Untitled Part 19
THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES WEREN'T JUST chaotic. They were what Chaos is like when Chaos wants to let her hair down and go nuts. And, believe me, you never want to see a primordial goddess go nuts.
Tauri silvestres dropped from cracks in the ceiling – crashing into tents, flattening troglodytes, scattering hats and soup bowls and pots of mushrooms. Almost immediately, I lost track of Will, Rachel and Nico in the pandemonium. I could only hope Screech-Bling and his lieutenants had whisked them to safety.
A bull landed in a heap right in front of me, separating me from Meg and Grr-Fred. As the beast scrambled to gain its footing (hoofing?), I parkoured over it, desperate not to lose my young master.
I spotted her – now ten feet away, Grr-Fred rapidly dragging her towards the river for reasons unknown. The close quarters and obstacles on the platform seemed to hamper the trogs' natural running skills, but Grr-Fred was still moving at a fast clip. If Meg hadn't kept tripping as they wove through the destruction, I would've stood no chance of catching up.
I leaped over a second bull. (Hey, if the cow could jump over the moon, I didn't see why the sun couldn't jump over two cows.) Another barrelled blindly past me, lowing in panic as it tried to shake a bull-hide tent off its horns. To be fair, I would've panicked too if I'd had the skin of one of my own kind wrapped around my head.
I'd almost reached Meg when I spotted a crisis unfolding across the platform. The little trog with the propeller beanie, my server during dinner, had got separated from the other children. Oblivious to danger, he was now stumbling after his ball of crystal as it rolled across the platform, straight into the path of a charging bull.
I reached for my bow, then remembered my quivers were exhausted. With a curse, I snatched up the nearest thing I could find – an obsidian dagger – and spun it towards the bull's head.
'HEY!' I shouted.
This accomplished two things: it stopped the trog in his tracks, and it caused the bull to face me just in time to get a dagger in its nostril.
'Moo!' said the bull.
'My ball!' shouted Beanie Boy as his crystal sphere rolled between the bull's legs, heading in my direction.
'I'll get it back to you!' I said, which seemed like a silly thing to promise, given the circumstances. 'Run! Get to safety!'
With one last forlorn glance at his crystal ball, Beanie Boy leaped off the platform and disappeared down the road.
The bull blew the dagger out of its nose. It glared at me, its blue eyes as bright and hot as butane flames in the gloom of the cavern. Then it charged.
Like the heroes of old, I stepped back, stumbled on a cooking pot and fell hard on my butt. Just before the bull could trample me into Apollo-flavoured marmalade, glowing mushrooms erupted all over its head. The bull, blinded, screamed and veered off into the bedlam.
'Come on!' Meg stood a few feet away, having somehow convinced Grr-Fred to double back. 'Lester, we've got to go!' She said this as if the idea might not have occurred to me.
I snatched up Beanie Boy's crystal ball, struggled to my feet and followed Grr-Fred and Meg to the edge of the river.
'Jump in!' ordered Grr-Fred.
'But there's a perfectly good road!' I fumbled to secure the crystal ball in my pack. 'And you dump your chamber pots in that water!'
'Tauri can follow us on the road,' shouted Grr-Fred. 'You don't run fast enough.'
'Can they swim?' I asked.
'Yes, but not as quickly as they run! Now, jump or die!'
I liked a good simple choice. I grabbed Meg's hand. Together we jumped.
Ah, subterranean rivers. So cold. So fast. So very full of rocks.
You'd think all those jagged, spearlike stones in the water would have been eroded over time by the swift current, but no. They clubbed and clawed and stabbed me relentlessly as I sped by. We hurtled through darkness, spinning and somersaulting at the mercy of the river, my head going under and coming back out at random intervals. Somehow, I always picked the wrong moment to try breathing. Despite it all, I kept my grip on Meg's hand.
I have no idea how long this water torture lasted. It seemed longer than most centuries I'd lived through – except perhaps the fourteenth CE , a horrible time to be alive. I was starting to wonder whether I would die of hypothermia, drowning or blunt-force trauma when Meg's grip tightened on mine. My arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket when we lurched to a stop. Some superhuman force hauled me out of the river like a dugong in a fishing net.
I landed on a slick stone ledge. I curled up, spluttering, shivering, miserable. I was dimly aware of Meg coughing and retching next to me. Someone's pointy-toed shoe kicked me between the shoulder blades.
'Get up, get up!' Grr-Fred said. 'No time to nap!'
I groaned. 'Is this what naps look like on your planet?'
He loomed over me, his police hat miraculously intact, his fists planted on his hips. It occurred to me that he must have pulled us out of the river when he spotted this ledge, but that seemed impossible. Grr-Fred must have had to have enough body strength to bench-press a washing machine.
'The forest bulls can swim!' he reminded me. 'We must be gone before they can sniff out this ledge. Here.'
He handed me a piece of jerky. At least it smelled like it had been jerky before our dip in the River Ouch. Now it looked more like deli-sliced sea sponge.
'Eat it,' he ordered.
He handed a piece to Meg as well. Her beekeeper's hat had been swept away in the flood, leaving her with a hairdo that looked like a dead wet badger. Her glasses were cockeyed. She had a few scrapes on her arms. Some of her seed packages had exploded in her gardening belt, giving her a bumper crop of acorn squash around her waist. But otherwise she looked well enough. She shoved the jerky in her mouth and chewed
'Good,' she pronounced, which didn't surprise me from a girl who drank skink soup.
Grr-Fred glared at me until I relented and tried a bite of jerky, too. It was not good. It was, however, bland and edible. As the first bite went down my throat, warmth coursed through my limbs. My blood hummed. My ears popped. I swore I could feel the acne clearing up on my cheeks.
