Nightpool (12 page)

He woke much later in a patch of sunlight
that shone down from a high opening at the back of the cave. He was
alone. It was warm. He stared out through the door at the sea and
felt the salt wind in his face. He looked down at the clay cast
that held his leg and peered under the rumpled moss blanket to find
himself naked. There were scars on his arms and thigh and chest
where old wounds had healed, a scar on his arm that he stared at,
frowning. It ran through a little brown mark that puzzled him,
though he did not know why. He pulled the cover back over himself,
and looked around at the cave, at its dark stone walls curving up
to the dome overhead. Seats were carved into the walls, and shelves
at different levels, and ledges for sleeping, like the one on which
he lay.

The higher shelves held objects from the
sea, shells of different shapes and colors, and corals. There were
some bones, too, and a whitened human skull. And, in one large
niche all alone, the immense jawbone of some creature with
viciously sharp teeth. Teb thought it must be a shark.

When the white otter returned he sat near
Teb and smiled a whiskery grin that made Teb want to laugh. Yet
there was a great, calm dignity about the white otter, too.

“Thakkur,” Teb said. “I remember. I guess
you saved my life. I guess I don’t remember much about coming here.
How did I get here? How long have I been lying here?”

Thakkur’s whiskers twitched. “It has been
all summer, and we are now into the fall; the shad are running. You
had a very high fever for a long time. You slept a good deal. I
expect everything is muddled in your mind. But can you tell me your
name? Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Teb tried, and when his name would not come
to him, a surge of panic swept over him. He could not remember how
he had gotten here, or how he had gotten hurt. He knew his leg had
been broken; he could remember the otters setting it, could still
remember tears springing at the sudden violent pain. But he could
not remember anything before the disjointed scenes here in this
cave and some confused, dark dreams that would not come clear.

“It will come,” said the white otter at
last. “It will come when you are stronger. Meanwhile,” he said,
laying a paw on Teb’s arm, “you are safe here. And welcome.”

But he was not welcome by everyone, Teb knew
that. And he would know it more certainly soon enough.

It was some time after the white otter left
that Mitta came to sit with Teb again, her paws busy now weaving
grasses into a thin cord, and he remembered her sitting quietly
beside him many times when he woke, and always her paws were busy
working at something, or playing with the necklace of stones she
wore. He saw, when he began to have visitors, that all the otters
except Thakkur wore such stones.

The visitors came two and three at a time to
look at him and touch him with shy, thrusting paws, rearing and
grinning with whiskered smiles and fishy breath, saying, “Hah,
human boy,” and “Hah, you are better, human boy.” They would come
dripping from the sea, their thick fur all spiky from being wet,
and they would come in dry and sleek and groomed, silken and
beautiful. But always their paws were busy as they visited with
him, playing with the worry stones usually, as if an otter’s paws
had not the ability to be still. Mitta sent one small cub out
because it made too much fuss by jumping up onto Teb’s sleeping
shelf to investigate his cast with busy fingers. “Get out into the
day and play with your worry stones, and leave the poor boy
alone.”

Otters touched his cheek with cold, damp
paws. Young otters nuzzled up to him and brought him limp
wildflowers, and in between visitors Teb lay looking at Thakkur’s
strange collection of relics from the sea. When Charkky and Mikk
came to sit with him, Charkky lifted down the treasures one at a
time for him to examine. There were, besides the shells and bones,
some rusted tools and odd bits of metal, a hinge, a spike, gold
coins and pearls, and a box made of sea-darkened maple and carved
with words across its top. He fingered the carved letters but could
not make meaning of them.

“I thought all humans could read,” Charkky
said.

“I don’t know,” Teb said, confused. “Only
that I can’t read this.” He felt so empty, not to know anything
about himself, not to know his name or how he had gotten to the
marsh where Charkky and Mikk had found him. They told him about the
battle, and about the making of the raft and their journey home,
but he could not remember anything before that time. He had no idea
what the battle was about, though all the otters agreed it had to
do with the dark forces, and with a leader called Quazelzeg. He had
no idea what he had been doing in that battle.

