SORCEROUS SIGNALS
Written by Rab Foster / Artwork by Lee Kuruganti
The Water Garden






















There’d been a massive rebellion in the east and overnight I’d gone from being a servant in the
governor’s household to being a refugee. Now a group of us were riding for the capital. Yet I would’ve
been safer if I’d stayed in the east—because the two people leading our group would soon destroy me.

Lady Sabra rode by my side. It was ironic my every moment was devoted to protecting her life when
she’d shortly initiate the end to mine. Her father, Lord Segrund, until recently the governor of the
Eastern Provinces, was on a horse a few yards ahead. The lord would see to it my death sentence was
enforced. No doubt too he’d write pages specifying in grisly detail how it should be enforced.

And the city we were riding towards was where I’d die. The skills of the artists employed in the
catacombs below the capital were legendary. I knew there’d be weeks, maybe months, of torture.
Afterwards, my body in hideous ruins but still sentient—those artists of the catacombs would ensure
that—I’d be executed.

Meanwhile, the people around me seemed to talk only about the marvellous sights of the capital that lay
ahead of them. In particular, they talked excitedly about a garden the Emperor, Lord Segrund’s brother,
had spent his recent years creating. In his old age, it seemed, the Emperor had devoted all his declining
energies to two passions, one of which was horticulture.

The other passion was rumoured to be sorcery.

* * *

I was doomed because Lady Sabra had grown fond of me. In the remote Eastern Provinces, she’d had
ample time to develop such fondnesses because she had few regal duties. At the same time, there’d
been no opportunities there for her to meet young men of a social status similar to her own and so
invariably the people who won her affection worked in the household around her. The result in every case
was death. Sooner or later word that his daughter was carrying on with one of the lower orders would
reach Lord Segrund and he’d have the courtier killed.

Lady Sabra didn’t dwell on the unfortunate outcomes of her fondnesses. She didn’t believe in wasting
time with regret and self-reproach. She’d move on and find somebody else.

I knew, however, when Lord Segrund heard about me it’d be from Lady Sabra’s own lips and she’d
convince him in this particular case she’d been blameless. No, I’d had the temerity to instigate the affair,
by showing an inviting smile, making a forward comment, stealing a forbidden kiss. By the time he heard
all this we’d be in the capital. Outraged, he’d have me handed over to his brother’s torturers, the artists
of the catacombs, for a torture session so long and merciless execution at the end of it would come as a
blessing.

She’d do this because I’d displeased her. I’d tried to rebuff her, out of surprise, propriety and fear.
These things had overpowered me on the evening the lady had made her move on me, which was also
the evening before we began our flight for the capital.

I’d panicked and said the word no sane person would ever want to say to her: “No!”

* * *

When we reached the capital it seemed a place of wonder to us. The younger members of the group had
never seen the city before. The older members hadn’t seen it for decades, not since the day when they’d
set off with Lord Segrund for the Eastern Provinces. Yet while the others gasped and pointed at the
marvels we rode past, the great temples and towers, boulevards and bridges, squares and statues, I
was so immersed in my own preoccupations I scarcely noticed them.

I wondered if Lady Sabra hadn’t decided to condemn me yet. Sometimes when she looked at me, I
sensed there was a struggle going on between the part of her that wanted me as a lover and the part
that wanted to annihilate me. But I knew any struggle would be short-lived. Soon she’d find someone
else to love and my damnation would begin. So I rode through the wondrous capital city dazed by the
fact of my temporary uniqueness. For a brief time, I was the only human being who’d refused Lady Sabra
and who still lived.

A minister welcomed us at the Grand Palace. He explained the Emperor would be indisposed until evening
and suggested we head for the guests’ quarters to change out of our travelling clothes. This minister
was a young man, too young to remember the days when Lord Segrund had lived in the capital, and he
spoke without deference. His voice even sounded a little disdainful when he concluded his welcome with a
question about the rebellion. “Have there been new…developments in the Eastern Provinces since the
sending of the last messenger?”

