The Wanderer's Tale (44 page)

No, no, not that world again, not again, PLEASE! Just let me stay dead . . .

Numbness. Freezing cold numbness. A chill that had turned him to ice.

i’m dead. i’m buried. i’m under the cold, cold earth. Don’t let me wake up now!

Rocking, undulating, swirling. Enclosed in the womb-like envelopment of death.

Oh, my head! My head! How is it possible to feel such pain when i’m dead?

A surging rush of consciousness. A dazzle of green and purple lights in his brain. A flooding of blood to the head. Sickening dizziness, like lying in bed when very drunk, eyes closed but feeling the entire world spin faster and faster until it seems the body is turning inside out. Then the sensation of being carried down a long, dark tunnel, out of the womb of death and into whatever awfulness lay beyond.

i don’t want this! i can really do without all this . . .

Then Gapp felt a sudden jerk that pulled him fully around, and he moaned again with the nausea sweeping through him. He was fully awake now, though he did not know it, and he was hating every second of it.

Where the heck . . . ?

He floundered wildly and gulped in a quantity of freezing water. Instantly he sank and thrashed his limbs about in wild panic. Another mouthful of water, this time into his lungs. He did not even know which way was up or down. Kicking in frenzy, he had the dull sense of his foot striking against something solid, and he pushed away from it hard.

Instinct took over. In his present position, it had to.

Coughing and heaving, Gapp surfaced and flailed about hysterically. His entire existence became one mad struggle. But after a while the recognition came to him that he was clinging to a hard surface, and onto this he held fast like a barnacle.

It took Gapp several minutes to cough up the residue of water from his lungs. At that moment all he could be concerned about was the luxury of being able to breathe again. The rest could wait.

So he gripped the rock tightly with his numb fingers, and resisted the current that threatened at any moment to tear him from his precarious hold on life and sweep him away. He had no idea where he could be, for it was utterly lightless; and the only sound in his present world was the hollow thundering of what might possibly be an underground stream.

Things, as usual, were
really
bad.

Gapp’s painful return to consciousness marked a turning point in his life. For on this occasion, for the first time in all his fifteen years, he was totally on his own. He did not have a clue where he was, how he had got there or what he had been doing beforehand. And he had no one to advise him on what to do now. All he knew was that he was floating in some kind of narrow tunnel, and that he felt cold and sick almost to the point of death.

If he was going to survive, he was going to have to do it all by himself; there would be nobody to help him out of this one.

With an unprecedented effort of will, Gapp forced himself to take action. In such dire straits as this, the animal instinct in him had to take over. A side of his mind that had not up until now played much of a part in his life, it now cut through the haze of disorientation, suffering and fear, till one single urge drove him on.
Survival
.

It was something that had never happened to him previously, but something that afterwards, however long his future might be, would occur all too frequently. And before long he would be able to call on that instinct at will.

Still holding himself as close to the wall as possible, he forced his unfeeling fingers to find a better handhold on the lumpy rock. He grunted through gritted teeth as he put all that remained of his strength into heaving his sodden weight upwards. His arms were pathetically feeble, to be sure, but the thought of giving up did not even on a subconscious level occur to him. All his being was now channelled into surviving. Several handholds later he was largely freeof the pull of the stream, with only his lower legs still submerged.

He halted briefly to gasp a few deep lungfuls of air, then resumed the climb.

Gapp had no way of knowing what lay ahead. For all he knew the wall might curve back over on itself like a pipe, and he would be forced soon enough to drop back into the water. But such details were irrelevant at that moment; all he could think of now was to get away from that freezing water.

He continued. Soon he found himself clinging onto the sheer wall with no footholds at all. Still in their saturated, slimy boots, his feet kept slipping on the slick surface of the rock, and more than once he came close to losing his hold altogether. But raw and bleeding though they were, he still had fingers and nails and his new survival instinct gave strength to his tenacity. He managed to find tiny crevices down into which he could just about wedge his unfeeling fingertips, and then larger outcrops began to appear.

