When I awoke I felt Moor at my right, Shami upon my chest at the left, and Artie at my feet. I heard my parents’ breath. I felt a warm happy comfort and wished to stay in this cool cave forever. One by one my companions awoke, and when I could sit up without disturbing the sleep of another I sat up and gazed in the direction from which I thought we’d come. But in that and every direction only darkness met my eyes.
“We ran so far I can no longer see any light,” I said.
“Speak softly.”
“Do you suppose it is daylight outside the caves?”
“I don’t know.” He touched my arm to silence me, and we sat listening. There was no noise anywhere except my own breathing. There was not the slightest breeze against my face. I could see nothing and hear nothing. But Moor’s senses were keener than mine, and he didn’t lift his silencing touch from my arm. So we sat and sat until I could hear it, too, a soft sound, almost like the sound of water trickling. But, just as skin is unmistakable even when it is hiding among items of like color, the faraway sound of human voices was unmistakable to me. And I knew the voices were getting closer—that’s why I could hear them now.
Moor pulled me and the dogs up and led us away, whispering that he would lead us in the direction opposite the voices he heard. We dared not turn on the lights Karrid had given us. Instead we moved away from the sounds of life in the same way that, earlier, we had fled the lights in the tunnels. Again we moved until I felt I could move no more. My parents never complained, but I knew they were exhausted. The dogs, also tired, whined occasionally. Though stronger, faster, and more agile than me, they needed more sleep.
Because I could not hear the voices unless I concentrated and stood still, I trusted Moor completely and found the same sense of relief in this trust that I’d once found in my trust of my parents. Finally he removed his hand from my arm and spoke. “I haven’t heard them for a long time,” he said softly.
My mother, who hardly spoke anymore, said, “If it’s been a long time, why do you tell us only now when we’ve been so exhausted? Whether it’s night or day outside, we have been walking a night and a day’s time.”
“Whoever’s following us is probably resting, and we must as well,” said Moor. “We must hope that when we leave this cave we will be somewhere safe.”
My mother persisted. “Who are they? Why don’t they take a motorsled?”
“They have one,” said Moor. He spoke in my ear, though, so my mother couldn’t hear, and I knew he’d grown angry with her. “Perhaps they don’t know exactly where we are, just that someone is in here. They may have lights, but my hearing so exceeds the power of my sight that I can’t know with certainty.”
Moor didn’t speak again, just sat down. We ate some of the provisions we’d brought and then lay on the rock ground. I could feel in the darkness that Moor’s mood had softened, and though much still troubled him, he also seemed strangely relaxed and content, almost complacent. This was something new, something I’d never known in him. As he sank into sleep, I soothed him with affectionate ritualistic lies, about how my only desire in the world was to knead his feet when they tired of walking, and to kiss his temple when his head hurt, and to rub against his skin like a dog in the mud. But then I found I really did desire these things, and I kneaded his feet, kissed his temple, and rubbed against him like a dog in the mud.
I awoke later—how much later I don’t know—to hear my father talking softly to no one in particular. He was in mid-sentence, as if he’d been speaking for a long time. “...never been without sight for so long,” he was saying. “Did you know I was a mayor once? And now what good is it?”
Moor touched my arm. “We may have to leave soon. I think I heard something.”
“Already?”
“I don’t know how much time has passed.”
“Maybe we should leave now even if you don’t hear anything more. We can get farther ahead of whoever follows.”
“I can’t know where they are unless I hear them.”
I looked around, saw nothing, but I imagined I could see Moor’s shape, not see it exactly but know its presence with my eyes. “Perhaps we’re followed by friends,” said my father. “And we can’t be sure which of the forbidden branches we’ve followed.”
“If they’re friends let them shout it to us,” I said. “Until then, I will believe otherwise. Therefore, we find that we can be saved only by the voices of those who would destroy us.” Moor leaned his head against my shoulder. I reached for his face and closed his eyes.
