"Are we under the ocean?" asked Ornery, apprehensively. "I mean, the Jellied Sea?"
"I think not," Questioner answered. "My judgment is that the first tunnel brought us under the badlands west of Sendoph, that the first small stream brought us farther west. The river then changed our direction, taking us north or northwest-which would be more or less toward the Jellied Sea-until we came to the fall, from which the stair twisted upon itself going mostly down. Now we are north and west of the place we began, looking westward across this sea, and above us are the badlands. This ocean is self-contained, with its own atmosphere, like a submarine vehicle."
"But the water"s been running down into here," objected Ornery. "Wouldn"t it fill it up?"
Questioner shrugged ma.s.sively. "Kaorugi has no doubt taken that into account. Possibly it runs past furnaces of the deep which turn it into high-pressure steam and thrust it up somewhere else," said Questioner. "We need not worry how it happens since it is evident it does. Otherwise, we would all have drowned by now."
Far out on the luminous waves, a shadow appeared.
"A ship," cried Ornery. "A sailing ship."
Though of unfamiliar appearance, it was a sailing ship, with a curly prow and two short masts that held reefed sails. It was being towed by their old acquaintance, Joggiwagga, whose moon-eye preceded the craft. On the deck, along the rail, stood a dozen Timmys.
Mouche stared, searching. They did not include Flowing Green, and he felt a surge of relief. For his Hagion to be here with him would have been too much.
"Why can"t Joggiwagga just tow us where we need to go?" asked Ornery.
"Forbidden," cried the Corojum. "His place is not there. His place is here and outside."
"But our place is there?" cried Mouche.
"There, or nowhere, my friend. Together we will live or we will all die, as is the way of worlds. Together all creatures must live, changing together, else the world dies. All creation dances together, is this not so?"
"Usually," replied Questioner. "Is there a way I can get on that ship, or must I fire up the gravities?"
"There is a way."
The ship stopped at the edge of deeper water, unrolling a silvery tongue that extended across the shallows and up onto the beach, stiffening into a ramp. "Welcome," said the ship. "Please watch your footing."
The tongue was as rigid as a gangway, and when they had come aboard, it rolled up behind them. The Corojum showed them where to put their packs, and the Timmys invited them to a table set with food and drink.
Mouche watched them as in a reverie, and Questioner watched him watching the Timmys. She thought the boy was in the grip of dreamtime. It wasn"t s.e.xual. She was sure of that. It was something else entirely, the lure of the marvelous and mysterious, the siren call of the unknown. Or perhaps the Timmy who had tended him as a child had had green hair.
After they had eaten and drunk and the Timmys had cleared away all evidence of the meal, the Corojum summoned Timmys, Ornery, and Mouche to work together in setting the sails.
"If it"s alive," whispered Ornery, "why doesn"t it set its own sails?"
"It"s not alive like that," whispered one of the Timmys. "It"s just alive enough to utter a few courtesies and keep itself mended."
Slowly, after several tries, the sails were swung into the desired position, and the ship turned slowly with the wind, which endlessly blew, so the Corojum said, down the stairs behind them.
"It is so, for so Kaorugi designed it."
"How far do we have to go?" asked Ornery, tightening a very organic-looking rope around a cleat that had obviously grown into place where it was.
"Until we get there," murmured Questioner. "Is that not so?"
"That is so," replied the Corojum. "That is always so."
48.
Westward the Wilderneers.
By Bane"s count, four or live days had pa.s.sed since the death of Marool and their arrival in the camp. That morning Ashes told him and his brother to pack up and ready themselves for a journey.
"Where to?" Bane demanded.
"I told you about that time the Timmys took us? That pond kind of place they took us to?"
"Underground, you said."
"No, not under. Just down in a deep valley, well, an old volcano. Anyhow, ever since then, some of us have kept watch on that place. Now, the mountains are getting ready to blow, and when that happens, we need all of us to be ready to take over, so it"s time to fetch all our friends."
"Prob"ly dead by now," said Dyre. "That was a long time ago."
