Tommy took off his backpack, put it on the sand, and sat down on top of it. He started to finger the chain through his shirt. It warmed.
How bright and sunny it had been in the puddle. He could see himself in that stupid Ace Robotroid bathing suit. Coming up from the water. Plopping down in the hot sand beside the striped umbrella. Starting to build a sand sculpture. An octopus. Or a lobster. Or...
Tommy reached toward the damp sand.
He started to trace out a lobster.
Only it wasn’t a lobster.
More like a squid.
But not a squid.
He knelt down on the sand to get the thing right.
Whatever it was, it had very long legs with knees that came too low. The feet were large and ... webbed. Tommy sat back to look at it. Webbed was right. The chest was thin and long, but its arms were huge. Its hands hung down to its low knees, so in battle, it would be able to swing wildly. Tommy could imagine the whistling of a club, or a sword, or something worse.
Its head was round and large, but then again ... Tommy rubbed away the sand. Not round. More jagged. Sort of random. Like its long mouth. Other than the mouth—Tommy was very sure of this—it had no face.
He finished outlining ... whatever it was, and started to pile the damp sand into the outline to make the body. He sculpted the strange long legs, the thin chest, the arms. He added a hooked weapon in its hand—a trunc. Of course a trunc. Then he built up the jagged head and left the face blank except for the terrible long mouth.
He stepped back and looked around until he found a scrap of wood. With that, he scalloped out the armor that covered the thing’s body. When he got to the head, he added more sand from the shoulders up and shaped the tall, sharp helmet it wore.
Then Tommy knelt and added the halin that it would wear at its belt. He made the handle look like bone. The blade at the end of the halin had the same hook as the trunc.
Tommy stepped back again and looked. It seemed so...
An O’Mondim. It was an O’Mondim! How could he not have known this from the moment he started? An O’Mondim!
From over the water, the wind struck up and began to push the waves inland more fiercely than they had come in all day. Gray clouds began to scud above him. Sand blew against his face.
An O’Mondim.
Tommy stared at it. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
An O’Mondim.
He should destroy it. He should destroy it before the tide reached it.
He looked out toward Patty. Her jacket pockets were bulging and she was weighing two very large white stones in her hands, probably trying to decide which one she was going to try to fit in.
Tommy looked down at the O’Mondim again.
He fingered the chain.
Something was not right. There was more that he should do.
The tide began to come up. A wave almost reached the O’Mondim.
Tommy knelt down by the O’Mondim’s head. He wiped the sand helmet away and reshaped the face quickly. Then he reached under his shirt and took off the warm chain and pressed it across the creature’s forehead—deep, so that when he pulled back his hand, the chain’s line was clear and sharp. He looked down at what he had done.
Another wave came, and this one reached the O’Mondim. It did not wash away the sand.
Tommy put the chain back on over his head. Hot against his skin.
Suddenly, the beach was very, very still. The traffic from Water Street stopped, the seagulls lighted, the waves rolled dead.
And Tommy heard a moan.
It was low, quiet. He couldn’t be sure he had heard it at all.
Then another moan.
This one he was sure of.
He had heard the O’Mondim.
Tommy stood.
A sudden wind came up. Tommy felt it hard against him, pushing him away.
With a jerk, Tommy Pepper kicked at the O’Mondim’s right hand, obliterating it.
And the sound of everything started again—the traffic, the seagulls, the water. He listened. He couldn’t hear anything like a moan.
He stepped back from the O’Mondim, and after a moment, he called to Patty. She came running over—sort of. She was pretty loaded down with white stones, including the two large ones that she couldn’t decide between so both overflowed her jacket pockets. They moved up to the top of the beach and Tommy helped her choose the white stones she’d bring back—“Just three this time.” Then they climbed the steps to Water Street, Tommy hurrying her. At the top, he looked back once more at the sand O’Mondim. The waves had reached its long legs, but when the water pulled away, it still didn’t take any sand with it.
