The sunlight penetrated the water to a remarkable depth; I could see for hundreds of feet in every direction. There were rainbow-hued fish and colorful coral; long strands of seaweed waved up at me from the bottom, where Josephine and her sisters lay curled around one another, dreaming watery dreams. But there was no sign of Daisy.
I surfaced and formed a reconnaissance plan.
The lagoon was bordered on one side by a tall limestone cliff, and now I swam to its base before diving again. I planned on making a complete underwater circuit around the edge of the lagoon, hoping that this might be the best way to seek Daisy out, if indeed she was still here. But before I had advanced more than a dozen feet I spied, perhaps ten feet below the surface, what appeared to be a hollow in the cliff face. Curious, I swam toward it, only to be met on the way by a very excited Daisy.
She was delighted to see me. How can a crocodile show delight? you might ask. She swam around my head, nipping at my ears, my nose, then snapping at my lower lip and drawing blood. A Daisy kiss? I laughed to myself: my fourth female conquest! She turned and headed in the direction of the hollow. Was she asking me to follow?
I trailed behind her. She kept turning and looking back, as if to make sure that I was taking her lead. I began to worry about my breath, but I figured that I had perhaps another forty-five seconds, possibly a minute, of comfort remaining, and so I trusted my instincts while giving in to curiosity. On arriving at the hollow I discovered that it was an entrance to a narrow tunnel in the rock. What boy could resist?
My lungs were about to explode.
I raced to the surface, where I gasped for air. I should return to Peter, I thought, if only to tell him where I was headed. Perhaps he would join me. But curiosity and Daisy’s urgency got the better of me. I sucked in several deep breaths and kicked under the surface once again.
Daisy was waiting for me by the tunnel entrance. On seeing my approach, she turned and entered. It was then that I made a courageous—and possibly very foolish—decision. My hips could barely fit through the opening. Once inside, would I be able to turn around in order to return? Daisy disappeared into the darkness ahead of me. I followed.
The tunnel was lined with rocks and coral. Their sharp edges cut me as I advanced. I wanted to cry out in pain, but I could not open my mouth for fear of losing air. I began to panic.
I could not go on. My lungs would not hold. I tried to turn around, but it was impossible. I could only move forward. Daisy paddled ahead of me. Then it occurred to me: how could I see her? If this was an underwater cave, what was the source of its light? Furthermore, how could she breathe? I knew nothing about a crocodile’s ability to hold its breath, if that is in fact what it did, but she had been underwater much, much longer than I. Did she know of something that I didn’t, of some ray of hope that lay ahead? I could do nothing but follow her.
Gradually the light seemed to grow brighter. It must be my dying brain playing tricks, I thought. I could no longer see my reptilian friend. What had become of her? I gave one or two final kicks, pushing onward, then turned onto my back in order to see the heaven to which I was about to ascend. My lungs were screaming, and the time had come for me to end the agony. Swimming with my face pressed to the rock ceiling, I had no choice but to suck in my watery Death. An awfully big adventure indeed! Peter, alas, would never know what had happened to me. Peter, alas, would forget me by tomorrow.
I opened my mouth to take in water, and filled it instead with the sweetest air I had ever breathed.
My face had found a pocket of atmosphere trapped under the rock, a treasure chest of oxygen acting as a buffer between limestone and lagoon. Was it luck or instinct that made me flip onto my back? No matter. This pocket, but several inches in height, was enough to renew my hope. Ah, but what now? I inched forward a bit, still sucking in air as though I could never get enough of it. And miraculously the pocket continued onward, expanding, increasing in height. My goodness, there was now nearly a foot of open space above me! I pushed forward with my hands, dragging my body along the sharp rock ceiling, razoring my chest and thighs with a dozen tiny cuts. The air pocket continued to climb and grow until—God be praised! A miracle!
It was a small cave, perhaps twenty feet high, lit from above by a hole in the rock ceiling. I looked around. A shoreline! If my strength allowed, I might be able to pull myself out of the water and onto damp earth. I lowered my feet in preparation for an enormous effort of will, and they met bottom. Lo! I could stand with ease.
