Power of Three

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “I can’t,” said the smaller one. “They’ve stopped me, too.”

  “Then jump into the moat!” commanded the other.

  “Not yet,” said the smaller Dorig. “That wouldn’t do any good.”

  Its air of assurance was beginning to irritate them all as much as it annoyed its fellow. “Then I can’t think what you’re aiming to do,” Ayna said. “You might as well surrender.”

  “And I can swim, too,” Gerald added.

  “I know—like a fish out of water. I’ve seen you,” the Dorig retorted, keeping a wary eye on Brenda. Brenda, knowing she did not maneuver well, was shuffling forward until she had a chance to pounce. The smaller Dorig held itself ready to dodge, its deep yellow eyes flickering between her and the crowded bridge. “What are you trying to do?” it said. “It won’t help you to kill us. Our people will only kill you.”

  “We’re not trying to kill you,” Gair said.

  “We wouldn’t know how,” said Gerald. The Dorig he was holding relaxed considerably at that. “We want to talk to you.”

  “Why?” said the smaller Dorig, still backing.

  “About the Moor being flooded,” said Gair.

  “That’s nothing to do with us. Or you either,” said the Dorig Gerald was holding. “You—”

  “Shut up, Halla,” said the smaller Dorig. He stopped backing, although he was near enough to the moat to jump in if he wanted. “Suppose I agreed to talk. What then?”

  Brenda looked doubtfully over her shoulder to see what the others thought. “It’s probably a trick,” said Ceri.

  They all thought Ceri was right. But the only way to get anywhere seemed to be to treat it as real and to hope to turn it to some advantage. Gerald said, “Then we’d ask you to come into the house of your own free will and discuss things.”

  The two Dorig exchanged looks. “In there!” the larger one said dubiously.

  “If we did,” said the smaller one, “would you agree to take the Thought off us, so that we could shift shape again?”

  “No,” they said, all five, in chorus. Gair added, “But we’d promise to take it off you after we’ve talked.”

  “By the Three Powers?” said the larger Dorig quickly. “And the Sun and the Moon, and the strange gods of the Giants?”

  “Yes,” they said, and Gerald asked, “Well?”

  “But if we agree,” persisted the smaller Dorig, “that means we’re in your power without any defense. Would you agree not to use your magic?”

  “We haven’t got any magic,” said Gair, to which Gerald added, “And we certainly haven’t.”

  “I wish we had,” said Brenda, sighing.

  “Yes you have,” said the smaller Dorig. “Lymen have words and thoughts, and Giants have unnatural strength and things that work by themselves. If you use any of those, it’s not fair.”

  Gair and Gerald looked at one another. Gerald shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t call most of that magic, but we won’t use them if you want. Now will you come indoors?”

  Considerably to their surprise, the smaller Dorig said, “Yes. All right.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Hafny,” said the larger one. “All right. I agree, too. Now let me go.”

  Before he let go, Gerald cautiously asked Gair, “Have they got any other powers you know of?”

  “They can use words a bit,” Gair said. “But you’ll have to risk that.”

  So Gerald let the larger Dorig go and they all trooped across the bridge and through the door of the house. It seemed safest to Gerald to keep the two Dorig as far apart as possible. He went in front with the larger one. Brenda and Hafny brought up the rear, as queer a pair as you could hope to meet. Gerald led the way into the dining room. “Around the table conference, Giant-fashion,” he said.

  The size of the room made the two Dorig seem smaller, and more slender, than before. They stood side by side and gazed round wonderingly, particularly at the ugly plates in the cupboards. Gair was interested to see that the gray-silver of their bodies did not seem at all wet now. Indeed, it was sagging and wrinkling from their joints in a way that you would expect from clothes rather than skin.

  “You know,” said Brenda, “those clothes aren’t like the armor the lot in Garholt were wearing. They’re more like the suits people wear for skin-diving.”

  “I’ve got one,” said Gerald. “Only mine’s rubber.”

  It seemed there were things Giants and Dorig understood better than people. Both Dorig looked interested. “Rubber’s that black stuff that stretches, isn’t it?” Halla said to Hafny.

