Lampfish of Twill

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Eric rose to his feet and set Gullstone down among some clumps of grass. Then he watched nervously as the bird strutted away several yards. After all they had been through together, he felt more protective than ever and did not want to let the gull out of his sight for a minute. Nor did he, in this crucial matter, like to rely on the advice of Mr. Ezekiel Cantrip, who had tricked and alarmed him so many times. The fellow was completely unpredictable. Who could be sure, even now, that they weren’t under the influence of some ridiculous spell? Eric scooped Sir Gullstone off the ground and walked back toward the boulder.

  “Mr. Cantrip,” he began.

  The old man raised a hand. “I know, I know. You want an accounting of this place. You’re a traveler at heart, I can see. Not content to pass through with a glance and blink. Got to have the details of what’s under what. Well, I’ve done some research, let me say, since I dropped down here by accident all those years ago. What with my own travels since, I’ve put things together. I’ve seen some, though not all, of the larger design. If you’ll leave that poor gull alone for a minute and come sit down, I’ll give you the story. That’s right, put him down. No, don’t worry—he’ll stick near.”

  Then, though Eric wasn’t at all sure he was the sort of traveler the fishcatcher had in mind or that he should believe what he was about to hear, the fishcatcher began to tell the history of Underwhirl: how it was the first, the most ancient, and the most beautiful world of Earth, the core from which their own present world had evolved, how this original core had been enveloped by oceans, submerged by time, left behind as newer worlds rose and became peopled and were built over it. So for eons it had lain, deep and unchanged, below the surface. And though all signs of it had vanished, it remained connected to the upper world by means of a series of whirlpools that had sprung up through the oceans in earliest times.

  “In former days, the old world beneath the whirlpools was not forgotten,” the fishcatcher explained. “It was part of our world’s history, and the whirlpools’ connections were understood. Later, the whirlpools shriveled and became fewer, and people began to forget, not only in Twill, but everywhere. Now there are fewer spouts still, and those handful are often found in out-of-the-way places, where our upper world’s habit of change hasn’t so fiercely caught hold.”

  “And the lampfish?” asked Eric. “What part do they play?”

  “But they are exactly what they are called,” Zeke Cantrip replied. “Lamp fish. The name is ancient. They are and always were the guides and lights to Underwhirl. They come and go between the worlds. I suppose in the deep past there were many more of them, and that when people on our shores looked out upon their rosy lights, they were reminded of the vast, unchangeable world below. Perhaps they were comforted to know that it would be there forever. The upper world has always been a place of such furious change. Not that it shouldn’t be, of course. That’s the way of life. I’ve always been in favor of moving on and out, of not holding things back, as you know very well.”

  He looked pointedly at Eric, who sent Gullstone a guilty look.

  “The strange part,” the fishcatcher continued, “is that the name of the lampfish should be so well remembered in Twill when its real meaning was lost long ago.

  “It’s even stranger how Twill got fixed on the lampfishes’ red bones, and a whole different idea of the great fish grew up,” Eric added. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? I would have stopped hunting the minute I knew.”

  The fishcatcher shook his head and laughed. “Ha!” he replied. “You’d never have heard me. You were as deaf as the rest till I got you down here.”

  Eric thought this unfair since in his view he’d listened quite hard to Zeke Cantrip, when he wasn’t giggling and blathering on about nothing. There was no time to protest, however. Suddenly the old man was up on his feet, gesturing at the horizon with his usual melodrama.

  “Speaking of moving on!” he bellowed. “It’s time to hoist our sails.”

  “Is there a storm?” Eric cried in alarm. He jumped up and made a grab for Gullstone.

  “A storm! That’s a good one! Don’t you know there’s never been a storm in Underwhirl? And never will be, neither, just like there’ll never be a sunset or a moonrise or a hot day or a cold one. Nothing moves down here, in case you hadn’t noticed. Nothing changes or moves. It’s always the same.” Mr. Cantrip started to lurch away.

  “Wait!” shouted Eric. “That’s not true at all. What about those big pink clouds floating over our heads. What about…” He looked around for other examples.

