Then something touched my face. A moth?
I heard the young woman’s voice. A murmur, close to my ear. “Stay silent until they’re gone.”
Her hand found mine. I was surprised how much this comforted me. I took shuddering, painful breaths. There was not a centimeter of my body which did not in some way hurt, but her action allowed the pain no effect. I was instantly heartened. I sensed feelings towards this half-child which were hard for me to identify—feelings of comradeship, perhaps. Only mildly did I feel sexually attracted towards her. This surprised me, for she had a sensuality and grace which would have drawn the attention of most men. Perhaps I was beyond passion or lust. In circumstances like mine, such needs become neurotic and self-destructive, or so it has always seemed to me by observing the erotomanes in my own family. For them the stink of gunpowder was always something a little delicious.
I asked her if, under the circumstances, she would mind telling me her name. Was it really “Gertie”? I heard her laugh. “I was never Gertie. Does the name Oona sound familiar to you?”
“Only from Spenser. The Lady of Truth.”
“Well, perhaps. And my mother? Do you not remember her?”
“Your mother? Should I have known her? In Bek? In Berlin? Mirenburg?” Ridiculously, I felt as if I had made a social faux pas. “Forgive me . . .”
“In Quarzasaat,” she said, rolling the exotic vowels in a way that showed some familiarity with Arabic. It was not a place I recognized and I said so. I sensed that she did not entirely believe me.
“Well, I thank you, Fräulein Oona,” I said, with all my old, rather stiff courtesy. “You have brought me many blessings.”
“I hope so.” Her voice from the darkness had grown a little abstracted, as if she gave her attention to something else.
“I wonder what’s happened to Bastable?” I said.
“Oh, that’s not a problem. He can look after himself. Even if they capture him, he’ll get free one way or another. For a while at least his part in this is over. But I have only his instructions for finding the river which he promises will lead us eventually to the city of Mu Ooria.”
The name was faintly familiar. I remembered a book from my library. One of those unlikely memoirs which enterprising hacks turned out in the wake of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and Raspe’s Munchausen. The author, perhaps the pseudonym for an ancestor, claimed to have visited an underground kingdom, a refuge for the dispossessed, whose natives were more stone than flesh. I’d enjoyed the tale as a boy, but it had become repetitive and self-referencing, like so much of that fantastic stuff, and I had grown bored with it.
I pointed out that I was in rather poor shape for a long walk. I was already surprised by the immensity of the cave system. Did she know how far it extended?
This seemed to amuse her. “Some think forever,” she replied, “but it has never been successfully mapped.” She told me to wait and went off into that cold darkness. I was astonished by the ease with which she seemed to find her way. When she came back I heard her working at something. At length, I felt her lift me under the shoulders and drag me a few feet until I was lying on cloth. She placed my sword beside me.
“Thank the Nazis for starving you,” she said, “or I wouldn’t have the strength for this.” I felt the cloth rise and tauten under me. I could now feel the sides, like long, smooth saplings, but not wood. And then we were moving forward. Oona the Bow-woman was actually dragging me on a kind of travois.
I noticed with a certain dismay that we were still going downwards, rather than back up towards the crevice I had created with the sword’s harmonics. Although never very conscious of it before, even in the dugouts of Flanders, my tendency to claustrophobia was growing. Yet I knew even Oona wasn’t strong enough to drag me back to the surface. She seemed to have some sense of what lay ahead. Trying to reach a place of safety which she knew of either from her own experience or from what Bastable had told her. I hoped that Bastable himself had not been captured. No civilized man can imagine the tortures those brutes invented. I shuddered at the thought of Gaynor finding me in this condition. I tried to speak to Oona but became dizzy just from the effort. Soon it scarcely mattered to me, for I passed out at last.
I awoke with a sense that something had changed. The silence around me had become peaceful rather than sinister. There was a whispering, as of a wind through leaves, and I realized that I could see a dim band of light in the distance, as if we faced a horizon.
