“Blasphe … W-w-w-w-what? What in the world does that mean?” Otulissa asked.
Primrose blinked. “You mean you don’t know?” She was stunned. She thought Otulissa, the most learned owl in the tree, would know the meaning of this word. How could Elyan and Gemma know and not Otulissa? They weren’t half as smart.
“Well. I am familiar with the word in certain contexts. It comes from the Others and has something to do with their gods and their churches, but it is certainly not an owl word. I can’t imagine it being an owl anything.’”
“Well, it is and I’ve done it.”
“What have you done?’
“Nothing that I am aware of. So I can’t really tell you.”
“Primrose, Primrose.” Otulissa sighed. “Does this have something to do with the ember?” “Yes, but I didn’t cause it.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. Just begin at the beginning.”“I was on watch. You know I’m” - she paused - “or was, an acolyte of the ashes. My duties were to remove the ashes from the chalice.”
“The chalice? What in hagsmire is that?”
“You know, the container that Bubo made.”
“Since when are they calling it the chalice? We always just called it the container or the pot - or the cask. Another one of those frinkin’ Others’ words. We’re owls, for Glaux’s sake, not Others. Well, go on.”
“It was shortly after I removed the ashes that the ember started to grow dimmer, lose its glow. To make a long story short, they all got nervous. They were sure that somehow I hadn’t done it right, hadn’t said the right words.”
“What words?”
“Just words. Gemma made them up, I think. She said I’d done something, said them wrong. Saying them wrong is blasphemy. But I swear I said them the way I always did when I remove the ashes. I didn’t do anything differently. The ember just started to kind of fade. I didn’t make bias-whatever.” And with that, the little Pygmy Owl began to weep.
Otulissa hopped over and began running her beak through the feathers on Primrose’s tiny wings. “Of course you didn’t.” She paused and pitched her voice low and very rough. “You want to hear blasphemy? I wish they’d chuck that frinking ember into the Sea of Hoolemere and I’d yarp a pellet on it for good measure!”
Primrose jerked up her head. “Don’t speak that way, Otulissa. You’ll really get in trouble.”“Trouble? I’m in prison. It’s the whole frinking tree that’s in trouble.”
Primrose blinked again. She’d never heard such language coming from Otulissa. She was swearing worse than a seagull.
The prison hollow was not commodious and there had even been talk of putting bars in another hollow as there were apparently more blasphemers. But on this particular morning as a weak winter sun trickled in, Otulissa, who could not sleep, got up to stretch her wings as best she could without disturbing Primrose. Normally, she would have been happy to see this late-winter sun, for that would mean that spring could not be more than a moon cycle away, that the tree would be coming out of the season of the white rain and begin to turn silvery and then with summer golden and then in the final flush of the yearly cycle, copper rose. But for moon cycle after moon cycle, it had not changed. It was still summer gold. How boring life is when nothing changes, Otulissa thought as she peered out through the bars. Gold! I hate it Just then in the pale dawn sky that was streaked with a pink as delicate as the inside of seashells, she saw a spot of white - two spots of white. Not clouds, she thought. Her thoughts came slowly but with a crispness, a clarity as she watched the two spots grow larger.
It can’t be. She hasn’t flown out from the island in years. But I swear I’d recognize that fat head anyplace. And Soren! Her gizzard leaped.In the next moment, a great triumphal chord sounded from the grass harp. The great tree throbbed with a fluttering of wings, and owls could be heard crying, “The Band is back! The king is returning.” Hundreds of owls swarmed out of their hollows. The air around the tree was laced with cries of “Hail Coryn, king of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. The ember will glow once more.” Then the sound of things crashing, shattering.
“What was that? What is it?” Primrose awoke with a start.
“Coryn is back. The Band is back,” Otulissa said breathlessly,
“But that noise. Is it a fight? What is happening?”
“I don’t know.” Otulissa blinked. Fear threaded through her gizzard. “I can’t imagine.”
