After several more attempts, each ending in the same way, to the vast entertainment of the children, he concluded that there must be some reason for the wingmen's tails, although he could not see what it was, and he gave up the idea of flying.
Spring was now well advanced, the crops growing in the fields, the orchard trees in blossom, scenting the air with a powdery piercing sweetness. Drifts of petals rose into the sky when the wind blew. On five successive mornings the wingpeople stood outside the town to watch them; they sang and played music on bone flutes, then swarmed back into the towers.
Several times more he saw the river whipped by the wind into slender waves taller than a man, and he never ceased to marvel that so light a breeze could make the waves so tall. In a way he understood the symmetry of it, that because the water weighed so little the strength of the wind against it was greater: but what if the water weighed nothing at all—how high would the waves be then?
Caged and restless, he spent days wandering in the forest, searching the cliff wall for crevices, staring at the cataract. Somehow he must find his way through it—but then what? He was already too many thousands of leagues from the Midworld to hope ever to get back afoot. The moment he came to any shaft, the geas would force him to go down. It was frustrating to know that he had killed demons and survived many perils, and yet he could not escape the power of that one old man up in Hovenskar. Sometimes he thought he felt Goryat's eyes on him wherever he went: or perhaps not Goryat, but someone even more powerful, some old god crouching at the center of things, with his hands and eyes everywhere.
What if he gave himself no choice but to go up when he came to a shaft? If some engine were to carry him up as irresistibly as an engine had carried him down...
He came back to the thought of the engine the box had shown him, the bladder filled with a gas lighter than air, a basket suspended beneath it, himself in the basket, rising... Clouds were lighter than the air, else they would fall, and so was the smoke from a fire. The bladder could be held open above a fire so that the smoke went in; thus it would rise, but then how to make it come down again? In the normal course of things smoke never came down. Perhaps a hole could be pierced in the top of the bladder, with a cover over it; remove the cover, the smoke escapes, the bladder descends. One morning, surrounded by children as usual, he experimented with a bladder taken from the body of a horned forest animal he had killed the day before. The children watched in fascination as he kindled a fire of twigs, then set to work scraping the bladder clean, drying it, and tying off one end with a bit of cord. He spread the other end open with two crossed twigs and held it above the little fire.
"They want to know what you are doing now," the box said.
"Tell them I want to see if the smoke will make the bladder rise." The box spoke with them briefly and then said, "They say they will make it rise for you if you like."
"Tell them to be quiet." The bladder was growing plump in Thorinn's hands; it trembled, moved; he released it and it ascended slowly an ell or two over his head before it gently capsized in the air and came down again. The children were fluttering around in their excitement, ignoring the light drizzle that had begun to fall. One came to him and grasped his hand earnestly, speaking into his face. "What is she saying?" he asked.
"She is saying that you are a magician, the greatest in the egg. She asks that you bring her pet bird back to life."
"Tell her I know no such magic."
The box spoke; the child, with a sulky face, moved away. Thorinn was looking at the limp bladder. Evidently what it needed was a weight to keep it upright, so that the smoke could not spill out and be lost. After some thought he bent a twig into a circlet and tied it securely with cord; this served to weigh down the bottom of the bladder as well as to hold the mouth of it open. This time he used a smaller fire and held the bladder closer. The bladder filled very satisfactorily with smoke and rose a dozen ells in the air, to Thorinn's delight and the awe of the children; but after a few minutes it took on a wrinkled appearance, sagged, and began to descend. When he picked it up it was flabby; nearly all the smoke had escaped.
He tried again, and this time tied a cord tightly around the neck of the bladder above the ring as soon as it was filled; the bladder rose as before and stayed up much longer, but it came down again just the same. The children were as disappointed as he was.
