Read The Dark Crystal Online

Authors: A. C. H. Smith

The Dark Crystal (10 page)

She led Jen along a tree-shaded path that ran through the swamplands. He noticed the way she walked: like himself, it seemed, except that there was something in her step that was both graceful and more confident. On their way, they passed by many creatures and plants that were quite new to Jen. One grazing animal in particular was to be seen in many places, the same kind of grub as the one that had retrieved’ him from the bog. They were Nebrie, Kira told him, amphibious creatures the Pod People domesticated for collecting milk. When a Nebrie died, its skin was used to make drums, and the patches of fur around its face and ears were fashioned into clothes for the little Podlings.
Jen remembered that Aughra had served him Nebrie cheese, which had been delicious. He would have to explain to Kira about Aughra and the shard and Skeksis and everything else. He could do so in dreamfasting, he hoped.
Fizzgig bravely growled at the harmless Nebrie. When they raised their grazing heads and gave him a mild glance, he bounced along the path again, following Kira and Jen.

I
n the banqueting hall of the castle of the Dark Crystal, seven Skeksis were seated at a long table, gorging themselves. Not sharing in the feast were the Chamberlain, who had been absent since his disgrace, and the Ritual-Master, who, with an ascetic calm, sat observing the rest.

From his elaborately carved imperial chair, the Garthim-Master shot glances at the Ritual-Master beside him. What was he up to? the Garthim-Master wondered. Was this some kind of saintly, abstemious pose designed to impress the others with his holiness and so establish his right to usurp the throne at the first opportunity? The Garthim-Master regarded the others and reckoned that, if that were so, it would be a fruitless undertaking. Force, greed, and ruthlessness were the qualities the Skeksis respected in a ruler. The Garthim-Master stretched out his arm and grabbed a nearly empty cauldron from the Treasurer. He stuck his head inside it to lick it clean, then tossed it away. He kept an eye on the Ritual-Master’s face and fancied he detected a flicker of distaste there. Good. That gave him an opening. Perhaps he should devise stratagems for defaming the Ritual-Master’s reputation for dignity, his alleged mastery of ceremonial order. The sooner that sanctimonious creature followed the Chamberlain into the wilderness, the more secure the Garthim-Master would feel on the throne.
Slaves carried in a platter on which a freshly roasted Nebrie was steaming. The seven Skeksis set to, ducking and twisting their heads to rip off the most succulent shreds of flesh from the carcass. Again, the Ritual-Master was content to survey his carnivorous brethren.
A small, hairy-legged shellfish, renegade from a previous dish, came out of hiding and made a run for it down the length of the table. Pandemonium broke out as the Skeksis flailed the table with their talons in pursuit of the morsel. The Gourmand prevailed, popping it whole into his mouth and crunching it with a smile of relish.
With a great clatter, a troop of Garthim entered the banqueting hall, and waited in a huddle. One of them carried a bulging, wriggling sack.
The Garthim-Master wiped his mouth and looked upon the sack with satisfaction. From the size of it, his Garthim had captured not only the Gelfling but a few Pod slaves as well. They would be welcome. His newly acquired position of supreme power, the Garthim-Master felt, demanded that he have a plentiful supply of vliya, which would sharpen his decisiveness. And besides, he reasoned, what was the point of aspiring to be Emperor if he did not avail himself of all the benefits of office? The old Emperor had never stinted himself. It was watching him quaff beakers of vliya that had convinced the Garthim-Master he must be the successor. The taste of power, indeed.
“Ehiideothone.”
The Garthim-Master commanded the Garthim to release the sack. They did so, dropping it heavily onto the marble floor.
From it, snarling and cursing her captors, Aughra emerged. She blinked her eye in the bright torchlight of the hall and rubbed her bruises angrily. “Fools!” she spat. “Skeksis, you fools!
Katakontidzeh!”
The Garthim-Master gaped in consternation. As Emperor, his orders had not been carried out. As Garthim-Master, his professional vanity had been blistered.
“Howtee oo mee Kelffinks,”
he said finally, in a voice slow with bewilderment.
“Of course I’m no Gelfling,” Aughra snapped back at him.
“Kaxakomddzeh tekka!”
She wheeled on the Garthim and cursed them as well, although she knew it was an empty gesture. She glowered at the Skeksis again. Since her emergence from the sack, all but two had neglected their feast: the Gourmand, and the Ritual-Master, who now felt he could stomach a few choice tidbits torn from the Nebrie’s breast. “I’ll get my eye to you all,” Aughra swore. “I’ll settle your aspects semisquare and
quincunx
.”
To assuage his humiliation, the Garthim-Master also flung oaths and threats at the Garthim. Such an outburst was pointless, everyone knew that. The Garthim were terrible but ignorant tools of the Garthim-Master. They did what they were told to do. They acted without question. They made no excuses. They had been sent to Aughra’s house, and they had brought back what they had captured. All the Garthim-Master had achieved by his tantrum was to make himself look foolish.
