“Could you make some soup?”
She and Elodia set about it at once, tipping water from a barrel and adding the grain and dried rabbit and some tammi and kebbel-root. The fuel for the stove was dried cow dung, hot burning, that filled a linen bag. She wished she had milk for the children.
The Children’s eyes had followed her as she investigated the room, and at the words MadogWerg they had seemed to tense, their faces to harden and to become slyly eager—the most alive they had looked since they had been awakened. She could feel their thoughts, their increasing desire for the drug as they came more fully awake and felt the sharp pangs of withdrawal. She felt, with them, the ugly quick pains in her body, in her legs and hands. She should have felt sorry for them, but she could feel only repulsion. She wished they could be shut away, she realized with shock. Oh, how could she think such a thing. She stared at Clytey Varik’s blank face, and felt a horror at her own emotions. Yet the Children were so like something dead that the feel of them, sick and negative, was almost more than she could bear. It was as if their very spirits tainted everything around them with a heavy intensity of lifelessness, with such a pall that joy and love were made somehow indecent in the presence of their intense death-wishing.
She looked up and found Thorn watching her and knew they had shared this. And she knew that their very sharing was repugnant to these drugged, sick Children. She felt a passion to get away from them, and then a gripping pity that made her turn and stare at them, so she almost cried out in agony at what they were.
As one, Toca and Elodia rose, and the four of them took hands and stood as before touching the runestone and trying to waken the Children more completely, awaken them to life, to wholeness. They breathed such passion into their effort, into the Children, breathed the very souls of their spirits into them. But they pulled away at last exhausted, near dropping with fatigue and discouragement; for the Children had remained as they were, their eyes and spirits willfully unseeing; blank and defiant.
Now Thorn looked at Zephy for the first time without that spark of challenge and assurance. He seemed to have lost hope suddenly. She stared at him with chagrin. “They don’t want this,” he growled angrily. “They don’t want to be better. We can’t make them want it, we’re not strong enough.”
“We are! You’re stupid to say we can’t! You’ll undo everything!”
“Undo what? They’re dead—they’d be better dead. Look at them! They want to be dead!” He swung to face the silent row where they crouched on the bunk, staring dully. “Look at you! You’re nothing. You’ve lost your very souls, you’ve let them be taken from you. You can’t even fight for your life! All you want is a morass to wallow in. To die in!” He turned away furious, his eyes dark with anger and his fists clenched as if he would like to hit them.
And Zephy, watching the Children with apprehension, saw the blonde young woman’s eyes go clear suddenly, saw her looking back at Thorn with life in her face. Zephy caught her breath, cried silently to Thorn, saw him turn and take the woman’s hands.
The woman looked at Zephy now, and smiled. Tremulous, uncertain, but aware. Very much aware. Thorn pressed the stone in her hand and they held it, the three of them. Zephy could feel the change then, could feel that now, at last, the bodily pains and depression did not matter, that something else stronger had taken hold. That life had returned, the stubborn eagerness for life.
At last the woman said her name, Showpa, and that she was of Quaymus. And they set about, together, bringing the others back. For with Thorn’s anger, all of the Children had begun to reach out, to feel out toward his strength. And toward the runestone. Had begun to fight at last.
TWENTY
Zephy woke cold and stiff from sleeping on the stone floor. She could not tell whether it was night or day. The constant darkness of the cave depressed and upset her. She had awakened several times, longing to see daylight. She rose and went into a side corridor, where there were several holes in the cave ceiling to let in air, and stared up at the barely light sky. The cold, predawn air felt so good. She had a terrible desire to leave the cave and run across the hills, free.
Instead she hunkered down against the stone wall, waiting for some sign of life from the others, thinking that otter-herb tea would taste wonderful, wishing she could wash herself properly.
None of them had wanted to sleep on the stone slabs. Certainly the Children who had been drugged had not. They had all chosen the floor instead, with Tra. Hoppa and two of the women occupying the bunks in the brewing room. Thorn had brought Tra. Hoppa and the baby down, and Showpa had taken to Bibb at once, relieving Tra. Hoppa of him.
