He had so many questions, and no one to offer him answers.
He had the shard, and no idea what to do with it.
As the dawn light tinged the sky, one question preoccupied him most. Where should he go from here? If he walked farther into the swamp, he might never get out again. And yet, he dared not turn back. Would the Garthim pursue him forever? Would they drown in the bogs of this swamp? They had been untouched by fire.
The light of day disclosed a fantastic swamp world to him. Trees trundled through the mud. Mushrooms spread gorgeous wings and whirred into flight. A fluttering butterfly was devoured by a long orange tongue flicked out from a drab stump of cactus. Puddles of liquid with a metallic sheen oozed from hollow to hollow by their own volition. It was like a laboratory in which forms of evolution were permuted. Jen saw hornets made of diamond deliver an appallingly ferocious attack on a serpent with a weasel’s face. They drove it into a hole in the swamp, which snapped shut. He concluded that some buried monster employed the hornets as a hunting pack, but for what commensurate reward? A bunch of flame-colored flowers hid their attractive heads from a bee by plunging themselves into the mire. For a period, shortly after sunrise, the air seemed to be charged with radiation that caused a static, crackling noise. While it lasted, certain creatures basked in it – silver worms, ginger wading-birds, animated thin sheets of something like creamy paper, and a clutch of small, furry, eight-legged animals huddling close together. Others disappeared during the crackling radiation, presumably having withdrawn into their lairs for self-protection. Everywhere, from branches, a hairy fungus swayed, palpitating, now and then exuding a pustule that popped and left dust floating down in the still air.
Nothing here seemed to be gentle. The chain of predation was rapid and unnervingly candid. It was obvious to Jen that he would soon meet something that would seek to destroy him, even if he eluded the Garthim. Nothing here could enjoy a long life. It was all too vivid. It was visibly decomposing.
And yet, he was too exhausted to go on and too frightened to return to the open country. He had to rest. If the Garthim caught up with him here, so be it. The urRu had taught him to look upon life – his life, like all other lives – as a cycle of fate.
He sat down on a tree stump, trusting that it would remain inanimate, and took out the crystal shard. He was entranced, not only by its refractions but by something else – the suggestion of some greater power it held, some higher intelligence stored in it. Certainly this mineral object possessed a property by which the vibrations of noise and of light were united. That he knew by the glow it had given off in response to his flute.
For a long while he gazed at the shard, all the time wondering where he should go from there. The Skeksis, a Great Conjunction, evil, the three suns, a Crystal, fate, “make it whole,” “heal the wound at the core of being” – all these were words he had heard said, but to him they were words without a syntax, without a dynamic relationship to each other. He was, he realized, in an even more precarious situation now than he had been in when he left the valley. Then, at least, he had a destination: the high hill. Now he simply had the shard and a nagging suspicion that, sooner or later, his journey’s end would be that castle of which Aughra had spoken. “They do things there,” she had said. A premonition filled him with deathly fear.
Would the shard glow again? he wondered. He put it beside him on the stump, lifted his flute to his lips, and played the notes. The shard again glowed, quite softly, and again it returned the notes raised by an octave, though with a less piercing ring than it had given under Aughra’s dome. But staring into it as it lay on the stump, Jen noticed something else.
An image formed inside the shard, as the images had formed themselves in urSu’s bowl. But this was a different image. Within the crystal he saw another crystal, glowing even more brightly than the first. He thought perhaps it was a refractive trick of the light. But then an event was enacted in the image: the inner crystal appeared to suffer a great blow. The prismatic pattern of its light was shattered all over the shard. The high-pitched resonance ceased and the image of the inner crystal turned dark. Then it faded. Jen was left blinking, unsure whether he had seen it all or not.
He recalled Aughra’s tale of the shard – how it had broken off, with a great noise, from the large Crystal the Skeksis had hammered. If his eyes were not playing tricks on him, that must be the event that this shard had the power to shadow forth when he sounded the notes that urSu had conjured up. He felt sure it was a clue to what was expected of him.
He returned the shard to its place of safekeeping inside his tunic and lay down flat on the stump, his eyes closed. He intended to concentrate on the information he had, hoping that he might decipher a pattern there, a guide for his journey… .
