Ariane hadn’t bubbled up in his tub in the middle of the night. She also hadn’t phoned, and he’d checked his e-mail that morning, discovering nothing but the usual spam.
Wally couldn’t figure out how anyone could fall for the obvious scams that flooded e-mail boxes. Everybody wants something for nothing, he thought. But TANSTAAFL. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Everything costs something. It’s just a question of how much you’re willing to pay for it.
He stole a glance at Major. The software magnate appeared to be asleep, head tucked into the corner of the seat, mouth slack, breathing softly. What’s Major willing to pay for what he wants? Wally wondered. What’s Ariane?
Or more to the point, he thought, what are Major and Ariane willing to make ordinary people pay...people like my sister?
He wondered how Flish was doing. She’d be in the hospital for a few more days. He wondered if he’d see her again.
He wondered how she’d feel about it if he didn’t.
He tried to put that rather morbid thought out of his head and concentrate on the landscape outside. They flew past a tiny village whose name Wally missed as the sign flashed by, though he thought it said something about an Abbey. Moments later they turned off the secondary road onto a route that barely deserved to be called a road at all. Unpaved, rough and rutted, it ran so close to the trees on either side Wally thought if he rolled down the window he could probably grab the branches. They were moving much more slowly now, but still the car rocked and bounced so much it worsened his headache and unsettled his insides. He swallowed hard. Hope we get there soon, he thought. Be a shame to throw up all over this nice black leather.
Ahead he saw nothing but the tall green-and-brown fence of the forest, broken occasionally by looming walls of grey stone. When he looked back, everything was blotted out by the cloud of dust marking their passage. If it had been raining, he suspected the road would have been thick, impassible mud. But it was dry, dry, dry. Not much for Ariane to work with, even if she’s here, he thought. But then they rumbled across an ancient stone bridge and he looked out and saw a broad river, winding between limestone cliffs.
Ten minutes later, they rolled to a stop in a clearing. A Renault SUV sat in front of the kind of trailer you’d see outside a construction site, and two smaller cars were parked near a couple of metal-sided prefabricated huts and a green portable toilet.
As the Mercedes pulled in behind the Renault, the door of the trailer opened and a man emerged. A little on the short side, a little on the rotund side, and a lot on the bald side, he wore a dapper grey suit and a huge smile. He came around to Major’s side of the car, swung open the door, and stepped back with an expansive sweep of his arm. “Monsieur Major, welcome!”
Major climbed out and offered his hand. “Dr. Beaudry?”
The man shook his hand vigorously. “Oui. And may I say, monsieur, it is a great honour. A very great honour.” His English was excellent; Wally had no trouble understanding him at all. “The Ministry is thrilled by your interest. And I do not think you will be disappointed.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Major.
Wally got out of his side of the car and stared around, trying to figure out where they were, and what this well-dressed Frenchman was doing in what looked like a construction camp. “I have always been intrigued by antiquities,” Major continued, “and I confess the tale of the discovery of this cavern –” Wally’s interest was piqued – “has captured my fancy.”
“Oui, yes, a wonderful discovery! Three schoolteachers, spelunking on a weekend in a tunnel, just about to leave. But then, ahead in the helmet light, a flash of colour...quite remarkable. Had they left even two minutes earlier, these paintings would still be unknown to us.” Dr. Beaudry spread his hands. “But with the discovery comes responsibility. They are very fragile. If we do not protect them, they could be lost forever. We have done what we can, and we will do more, but resources are limited. Your support would....”
“Of course, of course,” Major said. “And I certainly have every intention of supporting your work. But you understand I can’t make any firm commitments until I have seen the paintings myself?”
Wally finally made the connection: caverns and paintings. Cave paintings? He felt a surge of excitement that had nothing to do with Excalibur. Cool!
Dr. Beaudry nodded vigorously. “Mais certainement!” He gestured behind him, off to the left. “If you will follow me?”
Wally took a deep breath as they crossed the clearing. The air smelled of pine and dust, a smell that instantly made him think of vacations in the Rockies. You’d think French trees would smell different, he thought.
