Zadayi Red (21 page)

“Got something down here—oughta come see,” Paya wheezed out. He snatched a big stick from behind a boulder and wriggled out through Dahzi’s peep hole. Before Dahzi could even jump back, Paya stuck the stick in the fire. It was covered with pine pitch, and it blossomed into a torch.

“Come have a look-see,” the Crab Man said. He pedaled back into the darkness fast on his hands and knees, and Dahzi followed the same way.

In moments they were looking over a precipice. Dahzi could see sloping walls, but the bottom was darkness and mystery.

“Long way down,” Paya said. “Deep as maybe ten men standing on top of one ’nother. Watch.”

He grabbed a vine, leaned his weight on one arm, and started backing down the steep slope. About ten steps down he wedged the torch into a crevice, gave Dahzi a wild grin,
grabbed the vine with both hands, and dove into the darkness. “C’mon,” called an echoing voice.

Dahzi decided to climb down as far as the torch and have a look. He took a double-fisted grip on the vine and looked to see how it was fastened at the top. He couldn’t tell.
Oh well, it held Paya.

He squeezed the vine hard and stepped down sideways, watching where he put his feet. The limestone was slippery.

When he got to the torch, he peered over, expecting to see nothing but blackness. Paya was standing at the bottom and held up another torch. Dahzi wondered how he’d lit it.

“C’mon down,” said Paya, “it’s easy. Fun, too. Just put one foot after ’nother.”

Hell no,
Dahzi said to himself.

Studying the slope, he saw that the drop wasn’t sheer. The limestone was broken up, making steps here and ledges there.

“C’mon, there’s secrets to see.”

Now the Crab Man was showing off. Dahzi would have bet that no one else had ever been in Paya’s cave.

“C’mon, c’mon!”

Dahzi did.

He clambered too fast and almost lost his footing a couple of times. Even by the faint light of the torch he could see that the holds were plenty good.

When he planted two feet on solid rock and let go of his choke hold on the vine, he felt heat. Behind Paya was a low blaze, beside it a pile of tinder and wood, and beyond that a big heap of charcoal and ashes. The Crab Man had been coming here a long time and had this place well outfitted. Dahzi wondered why. He’d never seen mushrooms growing in caves, not beyond the entrance areas.

“Follow me,” said Paya, “follow me. There’s stuff you won’t believe.”

Like a man struck dumb, Dahzi followed the blaze of the torch. They went through a low, tube-shaped passage—
Like the body of a snake
, Dahzi thought. It gave him a chill. The tube seemed almost to swirl at the end, and then it opened into a chamber. Dahzi had the sense of wonders both marvelous and terrible looming in the vast darkness.

Paya led him eagerly to one area. It had a floor flat as a prairie, a ceiling as flat as the floor, and a forest of slender stone columns between, like little trees of rock pushing down against a solid earth and up against an immovable sky.

Dahzi reached out and stroked one. To his surprise it was cool, slick with moisture, and smooth. Where he expected to feel strength and tension, he experienced a sensual delight.

“Lookee here, too,” said Paya. He touched a knee-high jut of stone with his toe. “Shaped just like a you-know-what, ain’t it?”

A big
do-wa, thought Dahzi,
but still a
do-wa.

“Come along here, boy.”

Dahzi followed in the Crab Man’s footsteps, pacing among graceful columns.

“Here-here-here.”

Paya held the torch high so Dahzi could see. A whole wall looked like cloth, undulating smoothly down like it was draped over a woman’s breasts, belly, and hips.

“You could spend days just in this room, you could,” said Paya. “I’ve done years here, and I ain’t seen it all. But one thing . . . You gotta see this right now.”

Dahzi followed the Crab Man in a state of mind he did not understand. It was exhilaration, or ecstasy, like hearing a forest full of leaves, each one singing as it fluttered. The question of whether he should trust this odd fellow flickered across his mind like a shadow of a bird in flight and disappeared. Paya was a friend.

They walked a good way across what seemed to be the
same big chamber. Then they went around a corner and he could see light from the outside world, not a lot, just a little coming through a crack in the rock, but enough to make him feel better. Oddly, Paya crawled up the crack and scraped at something near the outside edge with his knife. He looked back and saw Dahzi watching him, then clambered back in a hurry, like a kid caught nabbing sweets.

