The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [173]
There was another possibility, which I considered time and again. As well as the caves that I used, there were other, smaller chambers which opened off one another, branching deep into the hill. One of these inner caves was little more than a chimney, a rounded shaft running up through the rock levels, to reach the air in a little corrie of the hill above. Here a low cliff, many years back, had, under the pressure from tree-roots and storms, split open to let light, and sometimes small rocks and rain-water, down into the hollow below. Through this fissure now the cave-dwelling bats made their daily flights. In time the pile of fallen stones in the cave had built up into a kind of buttress, reaching perhaps a third of the way up toward the "lantern," as I might term the hole above. When, hopefully, I looked to see if this rough stair had been extended, I was disappointed: above it, still, lay a sheer pitch three times the height of a man, and above that the same again, sloping at first steeply, and then more gently, to reach the gap of daylight. It was just possible that a fit and agile man could have climbed out unaided, though in places the rock was damp and slimy, and in others manifestly unsafe. But for an ageing man, recently in his sickbed, it was impossible. The sole comfort of the discovery lay in the fact that here, literally, was a "chimney"; in the cold days to come I could light the brazier there with safety, and savour warmth and hot food and drink.
I did think, naturally, about making a fire of some kind, in the hope that the smoke might attract the attention of the curious, but there were two things against this. First, the country people who lived within sight of the hill were used to seeing the bats go up daily from the hillside, looking for the world like plumes of smoke; the second was that I had little to spare of fuel. All I could do was conserve the precious stores I had, and wait for someone to make a way up the valley to visit the holy well.
But nobody came. Twenty days, thirty, forty, were notched on my tally stick. I recognized with reluctance that where the simple folk had come to pray to the spirit of the well, and offer gifts to the living man who healed them, they were afraid of the enchanter lately dead, and of the new haunting of the hollow hill. Since the valley led nowhere but to the cave and the spring, no travellers used it. Nothing came into the high valley, except the birds (which I heard) and, I supposed, the deer, and once a wolf or a fox that I heard snuffling in the night at the tumble of stones that blocked the cave's entrance.
So the tallied days dragged by, and I stayed alive, and -- what was harder -- kept fear at bay in every way I knew. I wrote, and wrestled with plans for escape, and did what domestic tasks the days demanded; and I am not ashamed to remember that I drugged the nights -- and sometimes the desperate days -- with wine, or with opiates that stupefied the senses and dulled time. Despair I would not feel; through all that long life in death I held to one thing, as to a ladder let down from the light above me: throughout my life I had obeyed my god, had received power from him, and rendered it back again; now I had seen it pass to the young lover who had usurped me; but though my life was apparently done, my body had been kept -- I could not tell how or why -- from either earth or fire. I was alive, and had regained both strength and will, and, prison or no, this was the hollow hill of the god himself. I could not believe that there was not some purpose still to be fulfilled.
I think it was with this in mind that I nerved myself at length to climb into the crystal cave.
All this while, with my