In the provincial palace, people, even ministers, would’ve lost their tongues for addressing Lord Segrund
in a disdainful tone. Here, however, the lord simply sighed and said, “Things have worsened. The
garrison at Hakyss has fallen. For days there’s been no communication from the garrison at Kebrol.” His
voice became faltering and wretched. “My brother should be informed. This was neither my fault nor the
fault of my soldiers. There’s never been a rebellion with such huge support as this. Planned with such
cunning. Executed with such ferocity.”

The minister cut in. “And this evening you’ll be able to brief the Emperor in detail about it. He expects
your fullest cooperation, having been merciful enough to invite you back to the safety of the capital.”
Then the minister smiled. “Before that, however, to let you and your party recuperate after your journey,
the Emperor has granted you use of the Water Garden. Exclusive use—for the afternoon you’ll have the
garden to yourselves.”

That was the simple title by which the Emperor’s fabulous garden was known throughout the Empire—
the Water Garden.

It was surely another sign of Lord Segrund’s declining authority that his courtiers were losing their
decorum. They’d seemed undignified enough when they’d been gaping and gasping at the landmarks of
the capital. Now, at the mention of the Water Garden, their decorum collapsed entirely. Forgetting their
master was sitting among them, they made a chorus of delighted noises. “Oh!” they exclaimed. “Ah!”

Yet as we followed the minister into the Grand Palace, I heard Lord Segrund muse: “Well, well. Until
today I was an outcast. But now I’m a guest in my brother’s precious Water Garden. An excellent thing
this rebellion has been for my rehabilitation.” No longer did he sound like a man whose spirit was broken.
This was the cunning, purposeful Lord Segrund of old I was listening to.

Even the prospect of the Water Garden failed to improve my mood. That didn’t happen until a later hour
when our group, scrubbed of the journey’s dust and dressed in clean attire, walked through the gates
behind the palace and into the garden. At that moment, as I crossed its threshold, there was a
miraculous change in me. The dismal thoughts left me. The evil weight that for days had seemed to
crouch on top of me, buckling my spine and bending me down, was suddenly gone. I felt I could stand
up straight, look around and take in the world again.

And the world had suddenly become beautiful.

* * *

Even the gruelling distance between the capital and the Eastern Provinces hadn’t prevented accounts of
the Water Garden from reaching us. Perfection was a word that often figured in those accounts. I’d
assumed, however, that perfection was a concept that existed only in the imagination—and in my
imagination at least, it was something I had only a fleeting notion of, something I could never actually
visualise. Thus, to suddenly see the Water Garden’s perfection was astounding.

Indeed, it seemed close to sorcery. This gave credence to the rumours the Emperor had employed
sorcery to help create the place.

The garden looked larger than it actually was because of the amount of water it contained, shimmering in
lakes and ponds, racing in streams and brooks, churning in rapids and falls. Walking through it I had the
feeling of being airborne, of soaring over the earth and gazing down on blue seas and rivers. Yet the
quantities of blue were balanced by the quantities of green. Lilies with huge leaves covered much of the
water while rushes pierced up at its margins. On sites between the water there stood rockeries with lush
seams of moss growing between their stones and long, feathery ferns curling round their bases.
Weeping willow, maple, cedar and cypress trees added extra measures of green, while the breeze rippling
through their leaves gave the landscape a look of haunting ethereality.

Speckling the blue and green were other colours. Dazzling yellow blooms protruded from the centre of
the lilies, the rushes had purple crowns and the rockeries were composed of grey and pink stones that
glittered with chips of quartz and mica. And constellations of flowers bloomed throughout the garden—
iris and marigold, mint and musk, arrowhead and cowslip. Yet there seemed nothing haphazard about
those colours. They were positioned as concisely as the embroidery in a tapestry.

There were animals in the garden too. They moved so gracefully that I almost imagined the Emperor
using his sorcery to choreograph them. Butterflies spiralled above the flowers, herons and kingfishers
made streaks of white and blue over the water and swans crossed that water in pale flotillas. While we
followed the minister we overtook several giant tortoises and even they seemed to stump along
majestically. Their shells had a hallucinogenic gleam and I realised they were encrusted with gemstones.