The scientist led them to a set of stone steps carved into the lip of the cliff. They descended those, and then turned right, onto a narrow path. Wally kept close to the cliff face; the far side of the path fell away into nothingness, a sheer drop all the way to the pointy tops of pine trees far below. As he looked out over the forest he paused, hand on the rock wall, feeling dizzy for a moment. Major glanced back at him and Wally straightened and continued the descent, the dizziness already fading.
Beyond the pines was another ridge of limestone, and as they went on down, Wally caught a glimpse of water through a gap in that ridge and guessed it must be the river they had crossed earlier. Eventually they descended below the level of the treetops, and a few moments later followed the path off the cliff and into the forest. After about twenty metres it led them to another clearing, nestled in a kind of box canyon formed where the cliff they had come down jutted out to join the ridge closer to the river. At the far end of the clearing, close to the rock face, squatted a blue tent, surrounded on three sides by a chain-link fence. Two beefy men in grey uniforms sat on lawn chairs just inside the closed gate, which they jumped up to open when they saw Dr. Beaudry and his guests.
Wally, jet lag dogging his footsteps, trailed a good five metres behind Rex Major as they approached the fence. Major had eyes only for the tent, gaze locked on it as though trying to see through the blue nylon walls. But as Major strode ahead, Wally slowed still more, suddenly conscious of something odd.
Every mile they had driven on the dirt road, every step they had taken on the descending path, had raised a cloud of choking dust. The whole region seemed gripped in drought.
So why, then, were there patches of drying mud and even a few shining puddles of water covering half the clearing?
A freak rainstorm? Wally thought. Or maybe they haul water from the river, and their water tank burst on the way up. But only a very freakish rainstorm could wet such a tiny portion of the forest, and only a very large spill of water could wet so much of it.
Wally could think of only one other reason there might be water out of place near the cavern. He raised his head and scanned the silent forest. Nothing moved; even the birds seemed to have been discouraged by the unseasonable heat.
But whether or not she was there, silently watching him walk up to the cavern with her archenemy, or whether she was long gone with the second shard, or whether she was even then in the cavern, of one thing Wally was certain: Ariane had arrived.
She couldn’t have retrieved the shard, he thought. Major says he would know.
Unless she has, and he does know, and he just hasn’t told me. His suspicion rushed back. What if that was his plan all along – to use me as a hostage again, to force Ariane to give him the shard?
But no, that didn’t make sense. If Ariane already had the shard, she wouldn’t still be here, and in that case, why would Major bother coming? Wally didn’t believe for a second he was really interested in ancient cave paintings.
He glanced at those out-of-place puddles of water, and felt a twinge of anger. If Ariane had already been here, then she really had set out to retrieve the shard on her own, without waiting for Wally to arrive.
But nipping at anger’s heels came anxiety. If Ariane had made it this far, and the shard really was in the cavern just ahead, why hadn’t she r
ecovered it yet?
Wally scanned the surrounding woods a second time. How would Ariane react if she saw him with Rex Major, not as his hostage, but apparently in cahoots?
Serious though the situation was, his mouth twitched. Cahoots? Does that mean I’m turning into a...a minion?
His smile faded. Or maybe a lackey.
He shook his head wearily. He was too tired, too jet-lagged, and his head still hurt too much for him to think clearly. I’m not a minion. I’m not a lackey. I’m just...confused. Ariane may have abandoned me, but I haven’t abandoned her. If she’s here, and she needs help, then I’ll help her. I have to.
Major had already gone through the gate with Dr. Beaudry. Wally hurried to catch up, reaching the flap of the blue tent just as it closed behind Major. He batted the nylon out of his face and stepped into the dim, stultifyingly hot interior.
Both Dr. Beaudry and Major were taking orange jumpsuits down from pegs on the tent pole. Wally glanced around but didn’t see any more. “Where’s mine?” he asked Dr. Beaudry.
