by Louise Wise
Understanding fell on Fly. His knees buckled and it wasn’t until he felt Molver’s hand on his shoulder did he realise he’d collapsed.
‘He’s saying she’s dead,’ Fly said. He wasn’t talking to anyone in general. ‘Over there. Under the rocks. Dead.’
‘The ground’s stopped moving,’ Molver said.
There was a wondrous hush, only broken by groans and grunts of the injured and dying. The trembling ground was still and ash floated down.
‘We still need to go,’ Molver said.
‘I need to find Jenny.’ Fly stood up, and Molver’s hand fell from his shoulders.
‘She’s dead…’ His words trailed off as Fly’s eyes snapped to his face. ‘Th-that’s w-what you said—’
‘I still need to find her. Her body,’ he added and began walking away. ‘Get out of here,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Take the buggy. Find your friends or my house. Do what you like.’
There was a collective howl. Fly turned. At the top of the valley stood a line of honnards. Fly couldn’t make them out individually, but he heard Bo shout ‘Fari, Chi-Chi.’
‘She’s in the afterlife with her baby,’ Molver said.
Fly turned his gaze on him. His mind was a whirl of thoughts, but he knew that some Jelvias believed in an afterlife. Maybe the honnards did as well.
‘We have to go,’ Molver said. He grabbed at Fly’s arm. ‘Please, Fly. I don’t want to go without you.’
‘And I can’t go without her,’ he said and Molver’s hand dropped from his arm.
Molver stared up at him. Tears made rivers on his dirty face.
Then beneath them, they both heard a baby crying.
Chapter Thirty Nine
Jenny had turned from the blocked exit and walked back the other way, using her hand on the damp wall to guide her. She walked slowly, the deeper she went into the cave, the darker it became. The walls became wetter, the ground underfoot soggy. She could hear nothing from the outside and there was a heavy silence inside the cave. Her breathing was loud. It echoed off the walls. Diana had been lulled into sleep as Jenny walked. She snuffled every now and then, making Jenny worry that she was struggling to breathe. The air was damp and smelled of mildew, and although this told Jenny there was plenty of oxygen, it felt as if the air shouldn’t be able to penetrate the intense dark.
‘We’re going to get out, baby girl,’ Jenny said. She repeated herself often, knowing it was self-reassurance.
She stopped and automatically ducked when she felt something brush the top of her head, then raised a hand to something soft. She could only presume that, by the smell, a fungus was growing from the cave ceiling. Another brushed her shoulder, and beneath her feet, the ground had become slimy.
She walked carefully, one hand on the slippery cave wall, the other clutching Diana against her chest. She gasped as one of her feet splashed into a deep puddle, which splattered her and Diana. The baby, snug in the fur, didn’t feel it, but Jenny felt the chill of the ice-encrusted water on her skin. She pulled her foot out, and stood a moment. Trying to think. Trying to bolster some inner strength from somewhere.
Come on, Jenny Daykin, you’ve been in worse situations than this!
She took another step, and a lump of mould fell from the cave roof, slipped off her head and down her shoulder. Jenny shuddered as it made contact with her skin. She closed her eyes, seeking resolve, and inched forward.
That’s it. One step at a time.
‘Oh, great, now I’m patronising myself!’ she said, and opened her eyes.
She started so alarmingly that Diana jumped and began to wail. Jenny’s shocked scream and the baby’s bawling echoed off the walls. Jenny turned to run from the creature she’d seen, but slipped on the ground, and conscious of Diana, raised a flailing hand to save herself and grabbed a handful of fungi. Amazingly, it held and she was able to haul herself up before making contact with the ground.
Almost feeling the animal’s hot breath on her neck, Jenny turned, pulling her sword. But the amber eyes hadn’t moved; neither had they blinked. They also weren’t adjacent to one another but spaced apart, one above the other. As she looked there were more glowing amber eyes.
Diana’s cries bounced off the walls, but the eyes didn’t flicker at the noise.
‘Well, look at that,’ Jenny said absently, sheathing her sword, and using that hand to stroke Diana’s head. The baby’s crying eased, and Jenny began to walk towards the “eyes” or rather holes of amber light in a cave wall.
