Nightpool

Chapter 19

Teb stared into Seastrider’s eyes and felt complete. He marveled at how intricately her scales were woven along her neck and back and along the slim reptilian legs she wrapped around the chimney, scales that could have been crafted of diamonds and of pearls. Her face was slim, her nostrils flared, her two horns white as sunstruck snow, and her cheek felt warm and cool all at once. His mind filled with her songs, and now, together, they made the team for which both had been born. They looked at each other for a long time. Above the sea in the deep afternoon light, Dawncloud circled, keening her agony of mourning, as only a dragon can, for her lost child. The sea rang with her misery, the sunken city absorbed her cry and held it as it held the memory of ages. Moonsong was dead, sleek and beautiful and dear, and not even grown to the full fierce power she should have known, would never know.

It was much later that Dawncloud dropped down out of the sky to dive again among the ruined walls, searching. Teb could see her forcing between stone buildings and down narrow, drowned alleyways, her wings folded close to her body, her white undulating shape curling among watery broken stone and through water shadow, touched by light from the dropping sun. What drew her, now that the hydrus was dead?

“She seeks something,” said Seastrider, watching her with a puzzled cock of her head. “Perhaps some old memory, a secret from the ancient city. Perhaps something else.” She kneaded her claws into the chimney like a great cat.

They watched Dawncloud slip along the top of a broken wall, to lie looking down into a high attic room, then saw her swerve down into it and disappear. “Come on my back,” said Seastrider.

“Can you carry me? You are only young yet.”

“Come on my back.”

Teb climbed astride as he would mount a pony, and she lifted so fast into the sky she nearly took his breath. He sat clinging between her wings, caught in wonder as the sea fled below, the outlines of the drowned city clear now—the upper and middle baileys and the barbican, the lower and greater halls, the keeping gate and the guard tower all laid out, and the streets surrounding it, the rooftops and the lines of the three old roads leading away. Then suddenly Seastrider dove. Down and down. She came to rest on the edge of a broken wall to look down into the ancient chamber where Dawncloud lay curled upon the stone floor, her head resting on the oak bed. The chamber, quite dry, was furnished. Teb stared down at it with shock: bed and two chairs and even a rug on the floor, its corner protruding underneath Dawncloud’s claws. How could a room remain furnished, as if someone had just left it, after hundreds of years of rain and wind and the dampness of the sea? Why hadn’t it decayed, like the rest of the city?

There were even blankets on the bed, a cookpot on the hearth, and the charred remains of a fire.

Teb walked along the top of the thick wall, looking down. Dawncloud lay quite still, as if caught in some inner dream, her shoulder against a small cupboard that stood beside the hearth, its door ajar, a touch of red showing inside. It was as he rounded the corner that he saw, down in the water outside the building, the nose of a boat. He moved along the wall until he could look down on its deck, the deck of a small sailing boat.

Her sails had been carefully reefed, but were dark with mold. Her sides were covered with barnacles, but still he could see the bright paint in streaks on her deck and knew she had not sat here for hundreds of years. A few years, maybe. He glanced across at Seastrider perched on the wall watching him, and knew she touched his thoughts. Then he climbed down into the chamber, beside Dawncloud.

He touched the blanket beneath her huge head and ran his hand along her muzzle. He looked around the room, and knew someone had lived here, come here in the little boat to this drowned place. But why? Then he approached the cupboard, caught by the flash of red.

He pulled the door open.

Two gowns hung there. One was red, flame red, with braid around the throat in three rows, and buttons in the shape of scallop shells. He could see his mother in it quite clearly. It had been his favorite dress.

She had been in this room. She had lived in this room.

But when?

She had never been away from them until she left them that last time. She had worn the dress just before she went away.

Was it here she came, then? But why?

And returned to the Bay of Dubla only to drown there? His mind seemed frozen, unable to think clearly.

If she came here in the boat, how did she go away without it?

He stood looking at the dress and at the little room with its blanketed bed and two chairs and the cupboard. In a shelf below the mantel was a blue crock, a small paring knife, and a green plate, all of them familiar, all of them from the palace. The knife handle made of wrapped cord soaked with resin, as old Pakkna always fashioned his knives.

Dawncloud was watching him now, and he knew that she, too, saw his thoughts. All five dragons were watching him, the four young draped along the tops of the walls. He looked at his mother’s dress and could see her wearing it before the red flowers of the flame tree.

