The dark crystal, p.9
The Dark Crystal, page 9
Jen grinned sheepishly. “Is it so obvious how hungry I am?”
He stood up. Ydra took his hand and led him to an area of the room where several Pod People had already started to dance again. Everybody clapped when they saw Jen take the floor.
Guided by Ydra, he found he had no trouble at all in stepping and skipping to the changing rhythms, up and down, round and round. Those Pod People who were not dancing crowded in to watch, cheering, beating time, and tossing seeds and fragrant petals. Ydra began to sing a wordless song, a lively version of the one Kira had sung in the boat on the black river. Jen, in turn, played his flute, along with the raucous band.
Soon the whole room was dancing. Only Kira, Jen saw, was still at the table. The cat’s cradle was on her fingers, but she was not attending to it. She had her head cocked in the air as though she were straining to hear a sound from outside the uproarious room.
In vivacious celebration of their happiness, the Pod People were shouting and clapping and stamping their feet to a climax. The din was such that nobody heard Fizzgig barking very loudly.
And then a hideous noise of cracking lacerated the room as one side of the shell house was smashed in. Splinters flew among the crowded dancers.
A great hole had been torn in the wall, and through it came a huge black claw.
It withdrew for a moment, then gashed a larger breach. A Garthim battered its way in. Others trampled through after it.
In the panic stampede, the Pod People skittered in all directions, crashing into furniture, howling with terror. Some escaped through the door or out the windows. Some were seized in Garthim claws and crushed to death instantly. Others were picked up by their heads or arms or feet and stuffed into round wicker cages that the Garthim carried on their backs. In the chaotic din of destruction and death, Jen ran desperately toward the table where he had been sitting with Kira. It had been overturned onto its side and Kira was crouched behind it, with Fizzgig. On the floor beside her lay her cat’s cradle, a mere tangled bunch of string.
Jen crouched down with her. “It’s us they’re after,” he gasped.
Kira nodded. “That Crystal Bat, on the river.”
Jen peered out over the top edge of the table. The scattered cooking fires had set the ruined house alight, but through the thickening smoke Jen saw one of the Garthim almost upon them, hurling aside everything in its path. Jen stood up in front of Kira, protectively. From his tunic he snatched the shard, the only thing he had that at all resembled a weapon. He gripped it like a dagger.
The Garthim towered over him now, its great serrated claw descending and grabbing his arm. With his free hand, Jen stabbed wildly at the black thing. As the shard struck the Garthim’s claw, it rang out with a deep, resonant note. The note resounded around the globe of Thra. Far out, on the plain, the urRu heard it. They paused in their trek and raised their old heads, listening.
The Garthim released its hold on Jen and drew back from him, into the dense smoke. Behind it, however, other Garthim pressed forward toward the upturned table. All of them had located their quarry when they heard the note of the shard. Repel them as he might, Jen knew that they were so huge that each assault they made was going to wound him badly before he could strike back. It was only a matter of time before he was killed, and then Kira. His wounded arm was already useless. It dangled from his shoulder. Blood was staining his tunic.
On the hand with which he gripped the shard, he felt the touch of another hand: Kira’s. It told him the way to the door through the blinding smoke, it told him of the forest outside, it told of freedom.
Hand in hand they ran, still crouching to avoid the thickest fumes. Fizzgig did not leave Kira’s heels. They passed within inches of Garthim, who, though invulnerable to flames, were now shown to be as blinded by smoke as any sighted creature. On their massive, plated feet, they were staggering in confusion toward the upturned table, randomly destroying whatever they collided with. The floor was a mess of Pod blood and flesh, splinters, food scraps, smashed pots.
As the Gelfling neared the door, a Garthim loomed up through the clouds in front of them. They froze. They could see only the lower half of its body. It lumbered away from them, itself seeking the clear air outside, smashing a path for itself through the walls. Jen and Kira waited to see which way it would turn, then bolted out of the house behind the Garthim’s back.
The scene they beheld outside was a desolate one. Smoke poured from every house in the village. All of them had been torn apart by the Garthim in their insensate hunt for the Gelfling. The cries of Pod People who had been collected as casual booty wailed on the night air.
