Cave Beneath the Sea

by Edward Willett

  “I don’t know,” Ariane said. “I don’t know what the Lady could or couldn’t do. I have her power, but she wasn’t even human. She was from Faerie. She might have been able to do things I’ll never be able to do. It’s not like she gave me an operating manual. Merlin drove her out of the world before she could do much of anything, remember?”

  Since Wally knew that Merlin had found the Lady because he’d carried his smartphone into her presence when he’d followed Ariane down the mystical watery staircase into Wascana Lake, he remembered all too well.

  “We need to search down in the water,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to scuba dive,” Ariane said.

  “Neither do I,” Wally said. “But we can both swim. Even me.” He knew he wasn’t a great swimmer, even yet, but the strange boost in strength and endurance and physical skill he’d noted while fencing, that he now knew came from the awakening shards of Excalibur, had carried over to other things, too. He’d managed to swim out to the island in the middle of Lake Putahi when they’d been after the third shard. He could manage swimming in this pool of salt water. It wasn’t nearly as big as the lake had been. “Up in the hut,” he indicated the stairs, “are snorkels and diving masks. And we’ve both got our swimsuits in our backpacks, so we won’t have to skinny-dip.” Unfortunately, he thought about adding as a joke, but quickly decided against.

  “It’s worth a...” Ariane’s reply was swallowed midway by an enormous yawn. She bit it off and finished, “...try.” She rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, Wally,” she said. “I’m wearing out. I need sleep. If we can’t find it right away, we’ll have to wait until daylight and give me a chance to recharge.” She turned and started back up the stairs.

  Wally followed her, but waited outside the hut while she changed into her swimsuit. Then it was his turn. He stripped out of his clothes and tugged on his trunks, then stuffed his salt-stained T-shirt and jeans, underwear, socks and running shoes into the pack. He took the waterproof flashlight, pushing his wrist through the cord that dangled from its end and tightening it so it wouldn’t slip off, but left his backpack on the workbench next to Ariane’s. Then he grabbed two masks and two snorkels and went out again, the humid air warm against his bare skin. Swimsuits make more sense than clothes in this climate, he thought. Although if the sun came out in the morning he’d want to cover up quick or his torso would quickly become the same colour as his hair.

  Together he and Ariane padded down the stairs again. He checked his waterproof watch, and did the mental calculations. “It’s just shy of 10 p.m. here,” he said as they descended. “Late enough we shouldn’t be surprised by anyone.” Assuming it had taken them most of an hour to get to this point from their arrival in the lake, that meant they had made the journey from Horseshoe Bay to the Caribbean in about two hours. Pretty impressive, he thought. I wonder how fast Ariane could make the trip if she knew exactly where she was going? He glanced up at the sky. It remained blank and black. “With a storm headed this way, maybe the island will be socked in in the morning and Rex Major won’t be able to fly here.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Ariane said, and Wally knew she was right: the storm was still a day and a half away, according to the forecast.

  Down on the platform, he handed her a mask and snorkel and a set of fins, and took the others for himself. The water continued to rise. They’d had to climb up six rungs on the ladder when they’d materialized. Now only four were showing, and the sound of the cataract falling into the seawater had changed.

  “How far does the water fall at low tide?” Ariane said, sitting on the platform as she pulled the flippers onto her bare feet, her mask pushed up on her forehead. There was an odd bulge around the middle of her sleek black one-piece swimsuit; the shard of Excalibur strapped to her side.

  “I don’t know,” Wally said as he tugged on his own fins. “Tides are pretty minimal in the Caribbean, but this is a long, skinny cave that’s probably much wider at the other end than it is at this one. So even if it only rises and falls a metre at that end, it could rise and fall a lot more at this end. Sort of like what happens in the Bay of Fundy.”

  Ariane shot him a look. “How do you know all this stuff, anyway?”

  “I read,” Wally said uncomfortably. He knew he could come across as a know-it-all. Flish had always hated it.

  And now Flish hates me.