In what was probably just a few minutes, he grew aware that the wall was becoming not quite so sheer. It might even be levelling out!

He desperately scrambled further up the rock-face before his strength ran out completely, and at last found himself just under a narrow ledge. With a final heave, he was over.

For how long he remained that way, drenched, curled up and quaking, Gapp had no way of guessing. He felt worse than ever before in his life. He shivered uncontrollably, his head was pounding like a war-drum, and sickness ran through his whole body. Unable to rise from his prone position, he languished in torment upon the ledge while the sharp rock surface dug deeply into his side and shoulder.

Eventually, with a supreme effort of will, he managed to push himself up into a sitting position. A fresh coughing fit overtook him with such violence that it felt as if his ribs were dislocated. Gapp was not sure if it were even possible to dislocate ribs, but it was a worrying thought. Worrying too was the wheezing sound of his lungs, which hinted strongly at pneumonia.

But he did not dwell upon this. Instead, he began chafing his limbs to try to restore their circulation, and hopefully get some warmth into him. At first this was a painfully slow process, for his hands and arms were so stiff he could hardly move them. But he doggedly persevered, and eventually his body began to remember what it was to be alive.

Gradually, awkwardly, he worked his sodden clothes off (after removing the little pack that was still miraculously strapped to his back) and wrung as much water from them as he could. He then put them back on. They felt repellently clammy against his skin, and he immediately broke into another fit of coughing.

i’m ill
, he thought darkly,
i might even be dying. But i’ve got to get out of here – there is absolutely not a chance that i’m going to end my life in a place like this.

Underneath, he knew how slim his chances were, but the front part of his mind refused to acknowledge this. So bit by bit he began carefully feeling the walls around him.

At first there was nothing to suggest any way out. The wall continued upwards, only with an even smoother surface, and when he risked jumping up to feel what lay above, he was shattered to discover that the roof was only a couple of feet higher. The ledge itself dropped sharply away on either side of him. He was stuck on a tiny outcrop of rock protruding from the tunnel wall, with
Pel only knew
how much solid rock directly above him, and a freezing stream below that probably only led further down into the deeps of the earth.nb

He was trapped as surely as he had been in the huldre-woman’s dungeon-dimension, only this time his situation seemed far, far worse. A sodden scrap of freezing wretchedness washed down the drain of life into the underworld like an old dead leaf. No sooner had he confronted these thoughts, than he broke down in great, heaving sobs of black despair and stayed like that for quite some time.

A while later Gapp suddenly thought of something.

The pack!

He still could hardly believe that this saturated lump of leather had survived all this way with him, and thanked his foresight in strapping it on so securely. He had never kept very much in it, for the bulk of his baggage was carried by poor old Bogey. He doubted he would find much left in it now, but at least it was something.

Indeed there was not much, from what his frozen fingers could determine: a mush of indeterminate foodstuff he had stowed away from Nym’s table; a thin roll of
bachame
he always kept to hand while travelling, for use either as an extra layer in his bedroll or as an undergarment or a small groundsheet; and – ah, here was something at least – one of his precious throwing-knives. It was the one whose blade had snapped, which he had put into his bag ages ago, hoping to get it fixed later.

Before anything else, the boy scooped all of the mush of waterlogged food into his mouth, and missed not a smear from his fingers. Then his hands went down to his belt and rummaged through the pouches attached to it. In one of them his hands closed over the familiar and reassuring little box that contained his tinder, flint and steel.

‘Light,’ he announced, his voice no more than a harsh croak, and prised the lid open. Inside were still the tiny packets of wax-sealed tinder – unbroken.

Now, what can I burn?

The
bachame
, he remembered, was special Peladane issue; tightly rolled in a thin oilskin wrapper, it was fashioned to be proof against even the most torrential downpour. But how effective would it be against the soaking Gapp had endured?

