“It’s me,” came back Arliss’s echoing voice. To Aidan’s relief, it didn’t sound very far away.
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
“Trying to strike a fire,” Arliss remarked, “but it’s mighty damp down here.”
Aidan was out of the entry tunnel now and able to stand up straight. He called back up the chute, “Bottomtom-tom-om.” The slightest sound echoed all around the chamber where he now stood.
“Welcome to the underworld,” chuckled Arliss in the pitch blackness. “Have a look around.”
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
A few strides away, Aidan saw three sparks in succession. He heard Arliss grumbling in frustration. He stepped carefully toward the sparks, hoping not to stumble on an upthrust rock or break his nose on a hanging stalactite.
Tchk … tchk … tchk.
At last the spark caught on a little pile of dry tinder and became a tiny, licking flame. Aidan saw the knuckly silhouette of Arliss’s hand reach toward the flame with a splinter of fat lighter, which burst into a yellow blaze. The dim light illuminated a smile of relief and satisfaction on the young miner’s narrow face. He took up one of the cane torches at his feet and dropped the flaming splinter among the shaggy fibers at the top. They quickly caught, and the hot-burning pine pitch popped and snapped. He handed the lit torch to Aidan and held out the second torch to borrow fire from Aidan’s.
Their eyes had grown accustomed to total darkness, so even the muted light cast by the torches seemed bright. But soon their eyes adjusted, and the boys were astonished to see what sort of cave they were in.
It was an enormous chamber, much bigger than King Darrow’s great hall. The walls, floor, and ceiling were carved out of glittering white limestone. Great swaths of golden brown and burnt-red rock seemed to move across the walls like cloud formations. The floor of the cave sloped down to an underground lake, where the water was so clear that the stone below the surface was no less visible than the stone at the water’s edge. But where the water grew deep—as deep as any ocean, by the looks of it—it took on a greenish-blue hue.
Aidan and Arliss stood wordlessly, trying to take in the scene before them. Behind them they heard a grunt, and two boots appeared at the end of the entry chute, followed by the legs, the thick round body, and the head and arms of Ernest. He stood blinking in the torchlight, rubbing a banged elbow and stretching a sore backbone. When his eyes adjusted, he staggered back a step, amazed at the scene. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, and his voice echoed around the chamber. “To think such a world as this was right below our feet, and we never knew it!”
The three remaining miners appeared each in his turn, with Gustus bringing up the rear. Each was as awestruck as the others, but each also understood that the beauty of the place didn’t lessen its danger.
“All right, boys,” began Gustus, “we got a wet cave. That means we got to be very careful of our fire. If we lose fire, we don’t get out of this cave alive.” He looked intently into the faces of his men. “You saw how dark it was in that entry chute. Without these torches, this whole cave would be just as dark. We can’t lose fire,” he repeated slowly and emphatically.
“Everybody’s got seven torches. That’s forty-two torches between us, minus the pair that’s already lit, makes forty. That’s twenty pair: ten for the trip out, ten for the trip back.”
He paused. He wanted to be sure everybody heard him: “When ten pair of torches are burned, we turn for home.”
“But, Gustus,” interrupted Arliss, “what if we haven’t made it to the other side yet?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care if we haven’t made it out of this entry chamber yet. I don’t care if we’re so close we can smell Pyrthens,” answered Gustus. “When we light the eleventh pair of torches, we turn it around. It don’t serve any purpose for us to die in a hole for lack of fire to get out.” Arliss saw the logic in this. He submitted to his foreman.
“A torch burns three-quarters of an hour,” continued Gustus. “That gives us about seven hours to find the Pyrthen camp. So let’s move it. The torches are burning.”
Taking Aidan’s torch, Gustus led the way along the edge of the lake. He, Ernest, and Cedric formed a trio, and behind them Arliss and Aidan walked in the light of Clayton’s torch. It was a relatively easy hike at first, but the lakeside path was not straight. The lake wound its way beneath the earth like a great tunneling snake, and Aidan quickly lost all sense of direction.
