The Mirror After the Cavern

by Jeffrey Quyle

  None of it made any sense.

  His attention was distracted as he once again saw a flash of light with his peripheral vision, some shiny object reflecting the sunshine, from a spot higher up the mountainside. It wasn’t the same flash of light he’d seen earlier, before the jackal attack; this new light was miles away from that other one.

  Silas began to stare up the mountainside frequently, as his own trail meandered along near the bottom of the river valley. He was hungry once again, then realized that his mule was hungry as well. He stopped the wagon, then released Hron and led him to a small pasture, before he went browsing through the woods, looking for food for himself. With his knife he harvested a few greens, but nothing substantial, until he saw a wild turkey flock. He pulled his knife free and then threw it between the intervening trees, towards the dozen large birds that warily pecked at the forest floor.

  The knife flew true and struck one large tom, sending the rest of the flock immediately flying off in a low, horizontal escape while the victim of Silas’s attack remained a still, dark pile on the ground.

  Silas soon returned to the wagon with his prize, and started a smoky fire with damp tinder and wood. He coughed through the smoke, and suffered watery eyes, but eventually placed several spitted pieces of meat next to the fire to cook, while be continued to feed the fire with more damp wood, wishing he could find something dry in the aftermath of the previous day’s rain, so that the smoke would not continue to be so intense and annoying.

  An hour later, he had fed his appetite and roasted several extra pieces of meat to eat later in the day. He returned Hron to the wagon, then resumed his journey along the trail. It was a strange journey he was on – he had no destination or deadline, only a personal commitment to not stand still. He would find his way to other people, sooner or later, and then figure out what his next steps would be.

  He saw another flash of light on the mountain above him, a small sparkle that managed to make itself visible through the foliage of the trees overhead. It was the same reflection he’d seen before, though it was further north, further ahead of him that it had been before he’d stopped for his meal. But it remained a constant reflection this time, he noted, not a momentary flash; whatever it was, it was catching the sun’s rays at the appropriate angle to allow it to maintain its visibility for him.

  A second flare of light appeared ahead of the first, and also remained steady. There were a pair of lights, and Silas wondered what they were. Could there be one individual trailing another, tracking or following the leader, he wondered.

  The pair of moving reflections on the mountainside seemed to enter a curving portion of their own trail, and suddenly a dozen more reflections momentarily lit up, revealing a long train of travelers all following one another on a mountainside road.

  “Hey!” Silas shouted loudly, and pointlessly, given the long distance that separated him from the caravan he had spotted. He was looking at his own trading group, the band of wagons that he had been so abruptly torn away from when the earth had opened beneath his feet.

  He had a place to go, just like that. He saw a goal – he wanted to reunite with Prima’s caravan. Days earlier he had wanted nothing to do with the traveling merchants at all – when he’d been a student in the Wind Word Speakers’ academy, he’d been bitterly opposed to being sent out to travel as an itinerant trader. But now, alone and lost in the wilderness, the caravan suddenly seemed like the safest harbor any ship lost at sea had ever discovered. He had to reunite with them. He had to.

  “Prima!” he stood in the wagon and poured all his emotions, all his energy, all his desire, into the call. “Prima, I’m down here in the valley! I have the mirrors!” he felt a peculiar tightening in his throat as he roared the words, and his vision seemed tainted with a misty, colored filter, as though he was looking through the yellow gasses of the cave once again. His nerves throughout his chest seemed alive with energy, and tingled with initiative as his voice seemed to emerge from his mouth with a peculiar vigor.

  He stood and looked up at the caravan with a deep yearning, seeing the far-off collection of travelers as his home and hope.

  Then the wagons arced just a few more degrees around the curve they were negotiating on their own mountainside road, and one by one their reflected sunshine winked out, and their location became a mystery to Silas once more.

  “No!” he moaned in despair, as he stood and looked up at the dark and leafy mountainside.

