The Dark Crystal (7 page)

Read The Dark Crystal Online

Authors: A. C. H. Smith

BOOK: The Dark Crystal
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He was still staring in bewilderment when he realized that a planet as large as himself was rapidly about to sweep down on him. He threw himself flat on the floor and felt the planet pass an inch above his head. He looked around for a safer place, but the orbits of the orrery seemed to encompass the great room.
Where was Aughra? Clearly this was where she lived, as well as her place of work. Her domestic clutter, pots and pans and utensils and glassware, lay scattered around, amidst alchemists’ tools, biological specimens, and bits and pieces of half-assembled machines. He raised his eyes and saw a gallery running the circumference of the dome, with two large telescopes mounted diametrically opposite each other. But he could not see her up there, either.
“Like my house, eh, Gelfling?”
Jen jumped. Aughra had suddenly appeared behind him, perhaps emerging from some trapdoor.
“Such marvels,” Jen said. “I never knew – “
“Ha! What you expect, huh? Hole in ground?” She grunted. “Gelfling.”
Aughra ducked casually as an urgent, spiked moon slashed past her gray head with the whoosh of a battle-ax. Jen, with his back to it, had not seen it coming. A foot lower and it would have decapitated him.
“Where should I stand that is safe?” he asked her.
“Safe?” she snorted. “You won’t find safe here. Nor anywhere. Just watch out. Get used to it soon enough, when you know what to expect.”
Jen nodded at the orrery. “What
is
that?”
“It tells you what to expect. Like now you’re going to lose an arm if you don’t look around.”
Jen looked around quickly, just in time to dodge a bright comet. “But-” he started.
“Follow,” Aughra told him, laughing to herself. She led him halfway around the room to a niche that was presumably a sanctuary from the dangerous cosmos. There she sat him down at a table. “You hungry?” she asked.
“Yes.” Jen had forgotten that he was. Too much was happening too quickly.
She opened a cupboard door, and gave him a piece of cheese and a beaker of white juice. He sniffed them cautiously.
“Go on,” Aughra said. “Do no harm to Gelfling. Used to eat that all the time. Nebrie cheese. Kainz juice. What you eat, then? You really Gelfling?”
“Yes,” Jen said hurriedly. “Tell me, you used to know other Gelfling, you said?”
“Maybe.” It was disconcerting how abruptly Aughra could become taciturn.
“But you said–”
“I said lots of things. Too many. Nobody to talk to, that’s why.”
“I would like to know more about the other Gelfling. I’ve never met one.”
“Never will. All dead. Skeksis sent Garthim.” She stared at him, shaking her head in puzzlement. “Go on, eat.”
Jen took a bite of the cheese. It tasted good. He sipped the juice and found it delicious. All the time, Aughra was shamelessly staring at him.
“Excuse me,” Jen said, “but would you tell me something? Are you female?”
Aughra laughed out loud. It was not an attractive thing to see, with her black teeth and squat body, but it cheered Jen up. “Female,” she chuckled, “yes, bit that lasts is female. Bit gone rotten is male. Too busy. Oh-ho.”
“What happened to your eye?” Jen asked with more confidence. “The one you can’t take out, I mean.”
“Eye? Burned out.”
Jen gasped. “How horrible.”
“Worth it.” She tapped the empty socket. “I saw Great Conjunction. I saw what Crystal did. Only one, me. No one else saw it.” She leaned her face close to Jen, who stopped chewing his Nebrie cheese.
“I looked at Crystal,”
she declared with emphatic satisfaction.
Jen nodded as though he understood a word of it all, and went on chewing. It really was good, this cheese.
“Only one, me,” Aughra repeated. “Except urSkeks, of course. Ha! They’re different, so. When they set up that chant, out here, everywhere, reverberating crystals were, then, all over Thra. Did you know?”
Jen decided that he did not know that and shook his head.
“No. I thought not. Well, that’s why Aughra built this, see? They helped, before Great Conjunction, last one.” She gestured to the orrery. “What you think it is all for, huh?”
“To tell you what to expect?” Jen suggested.
“How you know that, Gelfling?” she asked suspiciously.
“You told me.”
“Ah. I did. Well, how else you or Skeksis or anyone know about conjunctions without all this? Hmmmm?” She leaned forward again and spoke intently. “How else you know about Great Conjunction coming? That’s why you here, no? Aughra knows.”
“My Master told me something about it.”
“How
he
know?” Aughra asked sharply.
“I can’t say. He was dying and didn’t answer my questions. What is the Great Conjunction?”
Aughra gave a deep chuckle. She leaned across to a workbench and picked up an alchemist’s brass triangulum. With her other hand, she took out her eyeball and held it so that it was staring at Jen through the triangulum. “See?” she asked. “Three circles. All together. Concentric, huh? Three sun brothers. Big quarrel over daughter of moon. That’s story they tell, you ask Pod People. They need stories, them. She drowns herself, they separate, and when they come together again,
zzzah!
” Aughra hammered the triangulum on the table, making little rings on the surface of the white juice. “Big battle. Or big friendship. Can’t tell.”
“I see,” Jen said. “Could we look for that shard of crystal now?”
“Wait, Gelfling,” Aughra replied, screwing her eyeball back in. She replaced the brass triangulum on her workbench and wandered around the table where Jen sat. She peered into boxes and opened drawers, still talking. “You want to know about Great Conjunction. When it do come, you better be underground. No telling. End of world, maybe. Or beginning. End, beginning, all the same. Big change. Good, bad, I don’t know. Whole planet might burn up. End of Thra. End of Aughra …
ffffft
. You too. Smoke rings. So? We all turn to smoke one day, no? Come from smoke too, some say. Don’t know. Might not be so bad, smoke. Float around. In air. See world. Hmmmm?” Suddenly she laughed hysterically.
Jen smiled, out of politeness.