They hurried back through town and then along the gravel path toward home, which, when they got there, was surrounded by a new sea of yellow flags marking out foundations and roads and parking lots. There must have been hundreds of them. Thousands.
“You go on in, Patty,” said Tommy.
She looked quietly at him.
“It’s all right. Dad will want to see your new stones. I’ll be up.”
She pulled the stones out of her pockets, but she climbed the railroad-tie steps slowly.
Tommy went down to the shore, stepping around the yellow flags as if they were snakes with reared heads—and it wasn’t easy, since there were so many. He looked far out to a horizon that was misty.
The sunlight, the striped umbrella, the sand pail. His father. His mother. Patty singing—he’d forgotten this!—Patty singing one of her songs that went on and on and on and that he would give anything, anything, anything to hear her sing again.
Anything.
So he began to sing of the grief of Githil, and though it was a song always sung for Hanathra, it came now achingly out of him, and the ache was so terrible that it closed his throat. But he sang against the misty gray of the air, and the misty gray of the water, and what was strange was that the melody of the song changed, and it became—how did this happen?—it became the Bach that Tommy hated. Githil’s loss filled that new melody.
At the edge of the water, where the sea met the land, bearing the grief of Githil, Tommy Pepper sang until the end, when Githil climbed into his rau and floated away from the land and was seen no more in that world.
Then Tommy Pepper was silent.
His mother had almost, almost reached him today.
When his father came down from the house, they stood by the water together. His father sipped at his cup of tea. They listened to the tide. The waves troubled themselves.
“I miss her,” said Tommy.
His father held him.
“I don’t think even Githil knew what it felt like, missing her like this.”
His father looked at him. “I suppose,” he said. He held him tightly. Then, “We’d better head up,” he said. “It’s going to start raining soon, and it looks like the tide is coming in quickly.” He looked at his watch. “Seems pretty early for that.”
And it was a good thing they went up. They had hardly closed the door before the rain smacked against the house with a nor’easter fierceness too strong for early fall. Completely wrong. The wind bellied the waves into gray and white piles, and when they crashed onto the beach, the watery spume blew against the small Pepper house, which shuddered with each blast.
Tommy and Patty watched through the front windows. They had hardly ever seen the waves come up the beach this far, and they could feel the house shake when the water bellowed. Tommy figured that by now, the waves should have ripped the O’Mondim clear off the Water Street shoreline.
And he hoped that maybe the waves would take the yellow flags with them too.
SEVEN
The Woe of the Ethelim
Not many days after the hanorah had sounded in the Great Hall, Calorim the Greedy did fall from the walls of the Reced, and those who found him swore his hands were bound.
By Second Sunset of that same day, Belim and Belalim the Scarred were gone from the Reced—some said at the behes
t of the Lord Mondus. Others said that Verlim, known as the Destroyer, had commanded that they should march to the north. More whispered that Belim and Belalim the Scarred had fled to their ancestral homes in the west.
Whatever the cause, they reached neither north nor west.
The Lord Mondus commanded that the wuduo be hung for the death of Calorim, and Belim, and Belalim—as they had been hung at the deaths of Taeglim and Yolim—and that these Councilors be mourned, and that now the Twelve Seats would be Seven.
In the city below, the Ethelim watched the black wuduo blow in the wind, and the Lord Mondus heard their murmurs, and he reached out against them, whom once the Valorim had protected, and whom once the O’Mondim had gladly served.
At his word, the O’Mondim drew their trunco and did coil like vitrio around the City of the Ethelim. Those who remembered days of light felt the Twin Suns darken against them, for the O’Mondim smashed the glite of the houses in the city, they bore the mothers and fathers of the Ethelim from their homes, they left weak tears and vain rage. They tore down the bright columns of the Hall of the Valorim and laid waste to the beloit inside. Of the statues of the Valorim heroes they found, none were not ruined. Those of Elder Waeglim vanished as if he had never stood as iron against the faithless Valorim and the O’Mondim host at Brogum Sorg Cynna.