The Ritual-Master now took charge of the situation. With a calmness calculated to shame the Garthim-Master’s ire, he stepped over to Aughra, who shrank from his flaccid flesh.
“Svaleros ho Kelffinks,”
he stated.
Aughra cackled with cold mirth. She already knew the Gelfling was dangerous to the Skeksis. She knew the prophecy; indeed, she had cast the charts and shuffled the cards that confirmed it.
Still calm, the Ritual-Master pointed out the obvious, that the Gelfling had to be killed.
“Kataf-theeressthou.”
Therefore, he asked Aughra to tell him where it was.
“Poostitoc?”
“Gone!” Aughra screamed at the Ritual-Master, and in her rage she threw back her head and laughed hollowly. “Gone! Gelfling gone. Was in my home, Gelfling. Not hard to catch him there, if you clever. But what you do? You burn my house.” She sneered. “Gelfling gone.
Porroh klet!
Burn! Ruin! Conflagration! Orrery destroyed. No more orrery, now how you make predictions, huh? And why? Because you send Garthim. Stupid Garthim! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Katakontidzeh!”
She paused, wondering whether to compound the Skeksis’ confusion by confiding that the runaway Gelfling had found the true shard. She was in a state to do almost anything to spite them at this moment. But the inveterate habit of not telling everything she knew, the trademark of the seer, gave her pause. Besides, that was a vital piece of intelligence.
While she was pondering, the Garthim-Master reasserted his authority by barking out commands. With one eye on the Ritual-Master, he ordered the Scientist and the Slave-Master to take Aughra to the Chamber of Life.
“Aukhra na Rakhash!”
Without her orrery, she was not of much use to the Skeksis. He shouted another order to the Garthim, to return to their pit.
“Garthim na bullorkhskaunga!”
Then he sat down at the table again and resumed tearing at the Nebrie’s roasted flesh, to show that he had nothing to worry about.
As Aughra was dragged away, she could not resist a few enigmatic taunts.
“Kakofrontez!”
she snarled. “Now prophecy is. Prophecy of Gelfling. Gelfling come get you, Skeksis fools. You see. And Aughra know when. Aughra know when is what and what shall be when. Oh yes. Oh yes.”
The Ritual-Master had been waiting to play his trump card. The one essential step that must now be taken had been overlooked by the Garthim-Master. The Ritual-Master would take it instead, and no one could accuse him of presumption at such a critical juncture.
He threw back his head and called up into the vaulted ceiling,
“Kelffinks makhun kim.”
Crowded together on ledges overlooking the banquet hall were the Crystal Bats, each grasping its spy crystal. At the Ritual-Master’s order, they awakened, and from the flock there arose a chill, shrilling sound. One by one they spread their wings and took off, flying out into the purple twilight through a high, open window. Usually their mission was simply to reconnoiter the whole landscape, transmitting back to the castle information that would give the Skeksis a broad surveillance of their tyrannized world; but this time they had received from the Ritual-Master a specific command: Find the Gelfling.
From the castle tower, they launched out in all directions, on their slowly beating wings.
K
ira led Jen through the swamplands to the bank of a river. It was a broad river, flowing lazily, but what was most striking about it was that its water was as black as a crow’s wing. It gleamed and rippled murmurously in the setting suns, whose reflected beams blazed from it like polished copper. Jen knelt on the bank and cupped water in his hands to see whether the river was simply gorged on dark mud from the swamp. No, the water was black. It ran through his fingers, leaving no sediment.
He looked over his shoulder at Kira, standing behind him, and confessed to her his fear of the color black.
She nodded. “I know. I used to have that fear, too. The Garthim, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Jen said. “I never knew why.”
“And now you’ve seen them again and escaped from them.”
Jen smiled ruefully. “So now, you think, I ought to be able to conquer my fear.”
“I conquered mine.” In Kira’s voice was the hint of a challenge. Then she knelt beside him and put her arm around his neck. “It was because of this river that I learned to conquer it. I love this river. You’ll see why. Come on.” And she led him along the bank.
She was right, of course, Jen reflected. He could not spend the rest of his life in fear of a color. There was no shame in fearing a thing like the Garthim. Only a fool would be reckless with them, a shortlived fool. But black was the color of the sky between stars, the color of a burnt stick, of crows, of his eyelids when he slept, and no tyranny of darkness could enlist everything black. She said she loved this river, and he would see why. Jen trusted Kira. In dreamfasting he had told her of his time by the waterfalls pining for the company of another Gelfling. She, too, had been lonely. Now they had to trust each other, or else the world, transformed by their chance meeting, would become a place without meaning or future after all, a place merely of chance.
Hauled up on the riverbank was a shell, the husk of a dead beetle. Kira pushed it down onto the water, and Fizzgig leaped into the boat, obviously at home in it. Kira followed. “Come on,” she said again.
Jen climbed in, and Kira, with a pole ready in the boat, pushed them off.
They floated away, on the black river, gently rocking as they drifted with the current. They left the swamplands and came into a stretch where the river ran between low cliffs, on top of which trees arched over on both sides. Kira was reclining with one hand trailing in the water. Jen, too, relaxed, lullabied by the motion of the boat.