They walked on through the chamber. The space was narrowing down, like going from an enormous stomach to a gut. They treaded through a narrow passage, then an area of broken footing, then a low alley. Finally they had to crawl, and at the last, slither.

When Dahzi got on all fours again, he heard . . . water. Running water. He could hardly believe it.

Paya led him a few steps to the bank of an underground river—and stepped in.

Dahzi looked at the torch, wondering how long it would last, and where Paya might have another stash of torches.

The youth waded into the cool water. He was filled with excitement and fear.

Paya doused the torch in the river.

Blackness. Astounding, absolute blackness. Dahzi felt like he was floating through space and slowly turning head over heels.

“Ain’t never seen nothing like this, huh?” said Paya. The Crab Man cackled. “If ‘seen’ is the word.”

Flutterings in the heart and mind. Gurgles in the gut. Surges of emotion. Wild beating of the heart. Then huge pulsations of fear lifted him up and crashed him down. Dahzi drowned in panic. He suffocated in terror.

He heard himself scream, and then realized that the scream was entirely in his mind.

Infinite darkness. Blackness like a world of its own, filling all the space that keeps the stars apart. There was no sun, no
moon, not even the faintest glimmer of any heavenly body. A universe of blackness.

They stood there for . . . Dahzi hadn’t a hint of an idea how long. Days, moons, winters. They stood until . . .

The mind knows a place beyond terror, and Dahzi found it. It was a surrender to the center of dread, where every horror had come to pass, and there were no more.

He stood for a long time in that place, too.

At last, as though he knew Dahzi had found a bizarre kind of rest, Paya took his hand.

Dahzi’s world changed—a warm hand. The Crab Man led him downstream.

They glugged along, and the plish-plash of the water made two points of orientation in an empty world.

Dahzi heard the river begin to hum, like it was running faster.

“This is going to be somp’n exciting now,” said Paya.

He shoved, and Dahzi pitched into nothingness.

At first he thought he’d fallen off a mountain. He kerplunked into water. Maybe he’d fallen a body length.

Now they seemed to be in a pool of still liquid. Dahzi discovered he could stand up, though the water came to his collarbone.

“Learning somp’n new, ain’t you, boy?” Paya pulled Dahzi on.

Before long he said, “Close your eyes.” He waited. “Honest now, be they closed?”

Dahzi closed them. Nothing could be darker than what he was seeing.

“Now cover them tight with your hands.”

Why not?

Glee squeezed Paya’s voice upward. “I got you a fine surprise.”

Dahzi followed his strange friend, trusting, in truth in a
state beyond trust. He felt like he’d been swept out to sea in a basket and had given himself up to the thrill of the ride.

Step after step. Dahzi couldn’t tell what was changing, if anything. The water lowered little by little to his waist, and then his knees.

“Open your eyes.”

Blasts of light.

They stood in a big lake, which was a dazzling radiance. Sunlight streamed in from one side. It was astounding. Sometimes Dahzi had resented the blistering rays of the sun—here the sun seemed a blessing beyond imagination.

It came through a huge shaft angling gently up, a window on the world ruled by Grandmother Sun, who was now unreal. The opening on the mountainside was big enough for a dozen elk to walk through side by side.

“I’ve found some things out in my years here,” said Paya. The words skipped like stones across water.

Gradually Dahzi’s mind accepted the reality of this light, just as it had adjusted to the grasp of darkness.

Paya led the way to the shore and to another pile of firewood and several torches. Dahzi thought,
We don’t need the torches here. Maybe they’re for the trip back.

“Build a little fire and I’ll get us a treat,” said the Crab Man.

Dahzi set to the work with flint. Paya waded to a shallow part of the pool and squatted. He was perfectly still, his hands in the water. Dahzi wouldn’t have thought Paya could stand so still.

As Dahzi blew the first embers into flame, he saw Paya fling his arms upward, and a shadow flew from them. Whatever it was splatted onto the rocky shore and did a white dance there.

Paya squatted again and waited. Dahzi stoked the fire and watched in amazement. Before long another something sailed up from Paya’s hands and did the flop-dance.

The Crab Man splashed his way to his catch, crabbed along the shore to the fire, and presented it for Dahzi’s inspection.

