“No!” cried Ekkthurian. “The council—”
“Yes,” Thakkur said. “This is a matter for all to decide and takes no special knowledge of the fishing waters, which is the council’s purpose.” Thakkur looked down over the brown velvet mass of otters. “Those who would send the boy away, please stand.”
Perhaps a dozen otters stood up, some of them sheepishly. One young otter looked around him and sat down again.
“Now those who would give him sanctuary.”
The velvet floor seethed, as all over the cave otters rose up. Then all heads turned to look at Teb. And when the council left the dais, a crowd of otters gathered around him, standing tall to touch and stroke him. Mikk and Charkky hugged him so hard, they nearly toppled him and had to pick up his fallen crutch. Then Mitta was there—hugging, too, and giving him a wet lick on the ear.
“And when you grow tired of my crowded cave, Tebriel, and the ruckus of the cubs, Thakkur has said you may have a cave of your own.”
So it was that, when at last he put his crutch aside and could walk the cliffs of Nightpool with only a small clay cast, Teb chose his own cave and moved into it. Though the moving was simple enough: his moss bed cover, his old bloodied tunic and trousers and boots, the note he had carried, and a clamshell for eating. He chose a cave down island from Thakkur’s, jutting high above the pounding waves and with salt spray coming in and the rising sun to wake him. It had seven shelves for his possessions and a single sleeping shelf. A cave for a bachelor otter, such as Mikk and Charkky shared, and at once it was home to him and seemed wonderful.
The year was coming on toward winter now, and turning cold, and Mitta found him a second moss blanket, for, as she pointed out, he had no fur to warm him. He cut and tied a breechcloth from his old, torn trousers and donned the tunic again. And as the winds turned chill, Mitta began to weave him a gull-feather blanket.
She sent all the young otters along the cliffs gathering feathers and moss, and Teb made a loom for her by tying four driftwood poles into a square and lacing it with grass rope, as she directed. The weaving began well, thick and soft, and Teb took Mitta’s place gathering oysters and clams so she could work on it.
He gathered cattail root and water herbs, too, from the freshwater lake, but he was growing very tired of raw food and longed for roast mutton and fresh-baked bread. He longed to be swimming, too, for the late fall turned hot suddenly, and even the small cast itched and made him hot all over. Though he did not know whether he could swim, and he thought it so strange that he could remember vividly roast mutton and good things to eat, yet could remember nothing of real importance about himself, who he was or where he belonged. He watched the otters fishing in the sea and playing, flying through the clear water, darting and twisting. He watched them floating, napping in the sea anchored in the rocking beds of kelp, watched the mothers carrying their cubs on their backs or rocking them on their stomachs, watched Mikk and Charkky’s scouting band of young otters go out to track the fish migrations, and he felt left out and alone.
There were three little bays at the north end of the island, and here in these sheltered places the seaweed was thick, and the periwinkles and little mud crabs grew. One bay had a shingle beach that he explored and tide pools to poke into. He watched the bright, small sea creatures that lived there, ruffled snails and anemones that looked like flowers, and he walked the rocky oyster beds that spread north from the island’s tip, exposed at low tide, and gathered the oysters, prying them up with a thick fragment of shell. But he was restless and longed to be out in the sea. He explored the island’s wave-tossed beaches with Charkky and Mikk, and they showed him, from the far north end of the oyster beds, a deep undersea trench that ran out from the mainland, dropping down across the undersea shelf toward the deeps. The otters preferred to stay in the shallower waters above the wide shelf, where the fish were plentiful and the larger creatures of the sea—the great eels and the giant squid and huge sharks—did not usually come. Teb could see the mark of the undersea trench, like a drowned river, on the land, too, where the high cliff broke into a ravine and spilled out a little stream. When the tide was in, the seaweed and mud flat were disturbed, and the little creatures that lived there moved about, drawing great flocks of gulls to dive and feed. And the highest tides splashed their waves into the northernmost caves of Nightpool, giving the occupants wet floors, which the otters seemed to find delightful.
He watched the otters humping through the sea in smooth shallow dives, then floating facedown so they could see the fish beneath the water. He watched them dive deep, to come up below a fish where it could not see them, to grab it from below, then surface. They would lie on their backs eating the squirming creatures with relish.
A larger bay opened toward the south end of the island, with a jutting arm of land to protect it, and it made a fine place to drive big schools of fish in toward land, the otters working together as men would herd horses, driving the fish nearly onto the shore, then grabbing as many as they could hold and stuffing them into large string bags. Teb was watching such a drive one morning when he turned to see Ekkthurian atop a jutting rock, watching him. He smiled at the thin, dark otter and tried to talk to him, but Ekkthurian scowled and turned away, and later Teb saw him with his two companions, talking angrily to Thakkur, just beside the great cave.
He came on them suddenly and heard Ekkthurian saying, “He is leading the young otters in unnatural ways, Charkky and Mikk spend too much time with him, and the small cubs are beginning to look up to him and to repeat things he says, such as that cooked food tastes delicious, that a steel knife would pry up oysters better than a shell does. They are otters, not humans, and they must not forget it. The boy is not a good influence.”
Teb slipped away, not wanting to hear more, and stayed off by himself for the rest of the day. But that night, as he sat at supper with Mitta and her cubs, she said, “You are sad, Tebriel.”
“No, not really.”
“You will remember one day who you are and where you came from,” she said. “And you will have the cast off soon.”
“I know.”
“Meantime, though, it’s hard to be patient.”
“Yes.” He didn’t tell her what really bothered him. It is an ugly feeling to know you are not wanted, even by only a few.
“Have you tried again to read the small paper you carried?”
“Yes. It seems it ought to come right, that if I looked at it just the right way, I could read it. But I never can.”
“There is some writing in the great cave. Could that help?”
“Where?”
“On the walls among the pictures. A few marks, all together in one place, just to the left of the entry.” She saw his excitement and grinned. “Go, then. Go and look.”
He went slowly over the rim of the island, impatient at his clumsiness in the cast, then stood at last in the great cave, alone. It was dim now in the fading light. He approached the dais and stood looking at the sacred clamshell, remembering the only prophecy that Thakkur had been able to bring forth about him, that somehow he was linked to the fate of Tirror and so, too, to the fate of Nightpool. But how? What could such a prophecy mean? At last he turned away.
The words were all together as Mitta had said, one beneath each animal leader, fox and otter and wolf, owl and great cat. Teb studied each word and knew that the separate letters made the sounds of the animals’ names. He had a vague memory of someone showing him how this could be, someone saying the sounds of the letters, but he could not dredge up who, or where that had happened.
He stayed in the cave a long time, fitting sounds to letters the way he thought they should be. There was no word for badger or unicorn, or for the dragon. He stood looking up at the dragon with a terrible yearning that left him puzzled and excited.