The Golden Tree Page 7

  She was fairly sure that Eglantine didn’t think things were normal. And Eglantine had hemmed and hawed and not yet given an answer about participating in one of the endless rituals that the GGE was always dreaming up. But Primrose, Eglantine’s best friend, seemed most enthralled with all the ceremonies and had agreed to become an acolyte at the altar of the ashes that were collected from the ember.

  Otulissa alighted on the branch outside her hollow. There was a cross fire of brilliance that almost hurt her eyes as the midday sun reflected off the golden vines and limbs of the tree. Years before they would have called this a perfect late-summer day - the milkberries approaching the copper rose color of early fall would indeed have a special luminosity on a day like this. Owls would even get up from their daytime sleep for a glimpse of such splendor. But now it did not seem splendid. Too much of a good thing and, alas, even beauty becomes quite ordinary. Even vulgar. Yes, vulgar. The tree is vulgar. Otulissa sniffed. “Vulgar” was one of her favorite words. Tawdry, vulgar, coarse, gaudy, ostentatious, flashy - like Madame Plonk. Madame Plonk was all of those words.“Oh, great Glaux, Madame Plonk! You scared the living nightlights out of me!” Otulissa gasped as the Great Snowy entered her hollow. Indeed, none other than Madame

  Plonk perched just inside Otulissa’s hollow. She looked in all her frippery about as out of place among Otulissa’s simple furnishings - books, maps, and such - as golden milkberries in winter.

  “I know we’ve had our differences but…” Madame Plonk began.“We are different.” Otulissa blinked. There was no owl who could be more different from herself than Madame Plonk. Right now, however, Otulissa had to admit she had never seen Madame Plonk look so sad - indeed, devastated. “Whatever is the problem, Madame Plonk?” And she was tempted to add, How could I ever help you with arty problem you might have?

  “It’s my teacup.” Madame Plonk’s eyes welled up with tears.

  “Your teacup?” Otulissa was bewildered. What in Glaux’s name is she talking about? And the way she was scratching her breast with one talon suggested that her teacup was some vital organ that had begun to act up. “Madame Plonk, I am not quite following you. Your teacup?’

  “My coronation teacup. I’ve had it for years.” She sobbed and collapsed now from the guest perch into a small mountain of white feathers.

  “Pull yourself together, Madame Plonk. This is most unseemly. Get a grip!”

  The Snowy picked up her large head. “You don’t remember? You helped me read the numbers and the name. I’m not as smart as you and you were so kind.”

  Aahh, the pellet drops! Otulissa thought, but did not say so out loud. It was a crude expression for finally remembering something. She did remember the teacup now. It was another gewgaw that Plonk had gotten from Trader Mags. Yes, there was a picture of a female Other wearing a crown gazing out with great dignity, a dignity that far exceeded anything Madame Plonk could ever aspire to. And there were numbers.“One-nine-five-three. Yes, of course.”

  “Queen E, you remember?”

  “Yes, I can’t imagine why anyone would give a one-letter name to a queen. One must assume the rest of the letters were worn away though time. So what is the problem?”

  The very question threw Madame Plonk into a new fit of sobs. She was beating her wings now on the floor of the hollow. To Otulissa, she seemed like an actress who was enjoying her own performance a bit too much. But then again, there was something rather gizzard-rending when she began to speak. “You cannot imagine how, over all these years as the dark fades from the day, after I have sung ‘Night Is Done’ and all the owls go to rest, how wonderful it is to settle on the branch just outside my hollow with my coronation cup filled with milkberry tea. So restorative to not only the voice but the spirits. I watch the sun creep up over the horizon.”

  Great Glaux, she’s waxing absolutely poetic! Otulissa thought as Madame Plonk wiped away a tear.“And now would you believe it?”

  “Believe what, Madame Plonk?” Otulissa said gently.

  “They want, no, they demand, my coronation teacup.”

  She flopped down again with a huge soh. Great Glaux in glaumora, what am I going to do with this ,.. this … thing? Otulissa thought as she regarded the heaving heap of white fluff. She sighed deeply and then spoke calmly. “Who precisely wants the teacup?”