Once I was out of the water, I lay on this underground beach for several minutes, gasping for breath. I heard a soft peep, and turning my head I discovered Daisy sitting on a rock, either cheering me on or laughing at me.
It seemed that since we had last met she had learned to talk. She peeped again. “I’m coming,” I said, “just give me a moment. You’re as impatient as Peter.”
She waited a few moments more. Carefully I stood. Rivulets of blood ran down my chest and legs. Daisy lapped the blood as it puddled at my feet. This seemed to me only fair and rather eased my guilt: after all, had I not dined quite recently on every bit of edible crocodile imaginable?
Once she had quenched her thirst, she turned and scampered deeper into the cave. Again I followed. Cracks in the ceiling let in sunlight, so that I was never in danger of losing my way. We walked on and on, seemingly for miles. At one point, thinking she must be tired, I picked up Daisy. I had no pocket in which to carry her (my trousers being back on the shore with Peter), so I placed her on top of my head. She rode there for a while, and after a time—seeing, I suppose, that I was headed in the right direction—she curled up and fell asleep.
I couldn’t help but wonder: was this path indeed leading to some satisfying end? Why would any sane human trust a crocodile to lead him anywhere? What if I eventually became lost, to die in a maze of underground tunnels? But then again, what choice did I have, other than to turn around? Finally, exhausted, I entered what appeared to be an enormous grotto but dimly lit by the vanishing sun. I’ll lie down, I thought, just for a moment and close my eyes. I gently removed Daisy from my hair and stretched out on the rock, nestling her in a small cavity in the floor beside me. The next thing I knew I was awakened by a thin shaft of daylight. I sat up and looked around. Darkness was everywhere, but for this blinding shaft.
Daisy peeped a good morning. She seemed content to remain where I had placed her. Was this room our final destination?
I decided to explore. The air was quite damp; I sensed that there was water here, perhaps the source of the underground stream. As I moved along the wall, farther and farther from the opening through which I had entered, a thought—a fear, actually—began to gnaw at me. I pushed it away, refusing to believe until I had proof. And soon enough I did: my hand came upon something protruding from a crevasse in the wall—a torch! One of several left by Lone Wolf and the other young men when I returned with them down the Deep Well! Daisy had led me along a back-door pathway to the very cavern in which Tiger Lily and I had met our nemesis.
The monster was dead, I knew, but were there others like her? (And it was female—a discovery proudly announced by Sunflower when she and the native matrons butchered the carcass.) We had sighted no mate when we came back for the carcass. But now, alone in the dark, I felt a presence. The monster’s husband, larger than the she-dragon, lay licking its jaws at the edge of the water—I was sure of it. Naked as I was, I had not even Peter’s blunt stick to wield as weapon! I was a dead man.
Daisy had led me here, to the crocodile’s underground home.
Daisy had led me, quite possibly, to my death.
As I calmed my breath, I tried to think of what to do. I could run, of course, out of the cavern and up the tunnel to the bottom of the well, but if there were a giant lizard here he would be on me as soon as he heard me scrambling across the rocky shore. I assumed he was sightless like his wife, and had been for many years, making his blindness an asset; whereas my blindness was new, and made me all t
he more vulnerable. I then recalled that the native men on our descent had left some flint and steel on a ledge nearby, to be used if one of the torches were accidentally extinguished. Fire was a weapon and my only recourse. I stretched out a hand and found the ledge. And yes, there they were! Happily, in my days at the camp, Tiger Lily had instructed me in the intricacies of using flint and iron pyrite to start a flame. (I had watched Peter do it many times, though he had no patience as an instructor.) The steel, I knew, was even more effective, but would it be enough? How damp was the torch? Would the pitch in which it had been dipped still be effective?
I struck flint against steel, holding both near the torch’s head. I feared that the sound would draw the creature to me, but I had to risk it. I struck a spark. It had no effect. I struck again. Another spark. And lo! the pitch took the bait, as it were, and in a moment the torch was ablaze.
