by Ellis Knox
The portal offered no reply. We waited a few moments. The moments became longer.
“I’m going back,” Henrik said.
“Wait, Uncle,” Nik said. “They’ll be along. I don’t like the idea of jumping back and forth.”
“I’ll give him one minute, no more.”
Well before the minute, Cosmas stepped through the opening. He was carrying a squirming dwarf, whom he immediately set down.
Bessarion turned right around and went back through the portal.
“What the …?” Nik started toward the portal, but Beso was back in only moments. He looked at us all and his chin went up a bit.
“I walk through on my own. It is undignified to be carried.”
“He would not stop praying,” the ogre said.
Nik and I both laughed with relief.
Queller, though, only told Cosmas to get out the instruments.
Again we took measurements. At the end of these, the professor declared we were more than two hundred miles deeper and perhaps five hundred miles west of our previous location on the other side of that black rectangle. I looked at the portal as if it were a dangerous beast.
“Can that truly be?” Nik asked of no one in particular.
“It was always a logical possibility,” Henrik said. “It explains how the dwarves survived the Long Dig: it wasn’t so long as all that.”
Beso muttered something angry under his breath.
“You’re belittling their accomplishment, Uncle,” Nik said.
“Not at all! They created a portal—more than one, most likely. That alone is the stuff of legend. And do you recall all the walking we’ve done so far?”
“If I didn’t,” Nik replied, “my feet would remind me.”
“Well, the dwarves dug all those passages. No, I belittle nothing.”
Beso seemed to accept this, with some reluctance, but it was enough to get us going again.
The tunnel on the other side of the portal was also dwarf work, shaped into a rectangle with somewhat rounded corners and a slightly arched roof, which at its middle was tall enough to accommodate our ogre. I wondered why dwarves, less than half his height, would expend the extra effort. I decided it was because they used wagons or otherwise had something tall enough and valuable enough to require it.
I put my theory about the tunnel to Professor Queller at the end of the day’s march. He nodded, then peered at me in a bird like way, head cocked, eyes bright.
“The upper reaches, Gabi,” he said. “They were not so spacious. And up near the entrance is all just a jumble. Do these facts cause you to revise your theory in any way?”
I considered the question as I chewed on way bread. I had grown so accustomed to its tastelessness, I no longer noticed. It was merely a thing one did to keep alive, like breathing air.
“No,” I said, after swallowing. “The big passages are for wagons and such, bringing supplies to the way station. Once the lead dwarves struck through to the Surface, though, everything changed. They built the Troll Gates and that horrible maze, but they no longer needed the wagons because they dispersed, maybe even branching out while still under ground. They were cautious, careful. Not everyone charges willy-nilly into the unknown.”
I smiled at him to show I was only teasing.
“We agree. From here to the center of the world we will find these spacious roads, for the dwarves were living where they were working. They had left Urland in search of a new home.”
“Urland?”
Henrik grinned and ducked his head. No matter how stuffy and professorial he could be, Queller had these little-boy moments that were so unguarded and genuine, my heart softened every time.
“It is the name I have given it,” he said, his eyes looking up at me from under his brows. He might have even blushed.
“Given … what? The Second World?”
“One cannot call it the Second World without there being a first,” he said, and the professor returned to his face. “That’s a bit arrogant, when four of the Five Folk hail from there.”
The proposition was not unknown to me. One of his papers, delivered to a small and hostile audience at the Sorbonne some years back, had argued that not only did dwarves, elves, ogres, and gnomes all originate inside the Hollow Earth, so had orcs, goblins, and the other creatures of the Wild. I was in Paris when he gave that lecture. I’m quite sure I was the only one who had not laughed. Or booed.
“Urland,” I repeated the name. “Origin Land?”
“Precisely. The Ur-land. Sometimes our native tongue has just the right word, don’t you agree?”
Sometimes, though rarely to my own mind. French is more precise, Latin is more evocative, and English is more versatile, gathering as it does the sins and virtues of all the others. But “Ur” was a nice fit. In German we have Frühgeschicte, which is “early history.” Prior to that comes Vorgeschichte, which renders more or less correctly as prehistory. And then there’s Urgeschichte, which doesn’t have a good equivalent in any tongue. It is the history of beginnings, of sources, of origins.
Yes, Urland would serve nicely. As long as there really was a Second World to apply it to. And as long as we lived to see it, for an axiom of exploration is that you don’t get to name it unless you’ve actually seen it.
“Why did they abandon their home?” I asked. This way bread was getting older and tougher with each passing day. I needed a full Queller lecture just to get through a meal.
“That is the central question, before all others. The Ur-Frage.” He chuckled at his own joke. I smiled through my chewing.
“A cataclysm is one possibility,” he went on, “but that presents problems of chronology. A cataclysm sends all the peoples running for the exit, but that means they would all reach the Surface at more or less the same time—say, within a century—and we know that’s not the case. Elves appear in our records much later than dwarves, and the very first to arrive were goblins. Now, how did goblins get here before the dwarves who dug the tunnels and built the portals?”
