Around him were the dim forms of his companions. A slick palm touched one fluttering foot, pushed gently. Looking back he could make out the plump shape of Clothahump. He was swimming casually around the nonaquatics. The water took a hundred years off his age, and he moved with the grace and ease of a ballet dancer.
The push was more to insure that no one lost his orientation and began swimming sideways than to speed the swimmers in their descent.
Even so, Jon-Tom was beginning to grow a mite concerned. Increasing pressure told him that they’d descended a respectable distance. Both he and Flor were in fairly good condition, but he was less sure of Pog and Caz. If they didn’t reach the air pocket they had to be heading toward shortly, he’d have to turn around and swim for the surface.
The surface he broke was unexpected, however. He felt himself falling helplessly, head over heels, windmilling his arms in a desperate attempt to regain his balance.
A loud splash echoed up to him as someone else hit the water. Then he landed with equal force, sank a few feet, and fought his way back to the surface and fresh air.
He broke through and inhaled several deep breaths. Nearby Talea’s red curls hung straight and limp as paint from her head. She blinked away water, gasped, and sniffed once.
“Well, that wasn’t bad at all. I’d heard it wasn’t, but you can’t always trust the tales people tell.”
Her breasts bobbed easily in the current. Jon-Tom stared at her, more conscious now of her nudity than he’d been when they’d first removed their clothes up above.
But they were above. Weren’t they?
Something shoved him firmly between the shoulders.
“Let the current carry you.”
Jon-Tom turned in the water, stared into the vast eyes of Bribbens. Looking past him he saw the ship. It was neatly anchored and sat stable in the middle of the stream, perhaps ten yards away. They were drifting toward it.
Following the boatman’s advice he relaxed, his body grateful for the respite after the dive, and let the current push him toward the boat. Mudge was already aboard, restocking supplies. He leaned over the side and gave Jon-Tom a hand up, then did the same for Talea.
There was a large, flopping thing on deck that Jon-Tom first thought to be an unfortunate fish. It flipped over, and he recognized the still bound and outraged body of Pog. He accepted Mudge’s proferred towel, dried himself, and began to untie the famulus’ bonds.
“You okay, Pog?”
“No, I’m not okay, dammit! I’m cold, drenched, and sore all over from that fall.”
“But you made it through all right.” Jon-Tom loosened another slipknot and one wing stretched across the deck. It jerked, sent water flying.
“Not much I can do about it now, I guess,” he said angrily.
With the other wing unbound the bat got to his knees, then his feet. He stood there-fanning both wings slowly back and forth to dry them.
Mudge joined them. His fur shed the water easily and, almost dry, he was slipping back into his clothes.
“Wot’s up, mate?” he asked the bat. “Don’t you ’ave no word for your old buddy?”
The large sack of clothing lay opened nearby. Jon-Tom moved to sort his own attire from the wad.
“Yeah, I got something to say ta my old buddy. You can go fuck yourself!” The bat flapped hard, lifted experimentally off the deck, and rose to grip the right spreader. He hung head down from there, his wings still extended and drying.
“Now don’t be like that, mate,” said the otter, fitting his cap neatly over his ears and fluffing out the feather. “It was necessary. You were ’ardly about t’ come voluntarily, you know.”
Pog said nothing further. The otter shrugged and left the disgruntled apprentice to his huff.
Jon-Tom buttoned his pants. While the others continued dressing around him, he took a moment to inspect their extraordinary new surroundings.
There was a dull roaring as if from a distant freight train. It sounded constantly in the ears and was a subtle vibration in his own body. His first thought was that they were in a dimly lit tunnel. In a way they were.
The ship rode easily at anchor. On either side were high, moist banks lush with mosses and fungi. That they were not normal riverbanks was proven by the peculiar habits of the higher growths clinging to them. These ferns and creepers put out roots both upward and down, into both running rivers.
Above was a silver-gray sky: the underside of the upper river. Jon-Tom estimated the distance between the two streams at perhaps ten meters. The mast of the boat cleared the watery ceiling easily.