Jen and Kira had no time to stand and stare in pity. They sprinted into the low brush at the margin of the forest. But they were not quick enough. One of the Garthim had spotted them. They heard it behind them, clattering and pounding in pursuit, closing in on them rapidly. As they ran, they both knew it was hopeless. At every stride they expected a claw to seize one of them from behind, crushing their bones and flesh to a pulp. Jen grasped the shard tightly. He would fight to his last breath.
Then, from the line of trees where the forest began, a thing yet more terrifying than the Garthim emerged, watching them with cold reptilian eyes. Kira screamed, and Fizzgig set up a frenzy of barking at the monster that had appeared in front of them.
It was the Chamberlain, still decked in motley rags. His taloned hand was raised in a gesture of arrest.
Still running, Jen and Kira took the only escape left to them, veering off through the brush parallel to the forest margin.
The Garthim, however, two strides behind them, halted at the Chamberlain’s gesture. The Skeksis repeated it, and the Garthim, hesitantly, turned round and lumbered back toward the raped village.
When they realized that the noise of pursuit had stopped, Jen and Kira stumbled to a halt, panting. Turning to look behind them, they saw, bewildered, the Garthim making its way back to the rest of the troop. They saw Kira’s home, smoke billowing from the gashes in its side, and other houses wrecked, and the vast shadows of the Garthim gathering the hysterical Pod People in their claws. And they saw the thing a distance away in the brush, its head turned on its long neck, watching them. It made another gesture to them. But it was not moving in pursuit of them.
Exhausted, they walked into the forest. As they began to push their way through the undergrowth, bracken and shrub and fern, pathetic sounds from the village they had abandoned still rang in their ears.
Kira was weeping. “That was my home,” she sobbed. “I grew up among those people. In that house. And now, it… I saw Ydra. They picked her up by her hair and tossed her into a sack. Like a cabbage. An old woman. The Garthim… Oh, Jen…”
Jen said nothing. He put his unwounded arm tightly around her shoulders for what comfort he could offer, but he could think of nothing to say. Because of his quest he had met Kira. That was what she had said. And because of his quest her people had been massacred. That she did not have to say.
Brian Froud
CHAPTER V
AT THE HOUSES OF THE OLD ONES
Kira was at home in the forest. Having often played there as a child, she knew the paths and the glades. Follow her, she told Jen, and she would find her way, even in the dark night, to a soft bank she knew in a secluded, safe place where they could sleep in comfort. It was not far, she said. Both of them, exhausted, ravaged by visions of horror, needed to sleep. And Jen’s arm, although it had stopped bleeding, ached with every step he took. Kira said she could heal it with a moss the Pod People used. She would find some in the forest.
Jen was preoccupied with what he had witnessed. He felt himself tremble and was grateful for Kira’s company. Although the night had been even more harrowing for her, she was the one who had found the courage to be calm, to do what had to be done.
Brambles scratched their skin as they pushed deeper into the forest. Any creature could be lurking in the darkness under the trees. “Not far now,” Kira said encouragingly. Jen tried hard to ignore the throbbing in his arm. Never before had he known so much agony. Each time his right foot landed on the ground, a stabbing pain shot through that side of his body. When they reached the bank that Kira had remembered, Jen sank down with a groan of relief. He had almost fallen asleep before Kira found the healing moss and took the shard to cut strips of moss from the ground. Then she bound them around his arm.
“Are we safe here, do you think?” Jen asked groggily.
Kira was concentrating on his arm. “Well,” she finally said, “I think there are too many trees over us for the Crystal Bats to find us.”
Against the pale moonlight of the sky, Jen could see that she was right. Although they were in a glade of sorts, the high branches of the trees met above them, like fingertips touching. Behind them, as they sat on the bank, was the thick undergrowth through which they had forced their way. Facing them, across the glade, was a dark horizontal cutting off the paler sky, the edge of a low cliff, perhaps. It certainly felt like a secluded and sheltered spot. But it was not the Crystal Bats that he most feared now, nor even the Garthim, of which they were harbingers. No, what luridly preyed on his mind was the horrible apparition that had slouched out from the forest and confronted them as they were fleeing.