And Otulissa really couldn’t have imagined what was going on in the Great Hollow. The Band, Madame Plonk, Coryn, and Doc Finebeak swept through the immense hollow where the owls shared many of their most solemn and most festive occasions. In their absence, the Great Hollow had been rendered unrecognizable - draped with all sorts of embroidered cloth and tapestries made by the nest-maids’ sewing guild. The ember itself had been placed on an altar that was strung with beads and pearls obviously acquired through Trader Mags.“It looks like a church!” Gylfie squealed in dismay.
“It’s so OTHER!” Soren gasped.
“It sure ain’t owl!” Twilight raged. Twilight, who had much of his strength back, now seemed suddenly to regain the rest as he flew directly at the tapestry that hung behind the altar and, with his beak, tore it down.
“Blasphemy!” an owl cried. “Arrest that owl!”
“Shut up!” Bubo roared. “Or I’ll knock yer block off!’
“Bubo,” Coryn commanded, “go immediately and release Otulissa and then take your strongest hammer and tongs and destroy those prison bars.’
The Band and Coryn tore through the Great Hollow,
ripping down tapestries, scattering ashes from small cups and bowls. The Guardians of the Guardians of the Ember perched in a confused silence, willed, slender shadows of their former selves. They mumbled to one another, blinking and wondering. And when all the gilt and glittering ornamentation had been removed, the Great Hollow stripped bare of its elaborate decoration, the acolytes and. the choirs told to shut their beaks and stop the maddening songs and prayers of praise to an ember, Coryn called the owls of the great tree to order.
“The parliament!” the young king commanded. “I want the parliament perched directly before me.” The owls of the parliament gathered on a perch. “Now this group, the … the …” Coryn resisted calling them a mob. “The Guardians of the Guardians of the Ember, please fly forth.”Six owls flew up and lighted down in front of Coryn: Elyan, Gemma, and Yeena; Penfold, a Northern Saw-whet; Humbert, a Spotted Owl; and a Great Gray called Felix.
“Disgrace to the species!” Twilight muttered, eyeing Felix.
Elyan stepped forward. “We meant no harm. We only intended to protect.”
“You did nothing of the sort,” Coryn fumed. “You violated the very meaning, the essence of this tree. A prison!
What twisted gizzard came up with the horrendous notion of a prison? How dare you!” Coryn flew directly at the six owls, dropped his beak open, and hissed his fury at them. The tiny Northern Saw-whet was toppled by the wash of Coryn’s wings flapping in rage. “And this ember!” He seized the iron cask and shook it so the ember glowed more fiercely. “This ember is not a living thing. It has heat, yes, and peculiar powers, and must be kept from the likes of Nyra. But it is not noble. You Guardians are noble. And I set the Great Ga’Hoole Tree and its noble owls above any ember. It is your loyalty, your love of this tree and its values that I esteem above any riches in the owl kingdoms. For that is invaluable and knows no price. I shall take the ember back to the Beyond if it becomes a false god to you. We are owls. We value each other. We celebrate our owlness and not the heat and the glow of an ember. You have done shameful things, committed heinous acts in the name of this ember. You have imprisoned one of our most trusted and revered owls, the ryb Otulissa. You have forced Bubo to make bars for a prison. Arrest!” Coryn spat out the word. ‘We have no room for such words in our good and Great Tree of Ga’Hoole.”
“What will you do to us?” Felix asked. “What is our punishment?” Coryn blinked at the si
x owls. They all were
waiting for him to mete out some punishment. But that would be too easy. “What would you want me to do? Put you in prison?” he said with a contempt that made every owl’s gizzard shrink in shame. “What has happened here?” he wondered aloud. “You have become so Other-ish. Perhaps you should go to a place where Others might live. But they live no longer, as I understand. Now go to your hollows. We will deal with you later.” The offending owls filed out.
Coryn picked up the teacup and looked at the picture of the dignified queen with her serene blue eyes. Queen E. “Here, Madame Plonk, this belongs to you, I believe.”“I don’t want it any longer, Your Majesty.”
“No, Plonkie,” Coryn called to her affectionately. “Take it. It is yours. You have never confused being an owl with being an Other. You’re owl, through and through.”
“Take it, my dear,” Doc Finebeak urged.
