The Silent Isle (35 page)

The two women
dove for the dirt and buried their faces in their arms as their last charge
exploded behind them.

***

“It’s not the
fuse,” Bailus said, crouching over the barrels as Dane approached.  “Look,
it’s burned clear to the powder.”

“How’s that?”

Bailus
shrugged.  “Maybe it’s too wet in here.  Maybe it’s just a bad
batch.”

Dane
swore.  “So what do we do now?”

“We part ways, old
friend,” Bailus said.

“What?”

Bailus stood
slowly; his right hand gripped the haft of his hammer near the head.  “I
told you once this stuff was the future of warfare.  I said it would leave
no room for the courage and skill of men.  I guess I was wrong about
both.  At least for
today,
and that’s all that
matters for me.”

Screams echoed
out of the darkness at the further end of the tunnel.  Bailus shifted his
hammer to his left hand and held his right out to Dane.  “It’s been my
pleasure to serve you, sir.” 

“Come on,
Bailus, we don’t have time for this,” Dane said.  He pried the stopper out
of the bottom barrel with his knife and stuck the slow match into the little
cascade of powder that poured out.  There was a crackle of sparks and
nothing more. 

“You’re wasting
your time, sir,” Bailus said.  “Something’s been telling me it would be
like this ever since I had my vision.  The people who lived long ago, they
had weapons far greater than these. 
Weapons to turn
cities into plains of ash.
  But those weapons weren’t what survived
the wars they wrought with them.  The people were.  In those days, as
in the times before, as in these times, it was the courage of mankind that made
the difference.  Not just of mankind, but of the individual women and
men.  It was their choices that changed things.  Now it’s my time and
my choice.  Go, sir.  Go and live your life.  Love your
woman.  Your time will come but not here, not now.  And I ask that
you don’t take my time from me.”

“This mission
was my idea,” Dane said.  “It’s mine to see through.”

“With all
respect, sir, you can’t do this.  No one but me can.  I may not be
half the man I once was, but of all the men your father sent out here, I’m
still the strongest.  Maybe he knew what he was doing in assigning me to
your crew.  Or maybe
Someone
else had Her hand in
it.  At any rate, I’m here now.”

Dane began to
back away.  The whole thing seemed somehow preordained, as though Bailus
was merely taking his place in a much greater drama.  He nodded.  He
knew Bailus was right.  He could have ordered him out.  Bailus might
have obeyed him.  But his respect for the man forbade him from giving such
an order.  He could have stayed, but he knew this was something Bailus had
to do alone.  In a way, the path which waited for him was more difficult
than Bailus’s path.  Dane suddenly surged forward and took Bailus’s right
hand with his and clasped his left arm around Bailus’s shoulder and pulled him
to him.  “There were never men like you,” he said.  “There were never
soldiers like you.”

“And there were
never friends like you, my lord,” Bailus said.

Dane slapped
Bailus on the shoulder as he pulled away.  “Go to it.”

Dane walked back
towards the door of light that stood at the mouth of the tunnel.  He heard
Bailus’s first blow fall. 
Then the second, accompanied
by the sound of splintering wood.
  He did not look back.  The
third blow fell and with it came a slither of earth.  The screams of the
shriken
mounted behind him.

Bailus destroyed
the two beams that bordered their barrels in half a dozen swings of his
hammer.  The roof sagged above his head.  He turned to the opposite
posts.  The third beam was stouter than the first two and Bailus did not
break it.  He battered the top end of it till it tore free and fell clattering
on the floor.  A shower of earth fell on his head and shoulders.  He
turned to the final pillar.  His body was tingling all over.  There
was a mist in his eyes, not of sorrow, though not of joy either.  At least
not like any joy he had ever known.  It was a holy feeling, he could say
that much. 
A strange holy feeling, at once silent and
exultant.
  The screams of the creatures were closer than ever now,
but he hardly heard them. 

The fourth post
was as stout as the third.  His blows fell at the base and the top of the
beam, but it would not budge.  Its ends were sunken too deeply in the
earth.  A strange sensation surged through him.  He knew in that
moment that every ounce of his strength, every bit of muscle and grit and bone,
was a
gift,
had been knit into him with precision and
purpose.  His blow fell squarely on the center of the beam, but it threw
his hammer back at him.  The force of the blow ran down the haft and shook
his arms.  There was a searing pain in his side and
a
spreading
warmth there and he knew he’d torn his wound open again. 
He repeated the blow, landing it half a dozen times in the same place.  On
the final time, the beam yielded a little, splintering on the far side. 
He looked behind him.  Scurrying shapes, darker than the pitch black of
the tunnel, surged towards him.  He knew he had time only for one more
swing.

Bailus Conley
set his feet.  He squared his shoulders.  He brought the hammer back
and then hurled it forward with more strength than he’d ever known he
possessed.  The hammer never stopped moving, the head passed straight
through, the beam buckling like a knee, and eternity came roaring down upon
him.