  Once he and his sister had been not just family but friends. But that was before his family had shattered into broken shards like those of the sword Excalibur – and the edges of those shards were just as sharp and cutting, though he felt the pain in his heart instead of his flesh. He raised a hand to the fading scar on his cheek, left by the second shard of the sword when Ariane had called it to her in the cave in France.

  That cave had almost proved disastrous, to the quest and to their friendship.

  He hoped they’d have better luck in this one.

  “Let’s see what we can see,” he said. He got to his feet, flapped awkwardly in his fins to the edge of the platform, pulled the mask down, adjusted the snorkel, and started down the ladder.

  A moment later they were both in the water, staring down through the masks at the bottom of the cave beneath the sea.

  Unrealistically, Wally had hoped maybe they’d see some sort of treasure chest, just the right size to contain the fourth shard of the sword. But of course if anything had been in plain sight it would have been picked up long before. The cave was visited not only by divers almost every day, but by a freaking submarine! It wasn’t a very big submarine – it only held five people, from what Wally had read on the resort website – but still.

  Instead, all he saw was rough stone, with here and there a large, loose boulder resting on it.

  Wait a minute, he thought. Loose boulders?

  He turned and swam as close to the cataract as he dared – not too close, because the closer he got to the wall the more the rise and fall of the water threatened to throw him against the rocks. He looked right and saw Ariane floating nearby. He turned his attention back to the bottom of the cave. At the base of the cataract lay a pile of loose rock, which had clearly fallen from somewhere up above.

  The Caribbean has earthquakes, he thought. And the shard was placed here a thousand years ago. If the Lady hid it in the cave at the base of the cataract, and then there was an earthquake...

  He stared at the rocks a few moments longer, breathing steadily through the snorkel, remembering another lake, on the other side of the world, high up in the mountains of New Zealand. When he’d reached that lake, he’d somehow known that the third shard was on the small island near its centre. He had his own connection to Excalibur, and it had nothing to do with the power of the Lady of the Lake. And that meant that maybe, just maybe, his power wasn’t negated by salt water.

  He couldn’t sense anything yet. But if he got closer...

  He took a deep breath through the snorkel, and dove.

  The fins helped as he angled his hands to drive himself as deep as he could. But the water continued to surge, and in among the rocks at the bottom of the cataract, it also swirled. It seemed to seize him like a giant hand. He lost control.

  It twirled him around and drove him against the rocks.

  He curled up just in time, hands over his heads. His shoulder banged painfully against rough stone, and his held breath whooshed out in a torrent of bubbles. Then the water receded, tugging him away from the stone, and he straightened and drove, chest bursting, up toward the surface.

  He spat out the snorkel mouthpiece and sucked air, mixed with just enough salt water that he choked. Then Ariane had hold of him, pulling him with her, back toward the dock. They crawled out onto the wooden platform together, and, still on his hands and knees, he coughed and spat, trying to get his breath.

  “Are you crazy?” Ariane shouted. She took hold of his shoulders, pulled him back until he sat on his haunches. “You could have been killed!”

  “Didn’t...expect...the current,” Wal
ly gasped out. He took a deep breath, the first one he hadn’t choked on.

  “What were you trying to do? There’s nothing down there...nothing but rocks. The shard’s not here.” He could hear the bitter disappointment in her voice.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. He swiped the back of his arm across his mouth, then twisted around to look at the tumbled rocks at the base of the cataract, where the falling water dashed into white spray before pouring in a thousand separate streams down into the seawater. “It’s buried beneath those rocks, somewhere at the very bottom, where it’s always under salt water.”

  “You don’t know that,” Ariane snapped. “You’re just guessing.”

  “I do know it.” Wally touched his shoulder. “Ow.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Ariane said, her voice softening with concern. “Wally –”

  “It’s nothing,” he said impatiently. “Ariane, I’m telling you the shard is there.”