Oona was faintly visible to me as a dark shape against a darker background. She had prepared food. Something which smelled like turnip, tasted like mashed gingerroot and had an unpleasant slimy texture; but I felt invigorated by it. She told me our breakfast was made from local food. She was used to foraging down here.
I asked her if this cave system was like the famous catacombs of Rome and elsewhere, where victims of religious persecution had hidden, sometimes developing whole communities.
“The victimized do sometimes arrive here,” she said, “and find a certain sanctuary, I suppose. But there is a native race, who never venture close to the surface, who are the dominant people.”
“Do you mean an entire civilization dwells in this cave system?”
“Believe me, Count Ulric, you will find much more than one civilization down here.”
Rationally, I refused to accept this fantastic claim. Even the recently explored caverns of Carlsbad were not so vast.
And yet something in me was prepared to believe her. I sensed an echo of a mysterious truth, something that perhaps I had once known, or that an ancestor had experienced and which was imprinted in my race memory. I knew of the fashionable fascination amongst German bohemians who spoke of a world within the world, whose entrance lay at the North Pole, and I knew some of this nonsense had been given credence by Nazis like the vegetarian crank Hess, but I had never suspected that such an underworld existed beyond the fantasies. Probably it did not. This system, though vast, was bound to be finite and so far there had been no evidence of it being populated by any kind of human settlement. Perhaps Oona herself was one of those who believed the myth. I had no choice but to trust her judgment. She had, after all, saved my life more than once.
I was convinced that Gaynor and Klosterheim were still in pursuit, that my sword meant too much to them. They would follow it, if necessary, into Hell.
As the light grew less faint, I could make little of my surroundings. The echoes told me that the roof of the cavern was very distant, and I began to wonder how much farther we could go down before gravity began to crush us. Mostly what I saw was a kind of reflected glow from icicles and stalagmites. We seemed to be following a smooth road of igneous rock, perhaps some ancient lava path, which wound down towards the shining horizon. As we got nearer, we became aware of a rushing sound which grew louder until it was a distant roar. I could not imagine what was causing the sound. Neither could I guess the source of the light.
We made increasing stops as Oona rested. She was growing tired and the roaring was so loud, so unbroken that we could hardly hear each other. Yet she was determined to continue. Fifteen minutes and she was up again, dragging me and the travois down the gleaming slope until at last the ground leveled out and we were standing on a kind of hillock, looking towards a band of pale pewter light which danced forever ahead of us.
I had tried to ask her what it was, but she couldn’t hear me. She was almost as exhausted as I was. I could tell by the way she moved the poles onto her shoulders, settled the makeshift harness around her, and plodded on.
My strength had hardly returned. If I did not see a doctor soon, many of my broken bones would not heal properly and a split rib might pierce some internal organ. I had no special fear for myself, but I acknowledged this reality. I was already reconciled to death. It would give me great satisfaction if I and the sword were lost forever to my enemies.
We kept moving, meter by painful meter, towards the source of the light and the sound. Now, every hour or so,
Oona would pause and take a drink from the flask she carried. Then she would force me to swallow some of the ill-smelling stuff. A witch’s brew, I said. If you like, she replied.
I had no idea how far or for how long we traveled. The sound grew louder and louder until it pounded like blood in my eardrums. My own skull seemed to have become a vast auditorium. I was aware of nothing else. And, though still dim by ordinary standards, the light was growing so bright it had begun to hurt my eyes. I found it hard to turn my head, but when I did so I saw that the band of sparkling brilliance had grown much higher and was rising into the darkness, illuminating every kind of grotesque shape. I saw frozen rock that seemed organic, that assumed the shapes of fabulous beasts and buildings, of people and plants. Etiolated crags. A silvery light contrasting with the utter blackness of the farther reaches. A place of deep, alarming shadows. A monochrome world in extremes of black and white. A mysterious spectacle. I could not believe it had not been discovered or written about before now. I had no idea of its history or geography. It seemed somehow obscene that the Nazis should be obsessed with exploring and no doubt conquering this weird unspoiled territory. They had a natural affinity, I suppose, for darkness. They sought it out.