Strangely, he felt most at ease within
himself in the evenings when he was alone in the cave with Thakkur,
for the old white otter did not ask difficult questions, but
instead told him the tales of the Ottra nation, fables of the sea
and of magic creatures, stories that stirred some strange longing
in him; as if he had heard such tales before, as if he valued them.
Somehow such tales seemed a part of himself, though he had no
notion how. Tales of the diving whales that would come to the
surface with the sucker marks of giant squid on their black hides
from deep-sea battles, tales of seabirds that could travel the
entire length of the great sea without ever landing, and of the sea
bat that swam deep down on wings as wide as the length of twenty
otters. Tales of ghost lights deep in the sea made by the souls of
drowned fishermen. Tales of drowned cities that once had stood on
solid land; though it was not until much later that Thakkur
explained how such a thing could be. Tales of the ghosts that were
said to haunt such cities. And tales of the three-headed black
hydrus that Thakkur said was so very different from the smaller
land hydruses, fiercer, and foreign to this world, having entered
Tirror from some other world. Though again, it was not until a
later time that Thakkur would tell him how that entry was
accomplished, or how deep was the sea hydrus’s evil.

When Teb began to feel stronger, he grew
restless, hobbling around the cave, but the clay cast was fragile,
and Mitta wouldn’t allow him to go very far out along the ledge.
The cast was hot and itchy, too, and he longed to pull it off.
Mitta said, “Not yet. I don’t know how long it will take to heal; I
only know about otters’ legs. And yours was so very hurt. A few
more weeks, and we will cut it off.” But he dreamed of being free
of it, and of leaping into the cool sea, free and whole, to dive
and float as the otters did, to roll and play their complicated sea
games with them. Though Teb had no idea whether he could swim. He
could not remember swimming.

He moved his sleeping place to a shelf
beside the door, opposite Thakkur’s, where he could look directly
down at the pounding waves and feel the sea spray on his face. And
in the daytime he watched the otters fishing in the bright, rolling
sea, their long sinuous bodies turning underwater, and he imagined
how cool and silky the water must feel.

Then one morning early, Charkky and Mikk
appeared at the cave door with a long, forked branch.

“It’s a crutch,” Charkky said, and hobbled a
few steps to demonstrate. “We padded it with moss. See?”

Teb tried it, and it worked just fine. He
hobbled around the cave, grinning.

“And Mitta says you are to come and live in
her cave awhile,” said Mikk. “You are growing too restless. You can
wander more on the inside of the island.”

He walked to Mitta’s cave on the new crutch,
over the rocky rim of the island, flanked by Charkky and Mikk. They
paused on the high rim, whipped by the sea wind, and Teb stared
down at the inner island with surprise. “It’s hollow.” A bright
green valley lay far down in the cupped center of Nightpool, rich
with meadow, and with a little lake and a brilliant green marsh
and, at the far side of the valley just below the rising black
cliff, a long body of water that was an inner sea, moving and
churning like the great sea. He could see a black tunnel at the
south end through which the sea was flowing in. The inner cliffs,
around the meadow, were lined with dwelling caves. “It’s all
hidden, the whole valley. No one would ever know.”

Charkky and Mikk grinned at his
appreciation.

Below them in the little lake, a dozen otter
cubs were playing catch with a shell, tossing it far out, and
diving and squealing. At Mitta’s cave, her own three cubs
overwhelmed Teb with chittering and hugging, and the smallest
climbed right up his good leg, to cling to his neck, tickling his
throat with her whiskers.

So it was that Teb moved into Mitta’s cave,
with a sleeping shelf by the door, where he could come and go as he
liked. From here, with the help of the crutch, he could make his
way down to the little valley and wander among the tall bright
grasses beside the marsh, watching the water birds fly up and small
snakes slip away from him, watching the otters at food
gathering.

He missed Thakkur, though, and the long
evenings of storytelling. He went back often, but it was not quite
the same as listening to Thakkur’s tales curled up under the cover,
ready for sleep. And there was no strong pounding of the sea in
Mitta’s cave, only a faint echo accompanying the sleepy whimpers of
the cubs. Teb began to put himself to sleep by trying out different
stories about himself. Was he a fisherman’s son? A blacksmith’s
helper? Where had the scars come from? No story he could imagine
seemed to stir a memory, even that of a slave, though it would
explain the scars. And then one morning, Mitta found the note.