Then did Bruleath of the Ethelim, who had fought side by side with Elder Waeglim and had known his love, purpose to leave the city with Hileath, his daughter, and Ealgar, his son, for the foot of the Lord Mondus was heavy and Bruleath could not endure that the O’Mondim should come against his daughter and son.
Three days they watched the roaming O’Mondim, and one night—long before the rising of Hnaef—the three cloaked themselves and gathered what was most precious to them and easy to carry. Behind their door, they waited and listened to the sliding feet of the O’Mondim, who searched for what was left to make fah. The breaking of glite was heard in the dark, and the stench of the O’Mondim thickened the night air, and still Bruleath and Hileath and Ealgar listened to the slything of the O’Mondim until it seemed that First Sunrise must soon begin.
But with rising Hnaef came the O’Mondim.
Bruleath did not hear them. None did know that O’Mondim could come on silent feet.
The O’Mondim burst the door locks. Then did Bruleath draw his orlu and strike down the first. But even as he swung the blade, even before the first O’Mondim was felled, there were trunco at the throats of Hileath and Ealgar, and Bruleath dropped his orlu to the floor and he was wrapped in long arms and taken.
In the empty house, it was Ealgar who picked up his father’s orlu, and he and Hileath carried the fah fallen O’Mondim out into the street, and Ealgar turned toward the Reced and held the orlu with O’Mondim blood upon it up into the air. And then did he realize that his dreams were true dreams.
But the faceless O’Mondim dragged Bruleath through the city and up into the Reced. Through the Outer Court they dragged him and into the Great Hall, and there they dropped him at the feet of Verlim, known as the Destroyer.
“Bruleath, hero of the Ethelim,” spoke Verlim, “the Lord Mondus has heard how you once fought beside the Valorim and waged war against the O’Mondim.”
Bruleath stood, waited.
“The Lord Mondus honors your deeds, if not their turn. Now he wishes nothing but peace to the Ethelim, and he would begin with you. He would withdraw the O’Mondim if you would turn the hearts of the Ethelim to his rule. It rests with you.”
So did Bruleath, who fought side by side with the Valorim and who was sorely wounded at Brogum Sorg Cynna, hear the words of Verlim the Destroyer—and know them for slything lies.
“Bring me a sign of the obedience of the Ethelim. And know this: the Lord Mondus will not hold back his foot for long,” said Verlim. Then did the O’Mondim gather around Bruleath and grip his arms and take him from the Great Hall.
The Lord Mondus stood in the uppermost chamber of the Tower of the Reced, where Young Waeglim had sent the Art of the Valorim out of the world. The song he sang was a dark song, and brooding, and empty, and it coiled away from the world like fast smoke. And the Lord Mondus did not believe it would be answered, for how could it be answered when there was none to answer?
But he sang anyway, in dark hope.
And as Second Sunset fell upon the world, he suddenly raised his face to the cold air. And he heard the cry of an O’Mondim from a world where there could have been no O’Mondim.
Unless the Art of the Valorim had conceived it.
EIGHT
Storms
The storm kept on through supper and through dishwashing afterward. It kept on through Mr. Burroughs’s circulatory system homework, too, and its shrieking was so loud, Tommy could hardly think about the difference between auricles and ventricles and whether white blood cells or red blood cells carried the oxygen and who cared how many miles of capillaries ran under everyone’s skin? The storm kept on through making egg salad for tomorrow’s lunches, and it screamed through The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Tommy’s father had to almost holler to be heard—which didn’t exactly make Robin Hood’s merry adventures sound very merry.
Outside, the wind blasted the sand against the Peppers’ house and pulled at the corners of the clapboards, tearing to get inside. The house creaked on its beams and the windowpanes battered against their frames until it seemed as if the glass must shatter. The rain came against them in such a flood—like the Falls at Hagor of Tillil—that Tommy wondered if it was rain or the waves themselves coming up against the house. He fingered the chain.
