by Jack Lasenby
“How are we going to know when it’s morning?” the sick little one, Tupu, asked. I had taken her on my back, hearing exhaustion in her voice. Her face burned against my neck, the fever of her disease.
“It depends how long the tunnel is. We’ll keep going as long as we can. Then have a sleep.” At least the floor was clear, nothing to stumble over. And always the sound of water.
I counted the Children each time we rested. Checking by touch as well as voice. “Keep in your pairs.” The older girls, Maka and Tulu; the two little boys, Chak and Hurk; the boy and girl I had despaired of, Tama and Puli; pregnant Kitimah and Sheenah; the older boys, Paku and Tepulka taking it in turns to carry Kimi. Twelve! In the dark, it was as if I had to learn their names, their voices, their appearances all over again.
Lutha must think we had been crushed by the rockfall. If they dug after us, they would find only a hole filled with water. A few days, and it would be as if we had never lived on the Headland. Kalik would change his plans and start plotting something else. What about his cold rage? “I give up nothing,” he once said. Neither he nor Lutha would understand what I had done. Nor why.
All that time in the Land of the White Bear I had loved Lutha’s memory. I remembered the night she helped me escape from the Island of Bones. Telling me how the priestesses had ordered a Salt Man killed. “He took a long time to die,” she said, and I heard again the catch in her voice. But that was before, corrupted by leadership, she learned to use cruelty herself.
Then I was back in the tunnel, hearing our feet splashing through water. The Children’s voices tiring. We found a raised heap of dampish sand and slept, but first I made everyone drink. It would keep them feeling full. The four little ones slept on the deerskin in the middle, the bigger ones around them. Paku’s confident voice said, “We are escaping!” and I heard an excited sigh from Kimi. A tired chuckle from Chak.
“Where’s Nip?” he asked.
“Lutha had her on a rope. I couldn’t get her.”
“Will Lutha be cruel to her?”
“She’ll be kind to her. And her pups.” There was no point in telling him Nip had died, crushed in the hole.
Everyone woke hungry. Maka and Tulu cuddled the youngest ones, reminded them where we were. Tepulka made them laugh. Not what he said so much as the way he spoke. We finished the bear meat, shared a smoked fish. “Suck every bit off the bones,” I said. For some reason, that made Kimi laugh. And we all laughed at her. Then Chak laughed at the sound of somebody piddling. I felt, counted all twelve, and we went on.
I didn’t say that the run of water had increased. I had known by its sound, the moment I woke. Nobody else seemed to notice.
Then we saw a lighter shade of darkness, felt air on our faces. But the light came from above. Paku climbed and stood on my shoulders, Tepulka, Maka, and Tulu supporting his legs. He reached up into the dark with the spear, said he could feel a round hole in the roof.
I told the Children the hole was built by the people who made the tunnel. “To bring in fresh air. We couldn’t climb it.”
“Did somebody really build the tunnel?” Chak wanted to know.
“The Old People, the People of the Walls, they tunnelled through the hills to save climbing them. The tunnels were their Ways, what they called their Roads.”
“Remember,” said Puli, “‘…the donkey ran down the road.’ In the story?” I listened astonished to her voice. It was one of the few times Puli had spoken. There was a new spirit in the Children: they had something to live for.
“I remember!” said several others.
“Well,” said Puli, “we’re running away from our cruel owners, too. Down a road through a tunnel.”
“Up!” said Chak’s voice, “because the water’s running down,” and we all laughed.
Then it occurred to me, the tunnel might be one of those the Old People used to carry water. For making the thing they called electricity. The sooner we got out, the better.
“How do we know we’re going the right way?”
“There isn’t any other,” Tepulka told Chak. “The water’s running back to where we came from, so we should come to where it starts.” There was a long silence as Chak thought.
“Does the water come in through the mouth of the tunnel?”
“I don’t know,” said Tepulka.
“How far have we got to go?”
“Not too far.”
