"Well," said some extremely angry little bubbles. "I'm not broken, but a
lot
of water has slopped out, thanks to
nobody in particular,
and one of my snails is missing."
"Here's your snail," said Corby soothingly, "and a couple of nice new round pebbles." I heard three little plops. "And a—oh, no: it's a bone . . . Sorry."
"What sort of bone?" I sat up incautiously, to be rewarded with a pain that beat like a drum behind my eyes.
"Only a little 'un. Rat, mouse; bat perhaps . . ."
There was a shuffling behind me and Conn's groping hand closed on my shoulder. "Sorry about that, Thingy dear: there was a drop at the end of the passage. No bones broken?"
"I don't think so," I said crossly. "Where—where are we?"
Snowy shifted his hooves. "Under the mountain . . . Have you your flint and tinder safe?"
I felt in my pocket. "Yes, but—"
"What happened to the torch you carried?"
I groped. "Here . . ."
"Right. You have kindling somewhere about you, too; I saw you pick it up. Let's have some light, shall we?"
Given something to do, I felt better, and even more so when Snowy bent his head and touched the stub of his horn to my head. I heard his soft moan even as my pain lessened, and I reached forward to push him aside.
"Don't, oh don't! I can bear it. Don't hurt yourself . . ."
"We are one, child, all of us. All pain is to be shared, all troubles; all endeavour, all joys . . ." I felt an immense comfort, as though my mother had kissed me better, my nurse taken me on her lap, my father laid his hand upon my head. It was another of those elusive flashes of what I could not even call memory, and gone as swift as kingfisher-flash.
I lit the kindling—birch-bark, moss, twigs—and took from their friendliness a branch-tip of fire. As it flared I stood up, all aches and pains miraculously gone, and held it out to Conn.
"Hold it high—let's see where we are . . . Oh, oh!" I gasped in awe as Conn held up the torch. It flared and dipped and crackled and shone its flickering light upon towers, castles, trees, mountains, cliffs, frozen waterfalls, avalanches—all shimmering like ice and moon-glow. "What—what are they? So beautiful . . ."
"Stone castles," said Corby admiringly. "Cliffs; snow-slides . . . Caw . . ."
"Stalactites and stalagmites," said Conn, and he whistled through his teeth. "Magnificent! I've seen the like in Frankish lands, but nothing so grand . . ."
As we stood there, admiring, I heard a faint tinkling sound as first one great icicle and then another dripped into the silence. Moglet wrapped herself round my ankles.
"Too big," she said. I knew what she meant, and some of her unconscious, unspoken fear formed my next words.
"Which is—is the way out?" and even as I spoke the torch in Conn's hand flared and sputtered and I realized how little fuel we had left.
Then came Snowy's comfort. "There are several openings on the other side of the cavern. To save fuel we shall go without light, travelling around the perimeter and exploring each passageway as we come to it.
"I shall go first as, to some extent, I can see in the dark. Thing dear can come next, holding to my tail—but try not to pull it—and the knight shall bring up the rear. We shall not travel too fast, and if I come across any obstacles I shall try and warn you in plenty of time. Toad and cat with Thing, crow and fish with the knight . . . It will take some time, but we have that to spare. Now, get ready, and remember to bring what wood we have left and any kindling. Easy does it!"
I don't know about the others but I kept my eyes closed, pretending to myself that it was only a game and that if I opened them there would be light. Puddy was quiet in my pocket, but I could feel Moglet trembling against my chest. Snowy's tail was soft and silky and comforting to hold and Conn's hand warm on my shoulder. It seemed we stumbled, tripped, wandered for hours; sometimes we climbed over rocks, sometimes squeezed round or ducked under; sometimes there was open space and nothing tangible save the last step and the next. If we paused for even an instant, the silence clawed back into our consciousness as palpable as the ever-present dark. But there was always the tinkle-drip of water, sometimes nearby, sometimes seeming miles away, by its very randomness making the black silence all the more terrifying—the drip of melting snow in an immense and deserted forest, the crack of ice on a hollow lake, a child crying in a deserted house—
By now my mouth was dry, my brain in a vacuum, my senses like little sea-anemone tentacles, scared of touch or bruise. Some of the passages Snowy didn't even bother with, as if he knew at once they were dead ends; others we traversed for a hundred steps or so until they narrowed impossibly. I lost count: was this the fifth or twenty-fifth way we had gone? And all the while an uncooked lump as big as a cottage loaf, doughy and indigestible, was rising, ever so slowly, from my stomach to my throat, so that when the squeaking began all my tensions, all my fears, erupted in a small shrill scream.
