Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Read online

  And it appeared as if he was running out of room. A narrow spine of rock, steep and as sharp as the blade of a massive sword, began to rise out of the ridge on his left, slicing upward into the flank of the great mountain, forcing him to the right onto a tiny ledge. He could no longer see the river to his left and he was in imminent danger of falling into the chasm on his right. The snarls and grunts of the wolves grew louder as they strained to catch him.

  A horrible suspicion began to grow in his mind that the hooded figure had directed him into a trap. Probably, he thought, the wolves were the minions of the sinister figure and he was being given to them as a prize. As he considered that thought, his fear began to be replaced by rage. Reaching deep inside himself, he put on a desperate burst of speed. They had not caught him yet. The mountainside was close and he could see stands of tall conifers. If the narrow ledge lasted and he made the trees ahead of the wolves, he could shinny up the slick trunks and perhaps put himself out of their reach. If it came to it, and he ran out of time—if the wolves came too near—he would simply hurl himself off the cliff and into the river.

  And then any choice he had in the matter was abruptly taken away. The narrow ledge, slick with rain, ended, and he ran straight off into space. As he tumbled through the air, the rain pelted him from all sides, and the growling and the snarls of the wolves on the cliff above were overwhelmed by the approaching sound of the furious floodwaters below. The only thing he could clearly see as he tumbled end over end through the air, getting closer and closer, was a roiling mass of churning river.

  IV

  There was a moment of very odd silence when he smashed into the water and went under. He felt curiously weightless even as he was pulled down into a muted, distant roaring that completely enveloped him. The air had been knocked from his body and his lungs burned, but he instinctively kept his mouth shut. Wrapped in liquid gloom, he didn’t know exactly which way was up. Knowing of nothing else to do, he flailed about with his arms and kicked mightily with his legs. Finally his head broke the surface and he gulped in air and found that he was a bobbing cork in a writhing cauldron.

  Looking about to find the bank so that he could make for it, he was stunned to discover that in nearly every direction there were sheer rock walls. The water was churning and spouting in miniature geysers and was carrying him around in a circle. On every side except the narrow defile where the river entered the maelstrom there were slick, sheer walls of smooth rock. He was in a gigantic whirlpool and he was being pulled toward its center.

  He fought frantically against the current but there was nowhere to flee even if his efforts were successful, and they were not. The roiling current pulled him to the center of the vortex where the water surged downward in a furious spiral. He felt himself going under and with a last desperate effort filled his lungs with air. Then he went down into a churning, roaring darkness full of things that banged into him and jostled by in a mad rush. There was a moment when he felt almost weightless again and then there was the sudden sensation of intense speed. The flood was carrying him under the earth in rapid fashion.

  He was caught in a siphon and it was taking him into the bowels of the earth. In a flash of memory, he recalled the peculiar spring spewing into the river from the fissure in the canyon wall far to the west. If this was the current that was going there, he was doomed. He would never survive such a distance unless there were cavities underground where he could replenish his air. And he knew so little of such things that he had no reason to hope.

  There were other bits of flotsam, large and small, that collided with his head and body in the surging water. He was at the mercy of the flood and in constant danger of being brained or having the breath knocked from his body. In order to extend the value of the air in his lungs, he could not risk an energy-consuming struggle with the current but was forced to let the river take him. There was no point in struggling, anyway, in such a torrent. He was probably going to drown, but he was determined to hang onto life as long as possible and hope for a miracle.

  Once, he opened his eyes and peered about into the water, a dangerous maneuver in the muddy maelstrom and it availed nothing. It was utterly dark and he could not make out even the simplest of shapes. Every so often his head and body banged against something slick and unyielding. It finally occurred to him that it was the side or perhaps the top of the rock tube through which the siphon flowed.

  On and on he went, helpless in the power of the water, until his lungs burned so fiercely that he realized that the end of his struggle was imminent. There was no more virtue in the air contained in his lungs but even so he was loath to let it go. He felt that if he did so, he would yield to the temptation to gasp for more and fill his lungs with water. A sense of detachment slowly began to creep into his consciousness and he knew that the end was near.

  As he began to slip into blackness, a thought occurred to him that, oddly enough, pleased him. During the journey across the plains in the wagon he had vowed to himself that before the end of the year he would either be a free man or a dead slave. It now appeared that he would, in fact, die. But he had not been a slave now for more than a week. He would die a free man.

  Then a voice broke in upon his thoughts and he recognized it as the voice of the cloaked and hooded figure he’d seen up on the ridge.

  Hang on, it said, you’re almost there.

  Suddenly, as in a dream, he felt his head break through the surface of the water into free air. He was certain that it was illusion brought on by the nearness of death, but he was so utterly fatigued that he welcomed it and relinquished the dead air in his lungs and breathed.

  He was stunned to discover that instead of the warm shroud of death, he suddenly felt colder and clearer headed. His lungs burned as if they were on fire, but he was breathing real air. He was still charging along at the mercy of the flood but was evidently out of the siphon. As he breathed in good air, his head cleared and he looked around. He was in utter blackness; either that or he had been knocked blind by the many collisions with the rock walls of the siphon.