For my own part, though it was a wonderful revelation to know that such a world existed, I longed to be free of it. Half-dead as I was, this world shared too much with the grave.
Yet it was clear I was in some ways restored. Whatever remedy Oona had forced me to drink had reinvigorated me in a way that the sword could not. Even the pain of broken bones and torn muscles and flesh was reduced to a single, dull, acceptable ache. I felt fresher and cleaner, as I used to feel when I took an early swim in the river at home.
I wondered if I still had a home. Had Cousin Gaynor fulfilled his promise to pull the place down stone by stone?
Perhaps he now thought me in possession of both cup and sword and would do no further damage to Bek or its inhabitants. But that meant he would be here, somewhere, determined to claim the sword for himself, certain in his madness that I knew the whereabouts of a mythical and probably nonexistent Holy Grail.
The roar seemed to absorb us. We became part of it, drawn closer and closer to its source as if hypnotized. We made no resistance, since this was our only possible destination.
Using the poles of the travois and with the sword slung over my back on a piece of queerly tough fiber Oona had given me, I was now able to hobble forward beside her. The light had the brilliance of the flash powder cameramen use. It blinded and dazzled, so that Oona soon replaced her smoked glasses and I drew the peak of my deerstalker down over my eyes. Effectively we were blind and deaf and so moved even more slowly and carefully.
The phosphorescence curved in a wide ribbon that stretched across our horizon and fell, almost like a rainbow, downwards into sparking blackness. Farther away one could just make out another glowing area, much wider than the great band of light which pierced the darkness of the vast cavern. None of this light revealed a roof. Only the depth of the echo gave any notion of height. It might have been a mile or two up. The roar, of course, was coming from the same source as the light. And so, I now began to notice, was the heat.
If complex life did exist so far below the surface of the earth, I now knew at least how it survived without the sun.
From the humidity I guessed us to be approaching the river Bastable had mentioned. I was unprepared for the first sign that we were near. Like winking fireflies at first, the rocks soon became alive with the same silvery blaze we could see ahead. Little stars blossomed and faded in the air and began to fall on our bodies.
Liquid. I thought at first it must be mercury but realized it was ordinary water carrying an intense phosphorescence, no doubt drawn from a source closer to the surface, perhaps under the sea. Oona was more familiar with the stuff. When she found a pool, she cupped her hands and offered some to me. The water was fresh. Her hands now glowed, so that she resembled some garish saint from a commercial Bible. Where she pushed back her hair, her head was briefly surrounded by a halo. Wherever the water clung to us, we were jeweled in pewter and glinting quicksilver. She signed that I could drink if I wished. She bent to her hands and sipped a little. For an instant, her lips glowed silver and her ruby eyes regarded me with enthusiastic glee. She was enjoying my astonishment. For a few seconds the water passing down her throat illuminated veins and organs so that she seemed translucent.
I was entranced by these effects. I longed to know more about them, but the roar continued to deafen us and it was still hard to look directly at the horizon.
As the phosphorescent water fell on our heads and bodies, covering us with tiny fragments of stars, we ascended smooth, slippery rocks at the point where the great wall of light began its gentle downward curve.
At last we could see the reason for the roaring. A sight which defied anything I had witnessed in all my travels. A wonder greater than the seven which continue to astonish surface dwellers. I have often said that the wonders of the world are properly named. They cannot be photographed or filmed or in any way reproduced to give the sense of grandeur which fills you when you stand before them, whether it be Egypt’s pyramids or the Grand Canyon. These unknown, unnamed falls were like something you might discover in Heaven but never on our planet. I was both strengthened and weakened by what I observed. To describe it is beyond me, but imagine a great glowing river widening across a falls vaster than Victoria or Niagara. Under the roof of a cavern of unguessable height, whose perimeters disappear into total darkness.
