The tide started to roll out again, and Slate, Arianna, and Pilotte set off along the widening beach to locate the entrance to the Navel of the World. In half an hour, they came to a tiny bay surrounded by seawall. Arianna noticed the timeworn carving of a face at the top of the seawall, consistent with the map's description of the cave entrance.
"The entryway should be below that face," Arianna said.
"And we have to be in position underneath it when the tide falls, right?" Slate asked.
"That's right," Arianna said. "The way the water's moving, that's going to happen soon. We need to hurry."
The tide was receding as quickly as it had come in, and so Slate and Arianna quickly bobbed and paddled themselves into position underneath the statue and started to tread water, trying to keep their packs above the water, which was harder than keeping themselves afloat. The more waterlogged they got, the less it seemed like Slate and Arianna would be able to hold on. Pilotte sensed this and swam between them, so they could use him as a buoy.
It wasn't too long before the water level had descended low enough to reveal the cave entrance. The travelers swam into the space and the water poured out, leaving them on a smooth stone floor. Jewel-inlaid bas-reliefs were carved into the frame of a stairway, which lead up from the entryway into darkness, and elaborate sconces hung from the walls. Though the artworks had suffered the damage of hundreds of years of the battering ocean, enough of them remained to stun, executed in geometric patterns and organic forms as beautiful as the finest masterpieces in Jaidour.
The tide kept moving out, until the little bay outside the cave entrance became a rocky beach.
“Well, we're stuck until the tide changes again,” Slate said.
“Then it's up the stairs, isn't it? Go on, you first,” Arianna said.
Slate toed hesitantly up the slippery stones. The staircase was long, so long that it wound up into the darkness until the light from the entrance could no longer penetrate it. When he couldn't see any farther, Slate stopped.
"We have to go back," he said. "So I can see where my flares are in my bag."
"Wait," Arianna said. "I've got a better idea."
There was a click, and a yellow flame sprang to life from Arianna's hand, sending the shadows fleeing and revealing the stairwell.
"That’s handy," Slate remarked.
"I'm glad it still works," Arianna said. "It got soaked."
"Lucky for us,” Slate said. “Let’s keep going.”
The team continued its way up the stone steps, pressed close together. The circular passageway eventually came to a narrow hallway that stretched out beyond the light’s reach.
"Now what?" Slate asked.
“Let’s check the map before we go any further,” Arianna said. She fumbled for a moment getting the soggy map out of her waistbag. “According to this, we should follow this hallway in front of us.”
“Well, obviously. There’s no other option. But where does it lead?” asked Slate.
“Navel of the World?” Arianna wondered.
The narrow hallway was extra slippery on account of a fuzzy moss growing on its stones and drippy ceilings, and it made for difficult walking, especially as Slate, Arianna and Pilotte were huddled so close to one another. They were so distracted that they reached the end of the hallway without realizing it. Slate almost fell out into the black void that yawned open before them, but Arianna sensed his body starting to pitch forward and managed to grab his shirttail and pull him back. He fell onto his side with a surprised yelp that echoed loudly around what must have been a huge space below.
"I think we found the Navel," he grunted.
“But the hallway ends,” Arianna said, shining her light down into the nothingness. “I can't see a thing." She unfolded the map again to study it.
“What do you think is down there?" Slate asked.
"Hand me one of the flares from my bag,” said Arianna.
“Flares?” Slate asked. “How are you so well prepared?”
“It’s all about preparation, Slate,” Arianna said. "Quick, they should be on top."
Slate went into the pack on Arianna’s shoulders and found a bundle of four flares near the top. He handed one to Arianna, who smacked it against the stone to activate it, and then heaved it off into the darkness below.
“What did you do that for?” Slate asked. “We only have three more of those.”
“Look,” Arianna said, pointing down to the pool of illumination around the flare on the floor of the cave. “There’s the bottom.”
“Oh, I get it,” said Slate.
“Perhaps one of the other stairways on the map leads down there,” suggested Arianna.
“But where are the other staircases?” Slate asked.
“Well,” Arianna said, studying the map. “I think we actually passed them, on the stairs up from the entryway. Before I lit the sparkbox.”
“Oh. So then it’s right back where we came from?”
“I guess so.”