  It gradually occurred to him that not only was his head above water but that the pace of the current was slowing until he was floating along rather gently, as if the stream had opened out and lost a good deal of its impetus. He could feel movement in the air but couldn’t be certain whether it was an independent breeze or if the rushing of the water had caused it. He moved his arms and was able to make progress against the slowed current, but which way to go?

  All around him was complete and utter darkness. His eyes, for whatever reason, were useless to him. While he moved his arms and kicked his feet, looking around in the blackness for any clue, his feet touched the malleable surface of an underwater gravel bar.

  The underwater bar seemed to slope up to his right so he swam in that direction and after a few moments found the water shallow enough that he could stand. He waded carefully about in the dark until he was sure of which way the water grew shallower. Then he moved cautiously in that direction.

  While he was still in knee-deep water, he came to a place where the water was deeper to his front and the gravel bar sloped away sharply. As he stood wondering what to do, he realized that the sound of the rushing water came mostly from behind him and to his right. The main current of the river, then, was to his rear, flowing from the right to the left behind him, which meant that he was moving away from the strength of the underground siphon that had carried him inside the earth and was probably facing a shore somewhere to his front.

  The deeper water in front of him was probably a backwater but to be safe, he eased along the top of the bar to his right, feeling his way with his feet, without plunging ahead. The bar angled obliquely to the right for a short distance and then curved slowly back to the left. He waded carefully along it, one step at a time, as the water grew gradually shallower.

  Abruptly, he came to the end. His feet were still in about a foot of water when he came up against the face of a vertical rock wall. He reach
ed out and felt for the extent of the wall in all directions. It extended farther than he could reach, up and to either side. He would have to go either to the left or to the right, blindly, completely embraced in darkness.

  He eased a bit to his right, but the sound, the deepening water, and the movement in the water confirmed what he’d already suspected—that that way led him back into the river’s current. He started back to the left, feeling his way along the wall as the water deepened and the soft mud and gravel sloughed beneath his boots with each step. The water grew deeper as he eased along the smooth face of the rock wall but remained relatively calm. Finally, he was in over his shoulders. But just when he thought he might have to swim, his feet touched a smooth bottom that was hard and level. With just his head above the water he continued to work his way carefully to the left.

  The sound of the rushing river ebbed slowly away behind him as he moved cautiously through the deep, still water at the base of the wall. Then his foot came up firmly against something solid as if there was an inside corner in the rock wall. He felt out to the left with his hand but the smooth face of the wall went straight on into the darkness. There was no corner in the wall above the surface of the water. Gingerly he raised his foot up and it came to the top of the underwater impediment.

  There was a stepped place in the smooth floor. He stepped up onto it and immediately his probing foot came up against another obstruction. Above that was another. Amazingly, there was a series of underwater steps rising out of the river and they did not feel as if they were a natural occurrence but rather the result of deliberate construction. Although it was difficult to be certain through the thick, sodden leather of his boot, they seemed to be too smooth and too even to be the result of natural forces.

  He rotated his body to the left and keeping his right hand firmly on the vertical wall of rock, carefully climbed the underwater steps. Slowly but surely, he walked up out of the water. In the complete darkness, he knelt down and crawled up the evenly cut steps on his hands and knees, careful to stay near the wall. A blind, but careful examination of the surfaces with his hands told him that the steps were not natural but that, in fact, someone had made them. Finally, after twenty or thirty steps which brought him several feet above and away from the river, he came to a smooth level place.

  Exhausted from his exertions in the siphon and the mad charge along the ridge, he lay on his back on the smooth rock and rested. His heart was pounding in his chest and it seemed to him that the sound of it was booming out and echoing in the darkness.

  Lying there, enjoying his first respite in several terrible hours, he grieved for Decius and found that he blamed himself. Decius had not been forced or even encouraged to come along but even so, the decisions Aram had made had helped bring about the horrible end of his friend. He suffered the pangs of terrible guilt for being thankful that the intensity of the day’s events and the sudden, bizarre change from rainy afternoon to utter, subterranean night made Decius’ death seem distant and unreal.

  Remembering the voice he’d heard while he was under the water, he sat up and looked around. In all directions, it was impenetrably black. If the tall man were present he would not be able to see him anyway. He stood up and stepped back to lean against the wall and faced the darkness.

  “Hello,” he said aloud and waited. All he heard, several seconds later, was his own voice bouncing back to him off distant unseen surfaces. Judging by the time that it took the echo to return, he surmised that he was standing in a very large chamber.

  “Hello.” He said again and again there was nothing but the echo of his own voice. If the strange person from the ridge had somehow accompanied him underground, that person was not responding. After thinking about it for awhile, Aram decided that he had imagined it. Almost certainly, he’d imagined the underwater voice and owing to the extreme duress he’d been under, probably the cloaked figure on the top of the ridge as well.

