“Peter, old man,” a deep voice greeted us. It belonged to a tall, muscular, handsome fellow clad in a waistcloth and speaking in a very proper British accent. (He sounded, indeed, as if his education had been Etonian.) “Who is your guest?”
“Lone Wolf, this is James,” Peter said, still hanging his head low, as if observing some rule of etiquette.
Foolishly, I looked up. “How do you do? Peter only just told me of your loss. I’m so sorry. I hope it wasn’t anyone in your family.”
Lone Wolf stood a little straighter, as if I had said something slightly offensive.
“We are all family here,” he replied.
“Oh” was all I could think to say. Peter elbowed me, and I lowered my head, copying his posture as before.
“Tiger Lily was to be my wife. Our engagement, though not official, was understood. Now that union will never take place.”
I remembered Peter mentioning this name. I glanced over at him and saw a tear drop from his eye to land with a plop on the top of his foot.
“Welcome,” Lone Wolf said at last, and it was only then that Peter raised his head. I followed suit.
“Tiger Lily?” Peter exclaimed softly. His voice caught in his throat.
“It’s good that you came, Peter.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it. But I will miss her,” Peter said with a glint of excited anticipation. He now acted as if the sole purpose of our visit was to pay our respects at the funeral feast, yet I could swear that he knew nothing of this affair until he first saw the black feather.
“When did she die?” I asked in all innocence.
“She hasn’t yet,” snapped Lone Wolf. “She won’t die until tomorrow.”
I was utterly confused. “Has she been ill very long?” I asked with as much sympathy as I could muster.
“Not at all,” Lone Wolf scoffed. “She’s in excellent health. We would have postponed the death if she hadn’t been up to it.”
I could tell that he took great offense at my question, and thought me rather impolite and stupid. Perhaps he had been Eton-educated.
He turned and led us toward the largest tent of the village, where the funeral feast was in progress.
* * *
The tent was packed with between forty and fifty natives—every member of the tribe, I later learned. We were politely welcomed, and invited to sit cross-legged on the tent floor in the middle of the congregated company. I was placed beside a large round woman with an enormous bosom and very bad teeth who introduced herself as Blue Bonnet. Her English gave no hint of any native lilt but rather smacked of Shoreditch. (I here make no attempt to reproduce her poor grammar or odd dialect; suffice it to say that had I met her on the streets of London I would have been wary of her company.) She was indeed as gentle a woman as I have ever known, and she soon cleared up any confusion about the sad circumstances we had stumbled upon.
The chief of the tribe, Great Panther, had been blessed with many daughters, the youngest of whom was the loveliest. He named her Tiger Lily, after his favorite flower. (There was an abundance of these on the island.) His wife, Sunflower, had borne him no sons, or at least none that lived. But when she was carrying their latest child and her birth pains began, Panther made a promise to the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death that if the child were a boy, and if that boy lived, Panther would sacrifice his most precious possession in gratitude for sparing the boy’s life. Panther owned many rare and beautiful seashells from his travels (which presumably encompassed the dozen or so islands of this Never-Archipelago), and he would have been happy to part with any or all of them in exchange for his son’s life. But when the boy (for it was a boy) was born healthy, and still thrived after a month, Panther asked the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death which of these precious shells he desired, and in answer Panther was given a dream. In that dream the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death told Panther that the God would be satisfied only with what was promised, and what was promised was Panther’s most precious possession, which was not a seashell or an entire collection of seashells. It was Princess Tiger Lily. And so, being a man of his word (which was true of all members of the Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini tribe), Panther was to take Tiger Lily on the morrow to the lip of the Deep Well, where she was to descend to the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death, who would take her as his bride and keep her until her bones had turned to dust.