  Madame Plonk raised her head and said crossly, “Not just any teacup, the coronation teacup of Queen E.”

  “All right, who wants the coronation teacup of Queen E, and why?”

  “The acolytes of the altar.’

  “Oh, racdrops!” Otulissa exploded. “Whatever for?” “The sacred ashes of the ember,”

  “Oh, now they’ve really gone too far,” Otulissa said. And apparently they truly had, for Madame Plonk, who had enjoyed until now all the ridiculous vulgar ritual of what was being called the “cult of the ember,’ was fed up.

  Otulissa spoke briskly. “I don’t know when this stupidity will end, but surely Primrose could help you out. She’s an acolyte, isn’t she?”

  “She is, but she is … I don’t know how to put it…. Sheis really enjoying being one. She’s changed. Even Eglantine says so. And you know she’s writing plays now.”

  “Yes, I heard that. I heard that she’s quite good.”

  “Yes, odd, isn’t it? All of us in some way have been able to do so much more. Why, I never thought that I could ever reach those high notes in the moonlight cantata with hardly taking a breath but since the ember arrived I can.” She paused and raised her head. Her yellow eyes turned hard. “BUT I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS! I WON’T GIVE UP MY CORONATION TEACUP.”

  “But what can I do about it, Madame Plonk?”

  “Hide it, please, Otulissa. No one would ever suspect that such a rare and beautiful thing would be kept here.” She looked about the spare hollow not so much with disdain as pity.

  Otulissa would never know quite what made her agree to take the teacup, but she did. Perhaps it was just the wrongness of the tree and the stupidity of all this ritual. What, indeed, gave these idiot owls the right to commandeer personal possessions for their ridiculous rituals? Acolytes of the ashes! And that Primrose, a very sensible owl, a responsible member of the search-and-rescue chaw, had bought into it! Well, I shall have a very serious talk with her, Otulissa thought. But then she thought again. She knew she wouldn’t. Teacups might be hidden, but words could be overheard, could leak out, and she had noticed that for the first time in all the years she had been at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, the owls in this golden era had become more guarded. They were frightened to say what they really thought. Indeed, what was considered a great flourishing of the Golden Tree could be the beginning of its death. How she longed for a true season of white rain, when the berries would turn the color of dried bones and the tree, leafless, would look grim and dignified with its dark limbs spreading like a black skeleton against a wintry sky.

  CHAPTER FOURTEENThe Rabbit at Last

  Coryn motioned to the Band to hold back and remain on the limb where they had just lighted down while he settled silently on the ground near the rabbit. In a pool of moonlight, it stood seemingly frozen in front of a spider web. As rabbits went, this was not an especially impressive one. Small of stature, with an undistinguished brownish-gray pelt, it was completely unremarkable except for the white crescent on its forehead. This, in fact, was the signifying mark of a web reader, a mystic rabbit who could read in the webs of spiders “tidings,” as the rabbit called them, from the present, the future, and the past. But the information was most often incomplete and vague. It came in fragments, the rabbit had explained to Coryn, much like the pieces of a puzzle.

  There was no greeting, and the rabbit did not deflect its gaze from the web. It merely took up as if there had been no interruption between that first time it had met

  Coryn and now. “A dark feather, ashes, bone. Is it now? Was it then? Or is it yet to come?”

  Coryn knew better than to ask a specific question. If he did, the rab
bit would give him a very confusing answer. But he could not help it, “Is it something about me?”The rabbit finally turned slowly toward him, “Me … me … me. Aaah, youth! Even with kings, it’s all about me, me, me.

  The four other owls fluttered down and stood in a circle around the rabbit. “I wish I could help you more. You’re looking for her, aren’t you?” Nyra’s name did not need to be mentioned. All five owls nodded. “And I can only come up with these three things - a dark feather, ashes, and bone. Coryn has explained to you that I can only offer pieces. I cannot put the puzzle together. And these pieces are very difficult. I am not sure if they are real or just… confusing!” the rabbit exclaimed. “What I see in the web is either a wisp or a whisper.”

  “You can see a whisper?” asked Twilight.

  “Shhh,” said Digger. “You’re being too literal.”

