Down the Mountain
The entrance to the caves behind the great house did not have stairs; it was a long, dark shaft with a rope ladder dangling down into it. They had to descend one at a time. The rock walls of the shaft felt close and cold on either side.
There had been much discussion about who would go. Vanu was going, and Tirtu seemed to feel it was obvious that he should go with him.
“You’ve only been down there a few times, my lord. You’ll need me to show you the way.”
Padunu had given Tirtu a doubtful look at that and asked when the last time was he went through the caves.
“Do you know the song?” Barda asked earnestly.
“No,” Tirtu admitted. “I don’t know the song, but—”
“What’s the song?” Lill asked.
The song was a catchy mnemonic that Barda and Khatu had invented to remember the route through the caves.
It was scatological and irreverent, and that was only the part that Barda got through before his mother shushed him.
There was, it turned out, another mnemonic, a much more sedate rhyme that Padunu knew and primly recited for all of them.
“Guess you’d better come with us, then,” said Vanu.
Padunu, who clearly hadn’t thought that through, went pale.
Halza didn’t know what they were talking about; he hadn’t picked up any Hawada in the weeks since arriving in Umtúshta. Lill asked Vanu if he should explain what was going on, and Vanu nodded.
“Caves?” Halza repeated, eyes wide. It turned out this was the first he was hearing about them. Then of course he wanted to come too.
“Besides, if I say I want to stay with the women, Lord Vanu will think I’m trying to take advantage of the situation to spend time with his daughter.”
“Halza … you know that Vanu speaks Zashian, right? And can hear perfectly well? And is … right there?”
Halza looked up at Vanu with an expression of comical horror. “I didn’t—of course—what I mean, my lord—”
“Guess you’d better come, too,” said Vanu.
“Then who, if you’ll pardon me asking, my lord, is going to stay with the women?” Padunu asked. “I count Lill among the women, of course.”
“I can stay,” Lill signed to Vanu, “if you think I’m needed here, but … ”
“Don’t be absurd,” Vanu signed back. “You’re the one I really need to bring.”
So they all went—Vanu, Lill, Tirtu, Padunu, and Halza—down the rope ladder into the cool, dark interior of the mountain.
Padunu’s lantern illuminated the bottom of the shaft, where a wooden platform had been built over the rough surface of the cave floor. There was a surprising amount of garbage lying around, mostly animal bones and pieces of broken crockery. Padunu was tsking over it.
“Barda and Khatu,” he said, gesturing at the mess. “They are supposed to dispose of refuse in one of the side tunnels, out of the way, but of course they just throw things down the shaft and kick them about. Lazy swine.”
“We’ll have to come down and clean this up,” said Tirtu.
Vanu, the last to descend, reached the bottom of the ladder with a thump of boot soles on boards, and the discussion about Barda and Khatu’s garbage disposal habits ceased.
“Onward, my lord?” said Tirtu.
“Let’s go,” Vanu signed and pointed to Padunu. Lill felt that needed no translation.
They set off in single file, stepping down from the platform into a tunnel that opened out after a short distance onto a shallow stone gallery on the edge of the same large cavern that Lill had seen under Vanu’s yard.
They had come down much further than Lill and Vanu had gone that time.
The vault of the cavern was shadowy above them, the strange hanging strings of rock just catching the lantern light.
Lill tried to resist the urge to stare around in wonder, which he felt would be unprofessional. They were, after all, on a mission.
Then he felt Vanu’s hand on the small of his back and looked up into Vanu’s face, dramatically lit by the lantern flame, the harsh shadows accenting his features.
Vanu smiled, and Lill realized he hadn’t been doing a good enough job of concealing his wonder.
He remembered Vanu saying that the caves scared him and thought that had been another of Vanu’s utterly unnecessary pieces of honesty.
He didn’t look nervous or uneasy at all.