A vast tonnage of that eerie water crashed and thundered, shaking the ground on which we stood, rushing down and down and down, a mighty mass of yelling light and wild harmonies that sounded like human music. Throwing monstrous shadows everywhere. Revealing galleries and towers and roads and forests of rock, themselves throwing out soft illuminating silver rays like moonbeams. Relentlessly carrying the waters of the world down to the heart of creation, to renew and be renewed.
Something about that vision confirmed my belief in the existence of the supernatural.
I felt privileged to stand at the edge of the mighty cataract, watching that fiery weight of water tossing and swirling and sparking and foaming its way down a cliff whose base was invisible, yet which became a river again. We could see it far below, winding across a shallow valley and forming at last the main mass of shining water which I now realized was a wide underground sea. At least this geography followed surface principles. On both sides of the river, on the rising banks of the valley, were slender towers of white and gray light so varied they might have been the many-storied apartment blocks of the New York skyline. The formations were the strangest I’d ever experienced. My geologist brother, who died at Ypres, would have been astonished and delighted by everything around us. I longed to be able to record what I was seeing. It was easy to understand why no explorer had brought back pictures, why the only record of this place should be in a book by a known fantast, why sights such as these were incredible—until witnessed.
In the general yelling turbulence and showering silver mist, I had not considered what we would do next and was alarmed when Oona began to point down and inquire, through signs, if I had enough energy to begin a descent. Or should we sleep the night at the top?
Although weak, I did everything I could to move under my own volition. I still felt Gaynor had a chance of catching us. I knew I would feel more secure when I had put a few more miles between us. On the other hand, I was deeply uncomfortable with my circumstances and longed to begin the climb back to the surface, to get to a place where I could continue the common fight against Adolf Hitler and his predatory psychopathic hooligans.
I didn’t want to continue that descent, but if it was the only way, I was prepared to try. Oona pointed through the glittering haze to a place about halfway down the gorge, where I saw the outlines of a great natural stone bridge curving out over the water, apparently from bank to bank. That was evidently our destination. I nodded to
her and prepared to follow as she began to make her way carefully down a rough pathway which appeared to have been covered with droplets of mercury. The roaring vibrations, the long fingers of stone which descended from the roof or rose from the ground, the light, the massive weight of water, all combined to half mesmerize me. I felt I had left the real world altogether and was in a fantastic adventure which would have defeated the imagination of a Schiller.
In all directions the rock flowed in frozen, organic cascades. Every living thing on earth seemed to have come here and fused into one writhing chimera so that trees turned into ranks of bishops and bishops into grinning gnomes. Ancient turtle heads rose from amongst nests of crayfish and their eyes were the eyes of basilisks. You felt they could still reach you. Gods and goddesses like those intricate carvings on the pillars of Hindu temples or Burmese pagodas. I found it impossible to believe at times that this was not the work of some intelligence. It reproduced every aspect of the surface, every human type and every animal, plant and insect, sometimes in grotesque perspective or magnified twenty times. As if the stuff of Chaos, not yet fully formed, had been frozen in the moment of its conception. As if an imagination had begun the process of creating an entire world in all its variety—and been interrupted.
This vision of a not-quite-born world made me long for a return to the darkness which had hidden it from me. I was beginning to go mad. I was coming to realize that I did not have the character for this kind of experience. But something in me pushed me on, mocked me to make me continue. This is what they had tried to reproduce in Egypt and in Mexico. This is what they remembered in their Books of the Dead. Here were the beast-headed deities, the heroes, the heroines, angels and demons and all the stories of the world. There was no evident limit to these statues and friezes and fields of crystal looming over us, no far wall which might help us get our bearings. I had begun to understand that we had passed beyond any point where a compass could help us. There were no conventional bearings here. Only the river.
The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Page 11