He became aware of a sound all around them. It was like a humming chorus, quiet enough for him to have missed it until he relaxed. He looked at the banks of the river to see what was causing it.
Kira noticed and smiled. “This is something you haven’t heard before,” she said.
“No, I haven’t. What is it? Where’s it coming from?”
She did not answer. Instead, she began to sing, and what she sang had no words. She opened her throat and chanted a long melodic line in one breath, all with her lips slightly apart. It was a melody in the Lydian mode, and to Jen it sounded ancient, although he did not recognize it from tunes the urRu had taught him. In the union of her voice and the melody was sorrow and its transfiguration into acceptance and wonder. Jen hardly dared to breathe at such beauty. Then he ached to respond. When her breath-line had expired and she prepared for another, he lifted his flute and this time played a simple counterpoint to her song. Even as he played, he could hear the sounds around them, which were in perfect harmony. Fizzgig stopped fidgeting and gazed over the side of the boat at his reflection in the glossy black water.
“Do you know now?” Kira asked. “Do you know where those sounds are coming from?”
Jen gestured helplessly. “I … it seems to be everywhere, in the trees and the river, and … no, I don’t know.”
“That’s it,” Kira laughed. “Look, that moss there, it hums. Listen to it.” Jen listened and heard. “Now the trees,” Kira told him. “It’s something like a whistle, or a sigh. And you see the bubbles on the water. Listen to them, Jen. You must always listen. There is always music to be heard. You can hear the percussion of the water rippling. The music we make is only a part of it. Now do you see why I love this river?”
As an answer, Jen raised his flute and started to play again, as attentive as he could be to the chorus he was joining. Kira waited awhile, then added her voice, lower this time, harmonizing.
The boat slowly turned, in the arms of the river, as the current bore them along in the twilight, and they made their music with the music that would have been there even without them.
Jen thought of all that urSol the Chanter had taught him about technique, and he was very glad to have that skill, since it enabled him to make a better, more considered contribution; but urSol had never taught him this, that music is revealed, not invented. From the banks he could now hear yet more threads in the tapestry of sound: a tiny ringing as of bells, a deeper gonglike note, and the cries of birds. Nothing was discordant.
Low on the horizon, the suns spread a lace of rose-colored light over the surface of the black river. Kira sang her melody. Always it seemed to be the same one, yet she had such command of inflections and subtly varied intervals that each breath-line disclosed a new modulation. Jen continued to harmonize. He thought he could find no better way to spend the rest of his life than this. If the boat had slowly sunk beneath the water, he felt he would not have minded.
Abruptly, Fizzgig started to bark. Kira, at the same time, glanced upward, pushed Jen down flat in the boat, then ducked her head, and lay curled up.
“What is it?” Jen asked urgently.
She answered in a whisper, “Up there. A Crystal Bat. Don’t move.”
“A what?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“A spy crystal? Someone I met mentioned them.”
“Same thing. The Pod People call them Crystal Bats.”
“How do you know what it is?” Jen asked.
“I saw a flash of light from the crystal in its claws.”
Kira had been quietly taking something from the pouch on her belt. Then she stood up. Around her head she was swinging a double-weighted thong. When she let go, it whizzed into the air directly above their heads. There was a squeaking, flapping noise, then a splash. More splashing. Then silence.
Kira said, “I hit it.” She was not boasting, just stating a fact.
Jen was awed. “Are there many of those?”
“More and more all the time,” she answered. “What they see, with their crystals, the Skeksis see, too.”
“How did you learn to do that, the way you brought it down?”
“The Pod People in my village taught me. They’ve had to learn it for their own protection. Otherwise they’d be in slavery by now. In many other Pod villages, all the people have been taken. The Crystal Bats are the only creatures they will kill. Except the Skeksis and their Garthim, of course. But they have no chance against them.”
“How do you know the spy crystal hadn’t already seen us?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it did. It would have hovered near us if it had. It didn’t seem to be hovering, did it?” Kira sighed. “What I ought to do is make sure it’s dead. I would if it were daylight. All we can do is hope.”
As they floated on, Jen told Kira about the crystal shard, and the torn and tattered words of bidding that urSu, and then urZah, had given him, and what had happened at Aughra’s house. He brought the shard out from his tunic to show to her. It gleamed in the twilight. “I know that what I have to do is… it’s something to do with the Skeksis. I don’t know what, though. And I don’t know who will tell me.”
Behind them, upriver, the Crystal Bat had dragged itself out of the mud, shaken off the thong, and was now cautiously gliding just above the surface of the black stream, on their track.

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