The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [15]
He did not look into the girl’s eyes.
They left.
Hurrying back, the abductors discovered that the corridors under Jesthe did web farther and in more convoluted patterns than the girl had described: they ended up, to their bafflement and disconcertment, not in the centrum at all—not even outside—but in the grotto beneath the palace they had both heard so many rumours about.
Awed by the size of this place, by the silence, by the darkness, they froze.
“You went the wrong way,” hissed the girl.
“You were leading,” said the boy.
She wheeled, thrusting out the sleeping cherub. “What do you want to do with this?”
He turned away. A large body of water, an underground lake, vanished into the blackness, as if swallowed whole. On the stone walls nearby, pale phosphorescence cast a greenish light. Four greasy flames burned in crude holders to either side of where they stood.
The boy took one of these torches and held it high, but the extent of the cavern remained lost, the wan hemisphere of light humbled by the dark.
“Let’s get rid of it,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t know. Let’s get rid of it down here.”
From tiny caverns—places they had evidently found to settle—faces of people emerged, watching with interest. A child, naked, pale as a grub, stepped from the shelter of her home to stare; the girlfriend, with the cherub asleep against her shoulder, bade the child a quiet greeting.
When he saw the small skiff tied to a dock, the boy motioned toward it with his chin. “Here,” he said.
So they boarded the boat, and again the cherub awoke, eyelids fluttering, muttering groggy inanities. This time the couple was far enough away from the chatelaine’s bedchambers that there was no fear of waking anyone, let alone getting caught. Regardless, the girl quickly rubbed her nose on the cool, fat cheek, saying over and over in comforting tones, There, there, hush little baby, hush, every thing’ll be all right, until a vacuous smile emerged, a pudgy white thumb thrust between pale lips, eyes closed in ignorant bliss.
The boy mounted his torch in the bow.
Pushing off, they knew their relationship was similarly cast adrift, threatened by imminent collapse, caused by inexplicable forces, risen up over the past few hours. Like the palace, their love was undermined.
The girl lowered her bundle to the wooden seat.
The boy poled the invisible bottom.
Neither of these abductors had yet seen out fifteen years. If either were much older, they likely would have settled on a less dramatic way of trying to ruin the chatelaine’s day, or maybe they would have continued to lie there, after fucking, on the girlfriend’s mattress, in her room on Hanover Street, merely talking, or falling back asleep, or otherwise letting inertia settle in. Idealism and naiveté were youthful cousins. Foresight and the considerations of age and experience often brought inaction, compromise, second-guessing; the ability to foresee the extent of actions—to understand implications of cause and effect—could effectively thwart spontaneous, if impractical, decisions.
Kneeling in the stern of the boat, the girl—who was named Dhuka by her parents but called herself Name of the Sun (because, like the rest of her generation, she had never seen this fabled orb, which burned, allegedly, above the clouds)—rowed, while at the prow, her paramour and the instigator of this misadventure, Nahid, the melancholic boy, steered clear of sharp rocks and the hanging masses of stalactites that threatened to brain them both from the surrounding ebon.
The weak torch crudely illuminated the immediate vicinity of the lake, an area not much larger than the skiff.
Grey aquatic creatures rose to bump oblivious against the hull, perhaps attracted to the glow, perhaps blind. Farther out, a monster breached, just keeping up with the boat—a string of sinuous humps—before slipping under the surface once more.
Then the ceiling of stone opened overhead.
This was heard by the couple more than seen: a gentle cessation of pressure, a change in the echoes that indicated the boat had moved