Nightpool (15 page)

They passed the harbors at Cape Bay and the
Bay of Fear, and in both bays they could see in the starlight rows
and rows of boats of all kinds and sizes anchored and tied one to
another. On some, lamps burned, though most were dark and quiet.
They could smell meat cooking, which made Teb wild with desire, and
the scent of frying onions was nearly more than he could stand.

Beyond the Bay of Fear the coast belonged to
Baylentha, and they reached the scene of battle near to midnight.
There they came ashore and curled down among the heavy marsh
grasses to sleep. A smell of death clung to the place, and Teb lay
awake a long time.

The knowledge of himself was here, and he
thought if he could go to sleep in just the right way, he would
wake in the morning knowing who he was, knowing why he had been in
this battle. Maybe he was a refugee, like the people on the
boats.

But when he woke at dawn he didn’t know any
more than he had the night before. The sky was barely light, like
tarnished silver, and the hills in the south and west black
silhouettes. He looked up across the marsh to the battlefield and
saw the huge, towering cage.

It was immense, made of whole trees, just as
the otters had said, and held together with chain as big as a man’s
leg. Its door was propped open, and he. knew he had been in there,
and he rose and began to walk toward it almost as if he walked in a
dream, stepping around the still-sleeping otters, who lay curled
together in a silky brown tangle.

The battlefield was strewn with the bleached
skeletons of horses. They were grisly in their broken helplessness,
their wild spirits fled, their lovely warm, moving bodies gone,
their collapsing bones sinking now into the earth, their eye
sockets empty and their brains eaten away, and whatever else it was
that had made those wild spirits all vanished. The smell of death
and rotting meat lingered, and here and there a hank of hide and
hair still clung to the bone. A few saddles lay broken beneath the
bodies, though most had been taken away. As Teb stared around him,
a ghost of the battle touched him, distant shouting and the thunder
of hooves and the clashing of swords rang in his head, then was
stilled, and he could not make the battle come clear; but his fear
had increased, so he was sweating and cold. And a song of the
skeletons and of death formed quickly and harshly, with a stark
white beauty.

There were no skeletons of men. He looked
for the mound of a common grave, but saw none.

He approached the cage and stood looking,
and knew he should remember this. He stared inside at the earth,
striped with the shadows of the great bars, and almost knew.
Almost. There had been terror in that cage.

And wonder. It was gone now. He turned away
at last, strangely lonely, and began to prowl among the tangled
heaps of bones, trying not to think of them as horses.

He found a rusted knife in a patch of weed
between the bodies and thought it would be fine when it was
polished. He found a single boot and let it lie. He saw the paw
prints of foxes crossing the battlefield, marked over with hoof
prints, and he stood looking at them, puzzling.

Why would fox prints stir him? Why was he so
sure they were foxes?

He glanced toward the cage, then toward the
grass where the otters slept. He wished they would wake and come to
keep him company. But the sky had grown orange with sunrise before
he saw Mikk rear up out of the grass to look around him, then soon
Charkky, then the others. He grinned and felt better when they came
across the battlefield, hah-hahing, to help him search.

They quartered the battlefield back and
forth, the otters rummaging around the heaps of bones, soon making
a game of it. They chased one another in and out among the
skeletons, picking up useless objects—a thrown horseshoe, a broken
bridle rein—and stopped to eat the blackberries that grew along the
edge of the marsh. Teb listened to their huffing laughter and shook
his head and kept searching, though he was growing discouraged.

But then at last, in a small ravine that
pushed back against the rising hills, he found a leather pack down
among the thick bushes. He pulled it out, undid the strings, and
spilled the contents onto the ground.

There was a pair of brown socks with a hole
in one toe. A pair of linen drawers for a very big man. Another
knife, not so rusted. A twist of tobacco. A sewing kit—needle and
thread and scissors—in a little cloth bag. And something dried that
might once have been cheese, for it had stained the leather and
cloth with its oil. He put the socks and knife and sewing kit in
the pack and left the rest. There was no flint, so he kept
searching, though in the end it was Jukka who found it as she
rummaged into a tangle of blackberries. She found the flint and
played with it, ate some berries, then at last came loping up the
hills to Teb to ask if this might be what he searched for, this
little unimportant-looking bit of metal in the wire holder, with
the second piece of metal dangling from it by a chain.

