Reprisal (46 page)

Killing could be done--but damage could not.

Joanna turned aside, kneeling, and set the rough rock down--set it down with great care to make no sound.

How, then? A blade folded out of the multitool? And which one--the serrated edge that had already saved Charis? The simple edge? One would be a sawing ...

the other a slicing through the girl's soft throat as she slept. And Charis would wake as she lay dying, drowning in her blood, and would know that her mother had killed her.

Trembling, astonished to fail at a task so simple, so necessary--one Charis would have accomplished at once--Joanna looked across the candle's light, expecting to see what she saw. ...

Rebecca, naked and looking much older--her hair woven with gray, her breasts and belly sagged and stretch-marked, sat on Frank's sleeping bag, watching.

Joanna knelt between her daughters, one alive and sleeping ... the other not.

She listened to Charis breathing--and saw Rebecca nod as if she'd always known she would come second to another sister. Had known also of her mother's deep avoidances, the cowardice she concealed behind her poems and caving.

Joanna got to her feet and went silently where Rebecca had been sitting, and was no longer. She stooped for her helmet and put it on ... picked up her harness, and the supply pack, with its reserves of lamp batteries, flashlight, lighter and light sticks. Then she came very quietly to gather Charis's helmet and lamp, tuck them into the pack.

The girl slept.

Carefully ... carefully, holding the pack and harness bundled, Joanna stepped close, bent to pinch the candle out, then put it in her coverall's side pocket, smelling of hot wax.

In perfect darkness, Charis sighed, turned a little, and slept.

... So slowly and silently that her boots seemed to refuse the rock, Joanna felt her way down the passage through blackness thick as molten tar. She touched damp stone, her fingers trailing along the passage side to guide her to a narrow turn. Then she went to her hands and knees to crawl carefully away, dragging the harness and supply pack behind her.--She crawled out onto the low rock drift ... and down it, turning to lift the pack and harness along, dislodge no stone. Then she stood, switched on her helmet lamp, and buckled her harness, squinting in the light.

Following the map in her mind, she went down a muddy corridor ... leaving behind her, coolness, stillness, and engulfing dark.

Down that short corridor to the fault ... and she eased and twisted back through the squeeze, dragging the pack after her on its tether.

On the other side, standing free, Joanna heard a noise ... a sound. A distant sound that resolved itself into a called "... Joanna?"

Her name echoed softly through the labyrinth on cool stone-smelling air.

"Joanna ..."

She turned and ran--as much of running as was possible through a maze of rock corridors, graveled crawlways. She stumbled, crept ... scurried away, panting--and heard in distorted echo, over her animal grunts of effort, faint, thin-drawn as fine wire, a girl screaming.

"Mama ..."

Then Joanna began to injure herself, trip, scrape, and slam into stone in her great hurry. The route out--so complex in choice of turns, slides, duck-unders, and descents--was still in her head, and she fled as if Charis could find and follow through darkness, was following, was just behind her.

"Mamaaa ..." Barely heard, even as echo, so Joanna was sure she imagined it--and needed to control herself, forgive herself for what she'd done so long ago, and now was doing again. Forgive herself, so she wouldn't go mad and wander as Charis would wander, blind and screaming.

She forgave herself, was sure she had, but went faster just the same, frantic, struggling through hard places with bleeding hands and knees and elbows ...

wading fast flushing small streams that foamed out of blackness. ...

And in time that seemed such slow time, she came staggering, exhausted, out into the river's old course, its polished tunnel more than a highway wide. ...

Then, with no excuse for hurry, with only silence heard behind her, she began to run again--stumbling, legs shaking. She imagined the sun, which might, in its rich heat and light, forgive her.

... At last, she came to the corridor's end, and slid and fumbled handholds down the northern wall, fell the last few feet and turned her ankle. Then hobbled ... hobbled away over the great, rubbled plain still containing the ghost of ancient waters, its lost black and silent lake.

Joanna managed slowly, limped along, gasping with exhaustion, and was certain there could be nothing following, nothing coming behind her.--But having crossed the plain, having done so much, she found it difficult to climb the ridge of fallen rock to the rope. The climb, up great heaped and tilted slabs of stone, was very difficult.

There was a time she would have done it standing, and lightly. But now she went on all fours, leaving bloody handprints and kneeprints she did not see--it was the last of her run, and she was very tired.

She found the rope, after only a little wandering along the ridge. It hung, snake-skin patterned and slim, out of nowhere ... hung tethered to the rope sack on a slab, alongside the sets of ascenders. It was the way to the sun.

Halfway up the rope, weary, aching, climbing no longer, Joanna hung in her harness. She hung suspended on her slender line deep in the well of darkness, in a silence only her heartbeat measured. She rested in emptiness, swaying slightly in cool breezes from dark to dark. ... She'd climbed the rope more and more slowly, foot by foot. More slowly ... until now, she climbed no more.

What was left of life was waiting high above, with its ghosts and loneliness, its warmth, light, and poem unfinished. While below, deep in the maze in darkness absolute, only a mad girl wandered the same few passages, blind, and calling for her mother.

Joanna waited for a while on her beautiful rope, that offered sunlight if she wished it. She waited ... surprised she hadn't known what must be done.--The answer, now so obvious, was what had followed, pursued her through limestone corridors ... and now had climbed the Blue Water to her.

She swung the supply pack up on its tether, released it from her harness, and clipped it to an ascender to hang fixed there on the rope.-Then she rerigged for descending, wove the rope through her rack, and started down. ... The line hummed softly through the descender as she went.

Her helmet lamp, her only light source left, should last the retracing hours.

... Near the bottom of the pit, she'd knot the ropesack high, and drop the last ten feet or so to the slabs of the ridge. Free of her, the rope would recoil a few feet higher still ... to hang out of reach and hidden in darkness, swaying to cool winds until her car was found in the woods above--perhaps in a few months, perhaps in a year or two, by some trespassing hunter.

Then, after their long time resting together, she and her child would be finally found in some far chamber--light brought to them at last with the voices of weary men, so they lay suddenly spangled, revealed in the glory of their vault of jeweled and shining stone.