Chapter Forty Nine – Hills of Moonlight

The bow of the little boat crunched against the gravel and Pazu jumped out into shallow warm water. Wading ashore, he pulled the rowing boat up the stony beach a little way, stowed the oars and grabbed his knapsack. He turned and looked up the slope. Steam was wafting up over the trees and he set off up the hill in that direction.

It was a week later, and Pazu had found out more from the books, enough to convince him the world wasn't as he thought. He sat, one morning, breakfast plate untouched in front of him and discovered his whole life was turning upside down. Everyone was descended from the flying nations. Everyone. And all of them had embraced flying and steam engines and motor transport and engineering and science, except here.

why?

"What is happening today?" she asked
"Do you need me to help with anything?"
"No. In fact if you don't, it would be best."
"Oh?"
"My month is starting again. If you're not near me I can't snap at you."
"Would it be alright if I went across the lake?"
"Are you going down the caves?"
"Yes. Or at least have a good look around."
"I've never been down the caves, but I'm told that, you know, they're not caves. You know what I mean don't you?"
"As soon as Shuna mentioned them, I had an idea about that. He said there was a volcano under the mountains. My thinking is, if these caves aren't caves, then the volcano isn't a volcano."
"Be careful. Don't go in too far, and don't do anything silly."

He looked at her, raised an eyebrow.

"Last time I looked I was still a miner. When it comes to holes underground I know what I'm doing."
"Mines don't have big fires in them. These caves do, to make the lake warm, the hot springs. Just, please, hm, be careful?"
"I will. Your boat in the shed, it doesn't leak does it?"
"Not when I used it last summer, but there is a tin of caulking pitch and some cotton waste in there so you can pack any holes."
"Have you any string or rope?"
"Yes, loads, the crop bailing twine. It's in the storeroom under the drying bins. And… well, something tells me you might need this."

She reached into her shirt and drew out her stone.

"Sheeta, are you sure? I've never taken it away from you before."
"I think I trust you. By now."

She made a small smile.

"Now get away from me before I nag you for not eating breakfast."

He scraped the scrambled egg onto a slice of toast and took a big bite.

"I'll be back after dark, can you put a light on top of the tower?"
"Of course. Please be careful."

what's the matter with her? month end worries I suppose.

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

The shore opposite the farm was a sheer cliff, so he turned right and rowed across to the sloping tree lined shore a little further up the lake. The hot springs were not hard to find, steam issued from them and they could be seen for miles in the cold weather. While snow lay on the rising ground in the village, on this shore, low down there was none at all, just a little on the trees and then no more until much higher up the mountain.

At the hot pools he stopped. He had never come across anything like this before although they reminded him a little of the salt factory's drying ponds. They were large irregular shaped depressions shallow, perhaps only two or three feet deep but the water was warm, in some of them it was hot and there was an odd smell, not exactly nice either. He could imagine the villagers coming here to bathe, it would be very pleasant, providing the pool temperature didn't change and boil you alive.

In some of the pools there were bubbles coming up in the centre and they looked deeper there. He hadn't come here to bathe though, another time perhaps. He continued up the slope towards the treeline where he could see the cliff face that further along formed the sheer lakeshore.

He came across the caves, they were not hard to find although the first three he went in had collapsed roofs a short way in. Then he found a more promising one. He found a stout bush at the cave mouth and tied one end of the bailing twine to it. He lit his lantern, checked the stone around his neck wasn't doing anything too odd and went in.

After a while he was in blackness, but he wasn't afraid, this was a familiar environment for him. Unlike the cave in the forest, this one didn't feel man made. It had a tapering narrow roof that closed to nothing at all, like a natural fissure in the rock. The floor was uneven and tilted all the way in, no steps, no archways, no carvings that he could see. After a few hundred feet of steady descent he knew he was in a natural cave.

He stopped and closed his lantern hood. The stone was making its normal gentle glow but nothing unusual, and no sound at all. He pressed on. He came to a junction where a smaller passage went off to his right, more steeply down. Just to be doubly safe, in case his twine should break, he took a chunk of chalk from his bag and scratched an arrow on the wall, pointing back to the entrance. He turned right.