The minister led us along tiled pathways, across latticed bridges and over zigzagging lines of
steppingstones until we arrived at a wide creek containing slow-moving water. We walked alongside this
to where the water of the creek crept into that of a central lake. A last footbridge spanned the estuary
here and gave access to a round paved-over area, snuggling in the corner formed by the creek’s end and
the lakeshore.

A low, crescent-shaped pavilion stood on the far edge of this paved circle. In front of the pavilion, out of
the centre of the circle, rose a tall thin column. Chairs and tables had been placed around the column and
servants were putting the final trays of a huge buffet on the tabletops. The minister announced this
would be our place of repose for the afternoon and took us across the bridge.

As I stepped off the bridge and into the paved circle, I noticed more about the pavilion. All its doors were
padlocked. Gardening tools and equipment were arranged along its front wall—propped rakes and
shovels, stacks of buckets and flower-baskets, a wheelbarrow, a huddling group of slender-necked stone
urns that ranged from waist-height to shoulder-height. However, as I studied those items and realised
how harmoniously they were arranged, the size, shape and colour of one object in careful juxtaposition
with those of the next, I began to suspect this was another display for the garden’s visitors. I wasn’t
looking at a real, working gardeners’ pavilion but at an artistic rendition of one.

I also saw the circle had a moat, a channel about three yards wide that’d been dug around the outer
edge of its paving stones. This circle of water didn’t exist separately from the creek and the lake, for at
one end it opened into the estuary where the two larger bodies of water came together.

The minister explained that, like his master the Emperor, he had business demanding his time this
afternoon. He withdrew. The servants, once they’d set the dishes on the tables, removed themselves
too. At other times Lord Segrund would’ve taken this desertion by his hosts as an insult but today he
was unperturbed. In fact, it seemed convenient that, while everyone ate, he could sit with the political
and military advisors in his retinue and discuss important matters without the Emperor’s staff being
there to eavesdrop.

I watched their discussions from a distance. Even with an absence of eavesdroppers they clustered
together and kept their heads low over their plates and whispered. I suspected they were conspiring.
And perhaps the conspiracy was happening already. Many things about the rebellion in the Eastern
Provinces didn’t make sense to me. The rebellion’s leaders—I remembered how during the past year
some of those people had been guests at Lord Segrund’s table. And the rebellion’s success—how could
that be possible? Before my transfer to the Household Guard I’d spent time as a soldier in several of the
garrisons. I’d seen how impoverished, underfed and physically feeble the peasants were. At the same
time I’d seen the fitness, training and brutal efficiency of Lord Segrund’s troops. How could a starving
rabble overcome a ruthless military machine?

The paved circle started to feel oppressive. The Water Garden surrounded me but I was ringed too by
the moat, which seemed to hold its wonders at bay—and a cage was a cage even in the middle of
paradise. Then the feeling got worse because I noticed something about the paving stones beneath me.
They’d been laid so their edges aligned themselves to form circles and lines. Concentric circles expanded
from the base of the central column to the edge of the moat. Meanwhile, straight lines ran from the
column to the moat like spokes in a cartwheel. This pattern of radiating circles with lines cutting across
them gave the place the look of a spider’s web.

And I was in this giant web with Lady Sabra and Lord Segrund. It was easy to imagine that in former
lives they’d been spiders.

Lady Sabra was the lord’s only child, but because she was young and female she was excluded now from
the discussions going on at the tables. The buffet had no attraction for her because her appetite for
food, unlike her other appetites, was meagre. Bored, she began to wander around the edge of the circle
and I followed a couple of yards behind. Because for the past year I’d served as her bodyguard my
proximity to her was no cause for suspicion.