But now, instead of Bibb, Tra. Hoppa had Nia Skane and the two little boys from Burgdeeth to look after. All three children had been found in a deep, nearly closed tunnel with a supply of watered MadogWerg so diluted that they were semi-conscious. They lay bound, with their drug-water in bottles beside them, being used in some terrible experiment that sickened Zephy. Thorn thought it had been done to see at what level of consciousness these three young ones would keep themselves voluntarily, when the drug in the sweetened liquid was all the food or drink they had. Tra. Hoppa had taken them at once into her own care, until she fell asleep from exhaustion. No one realized, perhaps, what a toll the journey had taken of her. She had looked tired and drawn when Thorn brought her in.
Now, with twelve Children awakened from the drug, they should surely be able to wake the others. But Zephy felt an unease all the same, for the sense of evil that clung about the caves had not diminished as the Children were awakened one by one. On the contrary, the feel of dark had increased. They all felt it, the sense of dark they had touched from afar, now grown strong all around them. Why? Why? She scowled, perplexed and frightened, and found she was clenching her hands so tight they had gone quite numb.
She rose at last when she heard others stirring, and went to the brewing room to make zayn tea. And all through the day and the next day as the remaining Children were found and awakened from the drug, she puzzled over the feel of the foreboding that lay rank as a bad smell upon the caves. But it was not until she found Meatha at last that she felt the darkness surround and touch her like a live thing.
She had discovered Meatha quite unexpectedly, after she had nearly given up hope, in a crevice so deep she might well have missed her. As Zephy stood staring, then knelt so the candlelight fell full on Meatha’s face, she could see no indication of life, nor could she feel the sense of life that had come from the others. Furiously, she tried to force her own sense of living into Meatha, her terror making her frantic. She poured every ounce of her strength into the pale girl, but the darkness gripped Zephy and held her, and seemed to swing a curtain between herself and Meatha; and she could do nothing.
When Toca found her, she was close to tears and exhaustion, and she thought she had lost Meatha.
Toca came to her silently and stood quiet for a time. She was so preoccupied she paid no attention to him. Then slowly she began to sense a kind of animal need and possessiveness coming from the little boy, something quite beyond her own power, and directed at Meatha. Something so basic and simple—like a baby demanding its mother’s attention with righteous fury. She drew her own thoughts back and waited, letting Toca take hold as he would.
She sensed, as his very spirit gripped into Meatha, that part of what he was doing he had learned from the baby, from Bibb, that demanding, uncompromising indignation; and that part of it was from his own experience. He was still so close to babyhood that he could more easily bring it forth: a charged, young-animal insistence to life that could not be ignored.
Nor was it ignored. For at last, where Zephy’s strongest efforts had failed, Toca’s were responded to. Zephy felt the darkness drawing back, knew that it was being held off; and finally Meatha opened her eyes, staring blankly.
Zephy, shaken, could have wept over Toca. She took his hand in her own and knew that he was complete and special, and admired him—and let him know that
she did.
When Meatha was able to rise, able to walk supported by them both, she clung to them as if the very touch of something living was necessary to nurture the flow of her own life forces. As if she had been very close, indeed, to dying. When she had been fed in that dormitory that the brewing room had become, leaning against Tra. Hoppa, taking a hesitant spoonful at a time, she was stronger. She and Zephy looked at each other silently, and a lifetime seemed to have passed. Truly a resurrection of life had taken place and neither could speak of it; and the strangenesses that lay between them brought them closer. For fear bound them; the gift of Ynell bound them; the darkness bound them.
Before the last Children were awakened from the drug, Thorn began to post guards—Children made well and willing to remain at the farther reaches of the tunnels, away from distractions of the mind, to sense anyone coming. above on the hills. But no one came, they were not disturbed; and finally Thorn wondered if the three soldiers—the two dead and the one still captive—had not been set to live here alone for a very long time indeed.