Backtracking, the team found that two other staircases did in fact branch out from the stairway they had entered on. They followed one of them down, to where the way grew tight and twisted. After many reversals, the team finally spilled out into the cavernous expanse of the main cave.
They soon realized that they had stepped onto a patch of subterranean beach barely wide enough to fit the three of them. A wide river of gently running water coursed in front of them.
“Just look ahead," Arianna said. "Over where the flare is burning."
“Is that... tile underneath it?” Slate asked.
“It sure looks like it,” Arianna said. “Back in the water with you,” she added, before pushing Slate into the underground stream.
“Gah! It’s so cold!” Slate cried. "Why'd you do that?"
“Don't worry, I'm coming in after you!” Arianna cried.
The two splashed and struggled in the frigid water, while Pilotte made an incredible leap over the entire river. He waited calmly while Slate and Arianna made their way across.
“Well, here we are,” Slate said through chattering teeth. “What happens now?”
“Why do you always ask like I'll know?” Arianna asked.
“You are a member of the Protectorate, after all,” Slate joked.
“Ha. Probably not anymore,” Arianna said.
All at once, the cave started to become brighter.
“Slate, look!” Arianna cried when she noticed.
It seemed as if the sun had reached a point in the sky outside where its rays could penetrate a series of square openings carved along the roof of the cave. The squares of light grew brighter as the sun poured through them to displace the darkness in the watery grotto.
With illumination, it became apparent that the walls of the cave were adorned with huge mosaics: beautiful, marvelously intricate murals made of seashell and gemstone. The three largest of the mosaics, those on the wall just opposite the sun portals and above the entrance to the chamber, told a story: the first showed columns of fire descending from the skies, volcanoes, earthquakes, and mass destruction. The second showed Alm ravaged on the surface, and people living underground. The third showed radiant beams of light streaming from the cave into the outside world, and the people returning to the surface.
“Navel of the World…” Slate whispered in awe.
“It’s where the Books come from, Slate," Arianna said. "Right here! This is where they wrote the knowledge of the Gods down. This is where our ancestors waited out the Fall!”
“Could it really be?” Slate asked, dumbfounded. “Arianna, could it be?”
After the team spent hours spent admiring and trying to decipher the hundreds of mosaics in the subterranean museum, Pilotte started to grow restless.
“He's probably hungry. I’m hungry, too,” Arianna said. “What I wouldn’t give for some roasted boar.
Roasted boar… oh… or potatoes, with butter and salt… or a great big piece of cheese and a hard loaf of bread
… oh my,” Slate gurgled.
“And for dessert, chocolate pie with dream cream and bitterberries!”
Pilotte couldn’t handle all the talk of food, and whined desperately for it to stop.
"Soon enough, old boy," Slate said to the wulf. "Soon as tide comes in we'll get you a feast."
“Well this is incredible,” Arianna said, “But we still do have an awful lot of time on our hands. Before the tide comes back in.”
“Don’t remind me,” Slate said.
“You know, we do have the translation key to the books.”
“Arianna, no. We can’t...” Slate stopped to think. “Wait a second, sure we can.”
He dove into his bag and pulled out the watertight skin that contained the Books. He also procured from it a metal flask. “Forgot about this!” he said. He unscrewed the top of the flask and took a drink, wincing at the bitter sting of the brite inside.
“What’s that? What do you have there?” Arianna asked. Slate offered her the flask. She took it and bettered his swig with a great gulp. “Ah!” she cried, nearly spitting the gulp back out. “That’s awful! What is it?”
“Tenury Ale! From the gift shop at the inn in Aurora Falls. This drink courtesy of the Protectorate,” Slate said.
After sharing a bit more of the flask, Slate pulled one of the heavy Books into his lap and cracked it open. “Just like before, just like the one I saw,” he said. “Nice pictures and nonsense.”
“That’s why we have a translation key,” Arianna said.
“Oh yeah,” Slate said. He got up and stumbled over to his pack again, and dumped everything in it onto the ground.
“Shhh! You’re making a mess!” Arianna giggled.
“It’s a quiet mess, though,” Slate laughed.
Without much food in their systems, the alcohol had them both in hysterics.
“Got it!” Slate proclaimed, picking the translation key out of the pile of books and papers.