The next thing he knew, he was suddenly awake. He sat upright, with no idea of how long he had been asleep. He puzzled over what it was that had awakened him. A strange noise in the swamp? Or just the strong sense he had of being watched? He looked around nervously. Perhaps the noise, or the uneasy feeling, had been part of a dream in his fearful body.
As his eyes darted about, he caught a glimpse of what had been an opening in a clump of ferns snapping shut. He rose and cautiously parted the ferns, edged his head through, and looked around. No creature was there.
Then he noticed something on the ground. In the mire there was a print, slowly filling with a trickle of muddy water. As he watched, water filled and obliterated it.
Jen withdrew his head and again peered keenly around him. There were many clumps of ferns, rushes, and swamp-rooted trees behind which a creature might be lurking. Then he detected another flash of movement behind another clump of ferns, and this time he distinctly heard the sound of something scuttling away from his gaze. From the sound of it and the size of its print, it could not be anything very large. Feeling bolder, Jen moved as quickly as he could through the mire to the place where he had glimpsed the animal.
Again there was no creature to be seen, but there was a spoor. It led to a patch of firmer ground, where toadstools grew thickly. Through the toadstools, a trail of broken caps pointed directly to the open end of a fallen, hollow trunk.
Stealthily, Jen circled around to the farther end of the trunk and crouched beside it. From somewhere he heard a sound much like his own laughter. His body tensed as he looked about uneasily. The swamp was full of noises.
He leaned forward around the end of the trunk. Staring out at him was a monstrous face covered with fur. It was uttering a low, very menacing growl. Then it opened its mouth, revealing several rows of teeth, and let out an enormous, terrible roar.
Jen jumped so violently that he staggered backward. Losing his foothold on the slippery ground he fell, and landed sitting in a boggy patch. Neither his hands nor his feet could find a purchase he could use to haul himself out of the mire.
Again he heard laughter, this time behind his shoulder. He craned his neck around. From behind a tree, a Gelfling girl stepped out. She looked at him with a broad smile and laughed again.
Jen was aware of the ridiculousness of his position, but he was much too stunned by the girl’s appearance to improve his dignity or to care that she was laughing at him or to feel anything at all except amazement. His open mouth made him still more a figure of fun.
From the hollow log, the fierce growls continued, interspersed with yaps. Jen glanced anxiously in the direction of the furry monster.
The girl followed his glance, then gave a whistle. From the log, the face with bared teeth skipped out, revealing that it was virtually nothing but face. Its body was a tiny ball of fur, nothing more.
“Don’t be afraid of Fizzgig,” the girl told Jen. “He won’t hurt you. He’s a terrible coward.” She looked at Fizzgig, who was scurrying across to hide behind her. “Aren’t you?” she asked affectionately.
Fizzgig looked up at her with devotion.
The girl was the most beautiful thing Jen had seen in his life: beautiful in herself, and beautiful in existing at all. Her hair was longer and fairer than his, her eyes were larger, and the tunic she wore was brown while his was a pale, creamy color: but there was no doubt what race she belonged to – the same wide cheekbones as Jen’s, the small chin, the pointed ears. When he found his voice, he said, “You are Gelfling.”
“Yes,” she answered.
“But…” Jen shook his head. “I thought I was the only one.”
“So did I.” They smiled at each other, astounded, delighted.
“I have been hidden all my life in a village near here,” she said. “I live with the Pod People. My name is Kira.”
“I have lived in a valley with the urRu,” Jen told her, “a long way from here. I am called Jen.”
He tried to stand up but found he had settled more deeply into the bog. His movements caused another round of growling from Fizzgig.
“I seem to be stuck,” Jen said.
“Here,” Kira said, “take my hand.” She knelt down at the edge of the mire and reached out to him.