Teb took it from her and gathered some dry
grass into a pile, then struck the metals. The sparks made Jukka
back off in alarm, huffing at him. The others gathered at once as
he got the tiny fire smoldering.

“Hah,” said Charkky. “It smells bad. No
wonder we never had any.”

“On Nightpool,” Mikk said, “you’d best do
this where old Ekkthurian can’t smell it.”

But to Teb the fire smelled wonderful, and
he felt disappointed that the others found it useless and silly.
They gave it another look, then went off again playing among the
nut grass and blackberry bushes. Teb dropped the flint into his
pack, and snuffed out the tiny fire reluctantly. It was much later,
when he had stopped to eat some blackberries for his breakfast,
that he found the bow, tangled down among the blackberry vines.

It was a good bow, made of oak, but broken.
He wondered if he could mend it. He went back among the skeletons
to pick up arrows, and soon had ten, then fourteen, that he thought
he might use if he sharpened the steel tips and replaced the
feathers. He showed the otters how it would shoot once he repaired
it, and this impressed them far more than the fire.

“How far will the arrows go?” Charkky
said.

“Oh, maybe clear to the hills, if I fix it
right.”

Mikk examined the bow, the curves so
perfectly formed, the little notches where the bowstring would
fasten.

“It would be fine for rabbit,” Teb said.

“Yes, and for shooting sharks from the
bank,” Mikk said. “Could you do that?”

“I could try. I could learn to.” Why not? He
wasn’t sure how to mend the bow, but he guessed he would think of a
way. He had gone to scavenge some strips of leather when Kkelpin
came clumsily dragging an iron cookpot.

“Is this of any use? It might make a good
bowl for clams.”

“Oh, it’s more than a bowl. I can cook in
it. It’s perfect. And it will fit in the pack, I think.” It was not
a very large pot and was coated with dirt and ashes. He brushed it
off and rearranged the pack so it fit, then went with Kkelpin back
to the site of the camp cookfire, but there were no other prizes;
it had all been taken away. There should be a big iron grid, he
thought, then puzzled that he knew nothing more, was still puzzling
over a fleeting vision of men around the cook-fire as they set out
for home in late afternoon, the bow and arrows across his knees,
and the pack strapped to his waist with a bit of bridle rein. How
could he know something down inside but not remember it? What would
it take to make him remember who he was and why he had been here?
And why did the great cage make him feel so strange?

He watched the sea roll green, shot with
light in the afternoon sun, the dark otter bodies flashing beneath
the glassy water and dark faces bobbing up to stare at him with
laughing eyes, and at last he forgot his own puzzling for the
joyous games of the otters. They passed the crowded harbors well
after dusk and slipped into Rushmarsh, the raft churning and
rocking in the busy water as a crowd of otters dove and played
around it in greeting.

But this was more than joyous greeting;
there was something wrong. The plunging agitation of the Rushmarsh
otters soon infected the six, and from the raft Teb strained to
make sense of the tangle of words as everyone talked at once.

“There has been something in the sea,” said
Feskken, swimming up to the raft. “Something huge and unfamiliar.”
His dark muzzle pointed off toward the darkening horizon, as the
old pale female joined him.

“It came to the mouth of the bay,” she said.
“It was thrashing and churning out there, and then lay still for a
long time, as if it were watching us.”

“It stayed until the sun went down,” Feskken
said; “then it sank deep, too deep for us to feel its vibrations.
Maybe it went away, maybe not. You had best spend the night in
Rushmarsh.”

“It wasn’t a whale?” Charkky said as he
settled down in Feskken’s holt. The grass house was larger than
those around it and crowded now to bursting with the otters of
Rushmarsh and the six from Nightpool, and Teb, as well as a gaggle
of cubs. Teb sat near the door, where he could slip out to tend his
fire.

“Not a whale?” Mikk repeated. “A lone bull,
following krill?”

