The Sea Below

by William Meikle

  The sight of the stone structure ahead appeared to bring Ed out of the blue funk that had taken him since they'd lost Bill and George, the tingle and thrill of exploration almost, but not quite, intruding on his grief.

  "I've seen structures like this before, they call them brochs in the Orkney Isles north of Scotland, ancient fortifications against sea raiders," Ed said, his first words since they'd got into the canoe. "I never expected to find the like here, so far from the worlds of men."

  "You and me both, lad," Danny replied. "But it's the first place we've seen that might be defensible; my arse thinks it's dead again in this bloody canoe, so I'm all for heading ashore and giving it a once over. Are you with me?"

  Ed nodded, and Danny took that as a yes. They paddled for shore.

  Elsa was out of the water and paddling for the rocky outcrop before they got within ten yards of it, and by the time they beached the canoe below what appeared to be a doorway, the dog was already inside exploring. Danny left Stefan and Ed to lug the packs out of the canoe and went to find the dog.

  She was sitting inside the circular walls with a dead rabbit in her mouth, looking very pleased with herself.

  "Shelter and supper, what more does a man need," Danny muttered.

  It didn't take Danny long to see that there was no other life on the rock. Inside the broch they were safe from attack most of the way around, shielded by a twelve-foot high wall. It was broken only on the side nearest the main island by a thin doorway that could be closed with a door of the same wood as the canoe they'd arrived in, and held closed by a sliding lock of more of the same wood. The wood had been smoothed by ages of use but the circular fire pit in the center of the building was long cold and the place had the air of having been abandoned for a great many years, perhaps even centuries.

  "So, do we stay?" Stefan asked as he and Ed arrived with the packs.

  "Aye. It can be secured. We'll have to keep watch of course, but it's far better than either the beach or the canoe. We can defend this."

  Danny left Stefan and Ed to get a fire going with what they could find around the broch while he went in search of a longer term supply of combustible material. Elsa came along at his side as they made their way across the rough stones that connected the promontory to the main island. There was more evidence of the rabbit-like things here; droppings were droppings wherever you found them, but no sign of anything larger than that.

  The walkway led to a rising track up onto a hill, which gave Danny a view over this end of the island. Away to his left he saw that a rocky plateau bounded onto the forest of the pale vegetation that harbored the baboons. The plateau itself was mostly rock and sparse grasses with the occasional larger shrub dotted across it; he'd seen the same pattern in many of the caverns they'd descended through higher above, and was not too surprised to see a small herd of a score of the six-legged horses galloping away from his position at some speed.

  To his right the island stretched away into a dim distance, darker there under a rock ceiling that was not festooned with the bioluminescent vegetation that had been ubiquitous everywhere else. Dark towers appeared to rise up on the horizon, although whether they were structures like the broch or the remnants of long dead trees he could not tell at this distance.

  Besides, he wasn't here to gawk. He was pleased to see that, also as in the higher caverns, there was plenty of the dead and dry tinder just lying around for the taking. They would have fire as long as they wanted it. With that, and the water from the inland sea which was drinkable, if somewhat metallic to the taste, they could survive on the rations they were carrying for some time to come. And if Elsa could continue to bring home the rabbits, so much the better.

  Danny was feeling slightly better about their situation as he carried the first of several armfuls of tinder back to their new home.

  - Ed -

  Curiosity about the structure around him finally intruded on Ed's grief after Stefan lit a fire and boiled up water for coffee. The shepherd stood at the doorway watching out for Danny's return, leaving Ed free to examine their new surroundings.

  The masonry was of the highest quality; he'd be pushed to insert a cigarette paper in any of the cracks, despite there being no evidence of mortar. The more he looked the more he was struck by the similarity to the brochs of Orkney, although here the rock was more porous, more volcanic in nature than the rough slate deployed by the Orcadians. And if his estimate was right, this structure was older by far than those on the wind-swept coastline far above and to the west. There was a sense of great age in these stones that had Ed wondering if the people who erected them had even been modern men at all. Neanderthals had lived in caves not fifty miles from this one; was it beyond the bounds of possibility that they had infiltrated here too, and left works by which they could be remembered?

