The Bark of the Bog Owl (15 page)

Harlan nodded. “Sounds about right.”

“That adds up to a very slim chance this scheme could work,” moaned Selwyn.

“True,” answered King Darrow, “but these are desperate times. We must try it.” He began pacing back and forth, thinking how best to make this happen. “There’s no point in sending a troop of armed soldiers and hoping they find their way,” he began. “We’ll send a team of scouts to explore the caves and mark a path, if there is one, for the soldiers to follow.”

“How about miners?” Aidan suggested. “Our regular scouts’ skill and training won’t do them much good
underground. But miners spend their days inside the earth.”

“The boy’s right,” agreed Lord Grady. “The mines of Greasy Cave are in my shire. Shall we send for some Greasy Cave boys?”

“Yes,” answered the king. “Grady, go to the captain of their regiment. Tell him to muster a team of five experienced miners for a special mission—a mission that might save their kingdom.”

Then the king added, under his breath, “An all-important, near-impossible mission.”

Aidan broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “Er … Your Majesty? … Could I go with the troop of miner-scouts?”

The king shook his head. “Young Errolson, you’ve risked your life enough today.”

“But, Sire,” Aidan insisted, “don’t you think someone small should be in the party?”

Harlan chimed in, “There’s some mighty tight spots in a cave.”

“And the miners I know,” added Aidan, “are pretty broad about the chest and shoulders.”

The king thought on this. “You may be right, Errolson. The miner-scouts might need someone who has the body of a boy but the wits of a man.”

The leader of the miner-scouts was Gustus, the eldest of the company and their foreman at the mines of Greasy Cave. His thick beard was turning gray, but he was still a man of tremendous strength and vitality. His gruff way of talking didn’t disguise the tenderness he felt toward his men or his commitment to their well-being. Of the four other miner-scouts, three—Cedric, Ernest, and Clayton—were all made from the same mold as Gustus. They were short, burly men, accustomed to the perils and difficulties of working below the earth.

One of the miners, however, was different from the others. Arliss was a teenager, only three or four years older than Aidan. He was tall and lanky and didn’t much look like a miner. He hadn’t yet grown into his full strength, so he lacked the other miners’ skill with pickax and shovel. Nevertheless, he had a vital part to play in the mission.

Gustus had selected Arliss for the company because he had what people around Greasy Cave called “the miner’s head.” In the sheer blackness of the underground, it is a rare person who can maintain a sense of place and time. In an unfamiliar mine, or a mine that was not properly marked, even a miner with many years’ experience
could get turned around and find himself lost for days. But Arliss, like his father and his grandfather before him, had an uncanny ability to navigate underground. Without sun or stars to guide him, he could always find true north. Without reference to horizon or landmark, he could always judge how far he had traveled. Arliss lacked the experience of the other miner-scouts, but, as Gustus was well aware, they were headed to a place where nobody had any experience. At some point, they would have to rely on instinct and intuition. They would have to rely on the miner’s head.

Aidan rounded out the group. His chief contribution was his small size. Should the way get too narrow for the miners to pass, it would be Aidan’s job to scout ahead. Otherwise, the young hero would mostly trail along with the group and try to stay out of the way.

The moon had not yet risen when the miner-scouts lit out for the cave entrance on the Corenwalder side of the valley. The night sky was clear, and the stars provided only enough light for the little troop to pick its way through the wiregrass. They all wore oaken miner’s helmets, and each carried a rope and climbing hook, a pack with hardtack biscuit, a tinderbox for lighting fires, a few basic supplies, a water bladder, and a bundle of seven torches made of river cane and pine pitch.

Each of the miners, as always, had a pickax and shovel strapped to his back. Even aboveground, the miners pitched forward when they walked, as if they were in a low tunnel. They had orders not to talk above a whisper until they were underground, so as to avoid the notice of any Pyrthen patrols that might be in the area. But the
miners were a talkative bunch. In the dark and gloomy holes where they spent their days, a constant stream of chatter and argument kept their spirits up. They couldn’t help talking now.

“Hey, Gustus,” called Clayton, “tell me again how we’re going to find a hole in the ground on a wide plain in the dark of night.”

“Harlan said to look for two big cedars growing so close together they look like two branches of one big tree,” answered Gustus, “about a half-hour’s walk to the northeast of the camp. He says the cave hole is ten or fifteen strides to the east of the trees.”

“And how long has it been since he’s seen this cave hole?” asked Cedric.

“Well, let’s see …” Gustus was figuring. “He said they quit this country after the first western invasion and he hasn’t been back since, so what’s that, thirty years or more?”