“Okay! Chapter one, page one,” Arianna began. Let’s see… Well, this isn’t easy. With the…hiccup. Oops. Perhaps we shouldn’t have drunken gotten?”
“Drunken gotten? Is that what the translation says?” Slate asked.
“Stop, stop, stop,” Arianna plead as she struggled to stop laughing.
“Okay, okay. Hiccup. Let’s see,” Slate said.
The two focused as best they could and began to work through the first paragraph on the first page of the green Book. The translation code was easy to understand; there were two versions of a story contained within it, one written in Protersian and the other in the language of the Books. To complete the translation, Arianna searched for a letter from the green Book in the translation and Slate wrote it in a notebook. Soon, they had the first few sentences translated.
“Should I read it to you?” asked Slate.
“Yes, please,” Arianna said.
“Okay, here goes: Book Two-Origins- In which is recorded the second half of the history of the human race prior to the Fall. From our earliest terrestrial wanderings to our journeys amongst the heavens, humanity has wondered what came before. May this volume make it through our dark night and illuminate our future. And that’s it.”
“Journeys amongst the heavens?” Arianna repeated.
“I have no idea what that means,” Slate admitted. “And my head hurts.”
“Mine too,” Arianna said. “Next time we do this, let’s not get drunk.”
“As drunk,” Slate corrected her.
The two passed out shortly thereafter, leaving hungry Pilotte to explore the little pockets and niches of the Navel of the World in search of something, anything to eat.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, Slate awoke feeling much more lucid.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked Arianna, who was bent over another of the many maps in the watertight sack.
"I did, but I was just about to wake you up,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Because of that.”
Arianna pointed to the water rising slowly over the banks of the subterranean river and onto the floor tiles; the tide was coming back in. Slate jumped to his feet and began cramming the Books and papers back into his bag. Pilotte raced ahead, disappearing up the stairs. He wasn’t gone long before he reappeared, barking in a panic, followed by the first trickles of tidewater, which soon grew into a steady stream, and then a spray. The stairwell was unusable; the team was trapped.
“Is there any other way out of here?” Slate hollered.
“Not according to the map, no!" Arianna screamed over the growing white noise of the water now pouring steadily down through fissures all about the walls of the cave.
Pilotte was the first to take the high ground, a worn stone altar, where he was soon joined by Slate and Arianna. The ocean water rushed in eddies and waves, pouring down from the high ledge the team had first entered to, and gushing out of the stairwell. As the water rose, overtaking the last few patches of dry ground that remained, Slate and Arianna looked on helplessly.
“Slate,” Arianna cried, pointing up to the square sun portals near the cave ceiling. “Do you think those holes are big enough for us to fit through?”
“Probably,” Slate shouted over the roaring waters. “But how can we possibly get up there?”
“We’ll wait,” said Arianna, pointing to a piece of flotsam rising with the water.
“Yes!” Slate cried. "I told you you always have the answers!" He grabbed Arianna and gave her a kiss.
Arianna looked stunned. She wiped her lips slowly and then smiled. She took Slate’s hand, as the rising water met the top of the altar. When it was at their waists, Slate, Arianna, and Pilotte began to float.
Slate lost hold of Arianna’s hand as the water in the huge space began to form a whirlpool. After being pulled around the whirlpool a number of times, and becoming completely disoriented, he felt his body being pulled on by a different force. The volumes of water exiting through the sun portals yanked Slate flat against the cave wall, and then slowly dragged him along it, which tore a hole in his coat and back. He gasped, taking into his lungs a great volume of salty water, and then screamed full-throated as his body was squeezed through the sun portal and he shot out into the open air.
The force of the water launched him from the cave like a stone from a blastporter, straight out for ten feet before he began to plummet. In a flash Slate saw the sparkling ocean, and then his body twisted and he could see Arianna and Pilotte flailing through the air above him. As he tumbled to the waves below, Slate felt his heartbeat pounding in his skull. And then the loud rush of air past his ears and the calls of seabirds in the bay were silenced, as he broke the surface of the water headfirst.