To his growing dejection, it did at first appear to be completely saturated; but as he continued unravelling it, he discovered to his delight that there was enough of it in the middle of the roll that was still dry. Not hesitating for a second, he set to work on it with his fire-making gear.

Thank you, Pel-Adan
, he prayed,
for granting your followers such foresight.

It crossed his mind that he ought to keep aside most of the
bachame
to use for lighting, but he was still so frozen that he could not resist using more than he should have there and then to make a fire. He kept it burning low so it would last for as long as possible, and then crouched over the flames to make sure that not one tiny waft of heat would go to waste. As it warmed his body, feeling came back to him, and his blood began to flow properly again. That was painful, very painful, but he did not mind. He meanwhile carefully held each one of his clothes over the flames to dry them.

Eventually they were just about dry enough to put back on and, still steaming slightly, he hunched over the meagre flames and stared about him. From what little he could see, he was still in what appeared to be a narrow tunnel, the course of a subterranean stream, with a low ceiling and no immediate means of escape.

The warmth and the light were meagre, but sitting there, with almost-dry clothes and a little food inside him, Gapp Radnar now felt like a king. Using instinct alone, he had crawled out from under the very clutches of his own extinction, then used his own resourcefulness to get to a position where he could now start to plan his way out of here. How many other esquires could have managed that on their own? How many people in this whole world could float maybe for days down an underground stream, and then climb out and build themselves a fire halfway up a tunnel wall?

‘Not ruddy many, I’ll bet!’ he croaked in self-esteem.

There was always a way, so long as you were prepared to look for it. On a whim, he dipped his hand into one of his trouser pockets and withdrew his old set of reedpipes. He rubbed their lacquered wooden surface fondly, and placed them to his lips. He would have music in this despicable hole, music such as there had never been heard in the depths of the underworld ere now! And when he got out of this place and returned to Nordwas, he would play this same tune to all the townsfolk, to the elite of the Wintus household, to his stone-skimming friends, even to his rotten family; and they would marvel! Songs celebrating his adventure would be sung by the troubadours and wandering minstrels, and his fame would ne’er die . . .

So he began to blow. But the only sound that came forth from the pipes was a bubbling semi-whistle, like a toad boiling in a pot.

‘Armholes!’ he swore, and shoved them back into his pocket.

Still as trapped as he had been an hour ago, his eyes now searched the wall opposite for any sign of escape. After a while he could just about make out a shadow indicating there was another ledge like this one on the other side. He could not see how far it extended, but at least it was something to investigate. Fired with sudden excitement, he made preparations in the last flickering light of his fire.

In one of the belt pouches he had a few small packets of pitchgel, a viscous, foul-smelling, oily substance that was intended for certain emergencies. He tore one of them open and smeared its contents on the end of the throwing knife’s hilt, wrapped a good quantity of
bachame
around this, bound it tightly, then wiped off the inside of the pitch-gel packet onto this. He held it to the fire. With a small
pffss
it ignited, and he held it aloft. It was probably the most pathetic torch ever made, but it was all he had available.

Gapp clamped firmly in his teeth the remainder of the blade, still attached to the hilt, and steeled himself. With the flames singeing his cheeks, and his braced limbs shaking badly, without further hesitation he sprang.

Over the churning stream he flew and, with an impact that nearly knocked him back down into the water, he landed upon the opposite ledge. Madly he grabbed for handholds as he felt himself topple.

He found none, a gasp erupted from his throat, and he toppled backwards.

But at the last second, he managed to twist himself around and kick away hard. He sailed back across the gap, and with incredible luck was back again, where he had started from.

He panted heavily, his heart pounding in his chest. ‘Not again!’ he breathed, ‘Never again! If you want me, you’ll have to try harder than that.’

He glared with loathing at the icy stream below, then, on a mad impulse, suddenly leapt across the gap again, grunting in defiance.