How the two rivers flowed without meeting, without smashing together and eliminating the air space between them, was an interesting bit of physics. More likely of magic, he reminded himself.
“Easy part’s over with.” Bribbens moved to wind in the bow anchor, using the small winch bolted there.
“The easy part?” Jon-Tom didn’t hear the boatman too clearly. Water still sloshed in his ears.
“Yes. This much of the Sloomaz-ayor-le-Weentli is known. Little traveled in its lower portion, but still known.” He pointed with a webbed hand over the bow. Ahead of them the river(s) disappeared into darkness.
“What’s ahead is not.”
Jon-Tom walked forward and gave the boatman a hand with the winch. “Thanks,” Bribbens said when they were finished.
A strong breeze blew in Jon-Tom’s face. It came from the blackness forward and chilled his face even as it dried his long hair. He shivered a little. The wind came from inside the mountain. That hinted at considerable emptiness beyond.
Here there was no mass of water-soaked debris to prevent their continued traveling. The mouthlike opening could easily swallow the logs and branches bunched against the mountainside above. The cliff did not descend this far.
When they had the second anchor up and secured and the boat was drifting downstream once more, Bribbens moved to a watertight locker set in the deck. It offered up oil lamps and torches. These were set in hook or hole and lit.
The wind blew the flames backward but not out. Oil light flickered comfortingly inside conical glass lamps.
“Why didn’t you explain it to us?” Flor brushed at her long black mane while she chatted with the boatman.
Bribbens gestured at the squat shape of Clothahump, who rested against the railing nearby. “He suggested back at my cove that it’d be a good idea not to say anything to you.”
Jon-Tom and Flor looked questioningly at Clothahump.
“That is so, youngsters.” He pointed toward the flowing silver roof. “From there to here’s something of a fall. I wasn’t positive of the distance or of what your mental reactions to such a peculiar dive might be. I thought it best not to go into detail. I did not wish to frighten you.”
“We wouldn’t have been frightened,” said Flor firmly.
“That may be so,” agreed the wizard, “but there was no need to take the chance. As you can see we are all here safe and sound and once more on our way.”
A muttered obscenity fell from the form on the right spreader.
They were interrupted by a loud multiple splashing to starboard. As they watched, several fish the size of large bass leaped skyward. Their fins and tails were unusually broad and powerful.
Two of the leapers fell back, but the third intersected the flowing sky, got his upper fins into the water, and wiggled its way out of sight overhead. Several minutes passed, and then it rained minnows. A huge school of tiny fish came shooting out of the upper river to disappear in the lower. The two unsuccessful leapers were waiting for them. They were soon joined by the descending shape of the stronger jumper.
Jon-Tom had grown dizzy watching the up-and-down pursuit. His brain was more confused than his eyes. The new optical information did not match up with stored information.
“The origin of the name’s obvious,” he said to the boatman, “but I still don’t understand how it came to be.”
Bribbens proceeded to
relate the story of the Sloomaz-ayor-le-Weentli, of the great witch Wutz and her spilled cauldron of magic and the effect this had had upon the river forevermore.
When he’d finished the tale Flor shook her head in disbelief. “Grande, fantastico. A schizoid stream.”
“What makes the world go ’round, after all, Flor?” said Jon-Tom merrily.
“Gravitation and other natural laws.”
“I thought it was love.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Clothahump, inserting himself into the conversation, “the gravitational properties of love are well known. I suppose you believe its attractive properties wholly psychological? Well let me tell you, my boy, that there are certain formulae which…” and he rambled off into a learned discussion, half balderdash and half science: which is to say, fine magic. Jon-Tom and Flor tried to follow, largely in vain.
Talea leaned on the bow railing, her gaze fixed on the blackness ahead and around them. The cool wind continued, ruffling her hair and making her wonder what lay ahead, concealed by the screen of night.