  The moment of hope was gone. He felt alone once again. But, he reflected, he now knew that the caravan was not impossibly far away. Despite all that he had been through, he had been able to see them. They were heading in the same direction he was, and if by some miraculous chance his path and theirs might converge in the future, he’d be able to blend right back into his group of fellow travelers.

  “Let’s go Hron. We’ve got a meeting to make,” he told the patient mule that stood in front of the wagon. Silas shook the reins to reinforce his words, without snapping the leather sharply; he didn’t want to hurt his companion.

  The wagon’s pace seemed to increase slightly, and Silas felt pleased. He began to daydream about a reunion with the rest of the caravan, but then he began to consider what it would take. Would he and Hron need to abandon the wagon? Could the two of them, unencumbered by the weight and size and awkwardness of the vehicle, move faster, and could they perhaps even climb the daunting slope of the mountain so that they could ascend to the road the caravan was on? He continued on, over a long stretch of road, mulling his new future prospects.

  He’d hate to abandon the mirrors, he mused as they traveled forward, especially after making Hron pull the wagon so far. But he’d hate to waste time moving slowly on a trail that might be a dead end, when the alternative was possible.

  “Hey!” a voice startled him. He jerked on the reins, drawing a sound of protest from Hron, while Silas’s head whipped around to stare backwards, seeking the source of the unexpected salutation.

  He saw a horseman on his steed approaching in the distance, dropping down from the mountainside slope onto the trail behind him, details obscured in the dappled light that filtered through the trees.

  It was another person, another human, a living being – something he hadn’t seen in several days!

  Silas leapt down from the wagon bench and walked briskly around to the back of the wagon, a broad smile on his face, watching the approaching horse carry the rider closer. The rider was still unidentifiable, with a deep hood drooping low over his forehead, obscuring any sight of the facial features, but Silas wasn’t concerned. He wouldn’t know anyone on the wilderness anyway.

  He wondered where the rider had come from, and suddenly felt a premonition of concern, a worry that the rider might not be approaching with friendly intent; Silas was alone in the forest with no friends, no allies, no one to stand up for him if an attack took place. His hand went to the hilt of his knife, and he stood still in place, watching warily.

  The horse drew much closer, but the hood still hid the face of the rider, until the new arrival was so close Silas could hear the horse breathing.

  “Is this a meeting with a man returned from the dead?” the rider asked in a raspy voice. Silas feared that the spirit of Moochie had risen, and was coming to finish the man’s effort to strike him dead.

  “Are you a ghost? I’ll fight you if you are,” Silas replied, pulling his knife free.

  The rider stopped and dismounted, just steps away, then pulled the hood back.

  “Ghost? What foolishness is this? Here I’ve come all this way to find you,” Minneota’s smiling face was revealed, shocking Silas’s fears away so abruptly, he gasped at the sight.

  “What, am I that ugly you’re sickened to see me?” she asked, stepping forward, then holding her arms wide and enveloping him in a tight hug that he returned with powerful emotions of relief and joy.

  “You’ll need to loosen up a bit so that I can breathe,” she whispered to him, her hair tickling
his lips as he let unknown quantities of tension and fear drain away from his body.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” he replied, hastily releasing her from the death grip he had wrapped around her. “I’m just so glad to see you!” he told her. “You and the caravan. The rest of the caravan’s okay, isn’t it?” he suddenly asked, wondering if she too had been separated from the caravan by some freak accident, as he had.

  “Oh, the caravan’s fine, fine as a spider’s thread. They’re all just wondering who it was that managed to boom his voice up miles of mountainside to call on Prima. I offered to come check, and here I am,” Minnie explained. Her hands were on his shoulders, holding him at arm’s length.

  “You, you heard me call?” Silas asked in astonishment. The distance was unimaginably far for a voice to travel.

  “We did; we all did. There were some who were a bit agitated by a cry like that in the wilderness. Prima himself was a bit spooked, if you want my private opinion. It seemed unnatural,” Minnie said. Her eyes were studying his face intently. He tried to look back, but the deep scrutiny made him uncomfortable, and he turned away.