He came to a cavern with a pool and there was a lot of water here, dripping from the roof. He found mineral growths on the floor and ceiling, he'd come across these only a very few times before at the Ravine and only in caves on the edge of the workings where men had yet to dig. The miners destroyed them quickly in their need to get the floor leveled or widened to allow ore tumbrels to be wheeled along, so it was rare to see this many. Some on the floor were broad and stumpy like fat piles of yaoko dung, while others were slender and spiky and delicate. In one place he found a section where the ceiling spikes hanging down had almost, almost joined to the floor ones growing up. The cavern was thirty feet high here and looking hard he found one pair of spikes now separated by only an inch. As he looked a drip of water fell from the upper one to the lower and deposited its miniscule load of minerals closing the gap by another tiny amount. He sat back in wonder and just watched. Drip. Drip. Slow drip. Tiny drip. Eventually the gap would be closed. Probably not even in his lifetime, but eventually. It was a certainty. Watching this slow certain progress he took a slice of poto bread and a bomao cake from his bag and ate, then drank cold sweet tea. He got up, time to press on.

He had been walking, crawling and climbing for hours, time was always hard to judge underground and distances were very deceptive. Had he prepared better he could have tied knots in the twine every few hundred yards and kept count but he had a good internal clock and sense of direction and he thought he was now deep under the mountain, still moving away from the lake and about three hours since he'd started. Eleven o'clock. His lamp had been doing something odd in the last ten minutes though, the flame seemed to be burning whiter, the light around him was paler. He was standing at the base of a slope of loose rubble, having slid down a kind of chute and reached a flat dirt floor. A pool and stream ran in front of him from left to right and this wider cave led away to his right, the floor mostly flat.

He pulled the stone from his shirt to check again and saw, to his surprise that its glow was much stronger. He shut his lamp and found himself in a blue world. Lifting the stone up its light was now enough to see by. He extinguished the lamp. Putting his hand tightly around the stone he concentrated. Nothing. No vibration, no sound. He pressed on, the underground stream on his left.

After a hundred feet or so the dirt drift ended at a wider corridor and there was a jump down here of three or four feet to the floor of the transverse pathway. The stream to his left plunged down its own chute and he could hear it roaring below him. Making sure he could get back up, he nimbly jumped off.

And then it all began to happen. First the stone became much brighter, not as bright as the lirhum spell but he certainly wouldn't need to draw a light spell from it, it was bright enough to light this corridor for twenty or thirty yards. The noise also started, a low hum, not unpleasant. Even with the rushing stream nearby he could hear the hum. The hum wasn't the stone either. And it was warmer here, in this corridor. He took out the chalk and scratched an arrow pointing up at the side hole he'd jumped from, and to be certain another on the floor pointing to that wall.

He stood and closed his eyes and for a moment tried to just be calm and still and see if anything came to him. He could feel the floor wasn't quite level, to his right was a little downward slope. He opened his eyes and turned right.

He couldn't help but be reminded of his dream. The blue colour was the same.

Another different thing here was this corridor. It was definitely a corridor. The floor was smooth, the sides vertical, the roof arched. This wasn't a cave. His heart beating faster, and beginning to work up a sweat in the hot air

was it hot, or just warm? hot, yes, it was definitely hot here. as hot as a hot spring

he strode on down the painted corridor, the walls, he now noticed were coloured, greens and blues, lines stripes and dots, curves and whorls. No straight lines here, this was a female corridor, curved decoration everywhere. That was an odd thought but unimportant. He pressed on.

The stream must be in a channel of its own behind the rock wall now because he could hear it rumbling and throbbing behind the stone on his left. He put his hand to the wall and felt it vibrating. The stream must be channeled under pressure to make that much vibration. The sound it was making was changing too, a deeper note. He could feel it through his boots as he walked.

When he first reached the cavern he didn't understand what he was seeing. The blue light from the stone leapt up suddenly in brightness and seemed to paint the wall to his left. Pazu looked up. It was a big cavern, much smaller than the library in the forest but bigger than anything in the Ravine. The noise was strange though now, no longer the throbbing of a stream pulsing under pressure between rocks, it reminded him more of a big engine working hard, bigger than the Tiger Moth's, definitely, maybe as big as Goliath's he thought. It felt as though it were all around him, the rocks themselves were vibrating

running, that's the word, like an engine, a mechanism running

and he felt a pulling on his neck. He looked down and the stone was dancing, jittering on the end of its cord, actually bouncing against his skin. It was warm and making a light noise, buzzing like an insect.