The bound Kubalese refused to talk. He would not give them any idea of when more guards were due or from what direction. When Thorn questioned him about the feeling of evil, of dark, he would only stare as if he didn’t understand. He accepted food grudgingly but told them nothing, so that Thorn half wished they had killed the man after all and saved the trouble. To pity the Kubalese, the drug giver, would have been hypocritical to Thorn, as it was not to Elodia, who felt some strange human kindness for the captive.
It was Elodia, though, who to save the others danger had successfully shielded her thoughts, taken a knife, and crept out into the night with Toca, through the hillside door. They went alone to locate a band of horses that Toca sensed, grazing untended, to the south. The little boy would have gone by himself, recklessly. They returned with the news of a small band of Kubalese horses and a wagon at what appeared to be an iron ore depot. And, a fact that shook them all, two smaller Carriolinian mares, butternut, all butternut. This news made them renew their search for Anchorstar, though he could not be sensed. Why had they felt him before they ever reached the caves, but not now? Their efforts brought an increased feel of evil only, an aura of malignancy. Their great fear was that, drugged and perhaps unfed, Anchorstar had died. Or that he had been deliberately killed, as too threatening in some way.
“I could not sense him here when we came to the caves,” Meatha said. “We could feel nothing but the evil. But we could feel no Children either, though we knew they were here. You saw them in your visions but we never did, we only had the knowledge of them. Maybe you did because you had the stone. When we came, there was just the feel of evil. And then almost at once a dozen Kubalese soldiers were around us, forcing us down to drink of the drug, making us swallow, holding our mouths open and pouring it so we choked—and they laughed, they were doing that to us and laughing. We could not resist them. Then afterwards I wanted the drug. I wanted it again and again,” she said, ashamed. “And when I was in that sleep, I didn’t care about Anchorstar, about anything. I—I wanted him to be like us . . .” She hid her face in her hands, torn with sobs.
“But I don’t understand,” Zephy said. “What made you come here from Eresu? Why didn’t the Children come before, if they knew about the captive Children?”
“They didn’t know. They could only feel the darkness, the danger. They don’t know everything, even in Eresu. They felt the evil, but they didn’t know what it was, where it was.
“But when you drew near Eresu on the mountain, I could sense you. I knew I had left the runestone for you to find, and now I began to feel that you had it. As you came nearer I began to see you sometimes. It was only after we began to sense you and the strength of the stone, that we began to feel that the darkness came from these hills in the south, and that there were Children here. It was as if before, with the Children drugged, there was nothing strong enough to reach out to us. The drugged Children were as dead; there was nothing in them to reach out and echo in our own thoughts. Perhaps when the runestone was closer, and magnified it, the sense of them in the darkness was clear.
“And then it seemed to me all at once that it was Anchorstar, too, who led us. Suddenly I could feel him here in the south. Maybe he had just been brought here as captive, I don’t know. But all at once, there was the presence of Anchorstar in my thoughts and of Children in danger, Children sleeping, drugged. It was all around us suddenly, and we started out at once. I know Anchorstar was here. But when we came into the cave there was only the darkness again.” She pressed her fist to her mouth. “We must find him. Have you searched everywhere? But you can’t have.”
“We have,” Zephy said. “But we’ll search again.”
They set about it systematically, each person taking a tunnel, scraping at the walls, examining the stone for loose mortar on the chance that there lay, behind a wall, a tunnel they had not discovered. Still there was the feel of dark around them, indecipherable, threatening.
“He must be very special,” Yanno Krabe said, looking down at Meatha as they sat at supper, “a very special man.” Tall, dark-haired Yanno had taken to Meatha at once, had followed her since she awakened, seemed to idolize her so that the others smiled a little, watching them, feeling his eager worship.
“Anchorstar is very special,” Meatha said. “He is . . . If it were not for Anchorstar, you would have died here; all of us would.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it was Anchorstar who told us what the Kubalese had in mind, what they were doing. It was Anchorstar who determined to search for you and to get the others away from Burgdeeth. And then it was Anchorstar’s message that told us of the danger and drew us here. He, and the sense of darkness that we felt.”