"They"re not dead," a.s.serted Ashes. "I told you we don"t die! And you"d best shut that backtalk, boy. Best remember what I can do if I need to keep you in line." He patted his waist, where the whip hung, its tip twitching hungrily toward them, the tip opening like a little mouth, a living thing.
Bane turned his eyes from the whip. "What d"you need us for?"
"Company. I like the company of my sons," said Ashes, laughing at them. "Besides, you"re safer with me than staying here. The Shoveler might decide to feed you to Belly. Or Crawly might get hungry and forget you"re part of the family. Or Mooly might decide to find out how well you can fight, and you don"t want to fight Mooly."
"I"m not ascared of him!" a.s.serted Dyre.
"More fool you, then," said his father. "You haven"t been in the pond like we have. You may not have our ability to heal. Mooly"s got a skin like steel plates and he"s fast. Faster than anybody here. Including me."
"So, it"s just us going?"
Ashes"s face went blank, as though the question had derailed him. His features sagged, like wax, half melted. Bane looked at Dyre, gritting his teeth, readying himself to do something ... anything. Dyre"s mouth was open, and he shivered as though frightened. Then, gradually, sense seeped back into Ashes"s eyes, his facial bones acquired rigidity, and he spoke as though nothing had happened. "It"s just us, starting out. Who else decides to go is their business. Us sons of thunder are into independent action."
When they left, several other of the Wilderneers said they"d be coming along, soon, and midway through the morning, Bane spotted Webwings, high in the air above them, flying far faster than they were riding. He cleared his throat tentatively.
"Well, what you got in your craw?" his father asked.
"Webwings, he"s up there. Those ... those spiders on him, Webwings. Where did he get them?"
"They aren"t spiders, they"re part of him," said Ashes, patting his hip. "Just the way this whip is part of me, and Crawly"s hooks are part of him. We came out of the pond that way."
"How come ... how come some of you are so big?"
"Weren"t big, not then. Some of us got bigger. Crawly wasn"t any bigger than you to start with. Foot wasn"t all that big, just one foot larger than the other. Belly wasn"t, he just had a pot on him. Ear wasn"t all that big, he could still get around, only he kind of held his head to one side. It"s just those parts went on growing and growing while the rest of them shrunk down."
"Why is that?"
Ashes pinched his lips together. "Well, Belly always did think more about his next meal than anything else. And Tongue was a talker."
"And Foot?"
"None of us can figure Foot. It wasn"t he liked dancing or anything. Gobblemaw was sort of like Belly. Mosslegs, we can"t figure. Webwings we can"t figure."
"When you all escaped from the pond place, what did the Timmys and those other things do?"
"Do? They didn"t do anything. They tried! Tried to push us back in, gibbering and jabbering. Some of them used our language, too, "Go back through, go back through," but we"d had enough. We smashed a few and beat a few and got ourselves out of there. They didn"t come after us, just perched all over the place, staring and chattering. Timmys. Joggiwaggas. Tunnelers. All kinds. Well, we gathered our people up, even the strange-looking ones, and we took them all up out of there, oh, that was some climb. We didn"t want to go by the road, take too long, so we went straight up, pulling and heaving, carrying the ones that couldn"t move on their own. Some of us decided to stay there, to keep watch, but the rest of us went back...."
The last few words trailed off dreamily, as though Ashes were drifting into somewhere else. Bane and Dyre exchanged looks again, wondering, not speaking until Ashes began to talk again, as though he hadn"t stopped.
"... went back eastward, to the towns, and by the time we got ourselves sorted out, that trader ship had already landed. Some of us, the ones who could move easiest, we tried to stop them, but they had weapons on their ship, and some of us got killed before they took off in both ships."
Dyre was still digging at the problem that bothered him and Bane the most. "The Timmys didn"t even try to stop you leaving?"
"No," Ashes snorted. "They pushed us in one side, and we swam out the other."
"Was it deep? Did they try to drown you?"
"Wasn"t deep and they didn"t try to drown us."
"So what did they take you there for?"
Long, dreamy silence, unbroken until Dyre asked the question again.
Ashes snorted. "Boy, if I knew that, I"d know a lot more than anybody else!"
Since Ashes immediately drifted into a reverie again, and since he seemed to have trouble dealing with the questions, Dyre gave up asking for a time.
