by Adele Abbot
“There is the philosophy of a street thief,” Calistrope said to Ponderos. “Taking without asking.”
“In this case, I think Roli has the right of it. No one here seems capable of caring one way or the other.”
Roli had found a tray of cups and passed three of them to his comrades. He took up a jug and filled them with an effervescing liquor which smelled of apricots and lemons.
They drank. It was the most refreshing draught any of them had ever tasted. As they drank, a moon rose in the darkened sky—a silver boat against a velvet sea sparkling with individual snow crystals. They became drowsy. They sat, overcome by a delicious languor which could only be dispelled by more of the delicious liquid.
Those who reclined closest to them began to notice them and to complement them on their choice of garments. Calistrope was dressed in a blue silk gown belted at the waist with a jeweled tie which supported a curled sheath holding a dagger. Ponderos was similarly clothed though the color was peach and a vast round turban covered his bald head with a chrome yellow feather raised to one side. Calistrope touched his own head to find that he was also wearing a turban. He took it off to look at it—blue to match his coat though smaller and less enthusiastic than Ponderos’. A tuft of crimson bristles sprang from a diamond clasp which held the folds together. Calistrope replaced it and looked to see how Roli was accoutered but Roli was nowhere to be seen.
Calistrope shrugged. What did it matter? He poured another cup of sherbet and investigated a plate heaped with sweet pastries.
“They are good? You like them?” asked someone, a female someone whose lips were so close to his ear that her breath stirred his hair.
He leaned back a little and turned. “Oh yes. Yes thank you,” he said. The woman was beautiful, her pale features set off by a cap of hair as black as the night above. Her skin was as white as alabaster almost everywhere, he noted, for she wore a few wisps of gauze and save for a cluster of gold rings on either hand, little else.
His pastry broke in half and crumbs fell all over his new companion’s knees. Calistrope brushed rather ineffectually at the debris. “I’m terribly sorry.”
She looked steadily into his eyes and took his hand. “That’s quite all right. Please, do it again.” And she brushed his fingertips across her knees again. She asked temptingly, “Should we find somewhere alone?”
Calistrope considered her suggestion carefully, for several moments—long enough to swallow nervously, just a little nervously; well—hardly nervous at all, really; he decided. “An excellent suggestion.”
He got to his feet and helped the woman up. Calistrope would have told Ponderos he intended to be back soon but like Roli, Ponderos was no longer there either.
The hours of the sorcerous evening passed in delights that Calistrope had thought himself too old to enjoy. But the woman was unbearably enchanting and when they finally fell asleep, they were entwined together, his nose filled with the soft fragrance she wore. The counterfeit moon spanned the heavens, dew-drops formed on grass blades and spider webs, the warming rays of an imitation yellow sun shone from the replica of a long-ago sky. High clouds were turned to golden wisps, morning mists to saffron.
Calistrope awoke, astonished to have slept and still more astonished to find the beguiling woman still breathing slowly at his side, a secret smile curving her red lips.
She was real and not a dream. He touched her face and kissed her lips, he kissed the rosy nipples, touched the warm smoothness of her breasts, ran fingers over her belly, unable to take his eyes away from the loveliness.
Minutes passed slowly and slowly, she came awake, smiling up at him from the pillows.
The mouth opened, rouged lips grinned lasciviously to reveal broken yellowed teeth. Hard fingers with dirty nails reached up to draw him down against the fat belly and flaccid breasts of the old crone who lay on the grimy rags and sacking. A louse ran out of her lank hair and sought refuge among the broken pillows of what had seemed a sumptuous bed.
With a cry of horror, Calistrope drew back. Pulling his travel worn cloak in front of himself protectively.