  “What about…” There wasn’t anything he could see at the moment. No wind, no wisp of fog or bird going by.

  “What about those big, rose-colored clouds?” he yelled again, for lack or other evidence. They were most certainly moving across the sky.

  Up ahead, the old man came to a halt and turned around.

  “Suit yourself,” he called back, with a touch of impatience. “But nothing moves nor has moved since before the dawn of time. Except the lampfish, of course.” He waved his hands toward the clouds.

  “Lampfish!” Eric looked up.

  He saw them immediately: enormous pink-scaled fish trailing streams of foamy mustaches across Underwhirl’s bright sky.

  “Ho!” cried Mr. Cantrip. “You never expected to see them there, did you? And so you didn’t. There’s the mind of Twill at work. You’d best be rid of it down here.”

  “Lampfish,” Eric murmured, staring up in awe. He had never seen them in broad daylight before. They were drifting about with the same magical glow as when they swam in the waters off Twill’s coast. But here they swam unafraid, in the open, as if air rather than water was their natural element, as if they didn’t have a single worry in the world.

  And they didn’t! Eric realized suddenly. He stood gazing up, clutching Gullstone in both arms. Or rather, they wouldn’t if they never went up the whirlpool. If they stayed here forever where no one could hunt them, where no storm could touch them and there was no need to hide.

  “Mr. Cantrip!” The fishcatcher had already put quite a distance between them, Eric saw with a start.

  “Wait, wait! Don’t leave us behind!” He wrapped Gullstone tightly against his chest and raced to catch up.

  “Why are we always racing to catch up with Zeke Cantrip?” he muttered to the bird as they panted down the road. “There is something about him that pulls us along. In Twill, in Underwhirl, it doesn’t matter where we are. Willing or unwilling, we follow either way!”

  Gully lay his head sympathetically against his friend’s shoulder.

  14

  NEVER HAD ERIC FELT as happy as he now began to feel, walking with the fishcatcher through Underwhirl’s lands. Never had he felt so pleased to be in a place. The comparison with Twill was breathtaking, for in almost every detail, Underwhirl was different. Where Twill was rough and spare and sparse, Underwhirl poured forth every kind of natural luxury. Fields of flowers, for instance, soft grass, blossoming trees. The road they traveled was smooth and warm under his bare feet, and so flat that Eric wished he had his trolley to race along it. There were no cliffs or ledges, no Cowering huts or toppled-down barns.

  There was no ocean anywhere in sight and, along with this, no anxious glance for the threatening thundercloud. There was no scanning the horizon or raising a finger to the wind. There was no wind! That took care of that. There was no sun either, apparently. But a sparkling transparency lay over the view, as if everything were encased in high-polished glass.

  It was not long before Eric took the fishcatcher’s advice and put Gullstone on the ground to fend for himself. The bird had quickly become too heavy to carry, and there was no danger that Eric could see. Also, though he didn’t like to complain, his unshod feet had begun to wear. A blister had already formed on the bottom of one heel, causing him to limp.

  “Aha!” the old man cried when he saw the trouble. “I was afraid of that! Hold on a minute, and I’ll have you fixed up.” He sa
t down at once by the roadside and took off his boots and his heavy fishing socks. Reaching inside a boot, he removed its leather sole lining. This he fitted inside one of the socks, making an ingenious slipper shoe.

  “Quit worrying about that gull and jump yourself into these,” he said, when he had finished the second sock. “You’ll be glad of them by the end of our road.”

  “Are you sure Gully will stay with us?” Eric asked, after he had put on the socks gratefully. “I wouldn’t want him to get lost down here.”

  Zeke Cantrip rolled exasperated eyes. “And where would the beleaguered bird go? Not up, that’s certain.”

  It was perfectly true. Gullstone could not fly. He trooped along behind them in a sort of flapping canter. Every once in a while he would spread his wings and lunge upward. But two or three feet was the highest he could go before falling back in a jumble of wings.

  Eric was rather relieved when he saw this. Flying was such a dangerous business. In Twill, he had never liked the way Gullstone could disappear for hours at a time. How much better that Underwhirl did not allow it, he thought, though Gully looked a little frustrated. The poor bird could not seem to understand the new rule and kept beating his wings in furious attempts to rise.