For a minute my thoughts became the normal thoughts of a bodyguard. I wondered how defendable this
paved area was. If a squad of assassins came rushing at it, how well placed would I be to fight them off?
It’d be simple if the assassins came across the bridge—I’d stand at the end of it and hack them down
one by one because its narrowness allowed the passage of only one person at a time. But if they tried to
storm across the moat…I stared at the water, wondering how effective a line of defence it was. I couldn’t
tell. The lake, the estuary and the torpid creek were covered with the sprawling green leaves and
gleaming yellow petals of the lilies. These floating growths extended into and around the moat, choking it
from bank to bank. How much water did the lilies conceal? A few feet of water that could be waded
through? Or fathoms of water a person would plunge down into and—after wrestling amid a submerged
tangle of stems, roots and tubers—drown?

But I soon stopped musing about assassins and lines of defence. The Water Garden seduced me again.
It was late in the afternoon and the sun had advanced into the western half of the sky behind us. Our
shadows pointed in the direction we’d recently travelled from, the east, where now there was the lake
with its congestion of lilies and the glorious backdrop of flowers, rockeries and trees…

Lady Sabra turned and saw me standing in a daze of admiration. “You seem distracted,” she said. “I’d
have thought in your job getting distracted would be a serious failing.”  

I forced my gaze away from the Water Garden and towards her. As my head turned I felt the presence
of another shadow—one falling on the side of my face, cooling my brow and cheek. It came from the
column in the middle of the paved circle. And suddenly I understood that this area was a giant sundial.
The column acted as the style. The straight grooved lines running out from it, around which its shadow
slowly wheeled, marked the hours of the day.

She continued: “Your attention, of course, should be focused only on me.”

“My attention…” I stumbled, “...is on you, my lady. It’s just that…I’ve heard the legend of the Water
Garden so many times and now that I’m here…Well, I can see why its beauty is legendary.”
     
She stepped closer to me. “I see. So its beauty eclipses mine?”

Her closeness unnerved me. If she came much nearer, our positions at the sundial’s edge would be taken
for an embrace. And if Lord Segrund were to look up from his discussions and see us standing so
intimately…I hurried to pacify her. “Comparing your beauty and the beauty of the garden is
like…like…comparing a jewel and a bird of paradise. Both are breathtakingly beautiful but completely
different in their form of beauty. So because I took a moment to admire the garden doesn’t mean I was
denigrating you.”

She smiled—poisonously. “Let me give you a comparison. Compare the result of my displeasure, which
would be a long sojourn with the torturers in the local catacombs, with what you could gain from my
favour. Riches, luxuries, privileges…After all, if my father’s plans succeed, he’ll be Emperor soon. And
you know how fondly he looks upon me. Imagine what I could bestow on you—the favourite of the
Emperor’s favourite!”

Thus, whilst threatening me, she confirmed my suspicions. Lord Segrund himself had engineered the
rebellion in the Eastern Provinces. He’d made sure it was on a scale that rattled even the Emperor in the
far-away capital. The Emperor was so alarmed, in fact, he’d recalled his younger brother from the
provinces. He’d done this despite the fact he and Lord Segrund had hated each other since they’d been
children and the latter’s posting to the east decades ago had effectively been an exile. To let a member
of the Imperial Family fall into the hands of a mob of rebellious peasants was unthinkable, no matter
what the Emperor felt personally.

And now that Lord Segrund was back, and as panic about the rebellion increased, he could begin his
manoeuvres. The Emperor was an old man. Lord Segrund was several years younger and capable still of
leading an army into battle. Maybe he banked that he’d be the one mobilising the troops in the capital.
He’d head the Empire’s forces as they moved against the rebels. Meanwhile, as the secret puppet-master
of the rebellion’s leaders, he could instruct those leaders when and where to betray the thousands of
peasants following them. Sooner or later the peasants would be marched into a trap and slaughtered.
Then the victorious Lord Segrund, the saviour of the Empire, would be in so powerful a position he could
force his brother’s abdication and take over.

His daughter had inherited that treacherousness. I knew not a word of her promises were true. Lady
Sabra would tire of me and I’d go the same way as the other courtiers she’d toyed with.

Now she said softly, “To please me, you don’t wish to compare me or equate me to anything. Not to
gardens, not to jewels, not to birds. You should praise my beauty and praise that alone.”

