At once he found himself choked, floundering, turning. He could neither sink nor rise. He pulled himself out again, coughing, spewing up water.
He sat on his causeway and looked back at the length of it, dimly shining under water in the torchlight. What bitterness to be defeated after such labors! But without the art of swimming, he could not move under water; the treacherous stuff would not even let him sink.
A thought came to him, and he stood up wearily, looking down at the stones of the causeway. He bent, seized one of them half under water and hoisted it out, groaning with effort. The wet stone weighed nearly as much as he did, and in his weakness he could barely hold it. Surely, if he threw himself into the water again, carrying such a stone in his arms, he must sink.
He gave himself no time to consider. As he climbed awkwardly around the last column, he slipped, felt himself falling. The water plunged past him. The stone was dragging him down; water was in his eyes, nose, ears... He felt a blow against his knuckles, knew he was on the bottom. His grip loosened and his body floated backward, but he seized the stone again. His lungs were bursting. He forced his eyes open, saw a stinging blur, a gleam... Holding the stone with one hand, he reached out desperately, felt his fingers close around wood and metal.
Somehow he found the thong with his other hand, pulled, rose. He burst into air—he was alive. The sword, the sword—His heavy arm came up, and in his hand, streaming water, was the bright metal.
Levered upward, the slab trembled, moved a finger's breadth, then began to slide. Thorinn pulled the sword out of the way, leaped back. Turning majestically, the slab rumbled down the slope in a dancing cloud of smaller stones. It struck a boulder halfway down, tilted, came to rest. Stones pattered, fell silent. A haze of dust particles hung in the air.
Thorinn examined his sword anxiously, but the hard Yen-metal had taken no hurt. The point was as sharp and straight as ever; the double edge was not even nicked.
Cool air breathed past him into the exposed passageway. In the light of the torch, it was curved, lusterless, smooth-walled, unequal in its cross section—tapering almost to a point at ceiling and floor. It sloped gently upward out of sight.
Thorinn turned for one last look out into the darkness of the cavern. He had slept, rested, eaten all he could hold of the young fungus he had gathered. The rest—there was little enough—was in his wallet.
He discarded the torch, which was too smoky to be used in a small space; for convenience, he strapped the light-box to his arm as he had done before. He entered the passage and gingerly began to work his way down it in the yellow glow. For the first twenty ells or so it was not bad; then the passage narrowed so sharply that he had to crawl, dragging his wallet behind. The passage turned and twisted like a serpent, this way and that, now left, now right. With each upward turn Thorinn waited for the voice to speak in his head, but it did not, and his spirits rose; but at last the passage took a definite downward slope and widened again.
Thorinn crawled out into a black echoing space—another cavern, much smaller than the last. The opposite wall gleamed in the light, streaked and knobbed with some glassy substance that seemed to have melted like tallow and hardened again on the stone. But when he touched it, it was the stone itself. A trickle of water came from somewhere above and dripped from the bottommost knob with a melancholy sound. Thorinn cupped his palm under it and drank a sip, but it was bitter. At the far end of the cavern he found two level passageways, one opposite the other, as if they were parts of a single tunnel that happened to intersect the cavern. Thorinn took the left-hand branch. Almost at once the passage widened, the ceiling rose and became a dome three ells high. In the middle of the passage lay something enormous, circular and dark.
Thorinn stared at it suspiciously. It made no move; neither did it have any eyes or limbs, so far as he could see. It had the chill hardness of iron; it was wrought metal, the largest piece he had ever seen—like a giant's shield, ten spans across, having a circular hole pierced in it of three spans'
width. This hole was not in the center of the shield but to one side; through it he could see the brown, scuffed floor of the passage.
He knelt and laid his palm curiously on the metal near the rim of the hole: and the massive shield turned under his hand as if it were afloat.
Thorinn sprang back, hand to his sword. But the shield was slowly rotating upon some hidden pivot, returning to its former place. When the hole was where it had been before, it stopped. A second time Thorinn bent forward, put his hand on the shield and felt it turn. When he took his hand away, it swung slowly back to rest. What could be the use of such a thing, here under the earth, unless it was some springe or man-trap?
As he hesitated, a sound came to his ears—the faintest of whispering or rustling noises; it seemed to come from beneath the shield. The sound died away, then returned: a sound like that of some small creature crawling, scraping along in the space under the shield... no, not like that, but like some sound that he knew. Then he had it: wind in the grasses.
The thing was impossible, yet the more he listened, the more certain he became. Using the tip of his scabbard, he prodded the shield. Under the circular hole, brown rock moved past, then a sudden glint of brightness. The wind sound grew louder; a warm breath of air arose. The bright lozenge expanded to a cramped circle, then filled the hole in the shield.
Thorinn's breath had stopped. He was looking down into depths of silver light and brown-green shadow. There were stripes of darker brown, diminishing in a curiously painful way; at last he realized that they were tree-trunks, gnarled and huge, that dropped darkening through space until they were tiny as needles' ends at the bottom.
He could not doubt his senses. Somehow he had got above the Midworld, for there it lay below him. Go down, said the voice in his mind.
3
How Thorinn discovered that it is easier to fall into paradise than to get out again.
In the spring, when the pleasure pods were ripe, everybody in Pink Circle went on a picnic into the wildgreen along the river Wend. Grasshopper men went, two by two, arms linked as theysoared through the air; dough women with their fancymen went, panting and wallowing; the gray-bearded Knowers went, hobbling, leaning together, and sat on the grass to watch the young people.
First the unsexed little girls and boys would collect food from the foodvines that grew in the wildgreen, spicy orapples and sweet nanaberries, meatlets in clusters, hamsaniges from the hamsanige bushes. Meanwhile the young men and women would be gathering cushions from the cushionleaf trees and arranging them in circles on the cool sloping lawns, near enough to hear the pleasant gurgle of the Wend. The song-girls would tune up their vine-strung rebecks and the rewould be singing, then the food gathered by the unsexed little boys and girls would be heaped up and eaten; then there would be jumping and running contests, games for the children, jokes and argument for the elders; and finally, one by one, the people would wander off into the wildgreen until each had found a ripe pleasure pod gaping invitingly, with its soft watermelon-pink lining like a doughgirl's you know. Each one would search until he found a pleasure pod that just fitted,long thin ones for the grasshopper men, round fat ones for the dough women, short stunted ones for the children and fancymen. The pleasure pods for the dough women had to be almost on the ground, for the dough women were clumsy and could not jump; but the fancymen could scramble up the tall curled vines, and the grasshopper men could jump, twist as they jumped, and land gently on their backs inside the pleasure pods. The pods would dip a little lower with the weight of the people, hanging down from their long strong flexible vines, and the lip of each pod would slowly close until the pod was shut tight, with the happy person inside like a worm in a flossweed. What dreams they had then, what pleasures, twitching and moaning with their pleasures so that the hanging pods trembled, first one, then another, then a whole row at once!