“Hey, Gustus?” It was Clayton again. “How do we know the cave hole on this side leads to the cave hole on the Pyrthen side?”

“We don’t know for sure,” said Gustus.

“Well, if anybody can find a path underground, it’s us,” answered Cedric, a little defensively. “We were made for this sort of thing.”

“True,” said Gustus. “But even so, the caves and tunnels we’re used to were dug by human hands. We got maps. We got long experience.

“But these caves,” he jabbed his finger toward the ground for emphasis, “these caves were hollowed out by the earth itself—by seeping water that melts away rock
like spun sugar. The tunnels of a limestone cave don’t give up their secrets very easy. Anybody who goes down that hole, boys, better have a good reason for it.”

The company walked on in silence, chewing on what the foreman had said. Ernest was the first to break the silence. “Am I the only one who’s not sure this is a good idea?” Nobody answered, so he continued. “I came here to fight Pyrthens, not to get lost in a cave and starve to a skeleton. Appears to me, Corenwald needs all the fighting men it can muster.”

Ernest’s remarks were met with a general mumble of agreement. But above the mumble came the boyish voice of Arliss, the youngest of the miners. “You’re looking at it all wrong.” He quickened his step to catch up to Ernest. “Sure, we came to fight, but the truth is, none of us is any great shakes when it comes to soldiering. We’re all of us handier with a pickax than a battle-ax.”

“What’re you saying, Arliss?” grumbled Clayton.

“I’m just saying, it might be that all the days we’ve spent in the mines were just getting us ready for this day. There’s a whole lot we don’t know about this mission. We don’t know if the cave is passable; we don’t know if it goes all the way to the Pyrthen side; we don’t know if we can find the way even if it does. But we do know that, whatever this mission turns out to be, there’s nobody readier for it than we are.”

“Live the life that unfolds before you.” It was the first thing Aidan had said since they left camp.

Everyone turned toward Aidan. “What’s that, son?” asked Gustus.

“Who knows what the future holds? Only the One
God,” explained Aidan. “You just live the little bit of life that you can see in front of you. You live it well. And that gets you ready for whatever unfolds next.

“Yesterday you were miners. Today, you’re scouts. Who knows, this might be a big waste of time—or worse. But maybe you’re the men who will deliver Corenwald from the Pyrthens. And the brave miners of Greasy Cave will be remembered forever in story and song as the heroes of the Bonifay Plain, whose bravery brought an end to the fifth western invasion.” He broke into an impromptu song:

The miners were unaccustomed to being spoken of as heroes. They rather liked it. Without their even realizing it, their shuffling steps locked into a soldierly march as they sang the refrain from Aidan’s song:

Gustus stopped short. “The twin cedars,” he said excitedly, pointing ahead. About a hundred strides away, Aidan could just make out the silhouette of the big, bushy trees. The company quickened their pace to keep up with their foreman.

Standing to the east of the cedars, Gustus scanned the landscape in front of him, but he saw no cave entrance. “Ten or fifteen strides to the east of the twin cedars,” he said to nobody in particular. “That’s what Harlan said. About where that clump of bushes is.”

Aidan’s heart sank. “Are you sure these are the right trees?”

“Have to be,” answered Gustus. “There aren’t many trees on this plain, much less big twin cedars. But how can a cave just disappear?”

Arliss, meanwhile, had gone over to the clump of bushes where Gustus had said the cave entrance should be. He was poking at the ground with the handle of his shovel. “Boys,” he called, “what you reckon this is?”

Running to where Arliss stood, Aidan could see that the bushes concealed a slight depression in the landscape. The miners circled around Arliss to see what he was poking at in the sand.

“Looks like a rabbit hole to me,” offered Clayton.

“Little big for a rabbit hole, ain’t it?”

“Well, it ain’t no cave entrance, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I don’t know,” Arliss answered, jabbing at the hole with the digging end of his shovel. “I think it’s a cave-in.” The hole opened a little under the shovel blade.
Encouraged, Arliss attacked the sandy soil with renewed vigor. “Fall to, boys!” he called.

The circle of miners pulled out picks and shovels and went at the hole in the ground, uprooting bushes and sending sand flying. In a matter of seconds, the hole grew to the size of a wagon wheel, gaping like a black mouth in the white sand.

“It’s a cave, all right!” shouted Gustus. “It’s a cave, boys!” The mission was on in earnest now, and Gustus took charge. “Clayton, Ernest,” he ordered, “get a climbing rope ready. Tie off on those cedars.”