  “But how can you –”

  “I felt it,” he said. “I sensed it. It’s there. And when Merlin gets into this cave, he’s going to sense it, too.” He looked down at the rocks: tonnes and tonnes of tumbled rocks, brought down by a shrug of the Earth’s crust some time in the past millennium. He touched his aching shoulder, and stared at the redness covering his fingers. “It’s there,” he repeated dully. He felt a little dazed. “But I don’t see any way for us to get to it.”

  “There’s a first-aid kit in the hut,” Ariane said. “Let’s get you up there.”

  <•>

  Ariane followed Wally up the stairs, feeling sick to her stomach as she looked at the blood running down his bare back from the cut in his shoulder. It wasn’t the blood that made her feel ill – she’d never been queasy at the sight of blood – but the fact that Wally had gotten hurt trying to help her fulfill her quest. Everyone I love is in danger all the time because of me, she thought bitterly. Because I agreed to accept the Lady’s power. Because I was selfish. “What have you done?” Mom asked. And she was right. What have I done?

  It hadn’t felt like the selfish thing to do at the time. It had felt like the selfless thing to do. Like the heroine of a fantasy novel, she would give up being an ordinary girl so she could stop the evil Merlin from taking over the world.

  But had that ever been the real reason? Or had she really just wanted power, power to make the bullies stop bullying, power to finally take control of her own life after being out of control for so long, shunted from home to home and school to school before finally landing with Aunt Phyllis?

  I should just give up, give Merlin the shards I have, let him win. It would be better for everyone.

  But she knew that wasn’t true. He would make the world an armed camp from which to attack Faerie. Besides, the shards of Excalibur wouldn’t let her. The power she had accepted from the Lady wouldn’t let her. She had to complete the quest. She had to win.

  Which meant she needed this fourth shard. Then she would have three. With three, she would surely find the hilt, the final piece; and she had been told that when she had that much of the sword, Merlin could not stop her from taking the final piece from him.

  Wally said he could sense the shard in the pile of fallen rock at the base of the cataract. She had no choice but to believe him. He was convinced he was the heir of Arthur, just as she was the heir of the Lady of the Lake, and the fact Merlin had decided Wally’s sister, Flish, would serve just as well as Wally himself spoke to the truth of that belief. So did the way the sword reacted to Wally. Only when he held two shards did they sing in harmony as they were meant to. And he had found the third shard on the island in New Zealand before she had.

  But knowing the shard was at the base of the cataract brought them no closer to reaching it, not when it was buried under tonnes of rock – not when that rock, in turn, was submerged in seawater. She could do nothing with that horrible stuff. Just swimming in it had made her skin crawl.

  I’m tired, drained. But we’ll figure it out, she promised herself. We will. We have to. Because Merlin will be here in a few hours, and if we don’t, he will.

  They’d reached the top of the stairs. Ariane opened the door to the hut and Wally went in and sat down on the stool tucked next to the workbench. Ariane grabbed the first-aid kit from its place beside the toolbox, pulled it open, and took out a package of gauze pads. She removed one from its wrapping and put it on the wound, a shallow cut maybe seven centimetres long.

  “Do you know first aid?” Wally said.

  “Believe it or not, I do,” Ariane said. “I took a course at my last school, the one before Oscana. I thought it might come in handy if I got beat up.”

  “Oh,” Wally said.

  A silence.

  Then he asked, “Will it need stitches?”

  “Can’t be sure yet,” Ariane said, “but I don’t think so. It’s shallow and not gaping. I’m supposed to hold this in place for ten minutes. That should stop the bleeding. But if it doesn’t...we’ll have to go to the resort.”

  Wally jerked. “No,” he said. “Merlin will find us.”

  “Better that than you bleeding to death or being scarred for life,” Ariane said sharply. “Quit moving.”

  Wally subsided.

  They were both dripping wet. Ariane realized she could do something about that, and ordered them dry. Of course, that just left them covered with a thin crust of minerals. She sighed. “I hate salt water.”

  “How do we get to the shard?” Wally said.

