Shadows of the Dark Crystal Page 7

  “Songs of brave heroes, thwarting villains,” skekOk said, almost humming the words. “Gives a Gelfling hope, eh? Gets a Gelfling through the night? Very well, very well.”

  Lord skekLach dug his claws under the front cover of his tome and, with an unceremonious gesture, flung the cover forward so the book shut with a cloud of dust and a resounding thump. He rose, leaving his quill, inkwell, and the tome to be taken away by one of his attendants.

  “Lodging!” he cried.

  Rising with the Census Taker, Lord skekOk gazed at the song teller standing uncomfortably before him, clacking his beak and sucking his teeth. When Maudra Mera laughed, much louder than seemed necessary, Lord skekLach jostled her by the shoulder with another clanking, ear-rattling guffaw.

  “Lodging, little Gelfling mother! And more wine.”

  “Yes, my lords, yes— Kylan, run on home now. Good night.”

  With a peal of coaxing laughter, the maudra led the two lords off, and that was the last Naia would see of them. They entered the town hall that adjoined the square, the only place still lit by torches and alive with music and the sounds of wine barrels and clinking cups.

  Kylan, left standing at the table, let out a big breath. He held out his hand and looked upon it. It was shaking, nerves not yet calmed from his meeting with the lords. He pushed both hands into his pockets, looking around and meeting Naia’s eyes only briefly before departing the square, presumably to wherever it was he called home. Then all was still and the square was doused in silence, so Naia took her time making her way to Maudra Mera’s home.

  There, on the main floor of the generous two-story hut, she found a stack of blankets and cushions laid out for her by the hearth and curled upon their flat softness. She longed for her hammock, the sounds of her sisters whispering between themselves in the adjoining room, and for the distant echoing footsteps of the Drenchen tapping through Great Smerth.

  What were her parents up to? Her mother, tending to her father’s wounds, no doubt. Her father, trying to laugh off his pain and discomfort, telling jokes, flirting with Laesid while she told him to stop moving around, lest his wounds reopen. Pemma and Eliona, complaining that it was too early for bed. All this in the warm heartwood of Great Smerth, so far away, it seemed like a dream, or a song someone else might tell.

  Her mind inevitably wandered to Kylan and his tale. Jarra-Jen’s adventures took place all over Thra, though some songs spoke of his home in Stone-in-the-Wood. She wondered if Jarra-Jen had ever missed home or felt lonely on the long journeys alone. Naia snorted and rolled to her other side, her back sore between the shoulders no matter which way she lay. It didn’t matter—Jarra-Jen was a folk-hero, likely not even real. And even if he had been real, so what? The songs might be fun to listen to while they were being sung—but after they were said and done, the song teller’s lute was packed away. They didn’t help her now. In a way, they were nothing but soft-speak, huff-puff only good for distraction, children, and the curious Podlings.

  No, what had been real were the glistening beaks and crafty eyes of the Skeksis Lords. Their coats and cloaks and robes and mantles all layered upon one another in opulent richness, in colors made of dyes Naia had never seen before, most likely cured from the fruits and vegetables all across Thra. And their ornaments! How had they cast such intricate shapes, in twisted metals? And that book, that counted all the Gelfling in Sami Thicket, and probably villages elsewhere. How many numbers were within it, and to what end? For whatever end, Maudra Mera would spend the night and the following days pursuing it, that was to be sure. Naia, however, would follow the opposite path, treading alone to stand on trial for her missing brother before the Gelfling All-Maudra.

  Well, she would bring honor to her people, if Gurjin would not. Before long, she told herself, the names of the Drenchen would be marked in the thick pages of Lord skekLach’s tome, and their number would be recorded in history. That held in mind, Naia stared at the wood beams of the ceiling for a long time, watching the shadows sway until their slow dance finally lulled her to sleep.