The Frenchman looked discomfited. “I am sorry, but Ministry regulations...no minors are allowed into the cave...it is very dangerous....”
“The boy stays with me,” Major said, not as if he were angry, but just as if he were stating an incontrovertible fact. “Find him a jumpsuit. Please.”
Dr. Beaudry opened his mouth as if to protest, seemed to think better of it, and silently opened a trunk at the foot of one of the beds and pulled out a third jumpsuit, this one blue. It was two sizes too large, as were the steel-toed climbing boots he was given next, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of selection. Wally pulled on a belt festooned with hammers and pitons and clips, then topped his spelunking ensemble with a helmet, complete with lamp. His head almost rattled around inside it, but he pulled the chinstrap as tight as he could and, feeling like a little kid playing dress-up, followed the two men out the back flap of the tent and to the cavern’s mouth. Major stopped, reached out, and flicked a switch to turn on Wally’s helmet lamp, then turned back to the entrance, a vertical opening in the rock face, just wide enough for the men to squeeze through. Wally slipped through much more easily onto a level floor of dry stone, and tilted his head back to look up, his light revealing slabs of limestone forming a V-shaped roof seven metres above him. He wondered how the spelunkers had recognized the cave entrance for what it was. He was pretty sure he would have just walked past it, thinking it nothing more than a shadow.
He looked down instead of up, and saw that the floor extended only about ten metres, ending abruptly in darkness. They moved forward until they stood right on the lip of a sheer drop-off. Wally flashed his light around. Looking up, he saw that the roof had sloped down until it was only a metre or so above Rex Major’s head. Wally ran his helmet lamp over it; it continued to slope for as far as he could illuminate it. He peered cautiously over the edge of the cliff and saw a pale blue light where the roof appeared to meet the floor. If there were a path deeper into the cavern, it would have to pass beneath that giant slab of rock. But it didn’t look to Wally like he wanted to be beneath it. He looked up uneasily, thinking of the tonnes of rock above their heads. What exactly was holding it up?
Dr. Beaudry noted his glance. “This was not the original entrance into the cavern,” he said. “This part of France is seismically active. The original entrance was in the next valley, the ancient bed of the river that now lies behind us. At some point an earthquake brought a landslide down over the entrance our cave-painting friends would have used. Perhaps that same earthquake altered the river’s course. For millennia the cavern may have been completely sealed. But then another earthquake shifted things again, creating this opening...and down below, a tiny, tiny crack through which we can once more reach the complex of caverns the ancients knew.”
He pointed to the top of a folding ladder that dangled into the depths, anchored at the top by two pitons driven deep into the rock. “This way. Be careful climbing onto it – it can be tricky to get your footing.”
Wally gave the sloping rock above him another uneasy glance, rather wishing Dr. Beaudry had not told them about the local landscape’s tendency to shift without warning, but then he sighed and moved forward. Dr. Beaudry helped him over the edge. Wally was glad he didn’t have more than the normal fear of heights. Or enclosed spaces. Or being crushed. Or buried alive. Or...
Stop it, he ordered himself. He felt with his foot for one of the flat metal rungs of the ladder. The thing seemed to have a life of its own and strongly objected to his putting his weight on it, always wriggling away just when he thought he had his foot in position. Eventually it stilled and he was able to step down on it. After that it was just a matter of carefully descending, gripping the sides of the ladder so tightly his hands hurt, always making sure he didn’t move the higher foot until the lower one was firmly on the next rung.
Halfway down he froze as dizziness swept through him and his head throbbed. Not now! He closed his eyes and held still, and the moment passed. Shaken, he resumed his descent. At the bottom he stepped off, turned sharply, and pressed his back against the rock face, breathing hard. The cold blue lamp hung on a collapsible aluminum pole, its light gleaming off the huge slab of the roof, which met the floor seven or eight metres from where he stood. He still couldn’t see how they could travel any farther. But then, peering around into the darkness, he saw that the floor sloped down to his right...and maybe fifteen metres away, just at the limit of the light from the pole lamp, he spotted a black crevice between the rock of the roof and the rock of the floor.