He examined the bladder carefully for holes and found none; it must be that the smoke was escaping through the tied-off portion at the top, and perhaps through the bottom as well. This was a disappointment; if the smoke could not be kept in the bladder longer than that, the larger version he had in mind would be of no use even to escape from the cavern, let alone to get back to the Midworld. He untied the neck of the bladder and looked at it glumly. The inside of it was moist to the touch, although it had been dry before: had the smoke turned to water when it cooled? Then all the children wanted to feel the bladder too. One of them tugged at his arm and spoke earnestly.
"He says the fire should be attached to the bladder, then the bladder will keep going up," said the box. Thorinn opened his mouth, then closed it again. With a charred twig he sketched on the side of a stone, while the children clustered around to watch: here the bladder, here the ring to hold the neck open, and here, suspended from the ring, a basket for the rider. Now, inside the basket, a fire pot lined with clay or earth: the fire ascends with the bladder, and as long as it burns the smoke cannot cool and turn to water; therefore the bladder stays aloft. But the basket can carry only so much wood to burn; when that is gone, down comes the bladder.
Thorinn fed more twigs to the fire to keep it from going out in the light drizzle. The air shimmered over the embers; flakes of white ash rose, wavered, and fell, yet there was no wind. Thorinn struggled with a thought: suppose it was not the smoke at all, but the air heated by the fire, that made the bladder rise?
At all events, he must begin to plan now for a bladder big enough to carry him and his possessions: how big must it be? The box was of no use: "That depends on the weight of the bladder and the lifting power of the air." When Thorinn asked what the lifting power of air was, the box replied, "That depends on how hot it is, and how hot the air around the bladder is."
"How am I to find that out?"
The box showed him a picture of a slender rod of glass, with marks on it and a thread of silver inside.
"This is an engine for measuring how hot a thing is."
"But where am I to get such an engine?"
"I don't know, Thorinn."
So it was evident that he must do it himself, and in truth he was rather glad of that, for when he asked the box's advice it always told him more than he wanted to know and more than he could understand, whereas when he worked a thing out for himself, no matter how difficult it was, at least when he was done he understood it.
That afternoon he made weights by cutting a stick into little pieces of equal length, and by attaching one after another to the neck of the bladder, determined how much it could lift when it was filled with hot air. He also found out by accident that he could measure equally well and much more easily by attaching a long cord to the bladder: then it rose until the lifting power of the air inside it exactly matched the weight of the cord which it raised from the ground.
From these studies Thorinn concluded that the height of the bladder ought to be at least eight times his own height in order to bear him and his belongings aloft. That meant a bladder sixteen or seventeen ells tall, much bigger than he had imagined it would be. He was tempted to make it smaller and therefore easier, but if it did not raise him, the work would be all for nothing. Because the bladder must bear its own weight as well as his, he wanted to make it as light as possible, and for this reason he gave up his first intention of making it out of pieces of leather or cloth; instead, he pieced it together out of the thin, parchment-like stuff the wingpeople used for interior walls and screens. Aided by Sven and Ilge, he cleared a space in one of th
e largest workshops and took what he needed. Presently the wingpeople brought more wall-stuff to replace what he had taken; when he needed more, he took that as well.