  Unable to see anything, and finding balance a difficult thing to maintain in utter darkness, he went back down upon his hands and knees and made several forays away from the rock wall across the level platform and returned. The platform seemed to be large and broad, and the steps went away from the wall farther than he cared to explore without the advantage of sight.

  Staying by the vertical wall and keeping one hand upon it, he got to his feet and moved away from the sound of the stream across the broad floor of smooth rock. After several minutes, he came to a corner in the stone. Another vertical wall went away from the one he’d been following at a ninety-degree angle to the left. Cautiously, he moved along this new wall, negotiating the unseen floor with careful steps.

  He came to another corner a little way along but this one turned inward to the right. Easing around the corner, Aram discovered that there were more steps leading upward along this wall. He was uncertain as to what to do. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to abandon the river just yet. Following it to its egress from the mountain might be his only certain escape from the depths of the earth.

  Before deciding whether to climb up or go back down, he eased across the steps in the dark and about ten feet away came to another wall of vertical stone, this one angling upward exactly opposite the other. So there were steps leading upward between two vertical walls of stone. Uncertain of what he should do and unnerved by the lack of sight, he sat down on the bottom step and gazed into the darkness in blind indecision. Where was he?

  What if he was not underground at all? Perhaps he’d been blinded by one of the many blows to his head he’d suffered in the maelstrom and he was even now sitting out in the open, exposed to other’s eyes even as he was helpless. But he rejected that thought—it felt like he was underground. The cool, damp air and the complete lack of environmental sounds other than that of the stream as well as the absence of outdoor sensations—like wind or rain—convinced him that he was under the earth.

  And that deepened the mystery. Who had built stone steps and platforms here inside the darkness of the mountain? Was it his mysterious hooded friend? If the spectral figure was real and not just a figment of Aram’s imagination, where was he and why didn’t he show himself?

  Then, staring into the utter gloom around him, he finally saw something—just a small thing—that brought him great relief. He was certain that he was not, in fact, blind. For if he looked toward the river and gazed slightly left toward the loudest part, he could see a faint, tiny glow, clearly shimmering with the movement of water. The siphon had seemed hideously long when he was caught in its power but evidently it was no so long as to completely exclude all light from the world outside.

  He was obviously in some kind of underground cavity where there was evidence of intelligent construction. The river had siphoned him into the guts of the mountain. And though the steps cut into the rock seemed to be proportioned for a man’s foot, he couldn’t help but wonder what thing lived here under the earth in the dark. What kind of danger was he in now, and how could he know when that danger was near?

  Pondering that question, he felt his insides tighten in fear. If he were attacked, especially if the attack was launched in silence, he would be utterly defenseless. He stood up. Action was much better than inaction and doing something would help to defray his anxiety.

  As much as he hated to abandon the familiar landmark of the river, the risks inherent in negotiating its deep current or even finding his way along its banks in the subterranean blackness made him decide that he must. Besides, if this was the stream that he and Decius had seen erupting from the rock into the river to the west—and he felt certain that it was—that point of outflow was three or four days away at least when moving above ground in the daylight. In the darkness beneath the earth, it would be an impossible distance.

  There seemed to be no other intelligent choice but to climb up the steps into the regions above, wherever that led. Certainly the sun and the open sky were somewhere above him so it made sense, since he had steps cut into the stone to guide him, to go up.
r />   Returning to the wall at the right side of the steps, he ascended them one by one carefully. Eventually, his hand discovered the top of the wall as he climbed and in a few more steps he’d left it behind. With nothing to support him vertically, he dropped to his hands and knees and negotiated a few more steps until he came to another level place. Remaining on his hands and knees, he eased out across the open space.

  Shrouded in darkness he did not know if he should, or even could, go straight, but there was nothing else to do. If there were any light ahead of him, or a way out of the mountain, he believed that it would be above him, so he would keep going up if he could discover more steps, or lacking that, sideways to the right. Since he’d come in from that direction, it made sense that the edge of the mountain would be nearest there.

  After what seemed a long time he bumped up against another vertical wall of stone. He hoped rather than knew that he’d gone straight. He eased along the wall to the right and came to a right angle turning back to the right. This he didn’t want because it would force him to backtrack and by listening carefully he could still hear the river running below him in that direction. He went back to the left and after a while found another stairway of stone indenting this wall and leading up. So after checking the width of the passage and finding it delineated by a wall on the other side as well, he went up.

  This stairway was narrower than the one that had brought him to this level, only about eight feet wide. Again as he climbed he stayed near the right hand wall. When this wall abruptly fell away from him he assumed that he’d come to another level open area. But as he eased his foot that way it came into contact with nothing. Kneeling down, he felt along the edge of the step. The wall of stone had gone and he felt only rough rock angling away from the stairway. The steps along this part seemed to have been carved from a natural slope of rock that was pitted with holes. He would have to be careful to remain on the steps and not stray.