The Dark Crystal (15 page)

He could only nod. Their speed was breathtaking. The trees along the margin of the forest were a blurred palisade. His ears were filled with the wind, and the drumming of the Landstriders’ paws on the turf. Small animals dashed out of their way, and leaves flew up where the riders passed. Jen had no time to consider whether his arm, still bound in green moss, was hurting him.

The Landstriders never faltered in their pace. Around the forest margins they carried the Gelfling, and then across a wide plain, through a powdery crater, up and down hills, along ravines, and twice they leaped the black river, sinuous across the landscape.

Kira pointed down to the castle entrance. “Look!”

Jen looked. “Garthim.”

“Yes,” Kira replied. “But can you see what one of them is carrying?”

Jen strained to see. He could make out a round object of some sort.

“It’s one of those wicker cages in which they put their prisoners,” Kira said. “Don’t you think so?”

“I can’t tell from here,” Jen answered. “But if you’re right, it will be your own villagers in there.”

The Landstriders were pawing the ground and growling deeply. Jen’s was already edging forward, unable to contain impatience.

Kira clicked her tongue again, and the Landstriders bounded keenly down the slope. They were going full speed as they closed on the Garthim. Then they hit.

To deliver their assault, they had to spring from their hind legs so as to drive their front ones into the hated foe. The effect on Jen and Kira was that, on impact, their momentum threw them off their mounts and they rolled free, past the line of bristling Garthim. Fizzgig went with them.

While Landstriders and Garthim grappled with a deafening roar and clash, Jen and Kira picked themselves up. Jen was looking at the castle entrance, ready to sprint inside, but Kira’s first thought was for the cage they had seen. The impact of the Landstriders had knocked it from the Garthim’s grasp. It had bounced and rolled toward the ravine, and came to a stop on the brink.

Kira ran across to it. She had been right. Pod People were packed closely inside. Hands protruded, beseechingly.

Kira shouted, “Jen!” as she began to tear at the cage. Inside, her face crushed and contorted against the wicker bars, was Ydra. “Don’t worry,” Kira was saying, “don’t worry. We’ll get you out of there, Ydra! We’ll get you all out!” Kira’s fingers scrabbled helplessly at the metal fastenings of the lid of the cage.

Jen raced to help her. The wicker bars were jointed together with leather thongs. He twisted with his fingers and Kira tried biting with her teeth, but it took them some time to undo one thong. The loosened bar now allowed only one peasant to squeeze through with difficulty and escape. There were probably twenty Pod People crammed inside. Jen took out the shard and used it on another thong, glancing anxiously behind him.

The Landstriders were magnificent, but their fight was doomed. One of them was rolling on the ground, wrestling with a Garthim, while the other was invisible beneath a pile of black carapaces. Two Garthim were not engaged in the battle, seeming to hesitate between attacking one of the Landstriders and pursuing the Gelfling.

With renewed frenzy Jen slashed at the thong, hoping against hope. If the shard could cut through this one, he ought to be able to release Ydra, who was moaning right in front of him.

Behind him, in the din, he heard a clattering, snarling noise growing closer. He threw a glance over his shoulder and screamed to Kira. Both of them jumped, in opposite directions, as the wrestling, growling ball of locked Landstrider and Garthim rolled over and over toward them and plummeted down the ravine to smash on the rocks far below.

Jen was staring down the precipice with horror when he heard Kira’s shout. He looked up. Four Garthim were about to converge on them. There was no escape route past them toward the hill, and the way along the ravine’s edge to the bridge was also blocked off.

Jen stepped in front of Kira, holding the shard out like a dagger. Fizzgig was whimpering on her shoulder. Behind the Garthim, the remaining Landstrider was on its back, still mauling and clawing but near the end of its fight.

The Gelfling stood on the edge of the precipice. As the black Garthim loomed over them, tentacles groping out for them, Jen felt Kira wrap her arms tightly around his waist from behind him. Then he was pulled over backward by her. His mouth gaped with shock as they toppled over the edge.

They were not dropping but floating, fluttering like sycamore wings through the air.

Still held firmly in Kira’s arms, Jen twisted his neck to see where the bottom of the ravine was, thinking that perhaps it always felt like this, that the mind stretched out the last fleeting moments of life beyond their time.

He saw that they still had some way to fall and that what they were floating on was a pair of diaphanous wings, which had unfolded from Kira’s back.

He looked up to the top of the ravine. Silhouetted against the sky, the Garthim were milling about aimlessly on the edge of the precipice.

Jen and Kira, with Fizzgig still on her shoulder, landed gently at the bottom of the ravine.