"Quiet, child!" said Snowy sternly. The perspiration ran through my fingers into his tail and Conn's fingers gripped my shoulder so fiercely in answer to my terror that I could not help but cry out again. "Quiet: the bats are back!"
The bats! I had forgotten them, although it was they who had led us the right way after the deluge of water, mud and stones had destroyed our first refuge. I felt a sudden rush of air as myriad wings brushed my mask, stirred my hair, and a language I did not understand touched the high pitches of my hearing. Apparently Conn noticed nothing, neither did Puddy or Pisky, but Corby put his head on one side to listen and Moglet poked her head from under my jacket.
"What do they say?" I asked.
"That the way out is three openings to the right: we were nearly there," said Snowy comfortingly. "Best foot forward!"
We squeezed into a narrower passage than most we had tried, but even I beneath closed lids could feel the gradual difference in the quality of the light, and risked ungluing gummy lids. We found ourselves now in a smaller cave than the last. There was light but no magic castles of rock, no everlasting dripping. Ahead was a rift or chasm, and beyond it the cave mouth and the setting sun sending bars of rose-colour across the floor. We had been entombed for nearly twenty-four hours. No wonder I was suddenly ravenous!
Over the chasm stretched a natural bridge of stone, wide enough for two to cross abreast. I started towards it eagerly, only to be halted by a buffet of bat-wings and a hundred shrill voices, and Conn's voice, harsh and incredulous.
"Look! Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look to the right, Thing!" He had got my name right at last but I did not heed it.
Across the chasm, stretched from side to side in eight equally spaced strands, was an enormous web. Even as we watched, a spider, as thick in body as a Lugnosa moon and as black and hairy as the Devil himself, legs jointed and hooked like some grotesque toy, ran across to the centre of the web and halted, multifaceted eyes glaring and mouth moving like the jaws of a wolf. I did not need Snowy's words to know we were beyond hope.
"The bats say that she stops all who would cross: see the corpses parcelled among the strands? They have tried to break through but fall helpless to the glue on the web. There is no way out for any of us, none, unless we can bring the spider to destruction . . ."
It was Conn's fighting Hirlandish temper that brought me to my senses. With a cry of rage he had charged the web, only to be repulsed by a twang! of impenetrable strands, a sticky front and a menacing clatter of joints from the spider. Conn collapsed on the ground by my side, such a comical look of frustrated fury on his face that I forgot my worries and patted his shoulder.
"You all right?"
"All right! All right? I'll kill the bastard, sure and I will! Just let me take my sword to its evil body and I'll—" but then he stopped and of course remembered that his weapon was in pieces. "Ah, wouldn't you believe it then! Just when I needed it . . ." He put his hands to his head and tugged at the unruly curls. All of a sudden he had shed ten years and was again an edgy, temperamental lad, the brogue tripping from his tongue like a slashed wineskin. "Ah, 'tis terrible, terrible! How in the world can we get past that—that black bag of air?" He sprang to his feet and began to pace the ten feet or so of rock in front of the chasm. "See, the bugger has stuck its net to the rock; there, there and there," and he pointed to thick suckers that anchored the strands. "And two at this side, one the other and two at the top—eight together, by the saints!"
Between the thick strands glistening with an evil, tarry glue that clung to whatever touched, were finer strands that glowed with a greyish light of their own. These were pearled with sticky droplets and clogged with pitiful little bat-parcels, some still feebly struggling in the last rays of the setting sun that slanted through the seemingly unattainable mouth of the cave. Freedom! So near, so frustratingly near! Were we, too, to end like those bats, waiting to be sucked to the bone, then discarded into the torrent of water we could hear echoing in the chasm far below the web? Or would we choose rather to drown in those depths, so far beneath the open sky, the woods, the fields we were used to? Or would we huddle here, cowards all, and slowly starve to death?