She looked up and laughed, cackled. “Never mind lover, you’re not the pretty boy you seemed to be either. Wait until the glamour is come again. Soon…”
Calistrope pressed his lips together and looked down at the bundle of clothes he was clutching and at his own body. There were rents in his coat and breeches, his knees were skinned, his fingernails were cracked and broken, wounds had left scars…
“Sadly Madam, you are in the right. Neither the boy I once was nor the man, yet my standards are fixed and will not be changed. I prefer to see things as they are and not as the make-believe world of these past hours would make me.
Calistrope pulled on his clothes haphazardly, he saluted the less-than-perfect maiden. “Goodbye, enjoy your dreams.” His erstwhile lover pouted her lips at him, Calistrope left her and went outside the hovel they had found for their trysting. Almost at once Ponderos met him and minutes after came Roli, hopping on one foot as he tried to fit the other into his breeches.
Each of them opened his mouth to say something but all remained silent. What they had taken part in was best not talked about, was best put behind and forgotten—if that were possible.
Calistrope took out Issla’s purse of silver powder and tossed a pinch into the air. Ponderos and Calistrope felt a weird tug inside them as the dust tried to pull at their own magical qualities then like smoke, the insubstantial stuff puffed indecisively hither and yon before divining a direction and snaking off towards the center of the village—now a huddle of log buildings again with gaps stuffed with moss and windows covered with sacking.
The companions followed it to the square where the streamer darted down and into a dark workshop, less broken down than some with smoke rising from its chimney.
A distant chuckle sounded. Words: “You enjoyed your night of abandon then, I’d dare to wager on that.”
The door was ajar and they pushed their way inside. A wizened old man sat by the hearth with a pipe in his mouth, a tray of rusted tools on the table beside him.
“Enjoyed yourselves, did you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” answered Calistrope. “Are you responsible for this wizardry?”
“In a manner of speaking.” The old man managed a fair imitation of Calistrope’s tart words. “A little conjuration and this,” he patted a machine built from brass and leather and glass. It was perhaps, the only dust-free thing in the place, at one end was a cluster of lenses like the compound eye of an insect; at the other, an oil lamp with a polished reflector to channel the light into the box like body. “My magic lantern.” And he patted it again.
“And you live your lives under the spell of this—this contraption.”
“As much as possible. It’s a poor enough existence here since the wasps came, there’s been no trading down the river since I was a youth.”
“As long as that?” asked Ponderos.
“Aye, indeed. We grow parbalows in the fields and trap shulies in the river, neither are very tasty until we transmogrify them with the aid of this,” he patted his shining machine.
“What a way to live.”
“And what’s wrong with that. Hmm? Soon the river will dry up and the very air will freeze solid. Why should we not enjoy what is left of existence before our time comes? Eh?”
Calistrope was silent. Neither of his companions had anything to add. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I can offer no argument against it. All I will say is that I’d not choose such a life for myself.”
The other nodded. “That is all that matters then. Choose this or choose some other way. Choose what we know or what is unfamiliar.”
“We will leave now. Goodbye.”
Again the other nodded and as Roli—last in line—was about to leave, he asked: “Is there no other way past the wasps’ nest?”
“The wasps’ nest? Hmm.” The magic lantern operator thought for a while as he scanned through a portfolio
of pictures—a valley on the far-off world of Caldeburn, a city of immense towers from ancient Earth, a hillside of rich vineyards and golden cornfields. He selected this last and took an image of a primitive Moorish town from his projector. “Farming, you see? This will get them harvesting for a season then we’ll have a bit more merriment.
“Now, past the wasps. Hmm. There’s a side valley to the south. Half a league along there is a cave, it has a perfectly round entrance. It’s of no use to haul produce through and I can tell you some of our young people went that way to leave the valley when it became too cold to grow anything but parbalows.”
“In spite of your make believe, they left here for good?”
The other shrugged. “None returned to tell us how much better it was beyond.”
Chapter 7
They stood on a ledge below the cave mouth. As they had been told, it was perfectly round; too round to be anything but artificial—a reassuring realization.
