaluating tea master, I must point out the mistakes you made while performing the ceremony.’ He was quiet. I waited. The softening veil of water had withdrawn from the room, there was only a dry and stony desert, a sphere of burnt air I could barely breathe. ‘It is clear you know the etiquette of the ceremony well,’ Niiramo continued. ‘But it is equally clear that you deliberately change it according to your own will where change is not advisable.’ He looked at my father and smiled his rich merchant’s smile.

‘I presume you know the rule by which only one of the teahouse windows must ever be open during the ceremony?’

‘Yes, Master Niiramo, I am familiar with the rule.’

‘Would you care to remind us why it exists?’

I quoted exactly as I had been taught.

‘So the guests could take pleasure in the scent of the tea and the humidity of air created by the water. Draught in the teahouse drives the aroma and the humidity away.’

‘I would be curious to hear why you took the liberty of breaking this rule.’

I bowed again, although I felt annoyed at having to answer such a stupid question.

‘For practical reasons, Master. The heat in the teahouse was suffocating. As the host, I thought of the comfort of my guests.’

Niiramo scrutinised me. I didn’t avert my gaze.

‘Whatever your reason, it was still an exception to the form and as such, a mistake,’ he said.

I forced myself to remain quiet. Niiramo continued, ‘Another mistake, on which I’m sure your father agrees with me, was your choice of teaware.’

I thought of the teacups and plates, their surfaces cracked by change and time, their steady forms under my hands, connecting me to the past-world.

‘Why do you consider it a mistake?’ I asked.

Niiramo’s smile twitched and deepened in his fleshy, smooth face. I thought of a narrow, long maggot digging into a rotten piece of fruit.

‘You must realise that a tea master preparing for such an occasion should choose the most valuable teaware available. It demonstrates respect towards the guests and understanding of the privileged nature of the tea master’s profession. I happen to know,’ at this point he gave my father a look, ‘that your father enjoys Major Bolin’s favour, and I can see from your house and garden that you have some wealth. I’m convinced you own better teaware, and you could surely have had a whole new tea set made for the occasion. That would have been wisest.’

‘But Master Niiramo—’ Niiramo’s eyebrows rose higher on his sweaty forehead when I spoke without permission. My father looked horrified. I cut myself short and bowed in order to request permission to speak, as was part of the hierarchy between master and apprentice. Niiramo nodded.

‘Master Niiramo, the ceremony is not about showing one’s wealth, but embracing change and accepting the fleeting quality of the world around us. It was my intention to honour this.’

Niiramo’s smile didn’t disappear. A sweat drop trickled down his cheek towards the skilfully crafted collar.

‘Are you telling me, girl, what the tea ceremony is about?’

Anger gathered in my throat like burning dust.

‘You should know without being told,’ I said before I could stop myself.

‘Noria,’ my father said.

Niiramo began to laugh a slowly accumulating, low laughter. The sweat droplet fell from his quaking cheek to the collar of his jacket and the fabric absorbed it.

‘You amuse me, Miss Kaitio,’ he said. ‘You have a lot to learn, about the ceremony and the world. I’ll let time and experience take care of it. In thirty years you’ll find yourself evaluating another young tea master’s graduation performance, and when he tells you that the ceremony is not about showing one’s wealth, you too will laugh.’

Never. Not in this life, not in ten thousand others.

Master Niiramo’s laughter faded slowly. He looked at me.

‘Then, of course, there is the unfortunate fact of your gender,’ he said. ‘Your father would have done wisely to mention it to me beforehand. I’d like to know why you believe that a woman can practise the profession of a tea master successfully.’

I understood now why Niiramo had looked so surprised when he had first seen me. Had Major Bolin purposefully neglected to mention that I wasn’t a man when talking Niiramo into this? I looked at my father, but he couldn’t help me. This was a battle I had to fight on my own.

‘Master Niiramo, might I ask you in turn why you believe a woman is not fit to be a tea master?’ I enquired.

‘It is written in the old scriptures,’ Niiramo replied. ‘Li Song writes, “A woman shall not walk the path of tea masters, lest she be ready to abandon her life as a woman.”’

I didn’t think the citation precluded women’s right to be tea masters in any way, but instead of arguing about wordings I said, ‘I believe it is possible to change the surface of things while retaining their core intact, just as it is possible to retain the surface appearances while carving the core hollow.’