“Are we sure we’re headed the right way?” he whispered to Arliss.
“Let’s hope the path takes a left-hand turn,” Arliss whispered back. “We’re tracking just a little north of due west.”
“No sun, no stars,” Aidan observed, “I don’t see how you can tell.”
Arliss tapped his helmet. “Miner’s head. Pap had it. Grandpap had it. I got it too.”
The underground landscape—as much as they could see anyway—changed constantly. In places, the lake disappeared completely, dropping away to an even deeper tunnel than the one they were passing through. In places, fields of massive stalagmites stood like whole forests of cypress knees, broad at the base and tapering toward the top. Where the ceiling was lower, they got a good look at the stalactites hanging ponderously over their heads.
All around them echoed the drip … drip … drip of seeping groundwater, heavy with dissolved limestone. It dropped from the bottoms of stalactites to the tops of the stalagmites below, leaving one more molecule of limestone on the tip of each, growing them toward each other in the slow way of underground things. In places the stalactites and stalagmites met to form great pillars from floor to ceiling, monuments to the patient work of water and limestone. In other places, the ceiling was thickly covered with thin, hollow formations like drinking straws. A droplet of water hung from each, and they shone like jewels in the torchlight.
The walls, too, were infinitely varied in color and texture, now white and smooth as alabaster, now striped red and white like bacon, now gray and muddy. The ground they walked on was sometimes smooth and slick, sometimes crunchy with bits of deposited limestone. But mostly it was mud they walked on—or through: slippery mud, sticky mud, ankle-deep in places, in some places even deeper, threatening to take a boot and keep it.
For the first two hours of the trip, the way was broad and the ceilings high enough that the company could walk upright. Though their way was winding, it wasn’t a maze. There had been only one path. They appeared to be making good time, and their spirits were high. As a bird flies, it wasn’t more than half a league from the east entrance of the cave, where they came in, to the entrance on the Pyrthen side.
“We can’t be far now,” remarked Ernest. “We’re on our third pair of torches, and we’ve been walking steady this whole time.”
After a brief hesitation, Arliss spoke up. “We’re not as close as you think. We’ve been walking due north the last half-hour.”
“Due north?” snorted Clayton, “what makes you say that?”
Arliss tapped his helmet.
Gustus sighed. “The boy’s got the miner’s head. That’s why we brought him along.” He was visibly disappointed. “So, Arliss, you say we’ve been making good time in the wrong direction?”
“Yes sir,” answered Arliss. “If this path doesn’t turn south and west soon, we’re not going to make it in time.”
The miners looked at one another in gloomy silence. Their good cheer was extinguished. “Cheer up, boys,” said Gustus, as jauntily as he could. “We got plenty of fire left before it’s time to turn around. Meantime, there’s only one way to go. So let’s go.” He forged ahead, in the opposite direction of where they knew their destination to be. The miner-scouts followed, but their tension grew with every step.
The miners had just lit a new pair of torches—their fourth—when they faced their first real navigational choice. A tunnel coming in from the left joined the corridor they had been following. Gustus stood in the intersection of the two passages. “Which way, Arl
iss?” he asked.
Arliss stood beside his foreman. “The big passage is pointing northwest. This new one points southwest.”
A cheer erupted and echoed around the limestone walls. They all knew they needed to turn southwest eventually. “Hurrah!” shouted Clayton, patting Arliss on the back as he squeezed past him to lead the way down the new passage. Falling in behind him, the rest of the party broke into happy song:
Fol de rol de rol de fol de rol de rol
De fol de rol de fiddely fol de rol.
“Stop!” The miners’ singing was interrupted by a shout from Arliss, who still stood in the intersection of the two passageways.
The surprised miners looked quizzically at their young comrade. He stood with his shoulders slumped and his eyes averted, the posture of a person with sad news to tell. “That’s not the way.”
Gustus looked at him, confused. “Pardon?”
“That’s not the way, sir.”
“But you said this way goes southwest,” spluttered Clayton. “The Pyrthen camp lies southwest of here. That’s one of the few things we know for sure.”
