The place was a cave about fifteen feet deep and nine wide, cut out of the sandy rock. The entrance was covered by a skin curtain hooked across it. In one corner of the inner end there was a flaw in the roof from which water dripped steadily at about a drop a second. It fell into a wooden bucket; the overflow of the bucket trickled down a groove for the full length of the cave, and out of the entrance. In the other inner corner was a mattress of small branches, with skins and a tattered blanket on it. There were a few bowls and utensils. A blackened fire-hollow near the entrance, empty now, showed an ingenious draught-hole drilled to the outer air. The handles of a few knives and other tools protruded from niches in the walls. A spear, a bow, a leather quiver with a dozen arrows in it, lay close to the brushwood mattress. There was nothing much else.
I thought of the kitchen of the Wenders‘ cottage. The clean, bright room that had seemed so friendly because it had no texts on the walls. The candles flickered, sent greasy smoke up to the roof, and stank.
Sophie dipped a bowl into the bucket, rummaged a fairly clean bit of rag out of a niche, and brought it across to me. She washed the blood off my face and out of my hair, and examined the cause.
‘Just a cut. Not deep,’ she said, reassuringly.
I washed my hands in the bowl. She tipped the water into the runnel, rinsed the bowl and put it away.
‘You’re hungry, David?’ she said.
‘Very,’ I told her. I had had nothing to eat all day except during our one brief stop.
‘Stay here. I won’t be long,’ she instructed, and slipped out under the skin curtain.
I sat looking at the shadows that danced on the rock walls, listening to the plop-plop-plop of the drips. And very likely, I told myself, this is luxury, in the Fringes. ‘You’ve got to have as little as I have…’ Sophie had said, though it had not been material things that she meant. To escape the forlornness and the squalor I sought Michael’s company.
‘Where are you? What’s been happening?’ I asked him.
‘We’ve leaguered for the night,’ he told me. ‘Too dangerous to go on in the dark.’ He tried to give me a picture of the place as he had seen it just before sunset, but it might have been a dozen spots along our route. ‘It’s been slow going all day — tiring, too. They know their woods, these Fringes people. We’ve been expecting a real ambush somewhere on the way, but it’s been sniping and harassing all the time. We’ve lost three killed, but had seven wounded — only two of them seriously.’
‘But you’re still coming on?’
‘Yes. The feeling is that now we do have quite a force here for once, it’s a chance to give the Fringes something that will keep them quiet for some time to come. Besides, you three are badly wanted. There’s a rumour that there are a couple of dozen, perhaps more, of us scattered about Waknuk and surrounding districts, and you have to be brought back to identify them.’ He paused a moment there, then he went on in a worried, unhappy mood.
‘In point of fact, David, I’m afraid — very much afraid — there is only one.’
‘One?’
‘Rachel managed to reach me, right at her limit, very faintly. She says something has happened to Mark.’
‘They’ve caught him?’
‘No. She thinks not. He’d have let her know if it were that. He’s simply stopped. Not a thing from him in over twenty-four hours now.’
‘An accident perhaps? Remember Walter Brent — that boy who was killed by a tree? He just stopped like that.’
‘It might be. Rachel just doesn’t know. She’s frightened; it leaves her all alone now. She was right at her limit, and I was almost. Another two or three miles, and we’ll be out of touch.’
‘It’s queer I didn’t hear at least your side of this,’ I told him.
‘Probably while you were knocked out,’ he suggested.
‘Well, when Petra wakes she’ll be able to keep in touch with Rachel,’ I reminded him. ‘She doesn’t seem to have any kind of limit.’
‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten that,’ he agreed. ‘It will help her a bit.’
A few moments later a hand came under the curtain, pushing a wooden bowl into the cave-mouth. Sophie scrambled in after it, and gave it to me. She trimmed up the disgusting candles and then squatted down on the skin of some unidentifiable animal while I helped myself with a wooden spoon. An odd dish; it appeared to consist of several kinds of shoots, diced meat, and crumbled hard-bread, but the result was not at all bad, and very welcome. I enjoyed it, almost to the last when I was suddenly smitten in a way that sent a whole spoonful cascading down my shirt. Petra was awake again.
I got in a response at once. Petra switched straight from distress to elation. It was nattering, but almost as painful. Evidently she woke Rosalind, for I caught her pattern among the chaos of Michael asking what the hell? and Petra’s Sealand friend anxiously protesting.
Presently Petra got a hold of herself, and the turmoil quietened down. There was a sense of all other parties relaxing cautiously.
‘Is she safe now? What was all that thunder and lightning about?’ Michael inquired.
Petra told us, keeping it down with an obvious effort:
‘We thought David was dead. We thought they’d killed him.’
Now I began to catch Rosalind’s thoughts, firming into comprehensible shapes out of a sort of swirl. I was humbled, bowled over, happy, and distressed all at the same time. I could not think much more clearly in response, for all I tried. It was Michael who put an end to that.
‘This is scarcely decent for third parties,’ he observed. ‘When you two can disentangle yourselves there are other things to be discussed.’ He paused. ‘Now,’ he continued,’ what is the position?’
We sorted it out. Rosalind and Petra were still in the tent where I had last seen them. The spider-man had gone away, leaving a large, pink-eyed, white-haired man in charge of them. I explained my situation.
‘Very well,’ said Michael. ‘You say this spider-man seems to be in some sort of authority, and that he has come forward towards the fighting. You’ve no idea whether he intends to join in the fighting himself, or whether he is simply making tactical dispositions? You see, if it is the latter he may come back at any time.’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I told him.
Rosalind came in abruptly, as near to hysteria as I had known her.
‘I’m frightened of him. He’s a different kind. Not like us. Not the same sort at all. It would be outrageous — like an animal. I couldn’t, ever… If he tries to take me I shall kill myself….’
Michael threw himself on that like a pail of ice-water.
‘You won’t do anything so damned silly. You’ll kill the spider-man, if necessary.’ With an air of having settled that point conclusively he turned his attention elsewhere. At his full range he directed a question to Petra’s friend.
‘You still think you can reach us?’
The reply came still from a long distance, but clearly and without effort now. It was a calmly confident ‘Yes’.
‘When?’ Michael asked.
There was a pause before the reply, as if for consultation, then:
‘In not more than sixteen hours from now,’ she told him, just as confidently. Michael’s scepticism diminished. For the first time he allowed himself to admit the possibility of her help.
‘Then it is a question of ensuring that you three are kept safe for that long,’ he told us, meditatively.
‘Wait a minute. Just hold on a bit,’ I told them.
I looked up at Sophie. The smoky candles gave enough light to show that she was watching my face intently, a little uneasily.
‘You were “talking” to that girl?’ she said.