She walked down the faintly glowing corridor, trailing one hand along the wall, listening for the baby and the bull. She kept an eye out for more droppings, too, but saw none. Not yet, anyway. After perhaps three minutes, the passage she was following emptied into a T-junction. The sound of the baby seemed slightly louder to the left (or do I just have a dominant ear to match my dominant hand? she wondered), so she turned in that direction.
She had taken only two steps when she stopped short. All at once she knew what the seeds were for: she was Gretel underground, with no brother to share her fear. She went back to the T-junction, knelt, and unfolded one side of her packet. She placed a seed on the floor with the sharp end pointing back in the direction from which she had come. At least, she reflected, there were no birds down here to gobble up her backtrail.
Rosie got to her feet and began walking again. Five paces brought her to a new passage.
She peered down it and saw that it divided into three branches just a short way up. She chose
the center branch, marking it with a pomegranate seed. Thirty paces and two turns later, this passage dead-ended in a stone wall upon which seven black words had been slashed: WANT
TO DO THE DOG WITH ME?
Rosie returned to the three-way junction, stooped to pick up her seed, and laid it at the head of a new path.
8
She had no idea how long it took her to find her way to the center of the maze in this fashion, because time quickly lost all meaning for her. She knew it couldn’t have taken terribly long, because the baby’s cries continued . . . although by the time Rosie began to get really close, they had become intermittent. Twice she heard the bull’s hooves go thudding dully along the stone floor, once at a distance, once so close that she stopped short, hands clasped between her breasts, as she waited for it to appear at the head of the passageway she was in.
If she had to backtrail, she always picked up the last seed so she should suffer no confusion on her way back out. She had started with almost fifty; when she finally came around a corner and observed a much brighter green glow straight ahead, she was down to three.
She walked to the end of the passageway and stood at its mouth, looking into a square stone-floored room. She glanced up briefly, looking for a roof, and saw only a cavernous blackness that made her dizzy. She looked down again, registered several more large pats of dung scattered across the floor, and then turned her attention to the center of the room. Lying there on a pad of blankets was a plump, fair-haired baby. Her eyes were swollen with crying and her cheeks were wet with tears, but she had fallen quiet again, at least for the time being.
Her feet were in the air and she appeared to be trying to examine her toes. Every now and then she gave out a watery, sobbing little gasp. These sounds moved Rosie’s heart in a way the baby’s all-out wails had not been able to do; it was as if the infant knew somehow that she had been abandoned.
Bring me my baby.
Whose baby? Who is she, really? And who brought her here?
She decided she didn’t care about the answer to those questions, at least not now. It was enough that she was lying here, perfectly sweet and all alone, trying to comfort herself with her own toes in the chilly green light at the center of the maze.
And that light can’t be good for her, Rosie thought distractedly, hurrying toward the center of the room. It must be some kind of radiation.
The baby turned her head, saw Rosie, and raised her arms toward her. The gesture won Rosie’s heart completely. She wrapped the top blanket in the pile over the child’s chest and belly, then picked her up. The infant looked to be about three months old. She put her arms around Rosie’s neck and then dropped her head — dunk! — down on Rosie’s shoulder. She began to sob again, but very weakly.
‘That’s all right,’ Rosie said, patting the tiny, blanket-wrapped back gently. She could smell the infant’s skin, warm and sweeter than any perfume. She put her nose against the fine hair which floated around the perfectly made skull. ‘That’s all right, Caroline, everything’s fine, we’re going to get out of this nasty old — ‘
She heard thudding hooves approaching from behind her and shut her mouth, praying that the bull hadn’t heard her alien voice, praying that the hooves would turn and begin to fade as Erinyes chose some path that would lead it away from her again. This time that didn’t happen.
The hoofbeats grew closer — sharper, too, as the bull closed in. Then they stopped, but she could hear something big breathing hard, like a heavyset man who has just climbed a flight of stairs.
Slowly, feeling old and stiff, Rosie turned toward the sound with the baby in her arms. She turned to Erinyes, and Erinyes was there.
That bull would smell me and come running. That was what the woman in the red dress had told her . . . and something else. It’s me it’d come to, but both of us’d get killed. Had Erinyes smelled her? Smelled her even though the moon was not full for her? Rosie didn’t think so. She thought it was the bull’s job to guard the baby — perhaps to guard whatever might be at the center of the maze — and that it had been drawn by the sound of the baby’s cries, just as Rosie had been. Perhaps that mattered, perhaps it didn’t. In any case, the bull was here, and it was the ugliest brute Rosie had ever seen in her life.
It stood at the mouth of the passageway it had just run, somehow as unsettled in its shape as the temple she had passed through — it was as though she were looking at it through currents of clear, rapidly moving water. Yet the bull itself was, for the moment at least, completely still. Its head was lowered. One huge front hoof, cloven so deeply it almost looked like a gigantic bird’s talon, pawed restlessly at the stone floor. Its shoulders overtopped Rosie’s five-feet-six by at least four inches and she guessed its weight at two tons, minimum. The top of its dropped head was flat as a hammer and shiny as silk. Its horns were stubby, no more than a foot in length, but sharp and thick. Rosie had no trouble imagining how easily they would punch into her naked belly . . . or into her back, if she tried to run. She couldn’t imagine how such a death would feel, however; not even after all her years with Norman could she imagine that.
The bull raised its head slightly and she saw it did indeed have only one eye, a filmy blue thing, huge and freakish, above the center of its snout. As it lowered its head and began to thud its cloven hoof restlessly against the floor again, she understood something else, as well: it was getting ready to charge.
The baby let out an earsplitting howl, almost directly into Rosie’s ear, making her jump.
‘Hush,’ she said, bouncing it up and down in her arms. ‘Hush-a-baby, no fear, no fear.’
But there was fear, plenty of it. The bull standing over there in its narrow slot of doorway was going to unzip her guts for her and decorate these peculiar glowing walls with them. She supposed they would look black against the green, like the shapes which occasionally seemed to twist deep in the stone. There was nothing in this center chamber to hide behind, not so much as a single pillar, and if she ran for the passage she’d come out of, the blind bull would hear her feet on the stone and cut her off before she had gotten halfway — it would gore her, toss her against the wall, gore her again, and then trample her to death. The baby as well, if she managed to keep hold of it.
One-eyed blind, but there ain’t nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
Rosie stood watching it with wide eyes, mesmerized by the tapping front hoof. When that tapping finally stopped —
She looked down at the damp, crumpled ball of nightgown in her hand. The ball of nightgown with the rag-wrapped stone in the center.
Nothing wrong with his sense of smell.
She dropped to one knee, keeping her eyes trained on the bull and holding the baby against her shoulder with her right hand. She used the left to open out her nightgown. The piece she had wrapped around the rock had been a dark red, rich with ‘Wendy Yarrow’s’ blood, but the downpour had washed much of it away, and the fabric was now a fading pink. Only the ears of cloth, where she had tied it over the rock, were brighter — were, in fact, rose madder.