  “It’s no good. It doesn’t go with you when you shift,” Hafny said.

  “Giants can’t shift shape, stupid!” said Halla, and Hafny was embarrassed. A pale pink flush flooded the white of his face. To cover it up, he stripped off his gloves, revealing long thin hands whiter even than Adara’s.

  “Do we give names?” Ayna said, rather formally.

  “You have ours,” Halla said, quite as stiffly.

  Hafny looked up. “And I have the Giants’,” he said. “They’re Brenda and Gerald. And”—he pointed at Gair—“yours, too.”

  Now it seemed there were things Dorig and people understood better than Giants. Brenda and Gerald looked quite bewildered when Ayna stepped defensively in front of Gair and demanded, “How did you come by his name? If you’ve dared misuse it—!”

  “I’ve known it for two weeks,” said Hafny. “And I’ve kept it in my head. Have you heard me speak it yet?”

  Ayna glared at him, quite unconvinced. Gair was aching to ask how Hafny came to know his name, but he never got a chance. The two Giants were loudly expressing their bewilderment. “What’s in a name? What’s the fuss about? He knows ours and we know yours. What does it matter?”

  “Giants don’t know words,” Ayna said scornfully. “And it makes you quite stupid, the way you throw your names about.”

  “You don’t let enemies get hold of your name,” Ceri explained, so that the Giants’ feelings might not be hurt. “Suppose the enemy put words on it. Even Dorig can do that.”

  “Even Dorig!” said Halla. “Don’t call us that! We’re people!”

  “No you’re not. We’re people,” said Ceri.

  “You!” said Halla. “You’re just a miserable little Lyman.”

  “Lyman!” said Ayna. “Listen—”

  Gerald made both Dorig jump by uttering a great bark of laughter. “Haven’t I heard this conversation before somewhere?”

  “Yes,” said Brenda. “And I’ll have you Dories know that we’re the only people around here. The rest of you are all fairi—something else!”

  The outraged expressions on the narrow white Dorig faces made Gair want to laugh as well as Gerald. “But you’re a Giant!” said Hafny. Brenda went purple and began to breathe heavily.

  Gair gave up trying to ask how Hafny knew his name. It was clear there was more fertile ground for disagreement here than he had ever known, and if he did not do something about it, none of the things they wanted to talk about would get so much as mentioned. “This won’t do,” he said. “We came here to talk.”

  “You called for talk, not us,” Halla said coldly.

  “But we agreed,” Hafny said. “And I needn’t have done.”

  “What, when I was a prisoner!” exclaimed Halla.

  “Well, that was your own silly fault for trying to drown a Lyman on Sun day,” Hafny retorted. “I warned you. And I told you that one”—he pointed at Gair again—“was probably very clever. He got away yesterday, and he tricked you properly today. So you see I was right.” Hafny was looking at Gair as he spoke, and Gair was surprised to see interest and a great deal of curiosity in his strange face. It had not occurred to him before that a Dorig might be as interested in him as he had been in Gerald, but it might well be so. And Hafny was making such a point of not using Gair’s name that it seemed as if his interest might outweigh the fact that his people and Gair’s were at war.

  Gair m
ade a peaceful gesture in his turn. “My name is Gair,” he said, formally. “And I was sitting on the bridge as bait.”

  At this, Halla looked extremely mortified, but Hafny laughed, the thin, sibilant Dorig laugh. “I told you so, Halla!” He looked from Halla’s cross face to the dining table. “Is that an eating-square? Do you want us to sit round that and talk?”

  “That was the idea,” Gerald said, glad to see things moving the right way at last.

  Hafny, rather uncertainly, went toward a chair. But, before he sat in it, he put his hands to his neck, undid a catch and peeled the silver-gray covering off his head. It was just like a hood when it was off. He laid it carefully on the table, in a way Gair felt sure was significant, if he only understood. Underneath, Hafny had hair—dark-honey-colored hair—as curly as Ceri’s, and ears only a little more pointed than Gair’s. Quite suddenly, in spite of his queer golden eyes, he seemed much less strange. Fascinated, they watched him next rip apart the top part of his silver-gray garments—which opened much in the manner of the Giants’ zippers Gair and Ayna had struggled with, to become a jacket over a leathery-looking shirt. It showed them that Hafny wore round his neck a bright green-glinting collar of such magnificent work that Ceri could hardly take his eyes off it.