Pazu was a man with a strong will and he was brave, few things ever made him afraid, but there was something here, something that was so unexpected, so big, so powerful that he began to feel fear, real palpable fear. For a start it wasn't just warm now but hot, like he was stood within a few feet of the old Clunker's boiler when it was running at full pressure, when it was burning with life, the pressure needle dancing on the red line. He was boiling hot down here, sweat was pouring off him.

And there was something about the way the blue light from the stone was lighting up just one wall that particularly unnerved him. He took a few steps from the end of the corridor into the cavern, and it was then he became frightened, there was no doubt about this emotion. He had never been more scared in his life. Because he felt a presence, he felt like his entry into the cavern had attracted someone's attention

no, something's attention

and it was looking at him, he felt like a great eye was upon him. And more than that, he became aware that he was present in a conversation between two entities. The stone around his neck buzzed but with a higher tone for a moment, then a lower tone. Then it stopped and began again, lower, higher, cutting off and going on.

talking, it's talking, my god, it's talking to the cavern

The deep rumbling vibrating tone would also change pitch. Climb and sink, drop off then rise in intensity and richness of tone. It boomed deeply like the biggest drum. Pazu put his hand over the stone to shut off the light. But the light didn't shut off, it continued. And he was in his dream, in a cavern deep underground, a cavern filled with blue moonlight, the moonlight shining down from the sky onto the blue hills and passing through them, right through the bones of the land into this cavern and lighting it up.

except, except that…

The blue light wasn't coming down from the sky into the cavern… it was being created here and going up and out. The hills of moonlight were being lit up from inside. From this cavern. With the stone at his neck held tight in his fist

and struggling there like a trapped panicking mouse

it emitted no light. The cavern itself was emitting light, or rather one side of it was. And sound, and heat. The wall to his left was flat and inclined beyond the vertical, it was about the height of the side of their farmhouse and quite smooth, like a rock had split down a perfect fault plane, a perfect slice of smooth rock like a giant slate. This giant slice of slate that formed one side of the cavern was tilted forward so the cavern was wider at floor level and narrower at the roof. And it was blue, glowing gently blue. All of it, the whole wall was like the tiny crystals of stone Uncle Pom had shown them in the cavern at the Ravine, but this was just so much… more. In every way it was more, bluer, smoother, purer, hot, droning and much more frightening.

its…

his mind could hardly grasp it, could hardly believe what his eyes were telling him was true

it's a crystal…

he saw the evidence above him, high up at this end of the wall. The crystal that kept Laputa aloft had been eight sided, it was two four sided pyramids joined base to base. Up there high near the ceiling near the wall he had entered the cavern by, he could see a point, an angle. He studied it carefully and his engineer's eye showed him what a perfect angle this was. His eye saw a horizontal line running near the roof of the cavern, above that line the face of the upper pyramid of the crystal sloped back and disappeared into the rock, up beyond the cavern roof. At the angle he'd noticed, he could just see the ends of the left hand faces of the upper and lower pyramids but these faces were almost completely buried in the mountain, merely a foot or two of each was exposed.

so…oh, my god…

He was only seeing one face of the eight and only half the crystal's full height. He looked up. Yes, their farmhouse would easily stand in this cavern, making the crystal twice as big as a house. Maybe even twice the height of the grain tower. The crystal that held Laputa aloft had been no bigger than his ribcage, this crystal was

hundreds of times bigger. how big an island would it carry?

Pazu suddenly felt faint. Weak, physically drained. Wondering how much landmass this crystal had once kept aloft, flying in the sky while men lived on it made his mind start to come undone, he could feel it giving up, refusing to attempt to calculate the mass. A huge island, a whole slab of countryside – certainly the mountain and the lake and the village. But… how much more? The river valley? The other two villages over the hill? Bhema's village? Penaerth?

