Shadows in the Cave

by Caleb Fox

  When the wave smashed against the rear of the sea cave, it clobbered the emergence slit and pounded the great slab blocking the way. Probably it was the slit itself that stood strongest against the waters, because the wave lost force in turning its corners. It still hit the slab hard enough to knock it half way down. Water slurped around both sides.

  Oghi got inundated. He made a quick change to sea turtle form and swam to the surface.

  Higher up the passage, Aku and Iona got swamped. They grabbed each other and treaded water.

  Above them the passage inclined steeply. Some people got splashed, but no worse.

  Oghi, Aku, and Iona swam to high ground.

  Shonan walked briskly down to them. “What happened?”

  “No idea,” said Aku.

  “My great-grandfather said that one huge wave comes with a hurricane,” said Oghi. “This must have been it. The sea cave is probably full of water, the village knocked flat.”

  “The Brown Leaves?”

  “Very few people out there could have survived.” Oghi hesitated. “It’s best not to guess. We’ll see in the morning.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” said Shonan.

  “What my great-grandfather told me, well, no one believes it.” Now he gained confidence. “I did tell you to block the emergence slit.”

  “Let’s go look.”

  On the way to the slit, they met Kumu and the other three soldiers with clubs knee-deep in water. Next they almost stepped into a small brigade of snakes escaping the liquid.

  Shonan hollered, “Every man come quick! Bring clubs!”

  A dozen men whacked away at snakes until their backs hurt, and until the water seeped away.

  Shonan rested, leaning on his club. “What are we going to see in the morning?” he asked Oghi.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Except for one thing,” said Shonan.

  “What’s that?” asked Aku.

  “Maloch,” said Shonan. “He’s alive, and he’s waiting for us.”

  Oghi nodded. “Yes.”

  34

  The rays of the morning sun shot into the cave—it was a slaughterhouse. The great wave and the tide had slid back to the infinite water-everywhere, leaving no comment but bodies. Shonan, Aku, Oghi, and a phalanx of soldiers walked through the carnage, nauseated. Brown Leaf bodies were mashed and mangled where they’d been flung against the rough rock walls. Skulls were crushed, legs snapped, arms twisted into impossible shapes, rib cages smashed. Most corpses were snake-bitten. The Amaso had to be careful where they stepped, because some snakes still squirmed among the dead bodies.

  “I think they all drowned,” said Shonan.

  “This cave—this tube,” said Oghi, “was full of water for a long time.”

  “The whole damn ocean tried to jam its way in,” said Shonan. “Aku, will you count the bodies?”

  But Aku had no heart for it. When they got to the seaward end, Aku told his father, “Fifty-something, I think.”

  Shonan nodded. “If we meet any enemies out there,” he said, “run back in here.” He flicked his eyes across their faces and said what didn’t need saying. “Damn well do not go down the little hidey-hole and give it away.” He paused. “If we see the Uktena, turn your back and run like hell. It’s bright out there.” As an afterthought, he said, “Everyone got his blindfold?”

  Everyone but Oghi did. Shonan gave him another one.

  The beach told the story of the cave again, except that the Brown Leaves hadn’t drowned—they’d been crushed against the stony cliffs. Maybe a dozen were still half alive. Shonan walked among them, ramming the point of his spear deep into the chest of each one that groaned or stirred or seemed to breathe.

  Aku was appalled. He noticed that his father was murmuring something. “What are you saying?”

  “The prayer that sends a true warrior to the Darkening Land,” Shonan said.

  Aku walked in silence.

  “Ending their suffering is a kindness,” said Shonan.

  On top of the cliffs, in his coral serpent form, Maloch lay in a crevice between rocks and watched his enemies walk their triumph. Except that they had accomplished nothing—the sea had done everything.

  Maloch regretted that his army had stumbled into the storm at the wrong moment. But that would not stand in the way of his real purpose here. He wanted to gobble up the life-fire of the young hero who knew not his own power, Aku, son of Shonan, and while he was at it the life-fire of the father as well. Strong in spirit, both of them. He looked down on his victims with satisfaction. Their ignorance pleased him. The thought of conquering alone, himself against all the Amaso warriors, pleased him even more. He needed no army to conquer his enemies.