After hearing this sad tale, I found it difficult to eat any of the delicious fish stew Peter and I were served. I thought instead of my mother and of my father, both of whom had been summoned by the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death. But my mother had drowned in her bath and my father had been devoured by sharks, and these circumstances, while horrible, were quite different from those of a lovely young maiden in the pink of health who was to voluntarily offer herself to the God in less than twelve hours. She sat not twenty feet away from me, flanked on one side by Great Panther and on the other by Lone Wolf. All three were served by Sunflower, her mother, who could not cease weeping and who carried Little Panther, the infant who had caused all this sorrow, in a sling at her bosom. I could not take my eyes off the princess, she was so beautiful in her stately resignation.
She was—I blush even now as I think of her—the most striking creature I had ever laid eyes on. Her skin was a shade of toasted almond, touched with a rouge of coral on cheek and lips. Her eyes were almost too large—just the right size, really, in which to drown oneself. Her teeth— Oh, it pains me to go on. And so, gentle reader, please picture the first love of your life. She was as beautiful as that.
After the meal (eventually I managed to eat more than my share) those who knew Tiger Lily approached to say their farewells. Peter, who couldn’t bear saying goodbyes, refused to face the girl and instead led me outside the great tent to a smaller one reserved for guests; there we bedded down for the night. Usually loquacious at bedtime, he said not a word.
I could not sleep at all. After an hour or so of tossing and turning, as Peter snored softly beside me, I arose and crept outside. The village was quite still. Skirting the few campfires yet burning, I walked to the cliff edge of the village and onto one of the four rocky “fingers” that extended out over the ocean. I took a few steps along the ridge of this finger, then sat down to contemplate the night sky.
I pondered Death, and how he could be a presence even here, on this Never-Isle where Time seemed to have stopped. In theory, I supposed, Peter and Panther and Tiger Lily and all the island residents might be thousands of years old, or older. Yet, even frozen, Time did advance here, in the passing of hours and days. There was birth (witness Daisy, witness Little Panther) just as there was some kind of Final Exit (witness Tiger Lily on the morrow, not to mention my father and all the men who had died in our recent sea battle). Was death here always sudden? How could that be? For if birth, which is a gradual process, was possible, then in its own way Death—the slow sickbed sort of death that touches most residents of London—must also be an expected event. I wondered then if Time had not so much stopped here as it had slowed. In some ways I was older today than I had been yesterday, if only in experience, and so in time, in a very very long time, I too would grow old, as would Peter, as would Daisy, and we all would—eventually—die.
“It’s a gorgeous night, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind me.
I turned round and saw a slim figure silhouetted against the campfires of the village. It was Princess Tiger Lily.
“May I join you?” she asked.
“Please, yes, I would be honored,” I said and shifted to make room. She allowed her legs to dangle over the high cliff.
“You’re Peter’s new friend,” she declared.
“Yes. I’m James, Your Highness. He saved my life.” I instantly worried that my mention of “life” would stir unhappy thoughts in her.
“He’s a brave boy with a good heart,” she said. “He’s at times too much of a boy. He’s always entertaining, but he doesn’t know how to handle—well—other emotions very well. He was afraid to say goodbye to me.”<
br />
She sounded like a woman of wisdom, of careful observation learned from the experience of a long life. This, of course, was probably true; she may have been even older than Peter, in Never-Isle terms. But it was the “womanness” of her wisdom that struck a chord within me. My mother, at her best, might say things like this; still, there was a heat in Tiger Lily’s words that made me aware of things about her that went beyond mothering. She wasn’t as delightfully womanly as the mermaids, of course, but still she stirred something within me, something that superseded mere affection.
“I’m glad you came with him,” she added.
“Why? I’m a stranger.”
“But you’re new to this world, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“I like that. There’s something about you that still sees things. Too many people here—mostly the men and boys—forget that there is more to life than just the Now. For that I’m glad of my leaving. My father and Lone Wolf and most of the males in the tribe are suddenly thinking about things they don’t usually pay the least bit of attention to. Even with all that, they’re sleeping soundly tonight, dreaming of food or the hunt or some new adventure. No one is taking the moment to look at the stars and think about what it all might mean. Like you.”
“But I don’t know what it all might mean. Nor do I understand why your father doesn’t simply say no. Toss a few shells to the Great-God or whatever it is and be done with it.”
