Page 124 of The Boy Bride

“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?