by Dave Butler
“One day we will run water from here directly into all my people’s homes,” the rajah said. “I have mixed feelings about that—coming to the well forces people to meet each other. But think of the time it will save. And any time a woman or a man doesn’t have to spend coming here to collect water can be spent on running a business, or playing with a child, or writing a poem. Imagine the lives of my people then! It will be nearly as magnificent as the tractors!”
“ ’Old on,” Bob said. “I believe I just ’eard you say ‘as magnificent as the tractors.’ What, are these tractors an ’undred feet tall?”
“No!” the rajah said. “They’re very small, so all my people may have one, if they wish. And with this very small tractor, a farmer can plow and plant her field in a fraction of the time. And with the rest of her day, she can teach her children to read, or go dancing, or admire the stars. Do you not find that magnificent?”
Bob scratched her head.
Charlie looked at the pipes. “These draw water out of the well?”
The rajah nodded. “And the aquifer beneath, the water underground that is connected to the well. Marvelous invention, though, is it not? Even this pump saves my people the trouble and danger of going down into the well.”
Charlie was confused. “But there’s so much rain! Surely now is the time when your people don’t need to come here for water!”
“You might think so,” the rajah said. “But the rain is so violent and lasts so long that it washes mud into wells and cisterns, and where there are pipes it shatters them. So some of my people can gather water on their own rooftops or in barrels, but many of them still come here.”
“This is just the pump, right?” Charlie asked.
“Yes,” the rajah agreed, “and you’re here to see the well. Come with me.”
The rajah led Charlie past the pavilion, both of them raising their umbrellas against the rain. Charlie looked over his shoulder to see his friends following. The bodyguards brought up the rear, with the captain’s brother lagging behind, last of all.
On the far side of the courtyard they passed through another brick arch, and then Charlie stopped in amazement.
What he was looking at seemed to be half pit and half palace. Like an inverted pyramid, the pit descended seven stories until it reached the level of the water. At each story, a square walkway circled the entire pit, and from each walkway down to the one beneath it descended multiple staircases.
Passages were bored horizontally into the earth at every level, and through their openings Charlie saw arches, pools, and verandas, as well as shallow canals leading the water from the main well along into the passages and their chambers. At whatever level the water lay, it would be surrounded by a shaded palace for lounging, bathing, and collecting rainfall.
“You could fit the entire library in that well!” Jan Wijmoor gasped.
The whole thing was built of brick and stone, and Charlie saw elegant statues everywhere of gods and goddesses he didn’t know: dancing men with elephants’ heads, four-armed men, women with skulls for heads, princesses seated on opening lotus flowers, muscular men with flaming spikes of hair and long, drawn-out tongues, snakes with human faces, and more. Water flowed down over the steps, and also out along stone rainspouts that turned into elephants’ trunks or snakes or other features, channeling the rainfall down into the bottom of the pit, where brown water churned. The most prominent of these gargoyles were four enormous stone swans, sculpted into the uppermost tier, which leaped out from the center of each of the four walls, spreading their wings as if trying to meet in the center.
“This is called a stepwell,” the rajah said. “So you see, it’s a little more than a hole in the ground.”
“The ’eck,” Bob said.
“How far down does it go?” Ollie asked.
“It is hard to say for certain.” The rajah shrugged. “I’ve never seen the well when there wasn’t water in it. To my knowledge, no one alive today has ever seen the well when it was completely empty of water. Thirteen is a fortunate number for Sikhs, so if my Sikh forefathers dug this well, I would guess it to be thirteen levels deep.”
“But?” Charlie asked.
“But this well is older than Sikhism, which after all was born only a few centuries ago. And besides, I’ve seen it with fifteen levels exposed to dry air, and a large pool of water yet in the center. One hundred eight, on the other hand, is an important number to my Hindu subjects. It stands for all the great teachers and teachings of their faith together. So if their forefathers dug this well, I might guess it to be one hundred eight levels deep.”
“But?” Charlie asked again.
“But unless the walkways become ridiculously narrow, I don’t think the stepwell is large enough to have one hundred eight levels.”
“ ’Ow many levels do you reckon it ’as, then?” Bob asked.
“Some number,” the rajah said, smiling, “between fifteen and one hundred eight.”
“And the Pushpaka chariot is down there at the bottom?” Charlie stared at the water. It was brown and turbulent, thrashed by the rain, but also by water streaming down the steps into the well. “The Pushpaka vimāna?”
“I’ve been told this all my life,” the rajah said. “I’ve heard old women and men swear that in dry seasons, when the waters are at their lowest, they turn golden. I tend to believe it’s true.”
Charlie stepped to the edge and looked down. “Bob, can you wind my spring?”
He felt a little self-conscious that the rajah and his men were watching, but Charlie steeled himself. If Bob could openly be a girl now, Charlie could openly be a…mechanical person.
“Amazing” was all the rajah said. “You are even more magnificent than a tractor, Charlie.”
“There you are, mate,” Bob said.
“I guess the good thing is that I won’t have to swim back up,” Charlie said. “Even underwater, I can just walk up the stairs.”