“I wonder how my father fares,” he said. His lashes tickled my hands as his eyes reopened. This time I let them be. “My father used to have a room he kept just for himself. We never saw the inside of that room. He kept it locked and went in and out only when no one was watching. One day I found the keys and sneaked in, and discovered nothing but refuse in there, dirty platters and torn garments and the remains of all sorts of food. Nothing more. He did nothing in there but eat alone and brood. He caught me in that room and beat me so hard my mother feared I would die. When I got better she took me to Mallarr. On that trip she was killed. He changed after that. He never beat me again. But I have no desire to return to him even now.”
“He was kind enough to let you go.”
“The only kind act he ever performed. I appreciate it because I know kindness is difficult for him. In Soom Kali duty is easier than kindness. Sometimes in the act of following our duties we find ourselves performing acts of kindness. Perhaps my father felt he was only performing a duty.”
“But we will return to see him one day,” I said firmly.
“We’ll go back,” he said. “I promise you.”
“I know I’ve asked you before and that you’re honest. But let me ask you again. Have you regretted helping me?” We whispered to each other in the dark. “You might have been a great warrior.”
“A warrior’s life at best is thrilling and lonely.”
“I hate war and yet I fell in love with a warmonger.”
“Sometimes I think two contradictions are more likely true than two harmonious facts.”
“Even now at this moment, you have no regrets?”
“No.”
“I could have spent my life in peace on that farm,” said my father.
I said, “I can’t tell whether the people are half free or half slaves.”
“And where can you tell that? In Bakshami, where the people are slaves to the heat? Or in Soom Kali, where they’re slaves to their own rigid rules?”
“Bakshami has always been free,” I said. “So has Soom Kali. Only in Forma does the government make war on its own people.”
There was a long silence. Then: “It’s time,” Moor said. We roused my parents and the dogs and started off again, walking as fast as we could without Moor losing the voices he heard far behind.
I wondered, and knew he did, too, which of the eleven forbidden caves we’d wandered down. Ultimately it didn’t matter: whatever dangers we would face, we would face them.
I couldn’t even hear my footsteps upon the ground, nor could I see a thing. Then Moor said urgently, “Run!” while at the same time momentarily preventing me from running by grabbing at my hand and pulling me close. I felt his swift hands yank the pack off my back and fling it aside to help me go faster. I felt his desperation. His lips brushed my cheek as he pulled off my pack. In a moment his pack dropped as well, and with it the last of our provisions. Voices echoed throughout the caves. I thought I saw the softest of lights far behind us, upon our path.
There is a joy to running for your life in nearly complete darkness. The six of us were alone with our speed. My panic was filled with the force of life and with the desire to keep not only my beating heart, but everything I’d ever known and seen and touched. All of that was there with me as I ran. I’d never run thus, in such darkness. I didn’t even harbor the hope that nothing blocked my way, because I knew that if something blocked me I would not see it and nothing could be done, and th
erefore I shouldn’t worry about that now, I should worry only about speed. So I had no hope and yet I was not hopeless but rather reckless. Moor and I laughed insanely at the recklessness we felt. Even my parents and the dogs half howled and half laughed with recklessness. And we were all laughing in this way as my father and the lovely Shami fell toward their deaths. Shami had been running to the left of us, and I heard her nimble footsteps end suddenly. Moor’s laughing cut short as she plunged howling down the famous crevice. A second later my father groaned as he realized he, too, had plunged into the emptiness.
I stopped and saw that behind me a light shone and was moving quickly forward. “Father? Shami?” I said, unbelievingly.
“They’re caught,” Moor said. My mother still ran with mechanical steps ahead of us.
“Let me give them my hand.”
“Don’t go near,” he hissed. “It pulls you in.”
“That’s only legend.”
“I felt it as I neared, like a hand beckoning me to die.”
