Nightpool

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

Mitta frowned at him. He felt tender toward her, knew she had tended him, only now she looked more angry than gentle. “We do not have fire at Nightpool. This is good food. You have been eating it all along. You need the strength it will give you.” She stood glaring at Teb until he managed to down a piece of the stuff, and found it was not so bad. He ate another—an oyster, he guessed—and soon grinned up at them and finished the lot. And then he felt sleepy again, his eyes so heavy, and he dropped off, watching Mitta tuck the moss cover around him.

  He woke much later in a patch of sunlight that shone down from a high opening at the back of the cave. He was alone. It was warm. He stared out through the door at the sea and felt the salt wind in his face. He looked down at the clay cast that held his leg and peered under the rumpled moss blanket to find himself naked. There were scars on his arms and thigh and chest where old wounds had healed, a scar on his arm that he stared at, frowning. It ran through a little brown mark that puzzled him, though he did not know why. He pulled the cover back over himself, and looked around at the cave, at its dark stone walls curving up to the dome overhead. Seats were carved into the walls, and shelves at different levels, and ledges for sleeping, like the one on which he lay.

  The higher shelves held objects from the sea, shells of different shapes and colors, and corals. There were some bones, too, and a whitened human skull. And, in one large niche all alone, the immense jawbone of some creature with viciously sharp teeth. Teb thought it must be a shark.

  When the white otter returned he sat near Teb and smiled a whiskery grin that made Teb want to laugh. Yet there was a great, calm dignity about the white otter, too.

  “Thakkur,” Teb said. “I remember. I guess you saved my life. I guess I don’t remember much about coming here. How did I get here? How long have I been lying here?”

  Thakkur’s whiskers twitched. “It has been all summer, and we are now into the fall; the shad are running. You had a very high fever for a long time. You slept a good deal. I expect everything is muddled in your mind. But can you tell me your name? Can you tell me what happened to you?”

  Teb tried, and when his name would not come to him, a surge of panic swept over him. He could not remember how he had gotten here, or how he had gotten hurt. He knew his leg had been broken; he could remember the otters setting it, could still remember tears springing at the sudden violent pain. But he could not remember anything before the disjointed scenes here in this cave and some confused, dark dreams that would not come clear.

  “It will come,” said the white otter at last. “It will come when you are stronger. Meanwhile,” he said, laying a paw on Teb’s arm, “you are safe here. And welcome.”

  But he was not welcome by everyone, Teb knew that. And he would know it more certainly soon enough.

  It was some time after the white otter left that Mitta came to sit with Teb again, her paws busy now weaving grasses into a thin cord, and he remembered her sitting quietly beside him many times when he woke, and always her paws were busy working at something, or playing with the necklace of stones she wore. He saw, when he began to have visitors, that all the otters except Thakkur wore such stones.

  The visitors came two and three at a time to look at him and touch him with shy, thrusting paws, rearing and grinning with whiskered smiles and fishy breath, saying, “Hah, human boy,” and “Hah, you are better, human boy.” They would come dripping from the sea, their thick fur all spiky from being wet, and they would come in dry and sleek and groomed, silken and beautiful. But always their paws were busy as they visited with him, playing with the worry stones usually, as if an otter’s paws had not the ability to be still. Mitta sent one small cub out because it made too much fuss by jumping up onto Teb’s sleeping shelf to investigate his cast with busy fingers. “Get out into the day and play with your worry stones, and leave the poor boy alone.”

  Otters touched his cheek with cold, damp paws. Young otters nuzzled up to him and brought him limp wildflowers, and in between visitors Teb lay looking at Thakkur’s strange collection of relics from the sea. When Charkky and Mikk came to sit with him, Charkky lifted down the treasures one at a time for him to examine. There were, besides the shells and bones, some rusted tools and odd bits of metal, a hinge, a spike, gold coins and pearls, and a box made of sea-darkened maple and carved with words across its top. He fingered the carved letters but could not make meaning of them.

  “I thought all humans could read,” Charkky said.