  Whoever they were, they had employed fire, that was obvious in the extra blackening of the walls and the stones in the central firepit. They had also been remarkably neat and tidy, for there were no artefacts, not even animal or fish bones. Ed wondered if the place had been a dwelling at all, or rather had it been a building of some kind of spiritual import, like a temple? His suspicions in that direction grew stronger when he examined the section of wall opposite the doorway. On close inspection he saw that it was covered with rank after rank of tiny carved figurines, each no more than the length of Ed's thumb, stick men--or rather, stick figures, for these, although they appeared to be bi-pedal and upright, all had six limbs. The figures depicted all had some kind of disability or injury--no head, one limb missing, one leg missing, both legs missing, row after row of them covering a six-foot breadth and the full height of the wall in serried ranks.

  It obviously had meant something to whoever had carved them there, but Ed couldn't make head nor tail of it.

  He fetched a notebook and pencil from his pack and began to copy down as many of the ranks as he could make out. He was still at it when Danny returned with the first armful of kindling and a report as to what he'd seen from the hill above the shore.

  "No more monkeys?" Stefan asked, and Danny laughed.

  "No, friend. I fear there's no food to their liking up this end of the island, which may prove to be both a good and a bad thing for us, for we too must eat."

  They decided on coffee before Danny ventured out again and all three sat, drank and smoked in silence for a time, watching Stefan turn the rabbit on a makeshift spit before the shepherd took out his deerskin of liquor.

  He handed it to Ed.

  "We cannot bury them, but we should say a word for your friends, don't you think?"

  Ed took a deep slug before replying.

  "Yes, they were my friends," he said. "And I am right sore to have brought them to this end. I only hope they will be able to rest easy where they lie, for it is a great shame to have left them as we did."

  "Had we not, we would be lying alongside them," Danny said softly. "It is always the way for those who survive."

  Danny took the deerskin from Ed and raised it as if in toast.

  "To absent friends," he said, and took a draught that would have floored Ed.

  Stefan took the deerskin, took a drink as long again, then surprised Ed by bursting into song, a sad lament in German in a clear, high baritone that rang and echoed around the broch as if it was a natural amphitheatre, the shepherd's echoing voice taking on a resonance and depth that was almost religious. Ed felt fresh tears come and turned away towards the figures on the wall again lest the others see, losing himself for a time in the routine of copying the ranks into his notebook.

  He was surprised to look up some time later to see Danny arriving in the doorway again with another armful of tinder; he had not noticed the old soldier leaving.

  "That should see us through until morning," Danny said. "Or at least until what passes for morning in these parts. I don't know about you chaps but it feels to me like it's time to be abed. It seems like a mighty long age since I last slept."

  Ed nodded. />
  "I have noticed since I arrived in this place that I have to remind myself to take a rest," he said. "In a place with no day or night one must make their own sense of time."

  "For my part I am used to the cycles of sun and moon. I feel them in my blood, and my blood says it is the middle of the night somewhere overhead. I shall take first watch," Stefan said. "A shepherd is used to being vigilant while others sleep. But first, eating is also required."

  They shared the rabbit among them, Elsa getting an equal portion to the men. They washed it down with some of Stefan's liquor, and after a smoke, Ed felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him. Using his pack as a pillow he lay down at the fireside and attempted to calm his mind enough to allow sleep. At first his thoughts were a roil of confusion; visions of death and bloody violence, red in tooth and claw and his grief surged back in full to almost overwhelm him. Desperate to seek solace anywhere else, his thoughts turned to the ranks of figures he had been transcribing. They marched across the mirror of his mind like a tiny army and, similar to the old trick of counting sheep, he found a strange comfort and restfulness in them, so much so that they were still with him there in the dark, marching in time as he finally fell into the well of sleep and welcome darkness.