“How long have we been walking, Tepulka?”
“Most of the night and the next day.”
“But we’ve been going for days and days!”
The younger children thought we must have been going several days at least. I knew it couldn’t be that long, or we’d have run out of food. And because I had to cheer up the others, I felt no distress myself.
“We’re getting there,” I said, but there were times it seemed the darkness would never end. At least the water showed we were heading in the one direction. Not wandering lost in different tunnels. I didn’t say anything about that.
“What if the tunnel just goes round and round?” asked Chak.
“Does it feel like it?” Maka said to him, her voice warm, comforting.
“No.” Chak didn’t sound very sure.
“Who would build a tunnel that goes round and round?” asked Maka’s sweet voice. Somewhere in the dark, a little voice said, “Chak!” And we all laughed at Kimi.
The next rest we had, they asked about Nip again. There were more tears, and they asked for their story. They wanted it again before we started off. I didn’t tell the story of the Dark Forest and the Showman.
The water had deepened while we were resting. Holding hands, the smaller children walked along the side of the tunnel. I kept checking their names. Trying to sound unconcerned.
We had two smoked fish left when I smelled fresh air. No point in exciting the Children if it was just another ventilation hole. The floor of the tunnel was more uneven and slippery with larger stones, water running fast. We had to feel our way. Waiting for someone to catch up. Making sure every pair was in touch. Six pairs. Twelve children.
I took Tupu on my back, and Tepulka carried Kimi. I felt my way around a large stone, and another. The biggest so far. As I crossed from one side of the tunnel to the other, the water was over my knees. Again, there seemed a lightening, a greying. Then I became sure of it. I stopped. Despite the rising water, I had not felt the closed-in feeling, the choked breathlessness of the Droll’s tunnel.
“You haven’t got time to worry too much about yourself,” I said under my breath.
“It’s lighter!” Chak shouted. “We’re out!” he cried.
“Don’t run outside the mouth of the tunnel!” I felt it myself, the urge to burst into the light.
Water roaring nearby. The air fresh. The tunnel shrinking. Bigger rocks and sand half-filling it. Something like a net between us and the light. A grating of huge metal bars rising into the roof just above our heads. Between their criss-cross a glimpse of a brown and green valley in sunshine! And the other side of the barrier of rocks and sand outside the gate, the tops of waves, the rapids of a river. Its surface almost level with where we stood.
The river had blocked up the entrance to the tunnel, turned, and run down its old bed, but it was in flood now, and some of it was coming over the barrier. If it rose much more, we would be swept away. Probably carried to join the river under Grave Mountain. Like the Shaman, swept back to the Land of the White Bear that Ate the Sun.
I could hear exhaustion in the Children’s voices. Tired, hungry, disappointed. And scared. As if it was my fault.
“I thought Nip would be waiting for us,” said Chak. And he sobbed.
Chapter 19
“Bears Don’t Have Horns.”
“Look!” said Kimi. “A bear!”
“Where?”
“Shh!”
“There!”
“Bears don’t have horns,” Chak told Kimi.
“It looks like a bear to me.”
“Not the deer. The white bear!” Kimi was near crying. I looked up the bars, at the roof of the tunnel.
“There!” said Kimi.
“I see!” Paku sounded interested. I looked where Kimi was pointing. Up to the right, something round and dingy white disappeared.
“It was a bear, wasn’t it, Ish? A white one!”
“Maybe a baby one. Come back and find somewhere to sit down. We’ll have something to eat and drink.”
“I don’t want to go back,” said Kimi. “I want to get out.” Tupu, Chak, and Hurk began to grizzle with her.
“I don’t like this tunnel.” Hurk’s voice quavered.
“We’ve found the mouth. All we have to do now is find a way out.” I picked him up. He turned his head into my shoulder and cried. Chak took my other hand. Maka and Tulu carried Kimi and Tupu. In the half-light, we sat on a bank of sand.