One morning he came upon Sven and Ilge in the workshop trying clumsily to fit a whittled stick into the hollow of a reed. Between amusement and sympathy, Thorinn explained to them through the box that both shaft and plunger must be perfectly round, or the fire stick would not work. Their grey-furred little faces were so earnest and trusting that he could not leave it at that, although he was impatient to get on with his own task. He found a good rod of hardwood in the wingmen's stores, for a plunger, and showed them how the shaft must be made in two halves carved to fit around it, then slowly tightened as the plunger was turned between them with wet sand to grind the pieces to a perfect fit, and finally glued together with an end-piece shaped to leave a hollow for the tinder. He left them toiling earnestly and clumsily at the task; he doubted that they could accomplish it, but at least they were happy in trying. He made his bladder in six sections shaped like a fish, each twenty ells long and nine ells wide. Under his direction, the children joined the pieces that made up each section with fish-glue, and hung the sections up to dry in the well. When that was done, Thorinn brought the sections back into his workroom, which in the meantime the wingpeople had begun to use again for their own purposes: he cleared out their benches, jars, and other rubbish, spread the sections on the floor, and began gluing the edges together. It proved exasperatingly difficult to make the flat pieces form a round shape without wrinkling or buckling, but after many failures he got the whole bladder assembled. He painted it all over with fish-glue, dried it again, and at last carried it outside for trial. Children trooped out after him. It was a still gray day. Thorinn unfolded his bladder and hung it from a cord stretched between two trees, with the neck about three ells from the ground. He made a ring of a bent sapling and secured it inside the neck. Beneath it he laid dry brush and branches in criss-cross layers, and kindled a fire. Flames curled up; smoke poured into the open neck of the bladder, and presently it began to fill. To Thorinn's disgust, a moment later there came a patter of raindrops in the trees and on the suspended limp bulk of the bladder. A gust of wind blew sparks slanting away from the fire; then the patter increased to a stuttering roar; water swept across the clearing in veils and torrents. Thorinn retreated to shelter until the rain stopped; by that time the fire was out.
Thorinn sent the children for dry wood. They found it without delay; the ground was dry only a few hundred ells distant. Thorinn built another fire and lighted it. After about the same interval, it rained again and put the fire out.
Thorinn saw then that whoever ruled the world, whether it was gods, demons, or even engines as the box seemed to think, they did not want him to inflate his bladder today. But he was loath to take it down, dry it and fold it, and put it away indoors, only to take it out again tomorrow. What if there were a roof over the bladder and the fire, to keep the rain off while the bladder filled? Such a roof would take him the rest of the day to build, and then it would be in the way when the bladder rose... But why not use the bladder itself as a roof?
He cut a pole a little less than three times his height, measured the bladder with it, cut it again, and used it as a measure to cut another the same length. He trimmed and whittled the ends carefully to roundness, so that they should not puncture the bladder. Leaping up with the first pole through the open neck, he managed to get it crosswise at an angle; then hanging from it and pulling the fabric of the bladder down, he adjusted it until it was level. He did the same with the second pole, crosswise to the first. Now the bladder was spread at four points to its full width of about seventeen ells, although it was hollow between. Thorinn built a third fire.
As he had more than half expected, it rained again. Now the spread bulk of the bladder sheltered the fire, although the rain smoked and streamed all around it. The hollow places between the poles began to fill out; watching from his place under the tree, Thorinn thought he saw the bladder straining upward. Exultantly, he took a step forward. While he was still in midair, there came a shattering crack and a white glare. Thorinn tumbled into the underbrush, blinded, stunned, and deaf. When he picked himself up again, the children's cries were receding in the distance and the bladder was in flames. Yellowish smoke was pouring from the fire; presently it went out. The rain continued, turning the fire into a soggy pile of ash. What was left of the bladder hung by its cord from a single tree; the other was split and slivered at the base, as if it had been struck by a mighty hammer; bits of the white wood lay scattered all over the clearing.
Thorinn sat looking at the ruins of his work. He felt a sudden elation, and realized after a moment what it was about: he knew a way to get up through the cataract.
"Box, if it should rain here so long that the valley is flooded, will the waterfall keep on flowing or will it stop?"
"It will stop, Thorinn."
So it must be; the rulers of the world, whoever they were, could not be expected to take such care of their subjects, only to let them drown in a flooded cavern. Now his way was clear.
Only two panels of the bladder had been ruined by the lightning, which had run down them like a crooked river, burning away a channel nearly a span in width and leaving the edges blackened. Thorinn made new panels, fitted them into place, glued and dried them.
In one of the workshops he found a basket adequate for his needs: it was round, nearly two ells broad, and two spans deep. For a firepit he brought clay from the riverbank and formed it like a deep dish in the center of the basket, leaving a space half an ell broad all around for himself and his possessions, including the firewood and kindling he must take with him. The basket had four handles by which he meant to suspend it; for this purpose he knotted together a rigging to fit over the inflated bladder. He attached a long cord to the top of this rigging, and eight shorter ones at the bottom which he brought together and fastened to the four handles of the basket. He also cut some pieces of wall-stuff to use as patches in case the bladder was damaged.