  And then, as they walked, Eric began to feel heaviness in his own body. His arms and legs acquired weight. His shoulders stooped beneath an unseen burden. The fishcatcher felt it, too. He walked slower and slower and finally called a halt to rest. But he was nervous about stopping for too long and urged Eric to his feet after only a few minutes.

  “Where are we going, and how much further is it, if you don’t mind my asking,” Eric demanded, when they halted a second time, more tired than ever. “We could use a longer rest after that struggle in the spout. Do we need to be in such a rush?”

  “We’re going to the settlement on Underwhirl’s lower flank. But there’s no rush about it,” the old man replied, giving Eric a quizzical look. “We have all the time in the world, and more.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because we’ve got to keep moving! Come on. Let’s go.

  “Wait a minute! That was less of a stop than we made before! Gully looks as if he’s on his last legs.”

  “And that’s exactly the reason why we must move along!” cried the fishcatcher. “Now, up, up, or we’ll be moored here forever.”

  So they plunged off again across the very beautiful and very still countryside of Underwhirl. It wasn’t that they were hot. The day was a most perfect temperature. Nor were they thirsty or hungry. Eric had never felt better in his life. The trouble came when he walked, or moved forward in any way. Then it seemed that the air refused to part, that the road wrestled with his feet and the landscape itself conspired to hold him in place with the charming stillness of its views

  “Stop! Stay!” everything commanded. “Why go any further when you have all of this!”

  Nevertheless, Eric fought ahead. He was curious about what the settlement might be. Not once along their route had he caught sight of another person or any signs of human life. For that matter, he had seen no animals, insects, or birds. A rather unusual place Underwhirl was turning out to be, but whatever he might find, nothing could take away Eric’s pleasure at being here. Safe was how he felt, for the first time in his life. Or rather, safe was how he was beginning to feel, how he saw it might be possible to feel if only he could stay in the place long enough.

  “No storms!” he could be heard muttering incredulously to himself as they plodded along. “No tides or currents! No weeps! No fishing and”—here he glanced over his shoulder, just in case—“no Old Blaster!”

  And he was most pleased of all to see his great lovable bird flapping along by his side like a well-trained dog, even if the gull did look a bit ragged from the effort. Even if his fine, white wings dragged for whole minutes on the ground now, and his arrogant head was bent, and there was a wobble in his walk that Eric hadn’t seen before.

  They had halted and gone on, halted and marched ahead so many times in the last however many hours it was (“No use counting time,” Mr. Cantrip observed. “It ran out here long ago, if there ever was any”), that Eric didn’t bother to glance around when yet another halt was called on yet another radiant hillside. But his eye leaped up a minute later at the sound of the fishcatcher’s voice.

  “There it is!” the old man wheezed. “Look, the settlement. At last!” The trek had exhausted him. He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

  “Where?” asked Eric. Despite the distance they had traveled, they were standing in a place so like the one they had started from, that a person might easily have mistaken the two.

  The fishcatcher had sighted something new, though. “There!” he cried, with a weary gesture. He began to limp toward an ancient and disreputable grove of trees. Eric followed, and though he peered and squinted and tried to rid himself of the mind of Twill, as the fishcatcher had advised, the grove refused to look any way other than ordinary. However, as they drew closer, a general rattle of branches arose, and a few less gnarled and twisted forms seemed to lean toward them.

  “Ahoy! Ahoy, there!” the fishcatcher cried in a delighted voice. And to Eric “Come ahead, young fellow. We’ve made it, I think!” Then again: “Ahoy!” to which there came a collective rustling reply that might have been “Ahoy!” or some more foreign greeting.

  And then they were among their welcomers, who were not trees at all, Eric finally saw, but people standing, sitting, and stooping among trees, people woven among trees in such a way that Eric could not see clearly which was tree and which was person. His confusion was increased by the rootedness of the figures. They looked as planted in the ground as the trees themselves, and, on closer inspection, appeared to have only the vaguest suggestion of legs.