My face felt warm again and I realised the shadow of the column had moved slightly, so it now fell onto
the sliver of ground that still separated us. Then I heard a faint sound below me and I glanced
downwards.

One of the hour-lines ran between us to the edge of the moat and now the shadow from the giant style
lay exactly along the line, signifying a particular hour in the late afternoon had been reached. However,
this line was more than a groove between the stones. It was really a cleft, deep enough for a little water
from the moat to have crept along it. And with the water had come the lilies from the creek and the lake—
though the cleft was too narrow to allow their leaves and flowers it’d become clogged with thin green
tendrils that apparently grew out of the lilies. For the first time today, those tendrils were covered by
shadow and hidden from the sun.

My right hand located the hilt of my sword and drew it back from the sheath on my hip. At the same time
the leather handle behind my shield, which had been looped round my left elbow, slid down my forearm
and into my hand, which gripped the leather as a fist. Staring down, I swore those tendrils were
beginning to move.

Then I heard a dramatic flailing of wings and I raised my head, in time to see all the birds on the lake, the
swans, cranes, herons, ducks and coots, were suddenly flapping up into the sky. And there were
movements on the land too. A few yards from us, one of the jewelled tortoises sank down onto the
ground and its head and legs retreated back through their holes, into the capsule of its shell. The thick
scales growing at the ends of the tortoise’s limbs sealed the holes behind them, and all that was visible
of it then was the shell with its garish crust of gemstones.

Something touched the toe of my left boot and again I looked down. One of the lily-tendrils had
managed to wriggle its way out of the cleft and was probing around my foot.

I sprang back from the cleft. On its other side Lady Sabra retreated too. First she moved with firm steps
but then she looked sideways, over the edge of the giant sundial and into the Water Garden, and saw
something that made her stumble and almost trip over herself. She turned her head towards me again. I
saw her eyes were growing wider, filling with surprise and then incredulity and then panic, and her mouth
was opening further and further until she seemed to gape half-wittedly.

She gestured towards the lake but for a time I could only stare at her. It occurred to me the thing she’d
inspired so liberally in others before, fear, had taken possession of her now.

Finally I made my eyes follow the direction of her arm and I saw how the lilies in the lake seemed to be
rising and falling in waves, as if there was a beast with a vast, pulsating skin lying beneath them.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the paving stones, the green leaves and yellow flowers were rising out of the
moat, into the air, and a layer of darker, less decorous green was visible beneath them. Out of this
previously-submerged layer, long, thick limbs—much bigger versions of the tendril that’d crawled from
the cleft towards my boot—had emerged and were slithering across the first yards of ground.

She managed to force some words out of her gaping mouth. “What is happening?”

But then her voice gave way to a scream and I realised that already one of those huge fibrous tentacles
had reached her. On its topside leaves and flowers flopped like grotesque green-and-yellow tumours.
Along its bottom side ran a row of thorny growths, like teeth. Too befuddled to turn and run, she’d let it
entwine itself around her leg and the thorny teeth were digging into her flesh, releasing small fine jets of
blood.

I started towards her with my sword raised but the limb seemed almost to perceive me—for it made a
wrenching movement and she was yanked away from me towards the water. At the same time other
tentacles that’d just clambered onto the paving stones reared up in anticipation. Her body landed
beneath them, they fell on her and suddenly she was gone, vanished beneath a pandemonium of leaves,
flowers and teeth.

Another of those limbs had crawled close. A huge ripple coursed along it and it lunged off the ground at
me. I swung my shield round to meet it and the ensuing crash of its wet, tubular flesh against the metal
panel nearly knocked me over. Somehow, however, I managed to stay on my feet. I battered back at it
with my shield and deflected it and with my other hand I drove my sword forward. The blade caught it on
the underside and sank deep between two of the teeth. Immediately yellowy pus spewed from the wound
and the tentacle retreated.