“He’s given his word. That is more precious to him even than I am. And I must say I’m proud of him for that.”
“But you could run away, couldn’t you? And there’s nothing your father could do about it. If you weren’t available and the God still demanded something precious, he might still hand over a very nice shell.”
She smiled. “Thank you, James. That’s a very clever solution. But I’m a little too duty bound for my own good, I admit. I don’t think I could live with myself if I ran away from the village. I could certainly never face Father again, not to mention Lone Wolf.”
“But if they love you, don’t they want you alive, Princess?”
“Life is no condition for Loving, James. More often than not it makes Loving more complicated. And vice versa.”
I thought about this for a moment. It made me sad. The person I loved the most, until now, was my mother, and it wasn’t easy keeping her in mind nearly every moment of every day. I worried that if loving a living someone was more of a challenge, how could I ever manage it? I didn’t like to think about this, and so I changed the subject.
“Are you afraid, Princess? Of dying?”
“A little. I try to think of it as Curiosity more than Fear. I like adventure too, and Death will be an awfully big one.”
In the silence that followed I studied her face. Desperate, I plumbed for Hope.
“You’re going to descend into something called the Deep Well, yes?”
She nodded.
“Are you sure there’s a god down there? ‘Who-Is-Death’? I mean, maybe there’s nothing. Maybe you’ll spend a damp morning in the well and then you’ll simply come back up.”
“No one who’s descended in the past has ever returned. We-Who-Are-Above listen, and we hear screams, and sometimes a great roar, and then there’s silence again. Granted, most of the Voluntary Descents tend to be old people or the occasional Disappointed Lover, so there’s little expectation for a triumphant return. We did send the Great White Father down, but we don’t like to speak of that.”
“The Great White Father? Who’s that?”
“We don’t like to speak of it, James,” she sternly reminded me. “Besides, he didn’t return either, which was all for the best.”
“Still, whatever is down there may not be immortal.”
“It’s always been there, at least according to the songs. They used to toss people down, on occasion, to make the God happy, but even when they did he never laughed, so I don’t think happiness was an achievable outcome. Anyway, they stopped doing that long ago. They just pray now, and on occasion throw him a few rutabagas.”
“But if he—or it—is mortal, it could be conquered. Why doesn’t someone go down with you? Lone Wolf—he looks like a proper warrior. He could fight the God, and perhaps even kill him. And then you and he could live happily ever after. Or something like that.”
“Yes, I’ve wondered about that too but you see—” She stopped, as if she knew a secret she was afraid to spill. “I shouldn’t say.”
“What? I won’t tell.”
She took a deep breath, then sighed. “Lone Wolf is afraid,” she whispered. “As is my father. As are all the men. Even Peter. They’re all afraid of the Great-God-Below-Who-Is-Death.”
“But being afraid shouldn’t stop anyone. I mean we’re all afraid of Death. I certainly am.”
“Yes, but they’re also afraid to admit it. Anyway, they won’t go down. I’ll have a bow and a quiver of arrows with me, and I’m a very good shot, so there’s some hope.”
I looked away for a time, studying the lowest star. Then I took her hand.
“I’ll go with you.”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and I knew right away that, even if it ended badly, this was the best and bravest decision I had ever made in my short life.
* * *
I returned to the tent before dawn, and waited beside Peter until he awoke. I told him of my plan.
“Are you mad?” he exclaimed.
“Probably,” I told him with a smile.
He thought about this for a moment, his brow furrowed in worry, as if he were searching for a jolly ending to Hamlet. Then he reached down to his liana belt and pulled out the blunt stick that was his “everyday” knife.
“Here,” he said, holding it out to me.
I almost laughed. Instead I took it and put it into a pocket. “Thank you, Peter,” I told him.
And then he smiled, as if all problems—his and mine and the world’s—were solved with that one generous gesture.