For days they drifted downstream in darkness; water above, water below, floating through an aqueous tube toward an uncertain destination. Jon-Tom was reminded of a corpuscle in the bloodstream. After all the talk of Zaryt’s “Teeth” and of traveling into the “belly” of the mountain, he found the analogy disquieting.
From time to time they would anchor in midstream and supplement their supplies from the river’s ample piscean population. Occasionally Bribbens and Mudge would make exploratory forays into the upper river. They would climb the mast, Mudge helping the less adapted boatman. A small float attached to an arrow was shot into the underside of the current overhead. The float was inflated until it held securely. Then the cord trailing from it would be tied to the mast. Bribbens and the otter would then shinny up it, to disappear into the liquid ceiling.
With them went small sealed oil lamps fitted with handles. These provided light in the darkness, a necessity since even such agile swimmers as the two explorers could become lost in the deep waters.
On the twelfth day, when the monotony of the trip had become dangerously settled, Bribbens slid down the line in a state of uncharacteristic excitement.
“I think we’re through,” he announced cheerily.
“Through? Through where? Surely not the mountains.” Clothahump frowned. “It could not be. The range is too massive to be so narrow. And the legends…”
“No, no, sir. Not through the mountains. But the airspace above the upper river has suddenly expanded from but a few inches to one many feet high. There is a substantial cave, far more interesting to look at than this homogeneous tunnel. We can travel above now, and there’s some light as well.”
“What kind of light?” Flor wanted to know.
“You’ll see.”
Preparations were made. Buoyant material did not have to be dragged or shoved downward this time. Instead, they simply had to raise it to the upper stream and insert it, whereupon it would instantly bob to the second surface. Mudge was waiting to slip a line on such packages and drag them to shore.
When all their stores had been transferred, the nonaquatics climbed the mast rope and pushed themselves into the upper river. It was far easier to ascend than that first uncertain dive had been.
Jon-Tom broke the surface with wind to spare. He remained there a while, treading water as he inspected the cavern into which the river emerged.
The boatman had understated its size in his usual phlegmatic fashion. The cave was enormous. Off to his left Jon-Tom could see the abrupt cessation of the solid stone wall that had formed a tight lid on the upper stream for so many days. Little debris drifted this far on the river, and what few pieces and bits of wood tumbled by were worn almost smooth from the continual buffeting against that unyielding overhang.
More amazing were the cavern walls. They appeared to be coated with millions of tiny lights. He swam lazily toward the nearby beach, crawled out and selected a towel with which to dry himself, and moved to inspect the nearest glowing rocks.
The lights were predominantly gold in hue, though a few odd bursts and patches of red, blue, green, and yellow were visible. The bioluminescents were lichens and fungi of many species, ranging from mere colored smears against the rock to elaborate mushrooms and step fungi. Individually their lumen output was insignificant, but in the millions they illuminated the cavern as thoroughly as an evening sun.
He was kneeling to examine a cluster of bright blue toadstools when a vast rush and burble sounded behind him. He turned, instinctively expecting to see some unmentionable river monster rising from the depths. It was only their boat.
The first days on board he’d wondered at the purpose of great collapsed intestines, carefully scraped and dried, that lined the little craft’s hold. Now he knew. Having been inflated in turn they’d given the boat sufficient lifting power to rise like a balloon from the lower river right up to the surface of its twin.
Now it bobbed uncertainly as Bribbens rushed to open the valves sealing each inflated stomach before they could lift the ship from its second surface to the ceiling of the cavern. Water ran off the decks and out the seacocks. Mudge pumped furiously to purge the remaining water from the hold.
Dry and dressed, the passengers were soon traveling once more eastward. The scenery had improved greatly. Jon-Tom hoped the cavern would not shrink around them and force them again down to the dull surface of the understream.
He needn’t have worried. Instead of compacting, the cavern grew larger. It seemed endless, stretching vast and fluorescent ahead of them.