Not a very big crevice, though. Certainly not tall enough to walk through.
Uh-oh.
Dr. Beaudry, once he’d joined Major and Wally at the bottom of the cliff, confirmed Wally’s suspicion. “Now, we crawl,” he said cheerfully. “I will lead. Then the young man, then Monsieur Major. D’accord?”
“Okay,” Major said.
They walked over to the opening. It was even smaller than it had looked from a distance. Dr. Beaudry dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into it. Wally looked at Major. “Go on,” Major said. “I’ll be behind you if you run into trouble.” His mouth quirked. “I have considerable experience with being confined to small spaces. At least this will be for only a short time. It’s less pleasant when it lasts for centuries.”
Wally cringed at the thought, and decided not to think about it. He took a deep breath, lowered himself to his hands and knees, and crawled after Dr. Beaudry.
The light of his helmet lamp revealed rough stone all around. Loose rocks covered the uneven floor. Sometimes he had a metre of clearance over his head; in other places his helmet scraped rock, making him very glad he was wearing it. At one point he wormed his way forward on his belly. All the time he was conscious of the vast weight of rock above him, aware that all it would take was an insignificant shrug of the earth’s surface to squash him into paste, and he found his heart pounding and his breath coming in ragged gasps. His brain kept yelling at him to go back and his limbs threatened to freeze up entirely, unwilling to continue to carry him farther on this unnatural journey into the bowels of the earth. But he concentrated on pushing himself a little bit farther, then a little bit farther still, telling himself that if the rotund Dr. Beaudry had made it through without getting stuck, then surely he could...and sure enough, after what really wasn’t very long but certainly felt like it, he saw light ahead of him. A moment later the gap suddenly widened and he crawled out into open space, illuminated by another battery-powered light. He raised his head and gasped.
A wild ox glared from the wall in front of him, its white eye wide above a black muzzle. Long, twisted horns ran up the rock, and a natural hump of stone painted ocher and yellow formed its massive shoulder.
Wally had seen photographs of cave paintings before, but seeing one in person took his breath away. The millennia-old pigments looked as fresh as though the artist who had daubed them on the stone had just put down his brush and steppe
d around the corner. Somehow the black lines, fewer than a modern cartoonist would use, and the smears of colour oozed life – primitive, wild and free – from a time Wally could barely imagine, a time already ancient when Merlin lived in Camelot.
Dr. Beaudry stood next to the ox, his head level with its eye, and smiled as proudly as if he had painted it himself. “This is what the three schoolteachers saw when they emerged from that tunnel for the first time,” he said. “And they knew immediately they had found something remarkable.”
“Remarkable indeed,” said Rex Major as he, too, crawled out of the tunnel and stood, gazing at the painting. “And yet only the beginning, I believe?”
“Oui,” said Dr. Beaudry. “This way.”
Tearing his eyes away from the painting of the ox, Wally realized that here, at last, were the underground rock formations he had been expecting to see since they’d entered the cavern. From the ceiling, just feet above his head, daggers of stone stabbed the darkness, glittering with crystals. More rounded humps and spires rose from the cavern floor. The path Dr. Beaudry now led them along wound and doubled back upon itself, avoiding stalactites and stalagmites. Glancing down, Wally saw the marks of many booted feet: but, strangely, all were confined between two strands of red twine, strung along both sides of the path.
Before he could ask, Dr. Beaudry explained. “This path follows the footsteps of the discoverers, who, most fortunately, were very careful to disturb the cavern as little as possible. No one is permitted to step anywhere else. Look here.” He stopped and pointed to one side, his helmet light picking out the skull of a great cat, snarling at them from across uncounted years. “There are other skeletons of animals that found their way in but did not find their way out. There may well be skeletons of humans elsewhere. There could be tools the painters dropped, arrowheads, traces of pigment...a careless footstep could destroy something of immense scientific value.” He turned his attention back to the trail.
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