  “If it’s a wisp, it is just an escaped thread from a dream. But if it is a whisper, well, it might be real. What I am seeing has the - how should I put it? - the cloudiness of a dream, but there is also an echo.”

  “Do whispers have echoes?” Twilight asked.

  “I asked myself the same question. One does not think of whispers as having echoes. Does one?” The five owls shook their heads. “‘Unless that is a whisper in a cave.”It was as if a holt of lightning had shot through Coryn’s gizzard. “Bones! Feather! Ashes! Cave! She’s in a cave!”

  “There are a lot of caves, Coryn,” Gylfie said softly,

  “No, not just any cave. The cave.”

  The four other owls exchanged skeptical glances.

  ”The cave of my father’s Final ceremony in the can-yonlands. She wants his bones, or rather the ashes of his burned bones!”

  “Great Glaux!” Digger blurted. ‘Ashes from a Final ceremony. Kreeth lusted for them. They were a most powerful ingredient for her monstrous experiments.”

  Twilight had grown very still. He looked toward Coryn. The moonlight glanced off his head, turning his gray feathers silvery. “The cave,” he said quietly, “the cave where I killed Kludd in the Battle of the Burning, is that where they had the Marking?’ The Final ceremony for a fallen leader was called the Marking.

  Coryn nodded. “They had guarded his body day and night so scavengers wouldn’t get it and then when there were only bones, they burned them.”

  “That is odd,” Soren said. “For a Final ceremony most owls burn the entire body. Why wait for the bones?”

  Coryn opened his eyes wide at his uncle’s question and then blinked. Blinked not in surprise but with a strange knowingness. Soren felt a quiver pass through his gizzard. “As I told you before we left, Soren, my mother had a fondness for peculiar rituals, rituals of violence and blood that have roots in a haggish legacy. We know from the legends the power of ashes from bones.”“But she hadn’t read the legends,” Gylfie said. There was a note of quiet despair in her voice.

  “She didn’t need to. She felt them,” Coryn replied evenly.

  “So,” the rabbit said, turning to the spiderweb again, “it is not a wisp, but a whisper.”

  “It’s real.” Twilight said. “Let’s fly!”

  And as the five owls lofted themselves into the winter night, Twilight had but one thought: I killed him once. If she conjures him up I’ll kill him again … and Nyra, tool

  In a distant cave in the canyonlands, an owl hunched over a book. The night was almost moonless; only a thin sliver hung in the sky. But it seemed that the rest of that moon had come down to Earth and sought refuge in this cave, for in the darkness a face like a glistening orb appeared suspended, its surface slashed and cratered with battle wounds.

  “I haven’t given up on the ember, Stryker,” she told her lieutenant. “I was hatched on the night of an eclipse, as was my son, Nyroc.” Never, never shall I call him Coryn, she silently swore. The years had not done Nyra any favors. Once considered a great beauty, a magnificent specimen of a Tyto alba, the loveliest of all Barn Owls, at least as far as the Pure Ones were concerned, she had not weathered well. Her dark eyes had lost their luster. The scar that ran diagonally down her face, a wound from long ago, had widened, leaving an ugly red slash. The unique heart shape of a Barn Owl’s face was perhaps its most alluring feature. The contours of the heart usually fringed in short tawny golden feathers had darkened on Nyra’s face to a deep muddy brown and grown shaggy, blurring the elegance of the heart shape. In several places, her feathers had grown thin, revealing unsightly patches of skin.She now looked up at Stryker as if expecting a response. “Yes, General Mam, I know that. I was there - well, not when you were hatched - but I remember quite well the eclipse when Nyroc hatched!”