Now she was talking intently to him again. “Only one, me, who really knows. Three times three ages, I watch, lesser conjunctions, some energy there, yes. But not enough. Nothing’s changed, can’t be. What’s coming now, ah. But you see little moon, there?” She pointed to the orrery.
Jen’s eyes followed the line of her bony finger and saw a very small, dark-painted orb rotating around one of the largest of the planets.
“Secret moon of Thra, that,” Aughra told him with a nod. “Nobody really knows if it there. Doesn’t reflect, see?
If
it there, it gravity has, yes, and that changes everything else, see?
Everything else
” she repeated. “Maybe. Maybe not. Could be soon, or not at all.”
Jen remarked, “UrZah told me something would happen shortly.”
Aughra smiled nonchalantly. “Suns might miss each other.” She tapped her nose. “But I know. Guess how?”
Jen thought and pointed to the orrery. “That tells you?”
“Idiot. Gelfling. I just told you, could be error in gravity calculation on that. No. I tell you. Lots of crystals now. All over ground. Everywhere I go. That always tells you, great metamorphosis due. I saw it last time, when Skeksis came.”
Jen frowned. He had heard that word from his Master and more than once now from Aughra. “Skeksis?” he asked. “What are Skeksis?”
Aughra sat down and gazed at him in silence for a long time. With incredulity she finally answered, “You don’t know that? What you doing here?”
“I told you. A shard.”
“And what you want shard for?” She glowered at him.
Jen felt stupid. “I don’t know yet.”
Aughra spoke vehemently. “Better ‘find out fast, Gelfling.”
“Perhaps you could tell me?”
She hesitated and seemed ill at ease. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know. Skeksis…” She shrugged.
“Are they something you’re frightened of?”
She snickered. “You think Aughra an idiot? Of course Aughra frightened of them.”
“My Master said something about them. I think he said they had great power and shattered the sky when he was born. And they are evil, he said, but what does that mean?”
“You have seen castle?” Aughra asked.
Jen had no idea what she was talking about, but he nodded, to avert her scorn.
“That’s Skeksis. They built it, them. Was a mountain, Crystal was inside mountain, down a shaft, in a cave, old cave, with a floor. That’s where I was, on the floor, spirals I remember, when I saw it. Lost this.” She tapped her empty socket again. “Then they came, after Great Conjunction done, they cut castle out of mountain rock. They do things there.” She shook her head.
“What kind of things?”
Aughra shook her head again and mumbled to herself. She shot a sidelong glance at Jen. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought Gelfling
knew
all this.”
“Perhaps the others you met did. I’ve never seen another Gelfling in my life. Well, not since I was very little, anyway, too little to learn anything about Skeksis or Great Conjunctions or–”
“UrRu,” Aughra interrupted him. “They not tell you anything?”
“Oh, many things. But not about all this.”
“But they sent you here, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Because of prophecy?”
“What prophecy?”
She shook her head quite vigorously. “Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know,” she muttered to herself. “UrRu, no use, them, no use to anybody.”
Jen was offended. “They are very kind,” he said boldly. “They loved me and cared for me.”
Aughra looked at him, her face doubtful. “Loving. Caring. That don’t destroy a Skeksis.”
“What?” Jen gasped with horror. “Destroy how?”
She hunched her broad shoulders and said nothing, shaking her gray head very slowly.
To pass the uneasy silence, Jen paid attention to a small retort that was suspended over a burner at the end of the table. He peered at it. Inside the glass, an indigo liquid was bubbling viscously. While he looked, however, his mind was on other things. If he had hoped that Aughra would clarify his quest, the truth was that she had merely added to his confusion. And frightened him as well. Before, he had been simply anxious to discover what was expected of him, and whether he would be able to perform the task. Now, from her enigmatic silence, he guessed that his mission, whatever it was, would place him in mortal danger. And beneath her silence, he had to confess that he detected her scorn at how little the urRu had imparted to him about it all. He resented being made to feel ungrateful to them.
Miserable with doubts, he tried again. He had nothing to lose. “Aughra,” he said, “these Skeksis… must they be killed?” To keep the question as casual as he could, he put his hand out toward the retort, pretending to be curious about it.
Aughra’s response terrified him. She slammed her hand down on Jen’s, pinning it to the table. “Don’t touch!” she screamed.
“I’m sorry,” Jen stammered. “I just wondered what it was.”
“Questions,” Aughra growled at him. “Too many questions, Gelfling. What you want, a shard? Find it.”
She stepped across to a cabinet and threw open the door, disclosing a shelf full of crystalline shards, glittering at him.
Jen gaped. “Which one?” he asked.
“If Aughra knew that, wouldn’t need Gelfling.”
A
s evening darkened into night, Jen sat cross-legged on the table, examining Aughra’s crystals. He had spent a long time sorting them into two piles. The larger contained those crystals he had rejected; the smaller was of those that bore some resemblance to the dagger shape his Master had shown him in the cloudy image. Aughra had left him to his task.
It came down to three crystal shards, in the end. Jen could not see how to choose among them, since they appeared to be identical – dagger-shaped, clear, all slightly flawed by internal cracks. He held them up to the light, he sounded them by knocking them on the table, he tasted them. No difference was perceptible. Even had he known for what purpose he wanted the shard, he could not have selected any one of the crystals over the other two. Perhaps Aughra would allow him to have all three. She did not seem possessive about them.
Aughra returned with a basket. “You want mushrooms?” she asked. “Caught them myself.” Her temper had improved again.
“No, thank you.” Jen showed her the three crystal shards. “These are all similar to the one I am seeking.”
“So which is it?”

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