  As for the Brown Leaf people back in their village? He did not need them. He had the guile and the dominance to take over any village and make it his own. He smiled to himself. Even Amaso.

  Aku, Shonan, Oghi, and their soldiers picked their way to the north end of the beach and gaped across the river at their town. The ocean had turned it to rubble. Their hearts sank.

  “You want to go over and inspect it?” Shonan asked Aku.

  “Not right now.”

  Oghi added gently, “There’s nothing to inspect.”

  They studied the landscape, the tidal flats, the river and its bottoms, their fields of corn, the plains beyond. All the way to the foothills in the distance, all was devastation.

  Then Oghi voiced it for everyone. “Where’s Maloch?”

  They stared at each other.

  Suddenly Aku said, “I’ve got to get back to Salya.”

  Maloch didn’t see the Amaso leaders turn and head back to the sea cave. He was busy taking a new form. In a cave, who would be suspicious of a bat? Who would worry about a bat? Who would think a bat might be the most terrible of enemies?

  He extended his new wing-hands and took pleasure in the feel of the membranes stretching between the bones. He looked around. Though his vision was somewhat dim, he would have an amazing sense of every obstacle he flew near. If he winged his way through a gang of swinging clubs, for instance, his ability to detect flailing stone heads would guide him through untouched. He had a sharp sense of smell and excellent hearing. He could sense the warmth of any living being nearby. Surely a bat was a perfect adaptation to the darkness of a cave, and all the people therein who intended him harm?

  He flew to the hidey-hole. Carefully, he crawled along the roof above the guard, someone he didn’t recognize who’d replaced the chief. Maloch smiled to himself at the memory of the chief’s final throes.

  He glanced at the sentry’s face and saw the fool was asleep. But even awake, why would a sentry get excited about a bat? Or, in the half-darkness, even notice a bat?

  Still, Maloch didn’t like ineptitude. He decided that, as a favor to Shonan, he would punish this incompetent. He landed delicately on the man’s shirt where it covered his shoulder. Then he bit the neck ever so gently. The man felt nothing, probably would have felt nothing even if he’d been awake. But the teeth injected a terrible poison that Maloch had concocted. In a few days the man would develop a raging thirst, go crazy, and suffocate.

  Maloch flew back to the ceiling and crawled through the emergence slit. He was less visible, he thought, when he merely crept along. He looked ahead. The passage showed the soft glow of lamps. He winged his way silently for a few paces, crawled, and winged again. Slowly, he made his way past sodden bedding, scattered belongings, and other chaos wrought by the great wave. Maloch reveled in chaos.

  Eventually, the passage opened out into a great room with a high ceiling. This was the spot for Maloch. Up he flew and into a large, dark hole where the wall had crumbled away from the ceiling. Here he could see without being seen, and with a little maneuvering re create himself into dragon form.

  He looked around and observed little of interest. The wave had not splashed its way this far into the cave. Women were making tea and breakfast, and everything was orderly. The
light from the horn lamps played with the shadows and lent the room a certain beauty. Beauty made Maloch shudder, but he knew how to destroy it.

  He looked for Salya. His plan was to attack her, or seem to, and create an uproar. That would bring her brother and father running. A rush to death. To him Salya was no more than a fly to brush away. This foray was to suck in the life-fires of Aku and Shonan and zoom away, boosted in power.

  The difficulty was that he didn’t yet see Salya. Damned eyesight.

  Just then Aku, Shonan, Oghi, and some soldiers walked in. In the hole Maloch quivered with excitement.

  Aku strode ahead, leaving the others behind. Some soldiers drifted off toward their families, and others walked into the passage beyond the great hall to their own camps, in a passageway that led to the closest of the uphill exits. Aku slipped through the grove of stone trees, past the guard Fuyl, and into the chamber where his twin lay in endless half-death.

