Nightpool

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 prayers 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.”

“No!” cried Ekkthurian. “The council—”

“Yes,” Thakkur said. “This is a matter for all to decide and takes no special knowledge of the fishing waters, which is the council’s purpose.” Thakkur looked down over the brown velvet mass of otters. “Those who would send the boy away, please stand.”

Perhaps a dozen otters stood up, some of them sheepishly. One young otter looked around him and sat down again.

“Now those who would give him sanctuary.”

The velvet floor seethed, as all over the cave otters rose up. Then all heads turned to look at Teb. And when the council left the dais, a crowd of otters gathered around him, standing tall to touch and stroke him. Mikk and Charkky hugged him so hard, they nearly toppled him and had to pick up his fallen crutch. Then Mitta was there—hugging, too, and giving him a wet lick on the ear.

“And when you grow tired of my crowded cave, Tebriel, and the ruckus of the cubs, Thakkur has said you may have a cave of your own.”

So it was that, when at last he put his crutch aside and could walk the cliffs of Nightpool with only a small clay cast, Teb chose his own cave and moved into it. Though the moving was simple enough: his moss bed cover, his old bloodied tunic and trousers and boots, the note he had carried, and a clamshell for eating. He chose a cave down island from Thakkur’s, jutting high above the pounding waves and with salt spray coming in and the rising sun to wake him. It had seven shelves for his possessions and a single sleeping shelf. A cave for a bachelor otter, such as Mikk and Charkky shared, and at once it was home to him and seemed wonderful.

The year was coming on toward winter now, and turning cold, and Mitta found him a second moss blanket, for, as she pointed out, he had no fur to warm him. He cut and tied a breechcloth from his old, torn trousers and donned the tunic again. And as the winds turned chill, Mitta began to weave him a gull-feather blanket.

She sent all the young otters along the cliffs gathering feathers and moss, and Teb made a loom for her by tying four driftwood poles into a square and lacing it with grass rope, as she directed. The weaving began well, thick and soft, and Teb took Mitta’s place gathering oysters and clams so she could work on it.

He gathered cattail root and water herbs, too, from the freshwater lake, but he was growing very tired of raw food and longed for roast mutton and fresh-baked bread. He longed to be swimming, too, for the late fall turned hot suddenly, and even the small cast itched and made him hot all over. Though he did not know whether he could swim, and he thought it so strange that he could remember vividly roast mutton and good things to eat, yet could remember nothing of real importance about himself, who he was or where he belonged. He watched the otters fishing in the sea and playing, flying through the clear water, darting and twisting. He watched them floating, napping in the sea anchored in the rocking beds of kelp, watched the mothers carrying their cubs on their backs or rocking them on their stomachs, watched Mikk and Charkky’s scouting band of young otters go out to track the fish migrations, and he felt left out and alone.

There were three little bays at the north end of the island, and here in these sheltered places the seaweed was thick, and the periwinkles and little mud crabs grew. One bay had a shingle beach that he explored and tide pools to poke into. He watched the bright, small sea creatures that lived there, ruffled snails and anemones that looked like flowers, and he walked the rocky oyster beds that spread north from the island’s tip, exposed at low tide, and gathered the oysters, prying them up with a thick fragment of shell. But he was restless and longed to be out in the sea. He explored the island’s wave-tossed beaches with Charkky and Mikk, and they showed him, from the far north end of the oyster beds, a deep undersea trench that ran out from the mainland, dropping down across the undersea shelf toward the deeps. The otters preferred to stay in the shallower waters above the wide shelf, where the fish were plentiful and the larger creatures of the sea—the great eels and the giant squid and huge sharks—did not usually come. Teb could see the mark of the undersea trench, like a drowned river, on the land, too, where the high cliff broke into a ravine and spilled out a little stream. When the tide was in, the seaweed and mud flat were disturbed, and the little creatures that lived there moved about, drawing great flocks of gulls to dive and feed. And the highest tides splashed their waves into the northernmost caves of Nightpool, giving the occupants wet floors, which the otters seemed to find delightful.

He watched the otters humping through the sea in smooth shallow dives, then floating facedown so they could see the fish beneath the water. He watched them dive deep, to come up below a fish where it could not see them, to grab it from below, then surface. They would lie on their backs eating the squirming creatures with relish.

A larger bay opened toward the south end of the island, with a jutting arm of land to protect it, and it made a fine place to drive big schools of fish in toward land, the otters working together as men would herd horses, driving the fish nearly onto the shore, then grabbing as many as they could hold and stuffing them into large string bags. Teb was watching such a drive one morning when he turned to see Ekkthurian atop a jutting rock, watching him. He smiled at the thin, dark otter and tried to talk to him, but Ekkthurian scowled and turned away, and later Teb saw him with his two companions, talking angrily to Thakkur, just beside the great cave.