Nelly Aldine was having a very
bad dream.

She lay on a
slab of cold stone.  All around her, other people lay on similar slabs,
though she could not turn her head to look at them.  A tall, thin man
stood over her.  He wore an awful mask like the head of a vulture. 
In one hand he held a bowl and with the other he reached into the bowl and
sprinkled its contents over Nelly and the other sleepers.

The bird-man was
speaking, or at least his mouth was always moving.  But Nelly could not
hear what he said.  She could not hear anything.  That was the second
worst part of the dream:  that there was no sound.

The worst part
was that she could not wake up.

She had tried
everything a girl could think of.  She’d tried screaming.  She’d
tried pinching herself.  She’d tried rolling off the slab onto the
floor.  This last one was the worst.  The first two did nothing (she
could not hear the scream nor feel the pinch); but every time she rolled off
the table she closed her eyes reflexively just before hitting the floor. 
When she opened them, she was back on the table.  She had tried this a
dozen times and it was always the same.  It was as if she
were
only rolling down a huge stair case and each step was
another stone slab with its own bird-man to hold her in his spell.

But something
was happening to the bird-man.  He seemed troubled.  He had stopped
moving his mouth and kept darting glances over his shoulder.  Nelly could
not see what he was looking at.  She could not see anything but him and
her body laid out on the stone table and the other people sleeping beside her
(and these she saw only out of the corners of her eyes).  Everything else
was a white wall, as if they were in a room with no ceiling or floor or corners
but just a single circular dome that enclosed them and glowed softly with white
light like the glowworms she used to catch with her sister in the caves.

Something was
definitely happening.  The bird-man had turned fully around so that his
back was to Nelly and the others.  The feathers or fur (Nelly was not sure
what they were) at the base of his neck bristled like the hair of an angry cat
and Nelly wondered for the first time whether the vulture-head thing was really
a mask. 

The bird-man
shifted a little to the left, as though he was trying to circle around
something, and Nelly could finally see what he was looking at.  It was a
woman.  A woman different from any woman Nelly had ever seen.  Her
face was dark and her eyes seemed narrow and pointed at the edges.  Nelly
thought her eyes looked like jewels set in her pretty, mysterious face. 
It occurred to Nelly this woman was a warrior, though she was not dressed like
a warrior and Nelly had never heard of a lady soldier before.  A memory of
her mother throbbed dully in the back of her mind but remained vague. 

The woman and
the bird-man circled each other.  Nelly tried to sit up and found for the
hundredth time she could not.  But she could see them well enough looking
down the length of her body. 

Suddenly, the
woman began to laugh.  Time and again the creature tried to charge her but
was knocked back, as though some invisible force stood in its way.  Nelly was
so caught up in this strange battle she did not notice the second woman for
some time.  Once she did notice
Her
, she could
hardly take her eyes from Her.  When she tried to describe the Woman
later, Nelly said she was golden.  But when people asked her about this,
Nelly could not remember if it was
Her
hair or Her
skin or Her eyes or Her clothes which were golden.  Golden is simply the
impression
She
left on Nelly.

The bird-man
began to tremble and then shake and then he fell forward and smashed into a hundred
pieces.  The women’s hair began to move as though a great wind blew behind
them.  The pieces of the bird-man began to move to, though not all at
once.  They blew away like smoke, little by little, until there was
nothing left of him.

Nelly did not notice
this at the time, but as soon as he was gone she almost instantly began to
forget him.  Her thoughts and eyes were focused on the two women. 
But they faded from view, too.  The first woman went first.  She got
hazier and hazier, as though she were walking into a fog, until she
disappeared.  The second woman looked directly into Nelly’s eyes. 
“Awake, brave one,” She said.  Then
She
vanished
and the light went with Her and Nelly was plunged into darkness.

Nelly did not
know how long she had lain there before she realized the darkness was not the
darkness of another dream but the darkness of wakefulness.  She pinched
herself and it hurt and she gave a little shriek of surprise and sat up with a
start.  But she could not see anything.  Wherever she was, it was
blacker than the darkest night.

Cautiously,
Nelly slid her feet off the table.  Sitting on the edge of the slab, she
stretched her legs as far as she could, but her feet did not touch
anything.  She worried the floor was very far below or, even worse, that
there was no floor at all.  She was reminded of sitting on her bunk bed
with her feet dangling down; her father, laying on the bed below beside her
little sister and telling them a story, would reach up without warning and
tickle the arch of her foot.  The memory and the feelings which
accompanied it seemed something from another life.  But they called to
her.  She shoved herself forward out into space.  Her feet hit sooner
than she’d thought they would and she stumbled forward.