"Time for supper," said Snowy. "What have you got in the pack, Thing dear?"
Not much: half a flagon of water, some ends of ham, rinds of cheese, honey. We ate what we could, bunched close together and shivering now, for the sun had gone down. Conn doubled his cloak to sit upon, for the rock struck chill, and Snowy lay down behind us so that my cloak would do as a coverall. Beyond us and the web the cave mouth was pricked with stars and a near-full moon swung into view, her pale light too high to penetrate the gloom of the cave. A couple of desperately hungry bats dared the web; one pulled back at the last moment, the other, with a high-pitched scream, became entangled and a moment later a pair of pincer-like jaws fastened on the poor, furry body. Poisoned venom quickly did its work and the stunned bat was rolled and twisted into an obscene shroud. The dry rustling and shaking of the web ceased, and the only sign of the terror that lurked there was a hooked claw that crossed the rising moon, a bar sinister on the gold.
I leant back against Snowy. "What can we do? How . . ."
"We must think," he said. "Consider, assess. There must be a way . . . But now sleep, my friends, sleep. Often in dreams the answer comes. Sleep . . ."
And cold, still hungry, I dozed off, the comfort of a strangely silent Conn's shoulder my pillow.
"I'm thinking," said Moglet.
After breaking our fast—a bad joke, this, on what we had left—Moglet had washed her face and perched on an outcrop of rock some discreet ten yards from the web. With inscrutable eyes she had watched the loathsome spider take two bat-parcels and suck them dry, then spit the bones to the torrent below. She had watched the giant insect wipe its jaws with a rattle of forelegs and, satiated, settle back in the middle of the web, to watch us.
The rest of us, excluding Snowy who said nothing, had spent some two hours in fruitless argument and discussion, first one and then the other putting forward wild schemes that could come to nothing. The only idea that had seemed remotely feasible, that of Pisky's to dare the torrent below, had been dashed by one quick look, a wary eye on the spider the while. If we managed to miss the ledges and projections on the way down and avoided being dashed to pieces on the rocks that reared up like fangs, we should surely perish in the swirling black waters that disappeared into a gaping hole in the rock to heaven knew where.
Twice Conn had tried to get near the bridge of stone that spanned the chasm and twice had been threatened by an immediately alert spider who had run down the web to meet him, jaws clashing. It even pursued him on to the rock floor of the cave the second time, to be driven back by some stones I flung in desperation. After this we were exhausted, and it was only then I had noticed and questioned the non-participating Moglet.
A careless retort sprang to my lips on her reply, engendered perhaps by frustration, but Snowy blew softly down the back of my neck before I could say anything.
"It is perhaps her turn," he murmured softly, which I did not understand. "Gather close, all of you, and send your thoughts to her aid. Close your eyes and empty your minds of all except that which will help her thoughts. Concentrate on cunning, wisdom, energy and, above all, freedom. Now, my dears, now . . ."
So we did. Huddled together, hungry, thirsty, cold and in despair, we nevertheless freed our minds and sent them over to where Moglet sat, a little receiving statue.
At last she stirred. She had been sitting bolt upright, large ears forward, eyes apparently unblinking. But now she performed a long, slow stretch, arching her rump in the air, tail a relaxed loop, front legs stretched out, claws a-scrape against the rock, ears back, head sloped down between her front paws, jaws almost at right angles in an exaggerated yawn. The ritual done, she sidled over to us.
"Well?" I asked, aware that the sun outside was at its zenith, aware of time trickling away like water through carelessly cupped hands.
"Stones," said Moglet. "Lots of them. A big pile. As heavy as you can throw . . ." And, exasperating animal as she could sometimes be, she folded her front pads underneath her and promptly went to sleep.
Stones it was then, gathered in the half-gloom by Conn and myself, pecked from ledges by Corby, hoofed from their hiding places by Snowy, until there must have been two hundred of them of all shapes and sizes.
Moglet opened her eyes and considered. "That should be enough . . . Now then, Sir Rusty Knight, I want you to cut two strips from your cloak, about half a man-hand thick and a hand-and-a-half wide—"
"From my good leather cloak? You must be joking!" expostulated Conn.
"Do as she says," said Snowy quietly.