Coryn motioned the Band and Otulissa to follow him to his hollow.
Otulissa’s eyes immediately fell on the tattered book. She walked up to it slowly as she might, cautiously approach a poisonous snake she was not quite sure was dead.
“It’s not The Book of Kreeth? Great Glaux!” she whispered.
“It is,” Soren replied quietly. “Nyra had it.”
Otulissa jerked her head up in horror and blinked rapidly. “Let’s hope she didn’t learn too much.”
“We want you to take a look at. it,” Coryn said. “You. of all of us, understand Krakish best”Hesitantly, she opened the book as if she expected venom to shoot from it. The minutes slipped by silently, slowly. The owls almost dared not breathe. Finally, Otulissa looked tip, “Well, the good news is that Nyra could not have understood a word, of this. The bad news is that I can’t, either. It is very ancient Krakish, We don’t even have the dictionaries here that might help me with translation,”
‘“Where would you find them?” Twilight asked.
Otulissa looked at Coryn and then Soren. “Does Coryn know about Bess?” she whispered.
“The Knower?” Coryn asked excitedly. “The Boreal Owl in the Palace of Mists?”
“I guess you do,” Otulissa said matter-of -factly. “She is the only one who could decipher this. Some of it, I daresay, is written in code. But Bess is experienced with codes.”
“You mean we have to go to the Palace of Mists?” Gylfie said.
“In time, I imagine,” Otulissa replied. “But for now let’s keep the book a secret.”
“Ezylryb’s secret library,” Soren suggested.
“Maybe,” Otulissa said. “But first I think we need to hide the ember.” Its reddish light danced on the walls. The glow had been restored to an even greater intensity. Red shadows sprang across the walls as if in a wanton and wild dance to unheard music.“And you have some ideas about that?” Coryn asked.
“Yes, come closer, all of you - not a word beyond this hollow.”
Then in the ear slits of the Band, Otulissa whispered her plan.
On another part of the Island of Hoole. not far from the great tree, as the sun rode high in the lengthening days of early spring and the inhabitants of the tree slept the thick sleep of midday, Coryn, the Band, and Otulissa gathered deep in the cave of Bubo the blacksmith,“This here be where I keep them,” Bubo the Great Horned nodded at pits in the cave floor that glowed with heaps of coals. “I got me bonks right here,” He pointed with a sooty talon. “And then the others - grade A, grade B, I don’t go lower than C. Below C, they ain’t much good for anything.”
He paused and chuckled. ” ‘Course, with colliers like Soren and Otulissa, Ruby and Martin, it be mostly bonks and grade AI get,” This was not flattery but the truth. The colliering chaw was extraordinarily talented. Not only were they good at retrieving coals, they were excellent teachers. Soren’s mate, Pelli, was bringing in a fair share of bonk coals recently, as was a young Saw-whet that Martin was teaching to work the lower layers of forest fires. “So, you be thinking of keeping the Ember of Hoole in here?”
“It was Otulissa’s idea and I think it is a good one,” Soren said.“The idea is that the ember should never again become an object of… of… of fascination, of worship.” Gylfie’s voice was urgent as she spoke these words.
“We know it is not like other coals or embers,” Coryn continued. “It affects owls who come into its presence differently.” And sometimes even those who are not in its presence, he thought. He would never forget the extraordinary heat that began to burn within him as Nyra advanced against him, pressing him into that sheer rock wall in the canyonlands. He remembered the shock when he realized that the green light that he was seeing was actually coming from his own eyes. No one else had witnessed this, no one except Nyra, and she had appeared to have gone yeep and then simply vanished.
By careful questioning of Primrose, Coryn had figured out that it was exactly at the moment of this confrontation with Nyra that the ember’s glow had begun to fade and this was what had led to Primrose’s arrest. Through some mystical transference, the ember’s energy had briefly become his. And although he had survived, as far as he knew his mother was not dead. Merely vanished. No body, no bones, no remains to be burned. He had peered into a few fires since he had returned, attempting to scour the flames for clues to what had happened to her. It was foolish, of course, because Coryn knew that he could never go to a fire and demand such specific information. He coughed a bit now as if to clear his head of the thought. “But Bubo, you do not seem to be affected by the ember.”
