The Dark Crystal (2 page)
Authors: A. C. H. Smith
T
he storm was closer to the valley now. Jen looked up at the sky. Its colors were reflected on the shivering pool. Soon he would have to find shelter in one of the vacant caves along the spiral pathway. For the time being, he willed himself to stay beside the pool, above the waterfall, playing his flute, until the last possible moment. His quiet, secure life among the urRu seldom presented him with the opportunity to be a little brave.
he storm was closer to the valley now. Jen looked up at the sky. Its colors were reflected on the shivering pool. Soon he would have to find shelter in one of the vacant caves along the spiral pathway. For the time being, he willed himself to stay beside the pool, above the waterfall, playing his flute, until the last possible moment. His quiet, secure life among the urRu seldom presented him with the opportunity to be a little brave.
He leaned forward and gazed directly down into the pool. “Is that a brave face?” he asked himself aloud.
Although the water was not still, he knew his face well enough to see it plainly reflected on the shifting surface. Under the fringe of thick, dark hair was a countenance made almost triangular by the wide cheekbones tapering to a small chin. His large eyes were set well apart, on either side of a flattish nose. His Gelfling face was framed by long hair, through which his pointed ears protruded.
“A brave face?” He had asked that question often enough, and others. A handsome face, was it? An intelligent one? Sad? Stern? Was it even memorable?
All he had for comparison were the lugubrious faces of the urRu. Their aged, wrinkled eyes were so different from his bright ones. The skin on their faces was old, deeply lined in runic patterns. Their faces were not even in the same place as was Jen’s but thrust forward on long, thick necks that were covered with manes of gray hair. When they walked, with their heavy, slightly swaying gait, on their two powerful legs, their massive long tails were not heavy enough to counterbalance the weight of their heads. They had to lean on walking sticks, which they held in front of them with one of their pairs of forearms, while their hind arms hung down toward the ground. Their heads were ponderous with wisdom, perhaps, or with memory, or with listening.
Their immensely slow and considered movements were made weightier yet by the garment each of them wore, something between a coat and a saddle blanket.
These garments had been made for them by urUtt the Weaver and were fashioned to the individual by the system of knotting threads that he used. The complex pattern of knots formed a cybernetic store for each wearer’s thoughts, be they the medicinal knowledge of urNol the Herbalist, the astronomic records of urYod the Numerologist, the macrobiotic balances of urAmaj the Cook, or any other of the bodies of erudition that the urRu had been collecting for many eons. The garments were dusty and worn with age, but the colors had remained fast and the threads had not frayed because urUtt had used no scissors.
How could Jen ever have learned about himself by comparison with creatures so entirely different and so much larger – a hundred times heavier, quite probably? Everything they had taught him, which was a great deal, had been taught by precept. They could give no examples, not only because of their different physical beings, but also because the knowledge they had was absolutely conceptual. Nothing happened, nothing was apprehended, but it was instantly translated by the urRu into an idea and matched with all the other ideas accreted over the eons like the dust on their garments. The spirals and runes in the skin of their heads were the grooves of coded thought, representing a symbolic interpretation of each urRu’s total past, from which, at any moment, the future might have been projected by one who could systematically construe the signs. The habitual sadness of their expressions and the marked slowness of their low, resonant speech were evidence of their cerebral natures. Anyone who had never met the urRu might have supposed, at first, that they labored under a collective guilt, such was their lack of spontaneous action.
“A brave face?” Jen shrugged and sat down again. The storm was heading inexorably in the direction of the valley. The sky was dark now, and a chill edge in the air heralded the first rainfall.
Jen played a tune, trying to finger harmonies that might answer the thunderclouds. He double-stopped one pipe of the flute, as a kind of chanter, and on the other experimented with the quarter-tone effects he had discovered by partial stopping. He tapped his foot in a slow rhythm, shut his eyes, and improvised a sinuous melody.
Da da da datta da datta da da.
Da da da datta da datta da da.
When lightning cracked nearby, Jen opened his eyes again. Someone was behind him and towering over him, someone he had not heard approaching. He turned around quickly.