“How did you do that?” Jen asked as they stood up again.

“Don’t you know?” Kira replied. “Once, ages ago,” she explained, “we Gelfling could really fly, not just flutter down like that.” She looked quizzically at him. “Didn’t the urRu teach you anything useful?”

“But I don’t have wings!” Jen insisted.

Kira smiled. “Of course not. You’re a boy!”

She looked around. The gully of the ravine was a noisome place, littered with the trash and ordure that the Skeksis had jettisoned there over time. Near them lay the broken bodies of the Landstrider and Garthim, still entwined like fatal lovers. The tentacles on the Garthim, and its legs, ending in plated, round feet, were very slowly twitching in the air. It was, no doubt, the nervous system making its last pact with death, but Jen jumped when he saw it and moved away, unsure whether a Garthim could die.

Kira put her hand in Jen’s, and they walked cautiously along the defile, curving around the base of the sheer cliff walls below the castle. They were slowly gaining height, but Jen wondered whether they would ever find their way up from the ravine to the castle entrance. And what they would do there, faced with the Garthim, was another question.

Even down here, he doubted whether they were safe from the Garthim. The Skeksis surely must know by now that the Gelfling had reached the castle. If there was a way of sending Garthim down here to catch them, they would be sent, assuming - Jen allowed himself a spark of hope – assuming, that was, that the Garthim were able to transmit information to the Skeksis. If not, then the Skeksis would be depending on a fresh reconnaissance by the spy-crystal bats. That would surely allow for a brief breathing space. Jen glanced up at the sky. He saw nothing there yet. It was even possible, he reflected, that the Skeksis did not know that the Gelfling were in the vicinity. Possibly the Skeksis’ only means of knowing their location would have been if one of them, alerted by the noise of fighting, had looked out from the castle toward the gate and seen Kira and himself before they went over the edge of the ravine.

Having little else on which to build his hopes, Jen decided to believe that, for the moment, Kira and he did have the advantage of surprise. A small advantage it was, considering the balance of forces against them. But to believe in it was better than to despair.

Following the curve of the cliff, around a buttress of rock, they came to the start of what seemed to be a long carving in the rock face. Farther on, foul water was trickling down. The carving continued, Jen could see, beyond the foul-water outlet.

And then he realized that the carving his hand rested on was of a great tooth. Next to it was another tooth, and another.

He stood away from the rock wall to take in the entire carving. Glaring out from the rock was the face of a gargoyle, with bulging eyes and beetled brow. Its mouth gaped open, and from the mouth came the trickle of foul water.

Moving on, heart pounding, to stand directly in front of the gargoyle, Jen could see a black tunnel stretching away into the rock pile.

He remembered what the Skeksis at the Gelfling ruins had offered: “Show you way into castle with me, secret way, no Garthim see, through Teeth of Shkreesh.”

Jen turned to Kira, trying to keep from his voice the loathing he felt for what had to be done. “This is our way into the castle,” he told her.

She nodded, shuddering. Simply to climb into that vomitory was appalling enough as an idea, even without the fetid tunnel behind it to negotiate, and then what awaited them in the castle itself.

“There’s no other way,” Jen said apologetically.

“I know.”

He spread his hands. “And I can’t leave you here. Because that would be even more dangerous.”

“You can’t leave me here,” Kira said, “because I am not going to be left anywhere.”

Jen nodded, accepting the rebuke.

First Jen, and then Kira with Fizzgig, climbed through the Teeth of Shkreesh. The Chamberlain, watching them from the top of the ravine, smiled, and stealthily turned away into the castle.

T
he tunnel was coated with slime. Perhaps the source of the faint light was the luminescence of decay, or it was simply the light from the ravine exit reflected endlessly up the shining, putrid tube. Had Jen and Kira been able to hold their breath indefinitely, they would have done so. As it was, the urge to retch did not abate until their senses took pity and adjusted to the rancid air.

They were clambering upward; the passageway inclined quite steeply at times. There were so many bends that they had soon lost all sense of direction. That did not matter; they had no real choices. The tunnel’s only features were ulcerous alcoves here and there, clusters of stalactites, and the rustling and slithering of creatures who had their abode in this foul passage. In the dim light, the Gelfling glimpsed a smooth white snake watching them, a colony of crested lice, and a creature resembling an elongated frog, with fur round its face and two large, glowing saucerlike eyes. Fizzgig was so frightened of these apparitions that he dared not even growl at them; instead, with an anxious little grunting noise, he scuttled at Kira’s heels.