The Coming of Hoole (15 page)

With her spells and foul ingredients, she had created some truly monstrous forms of birdlife. Some of their shriveled carcasses hung on the ice cave walls, like trophies of creations gone wrong, along with the neatly dried gizzards and strings of withered eyeballs of birds she had murdered. But one of her creations was alive. Looking at it caused alarm in Pleek’s own gizzard, or what was left of his gizzard after his union with Ygryk. As soon as an owl begins to consort with hagsfiends, a slow deterioration would set in on that once noble organ. So the sad remnants of Pleek’s gizzard quivered slightly at the sight of Kreeth’s puffowl, a cross between a puffin and a Snowy Owl. It was the vilest thing Pleek had ever seen. It waddled around with the pure white face of a Snowy disfigured by the garish markings and the big, fat, blunt beak of a puffin.

Kreeth had originally felt that it was best to use transformational charms and spells on a hatchling or very young bird and not try to do anything with the egg itself. But she had recently changed her thoughts about this, or rather her “philosophy,” as she liked to say. For Kreeth preferred to think of herself not merely as a practitioner of nachtmagen, but a scientist and a philosopher, as well.

“Pleek, Ygryk!” Kreeth called. “Its egg tooth is pecking out!”

The egg that was now about to hatch was that of a Great Horned she had stolen, which she had then “touched” with a crow feather. Touched in this case did not literally mean touching, but involved an incantation during what she called the primary spell phase.

Excitement coursed through the ice cave. Ygryk and Pleek pressed closer. One thought gripped them both.
This could be ours! A chick at last!
Kreeth heard a shuffling from a dim corner of the cave and swiveled her head quickly toward the puffowl. “Get away from those hearts. I’m marinating them. Get out of here.”

“Yes, Mummy!” the puffowl said, and waddled away in dejection.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t call me Mummy! I’m not your frinkin’ mummy! You’re my experiment.”

Then she turned to Pleek. “It should be hatching any second.”

There was a big cracking sound, then a blob of a tiny bird flopped out. “What is it?” Pleek whispered.

Kreeth cackled. “We’ll just have to wait and see. You ordered a Great Horned, didn’t you?

“Yes, but is it?”

“Could be this. Could be that,” Kreeth replied slyly.

“It does look like an owl, Pleek,” Ygryk said. “Bulgy eyes.” She and Pleek were bending over the little creature.

“Are you disappointed, dear? Did you want it to be more haggish?”

“No, no, Pleek. All I want is a nice little chick.”

What they got was indeed a chick. Whether she would be a nice little chick was doubtful. But the real question was: What species did she belong to? All chicks look very similar at the time of hatching. Nearly bald, their eye color murky, the newly hatched creatures are shapeless and fairly indistinguishable. But when they begin to fledge and their eye color becomes clearer, they bear all the features of their species.

For several days after hatching, it did appear to Pleek that the chick had all the first signs of being a Great Horned like Pleek. Her eyes were becoming the bright yellow of a Great Horned. It did make Pleek nervous, though, how Kreeth seemed more interested in observing himself and Ygryk than the chick. There was a cunning about Kreeth that he found very unsettling and every time he would say something about how it looked as if the chick were indeed turning out to be a Great Horned Owl, he swore he could hear Kreeth snort under her breath. It was right after the chick had lost her downy fluff and fledged her first feathers, which looked so much like Great Horned plumage, that something odd occurred.

Pleek and Ygryk were returning from a short hunting flight and had just flown into the ice cave to deposit their prey.

“How’s our little one?” Pleek boomed. Then he heard a sharp cry from Ygryk.

“What happened? My baby!”

“Has she been hurt? Is she dead?” Pleek spun his head toward Kreeth. “What have you done, you crone?”

“Nothing,” she cackled, “except to create a master piece.”

“Pleek, look at her!” Ygryk gasped.

He lofted himself over to where the chick was poking around for some ice worms. The little chick looked up at her da and blinked. Pleek felt his withered gizzard give a lurch. He was looking into the black eyes of a female Barn Owl, but her body had the coloration of a Great Horned. “Wh—wh—what happened? How could this be?” And then her face started to lose the tawny feathers of a Great Horned and to turn white. Even her shape seemed to lengthen a bit and widen slightly at the top so that it appeared more like that of a Barn Owl. “A Barn Owl! I never!” Pleek gasped in disbelief.

