The Wanderer's Tale (45 page)

This time he was successful, and landed perfectly upon the ledge. Straight away he clamped his fingers onto the rock face like a gecko.

‘Ysss!’ he snarled with the knife-hilt still wedged between his teeth.

Carefully and steadily he inched his way across this new ledge. It was hardly a hand’s span wide in places. It rose and fell unevenly, and was always slippery, and before long he saw with dismay that it finally came to an end. His feeble torch did not show him if it carried on further beyond the gap, so he desperately stretched his foot out to test it. Whereupon he at once lost his balance and pitched forward.

As he fell, he reached with outstretched arms to grab at something, anything. Luckily they came into contact with a further section of ledge as it continued on the other side of the gap.

So there he was, like a human bridge stretched across the divide, the icy torrent a few feet below him and the flames of his makeshift torch burning the skin of his face. Again, survival instinct took over, and he scrambled like a mad thing up onto this new ledge.

He finally spat out the torch onto the stone surface ahead of him, and lay panting in great, shuddering gasps.

‘Too close,’ he blurted into the darkness. ‘That was far too close!’

Gapp was a nervous wreck by now, after two close shaves in less than three minutes, and he could feel his whole body quivering like jelly. The torch was flickering with only a faint blue glow now, so as he lay on his belly, he occupied himself for the next few minutes with fastening on a little more
bachame
, and relighting it.

Here the ledge was only a foot or so below the tunnel roof, so Gapp was forced to proceed by crawling on his elbows. This was the closest he had ever come to understanding what it felt like to be an earthworm. On occasions he had to squeeze through gaps of no more than a few inches leeway, where he could feel the rock scraping him both at front and back.

Long minutes passed in such torturous progress.

At length he came to a wider section of the tunnel, and there he beheld something rather interesting. Just visible in the light of the flame was a fall of tiny droplets of water, sprinkling in a fine, blood-red haze from a hole in the middle of the tunnel roof. Gapp peered up at it in wonderment. The hole was fairly large, but without much water coming through. Could it be that there was another stream up there somewhere?

A trickle that size did not necessarily mean that there was a tunnel large enough for him to crawl through. It might be tiny, just a crack in the rock. And if he became stuck there . . .

He peered at the ledge ahead of him, and thought about the narrow gaps already that had nearly been the death of him.
Gap the Gapp-Slayer. Ha!
That was not funny . . . Again he glanced up at this new hole, which, now he came to think about it, might be just big enough to haul himself up through. It then occurred to him that if he were to continue following the stream along its course ahead of him, it was bound at some time to lead him
down
. No, what he needed was to find a way
up
.

On an impulse he leapt for the hole. He grabbed the edge of it, and panicked when he felt how slick it was. But he held on doggedly and hung dangling above the lethal current. He braced himself for a second, then heaved himself up through the hole – and scrambled onto the floor of the new cavern he was in.

He had succeeded in leaving the tunnel behind him.

He hardly dared to hope as he looked about himself at his new surroundings. After adding a little more pitch-gel to his torch, Gapp held it up and stared around at this subterranean wonderland he had come to.

To his utter bewilderment, he found that he could see quite far. The feeble flames of his little knife-torch were reflected back by a million points of glittering light, all of them the most marvellous and varied colours, that reached back a dizzying distance that hurt his eyes and confused his brain. From the near-lightless wormhole he had just emerged from, he was now in a cavern so vast the range of his sight seemed to simply fall away, and beyond that he could feel by the air that a vast space waited for him out there in the darkness. This cavern was absolutely huge.

His still unsteady senses caused him to lurch suddenly, and he had to close his eyes to regain his balance. Deeply he breathed in the fresher air. In contrast to the tunnel below, it now felt as if he was out in the open once more.

It was also, he noticed, so quiet in here. Below, he had grown used to the constant roar of water, but it was just a dull rumour now, more like the echo of a bad dream that was gradually fading in his head. Then, as his ears adjusted to the welcome stillness of the cavern, he began to hear the gentle, musical ringing of a hundred tiny trickles of water dripping into deep pools.