  “I don’t know,” Ariane said. “It would take dynamite. And I don’t think there’s any of that in this hut. Now hold still. I’m going to pull the gauze away.” She suited actions to words. She put the red-stained pad on the workbench and studied the wound. No fresh blood welled from it. “It’s stopped bleeding.” She reached for the kit, took out an antibacterial cream, and smeared it liberally on a new gauze pad. She placed that on the wound then taped it in place. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yeah,” Wally said. He sounded a little shaky. “It hurts.”

  Ariane rummaged in the first-aid kit and found a bottle of ibuprofen. She shook out two tablets and handed them to him, along with a bottle of water from her backpack. He took them gratefully and downed them. “Try not to move your shoulder too much or you’ll start it bleeding again,” she said as she returned the bottle of pills to the kit.

  “That could be difficult,” Wally said. “If we’re going after the shard.”

  “We’re not going after the shard,” Ariane said. She suddenly felt as heavy as lead, as though every ounce of her energy had fled her body at once. Her mind felt dull, unable to deal with any more problems. “We can’t get to it. We just can’t.”

  “Ariane –”

  “We can’t, Wally.” She sat down on the floor, her back to the closed door. “We’re going to have to wait for Major to show up. We’ll see what he does. Maybe he’ll uncover the shard for us, and we can go after it then. But there’s no way we can get it ourselves, Wally. Not while it’s under seawater.” She closed her eyes. “And I have no strength left,” she whispered. “None at all.”

  She only intended to rest her eyes for a minute. But it had been a long and difficult day, and she’d been using her power heavily.

  Before she was even aware of it, she was asleep.

  <•>

  Wally sat on the stool and looked down at the sleeping Ariane. She had slid softly, bonelessly, onto her side. She looked soft and vulnerable, exposed, lying there in her swimsuit, eyes closed. His heart ached with the need to help her, to protect her. He swallowed.

  But she was right. There was nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to break those rocks. Even if they had been submerged in fresh water, not salt, he doubted she could do anything with them. They were too big. Water would just flow around them. Like she’d said, they needed explosives, or some other way to force the rocks apart.

  He got up and turned off the master switch that had activated the lights in the cavern and in the hut. In the
sudden, complete darkness, he lay down on the floor next to Ariane. His shoulder ached from being slammed against the rocks. He was lucky he hadn’t broken anything. The cut was a sharper-edged, fiery pain within the dull throb of the bruise, but it seemed to be hurting a little less – probably the painkillers taking hold.

  Between the pain and the hard wooden floor he’d never be able to sleep. He’d just lie there and rest until first light. Then they’d have to get out of the hut before they were discovered.

  He closed his eyes, his mind still on the problem of the rocks. His thoughts drifted back through everything he had seen Ariane do. The memories became jumbled. The diamond mine in the Northwest Territories...the cave in southern France...the lake in the clouds...the “explosion” in the tennis courts behind the school...facing Flish and her “coven” in the hallway...

  ...tendrils of water, hardening to ice, smashing holes in the lockers...

  His eyes jerked open. “Ice,” he breathed. “Ice!”

  Ariane could turn water to ice. And ice –

  Ice expanded.

  Ice destroyed.

  Ice broke rocks.

  Ice!

  He sat up, wincing as his shoulder reacted, reached out with his hand to shake Ariane awake...and then stopped. He could hear her slow, steady breathing. He remembered how she had looked, lying there, exhausted, how he had wanted to protect her.

  Morning is soon enough, he thought. Morning won’t make any difference. She’ll need all the power she can muster. And that means she needs sleep.

  And food. He frowned. The fish and chips in Horseshoe Bay seemed ages ago, though it was only a few hours. And they would run out of water soon enough as well. They’d only brought a couple of bottles apiece. Sure, the waterfall was fresh water, but remembering the “No Swimming” sign up above, not to mention the leeches, he didn’t think drinking from it would be the wisest course of action.

  Time enough to worry about it in the morning. Even if Rex Major left Toronto at dawn, he wouldn’t get to the island until late morning. They still had time to beat him, to take the shard before he could get to it.