Tupai’s face showed mostly relief, mixed with a strange sadness. Relief that he had survived, relief that we had survived. All six of us had survived a deadly, violent attack and had emerged without even a serious injury. It was almost miraculous. The sadness I could not understand at first. It took me a while to realise that Tupai, veteran of a thousand fights (but none so deadly as this) still wished we had been able to avoid the fight. The peace-maker in him now held sway over the warrior, and fighting was something that he’d rather by-pass.
My own hands were shaking violently, a reaction to the adrenalin and the sudden calm, I thought. I had felt no fear during the battle, only the fierce urge to attack, to hurt, to kill these creatures. I had heard the words blood-lust used to describe soldiers going into battle, and I wondered if that had been the feeling I had had in the cave. I can’t believe I wanted to kill just for killing’s sake. My feeling had been more one of protection, of saving the lives of my friends.
Jenny’s hands were shaking too. She had crossed them over her chest to hide the constant quivering but I could see it in the ends of her fingers. She held a smile to her face like a mask, but in the pools of her eyes I could see only horror at what had happened.
Fizzer was calm, as always. Imperturbable. What had happened was what had happened, but more importantly, it was what was meant to have happened. I felt that Fizzer would only be disturbed by events such as these if he felt he had not played his part, not performed the role that was expected of him. That had not happened in this case. In the cave he had read the battle like a poem, had ebbed and flowed with its natural rhythms and canter. Even so, for all his calmness, Fizzer as much as anyone needed the embrace of his friends, the touch of others restoring a humanness to us all after the craze of the fight.
There was a strange kind of ecstasy in Phil’s eyes. In many ways he had fought the least, and yet, in other ways he had done the most, driving the mikhuy into the tunnel entrance, giving us time to prepare. Devising the jury-rigged catapult that had hurled death into the ranks of the Maeroero before even the battle was commenced. If Phil had doubts about himself, and I strongly suspected he did, then he had put those doubts to rest with his performance in the cave.
Jason was the hardest to read. His face was fixed, although I knew strong currents had to be running beneath the surface. Every now and then his entire body shuddered, no doubt the same reaction as I was feeling. But other than that he showed no emotion at all. Just a blankness. For some reason I wanted to reach out to him, and share some of whatever he was experiencing, because of all my friends, Jason’s reaction frightened me the most.
I eventually found out what the excited shouts of the Kuimata were about. Tukuyrikuq had been right. This had been no raiding party, it had been an army, over two hundred Maeroero in all. Their plan had been to steal the mikhuy and bore straight up through the massive walls of Contisuyo, opening a passage through which they would have poured into an unsuspecting city. Their plans had been thwarted, and the army destroyed, by six young surface dwellers, although as far as the Runa were concerned it had been Pachacuteq and five of his brave warriors.
The adulation that greeted us on our return to the main Nans of the walled city was intense. Word had spread rapidly, and our intended escape had somehow turned into a daring plan. One note that seemed a little odd to all of us, and was especially jarring to Phil for some reason, was that all the adulation seemed directed at Jason. Jason, Pachacuteq, had saved the rock-eater. Jason had defeated the Maeroero army. Jason was a hero and the rest of us were a hero’s followers.
Strange how the world turned sometimes.
I think I knew, even then that history had not finished with six kids from Glenfield College. That the events of the day were not an ending. To use the words of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, it was not even the beginning of the end. It was merely the end of the beginning.
The Runa have a word for a time when the world will turn upside down. Pachacuta. They believe that instrumental in this event will be the legendary figure of Pachacuteq. Rightly or wrongly they believed this to be Jason.
I didn’t know about that part, but I think that I realised, on some deep level, way below that of conscious thought, that the Pachacuta was coming. That the world of these people would indeed turn upside down, as the world above ground and the world below ground collided.
But in the meantime, I knew, that I had no choice. I, and my friends, had to accept our circumstances, accept our fate, and start to get used to a life without sunlight or seasons.
A life underground.
They call me Willka Nasta now. The Princess of the Black Light. Partly because I saved Turiz’s life after the cave explosion. I want to scream at them that I am no spiritual healer, but even the most primitive medicine seems magical to these people.
It is now many months since that day in the cave with the Maeroero and my blackness and despair has been growing each day. This is no life. This is a rock-walled prison that is sucking up the days of my youth and I am not sure if I can stand it. Not sure if I can stand losing a time of my life that can never be regained.
Until today that is. Today there is light in the darkness. A beacon in the depths of my despair. Today Jason thinks he has found a way out.
A path back to the surface.
- from the Journals of Jenny Kreisler
Cave Dogs (Pachacuta Book 1) Page 16