  Salya was ever unchanged. Aku felt impatient with himself for even noticing that. Since they found her in the Underworld, she hadn’t altered a whit, nor would she ever, not until he helped her. Kumu sat next to her, holding her hand. Her lover sat with Salya at every opportunity, always touching her, as though to pass his own warmth into her lifeless form. Kumu’s eyes looked hollow and vacant. Aku caught a glimmer, in that look, of how he would feel if Iona lay dead, and their child dead inside her. He blinked at the horror.

  Oghi came into the chamber, his sympathetic eyes on the husband and wife to be.

  “Maloch!”

  Aku took a moment to register the voice, his father’s, and what it meant. He was a step behind Kumu and Fuyl, sprinting through the stone tree trunks and into—

  Maloch the Uktena dominated the great hall. He looked half as tall as the chamber and wide as a huge boulder. Women were scattering in all directions, shooing or carrying their children. Aku was glad to see that the men were padding toward Maloch—uncertain and hesitant but on the advance. They wore their blindfolds, but Maloch’s diamond eye sent out only the barest glimmer. The stone lamps offered too little light to feed it.

  Maloch’s enormous mouth yawned open for a roar that deafened everyone, and reverberated in the chamber a long time, a weapon that itself stunned most of the warriors.

  Fuyl stepped forward and hurled a dart from his spear thrower into the monster’s maw. Maloch turned his head and it glanced off his teeth.

  Shaking his spear, Kumu ran behind the monster and toward the tail, as if he was going to climb the beast. The tail flicked. Kumu skidded screaming toward the nearest wall and hit with a thud.

  Aku stepped back among the stone trees, made a lightning change into war eagle shape, and flew out shrieking. He winged his way clockwise, to draw the beast’s head away from the side of his heart. The shriek seized Maloch’s attention, and the great head followed Aku.

  Fuyl hurled a second dart, and it knocked a fang out of the side of Maloch’s mouth. The dragon snapped out a bark louder than a tree crashing to earth.

  Aku flapped behind Maloch. Not all the motion of his feathers was flight—some was terror.

  Aku saw his father circle to the side where Maloch wasn’t following Aku with his head. Shonan meant to get at the heart. Kumu was on his feet and circling the opposite way.

  Aku screeched and flew straight above the tail and the spine and landed at the base of Maloch’s neck, talons gripping the ridge.

  Maloch bent his head hard to reach the war eagle but couldn’t. He flailed at the eagle with one of his short forearms, then the other—he missed both times. He roared hideously. Aku’s nerves and feathers fluttered.

  Now the dragon turned the cave into an echo chamber of bellows. Roar crisscrossed roar between the stone walls. Hearts quailed. Minds got confused.

  Oghi grabbed someone’s spear and ran to Maloch’s front. He threw it hard at the monster’s neck, but didn’t even puncture the scales. Maloch swept his head the other way, and Oghi tumbled across the floor as if he was falling downhill.

  Clinging to the dragon’s back ridge, Aku saw that the turn of Maloch’s head pointed his eyes toward Shonan. The chief charged, his spear aimed at the scale protecting the heart.

  Maloch snapped his huge head that way. Shonan flew, butted by the big snout and raked by the teeth. One side of his body drizzled blood from shoulder to hip.

  Aku screamed in terror. The monster drowned out his screech with a crow of triumph.

  Aku feared that the monster’s greatest weapon was his roar. Somehow Fuyl gathered himself and launched his last dart and drove it deep into the soft palate.

  Aku clung to the ridge of the monster’s neck with one foot, bent down, and pried up a scale with the other. Let this be the one! he cried to himself. He sank his beak into the flesh.

  Maloch yowled. For the first time he sounded hurt.

  Somehow Shonan got to his feet.

  Aku ate.

  Fuyl rushed to where Aku had his beak jammed in. At full charge he rammed his spear toward the same exposed flesh, but the dragon whirled, snapped, and bit his foe in half.

  Shonan crawled toward Maloch on all fours.

  Aku tore flesh as deep and hard as he could.

  Kumu ran forward, spear raised. He slipped in the dragon’s blood and slid directly beneath the great belly. The dragon mouth stretched toward Kumu but didn’t reach. Kumu ran out between a back leg and the tail.