They had gone a good bit farther on when Bane, who happened to be looking up to judge the position of the sun in the sky, saw Webwings approaching. "See there," he cried, pointing.
They pulled up the horses and waited. Webwings was searching the ground beneath him, possibly looking for them. Ashes took off his hat and waved it. The flying figure folded its wings and dropped, coming to rest on a large rock near the trail.
"I"ve got to go get the others," said Webwings. "Crawly and Strike and all the rest of us."
"Crawly and Strike should be coming," said Ashes, again in that dreamy voice. "They said so."
Webwings jittered, peering closely at Ashes"s face. "Some of "em went north to intercept the road. Movin"s easier there. We"ve all got to get there in time. Time"s running out. Got to get there." Webwings"s voice had the same dreamy quality as Ashes"s.
"We told our brothers we"d come get "em," Ashes a.s.serted. "Before we did anything about women or taking over. They"ll all want to be there. Hughy Huge. Old Pete."
Webwings stared at the sky. "I saw Pete. In the mouth of that cave where we left him. He"s still there. Grown to fit. Can"t get out, I shouldn"t think, at least not far."
"Good old Pete. We"ll get him out. Crawly"ll get him out. How "bout Gorge George? An" t.i.tanic Tom?"
"I caught sight of most of "em."
"How are they all? Good to see them again."
"They"re moving." He snorted and flapped his wings, sending the spiders fleeing to his armpits as he said distractedly, "Eager Eyes, you remember Eag, he can look down into the place, and he saw a whole bunch of Timmys and Joggiwagga and Tunnelers bringing some strange people there, just the way they did us. And one of the people is a blue person. You know what that"s about?"
"That"s got to be that Questioner"s people," muttered Bane. "I heard all about them at Mantelby"s."
Ashes stared at the sky, smiling slightly.
"What"s a Questioner?" demanded Webwings.
Bane slid off his horse to shake his shirt and trousers loose from his sweaty body. "Seven or eight days ago, maybe more, this Questioner thing came down in a shuttle, and they brought it to Mantelby Mansion to stay. And the servants said that"s why all the Timmys had to go, and why we ended up there, doing what Timmys had been doing, because this Questioner was there and she shouldn"t catch on we even had Timmys. And she-they all called it she-had this one blue-skin with her, along with a bunch of other kinds."
"Oh," said Webwings dreamily, as though he had lost interest.
Ashes switched his attention from the sky to his fellow Wilderneer. "What do you think it means, Web?"
Webwings shook his head. "Don"t ask me. I"m just telling you what Eager saw ... down at the pond."
"What would they want with a blue person?" Ashes muttered.
"What did they want with us?" Webwings responded.
"Things keep changing around," Ashes complained. "I wish everthing would settle for a few years, let us make some plans."
The flyer shifted from foot to foot. "You know, Ash, seeing that pond, I got to thinking, you remember Foot ... before?"
"Before when?"
"Before that pond. You ever know about his shoe collection?"
"Shoe collection?"
"We could never figure him getting that way, you know. Or me, but him especially. But lately, I"ve been remembering. Back on Thor, after he"d done it to some b.i.t.c.h, you know, he"d take her shoes...."
"A fetishist?" asked Bane. "We learned about fetishists at House Genevois."
"So what"s one of those?" his father asked.
"Somebody that gets off on a certain thing, like shoes, or gloves, or women"s underwear, or even parts of flesh...."
Ashes turned on Webwings, giggling like a schoolboy. "So what"d you collect? Dead birds? Girly feathers?"
"Forget it," said the other, sharply. "I just thought it might explain things."
"What did Pete collect?" Ashes went on. "I mean ..."
"I said forget it," Webwings said, launching himself upward. "I"ll tell "em you"re on the way." He spiraled high and then flew back the way he had come, toward the camp.
"What was he talking about?" asked Bane.
"Oh, he probably was talking about some of us, from Thor," Ashes said, once more in that dreamy, half-hypnotized tone. "Half of us, almost. The way they came out of that pond. They didn"t want to come back to the towns, looking like that. They wanted to stay there. Well. So they stayed."