He put a big, meaty hand on Arliss’s bony shoulder. “Arliss, you’ll be the first one down the rabbit hole.”

Aidan stayed out of the way as the miners made their preparations. Meanwhile, Gustus shuttled back and forth between the cedars and the hole, checking knots, securing packs, encouraging his men. The miners laughed as their foreman sang Aidan’s song in his gruff, tuneless way:

The rope securely tied, Gustus gathered his men in a circle. “Strap helmets,” he ordered, strapping his own as he said it. “Kneepads on.” To each of his men he handed two bulky squares of stitched leather stuffed with cotton, which they strapped around their knees.

Gustus threw the free end of the climbing rope down the cave hole. “And now,” he said, “to the One God we commend our lives and this mission.” He turned to Arliss and gestured toward the cave. “Arliss, lead the way.”

The young miner grasped the rope with both hands and backed into the hole. The blackness swallowed his lanky body. Looking up into the starlight, Arliss spoke one last time before he was completely lost in the shadows: “For God! For king! For Corenwald!”

The company of miners peered into the blackness of the cave hole and strained to hear anything that might tell them how Arliss was doing. It seemed an age before they heard his voice echoing up from the depths: “Bottom-tom-tom-om!”

Aidan went next. Backing hand over hand down the rope, he soon lost sight of the winking starlight and found himself in absolute darkness. It was comfortably cool down the hole; the muggy warmth of the summer night didn’t penetrate below the surface. Neither did the smells of the green world make their way into the cave. Above ground, the leafy odors of grass and shrub, the faint perfumes of flower and berry were so constant that Aidan rarely even realized he was breathing them. But down the cave hole, he smelled nothing but muddy clay.

The entry tunnel wasn’t a straight drop but rather a steep slope leading down to the innards of the earth. The limestone offered poor footing. Aidan hugged the climbing rope tightly as he inched through the narrow chute.

The miners above made no noise. Nor was there any noise from below. Aidan could hear only his own short breaths and the pounding of blood in his temples. Of all
his five senses, only the sense of touch was left to him, so he was very aware of the textures around him. In places, the limestone was as smooth as wavy glass and just as slippery. In others, it was as rough as embedded gravel, and sliding over it was a misery. Twice he bumped his head on protruding rocks that would have surely left nasty gashes had he not been wearing his miner’s helmet.

At last, Aidan heard a noise below him.

Tchk … tchk … tchk.

“Arliss?” he called tentatively. “Is that you?”

“It’s me,” came back Arliss’s echoing voice. To Aidan’s relief, it didn’t sound very far away.

Tchk … tchk … tchk.

“Trying to strike a fire,” Arliss remarked, “but it’s mighty damp down here.”

Aidan was out of the entry tunnel now and able to stand up straight. He called back up the chute, “Bottomtom-tom-om.” The slightest sound echoed all around the chamber where he now stood.

“Welcome to the underworld,” chuckled Arliss in the pitch blackness. “Have a look around.”

Tchk … tchk … tchk.

A few strides away, Aidan saw three sparks in succession. He heard Arliss grumbling in frustration. He stepped carefully toward the sparks, hoping not to stumble on an upthrust rock or break his nose on a hanging stalactite.

Tchk … tchk … tchk.

At last the spark caught on a little pile of dry tinder and became a tiny, licking flame. Aidan saw the knuckly silhouette of Arliss’s hand reach toward the flame with a splinter of fat lighter, which burst into a yellow blaze.
The dim light illuminated a smile of relief and satisfaction on the young miner’s narrow face. He took up one of the cane torches at his feet and dropped the flaming splinter among the shaggy fibers at the top. They quickly caught, and the hot-burning pine pitch popped and snapped. He handed the lit torch to Aidan and held out the second torch to borrow fire from Aidan’s.

Their eyes had grown accustomed to total darkness, so even the muted light cast by the torches seemed bright. But soon their eyes adjusted, and the boys were astonished to see what sort of cave they were in.

It was an enormous chamber, much bigger than King Darrow’s great hall. The walls, floor, and ceiling were carved out of glittering white limestone. Great swaths of golden brown and burnt-red rock seemed to move across the walls like cloud formations. The floor of the cave sloped down to an underground lake, where the water was so clear that the stone below the surface was no less visible than the stone at the water’s edge. But where the water grew deep—as deep as any ocean, by the looks of it—it took on a greenish-blue hue.