“It’s a dead end,” said Arliss. “I can feel it.”
“Oh no,” groaned Ernest. “It’s the miner’s head again.”
Clayton moved toward Arliss. His thick hand was clinched into a fist. “I think it’s time I knocked some sense into that miner’s head.”
Gustus quickly stepped between them. “Tamp it down, Clayton. Everybody’s feeling a little sharpish. Let’s hear what the boy has to say.” He turned to Arliss. “What do you mean you ‘feel’ a dead end?”
“You remember the long shaft at the Greasy Cave mines?”
“Since long before you was born,” answered Clayton.
“It’s got two entrances—north and south—and the main tunnel runs between them.”
“Right,” answered Gustus.
“Then there’s spur shafts running off to the left and right.”
“Right.”
“Get to the point, boy.” Clayton was losing patience.
“The point is,” continued Arliss, “the air feels different in the main tunnel than it does in the spurs. The air in the spur shafts is a little staler. In the main tunnel, there’s the slightest movement of air.”
He took a few steps down the southward tunnel. “Here the air is dead, like a spur shaft.” He stepped back into the main corridor. “Here I can feel just a tiny bit of air current.”
The rest of the miner-scouts stepped back into the main corridor.
“I don’t feel any difference,” Clayton grumbled.
“I don’t know,” offered Cedric. “It might be a little fresher out here. But I wouldn’t bet on it either way.”
Aidan, for his part, couldn’t tell any difference. It all felt dank and musty to him.
“Gustus, what do you think?” asked Ernest. “You’re the foreman of this outfit.”
“Don’t much matter what I think about air currents and stale air,” answered Gustus. “Don’t imagine I could tell the difference. But I do know we brought Arliss because he’s got the miner’s head.” Clayton groaned at this. Gustus flashed a sharp look in his direction, then continued. “More than once, his daddy’s instincts got me out of scrapes down in the mines. Some folks is just born to be underground. Arliss and his family is about half-mole. So if Arliss don’t feel good about that passage, I don’t feel good about it. We’ll carry on the way we’ve been going.”
“You can’t mean it!” shouted Clayton, his voice echoing around the cavern. “That tunnel points in the direction where we know the Pyrthen camp to be. And you’re going to send us in the opposite direction because of this boy’s hocus-pocus?”
Gustus answered Clayton’s outburst with a quiet question. “What makes you think that tunnel leads southwest?”
Clayton saw he was trapped. Gustus pressed the point. “I want you to tell me how you know that passage leads southwest and this one leads northwest.”
Clayton answered without looking at anyone. “Because Arliss said so.”
“Because Arliss said so,” repeated Gustus. “Without Arliss here, we wouldn’t even have sense enough to know if this was north, south, east, or west. So if you’ve still got a hankering to explore that tunnel, go ahead. We’ll pick you up on our way back. But the rest of us are going this way.”
Gustus shouldered his pack and led the way northward again. And Clayton, who fell into step with the rest of the group, wasn’t the only miner-scout who looked back wistfully at the southward passage as it melted into blackness.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A Very Dark Swim
It wasn’t long before even Arliss had reason to doubt the wisdom of their chosen path. As they made their way along the edge of the underground lake, the shore disappeared. Sheer cliffs dropped directly into the water on either side. Gustus stood at the very last bit of shoreline and scratched his head underneath his miner’s helmet. “All right, boys, we’re going to have to swim for it.” He had, at least, had the foresight to select for the mission only men who could swim, not a common skill among miners. “Everybody pull out your hardtack and eat what you can. I don’t know how far we’ll have to swim—I can’t see around this bend. You’re going to need your energy. Besides,” he continued, “you won’t be able to keep it dry, so you might as well eat it now rather than see it ruined.”
The men pulled the hard biscuits out of their packs and ate hungrily. “Cedric, Ernest,” Gustus continued, “can you swim with one hand and hold a torch with the other?” Both men said that they could.