Shami whined, a whine that was weak from her terror. The light drew closer, and for the first time I saw the shapes of people, in a motorsled. I leaned not more than the width of a finger toward the edge of the crevice and felt dizziness fill my head and make my thoughts thick and heavy.
“Father? Answer me.”
“Save yourself,” he called out.
At the sound of his voice my hand for the first time found the place on my knife that made it feel like an extension of myself. I leaned over, fighting the dizziness, and threw the knife in the direction of my father’s voice. He groaned, and I heard nothing else but Shami’s whining. My father would never suffer again. Shami whined once more.
“I have only one knife, sweet puppy,” I said. I fell to the ground and felt what Moor had, something like a hand beckoning me to die, pulling at me, making my brain dull and heavy. And then I felt something else as well, a pain piercing one leg so that I thought my leg was being cut in two. Something was pulling my other leg out of its socket.
Through the pain in my legs and thickness in my head I could hear Moor calling, “Mariska! What are you doing?” I didn’t know where I was, or what I was doing. “We must run,” he implored. “They’re very near.”
I heard growling and realized my pain came from Artie’s teeth pulling at my leg, fighting with the crevice for my life. Moor pulled my other leg. I doubted my body was strong enough to withstand the strength of Moor and Artie on the one hand, the crevice on the other. The beckoning hand tightened its grip. In proportion, the pain in my legs increased horribly and then I was sitting by the side of the crevice with the man I loved and the dog I’d raised. My head felt clear and my legs throbbed.
“I can’t move,” I said. “My legs.”
Moor shouted, “If you love me you must run.” There was bedlam, lights and voices and shouting. Moor fought off a Forman, and I staggered away. Artie and I ran, knowing that if we took a wrong step we, too, might fall to our deaths. Artie pulled at my clothes to make me hurry. My feet betrayed me as I stumbled, and my hurt legs bumped the hard ground. The absurd joy was gone. We bolted toward a fork. I staggered into the fork and all noise ceased. My legs made me want to cry out in pain with each step. I repeatedly darted into huge boulders and finally collapsed in terror and crawled toward the last boulder I’d hit, thinking that at least I might hide behind it. I felt blood flowing down my face from where I’d fallen against the rock. There was a sort of tiny cave, and I pulled myself into this cave and scrunched up, drawing in my legs and squeezing them to me.
There was no noise anywhere in these tunnels where noise carried so easily. I did not want to be first to make a sound, but neither did anyone else, if anyone else was even there.
Part Seven
1
I lay fearfully in my hole.
I heard a dull whine but felt so scared I couldn’t even tell whether it was myself who whined. And then I realized that the whine came from far away, that it was my darling Shami as she realized she couldn’t escape. After a while her whine was joined by a wailing from Artie that was so loud and full of the force of life it seemed more appropriate to birth than to death. Then silence.
I was barely able to move. I refused to show myself. And so the time passed, though how much time passed I don’t know. I feared I would die like this—no one would be able to reach me, and I would no longer be able to maneuver myself enough to get out. It was hard to breathe in my hole; I felt I was barely getting enough air to live.
I didn’t know whether I was dead or alive. I fantasized about how delightful it would be to let out a scream that would echo throughout the caves, and to run forth and be destroyed by the weapons of ... I didn’t know if anyone waited out there.
At moments I feared that the Formans were only torturing me, waiting until I had suffered so unbearably I preferred death to this existence. Then they would come in and save me from this insufferable cavity. Other times I felt certain no one was left but me. I had no idea what had become of Moor or my mother.
In my hole I learned about all the different types of misery, misery of loneliness, misery of loss, misery of immobility. I had known in the past the sort of acute pains that come from falling and cutting myself, from accidentally burning myself working on glass, or from getting hit by a powerful gust of sandy wind. But this kind of pain, the pain caused by stillness, was something new. It had seemed like nothing at first but built up moment by moment until finally it began building with increasing speed, so that it turned into something else altogether and produced a loathing of life and of myself such as I had never felt, and had never heard of anyone feeling in all my years in Bakshami. The more I couldn’t move, the more I hated myself.
