Nightpool

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  “I must leave Nightpool now. I must help Camery; somehow I must get her away from Sivich.”

  Thakkur said nothing for a long time. He moved about the cave, looking out at the sea, rearing up to touch objects along the shelves. Then he dropped to all fours, and flowed up into his sleeping shelf, his movements liquid and graceful, from his broad white tail to his black nose and eyes.

  “I expect the owl will return very soon,” he said, rearing up on his sleeping shelf to stare at Teb. “You would do better to wait for him. He will have more news of Auric, for he goes to seek out the underground armies that are said to be based at Bleven.”

  “Bleven is where Garit sent me.”

  “Yes. It is possible your friend Garit has already rescued Camery. The owl could learn whether she is still in the tower and save you possible capture. It would be no trick for him to drop down into the tower at night and never wake the jackals.”

  Teb knew that Thakkur was right, though all his anger at Sivich, all his instincts, tried to drive him out at once to attack the palace at Auric. But alone? What could he do alone?

  “If you go now and are killed or taken captive again,” Thakkur said reasonably, “what good will that do your sister? And what help will that be to Auric, or to the forces that fight the dark?”

  “What is the dark? I know what the foxes told me, that it is the unliving, that it—” Teb stopped abruptly, staring at Thakkur. “That it takes your memory away,” he said slowly. “Gone—they showed me, Renata showed me. It was like what I felt. Exactly.”

  Thakkur looked back at him.

  “Did the dark do that to me?”

  The white otter shook his head. “I cannot tell, Tebriel. There are other things that make one’s memory fail. Injury, severe sickness. You cannot be certain it was the dark.”

  The white otter moved, gliding across the cave and back restlessly. They could hear the laughter of a band of young otters playing in the waves. When Thakkur spoke again, it was sadly.

  “You cannot know for certain. You cannot know precisely what the dark is, either, Tebriel, until you can know the turnings of Tirror’s past. Few on Tirror remember, yet only through understanding how Tirror was born can one understand the dark.”

  “Tell me, then. Will you tell me?”

  Thakkur settled onto his shelf and folded one paw over the other. And as he began the tale of Tirror, pictures came in Teb’s mind of all Thakkur told him, and of more, as if Thakkur’s words unlocked stores of knowledge in his own mind, hidden and surprising.

  “Tirror was born a spinning ball of gases,” Thakkur said, “a ball of gases formed by a hand of such power that no creature can know its true nature, the power of the Graven Light. The ball spun and cooled to molten fire, then over centuries it turned to barren stone. All by design, Tebriel. It warped and twisted into mountains and valleys, but there was no tree or plant, no animal, no water to nurture life. Then the power of the Graven Light covered the barren, cooling world with clouds, and the clouds gave down water, and then life came. Small at first, then richer, more varied, until all Tirror knew creatures and plants and abundance.

  “But from the very beginning, the fire and bareness and the promise of life lured the dark that always exists in black space, and that luring was not by design. The dark crept through crevices into the molten stone, and it lay dormant through all the changes, and even the power that made Tirror could not rout it. It insinuated itself into each new form the land took. And it waited. It is the opposite to the force of light that created Tirror, and perhaps for this reason it could not be routed. It is malevolent, it is thirsty, and it lay accumulating self-knowledge and earth-knowledge.”

  Teb shivered. “And the light couldn’t drive it out?”

  “The light did nothing.”

  “But. . .”

  “Perhaps it is a part of the pattern, that the dark be here. That it works its own forces and its own tests upon Tirror’s life. I don’t know, Tebriel. I know a soul can find true life or fall dying, according to whether it embraces the dark.” The white otter took up a small round stone and held it quietly, as if it soothed him. “Humans don’t remember, as they once did, the long-shadowed tale of this world, or even that there was a time before the small island countries existed. They don’t remember the five huge continents that once were the only land on Tirror.”

  Teb tried to imagine huge continents, and no island nations, but could not. “How could that be? What happened to them?”

