"Well, I thank you, Fraulein Oona," I said, with all my old, rather stiff courtesy. "You have brought me many blessings."
"I hope so." Her voice from the darkness had grown a little abstracted, as if she gave her attention to something else.
"I wonder what's happened to Bastable?" I said.
"Oh, that's not a problem. He can look after himself. Even if they capture him, he'll get free one way or another. For a while at least his part in this is over. But I have only his instructions for finding the river which he promises will lead us eventually to the city of Mu Ooria."
The name was faintly familiar. I remembered a book from my library. One of those unlikely memoirs which enterprising hacks turned out in the wake of Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus and Raspe's Munchausen. The author, perhaps the pseudonym for an ancestor, claimed to have visited an underground kingdom, a refuge for the dispossessed, whose natives were more stone than flesh. I'd enjoyed the tale as a boy, but it had become repetitive and self-referencing, like so much of that fantastic stuff, and I had grown bored with it.
I pointed out that I was in rather poor shape for a long walk. I was already surprised by the immensity of the cave system. Did she know how far it extended?
This seemed to amuse her. "Some think forever," she replied, "but it has never been successfully mapped." She told me to wait and went off into that cold darkness. I was astonished by the ease with which she seemed to find her way. When she came back I heard her working at something. At length, I felt her lift me under the shoulders and drag me a few feet until I was lying on cloth. She placed my sword beside me.
"Thank the Nazis for starving you," she said, "or I wouldn't have the strength for this." I felt the cloth rise and tauten under me. I could now feel the sides, like long, smooth saplings, but not wood. And then we were moving forward. Oona the Bow-woman was actually dragging me on a kind of travois.
I noticed with a certain dismay that we were still going downwards, rather than back up towards the crevice I had created with the sword's harmonics. Although never very conscious of it before, even in the dugouts of Flanders, my tendency to claustrophobia was growing. Yet I knew even Oona wasn't strong enough to drag me back to the surface. She seemed to have some sense of what lay ahead. Trying to reach a place of safety which she knew of either from her own experience or from what Bastable had told her. I hoped that Bastable himself had not been captured. No civilized man can imagine the tortures those brutes invented. I shuddered at the thought of Gaynor finding me in this condition. I tried to speak to Oona but became dizzy just from the effort. Soon it scarcely mattered to me, for I passed out at last.
I awoke with a sense that something had changed. The silence around me had become peaceful rather than sinister. There was a whispering, as of a wind through leaves, and I realized that I could see a dim band of light in the distance, as if we faced a horizon.
Oona was faintly visible to me as a dark shape against a darker background. She had prepared food. Something which smelled like turnip, tasted like mashed gingerroot and had an unpleasant slimy texture; but I felt invigorated by it. She told me our breakfast was made from local food. She was used to foraging down here.
I asked her if this cave system was like the famous catacombs of Rome and elsewhere, where victims of religious persecution had hidden, sometimes developing whole communities.
"The victimized do sometimes arrive here," she said, "and find a certain sanctuary, I suppose. But there is a native race, who never venture close to the surface, who are the dominant people."
"Do you mean an entire civilization dwells in this cave system?"
"Believe me, Count Ulric, you will find much more than one civilization down here."
Rationally, I refused to accept this fantastic claim. Even the recently explored caverns of Carlsbad were not so vast.
And yet something in me was prepared to believe her. I sensed an echo of a mysterious truth, something that perhaps I had once known, or that an ancestor had experienced and which was imprinted in my race memory. I knew of the fashionable fascination amongst German bohemians who spoke of a world within the world, whose entrance lay at the North Pole, and I knew some of this nonsense had been given credence by Nazis like the vegetarian crank Hess, but I had never suspected that such an underworld existed beyond the fantasies. Probably it did not. This sys-tern, though vast, was bound to be finite and so far there had been no evidence of it being populated by any kind of human settlement. Perhaps Oona herself was one of those who believed the myth. I had no choice but to trust her judgment. She had, after all, saved my life more than once.
I was convinced that Gaynor and Klosterheim were still in pursuit, that my sword meant too much to them. They would follow it, if necessary, into Hell.
As the light grew less faint, I could make little of my surroundings. The echoes told me that the roof of the cavern was very distant, and I began to wonder how much farther we could go down before gravity began to crush us. Mostly what I saw was a kind of reflected glow from icicles and stalagmites. We seemed to be following a smooth road of igneous rock, perhaps some ancient lava path, which wound down towards the shining horizon. As we got nearer, we became aware of a rushing sound which grew louder until it was a distant roar. I could not imagine what was causing the sound. Neither could I guess the source of the light.
We made increasing stops as Oona rested. She was growing tired and the roaring was so loud, so unbroken that we could hardly hear each other. Yet she was determined to continue. Fifteen minutes and she was up again, dragging me and the travois down the gleaming slope until at last the ground leveled out and we were standing on a kind of hillock, looking towards a band of pale pewter light which danced forever ahead of us.
I had tried to ask her what it was, but she couldn't hear me. She was almost as exhausted as I was. I could tell by the way she moved the poles onto her shoulders, settled the makeshift harness around her, and plodded on.
My strength had hardly returned. If I did not see a doctor soon, many of my broken bones would not heal properly and a split rib might pierce some internal organ. I had no special fear for myself, but I acknowledged this reality. I was already reconciled to death. It would give me great satisfaction if I and the sword were lost forever to my enemies.
We kept moving, meter by painful meter, towards the source of the light and the sound. Now, every hour or so, Oona would pause and take a drink from the flask she carried. Then she would force me to swallow some of the ill-smelling stuff. A witch's brew, I said. If you like, she replied.
I had no idea how far or for how long we traveled. The sound grew louder and louder until it pounded like blood in my eardrums. My own skull seemed to have become a vast auditorium. I was aware of nothing else. And, though still dim by ordinary standards, the light was growing so bright it had begun to hurt my eyes. I found it hard to turn my head, but when I did so I saw that the band of sparkling brilliance had grown much higher and was rising into the darkness, illuminating every kind of grotesque shape. I saw frozen rock that seemed organic, that assumed the shapes of fabulous beasts and buildings, of people and plants. Etiolated crags. A silvery light contrasting with the utter blackness of the farther reaches. A place of deep, alarming shadows. A monochrome world in extremes of black and white. A mysterious spectacle. I could not believe it had not been discovered or written about before now. I had no idea of its history or geography. It seemed somehow obscene that the Nazis should be obsessed with exploring and no doubt conquering this weird unspoiled territory. They had a natural affinity, I suppose, for darkness. They sought it out.