Aidan and Arliss stood wordlessly, trying to take in the scene before them. Behind them they heard a grunt, and two boots appeared at the end of the entry chute, followed by the legs, the thick round body, and the head and arms of Ernest. He stood blinking in the torchlight, rubbing a banged elbow and stretching a sore backbone. When his eyes adjusted, he staggered back a step, amazed at the scene. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, and his voice echoed around the chamber. “To think such a world as this was right below our feet, and we never knew it!”

The three remaining miners appeared each in his turn, with Gustus bringing up the rear. Each was as awestruck as the others, but each also understood that the beauty of the place didn’t lessen its danger.

“All right, boys,” began Gustus, “we got a wet cave. That means we got to be very careful of our fire. If we lose fire, we don’t get out of this cave alive.” He looked intently into the faces of his men. “You saw how dark it was in that entry chute. Without these torches, this whole cave would be just as dark. We can’t lose fire,” he repeated slowly and emphatically.

“Everybody’s got seven torches. That’s forty-two torches between us, minus the pair that’s already lit, makes forty. That’s twenty pair: ten for the trip out, ten for the trip back.”

He paused. He wanted to be sure everybody heard him: “When ten pair of torches are burned, we turn for home.”

“But, Gustus,” interrupted Arliss, “what if we haven’t made it to the other side yet?”

“I don’t care. I don’t care if we haven’t made it out of this entry chamber yet. I don’t care if we’re so close we can smell Pyrthens,” answered Gustus. “When we light the eleventh pair of torches, we turn it around. It don’t serve any purpose for us to die in a hole for lack of fire to get out.” Arliss saw the logic in this. He submitted to his foreman.

“A torch burns three-quarters of an hour,” continued Gustus. “That gives us about seven hours to find the Pyrthen camp. So let’s move it. The torches are burning.”

Taking Aidan’s torch, Gustus led the way along the
edge of the lake. He, Ernest, and Cedric formed a trio, and behind them Arliss and Aidan walked in the light of Clayton’s torch. It was a relatively easy hike at first, but the lakeside path was not straight. The lake wound its way beneath the earth like a great tunneling snake, and Aidan quickly lost all sense of direction.

“Are we sure we’re headed the right way?” he whispered to Arliss.

“Let’s hope the path takes a left-hand turn,” Arliss whispered back. “We’re tracking just a little north of due west.”

“No sun, no stars,” Aidan observed, “I don’t see how you can tell.”

Arliss tapped his helmet. “Miner’s head. Pap had it. Grandpap had it. I got it too.”

The underground landscape—as much as they could see anyway—changed constantly. In places, the lake disappeared completely, dropping away to an even deeper tunnel than the one they were passing through. In places, fields of massive stalagmites stood like whole forests of cypress knees, broad at the base and tapering toward the top. Where the ceiling was lower, they got a good look at the stalactites hanging ponderously over their heads.

All around them echoed the
drip … drip … drip
of seeping groundwater, heavy with dissolved limestone. It dropped from the bottoms of stalactites to the tops of the stalagmites below, leaving one more molecule of limestone on the tip of each, growing them toward each other in the slow way of underground things. In places the stalactites and stalagmites met to form great pillars from floor to ceiling, monuments to the patient work of water
and limestone. In other places, the ceiling was thickly covered with thin, hollow formations like drinking straws. A droplet of water hung from each, and they shone like jewels in the torchlight.

The walls, too, were infinitely varied in color and texture, now white and smooth as alabaster, now striped red and white like bacon, now gray and muddy. The ground they walked on was sometimes smooth and slick, sometimes crunchy with bits of deposited limestone. But mostly it was mud they walked on—or through: slippery mud, sticky mud, ankle-deep in places, in some places even deeper, threatening to take a boot and keep it.

For the first two hours of the trip, the way was broad and the ceilings high enough that the company could walk upright. Though their way was winding, it wasn’t a maze. There had been only one path. They appeared to be making good time, and their spirits were high. As a bird flies, it wasn’t more than half a league from the east entrance of the cave, where they came in, to the entrance on the Pyrthen side.

“We can’t be far now,” remarked Ernest. “We’re on our third pair of torches, and we’ve been walking steady this whole time.”

After a brief hesitation, Arliss spoke up. “We’re not as close as you think. We’ve been walking due north the last half-hour.”

“Due north?” snorted Clayton, “what makes you say that?”

Arliss tapped his helmet.

Gustus sighed. “The boy’s got the miner’s head. That’s why we brought him along.” He was visibly disap
pointed. “So, Arliss, you say we’ve been making good time in the wrong direction?”