  “I don’t know,” Teb said, confused. “Only that I can’t read this.” He felt so empty, not to know anything about himself, not to know his name or how he had gotten to the marsh where Charkky and Mikk had found him. They told him about the battle, and about the making of the raft and their journey home, but he could not remember anything before that time. He had no idea what the battle was about, though all the otters agreed it had to do with the dark forces, and with a leader called Quazelzeg. He had no idea what he had been doing in that battle.

  Strangely, he felt most at ease within himself in the evenings when he was alone in the cave with Thakkur, for the old white otter did not ask difficult questions, but instead told him the tales of the Ottra nation, fables of the sea and of magic creatures, stories that stirred some strange longing in him; as if he had heard such tales before, as if he valued them. Somehow such tales seemed a part of himself, though he had no notion how. Tales of the diving whales that would come to the surface with the sucker marks of giant squid on their black hides from deep-sea battles, tales of seabirds that could travel the entire length of the great sea without ever landing, and of the sea bat that swam deep down on wings as wide as the length of twenty otters. Tales of ghost lights deep in the sea made by the souls of drowned fishermen. Tales of drowned cities that once had stood on solid land; though it was not until much later that Thakkur explained how such a thing could be. Tales of the ghosts that were said to haunt such cities. And tales of the three-headed black hydrus that Thakkur said was so very different from the smaller land hydruses, fiercer, and foreign to this world, having entered Tirror from some other world. Though again, it was not until a later time that Thakkur would tell him how that entry was accomplished, or how deep was the sea hydrus’s evil.

  When Teb began to feel stronger, he grew restless, hobbling around the cave, but the clay cast was fragile, and Mitta wouldn’t allow him to go very far out along the ledge. The cast was hot and itchy, too, and he longed to pull it off. Mitta said, “Not yet. I don’t know how long it will take to heal; I only know about otters’ legs. And yours was so very hurt. A few more weeks, and we will cut it off.” But he dreamed of being free of it, and of leaping into the cool sea, free and whole, to dive and float as the otters did, to roll and play their complicated sea games with them. Though Teb had no idea whether he could swim. He could not remember swimming.

  He moved his sleeping place to a shelf beside the door, opposite Thakkur’s, where he could look directly down at the pounding waves and feel the sea spray on his face. And in the daytime he watched the otters fishing in the bright, rolling sea, their long sinuous bodies turning underwater, and he imagined how cool and silky the water must feel.

  Then one morning early, Charkky and Mikk appeared at the cave door with a long, forked branch.

  “It’s a crutch,” Charkky said, and hobbled a few steps to demonstrate. “We padded it with moss. See?”

  Teb tried it, and it worked just fine. He hobbled around the cave, grinning.

  “And Mitta says you are to come and live in her cave awhile,” said Mikk. “You are growing too restless. You can wander more on the inside of the island.”

  He walked to Mitta’s cave on the new crutch, over the rocky rim of the island, flanked by Charkky and Mikk. They paused on the high rim, whipped by the sea wind, and Teb stared down at the inner island with surprise. “It’s hollow.” A bright green valley lay far down in the cupped center of Nightpool, rich with meadow, and with a little lake and a brilliant green marsh and, at the far side
of the valley just below the rising black cliff, a long body of water that was an inner sea, moving and churning like the great sea. He could see a black tunnel at the south end through which the sea was flowing in. The inner cliffs, around the meadow, were lined with dwelling caves. “It’s all hidden, the whole valley. No one would ever know.”

  Charkky and Mikk grinned at his appreciation.

  Below them in the little lake, a dozen otter cubs were playing catch with a shell, tossing it far out, and diving and squealing. At Mitta’s cave, her own three cubs overwhelmed Teb with chittering and hugging, and the smallest climbed right up his good leg, to cling to his neck, tickling his throat with her whiskers.

  So it was that Teb moved into Mitta’s cave, with a sleeping shelf by the door, where he could come and go as he liked. From here, with the help of the crutch, he could make his way down to the little valley and wander among the tall bright grasses beside the marsh, watching the water birds fly up and small snakes slip away from him, watching the otters at food gathering.