  Halla, a little grudgingly, did the same. Ayna gasped and Brenda sighed wistfully, as a cascade of hair fell from the gray hood—hair so silver-fair that Ayna’s almost looked brown. Halla was revealed as an extremely pretty girl, in a collar as rich as Hafny’s above a gold-embroidered shirt. Gair felt a little foolish. All his life he had heard Dorig talked of as “he”—or, most frequently, “it”—and it had never occurred to him until this moment that there must be Dorig girls. That there might be Dorig children was something he was more prepared for. He had suspected for some minutes that neither Hafny nor Halla was very old. And now that they looked more like the kind of people he was used to, he could see that Hafny was much his own age and Halla no older than Ayna—though their long, thin Dorig bodies made them more like the Giants in height. Gair was puzzled. He could not think how they came to be in the moat instead of the nine full-grown Dorig of yesterday.

  Gerald was frankly disgusted. He leaned over and growled in Gair’s ear, “They’re only a couple of kids!”

  “They must have important parents,” Gair whispered back. “Look at those collars.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Gerald said dubiously, and sat at the table.

  Everyone sat down, and Ayna and Ceri reluctantly gave their names. For a short while, it did almost look as if this Giant way of talking round a table was a magic to produce good will. Brenda brought the little barrel of biscuits with her from the sideboard when she sat down. In her greedy Giant way, she took one herself and munched it while she offered the barrel to the Dorig. Hafny refused. But Halla, seeing Ceri’s hand reaching out and Brenda munching herself, doubtfully took a biscuit and put it cautiously to her mouth.

  “Hafny!” she said. “It’s sweet!”

  Hafny’s face lit up and he stretched out a hand as greedily as Ceri. “May I?”

  “Go ahead.” Brenda pushed the barrel his way. “Don’t they allow you sweet things then?”

  “Only at Feasts,” Hafny said, crunching busily.

  “Nothing sweet grows underwater,” Halla explained.

  Brenda and Ceri were so horrified at this state of deprivation that they got in one another’s way to tip a heap of biscuits in front of the Dorig. But when Gerald, hoping to take advantage of these kindly feelings, tried to get down to business, disagreements began almost at once.

  “See here,” Gerald said. “All of us want to stop the Moor being flooded. Your lot want it flooded. Can you think of any way we can come to an agreement?”

  Hafny shrugged. “No,” he said frankly, with his mouth full.

  “It’s you Giants who are doing the flooding,” Halla said. “I told you it had nothing to do with us.”

  “Some of us Giants,” said Gerald.

  “These Giants live on the Moor,” Gair explained. “They don’t want their houses and land underwater any more than we want our mounds flooded.”

  Halla shrugged. “Then ask the other Giants.”

  “We did,” said Ayna. “And there are so many of them that they need the water to drink. The chief Giant has told us that there’s nowhere but the Moor where they can get it. But he said that if there was water anywhere else, he’d use it.”

  “I’m glad there isn’t,” said Halla. “We need the Moor flooded for living-space.”

  “Couldn’t you live somewhere else?” asked Gair.

  “Couldn’t you?” retorted Halla.

  “Not very easily,” said Gair, struggling not to get angry.

  “Neither can we,” said Halla.

  “And neither can we,” said Gerald. “Why do you need all that room?”

  “Why do you?” Halla countered.

  Gerald sighed angrily. Ayna said disgustedly, “This is getting nowhere!” Gair tried to swallow his mounting annoyance. Halla was no doubt angry still at the way they had captured her, but all the same, Gair was beginning to see why his people and the Dorig had always been enemies. He looked irritably at Hafny, who seemed quite content to sit gobbling biscuits and letting Halla talk, while he stared speculatively from face to face. Hafny was looking at Gerald as if Gerald’s size and restrained strength both awed him and made him feel rather scornful, when he felt Gair’s eyes on him. He looked at Gair and shrugged.

  “Our people are very short of space,” he said quietly. “They’ve been hopelessly overcrowded all my life.”