Gapp wiped the steam from his spectacles and gazed spellbound at the weird and wonderful rock formations that protruded from all directions. He had never in his life seen anything like these stalagmites, stalactites and other strange shapes, nor even heard tell of their like before, not even in the wildest and most fanciful boastings of the bards. He marvelled at what they might actually be, whether they were plant, animal, or some other life-form unique to this world he had entered. He even wondered if the cavern had been created by some mad troglodyte artist or wizard.

Some outcrops were a pure, brilliant white, while others were orange, gold, blue, purple, green or deep red. Some undulated smoothly, bumpily or curvaceously, others stuck out sharply in a bouquet of crystalline, needle-like spines.

Other tunnels he could now make out, branching off in all directions, leading out of the main cavern. Some were filled with clusters of rainbow-hued limestone icicles, and resembled gaping, fang-filled mouths. The floor and the roof rose and plummeted to a score of different levels. The whole place had a chaotic randomness to it that defied both reason and gravity.

Gapp exhaled as a sudden spasm of shivering overtook him, and watched with fascination as his breath turned to sparkling motes of ice. It was freezing in here, but it was a cold that seemed to Gapp somehow pristine and wholesome. Soft currents of air wafted in from the various tunnels and brushed past his face like tendrils of dew-spangled cobweb.

This cavern had an air of undefiled sanctity about it, and Gapp felt like an intruder. He was seeing things that men from the world above were not meant to see – probably never had seen. Perhaps he was the first human to witness it. His heart accelerated at the thought.

Tentatively, he began exploring.

The next few hours saw the young Aescal going from one cave to another. Each tunnel, each cave, each tiny hole he found himself crawling through, provided a new wonder. He now wore most of the
bachame
wrapped round him under his shirt, partly because of the cold but also to dry it with the heat of his body. This provided a constant supply of material for his torch, so he was never deprived of the sight of this underworld’s alien beauty.

He was surprised to find that he was still able to appreciate such things, considering that he was hopelessly lost hundreds or even thousands of feet underground, unlikely to ever see daylight again. Despite his mad struggle for life when caught in the stream, despite channelling every last fibre of his mind, body and spirit into the struggle to survive, a certain resignation to his fate had settled into him now. He was ready to take every minute as it came, and not concern himself too much with what might happen next. Something in him kept nagging at him, to admit that he was in all probability lost beyond redemption, that his supply of
bachame
would not last very long, and that soon he would be blundering around this cold, sharp, alien world in total dark, and eventually, after long miserable days of starvation, he would simply wink out of existence as if he had never been.

But his ordeal in the tunnel had brought out something in him that would not go away now, something as hard and icy as the stalagmites he wandered among. And so he continued, and was calm.

Hour after hour, still the boy journeyed on – ever exploring, forging ahead, eager to see what lay around the next corner. Gapp grew weak with hunger, but that only seemed to drive him on ever further.

In any case, there really was not anything else for him to do.

Time dragged by, measured only by the tightening coils of pain that gripped his empty stomach and by the dwindling supply of his
bachame
. He slept only once, curling up in a ball of shivering misery beneath a shelf of overhanging rock. The constant dripping of limestone from above disturbed his slumber, and filled it with troubled dreams. When he awoke and ignited a fresh pitch-smeared rag, he was horrified to see that this ‘stone-bleeding’ had deposited upon him a thin, crystalline coating that made him believe at first that the rocks themselves were trying to turn him into one of themselves, and draw him eternally into their world.

Could it be that they resented his movement, his warmth, his light?

Strange things began appearing around him now. He was not sure what they were, and to begin with he did not care, but as time went by they became more apparent. At first just vague images on the periphery of his vision, it was possible they were shadows cast by the uncertain flickering of his burning knife-hilt, but before long they began darting about in front of him, criss-crossing his path, sometimes even stopping as if to stare at him before fleeing back into the shadows. But whenever he strained his bleary eyes for a closer look – for they remained always just beyond the halo of his torchlight – he would see nothing at all.