Calistrope looked studious, “Do we go then?” he asked. The other two nodded. “Very well. Now, a moment,” Calistrope felt around in his bag and came out with a ball of thread. He wound the end around the stem of a convenient shrub and knotted it. “I think we have enough residual magic up here to make it stretch as far as we need it. Ponderos, the light if you please.”
One by one they clambered up to the cave and stood inside the opening. It was perfectly circular inside as well and almost perfectly smooth, regular undulations in the tunnel’s surface made it easier to climb the incline which they faced just inside. Eager to be on their way, they pressed ahead, the tunnel bored onward in long straight stretches with short curved sections where it changed direction. The changes in direction and slope were minor though, the tunnel always tending to the heading they desired. This was the case for more than a league at which point it swung around in a vast curve and split into four different routes.
“A pity that whoever bored this did not post signs,” Ponderos grumbled. “That way seems to curve around again, perhaps towards the main valley.”
They ventured along the new tunnel and eventually came to a dead end, the cul-de-sac being a perfect hemisphere bulging into the circular tunnel and closing it off, as if a large dull stone globe had been rolled into the tunnel.
“Now where?”
“Back again, oh!” Calistrope pointed upwards. “What about there?”
In the ceiling was an oval hole, the product of a second, higher, circular tunnel intersecting the one they occupied.
“Here,” said Ponderos to Roli, “I’ll lift you up and you can see what direction it goes. Here’s the lamp.”
Ponderos cupped his hands and Roli stepped onto his palms. Ponderos lifted him effortlessly and Roli disappeared down to the waist in the ceiling.
“Well?”
“Perfectly straight as far as I can see that way,” he shuffled round. “And that way… Let me down, quick.”
Ponderos lowered the boy and lifted his eyebrows.
“Get away from the hole, in case it sees us.”
They moved away and stopped with their backs to the hemispherical plug. Above them, something slid across the hole, a silvery grey hide bulged through slightly and dripped a viscous lubricant into the lower passage. The flexible surface moved slowly past the oval aperture for several minutes, thick liquid dripped from the edge and a ring of gelid stuff collected on the floor beneath the edges of the hole before the creature finally went.
“One of the builders, do you think, Ponderos?” Calistrope murmured. “That is why there are no signs, they can’t read.”
“I think you’re right,” Roli said. “That must have been its back end, there were no features, no jaws or eyes or anything.
“So it goes backwards,” suggested Ponderos.
“I’d imagine so,” Calistrope reached out to rap his knuckles against the tunnel’s end. “I mean, if it came this far and changed its mind, it would have to have backed up from here. That’s strange.”
“And what is that?”
“This wall gives a little. It isn’t tunnel wall, not this end part.”
Ponderos touched it. “Leathery,” he poked it vigorously. “I wonder where it goes beyond here.”
“Don’t do that,” warned Roli. “Something’s in there.” As he spoke a small tear started near the top and began to lengthen. They backed away. A silvery bullet shaped head poked through and bent this way and that. Small but wicked looking jaws opened and snapped audibly shut. Another head appeared above the first and a second tear started to one side.
“Babies,” said Ponderos calmly. “And wicked looking things they are, too. Roli, up again—into the roof. You as well, Calistrope—I don’t want to be caught down here with those things snapping around my legs.”
Ponderos boosted Roli through the hole in the ceiling and then Calistrope. There was a slurping sound behind Ponderos and he turned to see a thick greasy substance oozing out of the tears which had now spread from side to side. Wriggling and twitching, the tunnel-makers’ young slid towards Ponderos.
Calistrope leaned down and held his hand out for Ponderos to grasp. Calistrope pulled the other up to the lip and Ponderos then climbed the rest of the way by himself. “Where’s Roli?” he asked as he stood up.
“Reconnoitering,” said Calistrope. “That way,” he pointed in the direction opposite to that taken by the adult worm. Calistrope picked up the light globe and they followed after—no more than a score of paces and around a curve to where daylight glowed.
This was where Roli had stopped; they looked out over his shoulder.