He leaned forward, his way bread half eaten in one hand. He looked out on some imaginary audience. This was Henrik Queller in his essence: a man ever leaning forward, striving to communicate his brilliant ideas to the wide world, never giving up, however deeply hurt by that world’s indifference.
“Different causes for different Folk, then. That is a possibility. There can be overpopulation, causing a Folk to send out colonies, like the city-states of the ancient Greeks. But for all of them to be overpopulated? Not likely. What else might drive them? We have too little data to form any more hypotheses.”
He ruminated a while as he chewed his way farther into his way bread. Once he managed to get down another bite, he added a question.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Have any further hypotheses? Silly notions? Brilliant insights?”
“All I’ve got is this dry old bread,” I said. “Cosmas, might we have some water over here?”
“I’ll bring it,” Nik said.
He brought over two cups and handed them to us. I looked at mine.
“It’s only half full.”
“We’re on half rations,” Nik said.
My mouth went even drier.
“Well, well,” Henrik said, “that is a disappointment.”
I turned on him in amazement. “Disappointment? Is that what you call running out of water hundreds of miles below the surface?”
“It’s the word I chose,” Henrik said, drawing himself up a bit. With a flourish, he drained his cup at a single go, then smacked his lips in satisfaction. “Tomorrow I expect to see one marvel after another. We get closer with every passing day.”
“Closer to death,” I said.
“Come now, Miss Lauten.”
“Don’t you ‘Miss Lauten’ me! You can argue with me, you can yell at me, but I won’t be dismissed!”
“Gabi,” Nik said. He was trying to be reasonable, which was a tactical error on
his part.
“Nor will I be calmed down, like some nervous filly. This is serious. Henrik likes to hide behind his science, but here’s some basic science for you: dehydration!”
“We must suffer privations,” Henrik said. He had fully retreated behind his professorial mask. “With the discoveries we have already made, we are rewriting the basic tenets of history. Surely that is worth being thirsty.”
I stood and began to pace, because the only other motion I was contemplating involved a roundhouse punch to the face of a distinguished professor.
“More than once,” I said. My voice was tight from my holding it firmly in check. “More than once, you made claims I thought were absurd, only to have them proved right. I do not deny your brilliance, professor, but I do question your sanity. We will soon run out of water. We can live for some several days past that, after which we shall die, one by one. One by one, we will each be lying on a stone floor, forgotten by the world, like that poor wretch in the maze.
“And how did we come to this? Because of you, Herr Doktor Professor Henrik Queller. Because you cannot tell the difference between confidence and arrogance and lunacy. You have convinced yourself that you cannot possibly fail and therefore cannot possibly endanger those around you. This is why you aren’t a leader! Because you have led us into this place and you have no idea how to survive here, much less how to get us all home again!”
I sat down suddenly, struggling mightily to keep myself from bursting into tears. I wanted to. I wanted the release, but my old self-discipline would not allow it. Not in front of men. Then, quite unexpectedly, a thought set me to laughing inside. I had to contain that as well, lest I seem I was myself going mad.
“Gabi? Are you all right?” Nik said. The instinctive male caution around an emotional female was evident in his voice.
I allowed some weak laughter to escape.
“I am. I just realized that the only thing my outburst accomplished was to make me thirsty.” I gave another pale laugh and turned to Professor Queller.
“Oh, Henrik, please forgive me. I’m overwrought.” I stopped there. Everything I could think to say was all along the lines of “pity the poor female in distress.”
Queller was looking at his hands, his brow furrowed in thought.
“Uncle?”
“She’s right,” Henrik said. “I am not the leader, for all that it is called the Queller Expedition.”
“It is your expedition, Uncle.”
“I’ll take the name, never fear.” The frown lines vanished for a moment as the professor nearly smiled. “But my field is science, not exploration. That’s your expertise, Niki, and I’d do well to remember it.”
His retreat was so transparent, I repented my harsh words. But he turned away my every attempt at apology by saying I was right.
“You’re even right about dying of thirst, I’m afraid. No, let us state it plainly. At full rations we have three days of water. Six at half, if arithmetic has not deserted me as well. Can we go to quarter rations?”
“We can,” Nik said, “but at cost. We need our strength if we come up against more mountaineering.”
“What about food?”
“It will last longer than the water.”
“True, but perhaps we find water. How long does the food last?” He glanced over to me. “You see how practical I am being?”
I’d already apologized too many times, and nothing else seemed worth saying.
“We need to get going,” Nik said. “Can’t stay here.”
We all got to our feet, but Bessarion made no move.
“Beso?”
The dwarf was standing with his back pressed to one wall. At the professor’s voice, he turned around. Now facing the wall, he ran his hands over the surface as if caressing it.
“What’s he doing?” Nik asked.
Queller shrugged. “More of his devotions, I’d guess. Give him a minute or two, out of respect.”
“I’d respect it more if his devotion brought water from the stone.”
Queller made a strangled sound, all that was left of a chuckle.