'Wow,' I said. 'Do you sell this stuff?'
'Let me work,' growled our guide. 'Wasted too much time already.'
He turned and examined the wall of the tunnel.
As my vision cleared and my teeth stopped chattering quite so violently, I took stock of our sanctuary. At our feet, the river continued to roar, fierce and loud. Downstream, the channel shrank until there was no headroom at all – meaning Grr-Fred had pulled us to safety just in time if we wanted to keep breathing. Our ledge was wide enough for us all to sit on, barely, but the ceiling was so low even GrrFred had to stoop a little.
Other than the river, I saw no way out – just the blank rock wall Grr-Fred was staring at.
'Is there a secret passage?' I asked him.
He scowled like I was not worth the strip of sponge jerky he'd given me. 'No passage yet , crust-dweller.'
He cracked his knuckles, wriggled his fingers and began to dig. Under his bare hands, the rock crumbled into lightweight chunks like meringue, which Grr-Fred scooped away and tossed in the river. Within minutes, he had cleared twenty cubic feet of stone as easily as a mortal might pull clothes from a closet. And he kept digging.
I picked up a piece of debris, wondering if it was still brittle. I squeezed it and promptly cut my finger.
Meg pointed to my half-eaten jerky. 'You going to finish that?'
I'd been planning to save the jerky for later – in case I got hungry, required extra strength or got a bad attack of pimples – but Meg looked so ravenous I handed it over.
I spent the next few minutes emptying the water from my ukulele, my quivers and my shoes as Grr-Fred continued to dig.
At last, a cloud of dust billowed from his excavation hole. The trog grunted with satisfaction. He stepped out, revealing a passage now five feet deep, opening into a different cavern.
'Hurry,' he said. 'I will seal the tunnel behind us. If we are lucky, that will be enough to throw the tauri off our scent for a while.'
Our luck held. Enjoy that sentence, dear reader, because I don't get to use it often. As we picked our way through the next cavern, I kept glancing back at the wall Grr-Fred had sealed, waiting for a herd of wet evil red cows to bust through, but none did.
Grr-Fred led us upward through a winding maze of tunnels until at last we emerged in a brickwork corridor where the air smelled much worse, like city sewage.
Grr-Fred sniffed in disapproval. 'Human territory.'
I was so relieved I could have hugged a sewer rat. 'Which way to daylight?'
Grr-Fred bared his teeth. 'Do not use that language with me.'
'What language? Day–?'
He hissed. 'If you were a tunnel-ling, I would wash your mouth out with basalt!'
Meg smirked. 'I'd kinda like to see that.'
'Hmph,' said Grr-Fred. 'This way.'
He led us onward into the dark.
I had lost track of time, but I could imagine Rachel Elizabeth Dare tapping her watch, reminding me I was late, late, late. I could only hope we would reach Nero's tower before sundown.
Just as fervently, I hoped Nico, Will and Rachel had survived the bulls' attack. Our friends were resourceful and brave, yes. Hopefully, they still had the assistance of the troglodytes. But, too often, survival depended on sheer luck. This was something we gods didn't like to advertise, as it cut down on donations at our temples.
'Grr-Fred –?' I started to ask.
'It's Grr -Fred,' he corrected.
'GRR-Fred?'
'Grr -Fred.'
'gRR-Fred?'
'Grr -Fred!'
You would think, with my musical skills, I would be better at picking up the nuances of languages, but apparently I did not have Nico's panache for Troglodytish.
'Honoured guide,' I said, 'what of our friends? Do you believe Screech -Bling will keep his promise and help them dig to the emperor's fire vats?'
Grr-Fred sneered. 'Did the CEO make such a promise? I did not hear that.'
'But –'
'We have arrived.' He stopped at the end of the corridor, where a narrow brick stairwell led upward. 'This is as far as I can go. These steps will take you into one of the humans' subway stations. From there, you can find your way to the Crusty Crust. You will surface within fifty feet of Nero's tower.'
I blinked. 'How can you be sure?'
'I am a trog,' he said, as if explaining something to a particularly slow tunnel-ling.
Meg bowed, making her acorn squash knock together. 'Thank you, Grr -Fred.'
He nodded gruffly. I noticed he didn't correct her pronunciation.
'I have done my duty,' he said. 'What happens to your friends is up to Screech -Bling, assuming the CEO is even alive after the destruction you hatless barbarians brought to our headquarters. If it were up to me ...'
He didn't bother finishing the thought. I gathered GrrFred would not be voting in favour of offering us stock options at the next troglodyte shareholders' meeting.
From my soggy backpack, I fished out Beanie Boy's crystal ball and offered it to Grr-Fred. 'Please, would you take this back to its owner? And thank you for guiding us. For what it is worth, I meant what I said. We have to help one another. That's the only future worth fighting for.'
Grr-Fred turned the crystal sphere in his fingers. His brown eyes were inscrutable as cavern walls. They might have been hard and unmovable, or about to turn to meringue, or on the verge of being broken through by angry cows.
'Good digging,' he said at last. Then he was gone.
Meg peered up the stairwell. Her hands trembled, and I didn't think it was from the cold.
'Are you sure about this?' I asked.
She started, as if she'd forgotten I was there. 'Like you said, either we help each other, or we let a snake eat the future.'
'That's not exactly what I –'
'Come on, Lester.' She took a deep breath. 'Let's get going.'
Phrased as an order, it wasn't something I could have refused, but I got the feeling Meg was saying it to steel her own resolve as much as mine.
Together we climbed back towards the Crusty Crust.
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