As Jen’s hand touched hers, something like an electric charge was exchanged between them, and simultaneously their minds were welded into a single consciousness. A torrent of images gave each of them a clear insight into the other’s innermost thoughts and memories. It was intoxicating, liberating, yet controlled, articulated like conversation, not random, gushing. The images were exchanged and shared. Jen’s recollection of himself as a baby (seen more clearly now than ever before in his memories), crying amid the flaming ruins of his house, and in the distance black Garthim (as he now knew them to be) disappearing. For this Kira returned her own self-image as a Gelfling infant. Swaddled, she was wedged into a hole under the roots of a tree by her mother; hidden there, she saw her mother turn away, saw a huge pair of bony, taloned hands seize her mother and strangle the life out of her, and against a background of this desolate vision saw the Garthim, again smashing, destroying, killing, wasting.
Not only were these images transmitted: both Jen and Kira had the knowledge that each was receiving the other’s image exactly as though the exchange were taking place at the level of speech, where one would describe and see the other listen, respond, and acknowledge. And yet not a word was spoken between them. Only their clasped hands communicated.
Jen was gently gathered from the ruins of his house by the four arms of an urRu. Kira crawled on all fours through undergrowth and was found by a lumpish peasant man who carried her into a settlement of his people. There, she was surrounded by the community, who babbled with wonder and pleasure.
Jen, growing, splashed in the waterfalls, learned to draw runes on a black rock, and was patiently corrected by urSu. Kira swung in a hammock, was fed from a gourd, and when she jumped from a high tree provoked gasps of alarm among the peasant folk.
In a cave, Jen helped urNol mix herbs and fungi in a cauldron, which, to Jen, seemed vast. UrUtt wove a garment and showed Jen how to work the loom. Under urYod’s tutelage, Jen used an octonary abacus; and, cupped in the palm of urSol’s hand, he studied the fingering of his flute. Kira examined plants, played cat’s cradle with peasant children, of an evening sang the people’s songs with them, and once hid among swamp plants while a phalanx of Garthim trooped past.
And more. Three of the urRu – urlm the Healer, urAc the Scribe, and urTih the Alchemist – taught Jen to pronounce the secret, sacred names –
Teth, Cheth, Zayin, Ab,
and so on – and used riddles to impress upon him the symbolism of pentagram and tetraktys, sulfur and quicksilver, while urAmaj and the others at first intrigued him with their obsession to connect one thing to another, and later wearied him with it. In Kira’s image, her foster mother, Ydra, taught her Gelfling speech, explaining that their two races had always lived together in courteous harmony, as they had with nature. From Ydra she learned to communicate with animals and to understand the nature of plants. What neither Ydra nor any other of the peasants explained to her very well was history, especially Gelfling history. Being so deeply rooted in the life of nature, their notion of time was largely founded upon the cycle of the seasons, and barely did they comprehend the concepts of a changing world or a hungering spirit.
UrZah taught Jen to listen.
The flow of images ceased abruptly. Jen, sinking ever deeper backward into the bog, had let go of Kira’s hand in his struggle to remain on the surface. The mire was up to his chin. He looked anxiously to Kira.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t struggle.”
She held her head back and called out in a high-pitched wailing voice.
From deep in the mud, her call was answered by a low, rumbling noise. Looking around anxiously, Jen saw a roiling on the surface rapidly churning toward him. He hardly had time to panic before he felt himself being lifted above the mud and borne in precarious stateliness to firm ground, where he was deposited. Picking himself up, he saw what it was that had retrieved him – a grublike thing, three or four times his size. Kira was patting it affectionately on the muzzle and speaking to it in its own tongue.
Then she led Jen to a pool of clear water and helped him to wash off the mud.
“How did we tell each other so much without talking?” Jen asked her.
“Dreamfasting,” Kira answered in a matter-of-fact voice, sluicing water over him with her cupped hands. Seeing that he did not understand, she asked, “You don’t know about dreamfasting?”
He shook his head.
“Well …” she began, as though about to explain. Then she smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, now you do know about it.”
“Have you always known?”
“All my life I think, yes,” Kira replied. “The Pod People know, too. They’re the peasant folk who raised me. Didn’t your protectors use it?”
“The urRu? No. Not with me, at any rate. Can you do it whenever you want?”
In reply Kira held out her hand to him. From near their feet came a growl. “Fizzgig, don’t be jealous,” Kira reassured him. “This is Jen. He’s like me, it seems.”