“Where did she go?” he whispered. “What happened to my mother? She didn’t drown in the Bay of Dubla. Where is she?”

Then he sensed Dawncloud’s own eagerness and confusion. He sensed her desire, and then visions began to touch him, and he knew, all in a moment, how Dawncloud had lost her bard to murder, how she had slept away her misery in Tendreth Slew, then awakened to seek out a mate.

“But now another bard speaks to me, Tebriel. Somewhere she lives, she who lost her dragon even before my own agony. Somewhere Meriden lives.”

“She . . . is a bard?” Teb said hoarsely, hardly believing it. But knowing it was so, and wondering he hadn’t guessed before. Her songs, her strength, the way she seemed drawn away sometimes, searching. “She is alive,” he cried, caught in wonder. “But where? Where?”

“She is alive, she who turned from the skies in her own misery, and then was drawn back again.” Dawncloud reared tall above the broken walls and stared up at the sky and out to sea. Then she writhed her great body down again, into the chamber.

“There is a door in this city, Tebriel. I don’t know where, but I will find it. A door that enters, by spells, into the far Castle of Doors. And from that castle, one can enter anywhere, into any world. She is someplace there. Meriden has gone through one of those doors. And I will follow her.”

“My mother is alive,” he said. “Why did she go? Why would she leave us?”

“She went,” Dawncloud said, her voice ringing, “to a mission for all of Tirror. She went hoping to return. Do you not see her boat is still here? She would have sunk it otherwise. She went to give of herself in the saving of Tirror. She went to seek the dragon she thought did not exist anymore on Tirror. And to seek the source of the dark, too, and to learn, if she could learn, how to defeat the dark.”

“But how can you know that? You didn’t know before, or you would have gone before, to find her.”

“Somewhere in this room is a paper with words written on it. The paper tells this message.” Dawncloud sighed. “If I were not destined to join with Meriden, if I were not destined to know and love her, I could not know these words.” She fixed him with a long green look. ‘The paper is here, Tebriel. Search for it. And I,” she said, stretching up, then winging suddenly to the top of the wall, so the room was filled with the cyclone of her wings, “I must search now, for the door through which she vanished.”

She rose up towering, then was over the wall and gone; he heard the tremendous splash of her dive. Then three dragonlings leaped from the wall to follow. Seastrider remained, looking down at him. He stood a moment, his heart pounding; then he stormed up the wall and leaped into the sea and was beating the water, swimming after Dawncloud, choked in the waves she made. He felt Seastrider beside him. “No, Tebriel. No.”

“I must,” he said, choking, “My mother is there somewhere. . . .”

Dawncloud was so far ahead of him she was almost lost from his sight; the rocking of her passage sent water slapping into his face and up the stone walls. He felt Seastrider’s annoyance at him, and her love.

“Come onto my back, then, or we will lose her.”

He slipped onto Seastrider’s back and she leaped ahead with a twisting speed, her wings beating like great sails. He could not see Dawncloud. And then:

“I’m diving, Tebriel; hold on.” Seastrider dropped beneath the sea as he clung, and the water closed over him. Down, down . . . then up again, through a tall arch.

They were in a courtyard. Dawncloud filled the salty pool, rearing up before a dark stone gate all carved with symbols and held with a metal lock. He heard the words she whispered in her silent dragon’s voice, then she sang out loudly, so bright and wild he trembled. The dragonlings were singing with her, a strange song, not a ballad; this was a dragon’s command, and magical. The stone doors opened, and he could see nothing beyond but white mist, moving mist. Then Dawncloud was through. He leaped from Seastrider’s back to follow, but Dawncloud turned in the doorway, the huge silvery bulk of her filling it, and faced down at him, her great mouth open in a dragon’s terrible scream, so close to him he saw flame starting way back in her throat. “Stay back, Tebriel. Do not come here.”

“I must come. She is my mother.”

“All of Tirror is your mother. All of Tirror needs you and Seastrider. You would only hinder me here. How can I travel as I must, search as I must, with a small human companion? She is my bard, Tebriel. If she can be found, I will find her. A million worlds lie beyond this mist. I would lose you.

“Stay with Seastrider here. See to the tasks you were born to. . . .” And then with one thrashing motion she was gone into the mist, and the great doors swung closed again.

He paddled close to Seastrider, heartbroken. Then he slid onto her back, sadly, silently, and they returned to the small room where his mother had slept, the four dragonlings close together now, steeped in the sadness of losing their own mother.

