Nightpool (13 page)

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.