“Yes sir,” answered Arliss. “If this path doesn’t turn south and west soon, we’re not going to make it in time.”

The miners looked at one another in gloomy silence. Their good cheer was extinguished. “Cheer up, boys,” said Gustus, as jauntily as he could. “We got plenty of fire left before it’s time to turn around. Meantime, there’s only one way to go. So let’s go.” He forged ahead, in the opposite direction of where they knew their destination to be. The miner-scouts followed, but their tension grew with every step.

The miners had just lit a new pair of torches—their fourth—when they faced their first real navigational choice. A tunnel coming in from the left joined the corridor they had been following. Gustus stood in the intersection of the two passages. “Which way, Arliss?” he asked.

Arliss stood beside his foreman. “The big passage is pointing northwest. This new one points southwest.”

A cheer erupted and echoed around the limestone walls. They all knew they needed to turn southwest eventually. “Hurrah!” shouted Clayton, patting Arliss on the back as he squeezed past him to lead the way down the new passage. Falling in behind him, the rest of the party broke into happy song:

“Stop!” The miners’ singing was interrupted by a shout from Arliss, who still stood in the intersection of the two passageways.

The surprised miners looked quizzically at their young comrade. He stood with his shoulders slumped and his eyes averted, the posture of a person with sad news to tell. “That’s not the way.”

Gustus looked at him, confused. “Pardon?”

“That’s not the way, sir.”

“But you said this way goes southwest,” spluttered Clayton. “The Pyrthen camp lies southwest of here. That’s one of the few things we know for sure.”

“It’s a dead end,” said Arliss. “I can feel it.”

“Oh no,” groaned Ernest. “It’s the miner’s head again.”

Clayton moved toward Arliss. His thick hand was clinched into a fist. “I think it’s time I knocked some sense into that miner’s head.”

Gustus quickly stepped between them. “Tamp it down, Clayton. Everybody’s feeling a little sharpish. Let’s hear what the boy has to say.” He turned to Arliss. “What do you mean you ‘feel’ a dead end?”

“You remember the long shaft at the Greasy Cave mines?”

“Since long before you was born,” answered Clayton.

“It’s got two entrances—north and south—and the main tunnel runs between them.”

“Right,” answered Gustus.

“Then there’s spur shafts running off to the left and right.”

“Right.”

“Get to the point, boy.” Clayton was losing patience.

“The point is,” continued Arliss, “the air feels different in the main tunnel than it does in the spurs. The air
in the spur shafts is a little staler. In the main tunnel, there’s the slightest movement of air.”

He took a few steps down the southward tunnel. “Here the air is dead, like a spur shaft.” He stepped back into the main corridor. “Here I can feel just a tiny bit of air current.”

The rest of the miner-scouts stepped back into the main corridor.

“I don’t feel any difference,” Clayton grumbled.

“I don’t know,” offered Cedric. “It might be a little fresher out here. But I wouldn’t bet on it either way.”

Aidan, for his part, couldn’t tell any difference. It all felt dank and musty to him.

“Gustus, what do you think?” asked Ernest. “You’re the foreman of this outfit.”

“Don’t much matter what I think about air currents and stale air,” answered Gustus. “Don’t imagine I could tell the difference. But I do know we brought Arliss because he’s got the miner’s head.” Clayton groaned at this. Gustus flashed a sharp look in his direction, then continued. “More than once, his daddy’s instincts got me out of scrapes down in the mines. Some folks is just born to be underground. Arliss and his family is about half-mole. So if Arliss don’t feel good about that passage, I don’t feel good about it. We’ll carry on the way we’ve been going.”

“You can’t mean it!” shouted Clayton, his voice echoing around the cavern. “That tunnel points in the direction where we know the Pyrthen camp to be. And you’re going to send us in the opposite direction because of this boy’s hocus-pocus?”

Gustus answered Clayton’s outburst with a quiet question. “What makes you think that tunnel leads southwest?”

Clayton saw he was trapped. Gustus pressed the point. “I want you to tell me how you know that passage leads southwest and this one leads northwest.”

Clayton answered without looking at anyone. “Because Arliss said so.”

“Because Arliss said so,” repeated Gustus. “Without Arliss here, we wouldn’t even have sense enough to know if this was north, south, east, or west. So if you’ve still got a hankering to explore that tunnel, go ahead. We’ll pick you up on our way back. But the rest of us are going this way.”

Gustus shouldered his pack and led the way northward again. And Clayton, who fell into step with the rest of the group, wasn’t the only miner-scout who looked back wistfully at the southward passage as it melted into blackness.