Niiramo was quiet. I wondered if I had gone too far. The room was silent. Outside the wind chime sounded once, twice, three times.

Eventually he spoke.

‘I want you to understand this. If you were a candidate in one of the cities, I would demand you to retake the test. Yet I know the same standard can’t be expected in these backwater areas and, of course, not from a female apprentice. You have learned your craft solely from your father, and have never had a chance to make yourself familiar with the customs and knowledge of other tea masters. I see no obstacle to granting you the title of a tea master as of today’s ceremony, even if it wouldn’t have fulfilled the criteria under other circumstances or judged by a less benevolent master. However, I would advise you to be more alert about etiquette in the future, particularly if you receive guests from the cities or the military.’

I wanted to say something, but I saw my father’s expression, now closer to despair than annoyance, and I remained silent.

‘Are you ready?’ Master Niiramo asked.

I bowed.

‘Noria Kaitio,’ Niiramo read from the scroll. ‘Today, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, Year of Koi Fish in New Qian time, you have been granted the title of a practising tea master,’ he continued. Niiramo handed the scroll to me. Under the text were his and my father’s signatures. Master Niiramo moved to the side and my father stepped in front of me. I accepted the leather-covered book he gave to me and read the oath I had learned by heart:

‘I am a watcher of water. I am a servant of tea. I am a nurturer of change. I shall not chain what grows. I shall not cling to what must crumble. The way of tea is my way.’

I bowed low, and my father lowered his head. When I looked up, I saw his eyes moisten. He opened his mouth to speak, but sound caught in his throat.

‘I nearly forgot,’ Niiramo disrupted the silence. ‘Commander Taro sent his congratulations. He was right: your water has an extraordinarily good aroma.’

‘I should have warned you about the teaware beforehand,’ my father said to me in the kitchen, when we were wrapping two cups used in the ceremony in fabric for Master Niiramo as a gift, as was customary. ‘I knew he would be picky about it. I don’t approve of the way he spoke to you, but we never need to see him again.’ I had a feeling he was going to scold me because of my behaviour, but thought better of it.

‘Are you coming to Moonfeast?’ I asked him.

My father shook his head.

‘I’ve seen it all enough times. Sleep is more alluring to me now than the feast.’

Before leaving the house I took the scroll and the blank tea master’s book into my room and placed them on the bed. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My face was still red from the ceremony, and the tunic of my master’s outfit had dark, moist stains in the armpits. I changed into clean clothes and spread the outfit on the bed next to the book.

As I turned to put the book on my desk, I saw a thin white parcel that shone pale as moon on the dark wooden surface, and I recognised my mother’s handwriting in the letters spelling my name across it. My father must have brought it into my room before the ceremony.

The envelope was big: not a stiff mail pouch woven of seagrass, but made of real paper. Inside I discovered a large, thin shawl of fine wool. I knew my mother couldn’t have found it in our village, and possibly not even in the Scandinavian Union. Anything but the coarsest wool was difficult to come by. She must have ordered the shawl from faraway cities. I looked for a note, and my hand caught a small white slip of paper inside the envelope. I pulled the paper out and read:

To Noria, the new tea master, from your proud mother. Be happy today!

I brought the shawl close to my face. I expected it to smell of her hair soap and scented oil, but it only carried a faint smell of wool and paper. There was no trace of her.

I wrapped it around myself anyway.

I arranged the master’s outfit on a hanger and hung it from the curtain pole. Just then I happened to glance out of the window and saw Niiramo standing outside on the grass, waiting for his helicarriage to arrive. His face was weary and his eyes closed, and he brought a handkerchief to his brow in order to dab the sweat dry. His shoulders were slumped, as if extreme, previously hidden exhaustion had taken hold of him.

I shoved a small waterskin into my bag and flung the bag over my shoulder. Then I picked up a blaze lantern and a box of feastcakes from my desk and left.

When I reached her family’s house, Sanja was already waiting for me, sitting outside in an armchair that had seen better days. Minja was nodding sleepily in her arms, sucking on a piece of cloth filled with seeds. Sanja sprang up when she saw me and Minja woke up.

‘How did it go?’ she enquired.

‘You have a permanent invitation to my tea ceremonies,’ I said.

‘Congratulations!’ she exclaimed and grinned. ‘I’ll skip it, though, I’ve never been to one of those things and I wouldn’t know what to do.’ Sanja embraced me, dangling Minja with one arm. She was caught between us and began to protest loudly. ‘Wait, I’ll be back in a minute.’