  “But Prima still sent you down here to look into my call, even though he was scared?” Silas asked after a moment.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, he didn’t. He probably knows by now that I’ve left the caravan, but there’s not much he can say about it, is there?” she asked with a smirk.

  “But you!” her voice rose. “You’re alive!” she exclaimed. “How is that possible? What happened, and how did you come to be down here at the bottom of the valley? With a mule and wagon,” she amended her question with a raised eyebrow. “And tell me about your eyes.”

  “My eyes?” Silas faltered. “What about them?” he asked. “They feel fine.”

  “Are your mirrors intact?” Minneota asked, removing a hand from his shoulder, and placing it on the wagon.

  “I think one broke when we fell into the sinkhole, but the others may be okay,” Silas felt more perplexed with the strange twist of the line of questioning.

  “Let’s look,” Minnie grunted, as she pulled her own knife out and cut the leather lashings that held the rearmost mirror’s cover in place. She lifted the corner of the canvas, then rooted around with the inner wrappings, and exposed the shiny surface of a large mirror.

  “How you kept this intact, I’ll never know,” she declared. “Take a look at yourself,” she commanded.

  Surprised and confused by the reference to his eyes, Silas looked closely in the mirror, then leaned in ever closer to the patch of reflective surface as he was shocked by what he saw. His eyes were different – different from what they had been all his life, and different even from the eyes of other people. The white of his eye had turned a pale purple tint, while the brown iris of his eye had become heavily flecked and streaked with yellow, causing the iris to appear golden as the bits of brown and yellow were only discernable upon close examination.

  “It was the cave, the gasses in the cave,” he murmured absently as he pulled at the flesh around his eye with his fingers, checking intently, but finding nothing other than what he had first seen.

  “We fell into a deep, deep cave,” he said to Minnie, rising from his look in the mirror to face her. “Moochie died in the fall.”

  “Moochie?!” his listener questioned in disbelief. “We left Moochie behind days ago.”

  “He followed the caravan, and he attacked me,” Silas said. He held up the knife. “This was his; he was going to kill me with it when the earthquake struck and opened up the cave that we fell into.”

  “Whoa, whoa, back up,” Minnie cried. “Let’s hear this story from the beginning.

  “Do you plan to rejoin the caravan, by the way?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course, please,” Silas answered instantaneously. “I didn’t know if I would ever find the caravan again.”

  “Well, let’s get a move on while we talk. I’ll ride with you on the wagon, if that’s acceptable. Let me hitch my horse to the gate here; he’ll be glad you’ve got such a nice, smooth road to follow. He didn’t enjoy the path I used to come down the mountain at all!” she chuckled as she tied the horse’s lead to an eyebolt on the side of the wagon.

  The pair were soon in motion, Hron placidly pulling the wagon through the shade, as Silas began his story once again.

  “You say you all fell scores of feet through this cave, and you and the wagon and the mule all survived without a scratch?” Minnie asked incredulously.

  “We fell straight down. Moochie had his knife ready to stab me when we started, and the bumping made him scratch my chest. It changed colors, like,” he paused, “like my eyes, yellow and purple.”

  “May I see this?” Minnie asked cautiously.

  “I suppose so,” Silas agreed. He handed her the slack reins, then pulled his shirt up over his head, revealing his torso, and the yellow and purple streak that stretched from shoulder to heart. Minnie’s fingers reached out and gently touched the scar, tracing it along its length, and causing Silas to shiver from the sensation of her touch.

  “You all fell down into a cave?” she prompted him.

  Moochie fell out of the wagon, and he died when he landed, but the rest of us made it. I think one mirror broke – I heard something,” Silas returned to his tale. “The cave was swirling with clouds of gasses – yellow and purple,” he said.

  “Aaah,” Minnie acknowledged softly.

