by Susan Cooper
She was looking at the machete in my right hand, but without asking. “It’s a long story,” I said.
Gwen turned her head to look at Lou. “Stay beside him,” she said. “Stay beside him all the time.”
Annie was hugging Lou now, very close, the way Mam hugs us when she has to go back to Nassau. When she was done, Bryn put a hand on his shoulder too and gave it a squeeze. His face was grave and stern, and—it’s an odd word, considering Lou’s only seven—respectful. I was beginning to feel more and more as though the Underground didn’t think of us as people, but as some kind of offering to Gaia. Whoever Gaia was.
They are fanatics, do you understand that? Sir had said. Fanatics . . . threatening doom . . . threatening a sacrifice . . .
But Lou trusted them, so I had to as well.
Bryn lifted Lou up high; he was so big that Lou could sit there on just one of his broad shoulders, with his hand round Bryn’s head. Gwen gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Go well,” she said.
Annie came to stand beside me with one hand on my shoulder. And Lou reached out from his high perch and fitted the third star shell into its gap on the wall. Like the other, it flashed and clicked, and there it was, in place, as if it had always been there.
But that wasn’t all.
Very gradually, a deep rumbling sound began, somewhere a long way below us. It wasn’t too loud, but it was huge; you could feel a faint vibration in the earth and the rock all around. It gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling you have when you’re empty, except that the emptiness this time was full of fear.
Bryn put up his hands to Lou and swung him down to the ground. Lou looked round for me, and reached out to take my free hand, and I saw Bryn, Annie and Gwen all stepping back away from us.
There we stood, the two of us, alone.
The rumbling died down, and in the wall, the three star shells began to glow. Brighter and brighter they grew, blazing out, filling the cave with brilliant light, and then with a tremendous cracking noise, a split opened in the wall beside them. Very slowly, with the awful scraping screech we had heard when Bryn opened the first rock door, the wall started to move, but this time it swung back like a door on a hinge. The stars were in the middle of this door, and as it swung, the light blazing out of them filled the dark space of the labyrinth.
He walks through stars, the prophecy had said.
I felt Lou’s hand give mine a little squeeze, and we walked in.
Our shadows went before us into the cave. It was wider than the tunnels had been, though not so high, maybe six feet or so. The rocky walls were bumpy but smooth, gleaming with moisture. It smelled damp, but the air was fresh; there must have been little gaps open to the air, somewhere.
I heard a noise ahead, and I stopped. I could feel my heart thumping. “Listen!”
Lou cocked his head, but there was nothing but a faint dripping of water. He tugged my hand.
“Lou,” I said, not moving, “didn’t they tell you what this is all for? Are we going in here to find something?”
Lou looked up at me earnestly, and shook his head.
The handle of my machete was damp with my own sweat. “We just go in? And what happens, happens?”
He nodded. Then he flashed a grin at me, and he pointed his finger ahead, and then back, behind us. We go in, we come out
Let’s hope so, Lou.
He tugged my hand again. That talking tree had certainly given him total faith in what we were doing. Total blind faith. I swallowed, and we went on. The cave turned sharply to the left, so we followed it, and the light came with us. I don’t know how. It didn’t behave like normal beams of light; it seemed to be filling the space all around us, like air.
Our footsteps made soft scuffling noises. We turned another corner, this time to the right. I’d expected the labyrinth to be a maze, where you had to choose the right way to get to the center, and then follow it back again to get out, but this wasn’t a maze, it was just a twisty cave. And now that the dim light was all around us, not coming from any one place, we had no shadows.
Just as we came to another dark turning, there was a high squeal from somewhere ahead, and I saw a pair of red eyes shining in the darkness, down on the ground. I let out a yell, and we stopped. The light flowed round us. There against the wall was a black rat, as big as my foot. The red eyes gleamed at us. I could see sharp bright teeth.