He had known at once what it was, by instinct he supposed. To confirm his suspicions, he asked Kira, “That monster that tried to stop us—that was a Skeksis, wasn’t it?”
Kira tenderly wound the last bandage of moss around his arm and fastened it with a knotted stalk. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I’m sure it was. I’ve not seen one since the day my mother was killed by one, when I was still a baby, but it had talons like those I remember. And some of the Pod People have shown me Skeksis in dreamfasting. Yes.”
Jen sighed and lay on his back, watching the clouds feather the sky between the branches. His feelings about the Skeksis were ambiguous. In a way, it was almost a relief. If he had beheld a thing so ghastly and then been told that it was not a Skeksis, that he had yet to experience facing a Skeksis, he would have felt the world outside the valley of the urRu to be too desperate a place for him to live. And yet, if he persevered in his quest, there was every indication that eventually he would be required to confront the Skeksis, in some way to oppose a number—how many?–of creatures as fearsome as the one he had just seen. What possible chance could a Gelfling have against opponents so vicious in appearance, so huge? But then he recognized a further ambiguity in his feelings—about the giant bulk of that Skeksis there had been something vaguely familiar to one who had been raised among the urRu.
“Do you think it will be coming after us?” Jen asked.
“It didn’t look as though it would, did it?” Kira replied. “The Pod People say the Skeksis always use the Garthim for their hunting because they aren’t terribly good at it themselves. No, I think they’ll send their Crystal Bats out again.”
“Then we must stay here in the forest,” Jen said, “and always keep under cover of the trees.”
“What, forever?” Kira asked.
“If necessary,” Jen said. He looked at her. “Would you mind that?”
“Sooner or later they’d find us, somehow.” Kira shrugged. “In any case, what about this?”
She handed the shard back to Jen. He took it and looked at it wearily. “Yes,” he said, “what about this? It has already been responsible for the mutilation of your village. I hate it.”
He sat up and hurled the shard from him as far as he could. They heard it fall among the leaves on the other side of the glade. Fizzgig thought of fetching it but decided against it, on account of the darkness.
“Things can’t be responsible for anything,” Kira observed. “Only those who use them can be.”
Jen felt ashamed of himself. He said nothing.
Kira sat down beside him on the bank. “Jen,” she said, “I know what you’re feeling. But it’s not your fault it happened.”
“It wouldn’t have happened but for me.”
“That’s not the same thing. You could just as well say it wouldn’t have happened but for me either. If I hadn’t seen you in the swamp, or if I’d just run away from you—and I nearly did, in fact—then the village wouldn’t have been destroyed. Well, not tonight, anyway. But in the end, the Skeksis and the Garthim will continue to rule as they always have done, and any village might be discovered and destroyed at any time. They come and capture the Pod People in order to use them as slaves, you know.”
“What about the Gelfling? Did they destroy all of our people?”
“That’s what I was always told—except for me. The Pod People kept me hidden, and then taught me how to hide myself. And now here you are.”
“So why do you think that Skeksis sent the Garthim away when it could have killed us within a few steps?”
“I have no idea.”
“It was almost as though the Skeksis wanted to save us.”
Kira laughed without mirth. “I can’t believe that. The Skeksis have never cared for anything but themselves, that’s what the Pod People always say.”
“But suppose they say that because they have always been tyrannized by the Skeksis. Suppose the Skeksis have more feelings for the Gelfling.”
“I saw one of them kill my mother.”
“Yes,” Jen said miserably. “And there’s no doubt who those Garthim were really after.”
“No, there isn’t.”
Jen shut his eyes with the despair of it all. Soon, his body took pity on his mind and let sleep watch over him. Kira lay down on the bank beside him and also slept. The moon moved its shadows silently across their faces.
Jen awoke to daylight and to Kira’s face smiling down at him. His head was in her lap.