I fled back into the centre of the giant sundial. Unsurprisingly, Lord Segrund and his advisors had by
now abandoned their conference. The base of the giant style, where they’d been sitting, had become a
scene of mayhem. Overturned furniture, fragments of crockery and dollops of food covered the ground.
People ran, stumbled and crawled to and fro through the debris. On all sides more of those monstrous
limbs swarmed up from the moat, onto the sundial’s rim and over the ground towards the style. They
lashed forward, sometimes catching nothing and managing only to get entangled with one another.
Sometimes, however, they succeeded in grabbing a body, which was promptly hauled back towards the
water.

I knew there were more of those tentacles leaving the water behind me. Why, there was a whole lake of
them. How could I save myself?

The one thing in the way of the moat was the crescent-shaped pavilion standing on the sundial’s far
edge. Its doors were padlocked, but…Along its front wall was that display of gardening equipment—the
tools, the wheelbarrow, the big and small stone urns. Seeing those last things I recalled how the tortoise
had withdrawn into its shell before the organism beneath the water lilies attacked. But even the biggest
urn had a slender neck, too narrow to allow the entry of a man’s body…

I ran towards the urns, hopping across tentacles while they slithered about the ground, wetly shrouded
in flowers and leaves. I dodged bodies as they struggled in the grasp of other tentacles and slashed my
sword through other tentacles again as they lurched up in front of me. Pus splattered my face. Shreds of
leaves and petals flew around my blade. Once, a hand grabbed onto the tail of my tunic and I turned and
discovered that behind me was Lord Segrund himself. A green limb had wrapped itself round his waist
and he’d seized hold of me in a desperate effort to stop himself being dragged to the moat.

“Damn your tricks!” he screamed at me, as if in his terrified delirium he’d mistaken me for his brother the
Emperor—that master gardener, that master sorcerer.

I swung my sword, its edge struck the side of his neck and his hand released me as a great red burst
drenched his shoulder. Around us the tentacles seemed to sense the blood because a half-dozen more
of them flung themselves upon him. He disappeared amid a huge writhing knot.

I ran, jumped, dodged and hacked until I reached the urns. Discarding my sword but holding on to the
shield I scrambled onto the biggest one. Its neck was too narrow for a man to squeeze inside…But I was
a woman, one who’d been considered too scrawny to make a wife and mother, one who’d ended up
serving instead as one of Lord Segrund’s troops and later as one of his Household Guard. Because of
my sex I’d finally been appointed bodyguard to Lady Sabra—her father assuming a female bodyguard
wouldn’t interest her in the way various male bodyguards before me had. However, the lady had
adaptable appetites. When her father deprived her of male company, she discovered female company
suited her just as well.

My hips were bony and my breasts were small but I struggled to get myself into the urn. I was still
clutching the shield, which hampered me as I grabbed hold of the urn’s rim and forced myself down its
neck. But at last I squeezed through. I tugged the shield down after me, making it clang over the rim like
a lid. Then I crouched in the vessel’s black interior, feeling it shudder as the huge limbs slithered by
outside and knocked against it.

For hours I applied my remaining strength to pulling down at the shield, to ensure the urn remained
sealed—impenetrable as a tortoise shell.

* * *

Things eventually became silent outside the urn but I waited for a long time afterwards before I
relinquished my grip on the shield and began the painful task of wriggling up through the neck again. The
paving stones in front of the pavilion were still strewn with overturned furniture, smashed crockery and
spilt food. However, as I looked from side to side, I saw there were no bodies amid the mess. I was alone.

There was only a little light left in the evening but, to my surprise, I could still see over the creek and the
lake and make out even the distant features of the Water Garden. Beautiful though it’d been earlier, it
now seemed even more resplendent. Yet I was puzzled at how it could appear so clearly in the dusk.
Then I lowered my head and I saw that across the water, on the flat and serene-again masses of lilies,
the flowers glowed like a million yellow suns.
Make A Donation
Rab Foster spent his childhood in Ireland but he has lived and
worked in many places since then.  In the three years that it took
him to conceive of and write The Water Garden, he has worked
as a warehouseman in Scotland, studied for a Masters degree in
England and managed a language-teaching centre in Libya.