  “Those five continents were drowned. The small island continents are the highest mountains of those vast lands; they are all that remains above water.

  “Once there were great ice caps on Tirror, but then the weather grew warmer. The ice began to melt and flood the seas. The seas rose and flooded the land, and drowned the lowlands and the valleys and all the cities there. It did not happen quickly; the shores crept up and up, and folk moved slowly back. But many starved when the crop lands and pastures were covered.”

  “How could people forget such a thing? How long ago?”

  “Perhaps twenty generations. Humans have forgotten because the source of their world memory is all but gone.

  “Once this knowledge was relived in every village, in every place where men and animals met, in ceremonies in the old temple sanctuaries. The past was brought alive by the skill of the singing dragons and the dragonbards, by the wonder of the dragon song. . . .”

  A strange feeling gripped Teb, a sense of power that puzzled him, and he saw his hands were shaking and clasped them tight.

  “But the force of the dark grew stronger, until at last it drove the dragons out, and captured or killed the bards. And the dark spread tales about the dragon song until soon folk no longer believed in it. And then, at last, it seemed there were no more dragons, not anywhere on Tirror. Memory died. And with its death, each person was separated from the rich multitude of the past, and was alone. Without memory, Tebriel, we cannot know what the present means. We cannot understand evil, or goodness. Our world is caught in despair. Perhaps it was the scent of despair that drew a more powerful dark to us, that drew the unliving into Tirror from far worlds.

  “In the far north,” Thakkur said, “lies a black palace that once was hidden beneath the ice. Where it came from, no one knows. When the ice melted, it stood alone there, and it is girded with uncounted doors, and each door leads to a world beyond this world.

  “It is believed that Quazelzeg came from there and brought the sea hydrus, and brought a terrible lust to join with the dark of Tirror. And that is when the dark began to rise and create forces to crush all world memory, bringing despair, and so in the end crushing all life except that which it will enslave.”

  “He brought the sea hydrus,” Teb said. And he could feel again the creature’s dark evil. “It made a blackness in my mind. It destroyed . . . something I did remember. I thought, when I looked at it, that it. . . wanted to possess me.”

  There was a long silence between them, in which, it seemed to Teb, questions and answers and knowledge passed back and forth, things Thakkur was unwilling to speak of, things subtle and secret and not to be spoken of, yet.

  “It may well have wanted to possess you, Tebriel.” They stared at each other.

  After a long time, Thakkur said, “It is told that, once, the dark leaders trained the hydrus to drive out and kill the singing dragons. Dark soldiers used to capture the baby singing dragons when they flew tame and gentle into the cities, and they put them into a pit with a hydrus. The babies would stand up on their hind legs and try to sing—until the hydrus tore out their throats.”

  Chapter 14

  It takes ten months to hatch a dragon. The eggs were cream colored and rubbery. By the time the dragonlings hatched in late spring, the shells were stained dark by the rotted carcasses. Dawncloud would lay her head close to each egg and listen to the new little creature inside, wriggling and changing position. When the first hatchling began to scratch on the egg, during a screamin
g storm that nearly tore the nest from the stony peak, Dawncloud hunkered down over it and cocked her great head, and smiled, filled with wonder and joy, then raised her face to the raging skies and screamed her pleasure out onto the storm.

  By the time spring had raged its final storm and turned gentle, all five young were out of the egg and curling and twisting about the nest, raising their little heads up blindly into the warm spring light. In another ten days their eyes were open and they had begun to perch out on the edge of the nest flapping their young wings, and to cluster around Dawncloud, slithering up her sides and listening intently to the songs she sang to them. She had sung to the eggs, too, all during the incubation, and now the dragonlings pushed at her with demanding little horns to hear the songs again, and to hear others. Without the songs, a dragonling is nothing; the songs were as much a part of them as their brand-new fangs and their fiery breath.