  He missed Thakkur, though, and the long evenings of storytelling. He went back often, but it was not quite the same as listening to Thakkur’s tales curled up under the cover, ready for sleep. And there was no strong pounding of the sea in Mitta’s cave, only a faint echo accompanying the sleepy whimpers of the cubs. Teb began to put himself to sleep by trying out different stories about himself. Was he a fisherman’s son? A blacksmith’s helper? Where had the scars come from? No story he could imagine seemed to stir a memory, even that of a slave, though it would explain the scars. And then one morning, Mitta found the note.

  She had laid his bloody tunic and ripped trousers away at the back of her cave and given him a moss wrap to wear. But one morning early the three tumbling cubs found the clothes and pulled them out and began a rough game with them until Mitta returned and snatched them away. As she straightened them, her busy paws found a piece of paper deep in the tunic pocket.

  It was wrinkled and torn, and had been wet, so the writing was blurred. He stared at it and knew—he knew—but then it was gone, the knowledge gone. He tried to make out the words.

  After a long time, Mitta said, “What does it tell you?”

  “I can’t read it,” he said, puzzling. “I can see the letters plainly under the blur. But I don’t know what they say.” He frowned. “I can’t read, Mitta. I don’t know how to read.” He felt strange and empty. Surely he had known how to read; he was not a baby, but half grown.

  “Is it such a bad thing not to know how to read?” Mitta said. “Otters don’t know how.”

  “I think it’s a bad thing for humans.” He stared at the paper, perplexed. But it was not until two days later, when he had picked it up for the hundredth time to try to puzzle it out, that he suddenly saw one word in a new way and could read it.

  “Tebriel!” he shouted, startling the tumbling cubs. “Tebriel! My name is Tebriel.”

  The three cubs crowded around him. “Tebriel! Tebriel! Let us see!”

  “Right here,” he said, pointing. “Plain as your whiskers, it says ‘Tebriel.’”

  They glided up onto his knees and stared at the crumpled paper, but it was only blurred squiggles to their eyes.

  “If you can read your name,” said Mitta, “can you read the rest?”

  “No,” he said, frowning at the faded paper.

  “Is the paper so very important?”

  “It might tell me who I am.”

  “But you know who,” cried the cubs. “You are Tebriel. Teb, Teb, Tebriel,” they chattered.

  “I don’t know who, though. I don’t know who Tebriel is.”

  “Perhaps Thakkur can conjure a vision that will tell you,” said Mitta. “In the sacred shell, in the great hall. Your name will help him, something to bring the vision.”

  “He can do it,” cried the bigger male cub.

  “He can do it at the meeting to decide . . .” began the female, then looked distressed.

  “Meeting to decide what?” said Teb.

  Mitta sighed. “You will have to know soon enough.”

  The cubs were silent now.

  “To decide about you,” Mitta said. “To decide whether you can stay at Nightpool. It will be voted on. Some . . . some of the clan want to send you away.”

  “Oh,” Teb said. “I see. Well, I am well now; my leg is all but mended. I can go away now.”

  “And where would you go, when you don’t know who you are? There are the scars of a whip on your back, Tebriel. And the marks of a chain on your ankle. Do you think you can wander across Tirror in any safety when you don’t know whom to trust, and who might again make you a prisoner?”

  “Then I must wait for the vision to tell me.”

  “If Thakkur can bring a vision. It is not always so. Sometimes it takes much more than the germ of a word to bring knowledge through the sacred shell.” Mitta pulled a squirming cub to her and fondled his ears. “Thakkur’s visions are not such an easy magic as young cubs would like to believe.”

  Chapter 10

  Across the vast floor of the meeting cave, otters drew close to one another in untidy groups, a mass of dark velvet with gleaming dark eyes flashing looks at one another. On the stone dais at the back, Thakkur, white against the dark coats of the twelve council members, stood at prayer.

  The walls of the cave were set with pieces of shells of all kinds, in every color a shell can be, to make pictures, the pictures of animals, so that Teb was caught in a memory that stirred him terribly. What was this feeling? What was he trying to remember? He sat on a stone bench against the wall of the cave, between Charkky and Mikk, staring around at the animal pictures caught in a shaft of sunlight, and could almost see other pictures, another place very like this; yet when he tried to bring his thoughts clear, that other place vanished.