I tried to sound cheerful. “Paku and Tepulka will give me a hand. Maka will tell the rest of you a story.”
We scrambled back to the gate. Two hinds grazed across the valley. Several fawns careered across a sandy patch. Springing, feet hardly touching the ground, white-spotted red coats.
“They can’t be hunted,” I said. “So the tunnel must have brought us well away from the lake.”
Paku sighed. “That white thing wasn’t a bear, Ish.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t a goat either.”
“It might have been a sheep.” I was tugging at a rock set hard in silt.
“I’ve never seen a sheep,” said Paku.
“They’re good to eat, somebody said, and –” Tepulka hesitated. “And they’ve got long hair.”
“Wool!”
“We’re in trouble if the river comes any higher,” said Paku trying the bars. Each so thick through, they were too big to grasp in one hand.
“At least it’s not raining now,” said Tepulka.
“Shift this rock, and the others will come out easier,” I grunted. “Maybe we can get under the gate.”
“Why would they have a gate, Ish?”
“To stop boulders and logs blocking the tunnel.”
“Then this wasn’t one of their Ways at all?”
“It’s one of the tunnels they built to carry water. Probably joins the big one under Grave Mountain. Where the water shot out the other end, they’d use its force to make a thing they called electricity.”
“What’s that?” asked Tepulka.
“It travelled along metal wires. Invisible. Warmed their houses. Cooked their food. Gave light. Did all kinds of work for them. Ah!” The rock came free. Tepulka rolled it to Paku.
“But the tunnel would have filled up with small rocks and sand. And look at the logs outside.”
“They’d clear it regularly. There’d be traps in the bottom for this small stuff to fall through. They’d have cleared them, too. Once the Old People died, the traps would fill. The sand and rocks build up. Then floods must have dumped all that stuff against the gate and turned the river back down its old course.”
Tepulka grinned. “Pity we couldn’t find one of those traps and get out that way.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but I felt grateful. “At least we’re escaping,” Tepulka said. “Better than being slaves to Kalik.”
Again I noticed it was Kalik he spoke of. They didn’t see as much of Lutha. As I pulled at another rock, Paku managed to reach with the spear and work a branch between the bars. I levered with it. Another rock. Another. Soon I was standing in a hole, having to pass them up. But even when it became too dark to work, the bars still continued down into the sand.
First thing in the morning, I crawled to the gate. Rain was falling. The river was coming over the barrier. It had filled our hole with fresh sand.
As fast as we dug it out, more carried in. The rest of the Children stood watching us. Even the little ones knew what was happening.
“How did the gate open?” Paku asked.
“It lifted. See that slot.”
“So there’s another tunnel above this?”
“Just enough for the gate to lift into.”
Already Paku was scrambling up the grating, but there was only the narrow slot. A rock loosened in the water now running between the bars. I worked it to where Tepulka could take it, and there was a cry from Maka.
“Tulu’s found a crack in the wall!”
It was a line, a join down the curve of the tunnel wall. Paku and Tepulka tried it with their knives.
“See, Ish, the top of it turns and goes along here, and then turns down again.” Tulu traced the line around a section of wall the size of a door.
“Ish, the river’s rising!”
“Stand back!” I smashed a rock against the door.
“It sounds hollow!”
“It moved!”
“Hit it again, Ish!”
The sand I stood on went soft. Wet. My feet sank in. I got my balance and smashed again.
The tunnel echoing – the increasing rush of water. The line of the crack clearer. Paku and Tepulka took a turn, swinging up a rock between them. Then I had another go. The boys again. And Maka and Tulu. The little ones pressed behind us. I looked around to tell them to stand back and saw the sandbank had grown smaller. We could not even climb back to the gate. Water gushed between its bars.
“Give us another go!” I picked up a heavier rock. But Tulu put her foot against the wall, and shoved. A black space opened. She disappeared.
“Tulu!” Paku screamed.