She had laid his bloody tunic and ripped
trousers away at the back of her cave and given him a moss wrap to
wear. But one morning early the three tumbling cubs found the
clothes and pulled them out and began a rough game with them until
Mitta returned and snatched them away. As she straightened them,
her busy paws found a piece of paper deep in the tunic pocket.

It was wrinkled and torn, and had been wet,
so the writing was blurred. He stared at it and knew—he knew—but
then it was gone, the knowledge gone. He tried to make out the
words.

After a long time, Mitta said, “What does it
tell you?”

“I can’t read it,” he said, puzzling. “I can
see the letters plainly under the blur. But I don’t know what they
say.” He frowned. “I can’t read, Mitta. I don’t know how to read.”
He felt strange and empty. Surely he had known how to read; he was
not a baby, but half grown.

“Is it such a bad thing not to know how to
read?” Mitta said. “Otters don’t know how.”

“I think it’s a bad thing for humans.” He
stared at the paper, perplexed. But it was not until two days
later, when he had picked it up for the hundredth time to try to
puzzle it out, that he suddenly saw one word in a new way and could
read it.

“Tebriel!” he shouted, startling the
tumbling cubs. “Tebriel! My name is Tebriel.”

The three cubs crowded around him. “Tebriel!
Tebriel! Let us see!”

“Right here,” he said, pointing. “Plain as
your whiskers, it says ‘Tebriel.’”

They glided up onto his knees and stared at
the crumpled paper, but it was only blurred squiggles to their
eyes.

“If you can read your name,” said Mitta,
“can you read the rest?”

“No,” he said, frowning at the faded
paper.

“Is the paper so very important?”

“It might tell me who I am.”

“But you know who,” cried the cubs. “You are
Tebriel. Teb, Teb, Tebriel,” they chattered.

“I don’t know who, though. I don’t know who
Tebriel is.”

“Perhaps Thakkur can conjure a vision that
will tell you,” said Mitta. “In the sacred shell, in the great
hall. Your name will help him, something to bring the vision.”

“He can do it,” cried the bigger male
cub.

“He can do it at the meeting to decide
. . .” began the female, then looked distressed.

“Meeting to decide what?” said Teb.

Mitta sighed. “You will have to know soon
enough.”

The cubs were silent now.

“To decide about you,” Mitta said. “To
decide whether you can stay at Nightpool. It will be voted on. Some
. . . some of the clan want to send you away.”

“Oh,” Teb said. “I see. Well, I am well now;
my leg is all but mended. I can go away now.”

“And where would you go, when you don’t know
who you are? There are the scars of a whip on your back, Tebriel.
And the marks of a chain on your ankle. Do you think you can wander
across Tirror in any safety when you don’t know whom to trust, and
who might again make you a prisoner?”

“Then I must wait for the vision to tell
me.”

“If Thakkur can bring a vision. It is not
always so. Sometimes it takes much more than the germ of a word to
bring knowledge through the sacred shell.” Mitta pulled a squirming
cub to her and fondled his ears. “Thakkur’s visions are not such an
easy magic as young cubs would like to believe.”

Across the vast floor of the meeting cave,
otters drew close to one another in untidy groups, a mass of dark
velvet with gleaming dark eyes flashing looks at one another. On
the stone dais at the back, Thakkur, white against the dark coats
of the twelve council members, stood at prayer.

The walls of the cave were set with pieces
of shells of all kinds, in every color a shell can be, to make
pictures, the pictures of animals, so that Teb was caught in a
memory that stirred him terribly. What was this feeling? What was
he trying to remember? He sat on a stone bench against the wall of
the cave, between Charkky and Mikk, staring around at the animal
pictures caught in a shaft of sunlight, and could almost see other
pictures, another place very like this; yet when he tried to bring
his thoughts clear, that other place vanished.