  Shonan staggered to his feet and mustered all his waning strength for one running thrust toward Maloch’s heart. The spear point skidded along Aku’s beak and sank in next to it.

  The great beast shuddered. It screeched out a cry greater even than all the wails that had assaulted Aku in the Underworld.

  Maloch fell sideways onto Shonan. The spear’s shaft hit the ground square, and the monster’s bulk drove it deeper.

  Crushed by the great weight, Shonan cried out life and death.

  Aku hovered in the air for an uncomprehending moment. Then he sailed beyond his father’s body and began the transformation. When he looked human again, the red and green flutes were, as always, in his hand.

  He ran to his father. From behind he heard Oghi calling loudly but didn’t understand the words.

  Aku knelt in his father’s blood. For a moment he fumbled with the flutes—he couldn’t remember which one raised the dead. Of course, the red one. He put it to his lips.

  Oghi, Kumu, and Iona knelt in the same blood. In their arms they bore the body of Salya.

  “My wife first,” said Kumu.

  “Your sister first,” said Oghi.

  “Your twin first,” said Iona.

  Aku screamed—what words he didn’t know.

  “Take care of Salya,” someone said.

  Aku couldn’t figure out who was talking.

  A low voice: “Take care of Salya.”

  Praise be the Immortals! His father’s lips were moving.

  “You will die,” said Aku. “By the time I play the song for Salya, you will bleed to death.”

  A whisper: “Take care of Sal …”

  “You are my father.”

  Less than a whisper: “Take care of Sa …”

  Aku screamed again. He felt like he was being split in half.

  Oghi snatched the flutes out of Aku’s hands. The sea turtle man and Kumu took Aku by the arms and led him to the mouth of Maloch, still open, its last breaths gasping out. Then they picked up Salya and laid her where the breath ran over her, warm and moist, bearing the spirit. Oghi handed Aku the green flute.

  Aku’s soul quaked as the earth sometimes quaked. Half conscious, half transported, he put the green flute to his mouth, looked into Salya’s face, and played.

  His eyes closed, Aku saw it even as he heard it. The music floated, but it also spun. It drifted, yet it whirled. It spoke of timeless beauty, yet it danced. It changed colors, beginning in the green of the earliest leaf of spring, warming to the yellow of a gentle blossom, deepening to salmon, and twisting itself into every color at
once, scarlet, lavender, gold, and the blue of the loveliest twilights. Yet always it seemed frosted with green, a green that brought back to Aku the sense of promise he got from early grasses after a long winter.

  He did not see Salya begin to move. Her lips compressed, then opened. Her tongue ran along them.

  Aku played.

  Salya’s eyelids fluttered, opened, shut, opened, shut.

  Aku played.

  On Salya’s hands random fingers waggled. She bent a knee.

  Aku breathed the last of his song through the flute. He held the instrument across his legs.

  “Look,” said Iona.

  Aku looked, and saw Salya’s eyes gazing at him.

  He kissed her lips gently.

  Weeping, Kumu took her in his arms.

  Aku walked to Shonan, knelt, and saw that his father’s eyes were fixed, unmoving. Aku could not bear to look into his father’s face again. He took up the red flute and marched into a grave and stately music.

  At the end of the song, Aku said, “I have failed him.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Oghi.

  Aku touched the slack face of his progenitor and shed a tear. “Father, come back to us.”

  He walked over and started to sit beside Salya. Instead Kumu stepped in front of him. The warrior of the crooked tooth held out a prize to Aku—the eye of the dead Uktena, the diamond that foretold the future.

  “You earned it,” said Kumu.

  Aku cupped it in his hands.

  “Wha …?” Salya said. Aku and Kumu sat down next to her. “Who? What? Tell …”

  It was such a long story. Aku, Oghi, and Iona took turns telling it while Kumu held her. Salya remembered walking down the dune. She remembered one whack on the head, and thought maybe a second whack sent her into the darkness. She remembered nothing else.

  They couldn’t tell her about the ceremony where her life-fire was stolen—none of them had seen it. They could tell her how she looked when they found her in the Underworld. They told her some of what they saw and heard down there in the Darkening Land—the people writhing in agony, the imaginary causes of their pain.