  Chapter 10

  The following morning, Naia woke early. Though her body was tired, she was eager to leave Sami Thicket. On the road toward her destination, there would only be plants and animals to deal with. She made her bed and folded the blankets, though in her light sleep, she really hadn’t disturbed them much. From the calm quiet that had settled on the square outside, it seemed the lords had taken their leave. When Naia peered out the front-facing window, through a soft cloth curtain, she saw no sign of them, their feathered steeds, or their decorated attendants anywhere. She sucked in a breath when she realized she was not alone in the common room. Maudra Mera was mending pieces of leather with a short tough needle and sinew thread, rocking slowly in a finely finished chair. Her fingertips glowed blue with vliyaya, though it wasn’t the same healing magic as Naia had learned from her mother. Maudra Mera’s power infused itself in the thread with which she sewed, binding it tightly to the fabric through which it wound. Maudra Mera’s attention was on her hands, but her voice was for Naia when she said, “Eager to leave, my dear?”

  Naia straightened her tunic and brushed off her knees. “Thank you for your hospitality, maudra. But I have important business in Ha’rar, so I should be going.”

  Maudra Mera set aside her craft and walked Naia to the door. Naia’s pack was waiting for her, though it looked fuller than it had been when she arrived. Inside she found packed food and a skin of water. Hanging from the side by the laces were a pair of Nebrie-skin shoes.

  “Oh!” Naia exclaimed, almost too touched for words. “Thank you . . .”

  Maudra Mera tightened the drawstring at the top and hefted it for Naia, helping her sling it over her shoulder. For once, Naia thought the maudra might finally reveal some secret fondness for her—but instead, all the woman did was pat Naia on the arm and say, “You’ll tell your mother I took you in, won’t you? What good care we took of you?”

  Naia bit back a sigh and nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said shortly. “I will.”

  Sami Thicket was still sleepy in the early morning, the main street empty save for the hearth tender stationed in the center of the square and two night guards relieved of duty, returning home. None paid Naia any mind, not even to stare, as she left. Once she had crossed through the wood that shrouded the village, she paused to sit, digging out her handmade sandals from her pack. She held them in her hands, pride full to the brim as she compared them to the expertly crafted moccasins gifted from the Spriton. She didn’t need their charity—yet they were beautiful, in a way, with delicate beadwork and finely cured leather dyed a deep red. The inside was lined with clover fleece, soft and insulated.

  Swallowing her pride, she slipped the new shoes on, pulling the laces taut so the shoes fit snugly. The toes and heel were open, and she imagined she could climb in them—feats impossible in her clunky sandals. Reluctantly, without room in her pack, she left her old sandals on the side of the road behind her. There was no point in holding on to two pairs when she only needed one.

  The dirt path cut through the grassland, something she hadn’t been able to spot from the long route she’d been taking from Sog. The path had mostly footprints in its sandy wake, though here and there were long ruts made by wheels of wagons and carts. Once and again, Naia heard the voices of Podlings in their Podling tongue, working in the grass and digging up tubers, tossing them into the carts, singing and laughing. The prairie was maintained by them, it seemed. The grass was shorter here, less wild, the flowers growing in rows. As she rounded the big thicket, she saw posts circling a wide field, and far across the gently rolling acres she glimpsed a fleet of white wing-eared animals loping in the distance on legs as tall and narrow as saplings.

  Naia’s ears perked at the sound of Gelfling voices, calling to one another in the early morning. Up ahead, she saw a second cleared area in the field where the grass had be
en rolled flat. Several target posts had been driven into the earth there, each painted with different-colored stripes. Four Spriton Gelfling were standing about, three with rope-and-rock bola in hand. The fourth was standoffish, eventually dragged closer by one of the boys.

  Naia stopped to watch one of the girls hold the bola by the handle-weight—a fist-size rock at one end. She swung it over her head so the two counterweights—one at the middle and one at the far end—whipped around in a quickening circle. Finally, she let out a yip and released it. The rocks cartwheeled through the air and snapped around a distant target, the counterweights tying the rope in knots and securing it midway up the post.