They crossed the cavern, following Padunu, weaving between strange lumps and towers of rock, to arrive at the mouth of one of the tunnels, a narrow crevice that they had to turn sideways to get through.
Lill recalled the part of Barda’s song that described this, which seemed to have stuck in his head whether he liked it not.
“Is this safe? Are we sure this is safe?” Halza hissed, sidling up to Lill when they were through the crevice and clambering over some loose rocks on the other side.
“Shh, yes, of course. They come down here all the time.”
The tunnel sloped downward, and as it went lower it got wetter, water dripping off rocks in some places and pooling on the floor. Lill was glad of the thick-soled boots that Vanu had given him, which were good for keeping your footing on slippery rocks and staying out of the puddles.
They took several turns, following Padunu’s rhyme, while phrases like, “if you don’t take the next left, I’ll fuck your widow’s ass” jingled through Lill’s mind.
At some points the tunnels were drier and wider, and Halza would sound relieved (he was constantly talking, muttering things to Lill), and then he would notice that they were climbing instead of descending, and he would begin fretting that they were lost. This hurt both Tirtu and Padunu’s feelings, and they became increasingly short with him.
Vanu in turn snapped at them to pay attention to the route instead of worrying about Halza.
“Halza,” said Lill, struck by inspiration, when they reached a ledge where they would have to climb several feet and slide through a narrow opening, “does your family speak Akra?”
“What?”
“I just wondered if you spoke Zashian or Akra at home,” Lill went on, in Akra. His accent was bad, but the language was similar enough to Zashian that he’d always found it easy to more or less bluff his way through.
“Oh yes, my mother speaks Akra,” said Halza distractedly. “Are you sure they know where they’re going, Lill? And can we fit through that crack up there? What if one of us gets stuck?”
“Well, it won’t be me,” said Lill cheerfully. He’d achieved his objective—Halza was speaking a language that none of the rest of the group understood—so he was happy.
Then Vanu caught his eye as they were waiting their turn to climb up the ledge, and signed “Thank you,” and that made Lill happier still.
Once past the overhang at the top of the ledge—it was really just a kind of dangling flap of rock, and they were all easily able to slip under it, even Vanu—the cave floor dropped sharply again, so sharply that in places steps had been carved into the rock.
“Look, that’s a good sign,” Lill pointed out to Halza. “We’re obviously on the right track.”
Halza nodded distractedly and began worrying about the amount of water that was running down the channels that whoever made the steps had also thoughtfully carved along the sides of the passage.
“There’s just no pleasing you!” Lill laughed.
“Why are you so cheerful?” Halza asked in an aggrieved tone.
Lill didn’t try to answer. He could have said, “I just like caves,” but that would have been a partial answer at best. He could have said, “Aren’t you happy that we’re finally learning the secret route out of Umtúshta?” But did that really matter much anymore?
He couldn’t say that he was cheerful because it felt so wonderful that his husband had specifically included him in this mission.
Because he’d wanted to see these caves, yes, but he’d wanted especially to see them with Vanu.
Because he’d already found a subtle way to help by making Halza do his fussing in a language Vanu didn’t understand.
They reached the bottom of the stone stairs, where the water running through the gutters on either side joined up with some other water trickling in from another tunnel to become a fully fledged underground stream, gurgling along surprisingly fast through its rocky channel.
“Don’t tell me we have to swim!” Halza whimpered.
They didn’t have to swim, or even to get their feet wet, because there was a dry ledge along the side of the stream where they could walk toward the exit.
The final stage of the journey involved climbing up a ladder through another vertical shaft, to emerge at the back of a narrow fissure in a cliff face, where they could feel the night air on their faces and see the shapes of trees in the moonlight ahead of them.
Padunu had shuttered his lantern before they climbed out of the tunnel. Silently, single file, they walked out into the forest.
“We’re out,” Lill whispered to Halza. In spite of everything, it did somehow feel like an achievement.