  They were very alike, these young, yet each was its own creature, bold in its own way, clever in its own way. They named themselves, as is the custom among dragons, with names chosen from the wealth of the songs. Three were females; two were males. The males would grow darker later. They were heavier and broader of head. The males named themselves Starpounder and Nightraider. The females were Windcaller, Moonsong, and Seastrider. It was Seastrider who began to yearn first out toward the vast world of Tirror, to lean out on the winds staring eastward as if something drew her there, where the sea lay beyond Windthorst. As the summer grew warm they all began to flap on the edge of the nest, and then in late summer to soar down to the lower peaks. Dawncloud was very protective of them, for fear of common dragons and hydruses, and would not let them fly out over the bays at all, for fear of the more formidable sea hydrus she knew lurked somewhere there.

  She had sensed the hydrus during all her long months on the nest, and sometimes an ugly song of him touched her. It was not a good time on Tirror; the dark was growing bold. And the young humans who could turn the tide were not many. One boy, one girl, and if there were others they were distant, and vague in her mind.

  She did not know just where the boy and girl were, but not far. Surely on, or near to, Windthorst. The wild, larger scenes that marked Tirror’s history filled her mind now, the battles and movements of armies, perhaps because of the growing warfare that scoured this world, and it was harder to touch the unique, small scenes and thoughts. The boy’s songs touched her sometimes, though, pleasing her and exciting Seastrider unbearably. Did the boy sense the young dragon’s yearning? Was he even aware of her?

  Dawncloud herself had begun to know a yearning, as fragile as mist, so small a feeling that she could hardly trust it. Was there to be another bonding for her? She had not heard her own name spoken by a human voice since her tall, sandy-haired bard, Daban, had leaped to her back for the last time calling her name and laughing with her and singing. When Daban was murdered she flew to Tendreth Slew and crawled into the mud and went to sleep there, heartbroken.

  Was there another calling now?

  Did someone stand at the doors of the black palace, perhaps, come from another world? Or was someone meant to come to those dark doors soon, approaching the vague gauze of Tirror’s future? From no other place, she thought, would the sense come, then vanish so elusively. It was a woman, she thought. But the pale aura of her presence was so very faint, nearly without substance at all.

  Dawncloud was far too busy tending her young to dwell long on her own needs, for she was driven to hunt ever harder to feed the rapacious young fledglings, to sing to them long into the night, and to watch over their still-clumsy flying. Starpounder still held his tail too low in the wind and grappled at the nest before launching out in unsteady flight; his three sisters laughed at him before leaping skyward themselves. Nightraider kept to himself, diligently strengthening his wings. It took the males longer to master flight because of their added weight. But summer was young yet; they would all be skilled by fall.

  *

  The owl returned to Nightpool after the last spring blizzard, and then again two days later. When he learned that Teb was the son of the murdered king of Auric, he flew at once to Auric’s palace to search for Camery, but within two days was back, to say she was not in the tower.

  “Did you look for her in Bleven?” Teb said, his heart sinking. “Maybe Garit took her to Bleven.”

  “I went to Bleven to the place of brewing, as you said. Ah, fine brew, such as was left. There wasn’t much, an open crock, and the brewer himself gone, no sign of anyone, the place ransacked and the whole town deserted.”

  “And Camery was gone?”

  “Yes. If she was ever there.”

  “And you didn’t see a redheaded man?”

  “I saw no one.”

  “I must go to look for her.”

  “Where will you look that the animals cannot? Already the foxes search for her up through Mithlan and Baylentha and over into Ratnisbon. The foxes send you greeting, Tebriel. Did you know that Luex and Faxel tried to rescue you there on the battlefield at Baylentha and drove the dying horse off your leg?”

  “No. I don’t remember. . . . But what happened to them? It must have been their cries that Charkky and Mikk heard.”

  “Chased by jackals clear to the western ridge, where they went to ground and lost them,” Old Bloody Beak said, grinning. And then, “Here,” he said, pushing out a small object that had lain under his feathered posterior where he had dropped it. “I found this in the house of the brewer, underneath a girl’s ragged gown and tangled beneath a pile of bedclothes.”

