He woke, feverish, and plastered sky-moss over his wounds with hands that could barely hold it. He heard himself raving, and woke again listening for a voice that had just fallen silent. He fumbled for the light-box in his wallet. His hands were weak and sore, but he got the light-box out and managed to transfer a bit of moss from each compartment to the other.
He woke again knowing that he would live, and that he had passed into manhood by giving and receiving blows in battle.
There were two deep wounds in the back of his left hand, passing between the tendons and coming out at the palm. They were closed now, but the skin around them was angry for a finger's breadth. The wound in his other hand was shallower but more painful, a ragged tear slanting upward through the meat of his palm. There were puncture wounds in his chest, back, sides, and buttocks. The wound in his belly had closed; the skin all around it was red and hot to the touch. His eye was still swollen, but now he could see with it, and this, except for the nick on his leg that he had done himself, was all the tale of his wounds.
In time to come he would be proud of these scars, but he would always know that he had been sick with fear when he got them.
He was weak and very hungry. He ate some cheese from his wallet and drank more water, and presently vomited it up again, and slept. When he woke, still weaker, he ate again and this time kept the food down.
As time passed, he grew to dislike the sweet stench of his sickness. He undressed and bathed himself as well as he could, in the water from the jug, and felt a little better. He got up and explored the passage for a dozen ells in either direction, coming back to open the shield and drop his ordures into the dark world below. Go down, said the voice, but he was too weak to obey, and when he closed the shield again, the voice stopped. When he woke again, he walked a little farther, and the next time still farther, until he came to the end of the passage where it curved upward and became a steep ascending shaft, from which a faint current of air breathed in his face. He went back, ate, and slept again. When he got up, groaning with stiffness, he followed the shaft upward until after some thirty ells it broke into a larger tunnel. Lights came on in vast swooping arcs over his head as he rose, and the silent display was so gigantic that he nearly ducked in terror as he had done before.
He went back to the passage below, ate the last of his cheese, slept, and woke again. He was very hungry. He opened the shield; it was daylight below. Go down. And he must, to get food. He thought of leaving some mark in the sky so that he could find the place again; he reached for the thong that should have been around his calf, but it was not there, and he remembered that he had left them both in the demons' house. He took up the cord instead, and made a heavy knot in one end. Holding the cord, he opened the shield and dropped through. As he fell, the shield turned; he supported himself for a moment by his fingertips on the edge just before it closed, and pulled down all but the knotted end of the cord. As he let go, the shield closed on the cord, and Thorinn hung from it, then reached around and took a grip in the sky. He swung out and hung for a moment breathing and blinking in the glare. He saw the tree in the distance with its crown of branches and the dark bulge of the demons'
house between them. He was suddenly certain he could not get that far. He swung toward it in trembling haste until he was well over the tree, then let go and dropped.
The branches came up under him like a bed, and he was content to sprawl there, eyes closed, until his breathing was better. The tree below and around him was a tangle of limbs and branches, creepers, vines, and other plants growing all anyhow. He dropped to the next level where there were some red berries on a vine, but they were so bitter that one taste was enough. A little way below, he found a shaggy dark fruit like the one he had seen before, but not half so big; it was less than two ells long. He found a convenient perch and stabbed into it. Under the dry leafy shell was a skin of the thickness of two fingers, and under this a pulpy greenish-brown fruit. Having split the rind as far down as he could reach, Thorinn carved out a segment of the fruit and sampled it; it was at once sweet and tart, and made him avid for more. His hands were trembling. He cut out another section and ate that, and another, until his hunger was gone. Then he cut a larger piece, wrapped it well in leaves and put it in his wallet; and still what he left behind was enough to have fed a hundred men.
He climbed to the top of the branch and saw his way past the crown of the tree and the demons' house to the cord that hung from the sky. As he neared the house, he thought of the bundles hanging under the roof-tree, and was minded to go in and take a few, for they might be food, and he had nothing with him to eat but the fruit he had cut below. He leaped up onto the brown dome, but when he felt for the cut he had made before, he found it had been sealed up from inside. He made another beside the first, spread the edges apart, glimpsed the pole below, and dropped.