Lou let go of my hand and reached awkwardly into the pocket of my shorts. He pulled out the chunk of bread that was still in there, squished but dry, and he threw it onto the ground behind us. The rat rushed past us to get it, brushing by my ankle, and as it got there we heard more squeals, and two other rats dived at the bread out of the darkness. The squeals became angry snarls, and yelps of pain, and we left them tearing not just at the bread but at each other.
The luminous air came with us round the bend. It was a strange half-light, just enough to show the direction of the cave, not enough to show details—which made it scary, because you could imagine monsters in every patch of shadow. I could, anyway. Lou, he just went on.
And then, round the next turning, we came on something with a light of its own. It was the light that we saw first, glowing out of the left-hand wall ahead of us: a wonderful luminous glow of rainbow colors all flowing in and out of each other, the way colors do on the surface of a soap bubble. It was so beautiful that I forgot to be scared; I was too busy wondering what such a light could possibly be coming from. When we came closer we saw that there was a tall niche, almost a small room, in the wall, from which this light was pouring, and that the thing inside it was even more amazing than the light itself.
It was as if the softest imaginable blanket, very light and thick, woven of long silky iridescent fibres, had been attached to the back of the niche and then molded around the sides. If it hadn’t been upright, it would have looked like a wonderful welcoming nest, inviting you to curl up in its coziness. Even the way it was, you wanted to walk into it and nestle up against the sides. The threads shifted very gently, glimmering. I put out a hand, but couldn’t quite bring myself to touch, in case the thing, whatever it was, might vanish like a bubble and suddenly be gone.
But Lou reached out and grabbed my hand, hard, and pulled it down. He gave a hard sharp grunt of warning.
And before there was time for anything else, the center of this beautiful feathery nest fell away, as if it had dissolved, and out of the opening came a nightmare. Stalking toward us we saw a sprawl of hairy black legs as tall as Lou, and from them hung a gleaming black head and a huge round body, glittering black with a bright red mark on its belly. It was a gigantic spider, half as big as me. She was horrible. Her long legs swung her body over to us so fast that there wasn’t the smallest chance of escape.
One black leg kicked me hard in the chest, and I fell backwards, dropping my machete, banging my head on the rock. Through my dizziness I heard Lou scream, and as I scrambled to my feet I saw the spider towering over him, two bristled black legs flickering to and fro, an iridescence like the light glittering through the air. He struggled only for a second. She was wrapping him in spider-silk. Her spinning-legs moved so fast that already I could only see his head.
I had no time, and I knew it. I picked up the machete and slashed at her. The first hit cut off one of her spinning-legs. It dropped away like a broken branch. The spider stopped weaving and for a stunned moment she didn’t move. That was the luckiest moment of my entire life. I held the machete high in both my hands and brought it down as hard as I could, and the one stroke split her head and then cut her belly open almost in two. The machete smashed against the rock as it came down, and the impact made me stagger.
The spider made no sound. An awful-smelling green goo spurted out of her belly as the body fell backwards, and the legs flailed and twitched. I tried desperately to keep out of their way, because as I looked at her now, something jumped out of my memory. In our islands, the most dangerous spider is one called the bottle s
pider, or sometimes the black widow, and the way you can tell her is that she is black with a red marking on her belly the shape of an hourglass. If one of her stinging-legs gets you, you can die.
And that’s when she’s only the size of my little fingernail.
That huge disgusting body jerked violently once more, and inside it, along with all the green stuff, I glimpsed a cluster of small white things, all pressed together. I think they must have been eggs, like when you cut open a fish you’ve caught and find the roe, the mass of eggs the fish would have laid if you hadn’t caught it. I feel sorry when I’ve killed hundreds of unborn fish, but I sure didn’t feel sorry about the unborn spiders. A wave of the smell from the spider’s guts hit me, and I retched, and threw up on the rocky floor.
Lou was lying beside me, all trussed up in spider-silk. I was terrified she might have stung him; he wasn’t moving, and his eyes were closed. I thought desperately: don’t spiders wrap up insects to keep them alive?