“I been around so many most all me life, maybe it’s … it’s …”“Like an immunity,” Otulissa added. “You know, if you have had mite blight three or four times, your feathers somehow grow used to it and pretty soon the mites just dry up and don’t hurt your feathers at all.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Bubo said. “But you’re welcome to keep the ember here. I can’t think of a better place to hide it than in plain sight with a mess of other coals. No special container.”
“Well, it was a brilliant idea, thanks to Otulissa.” Soren nodded at the Spotted Owl. “Coryn, why don’t you remove it now and put it in with the rest of Bubo’s bonk coals?”
“Happily,” Coryn said.
He plucked open the latch of the teardrop-shaped container with his talons. The ember had regained its glow since their return. It looked as it always had, fiercely orange with the glimmer of green surrounding the lick of blue at its center. Except for the green it was not so different from any of the other bonk coals in the pit. And that was exactly how the owls in Bubo’s cave wanted it. There would be no more special groups or orders or societies or Guardians of the Guardians of the Ember. Coryn tipped the container over the pit and the Ember of Hoole tumbled in, lodging amid a cluster of embers in the top layer. Then it dropped down until it was almost out of sight among the others. All of the owls felt a gentle stirring like the softest breeze passing through their gizzards. They looked slowly at one another and knew at last that their world had been restored, their great tree put to rights - owls among owls and an ember among embers.
That evening as the owls began to rouse themselves from their sleep, across the Sea of Hoolemere, in the canyonlands. a beautiful wolf cast her wild untamed song into a night that flowed with stars as she saw a gathering of soft mist, the creamv golden color of her own coat.
“Cody!” she whispered. The mist wolf turned his head and raised its muzzle as if to say good-bye. “Go on! Go on!” she urged, and she felt something in her let go. Gvllbane could rest now; her pup was on the star trail and had nearly reached the cave of souls.OWLS
and other from theGUARDIANS OF GA’HOOLE SERIES
The Band
SOREN: Bam Owl Tyto alba, from the Forest, Kingdom of Tyto; escaped from St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls; a Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree and close advisor to the king
GTLFIE: Elf Owl, Micrathene whitneyi, from the Desert Kingdom of Kuneer; escaped from St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls; Soren’s best friend; a
Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree and ryb of navigation chaw
TWILlGHT: Great Gray Owh Strix nebulosa, free flier, orphaned within hours of hatching; Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
DIGGER: Burrowing Owl, Athene cunicularia, from the Desert Kingdom of Kuneer; lost in the desert after attack in which his brother was killed by owls from St. Aegolius; a Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
The Leaders of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
CORYN: Barn Owl. Tyto alba, the new young king of the great tree; son of Nyra, leader of the Pure OnesEZTLRYB: Whiskered Screech Owl. Otus trichopsis, Soren’s former mentor; the wise, much-loved, departed ryb at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree (also known as LYZE OF KIEL)
Others at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
OTULISSA: Spotted Owl, Strix occidentalism chief ryb, and ryb of Ga’Hoology and weather chaws; an owl of great learning and prestigious lineage
MARTIN: Northern Saw-whet Owl, Aegolius acadicus, member of the Chaw of Chaws; a Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
RUBY: Short-eared Owl, Asia flammeus, member of the Chaw of Chaws; a Guardian at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
EGLANTINE: Barn Owl, Tyto alba, Soren’s younger sister
MADAME PLONK: Snowy Owl.Nyctea scandiaca, the elegant singer of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
MRS. PLITHIVER: blind snake, formerly the nest-maid for Soren’s family; now a member of the harp guild at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree
OCTAVIA: Kielian snake, nest-maid for many years for Madame Plonk and Ezylryb (also known as BRIGID)
GEMMA: Whiskered Screech Owl, Otus trichopsis, a pompous member of the Great Ga’Hoole TreeELTAN: Great Gray Owl, Strix nebulosa, a member of the parliament who is unwholesomely in thrall to the Ember of Hoole