http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/sarek-sweden-rapa-aerial/

Part 1 – A Trade is Discussed and Accepted

On the morning of their fourth day in the delta valley, the clouds finally started to break. The rainy season had officially ended nearly two weeks ago, though Bellemar thought perhaps someone ought to have informed the clouds. It had been the driest rainy season in a generation, and that was noteworthy given how dry the prior years had been. Bellemar found the irony of three straight days of rain delaying her mission entirely hilarious. She’d been sent by the people of the River, the farmers and fisherman, the shepherds and shamans, to parlay with the river itself.

Underwhelming rainy seasons had been piling up lately. When she was born twenty years ago, the weather was entirely predictable. Six months of relative dry, six months with consistent, though not constant, rain. She had been raised by her conscientious parents to understand the ebbs and flows of the weather. It was how they, and all other farmers in the river valleys, planned their lives. But in the twenty years since her birth, the weather had become less predictable.

No, not less predictable. It kept an understandable pattern. It just wasn’t a pattern that played well with the growing population of people that relied on the river and the rains to live. It had rained less and less each year, and as a result the river ran lower and lower. Less water was available now, and more people needed more water than ever. It was, there was no denying, messy.

And so Bellemar found herself step onto the river’s delta at the dawn of the dry season. The river was a free flowing thing, and didn’t exactly take direction from anything or anyone. In that, she felt a certain kinship with it. After her father died, and her grieving slowly, painfully morphed into acceptance, she realized she wasn’t subject to anyone’s rule any longer. Her older brother, who’d always held such an enormous sense of duty toward the farm that it made up for her own disinterest with room to spare, hadn’t asked her to stay and help. So she was on her own now, free to flow across the world as she deemed fit, at her own pace and with only her own goals to fulfill. That she didn’t have any specific goals did nothing to diminish her excitement.

The river, despite all its freedoms, was not entirely autonomous. There was someone who held a certain influence over its existence. And it was with her that Bellemar had been sent to speak, to discuss the recent drought conditions and to request aid.

Bellemar didn’t think there was anything that could be done. Sometimes it rained a lot, sometimes it did not. Everyone was just going to have to learn to deal with less water for now and hope more came soon. The older farmers did not agree with this philosophy and did so with some verve when they spoke with Bellemar at the dawn of this venture.

“I don’t think she can make it rain more,” Bellemar had said.

“Why not?” The oldest farmer had been nominated to speak for the group. The others sat around a fire pit in the spokesman farmer’s backyard. On his back porch, their wives huddled close, whispering any manner of gossip or conspiracies or, Bellemar hoped, admonishments of their foolish husbands.

“She’s a river Nymph, not a rain god,” Bellemar had pointed out.

The farmer tutted, a note of patrician condescension in this voice. “Well there’s no such thing as rain gods.”

“But there are such things as River nymphs?” she’d countered.

“Yes.”

“That feels… arbitrary.”

The farmer sighed. He looked at his compatriots, a few of whom shook their heads despairingly. One even lifted his shoulders in a “what can you do? she’s young,” kind of way. Bellemar bristled at that.

“Guys, you invited me.”

“Ok, let’s lay it out straight. The Nymph won’t speak to us. She controls the river, or influences it at least, and we need the help. This is the third year in a row the yields are down across the valley. In the last twenty years, I’ve brought in almost thirty percent less food for my family and the other families that rely on me.”

“But the valley is more populated,” Bellemar pointed out. “More farmers with more land. There’s enough food for everyone now.”

“Not if it keeps getting drier. We’re already tapping the river way more than any of us are comfortable with.”

Bellemar shrugged. “So tap it less.”

“That’s not an option,” the farmer said. “We have to grow our crops.”

“Do you?”

The farmer looked uncomprehending. He blinked, dumbly, a few times before he answered. “Yes. We’re farmers.”

“And because of your line of work, she won’t speak to you?”

He nodded. “Talk about arbitrary.”

“So what do you want me to ask her?” Bellemar asked.

“Well you can’t just ask, not with her type. You need a plan, some kind of deal.”

The argument had gone on for some time. In the end, Bellemar had agreed to speak to the Nymph. She had always intended to go, but she wanted to make the farmers work for it. In truth, it sounded like a grand adventure, and farming life very much did not suit her any longer.

The proposal they’d come up with was so asinine that Bellemar hadn’t bothered to remember it. It was a complex series of farming terms and water-based concessions that didn’t make any sense at all. She was more comfortable winging it anyway.

For most of the year, the Nymph stayed up in the mountains near the river’s headwaters. What she did up there was anyone’s guess. The terrain was difficult to navigate, the animals unfriendly to human interlopers, and the weather would often change in an instant. In short, it was uninviting. The Nymph rarely came down from the mountainous headwaters.

Except for a few weeks this time of year. She ventured downriver, all the way, to the delta in a fat valley tucked between dark, rocky cliffs. It was where the river died, and every year she came down just as the dry season began. No one knew why.

It was here that Bellemar had been sent to find and treat with the Nymph. The delta was vast, and no one knew how to seek out the Nymph. It was possible Bellemar would spend the next three weeks hiking up once side and down the other and never see a trace of the river’s patron saint of… whatever. And even if she found her, the Nymph may not deign to speak with her.