  He was woken sometime later by Danny shaking him by the shoulder.

  "Your turn, lad. Best take my pistol. I've laid yours out to dry near the fire; you forgot that you took a soaking before we got you onto yon beach."

  Ed rose groggily, the pistol feeling like a dead weight at the end of his arm as he half-walked, half staggered to the doorway, not fully waking until he got some fresher air in his face from outside.

  Danny lay down by the fire and was snoring several minutes later. Stefan likewise was off in the land of Nod but Elsa was wide awake and on guard at Ed's feet, intently looking out over the causeway to the main island.

  Nothing moved and scarcely a breath of wind stirred the air. Ed's gaze rose when something higher up caught his eye. A flock of the great bats flew overhead, scores of them, all moving with an apparently singular purpose, heading directly for the darker area far to the right where the light dimmed and shadows gathered. Not for the first time Ed wondered at the extent of the ecosystem that appeared to be thriving down here so far from the eyes of the scientific community. He'd come here at first as a boy in search of treasure but now he thought, as a man, of the advances in knowledge he might impart to the world could he only escape to bring the news out.

  Here, on an island in a seemingly endless sea, stranded under God alone knew how many tons of rock, escape seemed a distant prospect.

  His watch proved to be uneventful. Elsa appeared to agree, and had laid down to sleep at his feet. Ed's attention turned once more to the stick figures. The implications were almost too much for his mind to hold. If it was more than some artistic license, if the people who drew these things were representing themselves, then there was, or had been, a race of six-limbed humanoids here in the depths of the earth, a parallel form of evolution that would surely have stumped Darwin as much as it stumped Ed. And once again his thoughts turned to what purpose the figures had served. Were they ceremonial in nature? Or were they some kind of record, marking time like a calendar? It was a code his mind continued to strain at, but when Stefan rose and began to prepare coffee some hours later, Ed was no closer to cracking it.

  He put it from his mind completely when Danny woke and their talk turned to less esoteric notions, the matter of their survival.

  They were breaking their fast with bread and cheese from Stefan's seemingly bottomless shepherd's bag. Danny spoke up first.

  "We'll do okay for a few days, weeks even," he said. "But once the rations we brought in are gone the fare may become somewhat monotonous. Elsa may be needed to hunt rabbits for us, and we can try fishing, but I don't hold much hope in that regard, for the waters looked to be mightily empty save for yon big serpent thing. We are lucky in that we have a defensible shelter, but I fear it is in the wrong place for it to be a long-term solution."

  Ed looked up as he lit a smoke.

  "You want to move on?"

  "Not yet," Danny said. "But we should explore outwards from here as much as we can, maybe go out a few hours in each direction, and return here for sleep."

  "We should all go together," Stefan said. "A shepherd does not split his flock in unknown territory."

  "Agreed," Danny said. "That was my plan in any case. We will trust to fate and leave the bulk of our packs here behind a closed door. That way we can travel light and be unencumbered should haste be needed."

  Danny didn't say why haste might be needed. He didn't have to, for Ed's imagination was more than capable of filling in the blanks.

  -Danny-

  Danny took the lead when they left the broch twenty minutes later. He decided on a direct line across the island for this first outing; he already knew there were baboons to his left and he wasn't keen to enter the darker gloom far to the right, at least not until he had a better idea of the lie of the land.

  Without the burden of a pack, with his saber swinging at his side and his pistol at his hip, he felt more like the soldier he had been and he even had a tingle of anticipation at the prospect of what might lie ahead. He felt alive, and that was something he'd been missing since joining civilian ranks these two years past. He could have asked for better circumstances than being stranded in these caverns, but all things considered, it was a great deal preferable to being dead.

  "Better even than surviving in London," he muttered. "But I could murder a flagon of ale right now."

  Elsa foraged ahead of them, as keen as ever to flush out any of the rabbit-things that proved more curious than cautious, but Danny stopped the others as they crested the small hill he'd climbed before to allow them a view over the rocky landscape they would be traversing.