He came on them suddenly and heard Ekkthurian saying, “He is leading the young otters in unnatural ways, Charkky and Mikk spend too much time with him, and the small cubs are beginning to look up to him and to repeat things he says, such as that cooked food tastes delicious, that a steel knife would pry up oysters better than a shell does. They are otters, not humans, and they must not forget it. The boy is not a good influence.”

Teb slipped away, not wanting to hear more, and stayed off by himself for the rest of the day. But that night, as he sat at supper with Mitta and her cubs, she said, “You are sad, Tebriel.”

“No, not really.”

“You will remember one day who you are and where you came from,” she said. “And you will have the cast off soon.”

“I know.”

“Meantime, though, it’s hard to be patient.”

“Yes.” He didn’t tell her what really bothered him. It is an ugly feeling to know you are not wanted, even by only a few.

“Have you tried again to read the small paper you carried?”

“Yes. It seems it ought to come right, that if I looked at it just the right way, I could read it. But I never can.”

“There is some writing in the great cave. Could that help?”

“Where?”

“On the walls among the pictures. A few marks, all together in one place, just to the left of the entry.” She saw his excitement and grinned. “Go, then. Go and look.”

He went slowly over the rim of the island, impatient at his clumsiness in the cast, then stood at last in the great cave, alone. It was dim now in the fading light. He approached the dais and stood looking at the sacred clamshell, remembering the only prophecy that Thakkur had been able to bring forth about him, that somehow he was linked to the fate of Tirror and so, too, to the fate of Nightpool. But how? What could such a prophecy mean? At last he turned away.

The words were all together as Mitta had said, one beneath each animal leader, fox and otter and wolf, owl and great cat. Teb studied each word and knew that the separate letters made the sounds of the animals’ names. He had a vague memory of someone showing him how this could be, someone saying the sounds of the letters, but he could not dredge up who, or where that had happened.

He stayed in the cave a long time, fitting sounds to letters the way he thought they should be. There was no word for badger or unicorn, or for the dragon. He stood looking up at the dragon with a terrible yearning that left him puzzled and excited.

He returned to his cave to unfold the paper, to try again to read.

It was a long message. He sounded out some of the letters, and tried to make words, but it wasn’t much help. He thought one word might be “of” and the one before it “care.” He could not guess at the rest, could make no sense of the carefully penned, faded lines. He put it away again, under a round rock on the shelf, and stood idly watching a band of otters floating on their backs in the green swells, cracking sea urchins open with their worry stones and eating them, tossing the shells into the waves. And it was as he stood there that something strange began to happen in his thoughts, that a song began to form, clear and rhythmic, speaking of the sea and the otters, a song that made itself. When it was finished, he remembered every word.

A verse came about Mitta, and about Charkky and Mikk, about Thakkur, until as he sat in his cave door musing, dozens of verses were formed, painting clearly the life around him, the joy and animal wildness of Nightpool, and each verse a little song in itself to cheer and entertain him. He knew he would remember them all without effort, and he wondered how that could be, when he couldn’t remember anything at all about himself.

It was the day that Mitta cut the last cast from his leg with a sharpened shell, and massaged his leg and pronounced it mended, that she said, “I think you must begin to cook your meals, Tebriel. You are not looking well, and you are eating less and less.”

He stared at Mitta. Cooked food would taste wonderful. “But cook how? There’s no way to make fire, Mitta. You need flint.”

Mitta glanced at the tumbling cubs, then sent them out to play. When they were gone, she said quietly, “You must steal what you need to make fire.”

He stared at her. “Steal it where? And what would Thakkur say?”

“Thakkur agrees with me. You are too thin and pale. Maybe raw food does not agree with you.” She touched Teb’s hand with a gentle paw. “Charkky and Mikk will go with you; they will like another ramble before winter. You will take the raft. You can steal what you need from the place of battle where they found you. Steal it from the dead.”

Teb sat quiet for some time. Mitta turned to her weaving, working feathers in with moss. Already the blanket was a fourth finished. She said nothing until Teb said suddenly, “You think if I go there, I’ll remember. Who I am, and what happened to me there.”

She looked at him evenly, a wild, steady look, the kind of look a hunting otter fixes on its prey.

“Perhaps, Tebriel. Do you think it is worth trying?”

It was later that he wondered uneasily if he was afraid to go back there, afraid of remembering. But that was silly. They would go there to the coast of

Baylentha, and he would find, somewhere among the bodies, which by now must be nothing but skeletons, the small striking flint he would need to make fire, and maybe a pan to cook in, maybe a good knife dropped and forgotten. And maybe he would find himself, maybe he would meet Tebriel there and know him and know all that had happened in his life.