Phosphorescent growths made the river an artist’s palette, oils of many colors all run together and anarchically brilliant. Gigantic stalactites drooped like teeth from the distant ceiling. Some were far larger than the boat. They drifted past huge panels of flowstone, frozen rivers of stained calcite. Helictites curled and twisted from the walls, twitching at gravity like so many crystalline whiskers. Fungi flashed from them all.
On both sides they could see passages branching from the main cavern. Jon-Tom had a powerful urge to grab a lamp and do some casual spelunking. But Clothahump reminded him there would be ample exploring to do without deviating from their course. So long as the river continued to run eastward they would keep to the boat.
The size and magnificence of the cavern kept him from thinking about the composition of the Sloomaz-ayor-le-Weentli. It was disconcerting to sail along a river that flowed not on rock or sand but on air.
“How do you know it even has a solid bottom?” Flor once asked their boatman. “Maybe it’s a triple—or quadruple—river?”
Bribbens rested in his seat at the stern, one arm draped protectively across the steering oar.
“Because I’ve been in and out of it many times, lady. Anyway, no matter where you are on the river the anchors always bite into the second bottom.”
Here and there the warm glow of the bioluminescents would fade and then vanish. At such times they had to rely on the lamps for light until they reached another fluorescent section.
It didn’t bother Pog. He’d finally recovered from his lengthy grumpiness. To him the darkness was natural, and he enjoyed the stretches of no-light. They could hear him swooping and darting beyond the range of the boat’s lamps, playing dodgem with the cave formations. Sometimes he’d leave the boat for long stretches of time, much to Clothahump’s displeasure and concern, only to have his internal sonar unerringly bring him back to the ship many hours later.
“Beautiful,” Jon-Tom was murmuring as he watched the glowing shapes drift past. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”
Talea stood next to him and eyed the dark openings that branched off from the main cavern. Sometimes these gaping holes would come right down to the river’s edge.
“Funny idea of beauty you have, Jon-Tom. I don’t like it at all.”
“Humans got no appreciation of caves,” said Pog with a snort, weaving in the air above them. “Dis all wasted
on ya except da spellsinger dere, an’ dat’s da truth!”
“Can I help it if I prefer light to dark, freedom to confinement?” she countered.
“Amen,” said Flor heartily.
For both women the initial loveliness of the formations had been surrendered to the superstitious dread most people hold of deep, enclosed places. Jon-Tom was the only one with a real interest in caves, and so he was somewhat immune to such fears. To him the immense shapes, laid down patiently over the ages by dripping water and dissolved limestone, were as exquisite as anything the world of daylight had to offer.
Flor and Talea were not alone in their nervousness, however.
“I think I liked it better inside the rivers,” Mudge said one morning. “Leastwise there a chap knew where ’e was, wot?”
He indicated the darkness of a large, unilluminated side passage with a sweep of one furry arm. “Don’t care much for this place atall. I ain’t ready t’ be buried just yet.”
“Superstition,” Clothahump muttered. “The bane of civilization.”
As for their boatman, he remained as calm as if he’d been sailing familiar waters.
“Does this place have a name?” Jon-Tom asked him, watching a clump of bright azure mushrooms on the shore.
“Only in legend.” Bribbens looked away for a moment. An impossibly long tongue flicked out and snared something which Jon-Tom saw only as a ghost of glittering, transparent wings and body.
The frog smacked his lips appraisingly. “No color, but the flavor isn’t bad.” He nodded at the cavern. “In stories and legends of the riverfolk this is known as the Earth’s Throat.”
“And where does it go?” Flor asked him.
Bribbens shrugged. “Who knows? Your hard-shelled mentor believes it to travel much of the way through the mountains. Perhaps he’s right. I prefer to think we’ll come out there instead of, say, the earth’s belly.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice.” Nearby Talea fingered the haft of her knife as though she could intimidate the surrounding darkness with it.
Or whatever else might be out there… .
The Hour of the Gate: A Spellsinger Adventure (Book Two) (The Spellsinger Saga) Page 9