I wrenched it from the crevasse and held it high, hoping to spot the enemy before he attacked. There was the lake. There was the islet in its center. There were the she-monster’s bloodstains on the rocks, her scratch marks in the sand where she had writhed in her final death throes. But there was nothing else—no dragon, no enemy, not even so much as a bat to be feared, save for my overwrought imagination.
Why had Daisy come here? Was she in search of her birth mother? Was the monster that I had slain—oh horrors!—my little Daisy’s ma? Daisy’s sandy incubator had been located far, far away—could the leviathan have left the cavern by the very path I had followed in arriving? Were there other paths? Once outside, she might have swum to Long Tom, quite a long journey but perhaps one dictated by Nature or Habit, and deposited her load of eggs. Something, of course, had fertilized those eggs, and perhaps someday I would meet Daisy’s father, but he certainly didn’t seem to be here. (Perhaps he was off in the depths of the ocean, eating mermen.) At any rate, Daisy had returned to her mother’s lair, and now she had brought me here, possibly to introduce me to the fierce dame. (I had heard of similar tales involving cats and kittens, and remembered reading of astonishing bird and mammal migrations. Why should I doubt that a reptile could do this too?) Following this logic, did Daisy know, in some inner core of her primitive brain, that I had murdered her parent? Had eaten her mother? Yet she seemed happy in my company. She peeped her joy again and again and again.
And then I wondered: what had brought the mother here? I remember reading as a child the myths of Rome and Greece, of Arthur and the Norse gods. Wherever a treasure lay buried, a monster inevitably guarded it. Was this the location indicated on my father’s treasure map? I recalled the crudely drawn creature that resembled a dragon. Was it meant to be a crocodile? Of course! Here lay the treasure my father, and so many others, had sought!
I was hungry, but I knew a way out: the Deep Well would easily bring me back to sunlight and Tiger Lily. On my first venture here, I had vowed to return one day and explore. Well, here I was, returned! Why not take this opportunity to uncover a treasure, quite possibly the Never-Isle’s “deepest” secret?
* * *
The water was frigid. I waded in quickly, then swam the thirty feet or so to the islet. I was shivering terribly when I emerged, and so went to work at once. The islet, as I had guessed, was more or less a mound of sandy soil. The mass of it was no wider than fifteen feet across, and now I walked to the center of the mound, fell onto my knees, and with my bare hands began to dig. The soil was wet and easy to move, and within minutes I was in it to my elbows. The light was not good here. I couldn’t bring the torch across the water with me and had returned it to its crevasse. Consequently I was dependent on its distant ambient light, and trusted more to the feel of things as I dug and sifted. The soft soil wedged itself under my fingernails and in between my toes. But that’s all I found—wet sandy soil. No treasure chest, no ingots of gold or pouches of diamonds—until my thumb bumped against something round and thick and solid, which I pried out of the dirt. Another something came along with it, a chain of sorts, and I quickly discovered—by feel, mind you, not by sight—that I had uncovered a pocket watch. I held it to my ear—it was still ticking! I dug further. Nothing more. Nothing but sand, wet and useless.
I was shivering from cold, and so decided to return to shore and thence to the lovely warm sun of the Never-Isle. I could come back another day, with a pick and shovel and a better source of light. Holding the watch above the water, I paddled one-armed back to where I had entered the lake. The going was slow, and I thought that my blood might very well turn to ice before my feet touched ground again. Yet I gritted my teeth and paddled on. Dripping wet, I knew I had to get to the surface before I collapsed from the chill. I said my farewell to Daisy, who peeped in return—she clearly had no desire to leave this wretched place—then headed back up the Deep Well’s winding stair to the native village above.
It occurred to me only as my head was about to appear above the lip of the well that I had left my trousers back with Peter and the mermaids. I was completely naked.
What to do? I was always somewhat shy about things like this (unlike Peter). I suppose the natives would not have cared a whit; nevertheless, I made sure that no one was in sight before I scampered to some nearby bushes. I soon heard a woman singing to herself, and peering out of the fronds that covered me, I spied Blue Bonnet gathering banana leaves.
“Pssst. Blue Bonnet,” I whispered.