  “Then there was a cave in, so we left the big cavern, and we went down a tunnel. We just had to follow it then, there was no choice, nowhere else to go, and it brought us out to this trail. We started walking a couple of days ago. We found some food to eat here and there, and we were attacked by a jackal, and there was rain, but not much else to report.

  “I saw the sun reflecting off the caravan wagons up high on the mountain road, and that’s when I shouted to Prima,” he added.

  “So, when did your eyes and scar change color? You can put your shirt back on, by the way,” Minnie touched his shoulder gently.

  “I don’t know precisely when,” Silas’s muffled voice pierced his shirt as he pulled it over his head. “I passed out once from the gasses, and that’s when I saw that the cut had healed with the colors, and the edge of the knife had changed too, but I didn’t know my eyes had changed color at all. Do you think it will last?” he asked anxiously.

  Minnie shrugged.

  “What were you planning to do with the mirrors?” she asked curiously. “You’ve dragged them along an awfully long way so far.”

  “I didn’t have a plan,” Silas ruefully admitted. “We just pulled the wagon along when we ran from the cave. I was thinking of leaving it here on the trail if I needed for Hron and me to climb up the mountain to get back to the caravan.

  “How are we going to get back to the caravan?” he asked for the first time, as the question occurred.

  “We’ll see,” Minnie answered lightly. “The caravan has to come down out of the mountains eventually to go to Ivaric – it’s on the coast,” she explained. “So we’ll see if your road leads anywhere towards where the caravan is heading, and plan to join up.

  “I guess,” she admitted. “Bones and bread! I don’t know. I didn’t even know you were alive down here a couple of hours ago.

  “And Prima still doesn’t know. I suppose I ought to go back to the caravan and report. He’ll be pleased as punch to know. Those mirrors were specially commissioned by the tyrant of Ivaric, and it wouldn’t have been a pleasant arrival to inform the palace that we lost them.”

  They rode along in silence for several minutes after that, as each contemplated the facts of their reunion.

  “Do you have any food to eat?” Minnie asked.

  “I roasted a turkey, and have some meat left over. Eat it if you’re hungry,” Silas offered, lifting the bundle of food that had sat under the driver’s bench.

  “Turkeys aren’t easy to capture. How’d you do it? Do you have a bow?” the woman asked as she plucked
one of the pieces of meat from the bundle. She looked at it, sniffed it, then took a bite.

  “I threw my knife at it,” Silas answered.

  “That’s an incredibly good throw, or a very lucky one. And this is good meat. But I asked about food to find out if you needed some delivered; I’m going to ride up ahead and see if I can rejoin the caravan. I’ll let them know you’re alive and you have the mirrors. We’ll send someone back to join you and bring food and supplies, if it’s going to be a while before we can restore your wagon to the caravan,” Minneota had decided her mission was finished, and she was ready to report. She surprised Silas by suddenly leaning over and hugging him, then planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” she smiled. “I missed you; we were all sad when we thought you were gone. All we found was that giant hole in the road.” She stood and retook her seat in the saddle of her horse. “You be careful, and I’ll be back soon,” she promised with a wink and a smile, then she dug her heels into the sides of her horse, and the animal picked up his pace, quickly leaving the wagon behind as the visitor disappeared in the shadows on the trail ahead of the wagon.

  Silas sighed contentedly. He felt a deep satisfaction from the encounter with Minnie. She had provided reassurance on many levels – that he would be able to rejoin the caravan, that he was missed, that he had impressed her as much as he had impressed himself simply through demonstrating an ability to survive a harrowing adventure all on his own.

  Hron snorted as Silas wallowed in his pride.

  “Yes, you were a big part of it too,” Silas agreed with the animal humorously.

  The tiny group traveled on contentedly. That night they woke in the middle of the darkness to the unpleasant chill of rain, but the next day they quickly dried out after the shower passed, and in the afternoon, Ruten the head guardsman came riding towards them on a horse, with a supply-laden mule behind him, putting an end to Silas’s solitude.