Now he had to consider how to defend himself if he should be attacked by an engine in the tunnels. He filled bags of flimsy paper with pitch and bound them to the tips of the stoutest arrows he could find. The bags burst and splattered when they struck a target, but he was not yet satisfied. What he wanted was something to entangle the limbs of the engine. He thought of sticky cords bursting out of the bag—but if they were sticky, what was to keep them from clinging together?
He began again, using fishing lines which he coated with pitch and then coiled inside the bag. But the bursting of the bag did not carry them far; something else was needed. He thought of springes, and began to make small circlets of sapling branches, tied together with the thinnest thread. He fastened stone weights to the ends of his fishing lines and coiled them so that the weights lay against the ends of the circlets where they were joined. After many trials he discovered how to mix the pitch with just enough water and fish-glue to make the lines fly apart when the thread broke. In the end he had in each bag a complicated construction of three sapling-rings, each with its coiled and weighted cord, each set in a different direction. When he fired it at a tree, the sticky lines whipped out in all directions and tangled themselves among the branches.
He prepared ten of these pitch-arrows, and in addition took a quiverful of the ordinary kind. Now he was almost ready. "Box," he said, "show me what way the engine brought me down into the cavern."
In the crystal appeared the outlines of a slanting tunnel. It forked, and one passage went steeply up while the other continued at the same pitch for a little space before it turned upward and became a vertical shaft. A tiny dot descended this shaft, moved down the slanting tunnel, and disappeared.
"Show me where the water runs."
The first fork and the stem of the Y filled with shimmering blue. "And that second shaft?" Thorinn asked, pointing. "Where does it go?"
The outlines drifted down
ward in the crystal. The shaft rose through a vast space and continued upward. At the far end of this space there were other shafts.
"What is that, another cavern like this one?"
"It is a cavern smaller than this one, and it is different in other ways."
"Are there men in it?"
"No, only engines."
Thorinn frowned. "Show me these engines."
In the crystal, he was looking into a cavern full of confusing shapes. An engine drifted by, then another. They paused, touched the side of one of the huge shapes that rose around them, then went on, for all the world like bees gathering pollen. They did not look at all like the engine that had captured him before.
"Box, will they harm me?"
"No, Thorinn."
"And that shaft in the ceiling, where does it go?"
The view traveled upward, the lines shrank together, and he was looking at another maze of passages, shafts, and tunnels. "Will it take me back to the Midworld?"
"Yes."
How much of this could he believe? The conviction had been growing on him that the box was not to be trusted, and that if it had another chance to betray him it would do so. Well, he would see. Early the next morning, before the children were awake, he collected all his belongings, including the tightly wrapped bladder with its basket, and set out for the upper end of the cavern He built himself a little shelter of branches near the cavern wall, within sight and sound of the cataract, and lay there that night. On the following day he began cutting poles for a shed ten ells long, eight high, and four wide. He planted the poles on rising ground above the river, and lashed other poles to them to make a peaked roof. He thatched the roof with bundles of branches to the thickness of half an ell. In the middle of the space covered by the shed he dug a firepit, and on either side he stacked dry wood from the forest. Then with his sword he cut through the trunks of four trees, forming a rough oblong around the shed, at a height of fifteen ells. He notched the stumps and cut the logs into pieces six ells long, which he raised with much toil, using a rope and a tripod of poles, and set into place at the ends of the oblong; he notched these in turn, and now cut more logs fourteen ells long, which he laid across the structure to form a solid flat roof above the peaked roof of the shed; and with leather thongs filched from the wingmen's workshops, he lashed the whole structure firmly together. All through this work, which occupied him fourteen days, the air was cloudless.
World and Thorinn Page 16