Then the lights blinked out.
“It’s a good thing we built up the fire,” said Tommy’s father, and he went to the kitchen to find the candles and flashlight.
Tommy and Patty got off the couch and sat closer to the heat, side by side. Tommy felt the chain warm, and he looked into the fireplace and saw a hundred other fires he had watched there: fires on first days of snow, fires on Christmas Eves, fires with marshmallows, fires when their mom sold a portrait, fires when their dad got a show, a fire the night Patty was born, which he could barely remember, but there it was now, clear as anything.
A fire that terrible night, when they all three sat together without saying anything. It was raining that night—an icy rain. But not as hard as this.
Their father came back with the candles and set them around the room, and then he shone the flashlight onto The Merry Adventures and read until Little John knocked Robin off the log and into the water and jolly Robin had to wade to the bank with little fishes speeding hither and thither around him and had to admit to Will Stutely that he had gotten a dunking and a drubbing both.
So the storm blew on and on until their father said they might as well sleep downstairs that night. Patty scrunched up at one end of the couch and Tommy spread out over the rest, and their father took two afghans out of the trunk in the front hall and he held them for a moment against his chest and then he laid them over Tommy and Patty and he blew out the candles.
Tommy watched the fire until he fell asleep.
And whenever he woke up that night, he saw his father tending the fireplace, keeping the room warm and bright until morning, and looking back at them, under the afghans.
When dawn finally showed itself, the yellow flags were gone again and all the beach was torn. The waves had reached up high and dragged sand away in long stretches, leaving behind shattered shells, broken crabs, tangles of rope and parts of old traps, and a layer of dark green seaweed that was already starting to rot. The red hurricane fences had been tossed aside and a row of old pines lay tumbled into each other and half covered with dark sand.
When Tommy and Patty boarded the bus to William Bradford Elementary School, they saw what the storm had done to the rest of the Plymouth coast. More pines uprooted and lying beside the road. New inlets dug into the beaches. Dunes leveled or moved wholly across the beach road. Houses with the shore eroded from beneath them, their porches
hanging crazily in the air. And parts of the road mounded with blown sand. They felt the bus shudder and wrench when they had to plow through it.
Even Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin was quiet, watching the destruction.
Still, Tommy kept looking back, just to be sure that Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin wasn’t intending to send a drubbing hither, so he hardly noticed the first policeman driving by with his siren going and his red and white lights turning.
He noticed the second one.
And the third, and the fourth, and everyone was at the windows when the fifth and sixth bolted past the bus.
“Looks like something’s up,” said Mr. Glenn.
When Mr. Glenn let them off at William Bradford Elementary, they walked across a parking lot covered with blown sand—sand that also covered the part of the school’s roof that now lay across the TEACHERS ONLY! parking spots. The door to the first grade hallway hung splintered off its hinges and a whole lot of sand had blown in.
The door to the sixth grade hallway was completely gone.
When Tommy Pepper walked in, Mr. Zwerger was stalking the halls, looking about as grim as a principal can look—which is pretty grim. Tommy kept to the other side of the hallway until he got to his locker, where James Sullivan and Patrick Belknap were waiting.
“What’s going on with Zwerger?” he said.
“Geez, Pepper,” said James Sullivan. “Did you see that part of the school’s roof is in the parking lot? How do you think he should look?”
Patrick Belknap leaned close. “And his house got robbed last night during the storm.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows. He didn’t hear a thing because he was upstairs asleep. And whoever did it threw rotten seaweed all over the place. That’s what woke him up—the smell.”
James Sullivan clutched his new not-Tom Brady-signed football close to him.
“It’s all right, Sullivan,” said Patrick Belknap. “No one is going to steal your football.”
“That’s right. They’re not.” He stowed it under his arm.