The thought that this island might extend a days ride across and include Penaerth made his knees buckle and he sank to the floor of the cavern. And worse still, the most frightening thing was, unlike the dead dusty library island, this one was alive, the whole wall of the cavern was aglow and worst of all, it was talking, it was having a conversation with Sheeta's royal stone. It wanted to live, it wanted to take flight. An insane thought went through Pazu's head, what would speaking the destruction spell do here? His mind saw the mountain, the lake, the village and the hills and woods lifting off, held up and floating away. But under that was the whole world, like the fat mechanical dome of Laputa that housed the Great Weapon, it would collapse and disintegrate and fall off, leaving the island in flight.

It was that image of destruction that finally got him moving, it was too awful to contemplate, he staggered upright but

in my dream, just like the dream

he struggled to stand. The stone on its cord hung down from his neck and seemed to pull hard, seemed to want to hold him here. It wanted to stay. He had no idea what it wanted to do here, what conversation it was having with the cavern but he'd had enough. With an awful groan of effort he stood and turned and staggered out into the corridor, the booming, buzzing, groaning voice of the mountain behind him in the blue-black.

He found the side corridor, boosted himself up and managing a shambling, drunken half run, he fled.

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

He remembered nothing of his run back, and the journey back down the hill was a blank but he must have run and slipped and fallen because his knuckles, palms and knees were torn, bleeding and bruised with hard contact with the ground. Even his protective leg wrappings were ripped to pieces. And one of his palms was torn with pine tree splinters. He beached the rowing boat and dragged it up the gravel bank and went up the dark hill to the farm. As promised she had lit a beacon, a brazier of some kind on the tower roof. He went in through the side gate behind the yaoko shed, dumping his gear in the equipment store at the base of the tower.

He went into the parlour. Sheeta was sat by the fire, she stood up in alarm at the sight of him, filthy, sweaty, his clothing torn, his knees bloody.

"Paetsu! What happened?"

He collapsed in a chair and she knelt in front of him.

"I'm alright. Alright. Fine now."
"Shuna, please get some water. And you, my filthy friend, tell me what happened."
"Later, later. Ugh."

Pazu noticed Shuna for the first time. The big man went into the kitchen and he heard the pump running. The bearded man came back with a wooden beaker of water which Pazu gulped down. It was deliciously cold, icy cold.

"Hm, taemo. Al-dhu, puhlko.(1)"

Shuna went out and refilled the beaker.

"Your hand! Look at you, what a mess! Shuna, can you help me get him to bed. I need to make up a timsu compact and put it on that hand."

--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I

Pazu lay in bed, undressed and with a cold cloth on his brow. Sheeta sat at his bedside, his wounded hand in her lap, pulling shards of pine tree bark out of the torn flesh with a pair of tweezers. He couldn't feel a thing, the crushed timsu compact had deadened the pain. He didn't like the look of his hand though, it was bloody and lumpy. It looked like a bowl of overripe strawberries.

reustaub, reustaub stimmer…

he thought, looking at her face. He loved her flavour and her full red lips looked like strawberries; the timsu was not only deadening the pain but sending his mind off as well.

"Paetsu, don't go wandering off yet! Shuna has some news. Oh, for heaven's sake! Stop fussing like a baby, give me your hand," she sounded cross.
"You are lucky you have such a skilled nurse Paetsu, you will need that hand tomorrow. You are going for a ride. To Penaerth," Shuna was leaning against one of the bed posts, his arms folded.
"Penaerth? Why?"
"The Gathering, they have reached their decision. Sheeta and I will be with you. We need to be on the road before dawn. I will stay here tonight, my bags are packed."
"Oh, damn. Taeg-dhu Lucita!" she cursed herself, "Oh, I've started bleeding."
"Sheeta, stay with him. I will pack your clothes. I assume you will want your ceremonial robes?"
"You are right I do. And pack Paetsu's haemshi as well please."

She put a hand to her belly and squeezed, bent over a little, grimacing against the sharp pain.

"Oh, hell. This is all I need."

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16 April 2007

(1) puhlko : please. In this context Pazu said "Al-dhu, puhlko" meaning "please everything". What he meant to say was "more, please" or "Pulko al-ur".

For author notes about Chapter Forty Nine, please see my forum (click on my pen name)