* * *
I stood beside Tiger Lily at the lip of the Deep Well, which was in the middle of the village and which looked exactly as any well should look—a circular pit lined with stones disappearing into darkness—with this one exception: a stone spiral staircase rimmed its interior, leading downward. There was little ceremony before the descent, all goodbyes having been said the previous night. Great Panther and his wife were present, and a few of the women. Most of the men and boys, including Lone Wolf and Peter, were nowhere to be seen.
Panther took the news of my offer to accompany his daughter with indifference. He shook my hand in proper English fashion, embraced Tiger Lily, shed a few tears, and turned away. Even he could not bear to watch our departure.
The steps were quite narrow and precipitous, and without a railing. Tiger Lily insisted on preceding me, since it was herself who was promised. She carried a full quiver of arrows and a long bow. I followed behind her, Peter’s stick-knife lying uselessly in my pocket. I carried a torch, which shed light on our descent. Our progress was immeasurably slow, becoming all the more difficult the lower we spiraled, for the stone steps were in poor repair farther down and eventually transformed into a sort of narrow mudslide. Handholds carved into the wall were all that prevented our falling the rest of the way. Tiger Lily was nimbler than I, and was forced to pause more than once in order to allow me to catch up.
The air, as we descended, grew quite chilly and the stones themselves slimy and damp. Approximately fifty feet down we became aware of an odor—a smell redolent, I imagined, of an open and occupied grave—which grew stronger the lower we went and soon became overpowering. Death was no stranger to this pit. At one point, forty minutes or so after we left the surface, I knocked loose a rock which tumbled into darkness and eventually hit water with a loud splash. As soon as the sound of that splash met our ears, an even louder sound followed: a ROAR, deeper and darker than any I had ever heard before. This was not like Barnaby’s roar, or those of the Big Cats in the savanna; no, thi
s was the roar of a veritable monster, and I could feel my very bowels weaken.
“Allow me, please,” I said to the princess once we reached well-bottom. A low underground tunnel lay before us. “Let me go first. I have the light, which might blind him, if he’s not used to it.”
Out of the tunnel flowed a stream of water that looked to be several feet deep. Ducking our heads, we followed a path upstream into the tunnel. The walkway edging the stream was lined with the bones of the long dead. Fresher corpses, mostly of fish but, shockingly, a few of merfolk (whether of men or maids I could not tell), floated on the surface of the waterway. We were approaching the monster, and I, somewhat foolishly, reached into my pocket to clutch Peter’s stick-knife.
Quite suddenly we were in a cavern, in the center of which lay a small lake. Stalactites dripped water. Other than that there was no sound.
The shore of the lake held more bones, more rotting bodies, and in the middle of the lake there appeared to be an islet, a mound of dirt and sand humped above the waterline. The light of the torch was not strong enough for me to guess its distance or its size, let alone see if any Great-God lay waiting there for us. A large log sat in the water just offshore, and I wondered if this were the boat on which some Never-Isle Charon ferried his customers. But where was this god? I turned in a circle, looking everywhere for the enemy.
We seemed to be quite alone. The water of the lake was crystal clear, and I could see no sign of life either on its surface or in its depths. I searched high and low, ever alert for the presence of the owner of the great ROAR.
“Hello!” Tiger Lily called. “I’ve come to fulfill my father’s promise!” Her voice echoed. There was no reply.
Of course! Panther’s dream was but a dream, a vestige of the superstition that ruled this ancient tribe! There was no Great-God! We had answered the summons, and, finding nothing, we could return to the surface with lightened hearts! We were saved!
As my eyes made one final sweep of the cavern, curiosity took charge. I wondered what was on the islet. Could this possibly be the location of the treasure marked on my father’s map? I would return some other day and explore, I decided. Perhaps I could indeed use the log as a boat to straddle and paddle across the lake. I wondered for a moment how the trunk of such a large tree could have found its way this far underground. Was there another ingress? It was then that I noticed a ball of whiteness situated on the log’s starboard side and, thinking it some sort of cave fungus, I inserted the torch into a crevasse in the cavern wall and approached.
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