  He studied these pictures, frowning. They showed otters. And foxes. Wolves and great cats and one old badger. They showed three unicorns. They showed a whole cloud of owls flying. And on the wall behind the dais was the picture that stirred him most. There, caught in flight, was an immense dragon, her wings spread halfway round the walls as she twisted in flight, gleaming. She struck him dumb with wonder, with recognition, with awe and yearning and confusion.

  He could not understand his emotions, and the more he tried the more confused he got, until his mind churned into a muddle and he gave it up, and attended instead to Thakkur’s prayers.

  They were gentle prayers of joy, and of thanksgiving for the good run of fishes, the good and plentiful yields of oysters and clams and periwinkles, and all the crops the otters harvested. And then a prayer of thanksgiving, too, for Teb himself, that he had healed and was well again. And then Thakkur turned to face the giant clamshell that stood upright on a stone pedestal at the center back of the dais. The cave became hushed as the white otter raised his paws, then stood motionless, his back very straight. He spoke so softly Teb could not make out the words, but soon the concave face of the shell began to shine with a smoky light. Vague shadows moved across it. Thakkur spoke Teb’s name three times, then waited. No image came clear, and again he spoke. ‘Tebriel. Tebriel.”

  No image formed, and at long last the shadows across the shell vanished. Thakkur turned to face the gathered otters, and a sigh of disappointment filled the cave.

  “I can bring nothing clear. I can bring no image to show us who you are, Tebriel.”

  “Then,” spoke up Ekkthurian sharply, “we will discuss what to do with the boy.”

  Beside Teb, Charkky sat up straighter, his whiskers twitching with anger. “The devil take Ekkthurian,” he said softly. “The sharks take him!”

  Mikkian sat very still, one paw lifted to his whiskers in a stiff, arrested gesture. Then he turned to look at Teb, his whiskers bristling and his round dark eyes flashing, and a little growl deep in his throat. “Don’t pay any attention to what he’s going to say. Old Ekkthurian’s nothing but a grouch.”

  But the sense of peace and unity that the p
rayers had brought, and that Thakkur’s attempt at vision had brought, dissolved as Ekkthurian rose from his place in the council ring, his voice harsh and hissing.

  “The boy is healed. His fever is cured. His limb mended. I saw him walk here to the meeting cave by himself, on the sapling crutch. I say it is time he move on. Nightpool is not meant for humans.”

  “What reasons do you have for hurrying our guest away?” asked Thakkur.

  “We do not receive guests at Nightpool, except others of the clan. We never have. Only the otters of Rushmarsh are welcome.”

  “Has that been put to a vote?” inquired Thakkur.

  “No vote is needed. That is our custom.”

  “It was not the custom when Nightpool was a sanctuary. When it stood along the old road before the causeway collapsed, no wanderer was turned away, human or animal. Who changed our customs?”

  “Those days are gone. This is not that time; that time is long past. Humans traveling the land now cannot be trusted.”

  “Do you question the boy’s honesty?”

  “There is no commerce anymore between us who speak with honest tongue and the human horde. They have proven themselves untrustworthy.”

  “Not all humans are of a kind,” said Thakkur. “Any more, Ekkthurian, than are any race.”

  “There is no perfidy or dishonesty among our race.”

  ‘That,” said Thakkur, “is a matter of opinion. Now I put the matter to vote. Know you all that the boy has, at this time, no other safe sanctuary save Nightpool. He does not know who he is or where he belongs. He has been kept as slave by someone, for there are the marks of irons on his ankles and the scars of a whip on his back.” Thakkur seemed very tall, there on the dais. “If we turn away one innocent human boy who has been so mistreated, know you that all of us will suffer soon enough at the hands of his abusers.”

  “How do you know such a thing?” barked Ekkthurian. “Is that a prophecy?”

  “It is a prophecy,” Thakkur said shortly. He stood looking at the council members coolly, his white body gleaming in the morning light. Then he looked down to the gathered otters. “The clan will vote, not the council.”