Thirst stalked us. It walked alongside us and rode inside us, like a disease. It affected how we spoke, and what we spoke of. By implied consent no one mentioned water. The word itself became a kind of taboo, a mighty curse we feared to utter. By not saying its name, we might reduce its power.
Instead, we spoke of rations.
“Time for your ration,” Nik would say.
“We’ll need to cut rations tomorrow.”
“Did I get my ration?”
Like cowed, dutiful children we never asked for more, fearing the day when we’d be told there was no more.
Several times over the next couple of days, Bessarion would stop and put one ear to a wall. Not one of us questioned the behavior. We were all too weary to do much more than wonder silently. The perverse thought came to me that this was how Beso prepared for death, but I said nothing. My throat was too dry.
“Let’s have a sip, at least,” the professor said, his voice scraped like snake skin over stone.
“It’s the last of it,” Nik said, as he handed me a cup.
I stared into the metal vessel. It held no more than a mouthful.
“Out?” Beso seemed not to understand.
“No more water,” Nik said, speaking the word now there was no more of the actual substance.
Deep in my gut something small and desperate raged at the professor. You’ve killed us, the child-voice screamed. You stupid, arrogant, self-important man.
The child-voice fell into babble. My mind spun slowly, like a light in a lighthouse, but the lighthouse was crumbling, and the child-voice was buried in the rubble. I took the mouthful of water and handed the cup to Nik. I kept the water in my mouth for a long time before swallowing.
It tasted like a last kiss.
The next day was a torment. Thirst, true thirst, is a frightening sensation. It starts as a dryness in the throat, a desire for water that one sets aside as inconvenient in the moment. Keep denying water, though, and thirst becomes a voice that nags continually, as insistent as a whining child. Like a child, the more it is ignored, the louder it gets. The voice becomes a shriek and then a thunder, until it buries all thought. Speaking words out loud is torture.
We went through another portal. Each was like the others. I stopped caring. The only things that went into my notebook were Queller’s measurements, which he still took at the end of the day. The chief measure of his own suffering was that he reduced his observations to once a day. And when he took a reading on one of his instruments, he merely showed me the number and did not speak. His eyes shone as they do with a fever. I was too exhausted, too delirious to record anything of my own.
Our route began to meander, or it meanders in my recollection of it. My only solid memory of that time still agitates me. Our route had just gone downward, turned left and then right, then went back up again. I commented on this, but no one replied. Then I heard Professor Queller.
“In and out, up and down.” He was repeating this phrase, over and over.
“Professor,” I said gently. I touched his shoulder.
“There is no up or down,” he said. “Only in and out.”
At the time I thought he was rambling, and perhaps he was. Later, as we tried to sleep—thirst interferes with this as well—I realized his point. Up and down were concepts that were helpful in relation to my own person. I lie down; I stand up. In any larger context, though, the words are cast adrift and lose their meaning. We were not traveling up or down; we were traveling inward, toward the center. Written out in this way, the point seems trivial, even pedantic. At the time, perhaps because my reason was so ragged, it hit me with the force of revelation. All entities everywhere were pulled toward the center—the center of gravity. Inward. And everywhere living beings struggled not so much to go upward but outward.
Toward the stars.
Thus did I lurch in my thoughts from the trivial to t
he grandiose. I couldn’t even imagine what was going on in the professor’s mind.
The day after—I’m sure it must have been the day after—we came into a strange cavern. The tunnel, which had meandered without changing dimensions or character, suddenly opened out. Twenty feet above was a ceiling of jagged stone, while the floor fell away another ten feet and was filled with boulders. Beyond, the jumble piled higher and the ceiling came down again. The way forward seemed to be blocked.
We did not discuss or even remark upon all this. We simply scrambled our way forward until we got to the far side.
“Rockfall,” I said.
No one replied.
I sat down. Waves of weakness struck each of us almost hourly now. I knew enough to sit down before I fell down. Above me I heard Professor Queller whispering.
“Where have you gone, Étienne? Is this your work? No, no, of course not. I can see that, my friend. Yet you came this way. Or did you find another?”
If Henrik was talking to ghosts, the end of all of us could not be far away.
“There is a way forward. Very small.”
Beso’s words offered hope. I was afraid to believe it was real. Nik scrambled to stand beside Beso. My head was still in my hands. It was all I could manage.
“It’s too small for me,” Nik said. “Definitely too small for Cosmas.”
“It can be made larger.”
My vision was whirling, and the words whirled with it. I announced I was going to lie down now and take a nap. If anyone replied, or even heard me, I did not know. I’m not sure I even managed to lie down.
Someone disturbed my pleasant slumber, as deep a sleep as I had enjoyed in many days. I thought maybe I had this thirst problem solved. But the someone kept moving me, pulling at me.
“Rude,” I whispered.
Metal touched my lips, and then came water. The taste first—before sight, before sound—the taste of clear water struck me like a blow. My eyes flew open and sounds returned. I took a proper sip, and water filled my mouth like a sunrise. I grabbed at the cup and tried to drain it. That same rude person restrained me. I got down a gulp and grinned at my victory. I looked at the face of my tormentor.