  Teb took the small, leather-bound diary eagerly. It was Camery’s, the spine sewn with linen thread by a little girl’s hand, the vellum pages covered with her neat, familiar handwriting. She had been at Bleven!

  He turned the pages, hoping they would speak to him. But he could read no word, only a few scattered letters and his own name. The writing was very small and crowded, and she had written on both sides of the paper. The last entry was hastily written, scrawled angling across the page.

  “I can’t read it,” Teb said, ashamed. “Can you?”

  “No owl can read. Our eyes are not suited to such work. Nor can otters,” he said, anticipating Teb’s thought. “Owls can see small birds at great distances, and an otter can see clearly underwater. But letters on a page are altogether a different matter.”

  “I must know what it says. Maybe the last pages tell what has happened to her.”

  He put the diary into his tunic pocket. He would not look at it again until after the meeting in the great cave, where Thakkur bid the owl come for prayer.

  *

  Teb sat at the side of the cave with Charkky and Mikk and Jukka and Kkelpin, ignoring the sour looks from Ekkthurian’s friends. More otters than not smiled at him, twitching their whiskers, and he heard soft hahs across the cave in gentle greeting. The owl sat up on the dais next to Thakkur, surrounded by the twelve, Ekkthurian scowling among them, along with Urikk and Gorkk.

  “Old Ekkthurian’s lucky he doesn’t have to look at himself,” whispered Charkky. “That frown would make a person sick to his stomach.”

  “He doesn’t like having Red Unat up there,” Mikk said. “He doesn’t think it’s seemly.”

  “He doesn’t think anything’s seemly,” Charkky said. “Except making others miserable. I wish the hydrus would eat him.”

  “Does it eat folk?” Teb said, frowning.

  They all stared at him. “Of course it does,” Kkelpin said. “What else would it be wanting?”

  “I don’t know.” But it seemed to Teb it wanted something else. He could still see in his mind the lure of those three terrifying faces. “I don’t know what else it could want.”

  His songs had returned to him shortly after the hydrus attacked them. But there were new songs, too, come into his head then, ugly songs filled with a sense of the hydrus. And if it had put them there, why had it?

  On the dais, Red Unat fluffed his feathers and shook his wings, then stood loo
king down at the mass of otters crowded into the cave. It was a moonlight meeting, and moonlight shone across his dark, mottled feathers, silhouetted against Thakkur’s whiteness and against the pearly gleam of the mosaicked walls. The crowd of otters covered the floor of the cave in a great dark mass, and only the gleam of their eyes was clear. Though to the owl’s sight, Teb thought, every detail of nose and whisker and claw would be visible. The owl spoke of the wars in the north, and it was not cheering news, for Quazelzeg was still moving south, slowly destroying everything in his path, food and shelter and herds.

  “He has conquered the Seven Islands and enslaved the fishing villages of Thappan and destroyed the fishing boats—the hydrus did that in one raging night of terror. He has taken the mines at Neiwan. They are working women and children in the mines to make coal for Quazelzeg’s forges and driving the men hitched to plows, instead of oxen. They ate the oxen and commandeered every horse and pack pony. They are raping the land, and already the conquered are starving. They will come down into Windthorst to deal with Ebis the Black soon enough. And,” said the owl, turning to stare at the council, “once he has conquered the human world, he will prey on the animals in one way or another.”

  “But there is nothing here for him,” said Ekkthurian. “Why would he want to come here?”

  “He doesn’t need a reason,” said the owl. “He will invent a reason. Otter hides, maybe,” he said, glaring at Ekkthurian. “Soft, warm otter hides for winter.”

  There was a great hush in the cave.

  Charkky turned to look at Mikk, and their paws touched across Teb. Teb heard Jukka swallow as she pulled her heavy tail tighter around herself.

  “And now the hydrus is returning, too,” said the owl. “It is a more immediate threat. It moves south from Vaeal, along in the shallower coastal seas. There are three teams of little screech owls watching and tracking it, and they will warn the otters at Rushmarsh when it gets close and send a message to Ebis the Black.”