Barda had given them directions to Otoni’s house, which lay between the cave exit and the village, just off the trail that led down the mountain to Sakka from the string of villages higher up. Once on the trail, they no longer needed to go single file, so Vanu slowed his pace to walk beside Lill.
“We’re not trying for stealth now, are we?” Lill signed.
Vanu glanced back at the others. They were walking quietly enough, but they clearly weren’t being stealthy by Lill’s standards.
That made Vanu think about what they were doing.
If Otoni saw a party of strangers approaching her house in the dark, she would be frightened.
And she was an archer; she would probably shoot at them.
“Need to go openly,” he said aloud. “Light again, Shaman.”
Padunu obediently opened the side of the lantern, spilling warm light onto the trail and the trees on either side. Vanu felt an odd lurch like dizziness. He had not come so far down the mountain since he was walled into Umtúshta three years ago.
Otoni’s house stood in a clearing, screened by the trees and easy to miss in the dark, except that there was light glowing inside. It was a small, round house with a thatched roof, like some of the humbler houses in Umtúshta.
“That’s a good sign, that she’s got a lamp lit,” said Tirtu. “Must not be hiding anymore. Maybe the trouble in Sakka is past.”
It wasn’t a good sign. Vanu heard Lill’s soft gasp as he realized it, at the same moment that Vanu himself caught the scent of smoke, saw the flicker of orange. The light wasn’t from a lamp. They had arrived moments after the house had been set on fire.
Vanu lunged and grabbed Lill’s arm, harder than he meant to, but he managed to stop Lill taking off across the clearing.
There were three men outside the house, dark shapes against the light from inside.
A fourth, who had been setting the fire, ran out to join them.
As they strode away from the house, an arrow whistled across the clearing. Lill stiffened.
“I have her location,” he said crisply.
It took Vanu a shameful, stupid moment to grasp that Lill meant he had seen where the arrow came from. Behind him, Halza and Tirtu were hissing at Padunu to close the lantern. In the clearing, the remaining men were running toward them, swords drawn.
Three years was a long time—too long—to spend letting his fighting instincts wither.
“Do I go find her, si—” Lill caught himself with a little shake. “I know where she is. I can get to her and tell her we’re here to help. The rest of you can take these men. Yes?”
More arrows were flying across the clearing, but there were still three men on their feet.
Vanu nodded. “Yes. Go.”
Lill was off, gone in an instant like a shadow among the trees.
Vanu tried to pull himself together. They were in among the trees, where they’d stepped off the trail to approach the house. They couldn’t fight effectively here—they had to retreat to the trail. He had no interpreter to shout orders for him.
“Back to the trail!” he barked, at a volume that tore painfully at his throat, to be heard over the sound of the asses still arguing about the lantern.
“I am not permitted to shed blood!” Padunu wailed, crashing through the undergrowth with the lantern, still fucking open, flapping from his hand.
“What did he say?” Halza shouted.
“He said get back to the trail!” Tirtu shouted back, shoving him between the shoulderblades.
“Who’s there?” called the men who had set fire to the house. “Are you with Arakhu Vinu?”
“Yes, yes,” Tirtu hissed frantically over his shoulder to Vanu. “Say we are!”
The men behind Vanu began crashing through the undergrowth. Another arrow thunked in a tree.
Tirtu took matters into his own hands: “Yes! We’re Lord Arakhu’s men just like you!”
“What?” the leader of the men behind them roared. “We’re not Arakhu’s men! After them! It’s more of the raiders!”
Vanu stopped in his tracks. Ahead of him, Padunu had gained the trail. Halza and Tirtu were stumbling after him.
“What about the traitor whore?” one of the men behind Vanu demanded.
“Leave her!” the leader shouted. “She’s—”
Vanu turned, and the man’s voice broke off. He reeled to a halt, finding himself faced with Vanu’s sword.
It was a challenge to fight in the thick of the forest, sure. But if it was hard for Vanu, it was much harder for his opponents. It always was.