Sanja vanished into the house, and after a moment she returned, holding a basket covered with cloth. She had left Minja inside, probably with her mother.

‘This is for you,’ she said.

I took the basket and lifted the cloth. Under it there was a box Sanja had clearly made herself. Not for the first time, I admired her skill with things I could never have done. I knew how to cite texts and perform movements and bow my head before guests, but she knew how to take things apart with her hands and put them together again in a different way, reshaping them until something new and astonishing emerged. She had fashioned a rectangular, multi-coloured box out of pieces of scrap metal and plastic and wood, an uneven, glistening surface where vine-like patterns climbed across the sides and the lid, entwined and spiralled out of sight again.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, and her face was a little less pale than usual. It was strange to see her so uncharacteristically shy. ‘It’s for tea.’

‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Thank you!’ I hugged her, pushed the box into my bag and handed the basket back. ‘Shall we?’

Sanja nodded. We started walking towards the central square of the village. A few stars shone glass-clear above, and the full moon glinted pale and sharp-edged as it cut its way higher through the thickening blue of the evening.

‘Look!’ Sanja said and pointed at the sky.

Initially I didn’t know what I was looking at, but then I saw it. Apart from the metallic moonlight, a flicker of fishfires brushed the dark outlines of the fells. It wavered slowly like a stretch of cloth in near-still water.

‘It’s only just beginning,’ Sanja said.

The sounds and scents of Moonfeast floated around us as we walked through the village. The backyards of the houses we passed were decorated with coloured blaze lanterns, and the rattle of occasional fireworks threw sparkles above the roofs. The smell of fried fish, vegetables and feastcakes wafted in the air. People were carrying harvest-meals and drinks to tables, and from some yards we heard music and buzzing voices.

From far away I saw the Moonfeast parade weaving its way around the village square. The Ocean-Dragon fashioned from junk plastic, plaited reed and waste wood glistened silver-white, swimming in the rhythm of the drums and chanting, as dancers carried it through the air. A group of children dressed up as fish and other sea-creatures followed the dragon’s movements, a shoal flashing their junk-plastic scales against the falling darkness. I played with the thought that the fishfires we had seen were actually lit by them, like in stories where the reflection of fish swimming with the Ocean-Dragons cast them to the sky. In the middle of the square a large full moon of painted wood was propped up on a high stand over the whole scene. When we came closer, I saw the eyes of the dragon glow with yellowish light. It took me a moment to realise that there must be a blaze lantern inside the head. In the haze the pale, narrow figure of the dragon was like a passing ghost, floating mute and otherworldly above all sound and movement.

I was beginning to enjoy myself. I felt Moonfeast drawing me in. Sanja was dragging me through the crowd towards a food stand. We bought roasted almonds and dried seaweed snacks. I saw Sanja twisting and changing her weight from one foot to the other while I paid for the food. I could guess where she wanted to go next.

‘Let’s try that one,’ she said to me and pointed at another stand near the entrance to an alley leading away from the square. As we made our way through the crowd, we passed a group of villagers talking in hasty, serious voices. One of them was listening to a message-pod.

‘It must be a fabrication,’ I heard someone say. ‘There hasn’t been anything in the news.’

‘You know how the news is,’ another one said, ‘and I wouldn’t put it past the Unionists. My brother-in-law says he knows some of them, and—’

‘My cousin saw it, that’s what he says,’ said the man holding the message-pod. ‘He was right there, and he says it’s complete chaos.’

It was a conversation that I would remember later, but back then I had other things in my mind.

Sanja was right: the stand had a small picture of a blue nymph painted in the corner of the canvas awning. Everyone knew what it stood for, and while it wasn’t strictly illegal, most self-respecting merchants refused to sell it.

‘We’d like four blue-lotus cakes, please,’ Sanja told the merchant, an elderly woman with large brown birthmarks on her face.

‘Aren’t you a bit young for that?’ the woman said, but Sanja gave her the money and she said nothing more, only dropped the cakes into the fabric pouch Sanja handed to her.

I looked into the sky. The fishfires had grown; they were spreading their thin veil across the night.

‘To the Beak,’ Sanja said. ‘It has the best view.’

