When his guide straightened up, Niall did the same, and found that he could now walk upright. But the tunnel was narrow, and in one place he had to clamber down some rough steps that felt like natural rock. As he slipped down the last one and fell to his knees, Niall found himself wishing he still had the flashlight, and reflected sadly that it was now somewhere at the bottom of the river.
His sense of touch told him that he was in a tunnel whose walls were partly rock and partly earth. The floor underfoot seemed to be made of hard earth.
A few minutes later the tunnel widened, and he was unable to touch both walls at the same time. When he reached up and found he could not reach the ceiling, he suspected that he had entered some kind of cave. This was further confirmed as his feet rustled through dry leaves. A moment later, he was able to see clearly as the chameleon man’s dim glow suddenly intensified into a light as bright as a full moon, illuminating the walls of a long, low chamber that terminated in a sloping wall of rock. The yellow light lasted for only a few seconds, then vanished completely, leaving him in total blackness; but Niall had no doubt that its purpose had been to enable him to see where he was.
He sat down in the darkness with his back against the wall, and realized that it was covered with a thick, velvety moss that was damp to the touch. It was pleasant to take his weight off his feet, but he felt weary and cold, and uncomfortable in his wet clothes.
He had been sitting there resignedly for perhaps a quarter of an hour, focusing on the beating of his heart and the gradual easing of the ache in his head, when someone touched him on the shoulder, then pushed something into his hands. It seemed to be a vessel shaped like a handleless jug. His invisible companion raised it and touched it to Niall’s lips, indicating that he should drink. He tilted it, and tasted a waterlike liquid with a faint earth flavor. There were fragments floating in it, and Niall’s guess was that it was a liquid collected from the dripping moss-like substance on the walls. But since he was thirsty as well as hungry, he took a long, deep draft.
The effect of the drink was not simply to quench his thirst; suddenly, the total blackness became less impenetrable, as if the walls were giving off a faint green light. By this dim glow he could now see his companions clearly. They looked as if they had also become phosphorescent; moreover, they had ceased to be transparent, and looked solid and opaque. (Niall guessed that, since they felt safe on their own territory, their power to become transparent was unnecessary.) The eeriest thing about them, as they moved around the cave, was their silence.
All had the same strange, nonhuman face as his original guide, and the same huge nostrils and ears. Their foreheads varied in size, as did the mouthlike organs in the center, and although their actual mouths never seemed to open except to drink, the supernumerary mouth in the forehead was oddly mobile and full of expression; it frequently opened and closed, so that at times they reminded him of fish.
Most of them were drinking from the juglike vessels, and Niall now observed that the jug from which he had been drinking had been placed beside him on the floor, almost buried in leaves. Reasoning that they would scarcely be drinking so much unless they had some reason besides quenching their thirst, Niall picked it up and took another gulp. Once again, it seemed to have the effect of increasing the light around him. And although he experienced nothing like the intoxication induced by mead or wine, he realized that he was now indifferent to the cold — that, in fact, it seemed somehow agreeable. Warmth would have been oppressive. He touched the skin of his face; it seemed as chilly as a corpse. Yet he was actually enjoying the cold just as he would usually enjoy warmth.
Now he noticed something else: that although they were drinking together, these strange creatures were not convivial. On the contrary, they seemed deeply thoughtful. And this, Niall realized, distinguished them from human beings. Of all the human beings he had ever known, he would scarcely describe any of them as thoughtful except under rare circumstances. On the contrary, humans seemed to feel that happiness was not being thoughtful. Yet they admired thought, and regarded their great philosophers among the most remarkable human beings. Why, then, did they go to so much trouble to achieve states of thoughtlessness?
Niall observed another interesting consequence of imbibing the mossy liquid. As strange as it seemed, he was not only enjoying being cold, but also enjoying being hungry. This seemed paradoxical; yet he realized that the normal sense of satisfaction that followed food was a dulling of the senses, which was the opposite of the sense of mental alertness that seemed an essential part of happiness.
About to take another sip of the water, he paused, and set down the vessel. Something was happening to him. Not only was the liquid producing an effect unlike that of wine or mead — it was actually having the opposite effect. Wine caused the heart to beat faster and the convivial glow to increase. This earthy liquid caused the silence to increase and to become deeper. A quarter of an hour ago, he had been tired; now the fatigue had vanished to give way to a deep calm, so that he could no longer feel his heart beating. It was as if he had had a long night’s sleep and was now completely refreshed.
He began to understand. Back in the spider city, when he returned to his palace in the evening, tired after a long day’s work in organizing repairs in the broken-down buildings, or trying to keep members of the Council from squabbling, he usually flung himself on a heap of cushions and allowed his serving maids to bring food and drink until he felt relaxed. But he never relaxed beyond a certain point. As his energies returned, he enjoyed talking with Veig or Simeon or his mother. Too much relaxation would simply have made him yawn.
Now it was different. This relaxation was like being released from bonds that had been cutting off his circulation; it felt as if the blood was being allowed to flow back into his limbs. The process was almost painful.
He had experienced something of the sort once before, lying in bed in Doggins’ house in the city of the bombardier beetles, when the energies of the goddess had awakened the morning flowers and made them vibrate like a thousand tiny bells. But this experience had soon ended in sleep. Now the process filled him with a deeper wakefulness, and an enormous curiosity about what would come next.
While these thoughts had been passing through his mind, he had been aware that there was some activity on the far side of the cave, as chameleon men moved in and out of some kind of entrance or tunnel in the far wall. A moment later he was offered a wooden bowl that seemed to contain chopped roots. He bit into one, and found that it had a pleasant, crunchy consistency, and was easy to chew. It was a flavor that he had never before tasted. In his palace, he had eaten many kinds of vegetables and fruits for the first time in his life — after all, until he arrived in the spider city, he had never even tasted an apple. This was like none of them, but was by no means totally unfamiliar.
As he chewed, he tried to compare the taste with other flavors: celery, fennel, carrot, turnip, potato, cucumber, quince, guava, even coconut. Then he realized that something odd was happening. It was as if he was being absorbed by the flavor, and losing his sense of who he was and what he was doing there. This was not unpleasant, for as soon as he transferred his attention elsewhere, it ceased immediately. But in the meantime his consciousness was floating free, like a balloon, without any feeling of identity.
He noticed something else: that his companions were eating with their mouths, while the lips of the mouthlike opening in the forehead continued to move. Suddenly he understood why the chameleon men had two mouths: the lower one was for eating, the upper one for communicating. No sounds were passing through the lips of this upper mouth, but as he watched the movement of the lips, it was impossible to doubt that they were using them to communicate in a wordless language.
At that moment, something happened that made him stare in amazement. Through the ceiling, a few feet from where he was sitting, a shining creature was descending, like someone floating down through a hole. Yet there was no hole; the unbroken ceiling was clearly visible through the shimmering surface. The creature was yellowish in color and round in shape, about two feet across. There were small, hairy tentacles on its body, which waved like tiny legs. Then it emerged fully from the roof of the cave, and floated gently down, as softly as a bubble. As it hit the dry leaves on the floor it seemed to bounce slightly, then went on sinking into them. A kind of tuft of yellow fiber on its head was the last he saw of it before it vanished into the floor.
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