“We don’t think it was a whale,” said
Feskken. “It’s the wrong time of year for a whale to come in so
close, near to Rushmarsh. There was nothing to draw it, no krill in
the water.”

Teb was glad they weren’t out on the dark
sea now, with an unknown creature lurking. He rose and left the
otters and went to the old abandoned grass holt where he had built
his fire, and sat hunkered before it, cheered by the burning
driftwood and the boiling iron pot. He dropped in some wild onion,
and that smelled grand, then the shellfish and lily roots. And then
he sat alone, opening the steamed clams and oysters and stuffing
himself nearly to sickness. Nothing had ever tasted so good, juicy,
and hot, and the flavors of seafood and lily roots a hundredfold
richer than ever they could be raw. He was almost finished when
Charkky and Jukka and Kkelpin came to sniff the cooked shellfish,
but only Charkky would try it. The other two watched him with
distaste.

“It isn’t bad,” Charkky announced. But he
didn’t take a second helping.

Jukka just looked at him. Kkelpin’s whiskers
twitched with amusement. Later when Teb yawned and yawned and
couldn’t keep his eyes open, no otter would come to sleep beside
his fire, so he bedded down in the fresh rushes alone, feeling very
cozy, and dreamed of building a fire pit in his cave. He woke to
such brilliant red light he thought the holt had caught fire, but
it was only the sunrise. They were off before breakfast, the little
raft loaded, now, with a great hank of freshly dug lilies, dirt
still clinging to the roots, and barely room for Teb to crowd
aboard. Once out of Rushmarsh, he swam for a long way, keeping a
wary eye on the open sea, then climbed back on the raft to warm in
the rising sun. He was glad the weather had warmed; he would not be
swimming in the winter, for already the sea had turned chill. He
thought of getting his tunic out of the pack, then didn’t, and was
almost asleep when suddenly the raft was rocking and the sea
heaving as the otters raced with it toward the cliffs.

“Jump, Tebriel! Jump for the cliff!” Charkky
shouted as a monstrous black shape foamed out of the sea, nearly on
them. “Jump!”

He leaped for the cliff and clung, and
climbed as the raft crashed against it and foam spewed below him;
he prayed the otters were climbing, too. He slipped, snatched at
wet rock, and nearly fell. Then the monster was beneath him, huge,
storming at the cliff so the stone shook. Teb heaved upward,
tearing his hands, and didn’t know afterward how he had moved so
fast.

He stood atop the cliff staring around for
the otters as the monster thrashed and heaved below: a giant
three-headed sea hydrus. He backed away from the edge as it reared
toward him; then he spun away and found a sharp stone, and wished
he had a knife. But the pack was lost, and all in it. Down to his
right, the raft had broken apart, and its logs were pounding in the
waves that beat against the cliff. There was no sign of the otters,
either on the cliff or in the sea. The creature remained still for
a minute, looking, and then it thrashed up against the cliff again,
rising higher in a spray of foam, the water pouring down its broad
black body, and its necks stretched out so the three heads came
over the top as he fled backward, each head as big as a pony, the
faces terrible parodies of human faces.

The muzzles were longer than a man’s, the
mouths broader, and the teeth close together and pointed. The eyes
were men’s eyes, muddy gray and vicious, three sets of identical
eyes watching and watching him with cold malice as he stood
crouched, knowing it couldn’t climb, yet ready to run if it did,
and to fight if it overtook him. The protruding mouths grinned and
drooled, and the center one licked evilly. It wanted him—he could
see it in its eyes, could feel its desire for him. An emptiness
came in his mind as he watched it, as if something had been taken
from him.

It watched Teb for a long time. It knew
something he didn’t know, seeing him from some incalculable
distance in time and space, Teb thought, and the emptiness within
him grew, and the terror. Had it killed the otters? He felt sick,
for surely it had killed them; and yet he was so very drawn to the
creature, and wanted, in some incredibly sick way, to walk those
few steps to the cliff edge, into its horrible reach. It looked at
him for so long, he was cold and hot all at once, and then it
smiled, all three faces smiled the same knowing, promising
smile.