“You never, is right!” Kreeth’s words bit the air. “I did this. And I shall name her Lutta. Lutta is my masterpiece. She is everything. And nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Ygryk cried. “All we wanted was one little chick that looked like one of us, or maybe both. What have you done? She’ll belong to neither of us.”

“That is your decision, my dear,” Kreeth replied. “But look at her. Look at what I have created.” Now the white face of the Barn Owl was turning the deep glistening black of a crow. The eyes were becoming beady crow’s eyes.

Within a single day, Lutta went through a half dozen transformations. For a few hours she was a crow. Then she slid almost imperceptibly into being a Barred Owl. Next a Snowy. The most spectacular shift was when, within the space of seconds, she would go from the total blackness of a crow to the pure whiteness of a Snowy. But perhaps her best transformation was when she changed into a Spotted Owl.

Lutta seemed cheerful enough, and Pleek and Ygryk were pleased, they guessed, that she called them Mum and Da, but they had a difficult time relating to this chick that Kreeth called a changeling.

“It’s genius what I have done!” Kreeth exclaimed several times a day and into the night. And despite all her protestations about not wanting to be a mother, she seemed genuinely fond of Lutta in an almost maternal sense.

“But all this changing—it’s not natural,” Pleek protested in the gentlest way.

Kreeth blinked her beady little eyes. “You think either one of you is natural? Who needs natural? Lutta is interesting. She’s a fascinating phenomenon.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Pleek and Ygryk nodded. Silently, they reminded themselves that they had a unique and wonderful chick. But each one silently thought,
We didn’t want a phenomenon, we just wanted a chick! Something we can call our own.
Still, they tried to appreciate this wondrous chick. To learn her ways. To come to love her and delight in her.

And for a while, it worked. Pleek and Ygryk told themselves that underneath the plumy whiteness of a Snowy Owl or the speckled splendor of a Spotted Owl or the silvery mist featheration of a Great Gray, she was still their little Lutta. Although it was especially upsetting to Pleek when he had brought her a plump little ice mouse for her first Meat-on-Bones ceremony that Lutta changed species a half-dozen times during the ritual. She started off as a Great Horned, then slid into the dark sleekness of hagsfiend. Pleek and Ygryk both churred at this, for they took it as an homage to themselves. “So respectful!” Ygryk murmured. And it would have been if it had ended there. But it did not. A moment later, Lutta had become a Pygmy Owl, of all things, and dwindled to such a tiny size that she could hardly get the plump thigh of the ice mouse down her gullet.

“Great Glaux, why would she do a thing like that?” Pleek fumed. Lutta blinked at him. “Why are you calling me she, Da, and not Lutta?” Pleek didn’t answer.

“Mum, why’s he calling me she? I’m your chick. It’s like you don’t know me.”

“We find it…hard sometimes, dear,” Ygryk stammered as she watched the Pygmy swell into a Barn Owl, then peered into the shining dark eyes that gleamed black as river stones in that stark white face. “It is you in there, isn’t it?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

From a corner in the ice hollow, Kreeth cast a sly glance.

Pleek and Ygryk were becoming less and less sure of Lutta. When out on their hunting flights, they would discuss their peculiar owlet.

“I just don’t know what to make of it, Pleek.”

“I know what you mean, my dear. I suppose we’ll have to teach her to fly,” Pleek said wearily. “As you say, it’s hard to know how to feel.”

Any child, bird or otherwise, can sense their parents’ doubt, and Lutta was no exception. At first it made her angry, but then she began to feel rather indifferent. What did she care what they thought? Kreeth was always good to her. Kreeth liked her the way she was—whatever that was. She began to dread when Pleek and Ygryk returned from their hunting trips. They always seemed to be whispering about her. She could sense it just before they entered the cave. And then they would either stare at her and not say anything or turn their heads as if it hurt them to look at her. But Kreeth was the opposite. She seemed to delight in all of Lutta’s transformations.

On this particular night, her parents had just returned and she was perched on her ice ledge as a crow, which she thought Ygryk would like, but Ygryk just got this hard look in her eye.
By the demons of smee holes,
thought Lutta, using a favorite curse of Kreeth’s,
why is my haggish, so-called mother staring at me like this?
“Look!” She blurted out. “I can’t help what I am and what I am not.” Kreeth craftily observed all this from a corner in the cave.

“I suppose that is so,” was all that Ygryk said. And Pleek went silently to his ice perch without even greeting Lutta.

At noon the following day, as Kreeth and Lutta slept, Pleek and Ygryk left. They abandoned their longed-for chick to the hagsfiend who had divined her.