“Lou!” I said. “Lou! Look at me!”
I gazed at his face, praying. After a moment his eyelids flickered, and he was blinking at me.
“Oh thank God,” I said, and I picked up my machete, wiped it on my shorts, and went to rip the spider-silk off Lou’s body. I thought it would be easy; I just slipped the end of the machete blade under the first few strands and gave a little flick.
They wouldn’t budge. They were so fine you could hardly see them, those tiny strands, but they might have been made of steel wire. My machete is pretty sharp, but I couldn’t cut even one strand, however hard I sawed at it. Lou was wrapped so close, his arms against his body, his legs tight together, that there was no way I could use the machete like an ax to chop through the silk, not without chopping at him too.
I knew that wouldn’t have worked anyway. When you touched the stuff, it was soft and gentle and stroky, just the way that glimmering nest in the wall looked. But it was stronger than steel, or stone, or fiberglass, or fish line, or anything I’d ever seen on earth. Nothing could cut it, nothing at all.
A great wave of hopelessness suddenly swallowed me up, and I heard myself let out a noise I didn’t know I could make, a long shriek of rage and fear and despair. More than anything else I think I was screaming for help—in a place where nobody could hear me, nobody cared, nobody would come. Then I choked up, and started to cry.
So I didn’t hear the first small rustling sounds, because my own sobbing was in my ears. The light was very dim in the cave now. The moment the spider had died, that beautiful iridescence in its gleaming wall-nest had died too, so that the only light around us was that faint glow in the air that had come with us from the beginning. In both directions, everything else was shadow.
And out of the shadows at the far end, beyond the spider’s nest, came a host of little flickering dark shapes as soft as moths, as quiet as falling leaves, dancing through the air. They flew jerkily, silently, darting round our heads. In a ghostly throng they hovered around Lou and tugged gently at the ends of the spider-silk that bound him, pulling it away from him, nudging him to his feet so that they could spin him round and round as they pulled the fine terrible strands away.
They were little brown bats, a great crowd of bats, light and fragile, and as they worked I thought once or twice that I could hear a high whispering twittering amongst them. But then it would be gone, and I felt I had imagined it. They filled the air with their tiny bodies and their delicate membrane-wings; there was a fluttering brown cloud all around me, and yet not one small body even brushed my face.
I stood very still, hardly breathing, my cheeks still wet. And there stood Lou before me, free of the spider-silk, eyes wide and bright, smiling.
We hugged each other, and for an instant I heard the high twittering voices in my ear like joy. Then there was only the rustling, the sense of a flickering brown cloud persistent all around us, filling the air. They weren’t going away, they were in charge of us, they wanted us to pay attention. But to what?
Lou stood there with his head up, and his eyes closed. It was as if he was listening to them, though there was nothing but the soft rustling to be heard. He began to walk, slowly. I knew it must be the way the host of bats were taking us and I walked with him. The light that had always been with us faded out of the air and was gone. We were in the dark now, in the kingdom of the bats, moving where they wanted us to move.
From the ground, I heard a brief scurrying, of quick feet rushing by. The rats must have got scent of the spider. In a moment they were gone.
Then Bryn’s voice came out of the darkness. “Lou? Trey?”
“Bryn,” I said. I was walking in a slow daze, walking where the fluttering guardians round my head took me, and it didn’t even seem surprising that Bryn was there. I assumed the bats had somehow fetched him too.
“Is Lou,” Bryn said, his voice husky, “is Lou—” and he couldn’t finish the sentence but I knew what he wanted to say, and I thought I knew why.
“Lou’s alive,” I said coldly. “Lou’s here.”
That is, I hoped that he was there, because we were separate now, no longer holding hands. We were alone in the dark, together.
And then the bats whirled in a frenzy in front of us, making us stop. We had come to the place where we were meant to be, and it was all so strange that it’s hard to find normal words to tell what it was like.