“We sang the ancient song for opening,” Nightraider said, filled with wonder.

“We sang it all together in our minds,” said Windcaller.

“It opened for her,” said Nightraider. “And she went through.”

“She will be through the Castle of Doors by now,” said Seastrider. “She will be out into another world by now,” she said sadly. “Searching for Meriden.”

In the little room, as the dragonlings lay along the top of the wall, Teb began to search for the small bit of paper or parchment that would hold his mother’s handwriting.

He found it at last, tucked down between an empty wooden cask and an iron pot, beneath the oak bed. He knew it at once, and wondered why he hadn’t guessed before. It was not a slip of parchment but his mother’s brass-bound journal that she had kept just as Camery kept a diary. His mother’s journal, locked, and the key missing.

He supposed he could break the lock, but he was loath to. Dawncloud had told him the message, surely all of it. He put the little book in the pocket of his breechcloth, then climbed the wall and down again, to examine the boat, as Seastrider watched from above.

The boat’s name could still be seen, Merlther’s Bird, then the name of her port, Bleven. Merlther Blish’s boat, reported lost months before his mother went away.

“She deceived us,” he said, fingering the cracked letters. “She meant to go away all the time. She lied to us.”

Seastrider sailed down to land beside him, dwarfing the boat and weighting it to its gunwales. She rubbed her cheek against his. “She did what she must. For Tirror. You do not listen well to my mother.” She was annoyed with him. He regarded her evenly.

“My mother said she went to battle the dark. Do you not listen? She deceived you only because it was required of her, because it would be wisest. Not because she didn’t love you. There was no deceit in her heart, Tebriel.”

He stood quietly, looking at the little boat that had been pulled in so carefully between the stone walls in this shadowed watery world. And he knew Seastrider was right. She nuzzled his hand until he put his arm around her. At last he let wonder touch him and the true joy that his mother was alive.

It was later, when he had returned to the little room that had been her last chamber in this world, that he began to wonder if his father had known all along. That she was not dead. That she had meant to go away in this fashion.

He must have hated the dark all the more, because it made it necessary for Meriden to go away. He must have felt terrible anger that he could not help her. That he must stay and guard Auric, while she did battle in a world so far away he might never see her again. Had he known, guessed, that they would never be together again?

Seastrider soared off the top of the wall and dropped down into the room beside him.

“How can Dawncloud ever find her?” he said sadly.

“It will not be an easy search. Perhaps there are vibrations out among those worlds, just as there are in the sea.” She curled down around Teb and lowered her head on her back, making a cocoon for him. “Rest, Tebriel. When night grows darkest, we will go home. To the Lair. Tonight, Tebriel, you will sleep among dragons, at the top of the highest peaks.”

“And tomorrow?” he said, his excitement rising.

“Tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . we will begin to assess the dark, Tebriel. We will begin to discover how best we can battle it, to bring Tirror back to truth. We will begin to strengthen our powers—of creating image and memory and hope through song. We will begin to discover other powers.”

“What other powers? The opening of doors . . . ?”

“Perhaps. And perhaps we can master the magic of shape shifting, and perhaps other ways to confuse the dark.”

He leaned back against her warm, jeweled side and felt the strength of bard and dragon, teamed, and thought that, with training together, they might know more power than he had imagined. Together they would make song, would shape Tirror’s true past for those who lived today, and he knew that this was their one great weapon. For to know what has been is to know what can be. This was what the dark must destroy if it would win the minds of its slaves. If it would create a willing acceptance of slavery. As the night drew down, and the thin moon rose, Seastrider said, “We will go now,” and they swept out across the sea toward Windthorst and Fendreth-Teching, four bright dragons, one carrying her bard, he caught in the wonder of this first flight, caught in the wonder of beginning.

They passed over Nightpool in darkness, high against the stars where no earthbound creature could see them. Yet in the empty meeting cave, before the sacred clam shell, Thakkur saw. This vision was clear and strong. The white otter smiled, and put from him his loneliness for Tebriel, in the knowledge that Teb was now, in this time in the world, exactly where he belonged.

Above, so close to stars, Teb grinned too as he stared up at the heavens, then down toward the dark earth below him, and he thought, Tonight I will sleep among dragons. The night wind washed around him, stirred by Seastrider’s powerful wings, and he felt her laughing pleasure, like his own.

We are together now, Tebriel, and soon my brothers and sister may find their bards, and my mother return with Meriden, and we will be an army, then, to challenge the lords of the dark.

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