Zephy watched them and thought Yanno a handsome boy. But he was too worshipping, his mind too full of Meatha. She tried to keep her thoughts private, a thing she was learning was very necessary with so many living close together. Necessary and difficult. They all tried to shut away and not intrude on each other, but sometimes it could not be helped. Now she saw a slight twitch come to Yanno’s eyebrow and thought, guiltily, that he knew of her disgust. She glanced up and knew her thoughts had been open to Thorn. He grinned. And later when they were alone he said, “Wouldn’t you like a pandering man to follow you around making cow eyes?”
“Oh, yes,” she bantered, “would you care to do that? I would like . . .” But he didn’t need to be told what she liked. She stared at him and suddenly the emotion that had grown between them rose like a quick tide so she glanced down hastily. “Cow eyes,” she said with distaste, to hide her own confusion. “Thorn, do you think he felt my thought?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.” He put his hand on her shoulder, leaned to kiss her, and their minds met in a tide so sweet, so engulfing that she could not pull away, felt lost in him as if they were one. He kissed her and held her, and when they parted they were together still in their minds. And they thought, How can we be like this, be so happy when Anchorstar may be lost.
They had tried not to think he could be dead. If Anchorstar was dead, if there was no point in searching further, they should all be away at once. For surely other Kubalese would come. And yet they could not bring themselves to abandon the search.
“The not knowing about Anchorstar keeps us here so we may never get out,” she said miserably. “It’s as if the very thought of him puts us in danger . . .” Then she broke off and stared at Thorn, appalled at herself. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, not really, not like it sounded.
“Or did I mean it?’ Oh, Thorn, did I? I’m so tired, my mind is so tired trying to revive the Children: trying . . . I think what I mean is, if we don’t get out now, will we ever be able to? Will we just grow weaker and tireder until—until the dark—until the dark . . .” She shuddered, collapsing in tears suddenly. And she knew only that he held her, was stronger at that moment, as she clutched at him as a drowning p
erson would clutch. She cried in great heaving gulps, couldn’t stop, and when the tears went dry at last, she gasped and gasped for breath, heaving, panic taking her. . . .
He slapped her, set her reeling. He caught her against falling, pulled her to him, and held her so her sobs subsided at last. How could he remain so strong?
“Another time,” he said softly. “Another time, it’ll be me falling apart and you to hold me. The way you brought me out of Anchorstar’s wagon, with my festering leg. One will always have the strength for both when it is needed—one, we are one . . .” And he kissed her then so there was no darkness, there was nothing save themselves in a perfect sphere of time.
Then at last he lifted her face from his sodden tunic and kissed her again. “Now,” he said as she stared up at him, “now we have work to do. We must find him, Zephy. We must find Anchorstar before we leave this place.”
*
But it was not until there was danger on the hills that Anchorstar was found.
For suddenly in the night the Children who stood sentry both below and above sensed Kubalese soldiers on the move. The destination of the riders was uncertain. If they were to come to the caves, the caves must be cleared. The Kubalese rode hard, were tired, wanting rest. But they could rest on the hills . . . it was not certain . . .
The riders came up the flat valley at dawn, toward the hills, a dozen armed men. As they approached the caves, they slowed. Yes, the cave was their destination, it could be felt now, their thirst for liquor, their longing for hot food. A longing, too, for sport that made the Children look at each other and shiver.
In the cave the brewing room was left as it had been found, dice sticks scattered, bunks rumpled, smelly clothes on pegs, dirty plates. Some of the Children went back to the slabs where they had lain drugged so long, and laid down on them once again, going quite still when they heard the soldiers. The rest moved together into three short corridors near the cave’s entrance, and there they waited silently. They had left the captive guard, drugged with MadogWerg, lying on his own bunk looking drunk. They left food on the cookstove, aromatic and hot and laced with MadogWerg. And the liquor cask waited invitingly.
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