The Beak was a sharp cliff jutting out of the side of the fell near the plastic grave. A narrow staircase climbed there from the edge of the village. It would be the best place to see the fishfires, unless we wanted to walk back to the tea master’s house and from there to the fell.

When we arrived at the Beak, we saw we weren’t the only ones to have thought of the place. A couple of dozen people were sitting there in small groups or isolated couples. We knew some of them from the village school and stopped to say hello, but Sanja whispered, ‘Let’s climb further up, there must be a less crowded place there!’

After a while we found a smooth landing of rock where we could see the sky clearly. Sanja spread her worn shawl on the ground. We placed our blaze lanterns on it and arranged a picnic meal of almonds and cakes around them. The fishfires above us reached all the way across the sky, wavering, calming down and rising again in high folds like the sea.

We didn’t talk much, yet the silence woven between us was not separating or empty, but a connecting silence where I felt at peace. Sanja was fumbling a cord of woven coloured seagrass on her wrist. I recognised the decorative ribbon sewn on the sleeve ends of her shirt and the long hem of her skirt. I had seen it somewhere before. An image of her mother sewing a ribbon to the edge of a tablecloth before Sanja’s Matriculation celebrations surfaced before my eyes. It had looked a little worn already back then. The ribbon had probably been attached to the sleeves and the skirt-hem to cover their tattered appearance.

I gnawed on my blue-lotus cake and waited for the drifting feeling of languor.

‘When the Ocean-Dragons roam, it means the world is changing,’ I said.

Sanja chewed on her roasted almonds and drank water from her skin.

‘It’s just a story, Noria,’ she said. ‘Fishfires are colliding particles caused by the closeness of the North Pole. An electromagnetic reaction, no more exciting than a light bulb or a glow-worm. There are no dragons living in the sea, no shoals of fish following them or the flashing of scales in the dark sky.’ She picked up a blue-lotus cake and tasted it. ‘These were better last year,’ she remarked.

‘I know what fishfires are,’ I said. ‘And I still see the dragons. Don’t you?’

Sanja looked at the sky for a long time, and I looked at her. Under the dim-green glow of the fishfires her face was different than in any other light, like a bone-smooth seashell veiled with algae. Her hands were two starfish in the abyss of the night. I could imagine them drifting away, being pulled into craggy mazes where daylight didn’t reach, where translucent, blind creatures didn’t make a sound or dream of another world.

‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I see them.’

Sanja placed her hand on my arm. I felt its warmth through the thin fabric of my tunic, each line of her fingers as if they were drawn on my skin with sunlight. Blazeflies glowed quietly in the lanterns, Ocean-Dragons roamed and the world turned slowly, unnoticeably, unstopping.

In the still of the dawn I walked home with my new shawl wrapped tightly around me. The road from the village to the tea master’s house didn’t seem long, or the shadows of the trees tall. After passing through the gate I clinked the windchime hanging from the pine lightly with my fingernails. I could still taste the previous day’s meal and the night in my mouth, and I wanted to chew on mint leaves. I turned towards the rock garden instead of walking directly into the house.

I remember that grass stalks brushed my ankles, the cool humidity of the morning hour sticking to my skin.

Memory slips and slides and is not to be trusted, but I remember.

I stopped in my tracks when I saw it.

A dark and narrow figure stood at the edge of the rock garden, by the tea plants, and waited.

My flesh and bones were stony and tight around my heart, and I couldn’t bring myself to take another step.

The figure turned around and walked away, until it had disappeared behind the tea plants. The branches moved for a moment where it had brushed them in passing, and then they were silent and still.

With heavy limbs I ran into the house.

There was no light or movement in the blaze lantern hanging from the entrance ceiling, and it took a while before my eyes got used to the half-light.

My father was lying on the floor, his face twisted with pain and his breathing laboured. There was a broken waterskin next to him. The water had spread into a puddle on the floor and wet my father’s clothes.

‘What happened?’ I asked him and tried to help him up. With great difficulty, he got to his feet, but he couldn’t stand straight.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just a little tired.’

‘I’m going to call the doctor,’ I said.

I walked him into my parents’ bedroom and put him under the covers. After a moment he grew restless.

‘I need to get some water from the kitchen,’ he said. ‘My mouth is dry.’

‘I’ll get you water,’ I told him, but he insisted on getting up and walking to the kitchen and pouring himself a cup of water.

It was the last time I saw my father get out of bed without help.