Bellemar adjusted the pack on her back. It was loaded with enough supplies for a full day’s hike. With all the free time in her tent upon her arrival, she’d had time to plan. She had a halfway decent map, and she’d marked off a little grid onto it. She would explore the little boxes one by one, in order, until she found the Nymph or until the window to speak with the river’s keeper closed for the year.

Exhaling with a sense of purpose, Bellemar stepped off the solid ground of the riverbank with a squish on the soft, wet stretch of golden land that was the river’s beautiful grave. She marched toward the nearest copse of trees, lifting her knees high with each step, a vision of industry to the men looking on from the camp behind her. She had no idea what might lay ahead, but whatever was going to happen, it wasn’t going to happen on a farm or a riverbank. It was going to happen out there, beyond the trees, in the great big world.

Just as she stepped into the first patch of trees, a woman’s laugh rang off the bark-padded trunks.

“Why in the world are you walking like that?”

Bellemar’s heart skipped a beat, and she paused in mid-step. Right leg lifted high, arms spread a bit to help balance. She swung her head to the right, toward the voice.

Not ten feet away, leaning against a tree, was a woman. Her hair was a rich, dark brown that cascaded over her shoulders and halfway down her back in elegant, sophisticated layers. Her skin was exceedingly pale without, somehow, looking at all unhealthy. Her blue dress was simply cut, and Bellemar understood it to be exceedingly old despite it being in pristine repair. Upon closer examination, the fabric was not fabric at all, but water, moving slowly from head to foot. How it remained opaque enough to preserve the Nymph’s modesty was beyond Bellemar.

And it was then she realized she still had her right leg bent up awkwardly. She slowly lowered it and reset herself to a more balanced standing position.

“I was hiking,” she said to the Nymph.

“I’ve seen hikers. They don’t walk like that.”

“Let’s say it’s a new style I’m working on and leave it at that?” Bellemar ventured, anxious to move on from this awkward start.

“Sure,” the Nymph replied with a small grin. “What brings you out here?”

“You, actually.”

“That’s no surprise,” she answered. “What is it you want now?”

Bellemar paused a moment, her curiosity piqued. “Do people come here to ask your help often?”

“They come, though I can’t say how often. Nymphs live a long time, and my definition of often may not fit with yours.”

“That’s fair,” Bellemar said. “I’m here because of the droughts.”

“I can’t make it rain more,” the Nymph interjected. “Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Well that’s what I said, but here I am anyway. There isn’t enough water for our fields.”

“That’s odd, because there seems to be a whole lot of it going out of my river and down the farmers’ chutes toward those same fields.” The Nymph sounded, to Bellemar’s surprise, more sad than angry.

“I’m not a farmer, for what it’s worth.” Bellemar thought it wise to position herself as just an envoy.

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“So we can’t make it rain, and neither can you. The farmers don’t want to take any more water from the river, but they won’t let their crops dry out and die,” Bellemar summarized. “There must be a solution.”

The Nymph shrugged. “Leave. Less people means less crops means more water, even during a drought.”

“And if the people won’t leave? If they keep taking from the river?”

“Is that a threat?”

Bellemar shook her head, and realized as she answered that she had begun to feel something of the Nymph’s sadness. “They won’t leave, and they won’t stop. They don’t know how.”

The Nymph smiled. It was warm and comforting and caught Bellemar entirely off-guard.

“That’s not what they usually say when they ask for my help.”

“No?”

“They beg or rage, plead or bargain. They rarely admit their own faults.” The Nymph cocked her head to one side. “And they always come with some kind of deal.”

Bellemar bit back a grin. She silently applauded herself for abandoning the flawed plan the farmers had generated.

“I honestly don’t know if I can help,” the Nymph continued. “I really can’t make it rain more.”

“So there’s nothing?”

The Nymph started to nod, but caught herself. Her face twisted into a look of contemplation for a few beats. Then she shrugged.

“There’s a reason I come down here at the end of every rainy season.”

“To see the delta flood?”

She shook her head, and her lustrous hair flowed and danced like a flood-swollen brunette stream. “To search for my replacement. Nymphs live a long time, but even by our standards I am old. By now, a Nymph child should have been delivered. Every year that passes without her arrival, I travel to river’s length, though I really don’t expect to find her. Not after so long.”

“Why do you think a child hasn’t been delivered?” Bellemar asked.

“I can’t say,” the Nymph said and shook her head. “But if you can find her, the one meant to replace me, I will spend what time remains for me looking for a solution to your drought problems. That is the truth. No cunning trades, no guarantees. You try to help me, I try to help you.”

Bellemar nodded. She saw a lot of sense in the exchange. It was honest and made in good faith. That was, she thought, the most the people of the river lands could have asked from the Nymph.

“I think that sounds perfectly fair.” Bellemar stuck out her hand to seal the pact with a shake.

The Nymph nodded, took the young girl’s hand in hers and shook the agreement into being. Bellemar pulled back to find a little piece of fabric that was not, in fact, fabric at all.

“Think of it as a thank you,” the Nymph said. “For your honesty.”

She stepped out of the little grove of trees and splashed into a little stream that run through the shadows of the branches. In a moment, she vanished into the shallow blue water, leaving behind no trace but the watery strip of dress clutched in Bellemar’s hand.

The intrepid young girl stashed the gift in her bag, amazed that it made nothing wet. She marched back across the soggy delta toward the camp, the river lands, and the world beyond. She had another adventure before her. And whatever it was, it wasn’t going to happen here on this delta.

It was going to happen out there.