And before anyone could say anything else, he took a running start along a stone elephant’s trunk and threw himself like a cannonball into the water.
Splash!
Charlie sank.
As the water closed over his head, he had the last-minute thought that the well could be bottomless, and he might now sink forever and never be found. Bottomless wells didn’t exist in the real world, of course, but what if Ollie was right? What if passage through the gate of the Library Machine had brought Charlie into a land that only existed in a story?
In stories, there could be bottomless wells.
And how were Charlie and Thomas going to get to Russia? Without the Library Machine’s ability to transport him instantly, he was back to riding in steam-trucks and stowing away on cargo ships.
He kept his eyes open.
At first he saw nothing but brown murk, and his eyes stung from the grit.
But then he sank enough to get past the cloud of sediment. Looking around, he saw a dark cloud of mud above him, like a roiling storm. To all sides of him, walkways and stairwells slid past. He wished he knew how many had gone by, but he must be fifteen or twenty levels down already, and sinking steadily.
And then the last stair and the final walkway passed, and the walls disappeared. Charlie still fell, and there was light coming from below.
He looked down, and was astonished at what he saw. This had to be the vimāna, but it looked nothing like a chariot. It looked like a palace, like a pyramid, only the vimāna’s basic shape was circular rather than square.
And it glowed.
Charlie found that by waving his arms against the water and pointing his toes, he could direct his descent. He wiggled and squirmed, steering for the top of the pyramid. As he got closer, he saw that the peak seemed to consist of a small open platform surrounded by four enormous swans. The birds were sculpted of metal and leaped out from the apex of
the vimāna in four directions, quartering the flying palace.
Did the stepwell’s similar swans announce the presence of the vimāna below?
Bong! Charlie struck the metal floor in the center of the four swans, bounced once, and came to rest lying on his back.
From that position, he looked up—no light. No sign of the entrance by which he’d come to this watery underworld. No cloud of murk, no stepwell. Just darkness.
And then something moved in the gloom.
Charlie stood, wishing he had some better weapon than the broken fragments of his bap’s pipe in his pocket. If he’d carried the unicorn horn or the cold-iron knife, he’d at least have something to stab with.
But then if he died down here, those would be lost with him. It was better that Thomas had them.
He saw the movement again, a flash of tail like that of a long fish or a sea serpent. And then another, and then more.
Was he surrounded by a school of fish, circling the vimāna?
The creatures came closer, and Charlie staggered backward a step.
They had the long tails of serpents, but from the waist up they looked human. They wore coats that might once have been a dark blue uniform of some sort, but most of the fabric had rotted away, leaving them all shrouded in blue strands like shirts made of spider’s web. Their eyebrows were raised with excitement; the whites of their eyes showed. Their mouths were open, their teeth long, yellow, and sharp.
They circled Charlie, too many to count.
One of them broke from the school and moved toward Charlie. It was a woman, and as she came closer, Charlie saw that her skin was a dark emerald green, and it glowed. She opened her mouth, and to Charlie’s surprise, he understood the words almost immediately.
“Are you the promised helmsman?” The language she spoke was close to whatever the rajah and his bodyguards used.
“What are you?” Charlie ignored her question. His own voice sounded far away, muffled by the water.
“We are nāgas.” The first a in the word nāga was longer than the second. The tip of a forked tongue flickered out from between dark green lips to lick the nāga’s teeth. Oddly, her voice was completely unimpeded by the water, as if she were speaking in ordinary air.
“Are you a folk?” Charlie asked, trying to delay answering her question. He was afraid she wouldn’t like his answer. “Do you live down here?”
“We do not live at all.” The nāga smiled, and through the green skin of her face, Charlie suddenly saw a skull. “When we lived, we were humans like you.”
“Not like me.” Charlie tried hard not to step backward, knowing it would only bring him closer to the nāgas circling at his rear. “I’m not a man.”
“A boy.” The nāga smirked.
“Yes. And no.” Charlie enjoyed the confusion on the nāga’s face, but he forced himself to focus. He needed a way back to the surface, preferably with the vimāna, before his mainspring unwound. He didn’t want to get trapped in some riddle game. “What brought you here?”
The nāga gestured at the gleaming pyramid on which Charlie stood. “We sailed the Pushpaka vimāna for Lord Ravana. But when the helmsman was slain and the chariot sank, we died.”
“And you’re waiting for another helmsman? Someone to fly the vimāna?”
“We’re trapped, dead inside the vimāna and beneath it. What you see isn’t our flesh, but our spirits.”
Charlie refrained from commenting on just how horrible and ugly those spirits were.
“Yes?” he prompted the nāga instead.
“Before leaving us, Lord Ravana promised he would send us another helmsman. A helmsman, Lord Ravana said, a flyer who could raise the vimāna from the deep, freeing us.” The nāga lowered her chin and smiled, which only made her teeth look longer. “Are you the helmsman?”
Charlie had no idea how to fly anything, other than the flyer Heaven-Bound Bob had built, which had been destroyed on the slopes of the Welsh mountain Cader Idris. “I have flown,” he said cautiously.