He landed on the pole and clung to it a moment, trying to hear past the beating of his heart. There was no stir below. He felt the cords around the pole, and began to pull up one bundle after another without troubling to open them, only cutting the cords and tying them together in pairs, in order to hang the bundles over the pole again until he was ready for them. When he had as many bundles as he could easily carry, that is to say, six, for the smallest was as big as his head and the largest four times that size, he began to think of his lost possessions, his leg thongs and the cloth which was all he had left of his treasures, except for some jewels in the magic jug. He did not include the box in this account, for it had betrayed him once and that was enough. He squatted on the pole looking down and listening. His eyes were now so accustomed to the dimness that he could make out a faint glow here and there. A vague bulk to one side must be the topmost platform, and remembering that this was empty, he dropped to it and paused to listen again. He heard the sound of faint steady breathing below. With sword in hand, he lowered himself to the next platform, and saw the bodies of demons lying sprawled all about him. By their size and number he knew these for the males; he saw their sharp sticks leaning in bundles against the wall. The next platform was that of the children and females, and below that the lowest platform, with nothing on it but baskets and mats. From this he dropped to a pole, and so to the bottom. The floor of the chamber was deserted, except for one old female who lay near the wall and did not stir. In the gloom, something hung from the lowest pole which at first he did not recognize: then he saw that it was the talking box. He was afraid it might speak to him, but it did not. He prowled around the wall of the chamber, turning over scraps of rubbish, feeling inside baskets and under mats. He found one of his thongs almost at once, lying as if dropped carelessly on the floor. There was no trace of the cloth, though he turned over every mat except the one the old woman was lying on. As he turned away in frustration the hanging box caught his eye, and in the dim light reflected from its side he saw a series of long scratch-marks. Had the demons hung the box there, then, to torment it in his stead? So much the worse for it... Still, if he took the box, he would be thwarting the demons of their pleasure. He approached and put his hand on the cord the box hung by, and only then realized that it was his other leg-thong.
He rose to the pole and untied the thong, then retied it as a carrying loop, and with the box on his back climbed to the top of the chamber again. The sleeping demons did not stir as he passed. Clinging to the crossbar under the roof, he thought of them sleeping peacefully. Bright light was what they hated; if he were to pull off the top of their house... but then the sound would awaken them. He touched the wall with his hand. Some of the woven fronds in the dome were new, but others were old and dry as tinder. Thorinn gathered up his bundles thoughtfully, dreaming of brightness. He leaped for the slit he had made and pulled himself through into daylight. Kneeling on the brown dome, he took the fire stick from his wallet and crumbled into it a few shreds of fiber pulled from the dome. One stroke set them aglow: he blew on them cautiously until a tiny pale flame leaped up, then tipped them out into a little p
ile of shredded fibers. After a few moments the flame caught, began to spread. Thorinn fed it with bits of brown leaf pinched off between his fingers, then with larger ones, then with whole strips carved out with his sword. A breath of foul air came up from the demons' den, making the fire burn more briskly. It popped, sending out sparks. Pungent whitish smoke billowed up. Bits of flaming tinder were dropping through the hole. Thorinn heard a shout of alarm below, then the tree began to shake. He cut a last strip, held the tip of it in the flames until it caught, then dropped it carefully into the blackness. He leaped to the topmost branches and from there swung out under the sky. Behind him gray-white smoke was spreading like a greasy cloud, and through it he could see the red glow of the fire like a demon's eye. He reached the hanging cord without difficulty, climbed up smiling, opened the shield, and let it close behind him. 8
“ ^”
How Thorinn was made captive by a flying engine that carried him deeper into the Underworld. When he opened one of the bundles he had taken from the demons' house, he discovered that it contained lumps of dried meat, tough and nourishing. He ate his fill, drank water from the jug, then wrapped the meat again and put it away. Next he set the magic box upright on the floor and looked at it in silence awhile.
"Box," he said at last.
"I am here."
"Well, what have you got to say for yourself?"
"I have nothing to say for myself."
"Then why did you betray me?"
"What does betray mean?"
"Why did you tell them to use the sword on me, instead of—" Indignation choked him.
"I did not tell them to use the sword on you."
"Don't lie!"
"What does lie mean?"
"Not to tell the truth. Not to say what really happened."
"I tell only the truth."
"What a lie! Didn't you tell them the sword was better than a stick to cut with?"
"Yes."
"And didn't you know they would use it on me?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, why did you do it?"
"Because they asked."
Thorinn sat back on his heels, confused and angry. "If it happened again, would you do the same thing?"
"Yes."
"Tell them about the sword, and let them kill me with it?"
"Yes."
"Well then, don't you see, I can't have you with me any more, it wouldn't be safe." Thorinn stood up.