  “And do you know the significance of being born on the night of an eclipse?” Stryker, though no mental giant of a bird, was a survivor, and he knew how to play the game to jolly the General Mam. He knew that she was eager to impart some tidbit of profound knowledge. Ever since he had gotten the book for her she had spent long days studying rather than sleeping. “We!!, I’ll tell you.” She sighed happily. Indeed, this was the happiest he had seen Nyra in a long time. Most of the Pure Ones were dead or gone. Some fled to the Northern Kingdoms-they thought they would be safer in those vast

  ice-shrouded regions of glaciers and endless winter. Some had vanished into the Beyond and still others had hoped simply to start over, and never to hear the words “Pure Ones” again. In all, there were only five of the original Pure Ones left: Nyra, Stryker, Wortmore, Spyke, and Gebbles.And there was a new recruit. Hardly a young one and not a Barn Owl, but an ancient Whiskered Screech from the Northern Kingdoms - Ifghar. He claimed that he was the brother of the legendary Ezylryb and he arrived with a Kielian snake named Gragg who, if he could be kept off the bingle juice, was fairly intelligent. They were both frightfully old. Ifghar could barely fly. But they knew war. They knew about fighting, and most important, they knew about ice weapons. The Guardians of Ga’Hoole had won the great battle in the canyonlands, the Battle of the Burning, often called the Battle of Fire and Ice because of the ice weapons that came with the reinforcement troops from the Northern Kingdoms. Since then, they had improved their skills with these weapons and sent regular expeditions to harvest new ones. Stryker hoped this Ifghar and his snake would sooner or later prove useful.

  “Let me tell you about the significance of an eclipse.” Nyra cocked her head and began to speak in an almost professorial manner. “You see, dear Stryker, when an owl hatches on the night of a lunar eclipse an enchantment can be cast on that creature, a charm that gives that creature unusual powers. Hoole, considered by some the first great king, was hatched on such a night, as was I and my son, Nyroc. An eclipse is coming and with this book thatyou fetched for me, well… .I think I can accomplish great things.”

  “Capture the ember?”

  “No, you fool, re-create a creature already hatched. Except I shall make him better this time … much better… . ‘ Her dull eyes began to glisten ever so slightly, as if deep within them a spark that had long lain dormant had been rekindled.

  chapter fifteenThe First Prisoner

  Otulissa looked through the bars of the hollow. It was all so unbelievable. A prison, at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree! And she, Otulissa, was the first prisoner! She gazed out the window at the wintry sky. It was just First Lavender and in the distance she could see three tiny specks and then a larger one. Her breath caught. It was Pelli and her chicks, Basha, Blythe, and Bell. It was their First Flight ceremony. Otulissa could tell by the configurations they were flying. But why would they be doing it before tween time at First Lavender? How odd. It wasn’t as if there were a danger of crows out here on the island. Crows rarely flew across the Sea of Hoolemere. They hated salt, water, almost as much as the hagsfiends had in the legends. Then it came to her. A new rule had been instituted that all First Flight ceremonies were supposed to be flown around the altar of the ember and the ashes. How wrong is that - to have one’s First Flight indoors, around some stupid altar and not under a starry sky.
Otulissa sighed and worry stirred her gizzard. “Oh,

  dear! I hope Pelli knows what she’s doing. This could be dangerous for her and the chicks,” Otulissa murmured to herself.

  Elyan and Gemma had pronounced that certain things were considered glimpox - or slanderous - a violation of the sacred nature of the ember. This would certainly be considered glimpox, They’d have to build a new jail. There certainly wasn’t room in this one. What was truly glimpox was a jail in the great tree. What could be a worse, a more horrendous violation of the nature of this tree than making a hollow into a jail? it was outrageous, unbelievable. And it had all happened because of that foolish coronation teacup she had agreed to hide for Madame Plonk. Otulissa shut her eyes tight, reliving the horrible moments leading up to her arrest.Gemma had arrived at her hollow. Her rather skimpy ear tufts stuck up as high as she could manage and twitched as if to add some sort of accent of authority to what she was about to say. “It has been reported that you have in your possession an article that was requisitioned for the vigil of the ashes.” Otulissa would not even deign to inquire what in hagsmire was the vigil of the ashes. She didn’t care.

  “Of what article are you speaking?” Otulissa asked politely.

  “The coronation teacup of Madame Plonk.”

  Otulissa immediately decided to own up to having the teacup and silently cursed Madame Plonk. At least she-would not be accused of lying. “Yes, right here.”She fetched the teacup from a cubby in her hollow so quickly that Gemma I most surprised. “Take it,”

  she said, shoving it toward the Whiskered Screech. “I have no use for it.”