“Where are we?” Jen asked.
“We are safe,” Kira replied.
“What a wonderful thing to hear the moment you awake!” Jen smiled back at her and sat up. He winced, feeling his arm.
“How is it?” Kira asked.
Jen moved it backward and forward, carefully. “Better,” he announced. “A lot better, I think. A bit stiff, though.”
“Leave the moss on for now, all the same.”
Jen inspected his green arm and grinned at the sight. Then he stood up and glanced around the glade. Fizzgig stood up with him and began to romp among the flowers.
“Did you sleep?” Jen asked.
“Of course I did.”
“With my head in your lap?”
“You were groaning a bit but it didn’t stop me falling back to sleep. On the contrary.”
“What’s that?” Jen was staring across the glade. What he had taken, in the darkness, to be the edge of a low cliff he now saw to be the façade of a ruined building.
“It’s the house of the Old Ones.”
“The Old Ones?” Jen repeated, intensely curious. A strange sense of intimacy with the house at once took possession of him. “Who are they?”
Kira shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s what the Pod People always call them, the Old Ones.” She seemed reluctant to say any more.
“Have you ever seen them, the Old Ones?”
“No. I don’t think anyone lives there now.”
Jen was wandering toward a dilapidated doorway. He was enchanted by the ruins, which he now saw were more than just the one house. Through the doorway, other walls and courtyards came into view. The stonework was graceful, with the remains of carvings evident here and there. The floors, where they were not covered with debris from the caved-in roofs, were apparently tiled.
“Don’t go in, Jen.” Kira’s voice was suddenly tense.
“Why not?”
“I was told not to. Ever.”
“Why? What’s the danger?”
“I don’t know. The roofs might fall in on you. The Pod People would never go inside. Bad things happened here once. The Old Ones were killed by the Skeksis. Jen?”
“I have to.” Jen meant exactly what he said. No mere idle curiosity was luring him into the ruins but an affinity he immediately felt with the place. He could not begin to explain it. He was being drawn inside, that was all he knew.
As if to confirm his impulse, lying in the doorway among the leaves was the shard, the blade of its dagger shape pointing inside the ruins like a compass needle. Jen hesitated a moment, then decided not to retrieve it. That was a decision he would rather defer for now. He walked through the doorway.
Then he turned round, looking back at Kira. “Come on,” he said and held out his hand.
She gazed at him, doubtful and anxious.
More persuasively he repeated, “Come on, Kira. We must see what’s in here.”
With a slow shrug and pursing her lips, she crossed the glade. At the doorway she stopped. “I’m afraid,” she muttered to herself, almost in apology.
Jen did not hear her. He had already turned back and was stepping cautiously into the ruined building.
Kira, too, noticed the shard lying on the ground. She picked it up and placed it in her pouch. Then, scooping up Fizzgig and clutching him close to her, she followed Jen into the ruins.
Everything Jen saw delighted him, in its proportions and workmanship, in its deft taste in decoration. Though ruined, the buildings still possessed a dignity, a noble bearing. He walked along a passage, then another at right angles. Doorways opened onto small chambers that no longer bore any trace of their furnishings. The roofs, it seemed, had been thatched, or at least covered in some kind of vegetable matter, branches perhaps, to judge by the litter of dead wood and shriveled fronds on the floor. Where any roofing at all remained, it consisted only of a few joists, now open to the sky. Throughout, the floors were tiled in terra-cotta. On some of the tiles traces of a pattern could be seen, but never in sufficient number to convey the meaning of the grand design. Windows had been plentiful. In many places now, the wall had collapsed above the lintel, leaving a sort of crenellation. Bushes and grasses had taken up habitation, as had scuttling spiders.
Around the next corner, an open archway led into a much larger and lighter room than Jen had previously seen. On the walls were scraps of fabric, faded and tattered evidence of some richer hangings, tapestries possibly. Most striking of all, in the middle of a long wall stood a chair of curious and elliptical design. In size, it would have suited Jen handsomely. He was trying to clear it of leaf mold, fungi, and cobwebs when Kira joined him.