He dimly wondered whether he was hallucinating through hunger, or illness. But eventually they did come fleetingly within the range of his light, just long enough to see that they were definitely figures.

Figures of short, misshapen people, with long skinny arms, big ears and twitching claws. They emerged from the walls, appearing out of solid rock, dancing and cackling in tiny, shrill voices, then disappearing again, through either wall, roof or floor. They seemed two-dimensional like shadows, and as lacking in substance as air. But they were there nevertheless.

Gapp half-ran, half-staggered onwards in a cloudy haze of fear. He was still hoping that this was a dream, but they gathered around him more closely now, seeming to feed off his draining life-force. They hissed like spiders, snatched at his clothing as he blundered past them, growled, spat acid, and glared at him hatefully with their huge, luminous eyes.

Gapp glanced behind him, and saw with horror that the whole tunnel was now filled with them. He spun away and plunged on ahead. But now his legs no longer seemed to move; it was like a dream of running, of escaping, in which each step seems to last forever. His whole body felt weighed down like lead.

Suddenly his mind exploded with blinding colour as he smashed his head into a wooden crossbeam. At once full consciousness returned to him in a searing flash of pain, and immediately the apparitions vanished. Fragments of old, rotting wood went flying, and he realized that he had crashed through some sort of barricade. He fell flat on his face and his torch went out.

Reality had returned.

Groggily, the lost traveller picked himself up off the ground.

Kinayda!
he wondered in utter perplexity.
Where am i now?

Man-made barricades in a natural cave network did little to sort out his confusion. Nevertheless, he could not restrain the sudden surge of excitement at finding himself possibly in the realms of real people again. For a short while, hope rekindled itself in his heart. And with the return of hope came the ending of his sense of resignation, and inevitably the recommencement of his anxiety.

Fear stole over him again, and he fumbled in the dark for his fire-making equipment. Those horrible little imps had chilled him to the marrow, and he knew he had only minutes before the pitch darkness finally drove him completely out of his mind. This time he did not bother to take off his
bachame
under-shirt – what was left of it – but instead simply tore at the fraying material in panic while he still wore it, until a clump of it came off in his hand. Hurriedly he smeared the last of his pitch-gel over it and set about striking sparks.

Eventually he had kindled a new flame and held the burning rag up to see around.

Hope leapt up anew; the unmistakable sight of neatly excavated rock walls was the first thing to greet his eyes. He was now in a tunnel that had been fashioned by
people
. There on the ground lay the broken knife-hilt he had been using as a torch, but more importantly, scattered about were several lengths of wood. Probably from the barricade. On closer inspection, they were satisfactorily
dry
.

Within minutes, Gapp brandished aloft a two-foot length of brightly burning timber. Compared with the measly tufts of
bachame
cloth he had been using, this new faggot blazed like a beacon in the darkness. His fear subsided, and he almost sobbed with relief.

‘Now,’ he said to himself grimly, ‘let’s get this over with.’

His illness and hunger now forgotten, Gapp wasted no time in further surveying his surroundings. He shielded his eyes from the glare of his new torch, and peered down the dilapidated passage that stretched ahead of him. It was littered with collapsed pit-props and other debris, and so cramped he had to stoop low to avoid cracking his head.

Whoever mined these tunnels must have been small indeed
, he considered. Haugers, he guessed at first, but reminded himself that the Haugrim rarely resorted to mining. Still, that scarcely mattered now, and without further tarry, he plunged on up the shaft.

Long minutes passed, and still the passage continued. So far he had not seen any other shafts or side-passages. Soon he found it becoming difficult to breathe properly, and he longed to stand up straight and stretch his backbone.

Eventually however, he did come to a side-passage. He took it without the slightest hesitation, and pressed on eagerly. So eagerly, in fact, he did not think to mark the turning.