As she edged towards them, she thought she could hear gushing water, but Diana, over her rude awakening, was now demanding food and Jenny struggled to hear over the noise. The slimy ground was covered with water, and it got deeper until Jenny could feel it lapping around her ankles.
‘Soon, baby girl,’ she said. ‘When Mummy can get out of this water.’
The noise of the water became booming and soon it drowned Diana’s cries. And the nearer she got it became more obvious the ‘eyes’ were cracks in the rock that fed to a cavern beyond. It became brighter too, and in the strange amber light, Jenny was able to see her feet as they splashed in the water. She didn’t look too closely at the transparent ‘slime’: a tentacle-like organism, which wriggled over the waterbed.
Water rose sharply to her knees, and then her path ended abruptly by a wall of rock where the ovals of orange light lit the area.
She placed an eye to a hole and saw steam licking the roof of the next cavern. Jenny could feel the heat. She stood on tiptoe to peer down to see the familiar orange water being dragged along in its current. Geysers spurted upward, which caused the steam. But what excited her was daylight streaming in from breaks in the roof.
She stepped away, and felt over the rock with one hand. At the bottom, the water had made the structure weak, and water pushed out through the many oval openings. Spotting a larger gap, she moved towards it and peered through. The drop to the amber water was at least twenty feet. Too far for her to jump and too risky for her to climb with Diana.
‘Oh, Diana, sssh,’ she said, as she stepped away. She cuddled the child to her chest, and the baby’s wails eased a little. She kissed the top of her head. ‘We’ll go back, and get you fed, eh, baby girl?’ Her mood had lifted, the way out seemed probable, she had her little girl back and Fly wasn’t too far away—probably searching the valley right now!
It didn’t seem to take as long to make her way back, but she’d forgotten how dark it was, and she knew it was psychological when despondency edged its way back. On dry ground, Jenny laid the baby back in her Jelvian-made crib and flexed her arm. The baby was tiny, but carrying her one-handed became hard after a while.
The child was wet again, and she worked blind and turned over the fur and bundled the baby up in a dry part of it, then released a breast for a feed. She sat against the cave wall as Diana guzzled greedily. Jenny stroked the top of her head, feeling the texture of her fine hair, and humming a tune from her childhood. Another life. So far away.
Her eyes were firm on the small beam of light that filtered into the cave, and every now and then dust trickled past the gap, making the light flicker, and each time Jenny’s heart fluttered with hope that it was Fly come to rescue her.
‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’ Jenny sang softly. ‘I don’t have to wonder what you are. Up above in space all alone, a ball of plasma in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle little star, I don’t have to wonder what you are. Made from hydrogen, helium and gravity.’ The ending word “gravity” became grav-i-tie to make it rhyme. Jenny pressed her lips against Diana’s downy head. ‘That’s what Granddad Zack sang to me when I was a little girl,’ she told the child. ‘I was fascinated with space even then. Your Granddad Zack was a famous astronaut, you know. He discovered the underwater lagoons on the moon.’
Diana’s frantic feeding had ebbed, and her little body relaxed as she fell into sleep.
‘Doesn’t take much to get you to sleep, does it?’ Jenny’s arms were heavy from the weight
of Diana, and her wrist especially ached. Gently she unlatched the baby from her breast, and laid her in the makeshift cradle.
She lay next to it, using her hands as a pillow. She closed her eyes.
***
‘There is a cave!’
Jenny woke with a jerk. She sat up, her hands immediately reaching for Diana, but stopped when she realised the baby was asleep and it hadn’t been her that had woken her. There was noise outside, as if someone was clambering over the rocks. Dust fell from the ceiling.
‘Are you sure you heard a baby?’ asked a voice. It sounded young; tentative.
‘You heard it, too.’
‘Could have been an animal?’
‘No. It was a baby. We’re going to have to be careful clearing this away. These rocks are holding up others.’
Jenny jumped to her feet. ‘Fly! Fly!’ she yelled, making Diana start. She began to cry, but Jenny rushed towards his voice. He sounded like he was above her somehow. She climbed to look through her peephole.