We felt her in darkness, pinned down by the slab of stone and metal that had fallen back. Maka, Paku, Tepulka and I lifted together. When Tulu scrambled free, I heard myself laughing. And heard her join in.
“Tulu’s all right,” I heard Maka telling the little ones. Water was now spilling into the passage.
I counted everyone into it. Twelve! Prodding the walls, the roof, the floor. Something shifted under my feet. I picked it up, felt the eyeholes, the teeth. Passed it to Paku behind me. “An animal’s skull. It must have crawled in here to die. So there’s a way out.”
But it was Tulu’s voice which giggled, “Of course there is. And I found it!”
“I thought you were Paku.”
“I found the door. So I want to be first out.”
At a wall of rocks and sand, I shoved and tugged. One rock came away easily. Several others fell. Light spilled! Tulu wriggled past.
“You’re too fat, Ish.”
“You’ll never get through. Your behind’s too big!”
Tulu giggled again. “I can’t shift this one. Oh!” A rock tumbled outwards. A log rolled away. More light!
“Pass a bow,” I called behind. Tulu’s feet disappeared. As she tore down the rocks from outside, water gushed in. A few frantic seconds passing out the little ones, shoving the last through, and we were outside.
“Twelve! Shhh!” I strung the bow. Crept around the blade of a grey wall.
Left, the bank of boulders and logs now under water. The main body of the river plunging down what must have been its old bed, before it was turned into the tunnel. Directly above, unable to hear us for the river, Kimi’s white bear cropped grass. I fired. It ran straight uphill, paused as if thinking, sank back. The arrow snapped as it rolled, fell, and knocked me to the ground. The others lifted it off, laughing.
“Don’t make a noise,” I beseeched. I crept under the stone wall, on to a grassy terrace. A clear hillside above. Over the tunnel entrance behind us, a face of smooth grey stone. No sign of danger. I yelped, deluged with cries of joy as the Children leapt, danced across the grass.
“But what is the white bear?”
“A sheep! Somebody get the other end of the arrow.”
“What’s a sheep, Ish?” “Can you eat it?” “Let’s have a touch!”
They felt it. Smelled it. Got the oil off the wool on their hands, sniffed, rubbed it
on each other’s faces. Nobody noticed the water creeping further up the iron gates.
Paku and Tepulka were skinning and butchering the sheep. “Bring that other bow,” I said to Maka. We climbed the hillside. Above the tunnel mouth, the smooth grey stone finished and rose in a bluff. On its far side several more sheep.
The river came from what seemed to be the east. We climbed and looked out over the country that way. Still raining there. No sign of people.
“What are you looking for, Ish?”
“We got down the hole into the tunnel. Turned right. Followed it this way. South. If it ran straight, the lake should be somewhere over there.”
Maka smiled. Shrugged.
“We don’t want to head back. And we don’t want anyone spotting our smoke.” I faced where I thought the sun should be. Working things out.
The trees opened on to a long clearing that seemed to run north. Through a scrub-filled gap at its far end we followed an animal track rutted by the slots of deer tracks, sheep, goats. Droppings. Then some heavier tracks and dung thicker than a big dog’s.
“See these?”
“Deer tracks,” said Maka.
“Rounder at the front.” I pointed. “Some other animal. And look at the size of its shit!”
We crept on to another clearing. Movement. Sheep or goats. And something black.
“What’s that?” Maka pointed. Shining to the north-west, Lake Ka’s long finger disappeared between the Western Mountains. And behind it, Lake Weah. I felt dizzy.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to be sure.” I stood up and looked again, reassured.
“Can we really make clothes out of that wool?” Maka turned her back on the view.
“Yes, warm clothes for winter. That’s the lake, all right. With any luck we’ve shaken off Lutha and Kalik.”
The life went out of Maka’s eyes. “Perhaps.”
“We’re going to beat him! We were lucky with the tunnel. We’re all alive. And we’ve found sheep. Let’s get back. What’s the matter, Maka?”
