They came to a halt, and three loud raps sounded. After a silence, there was the sound of something heavy being moved. Then the first gleam of light came from ahead, revealing that they were in a low-ceilinged chamber, about ten feet square. The light was admitted past great slabs of stone, which were being moved aside, and a cooler air blew in their faces. Two large stone slabs were being carried bodily apart, each by four men; beyond them, dozens of lighted lamps illuminated a broad chamber. Niall gasped. It was an enormous room, at least fifty feet long, and the lights, set in alcoves in the walls, made it almost as bright as daylight. But this, apparently, was only a kind of corridor. Hamna led them forward, and more slabs of stone were moved aside. There was yet another lighted room, whose ceiling was higher than the previous one and whose walls were supported by stone buttresses. And this was also apparently a corridor, for beyond it he could see a large chamber whose stone doors had already been moved aside. As they approached, he saw that it was filled with a crowd of people, including women and children. They parted to make way for Hamna, and down the aisle between them, Niall could see a big stone chair, approached by several steps. In it sat a tall heavily built man, his grey hair held in place by a gold-coloured band; the white garment he wore came within a few inches of his feet. The old man stood up, smiling, and held out his hand to Ulf; they clasped forearms.
“Welcome to Dira. My name is Kazak.” He had a strong, broad face, somewhat too flabby, and the look of a man who expects unquestioning obedience.
Niall was less interested in the old man than in the tall, graceful girl who stood by his chair. Her face bore a family resemblance to Ingeld, but the features were more clean cut. Her red-gold hair was held in place by a circlet of shiny metal. When he noticed that she was also looking at him with curiosity, he quickly looked away.
Ulf introduced himself, then Niall and Ingeld. The old king, Niall observed, looked at Ingeld with keen interest, taking in the short, spider-silk garment that revealed the curves of her body. Ingeld’s dress was far shorter than the tunics worn by the other women, including the beautiful girl beside the throne.
Kazak was saying: “This is my daughter Merlew, who runs my household.” When Niall clasped forearms with Merlew, he was thrilled by the softness of her skin, and by the delicious scent that came from her, quite unlike his own rank smell of sweat. When she smiled at him, showing even white teeth, his heart seemed to collapse with an emotion that was like fear, but far more agreeable. But with the self-control that came naturally to him, he gave no sign of his feelings.
Niall found himself being kissed and hugged by a large-breasted woman with very white shoulders and a firm chin. This, he gathered, was Sefna, his mother’s sister. She was ruffling his hair.
“Poor boy, you must be tired. Come and eat, then you can rest.”
She made a perfunctory obeisance to Kazak, bringing her right knee close to the floor, then, taking Niall by the hand, led him away. Massig waved cheerfully to him and called: “I’ll see you later.”
Another sloping corridor led to what were evidently the living quarters. Niall expected a large room; instead, he found a wide chamber with other corridors leading off it. What impressed Niall was the straightness of the walls and the neat right-angles of the doorways. It all struck him as unimaginably sophisticated and marvellous.
Sefna halted in front of a door in a side corridor; two steps led down into a large, square room with rushes on the floor. There were seats, made of sliced logs of wood, and a low table that consisted of one great round of wood, three feet in diameter. Through a low door in the wall, a dark-haired girl looked into the room. Sefna said: “Dona, come and meet your cousin Niall.” The girl came in and shyly accepted his handclasp; she had large brown eyes and an olive complexion. Niall judged her age to be about twelve.
In spite of Niall’s protests that he was not hungry, Sefna began to prepare food. Suddenly, Niall was very tired — so tired that he could scarcely keep his eyes open; this, after all, was normally the time of the afternoon when the travellers had slept. And his last sleep had been in the great fortress on the plateau. He relaxed on the couch of leaves and rushes and tried to answer Dona’s questions. Periodically, other children looked into the room from the corridor, but Dona shooed them away imperiously. It dawned on Niall that he was an object of general curiosity, and that Dona was the centre of some envy because he was her guest. In the pleasure of proprietorship, Dona soon lost her shyness, and Niall found himself treating her as if she were an older version of his sister Runa, teasing her and telling stories; she was so enthralled by his account of the country of the ants that he had to repeat the whole thing twice.
When the food arrived he found he was hungry after all — perhaps because it was hot — an unusual luxury. As he ate, he did his best to answer Sefna’s questions, but sheer fatigue made his eyelids droop. He was relieved when his father arrived, accompanied by Kazak, and he ceased to be the centre of attention. He dozed through much of the conversation that followed. Finally, he and his father were shown into a smaller chamber with grass couches that were covered with woven cloth; it was luxuriously soft, and he soon fell into a dreamless sleep.
When he woke up, he found Dona sitting by his bed, patiently waiting for him to open his eyes. She told him that in an hour’s time, Kazak was giving a feast in honour of his guests. In the meantime, she would show him where to wash and then take him on a tour of the “palace” (which its inhabitants referred to as “the shelter”).
He was impressed to learn that there was another level beneath this one. They had dug down to the water table, thirty feet below, and excavated a series of basements. In these there were the communal wells, and rooms in which the men and women could perform their ablutions. There were also astonishing sanitary arrangements, and an army of dung beetles disposed of the human waste.
The people of Dira had also domesticated ants and grey spiders. The ants were of the aphid-tending variety; they had cut galleries deep into the walls in which they had built their nests; in these nests they tended the greenfly larvae until they were large enough to be taken into the outer world; there, in the greenery by the shores of the lake, they were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the “palace”. The spiders were kept for their silk, which was treated by some process that removed its stickiness and then woven into cloth. There were workshops in which the women wove cloth from cotton and spider silk, and workshops in which stonemasons worked on large chunks of stones, transported from many miles away on rollers, and lined new galleries and corridors. This underground city was in a perpetual ferment of activity, like an ants’ nest. But this was not simply because such activity was necessary to keep everyone fed and clothed. It was because, as Niall knew only too well, one of the chief problems of life underground was boredom. Only a small percentage of the human beings in Dira went outside more than once a month, and even then, it was only for an hour at a time. The spiders knew there were human beings somewhere in the area of the salt lake; many years ago, they had captured hundreds of them in a great raid. (Niall’s grandfather Jomar had been among the captives.) But in those days, the humans had lived in caves near a ruined city, a dozen miles away on the shores of the lake. After the raid, the survivors had scattered into the desert; many had died. Then Kazak had reorganised them and, with the aid of fire, had driven a colony of leaf-cutter ants out of their underground city on the edge of the desert. This city became the “shelter”. In twenty years, Kazak’s people had turned it into a palace and an impregnable fortress. The purpose of the massive slabs of stone that covered the walls was not simply to prevent the earth from collapsing; it was to prevent insects from tunnelling into the palace.