‘Jenny!’
‘Fly! I’m here! I’m OK! We’re both OK!’ she shouted over Diana’s wails. She was crying too, only silently. She brushed the tears away. ‘The Jelvias—have they gone?’
‘Most of them have been killed,’ he said. ‘Where are you? You sound like you’re underground. You’re muffled.’
‘I’m here. Follow my voice. Who’s that with you?’
‘Just a kid.’ He switched to English. ‘I’ve been so worried about you, Jenny. Thought my life had finished when I came back to the honnards’ camp and saw them all murdered, and you and the baby gone. I didn’t even know if you’d given birth or not.’
Jenny pressed her forehead against the cold rock. Diana’s wails had quietened. Probably hearing Jenny’s voice had soothed her. She lay gurgling in the crib. ‘I was stupid. I left her with Melinda and Mum. I thought she’d be safer there than with me.’ She ran a shaking hand over her face. ‘You vanished. There was blood all over the buggy. I didn’t know what to think! I thought the Jelvias had killed you. The honnards brought me here. Are they OK? Is Bo and Zack OK?’
‘You named them all?’
‘Every one.’
Fly’s low chuckle made her giggle. She sniffed and rubbed her nose.
‘Can’t she magic her way out?’ asked the young voice.
‘I told you she isn’t a goddess. She isn’t magic.’
‘Who is that?’ she asked.
‘Molver. He stowed away on the space ship as a child.’
‘What are you saying?’ asked the voice. ‘Can’t she understand Jelvian? Is she stupid?’
Jenny laughed. ‘Hello Molver,’ she said in Jelvian.
There was silence and then, ‘She said hello! She said hello to me!’
‘You’ve made his day,’ said Fly.
She looked up. His voice came from somewhere above. She saw a glint of light as he moved and realised he was standing on boulders above her cave and peering inside to talk to her.
‘Can you see me?’
‘No.’
‘How bad is the landslide?’ she asked.
‘Bad. It’s unstable. No sooner we move rocks, more fall.’
‘This cave leads down into a cavern of hot springs. Down there daylight is spilling in all over. There’s an exit there somewhere. I just daren’t risk it with Diana.’
‘I’ll get you out,’ he said.
A trickle of small rocks fell from the roof as he moved. She could see his shadow as it cut off daylight through the chinks in the rock. Diana began to cry again, and Jenny moved towards her.
‘Stay back,’ Fly said. ‘I’ll have you out in a jiffy.’
She smiled at his English words and bent to Diana to scoop her up. No sooner had she gathered her in her arms a chunk of rock fell out of the ceiling and hit the crib, smashing it, followed by a rain of small stones and grit. The ceiling above was still encased in rock and smoke-like dust poured from the space it occupied. Jenny bit back on a scream and ran back to the blocked exit.
‘What’s happening?’ she yelled.
There was no answer.
‘Fly!’
‘He’s here,’ said the young voice. ‘He’s pulling away rocks the size of moons. He’s very strong.’
‘How’d you two meet?’ Jenny asked and watched the roof of the cavern anxiously. Nothing else fell and she relaxed slightly.
‘I rescued him,’ Molver said. ‘He’d been captured by the Jelvias and I helped him escape. Do you really have red hair?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you from Earth?’ The voice was a whisper.
‘Yes, I’m from Earth.’
‘Have magic powers?’
‘No. None.’
‘Oh.’ As if bored, Molver moved and the daylight spilled in from the gap.
‘Tell him to be careful!’ Jenny shouted.
There was no answer, and Jenny retreated deep into the cave and away from the crumbling opening. She fed the baby, just to soothe her, and waited for Fly to open up the entrance, and lift them out in his strong arms like all heroes do.
She could hear a lot of scraping, muffled talk and the odd groaning of rock on rock. Dust and rock particles slid down the walls, which seemed to become faster and more regular as the scraping from outside continued. She watched, becoming more and more anxious as the dust particles became larger until there was another loud creak and a chunk of rock dropped from the roof. Then there was a hideous groaning noise and several large rocks fell and broke on the ground. Diana’s cradle was buried. Jenny turned a shoulder, and shielded the baby from the choking dust. When the cloud dispersed and no more rocks fell, Jenny rushed forward to the cave’s blocked entrance. She was stopped by a stream of light pouring in from the tunnel-like gap, which had been reopened.
