A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [95]
The place I was in, other than being as black as a cow’s stomach, was cool, but not dangerously so, paved in big uneven stones, and, I thought, large. To confirm it, I cleared my throat and said a few experimental words, more for the sake of the echoes than because I expected an answer.
“Hello? Hello? Is anyone here?”
The ceiling was not too high and the walls, some of them, not too distant. I got to my feet cautiously, found the pressure inside my skull receding, and began to shuffle forward with my hands waving about in front of me. I had no idea how much ground I had covered, with the dark pressing in on my face and eardrums like a silent cacophony, filled not only with mundane horrors such as cobwebs and rats (silent ones) but with lurking presences as well, hands reaching out to touch me. When my fingers finally stubbed against cold stone, I threw myself up against its upright bulk like a shipwrecked sailor on a beach and felt like embracing it.
The walls were fitted stone, my exploring fingertips told me, not brick: large, finely textured blocks. I turned left, changed my mind and turned right, and set out with my left hand bumping along the stone, my right hand out in front, literally inching forward until I came to another wall, joining the first at what seemed like a right angle. I patted this new wall for a bit as if it were a friendly dog and then turned my back on it, retracing the way I had come in order to pace the boundaries of my prison. My feet were just over ten and a half inches long, so that measuring my first wall toe-to-heel thirty-two times made this side a shade over twenty-eight feet. I continued left, and at seven and a half feet, I was nearly sent sprawling by a pile of something soft on the floor. It was not a body, to my mixed relief, but two large half-rotten sacks stuffed with straw. Cautious, searching fingers brought me to an odd, squat, smooth sphere that swayed when I touched it. I picked it up, explored it with my left hand, and removed the top. It was a gourd, filled with stale and infinitely sweet water. I stopped myself from gulping, but sipped, clutched it to my chest, and reached out again. After a couple of sweeps, my hand caught another smooth shape with a more familiar feel: a small loaf of bread. I settled back against the wall, my backside cushioned, nursing my riches in my arms.
After a few minutes I began to feel ridiculous. I drank another swallow and broke off a bite of the bread (heavy and tasteless, made with neither salt nor sugar) and forced myself to put down my treasures and resume the circumambulation. It was not easy to walk away from them.
When I had circled my prison, I found to my vast relief that my bed and supplies were precisely where I had left them, seven and a half feet from the second corner. My prison measured twenty-eight feet by sixty and a bit. There were no windows, even ones that had been filled in, as far up as my hands could reach, no breaks other than a door in the wall directly opposite my bed, a door as stout and immovable as the rocks into which it had been set. The ceiling overhead seemed to vary in height and was, from the echoes, stone or brick. A wine cellar fit my mental image of the room, with its constant temperature, lack of vibrations, and convoluted roof arches.
A wine cellar meant a large house, and I thought that if it were in the city, even a small city, the rattle of wheels and hoofs against paving stones would penetrate, if not as sound, then at least as low vibrations. So, I was locked in the cellar of a country house. Not much help, perhaps, but it was nice to know.
I also knew that I had not been locked here to starve. Food and water were not habitually given to a prisoner who was being walled up and forgotten. They would come for me,
Whoever “they” were.