Fish. At least they imitated real fish, except they didn’t have eyes. Little bumps stood where their seeing organs should have been. And they were an eerie white, pale as fragments broken off a full moon.

Paya gutted the unnatural fish, skewered them on one of his sticks, and held them over the flames.

“Think they’re ghosts, do ya? Your tongue, it will tell you different.”

The flesh had a delicate taste, but savory. Dahzi’s mind rummaged around for what the taste was but could come up with nothing like it.

“Flesh, yes, good flesh. This is somp’n, ain’t it? We could catch more, eat more, but there ain’t that many. The lake don’t grow so many. Little flesh, little flesh.

“Follow Paya now, and you’ll get a sweet treat for the eyes.”

They splashed across the lake toward the entrance of the light. As they waded, the Crab Man’s eyes flicked about. The eyes looked like the crazy flight of bats through the air.

“Stay here,” said Paya. “You stand right in this spot now. Be back quick.”

He climbed into the shaft and looked for . . . Dahzi couldn’t imagine what. Eventually, he plucked something with his fingernails and dropped it into the bag he’d tucked into his belt.

When he’d worked his way back to Dahzi, the Crab Man said, “Right on now, right this way.” He seldom walked without talking, like his feet made his lips go.

He stopped at the edge of a deeper pool gouged into the lake. The bottom was oddly mottled with stones that looked like broken and discolored egg shells. That was a bizarre setting for one of the most beautiful flowers Dahzi had ever seen. It was white as a lily, with long, curly petals, shimmering delicately on the bottom on the pool.

“Very ginger now,” said Paya, “reach down and touch it. Very ginger.”

Dahzi did.

He looked at Paya gape-mouthed.

The Crab Man giggled and giggled, sending out hee-hees like birds scared out of trees. “Stone, yes. Oh, stone, it’s a flower of stone. Did you ever?”

His tone took an edge. “Easy now, don’t you break it. Paya, he’s been watching ’em, there’s a few more, but far as I can tell, takes years to make one, years. Don’t break it now. Ginger. Give this place love, yes, give it love.”

L
ove took the form, that night, of storytelling around the fire. Coming and going, the two of them had passed so many turnoffs and alternate passages that Dahzi couldn’t have kept count of them. Paya had several stories for each byway—perhaps hundreds or thousands of stories about the cave.

They ate the meat of the deer and Dahzi soaked up Paya’s tales. He felt even hungrier for lore than for food.

Finally the Crab Man wound down and rolled up in the deer hides he used for blankets. He summarized the day’s events with these words. “Folks know there’s a whole world above the earth—that’s the world of the sun and moon and stars. It’s a world they all, well, it’s enchanting, ain’t it, and it has the Sky Arch beyond.” He sighed, and let an undertone of secret pleasure creep into his voice. “But they don’t know there’s a world beneath their feet, now, do they? Don’t know that, no. Takes a different sort to explore that world, and a different sort to love it.”

“How big is the cave?” said Dahzi.

“Who knows? Big as the mountain, be my guess. Think on
that, the whole mountain, all the way from the Cheowa village to where the trail from the Tusca village comes in.”

Dahzi pictured it—a monster of a cave, maybe hundreds of holey fingers under a stone bulwark where you’d never guess, and maybe lots of ways in and out.

“Way it happens, seems like, the water, it comes down from the sky and runs through the ground and makes all the passages this way and that.” He made a snaky motion with one hand. “That’s the way Paya figgers it, anyhow.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Come the Planting Moon it’ll be nineteen winters. Ain’t wanting to go nowhere else, no, ain’t wanting to. Got my cave.”

Dahzi took the plunge. “What happened between you and Inaj?”

Paya sat up and glared at Dahzi. “Rude,” he said. “I told you, no talk about. Don’t.”

The Crab Man laid back down and turned his back, declaring he was on his way to sleep.

But this was important to Dahzi. He said, “Inaj did something terrible to me. You can’t imagine.”

Paya rolled back over, fixed Dahzi with his eyes, and held up the mangled hand. “This he done to me.”

Dahzi waited, to give honor to Paya’s pain. Then he said, “Inaj killed my mother and my father.” Dahzi didn’t see anything in Paya’s eyes, no glint of recognition of who he was.

“The bastard will be coming right by here on the way to the Planting Moon Ceremony.”