The weather turned cold. The Season of Storms came on. Tree rat and his friends put on another roof over the first one, and I built a pair of shutters for the window. Someone left me a thick blanket woven of moss, and bunwit carried in stacks of soft, dried grass for my mattress. I didn’t go hungry. Tree rat and bunwit seemed to have a bottomless cache of dried fruits and nuts. Some bird left me eggs every day or so. There were edible fungi and roots. The gobblemoles were still working on the southern road. The eastern one was clear. The flood-chucks had started on the western one. There were a couple of problems, not least the river to the south and west which ran right over where the road should go.
At first it didn’t occur to me to finish up the story. The third creature in the story is a d’bor wife. D’bor are ocean creatures, though sometimes found in very large lakes. They are not river creatures. They are very fearsome, a wild, unfamiliar kind of beast, neither furry nor feathered. I did not like the thought of the d’bor wife. Still, there was that river running half around the forest where it had no business being. Finally, after many many days had gone by, I sat bunwit down and put the problem to him.
“I don’t suppose there are any d’bor in the forest,” I said. Bunwit went on chewing, paying no attention.
“Are there any d’bor?” I asked. It looked at me. I sighed.
“Take me to the d’bor wife,” I said at last, fatalistically. He would or he wouldn’t. Trying to hold back wasn’t doing me any good.
I wasn’t really surprised when he hopped off in his usual errand-running manner. Southeast. Into the deep chasms of that part of Chimmerdong. Dangerous terrain. Leg-breaking terrain, and no Healer closer than Lake Yost. We slipped and slid. Night came on, and we slept under a tree. It was colder than comfortable. Morning came, dim under black clouds. We went on slipping and sliding.
Midday, I heard the sound. A waterfall. Sizable. A constant tumult of water into some deep, forlorn place. We were coming to it along the bottom of a canyon. The canyon opened out, wider and wider, and there the pool was before us. More than a pool, a lake. Across it the pillars of stone loomed up to the top of the sky and water fell in a strong, crashing flow.
And at the edge of the pool, grodgeling in the shallow waters, was a d’bor wife. She was slick and black and hideous. Her flappers were long and hard, shaped like coffin lids. Her one eye peered at me out of her tentacled head, and her jaws clashed their beaky plates together. I stood where I was, going no closer at all, and cried, “Why are you grodgeling away there, d’bor wife?”
She gargled at me. It took a little time before I understood the words. Story words. Oh, yes. Grodgeling to find the Daylight Bell. The lake spray tasted salt. Might be, I thought, it was tied through underground ways far and far to the Western Sea or the Southern Sea or even the Glistening Sea, far to the east. I did not want to go near her. Her mouth smelled of blood.
“Well then,” I cried, voice trembling so I could hardly understand myself, “I’ll grodgel with you, d’bor wife.” And I stumbled forward to bend above the shallow waters and begin grodgeling at it, splash, splash.
And I saw it, there, just sinking away beneath the waters, just the edge, the very edge, golden as dawn, curved, unmistakable, a bell sinking beneath the waves of the lake ...
So when she took me up, I screamed in real surprise and anguish. “I saw it! I saw it! Just then when you took me up, d’bor wife, I saw the Daylight Bell, sinking beneath the water ...”
There was no time to be frightened. She dropped me then, at once, and began trying to find it. I forgot the thong, forgot it all. Only after a long time, as she whuffed away in the water did I come to myself enough to slip the thong around a back tentacle and cry, hoarsely, through my tears, “Daylight Bell in water shan’t be; Daylight Bell in earthways wan’t be; Daylight Bell in treetop can’t be. Tricksy lie brings tricksy tie, now give me boon or else you die!” For I knew then it was too late. We had almost found it, the d’bor wife and I, but we had lost it.
When I told her the boon, she gargled, deep bubbling sounds like fountains at the bottom of the ocean. Her hide was dark as char and hard, half leather, half shell. Her tentacles wove spells before my eyes, and the suckers on them opened and closed like hungry little mouths. “Not a great boon,” she gargled. “I will owe you a boon more, ground-child. The things of the deep are mine, all things washed by ocean or sea. If you have need in such places, call on me.”
Well, you know the way of these stories. The river that blocked the Old Road was changed in its course, for the d’bor wife grodgeled it back where it belonged as her boon to me. The moles finished their work, and the flood-chucks. Each road was opened once more to the gray, and we set fires there that burned and burned in ever-widening arcs. When the Season of Storms was done, so was I. The Forest of Chimmerdong was open to the world on every side.
I sat in my