Down into the depths he plunged, his body turned up to the refracted sunlight. He saw Arianna and Pilotte splash into the water above him, trails of bubbles tracing their path as they fell. When the resistance of the water had slowed the team’s downward trajectory enough, each began paddling back to the surface. Slate broke first, with a loud gasp for air. He spun in the water, searching for Arianna and Pilotte, the gash on his back turning the ocean water around him red. Arianna bobbed up next, coughing, and then Pilotte appeared, closer to the shore. Next were the team’s bags, which popped up reluctantly from the water and looked like they would soon return to it.
“Get your bag!” Arianna called to Slate.
When he tried taking hold, the young man realized the extent of his injury: his right hand could barely grip at all. He pulled himself through the water with his other arm, dragging his pack behind him with his feet. Upon reaching the shore, he crawled up after Arianna to a sandy ledge high enough to avoid the still-rising tide, and collapsed.
“Well,” Arianna said, as she squeezed seawater from a twist of her hair.
"Well," Slate repeated.
“Is this the kind of adventure I’ve been missing?” Arianna asked.
“I haven’t done anything like that before in my life,” Slate said. ??
?Actually, strike that, I did go over that waterfall in the raft. Anyways, you call it adventure, I call it damn lucky. I don’t know how much luck I could possibly have left.” He winced as he peeled off his tattered coat to get a better look at the gash that wrapped around his side. The deep cut was oozing blood and a yellowish liquid.
“Oh no, Slate, that looks awful,” said Arianna when she saw his injury. “Here, lie down on the sand.”
Slate did so, and Arianna dug her medical kit out of her bag. The balm from it that she applied to Slate’s wound stung worse than the salt water.
“Ah! What are you doing?” Slate shouted.
“Be still, Slate. You’re going to get sand in your cut,” Arianna scolded.
The young man did remain still, except for his mouth, from which many curses flew before Arianna managed to finish treating his wound and covered it with gauze.
“How does that feel?” she asked after she was done.
“I’ve been better,” said Slate. “But I’ve been much worse, too. I’m just glad you are here, and that we’re all safe. And, that was pretty incredible, I’m not going to lie.”
“It was absolutely amazing,” Arianna agreed. “When we were churning around, and how we flew through the air? It was like a nightmare. I didn’t think we were going to get out of there alive.”
“Me either, I really didn’t,” Slate said. “Good thinking on the sun portals, though, I wouldn’t have realized that.”
“Well. We would both have found out sooner than later, I imagine,” said Arianna.
Slate watched the wind play with Arianna’s long brown hair, blowing it all about her, creating an effect like a halo. Her dark eyes shone from within the aura, warm and bright.
“You’re very pretty, you know, Arianna,” he said. It was simply what he was thinking, but it made Arianna blush.
“Oh, Slate,” she laughed. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“Oh? Well, you’re rather handsome, you know.”
Slate had never before looked at Arianna in the way he was now. She had always been like a friend, or sister, to him. “You think I’m handsome?” he asked.
“Well, you know…” Arianna murmured.
“Is that the real reason you came all this way to see me?” teased Slate.
“No, it’s not. I don’t need to travel halfway around the world for a date, I assure you that,” Arianna said.
“Plenty of dates in Aislin, huh?” Slate asked.
“Yes, in fact, there were.”
“What, did you have a boyfriend?”
“No, but I’ve been on dates. It’s not just you, you know, travelling the world on your great adventures, who gets all the romance.”
“Hey, you can do whatever you want, Arianna. You aren’t beholden to me.”
“If I had known that we would meet again, I would have waited for you,” Arianna said, her dark eyes sparkling at Slate.
“I…” Slate began, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. His heart was racing. There was a new feeling growing inside him, one that he didn’t have the energy to assimilate. “I’m sleepy,” he finally blurted out.
“He’s sleepy,” Arianna said, throwing her arms up. “Fine, Slate, fine. Go to sleep.”
The young man rolled over onto his side, careful not to disturb Arianna’s treatment of his injury. He lay awake for some time, unsure of what to think or what to say to the girl next to him.
“Are you mad at me, Arianna?” he eventually asked.
“No, are you mad at me?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good.”
Wordlessly, Slate and Arianna inched closer to one another, until their backs were pressed as close as Slate’s wound would allow. They lay like that for hours, saying nothing, synchronizing the rise and fall of their breaths with the crash of the waves.
Chapter 20