It was urZah the Ritual-Guardian, standing up straight on his haunched legs, his four arms spread-eagled, with his cane pointing to the sky.
“Pardon, Ancient One,” Jen said, fearing his flute had interrupted urZah’s thinking. “I did not mean to disturb you.” Although, Jen reasoned, surely even an urRu’s contemplation must be penetrated by a storm such as this.
UrZah answered in the fashion of the urRu, very slowly, with long pauses. “To mean is not to do,” he said. “To make a sound” – he reflected for a long time – “is to trouble the roots of silence. To play the flute is … to make a slave of air.”
Jen turned away impatiently. “I know,” he replied. “You’ve told me that before.”
At once he wished he had not sounded the note of rudeness. It was not that he had any fear of punishment. In all his time with the urRu, none of them had ever chastised him, however subtly.
Whenever he had spoken or behaved badly, the worst that had ensued, after a long meditative pause, was a somber sentence of philosophical correction. He doubted, in fact, that it was possible to upset one of them. No, he regretted what he had said only because it muffled the genuine respect he felt for urZah and all the others. Still, as the urRu themselves quite often said, a word spoken is a step taken.
Jen sat there, feeling awkward. He fingered his flute but thought he had better not play in case it was offending urZah. The urRu had not made a move but was still standing over Jen, his head cocked. Then he said, “In your cave there is one who has need.”
“My Master?” Jen asked. He stood up, with a little stab of anxiety. His Master, urSu, had never before sent for him in the middle of the day. Why now?
UrZah was gazing at the sky. “The storm comes,” he observed. “It is time. Time of change.” He paused. “Time of trial.”
So that was it. Something was to change and be tested. That was what the storm portended. Jen looked into urZah’s weary, kind face and nodded hesitantly. He had always known that this day, sooner or later, would come. The skills and intuitions that the urRu had cultivated in him, while sheltering his childhood, were always designed to prepare Jen for some task. The urRu had never told him what the task would be; and, truth to tell, Jen had never pressed them for an explanation. With all his wishing that things could be altered, that the urRu would let him roam more freely, and especially that all the other Gelfling would come back and live with him, he did not want to lose what he had.
He ran up the spiral pathway. He was only just in time. The storm was breaking on the valley now. The wind! It was blowing about more than dust and spray from the waterfalls. The very stones were being shaken by it. Jen could feel little pebbles pattering on his skin.
Why were urlm the Healer, urNol the Herbalist, and urSol the Chanter standing together outside the cave Jen shared with urSu? Was there danger in this storm? What were they talking about?
The three urRu moved aside, slowly, to let him pass. What must it be like for them, he wondered, to be so heavy and slow, and see one running as fleetly as he did?
Now his Master would tell him why the sky was turbulent. Such black force, scudding clouds that seemed to have a purpose. It was a day like none he had ever known, and he did not like it. Whatever it was that the storm wanted of him, nothing in his life would ever again be as it had always been.
“Master, here I am.”
As Jen stepped into the cave, through the entrance carved with the most elaborate runes of all the caves along the pathway, the storm outside rose to a crescendo of gale and rain and thunderclaps.
Jen paused for a moment beside his own small bed, carved into the wall of the cave, while his eyes and ears and breathing attuned themselves. He could see his Master at the rear of the cave, draped across the sleepframe that supported his massive weight. That was another strange occurrence today. His Master never rested during the daytime but was always at work with his books and his instruments, or conferring with other urRu.
“Master?”
UrSu, his head in an awkward position, stirred and looked up at Jen.
“Master, what does this storm mean?”
UrSu gestured weakly for Jen to draw nearer.
When he had done so, Jen experienced an alarm much greater than that which the storm had caused him. UrSu was prostrate. His breathing was labored and noisy. His eyes seemed cloudy and unable to focus clearly on Jen. His face was pale.
“Master, what is wrong?”
UrSu panted for breath before he could answer. “I was born…” he said, and the rest of the sentence was a mumble.