The circle of swimming nāgas came to an abrupt halt, so instead of a ring of wiggling tails, Charlie saw a circle of green snake-people, all baring their teeth at him. And extending long, razor-like claws in his direction.
Charlie nodded.
He examined the top of the chariot. Two rods rose from the floor to his shoulder height, each ending in a golden, glowing ball. They reminded Charlie of the control rods he’d seen on steam-carriages, including the steam-carriage that had carried Queen Victoria over Waterloo Bridge during her Jubilee celebration.
Only these rods didn’t seem near a steering wheel.
Also, they seemed fixed in one position, riding perpendicular to the floor. He didn’t think the rod would move if he touched it.
He was also afraid to touch it, because doing so might make his ignorance obvious.
“The steering mechanism,” he said to the nāga. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement designed to lure her into saying more.
“The steering mechanism,” she said back.
“Steeeeeeering,” all the nāgas wailed together. It was an eerie sound, with a strange interval between two long notes.
In the echo of the nāgas’ word, Charlie thought he heard his name.
He cocked his head to one side and frowned at the nāga. “Did you hear that?”
“Are you the helmsman or not?” the nāga asked. She licked her lips. “Because if not…we are hungry.”
“Chaaaaaaarlieeeeeee!”
“No, I definitely heard something.” Charlie looked up and saw an object that looked like a dark disk, falling slowly toward him.
A dark disk and, in the center of it…boots?
“Wait one moment,” he said to the nāga, and he jumped.
Charlie didn’t have to breathe, but he was too heavy to be much of a swimmer. Still, exerting his legs, he managed to leap far enough to reach the object—
which turned out to be a large brass bell, dropping through the water.
Clinging to the side of the bell, Charlie examined it. The bell was the size of a large closet or a small room. It sank slowly into the water because it was being lowered on an iron chain of enormous links. Two tubes, each as big around as Charlie’s arm, attached to the upper surface of the bell and climbed, winding around the iron links.
Booted feet protruded from the underside of the bell, and Charlie knew the boots.
They belonged to either Ollie or Bob.
“Charlie!” He heard his name, muffled by the water. The voice was definitely Bob’s.
Charlie rapped on the outside of the bell three times, and then pressed his hands and mouth to it to call to Bob. “I’m here. I’m going to guide you down. Hold on!”
The nāgas stared, but Charlie ignored them. By pushing off the bell, he got down to the vimāna’s platform before it did, and then he grabbed the bell’s lip. As it fell, he tugged hard and dragged it to the center of the vimāna’s platform, so that Bob’s feet came down right beside the golden rods and the bell settled on the backs of the swans, enveloping both Bob and the steering mechanism. That left a space about three feet tall between the top of the vimāna and the lip of the bell.
“What is this?” the nāga speaker hissed, and crept forward.
“The helmsman,” Charlie told her. “Hold on.”
He dropped to all fours and crawled under the bell. When he stood, he found that the inside of the bell was full of air, and Bob was sitting on a cushioned seat. She reached up to pull down a speaking tube from the wall of the bell and said into it, “I’ve reached the bottom, and Charlie’s here.”
Then she held it away from her mouth and Charlie heard the answer, in the rajah’s voice. “Wonderful! Tell us when to pull you up!”
“What is this thing?” Charlie asked.
“A divin
g bell,” Bob said. “Apparently, it’s what the rajah ’ad stowed on those other elephants. ’E expected we’d be using this all along, an’ was a bit surprised when you just up an’ jumped in.”
Charlie examined the inside of the bell. “One tube for speech. Another for breathing. Seats for two divers.”
“Do you know you’re leaking, Charlie?”
Charlie looked down at himself. Where his body had been pierced in various fights, he now leaked water. He grimaced, but there was nothing he could do about it. “Did Ollie not want to come with you?”
Bob’s face was flat. “ ’E did, as a matter of fact. I told ’im not to bother. I told ’im I’d need the second seat for my mate Charlie when we came back up.”
“You know Ollie’s your friend, right?” Charlie felt ridiculous even saying the words.
Bob growled. “Yeah? So my friend knew my biggest secret, an’ let me go on pretending, an’ making a fool out of myself? Is that what friends do, Charlie? They yumiliate each other like that?”
Charlie looked at his feet, dark outlines on the glowing metal platform of the vimāna.
“What’s all this, then?” Bob changed the subject. “Two poles ’ere, an’ I’m standing on something shining.”
“I think this is it,” Charlie said. “The Pushpaka vimāna. And outside there are…well, ghosts, sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“Well, they’re ghost…snake-people. With big teeth. I think they used to be the crew of this vessel, only they’re dead and cursed, or something. And if we don’t fly the Pushpaka vimāna, they’re going to eat us.”
“Well,” Bob said. “That ain’t friendly, but it’s much of a piece with the ghouls, innit? An’ then there was that dog on Cader Idris, too. A monster wants to eat me? Bring it on, my china.”
She stepped forward to the two rods and took them in her hands, gripping the poles. She pushed, and the rods didn’t move.
Charlie waited.
She pulled on the rods, and still nothing.
Charlie whistled a few notes.