  “And of course the smaller kings keep pestering us for action,” Halla said. “Luckily, the Giants are acting for us. As soon as the observers reported that, we took steps to move the Lymen. The bad wells at Garholt are a real problem, but we’re dealing with that now, quite kindly.”

  “Kindly!” said Ayna.

  Gerald looked at Halla with deep contempt. Gair could see Gerald had formed a very low opinion of her mental powers. He thought Gerald was right. Judging by the unreflecting way she spoke, he suspected she was simply repeating what other, older Dorig said. “You know what you sound like?” Gerald said to her. “You sound just like newspaper propaganda. Next thing, you’ll be saying you invaded Otmound and Garholt for defense, or peace, or something.”

  It was hardly to be expected that Halla would understand this. Nor did she. “Well, it would be more peaceful if there weren’t any Lymen,” she said. “And flooding Otmound was defense, in a way. The Otmounders attacked the refugees from the Halls of the Kings, fifteen years ago, when all they were doing was peacefully crossing the Moor, and they killed a whole lot of them.”

  “But what about Garholt?” said Ayna. “We hadn’t attacked you.”

  “If you wanted the words off their wells, why couldn’t you have asked?” demanded Brenda. Halla looked at her as if she had formed much the same opinion of Brenda as Gerald had of her.

  “How did you flood Otmound?” Gair asked, remembering Gerald particularly wanted to know this.

  “With pumps,” Halla said carelessly, in the way people do when they have not much idea. “They’d been planning it for years.”

  “Where did the water come from?” Gerald asked eagerly, forgetting his irritation.

  Halla looked blank. Hafny, grinning a little at her ignorance, came to her rescue. “It was the water from the marsh that always has to be pumped out of our halls anyway. They piped it to the Otmound wells and pumped it out of them into the mound.”

  Everyone digested this. Dorig were plainly ingenious.

  “Pumped out of your halls?” Gerald said slowly, disappointed and puzzled, too.

  “Hey!” said Brenda. “I thought you lot lived in water!”

  “Not in water. Under water,” Hafny said. He looked round at their puzzled faces and seemed almost as puzzled himself. “We breathe air,” he said. This was plainly true. Now they came to look, everyone could see hi
m breathing, and Halla, too. They had noses. Their chests went up and down. There was no indication that they had gills or anything fishlike about them. “And we have to pump water out of our halls and let in air to breathe,” Hafny said. “Don’t you understand?”

  Gair thought he understood. He had a sudden perception of the Dorig living in something very like their mounds, only under the bottom of the marsh or river. He turned to Hafny to ask if this was indeed the case, and he had a feeling Hafny was quite ready to tell him anything he wanted to know, but, at that moment, disagreement flared up worse than before. Gerald, who must have understood somewhat as Gair had done, said, “Then you don’t have to live underwater at all. You could leave the Moor and live anywhere you wanted.”

  “No we can’t!” snapped Halla. Gerald’s lordly tone irritated her, and she was annoyed that he had made her look foolish over the pumps. “My people will never take orders from a Giant. You Giants are nothing but great crude robbers. You descend from bears!”

  “Nonsense!” Gerald said angrily.

  “Like you descend from frogs,” said Brenda.

  That made Halla angrier than ever. Her face went pale pink and her yellow eyes snapped. “You dare! You say that, when you stole the land from us! Then you pour filth into lakes and rivers until they’re not fit to swim in, and then you expect us to leave the Moor to please you! I tell you, we have a right to live here! We were the very first people here.”

  “No you weren’t,” said Ceri. “We were.”

  Ceri, perhaps, had simply been putting Halla right. But when Ayna joined in, Gair could see it was because she disliked Halla. “And the Giants took the land from us!” Ayna said heatedly. “But that hasn’t stopped us trying to be friends with them.” And she looked at Brenda. From the way Brenda looked back, it was evident the two of them were closing ranks against Halla.

  Halla saw it and nearly spat. “Yes, licking the foot that kicked you! Everyone was saying yesterday that that was just like Lymen. Listen, we were here before either of you. You came and drove us into the water. And when the Giants came and drove you into the ground, we were glad!”