"It would be safe."
"How's that?"
"If you told me not to tell them the sword is better than a stick to cut with." Thorinn squatted again, staring at the box. "You mean if I told you not to, you wouldn't?"
"Yes, I mean I wouldn't."
"Well—Suppose I tell you now never to do anything or say anything that will be bad for me. Does that mean you never will?"
"I never will."
"All right then," said Thorinn, "but I don't understand you. I don't care if you're a spirit or an engine, why should I have to tell you a thing like that?"
"An engine can only do as it is told," said the box.
"Do as I tell you, then," said Thorinn. After a moment he gathered his bundles together, slung them over his shoulder, box and all, and set off down the passage.
After a time the dark eye at the end of the tunnel suddenly blinked light, and Thorinn knew they had come to a shaft. Here he paused, for if the shaft went both up and down, he would have no choice but to go down it.
"Box, does that shaft go both ways?"
"Yes."
"Is there another shaft near here that only goes up?"
"What is near here?"
"Oh—within ten thousand ells?"
"No."
While he mulled this over, Thorinn set down his burdens, opened one of the meat packages and began to eat. Presently he said, "Box."
"Yes."
"You said that an engine can only do what it's told."
"Yes."
"But doesn't that mean that if I tell you to do one thing, and then later somebody else tells you just the opposite, you'd have to do what they told you and not me?"
"Not if you had told me not to obey them."
"Then if somebody asked you to tell them how to kill me, you wouldn't?"
"No, because you have told me not to do anything that would harm you."
"Are you sorry you did it before?"
"What does sorry mean?"
Thorinn tried to explain this, without much success, for the box did not know the meaning of "wish," and he had to explain that, and then "feeling," which the box could not seem to grasp at all. Finally it said, "Is being sorry wanting a thing to be different even though it has already happened?"
"Yes, I suppose so. Well, are you sorry?"
"No, because that would be senseless."
"How, senseless?"
"A thing that has already happened can't be made different. Therefore to want to make it different is senseless."
Thorinn was not content with this, and they argued the point a little longer, but neither could convince the other; the box would admit only that human beings could think in a way which was senseless if it pleased them, but that boxes could not.
"If I told you to think in what you call a senseless way, could you do it?"
"Yes, but then my thinking would not be good, and that would be bad for you."
"What about my thinking? Do you mean you think better than I do?"
"Yes."
Thorinn absorbed this in silence. "Box," he said presently, "you told me there were people at the bottom of the Underworld. Did you mean they are people like me, or gods and demons?"
"What are gods and demons?"
"Gods are—they are like men sometimes but they can take other shapes and you can't kill them. And demons the same but not as powerful."
"There are some people like you and some gods and demons at the bottom of the Underworld."
"Suppose I went there—could I steal some of their magic?"
"What is it to steal?"
"To take something that belongs to someone else."
"You could steal some things, and they would give you some things." Thorinn was silent awhile. "The engines you talked about—would they take me there and not harm me?"
"Yes, Thorinn."
"And then would they take me back to the Midworld?"
"Yes, Thorinn."
"Could one of them come here?"
"Yes, if you call it." The crystal lighted, and Thorinn saw a tiny picture of himself bending over one of the rings in the tunnel, pressing it down. The ring sank into the floor. The box went dark.
"If I do that, the engine will come?"
"Yes."
"But why didn't you ever say so before?"
"You didn't ask."
Thorinn opened his mouth and shut it again. After a moment he said carefully, "If you had told me about the engine before, it would have helped me. Therefore by not telling you harmed me, do you see?"
"Yes, Thorinn."
"Well, then, after this you are not to harm me in that way any more. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Thorinn."
He was about to turn away when the crystal lighted; in it he saw a drop of water hanging from the end of a tube. It dropped, and yet remained in the middle of the crystal, and then grew larger as if he were moving closer to it. "In a drop of water there are many invisible things," said the box. The drop had swelled now to fill the crystal, and Thorinn saw that there were tiny swimmers in it, some with many legs, some with none, but all transparent as ice. "These creatures are too small to be seen with the eye; yet inside them are other things smaller still." In the crystal, one of the swimming things had grown huge, and inside it Thorinn could see a pulsing swarm of other creatures. He was interested, but after a few moments he began to grow impatient. The box went on showing him smaller and smaller things, until it got to a cluster of lights turning slowly against
a dark background.
World and Thorinn Page 11