For a moment he could not believe it; then he stood hastily and shouted, "Hi! Don't pull up the bucket!
How am I to get up again?"
A maned head appeared, in silhouette against the sky, and looked down at him silently. It vanished; another appeared at a different place; then it, too, was gone. "Ho!" shouted Thorinn, hearing his voice boom up the shaft.
He listened. Over the slow sighing of the wind, a sound so familiar in Hovenskar that it was heard only when it changed, he caught the grumbling voice of Goryat.
"Lift your end!"
Footsteps scraped on the pebbles beside the well-curb. Then something dark came into view and hung suspended in the middle of the disk. The broken circle of brightness around it flickered and vanished, the light on the walls turned gray and went out. A stony clang echoed down. The black air pressed close to Thorinn's eyes, and seemed as heavy to breathe as water. There was a long pause, then another clang. Thorinn's heart was leaping, but he reached for his wallet calmly enough, found the wooden light-box and uncovered the window of mica at the end. The pale witchfire of the sky-stuff inside brought his arms back in ghostly dimness, and a vague circle of the dirt wall; but though he shielded it with his hand, it would not reach the top of the shaft.
He waited, saying to himself, "It was a joke," but in his belly he knew better. Not for any prank would glum Goryat or his lazy sons have lifted those two great stones, the broken slabs left over from the roofing, which had lain half sunken in the earth beside the house for as long as Thorinn could remember, and laid them one atop another across the mouth of the well.
He listened. Dimly from above, vibrating through the slabs of stone, came the deep rising and falling tones of Goryat's voice. Though he could not make out the words, the rhythm was familiar. What was it? Then he knew: the invocation to Snorri, the one Goryat had chanted when they had sacrificed the horse. The men of Hovenskar lived by their horses; for the mares to go dry was a disaster. A prudent man does not offend the gods; therefore Goryat had sacrificed a stallion. When Snorri refused the gift, what more natural than to offer a boy instead?
Fear was a cold knot in his stomach. He took a deep breath, another. The walls of stone around him were like a shirt laced too tight. He felt half smothered already, and yet he knew there was no lack of air. It was thirst that would kill him—that would take days. To die of thirst in a well! Never mind, he had time, a precious gift—three or four days, perhaps, before he grew too weak. What else? He had his short sword, really an old Yen-metal dagger of Goryat's, in its leather scabbard; the broad leather belt it hung from, which might be useful in climbing; his wallet and its contents, which he now examined—light-box, fire stick and tinder, a few crumbs of cheese, a strip of dried horse-meat, and a few odds and ends, colored pebbles and the like, which he had picked up because they were pretty. Then there were the clothes he wore, shirt and breeks of buckskin, horsehide shoes, and the thongs that wrapped his calves: a rope of sorts might be made of all these things together. Thorinn sat down on the floor of the well and hugged his knees for warmth. In the glow of the light-box, which he had placed on a stone beside him, he saw a sudden flutter in the air: something small and gray had darted up zigzag to vanish in the darkness.
Thorinn stared upward, mouth open, then snatched the light and raised it over his head. At first he saw nothing. Then a small gray creature detached itself from the wall, spread a pair of membranous wings, and swooped erratically to the other side. It was a wingmouse, one of the darkness-loving creatures that sometimes flew out of the cave on the valley slope two leagues above. Where had it come from?
He turned the light on the opening at his feet. This was a narrow black gash at the side of the well, no more than a span in width, but he saw now that it widened below.
Kneeling with his forehead pressed against the mud and pebbles, he was able to see a shelf of muddy earth a few ells away. It did not extend all the way under the opening, however, for he could just make out an edge of blackness on the near side—a second, deeper hole. Mud and pebbles cascaded slowly down into the darkness. The current of moist air was feeble but steady against his fingers; it seemed to rise straight toward him.
Thorinn sat up, feeling his heart beat. Who cannot take the short way home must take the long, as the saying was. If he could somehow reach the cave of the wingmice... Go down, agreed the voice in his head. He pulled out his sword, jabbed the point into the lip of earth over the opening. A wedge of dirt and stones came away and drifted down into the darkness; he listened, but did not hear it strike. He pried loose another wedge, and another. When he had made the opening large enough to admit his body, he paused and again looked in. This time, in the dim glow of the light-box, he could see a tumbled mass of muddy earth and stone, sloping like a funnel. After a moment's thought, Thorinn unwrapped the thong from one leg of his breeks and tied it securely around the light-box. Kneeling again over the hole, he carefully lowered the box and let it drop. In darkness now except for the glow that came up through the hole in the well-bottom, he stood and listened. Goryat's voice still rambled overhead. He stared upward a moment silently in the darkness, then turned and lowered himself feet first into the hole.
The dim-lit cavern rose around him. He landed, staggered, caught his balance. Crouching, for there was little headroom here, he picked up the light-box and brushed away the clods and gravel that had fallen on it. He held his breath to listen. The silence was so deep that he could hear the thud of his own heart. The low dirt ceiling, porous and stained reddish-brown in places, formed an irregular dome. Ceiling, walls and floor were mud-splashed; stones bigger than his head lay as if tossed about. The mound of mud and stones sloped away channeled and rutted. In one direction it disappeared under a great tilted stone, leaving an opening no more than a span high; in the other it went almost level into the darkness. Thorinn untied the thong from his light-box and wrapped it around his calf again. A faint current of air blew in his face as he moved down the slope.
Just over his head, tongues of some crusty reddish material hung from the ceiling. Thorinn tugged at one curiously, and found that it was metal, rusted so thin that it broke in his hand. Below, the runneled mound grew shallower and seemed to end in a level floor, with a few scattered boulders. As he descended, the ceiling rose, forming an arch overhead, as if he were in the bore of some giant earthworm. The patches of rusty metal grew larger and closer together; he recognized others, twisted and broken, among the heaped earth and stones at his feet. Farther away, the arched roof of the tunnel glinted silvery through the rust. Thorinn moved along one wall, examining it as he went, and at last stopped in wonder: between the dots and patches of rust, wall and ceiling alike gleamed with silver-gray luster. The tunnel was lined with Yen-metal, the incorruptible; yet it had rusted away to nothing in places. With each long step he took, another yellow segment of the tunnel bloomed out of the darkness; presently it seemed to him that he was not moving at all, but the tunnel was leaping toward him. The tunnel was like a yellow eye with a vast black pupil at its center, and Thorinn began to feel a terror of it because it was so huge and so close. When he turned, he saw another yellow eye behind. After each step the silence pressed in on his head like a sound too loud to hear. He stopped when he was tired, gnawed a bit of his horsemeat and lay down to sleep. When he awoke, the yellow eyes of the tunnel were staring at him as before. He gnawed the strip of horsemeat again, but that only increased his thirst. He put two small pebbles in his mouth and sucked at them as he went, and that helped a little.