The Dark Crystal by A. C. H. Smith Page A

him.

    As Jen’s hand touched hers, something like an electric charge was exchanged between them, and simultaneously their minds were welded into a single consciousness. A torrent of images gave each of them a clear insight into the other’s innermost thoughts and memories. It was intoxicating, liberating, yet controlled, articulated like conversation, not random, gushing. The images were exchanged and shared. Jen’s recollection of himself as a baby (seen more clearly now than ever before in his memories), crying amid the flaming ruins of his house, and in the distance black Garthim (as he now knew them to be) disappearing. For this Kira returned her own self-image as a Gelfling infant. Swaddled, she was wedged into a hole under the roots of a tree by her mother; hidden there, she saw her mother turn away, saw a huge pair of bony, taloned hands seize her mother and strangle the life out of her, and against a background of this desolate vision saw the Garthim, again smashing, destroying, killing, wasting.

    Not only were these images transmitted: both Jen and Kira had the knowledge that each was receiving the other’s image exactly as though the exchange were taking place at the level of speech, where one would describe and see the other listen, respond, and acknowledge. And yet not a word was spoken between them. Only their clasped hands communicated.

    Jen was gently gathered from the ruins of his house by the four arms of an urRu. Kira crawled on all fours through undergrowth and was found by a lumpish peasant man who carried her into a settlement of his people. There, she was surrounded by the community, who babbled with wonder and pleasure.

    Jen, growing, splashed in the waterfalls, learned to draw runes on a black rock, and was patiently corrected by urSu. Kira swung in a hammock, was fed from a gourd, and when she jumped from a high tree provoked gasps of alarm among the peasant folk.

    In a cave, Jen helped urNol mix herbs and fungi in a cauldron, which, to Jen, seemed vast. UrUtt wove a garment and showed Jen how to work the loom. Under urYod’s tutelage, Jen used an octonary abacus; and, cupped in the palm of urSol’s hand, he studied the fingering of his flute. Kira examined plants, played cat’s cradle with peasant children, of an evening sang the people’s songs with them, and once hid among swamp plants while a phalanx of Garthim trooped past.

    And more. Three of the urRu – urlm the Healer, urAc the Scribe, and urTih the Alchemist – taught Jen to pronounce the secret, sacred names – Teth, Cheth, Zayin, Ab, and so on – and used riddles to impress upon him the symbolism of pentagram and tetraktys, sulfur and quicksilver, while urAmaj and the others at first intrigued him with their obsession to connect one thing to another, and later wearied him with it. In Kira’s image, her foster mother, Ydra, taught her Gelfling speech, explaining that their two races had always lived together in courteous harmony, as they had with nature. From Ydra she learned to communicate with animals and to understand the nature of plants. What neither Ydra nor any other of the peasants explained to her very well was history, especially Gelfling history. Being so deeply rooted in the life of nature, their notion of time was largely founded upon the cycle of the seasons, and barely did they comprehend the concepts of a changing world or a hungering spirit.

    UrZah taught Jen to listen.

    The flow of images ceased abruptly. Jen, sinking ever deeper backward into the bog, had let go of Kira’s hand in his struggle to remain on the surface. The mire was up to his chin. He looked anxiously to Kira.

    “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t struggle.”

    She held her head back and called out in a high-pitched wailing voice.

    From deep in the mud, her call was answered by a low, rumbling noise. Looking around anxiously, Jen saw a roiling on the surface rapidly churning toward him. He hardly had time to panic before he