Though, thought Daniel to complete the unspoken idea, any cistern here would have been the grave for the legion of creatures which had managed to crawl into it in the years since the lodge was last used. Well, they had the wine.
Candace pursed his lips. Daniel suspected the Kostroman had forgotten just how much a fishing lodge this really was, though the reality was more than sufficient for Daniel himself.
“I’ll tell you what, Leary,” Candace said. “If you go down the steps to the landing, there’s a path off to the left that leads to a cave. Since you’re the naturalist . . . ?”
“I’ll show him,” Bet said unexpectedly. “I’ve been here, you know.”
Her expression was perfectly innocent. Only a cynic would speculate that her comment—her admission—had something to do with watching Margrethe flirt with Daniel during the flight.
Daniel kept one of the mattresses; Bet had a bottle and a glass. He didn’t need a guide once they’d forced their way through the feathery undergrowth to the steps at the cliff’s edge. Land animals on Kostroma tended to be small, so the vegetation hadn’t developed the spikes and knife-edged leaves that made the jungles of many planets hell for humans who had to pass through them.
The steps had been formed by drilling a line of vertical holes to the desired depth, then cracking the overburden away. The treads themselves hadn’t been leveled, but passing feet had worn them smooth. Given that this islet must always have been remote from major traffic, Candace was right about the construction being very old.
Bet paused at the head of the stairway, turned her face up unexpectedly to kiss Daniel, and skipped down the steps giggling. The glasses winked in the sunlight.
Daniel followed at a more leisurely pace. In part that was the caution of a man who rigged antennae in sponge space, where a misstep could mean not only death but separation from the sidereal universe. In addition he was intrigued by thimble-sized cones of lichen growing out from the rock. They showed narrow bands of bright color, one laid over the other all the way from peak to base. He’d never seen anything like them before.
Bet stuck her head back around the curve of the cliff. “Are you coming, Daniel?” she called. She hadn’t used his first name before. Daniel stepped more quickly.
The steps wound clockwise down the cliff face. Midway they crossed a counterclockwise path. It was a ramp and had been melted, not cut, into the rock. Above the intersection the second path had been blasted away when the staircase was created. What remained, weathered but not especially worn, was a left-hand branch to the steps below the junction.
The remnant of the older path was almost level; at no time had it continued down to sea level. Unless sea level had dropped ten feet since the path was made . . .
“See?” Bet called, standing on the other side of a giant version of the lichens Daniel had been noticing. The cones were more frequent here than nearer the top, but this one was almost a meter high. “It’s just this way.”
Then she added, “Ooh!” and batted at the insect that had hopped onto her thigh. It was only the size of a fingernail, but its black and blue stripes were in sharp contrast with the fire-hot fabric of her dress.
“Coming, love,” Daniel said absently. “But we don’t want to lose this, do we?”
He waggled the rolled mattress. There were quite a lot of similar insects here. They were flightless and appeared to browse the lichen.
“We could make do,” Bet called with a giggle.
Daniel stepped over the giant cone. Bet vanished into the cliff face just ahead. A tunnel had been burned into the rock. The surface was vitrified like that of the ramp. Daniel walked inside and pulled down his goggles to get a better view of the interior.
Bet had gone to the end, thirty feet or so from the opening. There were niches about five feet long and a foot or so deep burned into the sidewalls all the way to the back. He, Bet, and a slight scattering of dead leaves from the vegetation above were the only other contents of the tunnel.