She looked around, and when she saw my face her eyes lit up. “James! You’ve come back!”
“Yes, I—I need a favor. I—I’ve lost my—my trousers. Could you do me a kindness and please—bring me—something?”
She laughed at this. The old women of the village were known for cracking ribald jokes that made even the bravest of the braves blush with shame. She said something to me which I will not repeat, dear reader, except to say that it had to do with the large banana leaves she was gathering, and then she handed me one. I asked for several more, and a rope, please. Still laughing, she undid her own belt and passed it to me along with a few more leaves, and thus I fashioned a sort of skirt that for the moment served its purpose. I emerged from hiding, thanked Blue Bonnet, and then quick as I could I hastened to pay my respects to Great Panther before seeking out my fiancée. Several of the natives stared, astonished at my dress.
To my surprise he was not pleased to see me. Nor was Tiger Lily, who sat at his feet.
“James, what are you doing here?” she exclaimed.
“I—I found a secret way. I’ll tell you about it over dinner. In the meantime— What?”
I could see the alarm on her face. Great Panther jumped in to explain.
“You shouldn’t be here, lad. Lone Wolf is angry, jealous, and insulted that he has lost the hand of the princess to an outsider. A boy without a shadow, he complains, but I think that’s beside the point. At any rate, he demands a meeting.”
“Well, of course I’ll meet with him,” I replied. “But he won’t change my mind.”
“You don’t understand, James,” Tiger Lily explained. “By ‘meeting’ he means ‘battle.’ In this case a battle between rival suitors. To the death.”
“Oh.”
“It’s his right, because I threw him over for you.”
“Oh.” All I could think of was how much older and bigger and stronger Lone Wolf was, compared to my fourteen-year-old musculature.
Panther continued: “We were hoping to hold him off until you returned for the wedding. It would be Bad Form to kill a bridegroom on his wedding day. But of course, any time before then . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“I could hide, and then sneak away tonight. He doesn’t need to know I’m here.”
“Too late for that,” said a voice behind me. Turning, I saw Lone Wolf standing in the entrance to the tent, his bronzed muscular arms folded resolutely across his broad muscular chest. He smiled.
* * *
It was decided that we would meet two days hence on the savanna at noon. We each were allowed up to two weapons of our own c
hoosing, although the two must “act as one.” A bow and arrows, for example, would fit the description. I could, of course, choose to ignore the challenge and hide in Peter’s Underground Home, but that would mean not only that I would lose Tiger Lily forever but that she would then have to marry Lone Wolf against her will. (That, at least, was the tradition, and Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini took pride in their traditions.) If, however, Lone Wolf and I met in battle and I was killed defending her honor, she could choose another suitor, or even decide to keep her maidenhood. Her free will and happiness depended on my showing up for the “meeting,” and either beating Lone Wolf to a bloody pulp (which was absurdly unlikely) or being horribly murdered while whispering my undying love for her with my dying lips.
* * *
I returned home to Peter the following day. He seemed remarkably unconcerned about my absence, and absolutely thrilled (once I told him) about the forthcoming combat to the death.
“But, Peter, I might die!”
“To die will be an awfully big adventure,” he answered. This phrase was becoming something of an annoying cliché.
Tink was the only being who evinced sympathy. “She’s very worried,” Peter remarked that evening over a pipe. “You know she loves you, and she’d rather see you married to that terrible girl than have you lying dead in a puddle of your own gore. She’ll deal with the girl later.”
“Thank her for me,” I said rather glumly, “I guess.”
“Thank her yourself,” he said. “She’s right here.”
“Thank you, Tink,” I repeated, even more glumly.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep, of course. I tossed and turned, and it was only then that I remembered the watch I had found on the islet. Tiger Lily had given me a pouch in which to carry it home, as there was no buttonhole in my banana-leaf skirt through which to thread the fob. All I could think of, at any rate, was my impending death—watches be d—mned—but now that it was only hours away, I could do nothing but sigh deeply and turn my thoughts to anything at hand that might be distracting.
Hook's Tale Page 11