Jen cocked his head to indicate that he had not understood. His Master waved his hand to ask for patience. He struggled to bring his breathing under control.
“I was born under a shattered sky,” he finally got out.
Jen swallowed hard, forcing himself to remain calm. “Please,” he said, “it’s me, Jen.”
Again the Ancient One waved his hand with impatience. His mouth moved, shepherding the words. “A Crystal sang …” He breathed heavily in. “A Crystal sang to the three made one. The dark column, the rose column, and … and the radiance … itself.”
Jen moved closer, leaning down to speak.
His Master muttered, “Listen. You must understand. You must … After nine hundred and ninety-nine trine plus one trine … The Great Conjunction, the Crystal sang … I was born, ah, Skeksis, too… .”
Jen stood there quite wretched, afraid of the changes in his life, and bewildered by the responsibility that he felt his Master’s laborious muttering was imposing on him. He had no idea what he was to do with these fragments of knowledge – if knowledge they were and not merely the pointless ravings of someone mortally sick – any more than he could imagine what he ought to do to help his Master now.
“You are ill,” Jen said. “You must rest.”
If he could calm his Master, he would go fetch urlm the Healer, who, with his sense of an aura, could lay on hands, and perhaps everything would be right again.
UrSu took no notice. “Thrice times six were the urSkeks,” he went on, with a kind of chanting rhythm to conserve his breath. “Dark the Crystal, oh … Shattered the sky, great pain, the Skeksis, they … Evil, dark, their rule …”
Jen was trying to concentrate on the torn words, in obedience to his Master’s injunction to understand, but at the same time he was miserable with the realization that urlm, whom he had seen outside the cave, must already have visited the Master and left because there was nothing more he could do there.
“Great power,” urSu continued, with a new access of breath, “not again, not renewed, not Skeksis, not if Gelfling, you, ah …” He groaned with the pain of his sickness. “You, make it whole, you must, you must, all whole, Gelfling. Again.”
Drawing on his last reserves of strength, urSu raised his arm and held it over a copper bowl of liquid that was on the floor beside his sleepframe. His three long fingers and thumb pointed at the surface of the liquid, which at once turned cloudy. Outside the cave, a bolt of lightning struck with such force that Jen felt the ground shudder beneath him. Then, bemused, he watched the bowl of liquid, for it was forming itself into a shape, an image, a picture of a mountain. On top of the mountain he could plainly see a curiously domed building.
UrSu’s eyes were shut fast. All his remaining energy was now concentrated into forming the picture in the bowl and the words he still struggled to speak. “A wanderer may come,” he muttered. His voice was faint, but by now Jen’s ears had attuned themselves. “Come from under the mountain bringing murder and birth.”
“Master …” In Jen’s voice was bewilderment and tenderness. He was close to tears.
UrSu clenched his fingers and released them with an alacrity that was out of keeping with the rest of his inert body. The clouded picture in the bowl changed. What took its place was the image of a piece of crystal, a dagger-shaped fragment, which glinted in the cloudy liquid below the urRu’s pointing fingers.
“Mark this crystal shard,” urSu intoned in a faint, distant chant. “An orphan must restore it. Heal the wound at the core of being. Wanderer, orphan, Gelfling, Jen, with this tool you may forge a fate. Now” – urSu’s eyes flickered open to look at Jen – “now you are alone.”
The image of the dagger-shaped crystal shard faded beneath urSu’s fingers. At the moment of its disappearance it sounded a high-pitched ring of two notes, which sang around the walls of the cave, then died away very slowly. All that was left was the noise of urSu’s heavy breathing. The liquid in the copper bowl had evaporated. UrSu’s hand hung down limp.
“Alone?” Jen asked. “But what about you? What about all the urRu? Master …”
The ancient urRu’s eyes were shut fast again. In a voice that sounded as though it came from the threshold of another world, he said, “Your journey must begin. The three brother suns will not wait.” He paused. “Remember me, Jen. We may meet again, but not in this life.”
Jen said nothing. He knew that words would be wasted. He stood, his face very still, aware of his small breathing in comparison with the gasping sound that came from his Master.
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