  The girl cheered and gave a little jump of victory. Two of her companions cheered with her, though the fourth was not so enthusiastic. Squinting, Naia recognized Kylan the Song Teller as the last, stiff like a stalk of grass as a bola was shoved into his arms, pushed up to the toe line from which he was to swing. The others chided and hooted at him, and from the way he held it in his hand—at the wrong spot, with the wrong hand—Naia could tell bola swinging was not one of his gifts. Reluctant, but jeered into it by his companions, Kylan twirled the weapon. When he let it loose, it was at the wrong time, before the counterweights had fully reached their peak—the bola went crashing into the earth, blowing up a chunk of dirt before falling to a pitiful rest not ten paces away. His companions exploded into laughter.

  Naia shook her head and re-shouldered her pack, looking ahead to the mountains. She had a long way to go, with no time to waste teaching Spriton youth how to swing a bola. She’d had a bola in hand since she was a child. One of her first toys, her father had often joked, was a tiny bola made of floating wood and vine. Kylan the Song Teller had plenty of his own people to teach him.

  The Gelfling voices drew her attention again as the curved road brought her abreast of their target field. The three Spriton had gathered around Kylan, and though Naia couldn’t make out all the words, she could hear their tone nudge from teasing to mean-spirited. Kylan went to retrieve his bola, but it was so sharply embedded in the earth that he had to use both hands to release it. Even then, when it came free, the recoil sent him stumbling backward, nearly losing his footing and eliciting another round of laughter from his companions. Naia watched for a moment more, until the oldest of the group, a boy with long braids bound with red and purple smimi feathers, reached out to shove the chagrined song teller.

  “Hey!” Naia shouted, interrupting the boy before his hands could make contact. “Don’t you think he’s had enough?”

  “Mind your own business, Drenchen!” the boy called back, but he turned to face her. While he had his side turned, Kylan snatched up his bag and made a quiet escape toward the road ahead. When the boy with the braids finally noticed, he hissed and shook his head. To Naia, he repeated, “Mind your own business and go back to the bog you crawled out of!”

  That got a good response from his friends, though Naia wasn’t impressed. She waited until Kylan had gained some distance before taking one of her own bola from her pack. From the road, she was twice the distance from the posts that the Spriton were. Swinging with a well-practiced arm and grounded stance, she brought it to full circle in only two orbits, then let loose on the third. The rope-and-rock sailed through the air with perfect precision, latching snugly onto the highest colored band on the center pole.

  “That’s what they teach us in the bog,” Naia shouted, grabbing her ears in her fists and sticking out her tongue. Speechless, the Spriton only looked back and forth between her and the tightly knotted bola at the top of the post. Neech, who had launched eagerly from her shoulder the moment she’d thrown the weapon, perched on the post in short order, taking the counterweight in his mouth and skillfully unwinding it. From the high vantage, he easily glided back to her with the bola dangling from his jaws like a pendulum. By the time he dropped it in Naia’s open hands, he was chirping with little pants. She smiled and kissed him when he settled on her shoulder. He wasn’t quite big enough to do his job tirelessly yet, but his effort had paid off in front of the Spriton, who gaped as if they’d seen two suns collide. Contented, Naia put her nose in the air and carried on down the trail, confident she’d have no more trouble from their lot.

  Up ahead, where his path through the field met the road, Kylan was leaning with hands on knees. When he heard Naia’s footsteps, he straightened, brushing his braid over his shoulder and taking in a big deliberate breath.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said with a trained formality. Naia noted that the woven pack strapped to his back was full, and not with bola or whatever else a song teller might take on a normal daily excursion. He had on traveling shoes as well, the same kind as she, but with less beadwork and more stitching. His gaze lingered at her shoulder. “Is that a muski? I’ve heard of the flying eels of Sog. I’ve never seen one before. My thanks to you, too, little one.”

  “You could’ve helped yourself if you’d fought back,” she said, letting Neech’s sudden self-contented preening speak for itself. “Those kinds are all talk. Give them a little fight-back just once and they’ll leave you alone forever.”

  Kylan looked warily down the road from where they’d come. Then he straightened his vest, paying it more mind than it required.

  “I’m not good at fight-back,” he said. “I know I’ll have to learn to be, on my journey . . .”