  Zeke Cantrip was not worried by any of this. He was in the middle of a jubilant reunion, hobbling to and fro, embracing whole clumps of figures, shouting out hellos at the top of his lungs. Clearly, these were people he knew and liked, whom he hadn’t seen for a great many years.

  “Saved my life, they did,” he explained to Eric, in between greetings. “I was pretty well broke up after coming down the spout that first time. By sheer good luck, I stumbled into this grove, thinking, I suppose, to curl up and die in peace. But these dear old sticks took pity on me. They nursed and sheltered and generally rustled me back to life.”

  A long applauselike rustle followed this speech. The tree-figures were tremendously pleased to see the old man, though rather hampered, Eric observed, by their stiff postures. They moved ever so slowly, reaching out to greet their friend. They nodded their heads and swiveled their bodies inch by arduous inch, then toiled valiantly to recover their positions.

  The fishcatcher was respectful throughout these rather ridiculous gymnastics and did not mind at all the long waits and awkward pauses in-between. When the first round of hellos was completed, he cried out eagerly to the grove, “And now! Let me introduce you to my traveling companion.” So Eric was taken between and around large numbers of twiggish arms, and he shook hands when they were laboriously offered, and tried to understand what was being said to him. And after a while, he did understand. Within the drawn-out rustle were slow-spoken words, perfectly clear when you slowed your own ear to receive them.

  “I…am…Wilmer…Diggs…sea…farer…swept…down…the…spout…in…a…hurr…i…cane…in…nine…teen…thir…ty…six.…”

  “I…..am…..Su…..san…..Ratch…..fish…..catch…..er…..caught.….in….. the…..whirl…..pool…..chas…..ing….. blue…..fish…..eight…..een…..twen…..ty…..one….”

  “Here…….be…….Cap…….tain…….Dav…….id…….Jones…….trad…….er..…..blown…….off…….course…….by…….a…….blast…….ed…….ty…….phoon…….and…….swal…….lowed…….up…….ship…….and…….all.…”

  “Tell him what year, Davy,” said the fishcatcher, who was listening with interest to th
ese recitations.

  “Six………teen………sev………en………ty………two,” came the slowest of all the slow-rustling voices, and Zeke Cantrip turned to Eric with a triumphant grin.

  “That’s more than three hundred years ago. There are others here older, but none whom we can any longer understand. The distance between their words has become so great that whole days may pass (by our Twillian measure) before a single sentence is uttered. Among those here in the settlement, it makes no difference, of course. Slow or fast, it’s all the same. You can be sure that conversations are under way even now that we cannot detect, conversations that may require hundreds or thousands of years to complete. Our ears hear only the youngest, quickest voices, those still in the range of our time-tempered senses.”

  “Do you mean that the longer they’re here, the slower they go?” Eric whispered. He didn’t want to embarrass the members of the settlement.

  “Yes, it’s true! And nothing to be ashamed of!” the fishcatcher answered. “People here are proud of their age. The long-range view is much prized in the settlement, and difficult to achieve, especially coming from a background of short-term struggle and risk. It takes hundreds of timeless years before the slowdown is complete. By that time, of course, the short-range view has paid the price. I’m told by my friends here that the present becomes so small and insignificant, so uninteresting in the general scheme of things, that it tends to become completely ignored. Ahem!”

  Here the fishcatcher suddenly did see fit to lower his voice, and to draw Eric closer to him. “There are some particularly ancient members of this settlement,” he whispered, “who do not even see us because of the unimaginably long and timeless range of their view. To them, you and I simply do not exist!”

  Eric looked around skeptically. But catching sight of a hulking tree whose primeval limbs snarled and bristled in a rather threatening way, he stepped closer to Mr. Cantrip.

  “The same force is at work on us even as we speak,” the fishcatcher went on cheerfully. “You may have noticed the difficulty we had hiking cross-country, and your sea gull’s courageous attempts to fly. We are all suffering the effects of timelessness. Our words are slowing, our motions are becoming fewer, our feet are beginning to take root in the ground, just as the inhabitants here have rooted and stiffened and disappeared altogether in some cases under layers of tree bark. It’s Underwhirl’s changeless core working to hold us still, to lengthen our view.”