She bumped into
another stone table.  Pushing against it to steady herself, she stood
up.  As she straightened, she placed a hand on the surface of the
slab.  Her hand came down on something warm.  It was a human hand,
far larger and rougher
than her own
.  “Who’s
there?” said a man’s voice. 

Nelly started
back and scurried behind her own table.  She had forgotten the other
people in the dream. 
Was this the dream?  Was she experiencing
now the reality of what she’d been dreaming?
  The thought frightened
her.

All around her, she
heard others stirring. 
Groans, questions, yawns.
 
The slap of boots hitting the stone floor.
 
The pad of bare feet.
  “Who’s there?” a voice
called.  The voice repeated its question and Nelly recognized it. 
Biggs Walker, the cook who pretended not to notice Nelly’s and Chloe’s raids on
the fresh baked bread.  “Mr. Biggs,” she called.  “Mr. Biggs, it’s
me, Nelly.  I’m over here.”

“Nelly?
 Bless you child.  Hold on, I’m coming.”

Before he
reached her, a thought struck her. 
Did she know the rest of these
people?
  No sooner had that thought struck her when another one
did.  “Mama,” she called. 

No answer. 

She began to
feel her way around, brushing her hands from table to table. 
“Mama.
 
Mama.”

Lots of people
were shouting names now, but none of the voices were her mothers.  The
voices echoed, adding to the confusion and allowing Nelly to guess they were in
some kind of closed space. 

“Mama.”
  Suddenly Nelly remembered and she called again
but her voice broke as she did. 
“Mama.
 
Oh, Mama.”

“Nelly,” a shrill
voice called to her from several tables over.

“Chloe,” Nelly
shouted. 

The girls called
once more and then Nelly had her arms around her little sister. 

“Where are we,
Nelly?”

“I don’t know,
but we have to find a way out.”  Nelly took Chloe’s hand and began to feel
her way along the tables.  She walked in as straight a line she could
until her hand met something solid but unlike the tables.  It was smooth
and extended to the floor and as high as Nelly could reach above and on either
side.  She guessed she had found the wall of their chamber.

Holding Chloe’s
hand in hers, she felt her way along the wall with her free hand until they
came to the corner.  They moved along the next wall and then the
next.  At the third corner, Nelly’s foot struck the next wall but her hand
did not.  Leaning forward, she groped in the darkness.  Finally, her
hand found the final wall, but it was farther back at that height than it was
at the floor.  Running her hand along the wall and back down to her foot,
she realized she was touching a series of steps.  She started up them,
pulling Chloe behind her.  The steps led to the ceiling of the chamber,
but nothing more.  She moved along the top of them until she came back to
the first wall.  She descended the steps and felt the whole length of the
first wall again, but there was nothing there to be found.

Nelly led Chloe
back to the stone stairs and they sat down on the first step.  Nearby in
the darkness, someone was weeping.  It sounded like a grown man.

Chloe tucked her
head against Nelly and began to cry softly.

Nelly did not
know how long they sat there but she did notice the room began to change. 
Something was wrong.  It was horribly hot and hard to breathe.  Nelly
felt suddenly sleepy.  It became harder and harder to keep her eyes open.
 And finally, whether her eyes were open or not, black spots with gold
rims danced before her.

She sat up with
a start.  She had dozed off but something had roused her.  While she
was trying to figure out what it was, it came again.  A sharp rap from the
top of the stairs, but muffled as though it came from outside the
chamber.  Again and again it sounded.  People around her where
starting to stir once more.  She felt Chloe lift her head from her
lap. 

The banging
noise stopped and was replaced for a moment by silence.  Then the silence
was replaced by a scraping, crunching noise and the most unbelievable and
wonderful thing in the world happened.  A crack of light appeared at the
top of the stairs.

The grinding
noise stopped suddenly.  There was a dull clang, and then the grinding
noise began again.  The crack of light grew.  People were getting to
their feet now.  Some began to shout and cheer.  Nelly took Chloe’s
hand once more and helped her up. 

The grinding
noise stopped and Nelly heard something coming out of the light more beautiful
than even the light itself. 
Voices.
 
Human voices.

Behind the human
voices swelled a symphony of birdsong.

Suddenly, the
line of light was eclipsed.  The light broke through only in a few
scattered places.  There was a terrible roar, the sound people make when
they put all their strength into a task, and the motes of light exploded into a
blazing window.  Then
came
a crash that shook the
steps beneath her feet, and Nelly saw the forms of men and women, black against
the ocean of light. 

Nelly bounded up
the stairs, pulling Chloe with her.  There was a confusion of voices but
Nelly hardly heard them.  Just as she reached the tops of the steps, a
figure moved in front of her, cutting her off from the light.  Then strong
arms were around her, pulling her close, and a wet cheek was pressed against
hers and she heard her Auntie Josie say, her voice
rising
above all the others, “Nelly. 
Chloe.
  Oh my
god, my god, my babies. 
Oh, my babies.”