  "Good Lord," Ed said. "It is certainly bigger than I thought. But will it all be like this? Dry and mostly dead?"

  Danny laughed.

  "It's no Isle of Wight, that's for sure. But yon baboons have thrived well enough here, have they not? Where monkeys can live, so can we."

  Stefan was looking right at the gloom under the darker patch of roof.

  "Are those dwellings over there?"

  All three turned to look, but no amount of attempted peering would enable them to discern the exact nature of the taller things in the shadows.

  "We'll get to them eventually," Danny said. "First things first. I'd like to find a supply of better water. And maybe some bigger game that would be preferable to stringy rabbit. Come. The day, such as it is, is passing."

  The first hour of their expedition passed uneventfully. The terrain proved to be as bleak as Danny had feared, a wide expanse of the same basaltic rock and scattered shrubs. Elsa got excited at one point when she finally flushed a rabbit from hiding, but it was too fast for her and it disappeared into a crack in the rock too narrow for her to follow.

  They stopped for a drink and a smoke on another small hill. From this vantage they saw that the island rose higher ahead to a tall conical mountain that might have been a volcano in some distant past. Some two miles away in that direction, where the slope got steepest, the bare rock gave way to a forest of pale vegetation that stretched away and up to a treeline just below the top. Danny was still looking upwards when Ed grabbed at his arm and pointed to the right-hand side of the slopes. This time there was no doubt about it; a score of dwellings, broch-like structures that seemed to mimic the cone of the dead volcano above, dotted the lower slope at the spot where the forest took over from rock.

  "We need to investigate," Ed said.

  "I guess we do," Danny replied, but he was eyeing the forest rather than the brochs, hoping for some of that larger game he'd mentioned earlier.

  They got their first sign there might be better hunting ahead when Elsa discovered a pile of droppings that needed to be pissed on. Stefan bent and prodded at the faeces with a stick. The stench that wafted up from them
had both Danny and Ed stepping back with hands covering their mouths.

  "Please don't do that again," Ed said as Stefan rose, laughing.

  "Some kind of deer I think," the shepherd said. "Bigger than rabbit, smaller than those horse-things we've seen."

  "Not baboon?" Danny asked.

  Stefan shook his head.

  "They are meat eaters. There's no meat in these droppings, just plant matter."

  "I'll take your word for it," Danny said, and stood back even more.

  They found more of the same kind of droppings over the next half hour as they neared where the land rose. Elsa did her business on each of them and Stefan thankfully refrained from poking around but the smell still hung heavy in the still, warm air. Danny chain smoked, the tobacco doing a fine job of keeping the stench at bay. There were no flies around, in keeping with the seeming lack of insect life in these depths, a small mercy for which to be thankful as the air got warmer still the closer they approached to the forested area.

  The volcano wasn't the tallest that Danny had seen on his travels but the slopes were steep and as they approached the tree line all three of them were working up a sweat with the effort of climbing. They had been tacking rightwards ever since seeing the brochs and approached the dwellings cautiously. There was no sign that they had been inhabited in recent memory. The forest had engulfed many of them, tumbled ruins that could be seen among the foliage; there was no smoke of campfires, no livestock, just a deep stillness, not even a breeze disturbing the air. And if there were deer in the area, they too were keeping their heads down.

  "It feels like the whole land is holding its breath," Ed said in a whisper, as if afraid to pierce the calm with noise. The silence felt somehow even more profound when they reached the brochs and wandered among them. These too had been uninhabited for a great age, only dry stone and cold hearths left behind. Unlike their new home on the shore, there was at least evidence of long-term habitation here; piles of animal bone that may have been deer and rabbit lay on the ground, and one massive skull mounted on a wall had Danny's old army senses tingling; it had been a great predator in its day given the breadth of its jaw and the size of its teeth, although he could not match it with anything in his experience.