Directly in front of them was the rough papery grey surface of the wasps’ nest. Beneath, on the same narrow ledge they had used before, was a wasp on sentry duty and strewn around it and on other ledges were bits of wasp—limbs, black and yellow chitin and fur. Two long strips had been torn from the side of the nest and wriggling grubs and translucent white eggs were visible. Insects were already repairing the damage from the inside.
“There’s been a battle out here,” Ponderos said.
“I would guess the worm we saw earlier has reached out of here and stolen a tasty snack,” Calistrope stroked his chin. “There are signs of earlier depredations as well. I daresay it has been going on for a long time.
“We have been noticed,” Ponderos warned them.
Sentry wasps had been signaled in some way and were crawling into the restricted space between nest and cliff. Glittering eyes stared up at them as the insects closed.
“We’d better follow the worm or go back the way we came, perhaps try one of the other branches.”
A few minutes later, they stood at the edge of the hole looking down at the ten or twelve young worms below. Each was two or three spans in length and each was enthusiastically attacking its siblings.
A buzz behind them attracted their attention from the savage little worms. Two wasps were crawling along the tunnel towards them, wings partly spread in the confined space. Ahead, from the far side of the hole in the floor, came a rumbling, rasping sound; movement was just visible in the gloom. The tunnel worm was returning and judging from its young, the creature must have a pair of powerful jaws at this end of the body
Several long seconds passed.
Which way lay the best hope for escape?
Roli and Calistrope raised their swords almost simultaneously and took a step towards the menacing sentinel wasps.
“No,” shouted Ponderos. “This way.”
In the passage below them, four or five of the infant worms lay twitching—paralyzed by their siblings’ venom. Others were already partly eaten.
Ponderos leapt down to the floor below. Roli And Calistrope followed. Swords whirled, cut… snick… snick… snick, three more of the aggressive creatures lay dismembered and dead; some of the newly hatched creatures reared up from feasting on brother or sister to watch the humans, perhaps considering attack, perhaps just caution. A sharp sword dispatched one and dissuaded the others.
By the time the adult worm’s head stopped above the opening, they were ten or twelve paces back down the tunnel and ready to run if necessary. The wasps’ wings created a high pitched whine as they rushed to the attack but despite their single-minded ferocity, they were outmatched by the worm’s armored front end. There was a sense of flickering movement, scraps of wasp fell through the opening to be seized on by the youngsters underneath and then the worm itself thrust its head through the intersection.
Gaping jaws capable of dealing with rock snapped open and closed, tiny black eyes ringed the vicious mouth, and these regarded the men malevolently. The worm wriggled and pushed a little further through the hole, swinging its head back and forth, but it was clear it was not supple enough to make the almost 180-degree turn necessary to reach them.
“Ah,” breathed Calistrope when it became clear that they were safe.
“Thank the fates,” added Roli.
Ponderos grunted as the worm began to work its way back. “It knows we’re here now. It knows these tunnels too; it hollowed them out, after all. Sooner or later it is going to sidle up behind us and that will be that.”
“Then our course is obvious,” Roli replied. “We get out of here, back to the wasps’ nest.”
As before, Ponderos boosted them through the hole in the roof and they, in turn, hoisted the big man to the upper level.
Roli leaned out with his arm outstretched. “I can almost touch it from here,” he drew his sword and poked the tip into the grey papery wall of the wasps’ nest. “It’s all damp,” he said.
“Well yes. I expect it’s where the worm tore it open a little while ago,” said Ponderos.
“Well,” Roli became excited, “we could cut it open again and jump across, make it down through the inside of the nest—come out at the bottom.”
“Very good thinking. As soon as we damage the nest, it will be seething with angry insects.”
“No, no it won’t,” Roli was rather put out. “The guards are all on the outside, once they’re grown they never go into the nest again—well hardly ever. There are workers in there, nursemaids, caretakers, cleaners and the queen of course but she’ll be near the top.”