  “Journey?” Naia nodded to his pack. “Where I come from, I think we’d call it running away.”

  “I’m not—!” he exclaimed, but the outburst was sudden with guilt.

  Naia chuckled.

  “Good luck to you, song teller. Don’t let others pick on you like that anymore. A rock’s good for one of two things: throwing or hiding under. Pick whichever you want, but the more quickly you decide, the better.”

  She waved a good-bye and headed down the path, leaving the chagrined song teller behind. The cleared ground was easy to walk on, flattened and free of stickerplant-filled grass. She wondered if it would go all the way to the mountains—if only she could be so lucky! The sky was clear, perfect weather for a long day’s journey, and . . . She heard footsteps behind her. Kylan, though a few strides back, was nevertheless on the same path, heading in the same direction, at more or less the same speed. They walked at a constant distance for some time until his eyes on her shoulders became so distracting that she slowed her pace enough for him to walk side by side. He smiled, and she didn’t smile back, unsure whether she wanted to become attached to a song teller on a journey like the one she was on.

  “Where are you headed, then?” Kylan asked.

  “Ha’rar, at the coast of the Silver Sea,” she replied. Hoping he’d take it as a warning, she added, “It’s a long way, through wilderness.”

  “Ah!” Kylan said. “North toward the misty peaks, through the Darkened Woods we creep, along the Blackened River deep. If I remember right, Stone-in-the-Wood is along the way, isn’t it? That’s where I’m going.”

  Naia shrugged in agreement. She knew from her dreamfast with Tavra that Stone-in-the-Wood was the halfway point between Sog and Ha’rar.

  “Would you mind if I joined you?”

  The question was so polite that Naia very nearly agreed on principle, but she imagined any number of dangers they might encounter on the way. In her mind, each scenario was made more dangerous when she pictured protecting a Spriton song teller who couldn’t throw a bola to save his life.

  “Well, I’m not sure . . . ,” she began. She tasted soft-talk forming on her tongue, and before the flavor could overwhelm her, she stopped and turned so they were facing each another. It wasn’t fair to either of them, really, and she knew better than to try to sweeten the inevitable.

  “Listen. Song Teller. I need to reach Ha’rar as soon as possible with a message for the All-Maudra. I don’t know how long it will take me, but I don’t have time to waste—”

  He held up
his hands. “You won’t have to take care of me. I promise, I—”

  “You can’t even throw a bola!”

  Again, his ears folded and he curled his lips in. A flush of guilt hit her cheeks, but she stood her ground. It was the truth, anyway.

  “Maybe not, but I can be useful in other ways,” he said. “At the very least, I promise I won’t slow you down. I may not be good at hunting, but I’m a good cook and I tell a good song.”

  “Songs won’t help on the journey I’m on,” Naia said. Although it was true, her belly rumbled a little, as if whispering to her in protest.

  Kylan caught the bit of hesitation and insisted, “I can record our journey in exchange for your protection from ruffnaw and—and fizzgigs!”

  Naia barked one accidental laugh at the thought, shutting her mouth quickly after, but it was too late; the smile was already on her face. She tried to lose it, but it haunted her lips.

  “Firstly,” she said, “I don’t need my journey recorded or songs during camp. Secondly, I would hope there isn’t a Gelfling alive who’d need protecting from a fizzgig!”

  “But in Jarra-Jen and the Maw of the King, the Fizzgig King eats Jarra-Jen whole,” Kylan said. If anything, he was determined, and he’d seen that smile. “To escape the huge maw was no easy feat; Jarra-Jen, yea, he tickled the King’s throat with a leaf—”

  “It sounds stupid,” Naia interrupted, but the smile was returning at the idea of a fizzgig swallowing someone whole—what nonsense! Jarra-Jen would have had to be an awfully small hero indeed. But Kylan’s words were strong, putting the ridiculous image in her head: a red-and-orange fluffy ball of fur big enough for a Gelfling hero to stand in. Before she knew it, she was almost laughing at the idea. Trying to hide her mirth, she turned away, hearing Kylan following.