When I wasn’t noticing the pain in my back, or my legs, or the horrible pain in my neck, or the hunger that wracked my stomach, I thought of Moor and my family, and of Shami falling to her death. I didn’t know whether she would burn to death at the center of the planet, or whether she would starve to death from her slow fall. I hoped she would starve. Either death would be harrowing, a slow building up of pain similar to what I myself was experiencing, but starvation would be less painful. In starvation Shami might even experience a type of vertigo that she would take for enlightenment.
Shami’s loud yelps and howls had ceased long ago, and except for an occasional vague cry in the distance, I didn’t hear any noise. Once, from my troubled sleep, I thought I heard the last call of Shami, the dog I’d once saved, growling and cursing in a manner so savage it seemed to emanate a physical force that scratched my face and pulled at my hair, begging me to reply. And I woke up and returned the call, realizing this might be the last time she would ever hear me. I screamed and cursed as savagely as she had, until it was no longer me but something that possessed me that called out to her. Artie joined me. She answered, and then we were all cursing together. When we finished, my ears hurt from my own voice reverberating in my hole.
There was no sound. But I could not know why. Perhaps I’d stunned the Formans into silence. The fear I’d been living with welled up in me, and now I felt scared not that the Formans were still there but that they weren’t, and I was alone in these awful dark caverns.
Something reached into my hole to touch me, and I froze. There was a whimpering then.
“Artie?” I called out softly, and he whimpered again.
I tried to move but couldn’t without causing even more pain than I already felt. If I was stuck here for the rest of my life, I would rot in a place where my bones would never be discovered, would never migrate to the great mountains of my homeland.
“Artie!” I said again, this time joyfully. “Artie! Artie!”
He whimpered more, and I knew his heart had broken. Instead of trying to get out, I lay weeping and fearful in my cave. Without guidance I was nothing. My life had always been laid out for me by those who loved me, and now, as far as I knew, no one who loved me still lived or knew that I lived. Who would guide me?
r /> I played a rhythm with my fingers against the rocks, but I didn’t leave my hole. In this way I passed time until my fingers grew tired. Then, full of stale air, without hope and without feeling in my extremities, I decided to leave my hole. I’d almost forgotten how to will my hands and feet to move and cried out in pain as I stretched a foot tentatively out. When I finally emerged I found myself as frightened as ever and needed to fight the urge to creep back in. Still, as frightening as it seemed outside the hole, at least the air was fresher out there. So I continued crawling in the dark, feeling for other tiny caves in which Moor or my mother might have hidden. But I felt that, for the first time in my life, I was completely without human companionship.
Artie and I stumbled forward in the cave, and I realized that he whimpered from weakness. He normally ate a great deal and had not eaten for some time.
I would not have thought myself capable of greater despair than I’d already felt. But for some reason the despair I now felt over Artie’s hunger overwhelmed my fear and even my pain. I forgot where I was, or why or how, and felt only a pure despondency that engulfed me in a sort of shimmering hot light which was not of the rational world but of another world I had never visited. I curled up as tightly as when I’d inhabited my hole and watched this light all around me. I felt somehow that everything I’d ever done had led to this moment, a moment when there was nothing left for me: Moor and my mother missing, Father dead, and Shami even still falling to her death when my intention from the start had been to save everyone I loved. So how was it that somehow all of this was connected to what had come before, to playing games with my sisters and brothers, to watching my parents create ever more spectacular shapes and visions in glass, to lying against my parents at night and listening to Cray the storyteller as he regaled us with tales of what had once been and what had led us to be who we were and who we would become. Nothing he had ever told me seemed to lead here, to this dark cave. And all of this left me with nothing in the present, except a future as dark as my past had been filled with sunlight. So I wondered whether this was to be the direction of my life, this movement from light to darkness, and whether this was the logical end.