A chunk of rock fell behind her, the pouring debris almost knowing her over. She moved towards the gap as gravel slid down the sides of the cave, and climbed until her face was level with the gap.
‘Fly!’ she shouted. ‘Fly, stop! Fly!’
Dust covered her hair, and her arms were bleeding from falling shingle.
The gap darkened, and her heart felt like it had stopped. But it was only Fly. She couldn’t see him; the gap probably stretched several metres.
‘What is it?’ he called.
‘Rocks are falling in. It’s too dangerous,’ she said. ‘We’re going to become buried.’ As she spoke part of the cave wall crumbled like mush, and Jenny jumped from the gap and ran towards the back of the cave. She heard Fly yelling, but couldn’t answer him. Rubble rained on her, and one rock hit her shoulder knocking her off her feet.
‘Jenny!’
Conscious of Diana, she’d not used her hands to brace her fall, and had fallen heavily on her injured shoulder. Grimacing, she stood up saying, ‘I’m all right.’ She looked into the face of Diana, but dark as it was in the cave, could see nothing. She heard a yawn, and satisfied moved back towards the tunnel and the sound of Fly’s voice.
‘I’m all right,’ she said again. She touched her sword, making sure she still had that. The gap looked bigger, unless that was her imagination. She climbed towards it.
‘Was there a rock fall?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A bad one.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘It’ll be easier to tell you the places that don’t hurt.’
He was silent a moment, then, ‘Can you touch my hand?’
She put her hand inside the gap, and brushed air. ‘No.’ She wanted to cry.
‘Try Jenny,’ he said. ‘Stand on something.’
She looked up and grabbed a rock jutting out, and heaved herself further up the cave wall. She pushed her arm in the gap again, flattening her body as close to the wall as she could without crushing Diana. Then something warm touched her fingertips. It was Fly. The tears fell then. Steady and heavy.
‘I can feel you,’ he said.
The tears made answering impossible, and all she could do was squeeze
the tip of one of his fingers.
‘I can’t get you out,’ he admitted. He sounded broken. ‘My guess is this valley is full of underground caverns and it won’t take much to cause it to fall in, and,’ he paused, ‘and if I continue it might all collapse.’
‘I can get to those underground caverns,’ she said.
His thumb made circular movements on the pad of her forefinger. ‘You don’t know where they lead, or even if they lead to outside.’
‘I know I don’t.’
They fell silent; their fingertips stroking one another’s.
‘I want you to do something for me,’ she said.
‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘I want you to take the baby.’
His hand retracted slightly, but then it was back. His fingers squeezing hers.
‘I have a better chance of surviving without her. She’s holding me back,’ she said.
‘You think you’re going to die in there, don’t you?’ he said. She didn’t answer. They both knew the reply anyway. ‘I’ve sent Molver to the buggy for some supplies that I can pass you. Are you hungry?’
She sniffed and rubbed her nose. ‘Very hungry.’ A clump of dust fell on her.
He let go of her hand, and she felt him feeling around the gap. ‘Do you think the baby will fit?’
‘She’s tiny, Fly. She’ll fit.’ She felt the baby move her head against her chest. Didn’t she say she’d never leave her ever again? ‘I’ve just fed her, so we have two to three hours before she needs feeding again. If not, I’m sure you’ll think of ways to feed her.’
‘Don’t say things like that.’
There was silence and then Fly said, ‘Molver’s back with rope. I’ll thread it through the gap to you. Tie it to Diana and I’ll pull her through.’ Their fingertips lingered on one another’s, and Fly was the first to pull away. Soon Jenny felt something hard and abrasive. The rope. She tugged it until Fly said, ‘That’s it. That’s as long as it goes. Now tie the baby to the other end.’
Jenny let the rope go, and stepped down from the ledge she was balancing on. She unwrapped the baby from the fur, then cuddled her, sniffing her hair and trying to drink in as much of her as possible.