“It won’t ruin the extra torches if they get wet,” observed Gustus. “We can shake most of the water out, and the pitch will burn in any case. But we can’t let the tinder get wet. Arliss, is that tinderbox still in your pack?”
“Yes sir,” the young miner answered.
“Take off your helmet, put the tinderbox on top of your head, and strap your helmet down tight over it, like this.” Gustus demonstrated with his own helmet and tinderbox.
“Aidan, you a strong swimmer?” asked the old miner.
“Yes sir, pretty strong.”
Gustus pulled a third tinderbox out of his pack and tossed it to Aidan. “Then you keep this one under your helmet. We’ve got to keep these tinderboxes dry. Do not, do not, do not let your heads go under.”
Aidan strapped the tinderbox under his helmet. He found it none too comfortable. By this time, Gustus had slid into the lake and was holding Cedric’s torch while Cedric got in. Aidan followed, then Arliss and the other two miners. The water was the exact same temperature as the air, but it felt a lot colder—miserably cold at first. Nevertheless, it was a relief to their sore feet to be relieved of the strain of walking on the stone and mud.
There was no telling how deep the water was, and Aidan tried not to imagine what sort of eyeless monsters might be lurking in its depths. He tried not to think about how such a creature might arise from a long sleep, awakened by the unfamiliar sound of six tasty Corenwalders thrashing around in his lake. And he refused to speculate as to how many miner-scouts such a creature could swallow in a single bite—or how many it would take to satisfy its long-dormant appetite.
He just swam, staying as close to his comrades as possible. The company had hoped that the sheer rock on either side of the lake would soon yield again to sloping banks, but they were disappointed. The little halo of the dim torches revealed nothing but looming cliffs on either side.
They swam on in silence, clustered around the torches held aloft by Cedric and Ernest. They settled into a steady rhythm and seemed to be making decent time. But though nobody said anything, they all wondered how much farther they would have to swim—and how long they could go before reaching the point of exhaustion.
The silence was suddenly broken by a terrified yelp, which was immediately drowned out by the sound of violent splashing. Just as suddenly, it grew darker. Turning toward the sound, Aidan saw a flailing hand break the water’s su
rface, still clutching a doused torch. Then, in the gloomy light of the one remaining torch, Ernest’s face appeared, eyes bulging in panic, mouth wide in a desperate gasp, then disappeared again beneath the frothing water.
Clayton and Cedric swam to their old friend’s side, and the next time he came up for air, they each grabbed an arm. In the ensuing flurry, Cedric’s torch went under, too, and the party found itself in total blackness. Above the thrashing and splashing came the clear voice of Gustus: “Clayton! Cedric!”
“Sir!”
“Sir!”
“Do you have hold of Ernest?”
“We’ve got him,” Clayton’s voice came spluttering back, “but I don’t know how much longer.”
“Ernest?” called Gustus, struggling to stay calm.
He was answered by a spew of water, then the high, pained voice of Ernest: “It’s a cramp! Can’t swim!”
By this time, Aidan had swum to the near wall and found a narrow handhold. “I’m on the wall,” he called into the darkness. “Gustus, Arliss, let’s make a chain out to them.”
Zeroing in on Aidan’s voice, Gustus and Arliss found him and joined hands, Aidan anchored to the rock, Arliss in the middle, Gustus sweeping his free hand out into the darkness toward the sound of splashing. He grabbed an arm as it flailed by and tugged the whole mass of struggling, thrashing miners to safety.
Soon all six members of the party were clinging to the rock face. Out of immediate danger, Ernest was able to relax enough so that the cramp released its wrenching grip on his leg.
“Well, boys, what now?” It was Cedric’s voice.
The silence and the blackness pressed down like a weight as each member of the party waited for somebody else to answer.
Gustus finally spoke. “Ernest, how you doing?”
Ernest’s answer was indignant. “We ain’t turning back on my account, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
Another long pause bore down on them as Gustus thought things over. “No fire,” he said, half to himself, “and we’re not sure we’re going to be able to get any.”
The Bark of the Bog Owl Page 16