There was no light, and yet I felt I could see. Perhaps I was seeing only what was put into my mind. I thought I saw a kind of rounded space in the darkness, gleaming a little the way the inside of a big soup-pot or cauldron might gleam, and in the center of the round gleaming space I saw a woman’s head. Only her face, and that very hazily. It was the way I’ve seen a face in a dream, and known that it was a particular familiar person, Grammie or Mr. Ferguson or Kermit, even though it was a face I’d never seen before.
This was a face I had never seen, a woman with kind eyes and a strong mouth, and I knew it was someone I had never known and yet had always known. I can’t tell you what that means now that I am back here, but I understood then, there. The face was Gaia.
She spoke to us. It was like the voice of the whole earth.
“You mistake me always. You dream of monsters, who will kill your heroes. No! No monsters are needed. I asked not for sacrifice, but for renewal.”
I think she was talking to Bryn, and he answered her. His voice was shaking, full of astonishment.
“But it was in the prophecy,” he said. “Out of the labyrinth the weaver spins him. She was a Wilderness creature, and our people have had her below, for generations. They told us that was what the prophecy meant. I was born Spiderkeeper, taught to keep her alive. Throw in food through the airholes, keep her there, to weave Lugh through death to life.”
So he had sent us into the labyrinth knowing the spider would kill us, expecting Lou to be magically reborn, to somehow save their world. They had all done that, all the Underground people, even Gwen. Had we never been anything to them but a sacrifice?
Gaia sighed, in a great deep rumble that came through the earth like thunder. “Mankind,” she said with distaste. “The last species. So ingenious, so foolish. Hear now, man, and understand. Lugh followed his instructions. He passed through the stars into the dark labyrinth, so that I might bear him up to the light, as I bear every sprouting seed. But the weaver of his rebirth is not a great monstrous spider, it is a child.”
Bryn said, bemused, “A child?”
“Children weave story,” said Gaia’s rumbling voice. “Wait, and watch. From child to child the right words go, and are preserved, even as the child dies by becoming man or woman.”
“Forgive me,” Bryn said. “Forgive us.”
“I forgive, but at a price,” Gaia said. “At a price. Many will die, but all will be renewed. Go up, and you will see.”
The eyes in the shadowy face glinted blue, green, brown, all colors, and they were fixed on Lou. And it was not Louis Peel from Lucaya that they were seeing.
&nbs
p; “Go up, brave Lugh,” she said. “Go up to my Lughnasa games. It is the day to dance with the children, in the story as old as time.”
The long low growling under the earth grew suddenly into a crashing roar, and above our heads the rock split open. Up and up the split ran, bursting, cracking, until you could see a chink of daylight at the top.
In the darkness below, there was a busy rustling on all sides, from all directions. The host of little brown bats filled the air again, flickering about us, and each one of them brought a strand of spider-silk—from the wrapping that had held Lou, from the soft nest in the wall, maybe even from the dead spider herself. They released the fine strands into the air, and in the glimmer of light from above we saw all these iridescent threads merge into a shining knotted rope, rising up, rising.
As if an invisible hand pulled it, the slender, shining rope rose up to the daylight, and hung there, still, without swaying. Lou went to it and began to climb, holding the rope with hands and feet, and I put down my machete on the rocky ground and climbed after him.
TWELVE
We climbed and climbed up the rope, pulling with hands, pushing with feet, from knot to knot. My arms and shoulders were screaming at me by the time we reached the top. Above me I saw Lou tumble sideways off the rope, into daylight. I hoisted myself the last few feet and tumbled after him, and found myself rolling on sandy dirt. Bryn’s head rose up out of the split in the ground behind us.
We were on a rocky hillside, overlooking a town. You could see that most of it was new, still being built. The part right below us looked old, with roofs and terraces spread in rows down to a kind of square, and a road running down from that to a harbor, and a glimpse of grey sea. I could only see a little piece of the harbor, because most of it was hidden by the hill on which we stood.
