Sebastian of Mars (11 page)

My little friend, Quiff’s kit, said goodbye
in the only way she knew. She climbed up my tunic, using her huge
paws and extended claws, and kissed me on the cheek. I clutched her
briefly, and returned the kiss.

“Your father will return safely to you,” I
promised, though I wondered if I would be able to fulfill the
vow.

Quiff took leave of his family, and then we
departed. He clutched the first of his maps, and led the way. We
had three horses, laden with supplies, one of them drawing a cart
which was outfitted for our riding. As we passed into the darkness
of the first tunnel opening, I felt my stomach clench, and a hard
knot of worry form.

Did I know what I was doing?

Did I have any chance of success?

Why had I listened to One? Why was I so sure
that she was right?

The darkness ahead of me only added to my
unease.

Four days later, I turned to Quiff and
rasped, “I can’t go on.”

I had struggled the last two days, keeping up
with his pace, which was a sturdy one. And, for the most part, I
had been successful in hiding my pain. But now it was too much for
me, and I could hide it no longer. My lungs ached, my legs were
plagued with cramps, my shoulders were shot with pain from the pack
I carried. I wanted to quit, but wanted to die before I would admit
it.

And I was very close to that point.

“You wishhhh to rest?” Quiff asked, blinking
his eyes.

“Yes.”

And then I collapsed,
and fainted into blackness.

I
awoke with a cool
cloth draped across my brow. There was a breeze in the tunnel,
which I had not noticed before. It felt like an autumn night in
Wells City.

I heard the gurgle of nearby water, and rose
up on my elbows to spy a creek nearby, and a cooked fish, its
steamy odor rising to my nostrils, next to me.

“Quiff?” I called, and then my companion
appeared, walking down from the nearby bank to greet me. Two
fishing poles fashioned from long sticks guarded the spot he
abandoned.

“Do you feeeel wellll?” he inquired.

“Yes, much better, thanks. Where are we?”

He produced his map and pointed to a spot
that meant nothing to me.

“Making our wayyyy,” he said.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Hourssss.”

“And you watched over me?”

He shrugged, and left me to attend to the
horses, which were agitated.

He returned in a minute and said, “We musssst
go now.”

“Why?” And then I suddenly had another
question, as a rank odor, rising from both myself and my companion,
overcame me.

“What is that smell?” I said, making a
disgusted face. I noted now that my arms and face had apparently
been slathered with an odious substance which smelled like rotting
fish.

In answer, Quiff pulled a jar from his pack
and unscrewed the top, offering it to me.

The odor coming from it was even worse than
what I had already sampled. I drew back in disgust.

“Why?” I asked.

He carefully re-closed the jar and put it
away.

“Protecccction,” he answered.

“From what?”

All he would say was, “Musssst go.”

“I still don’t–”

He pointed to the horses and said
nothing.

I felt dizzy, and then, taking a deep breath,
felt stronger. I mounted the horse cart, and we made our way out of
that cool spot, and into a stifling and close cave with no light.
My companion lit a torch, and the walls, I saw, were covered with a
greenish slime.

I heard a noise behind us.

“They commmmme,” Quiff said in a hushed
tone.

“Who?”

In answer, there was an explosion nearby, and
the horse drawing our cart was blown to bits.

The cart itself turned violently to the left,
and turned over. Quiff was thrown on top of me. For a moment he was
inert, and then he pulled me desperately to my feet.

“Hurrrrt?” he asked.

“No.”

“Go thennnn! Followww!”

He ran, and I ran after him.

Our other two horses, burdened as they were
with our supplies, had only made it fifty yards ahead of us. Their
eyes were dilated with fear. I took the reins of one, and Quiff
took the other. They were frozen in place, but then Quiff whispered
something in their ears, each horse in turn, and they seemed to
unfreeze and followed us.

Behind, there was commotion, and the sound of
hissing which grew closer. I glanced back and saw the walls of the
tunnel bathed in flickering, glowing light which grew in
intensity.

The hissing grew even louder.

I turned to speak to Quiff, but he was gone,
along with the horses.

Panic coursed through me as the lights behind
drew closer–

“Heeeere!” Quiff’s voice whispered fiercely,
close by me, but I could see nothing but rock wall.

His hand drew out of the dimness and grabbed
my arm, yanking me fiercely into a near-invisible slit in the wall,
barely wide enough for a horse to fit.

I opened my mouth but Quiff’s paw covered it
and he snapped into my ear: “
Look!
”

I looked out into the tunnel we had vacated
as a horde of horrid creatures passed by, sniffing and hissing,
holding torches before them as if they were blind. They were
vaguely feline, but their heads were naked and gray, elongated, the
ears pressed back tightly against the skull. Their bodies were
hunched forward and their paws trailed just off the ground,
touching now and again in a bobbing motion, as if they could not
keep their balance.

Behind us one of the horses snorted, and the
nearest creature swivelled his head in our direction, sniffing, his
whiskers twitching. His eyes were as large as soup bowls and flat
dead black, without pupil or iris.

We stood still as statues, and the thing
sniffed once more and then went on.

In a few moments we were alone again.

Quiff pushed past me and left our hiding
spot, and I followed. The horses came along behind us.

“Who were they?”

“Cousins,” he said, and then added,
“Balllldie cousins.”

“Those were baldies?” I asked.

He looked at me. “Worse. And morrre bad
ahead.”

I said nothing, but
followed his lead.

T
he next three days were uneventful, to the point
where I became bored. The steady pace helped strengthen me, and I
found that when I arose in the morning I did so with lessening
fatigue and more willingness to forge ahead. Quiff promised many
strange things to see, and I was eager to get to them.

Quiff, on the other hand, grew more and more
cautious, which should have been a sign to me. But in my eagerness
to get to anywhere that wasn’t an underground tunnel I overlooked
his hesitancy.

Which, naturally, almost got me killed.

On the morning of the third day after our
encounter with the Baldy cousins, we broke out into a strange
cavern suffused with light. A vague, sulphur smell had assaulted my
nostrils for some time, and Quiff insisted that we stop to cover
ourselves in the noxious unguent he carried. Between the smell of
dead fish and rotting eggs, I was dizzy with nausea when we
stumbled out of a cave opening into the cavern.

I was nearly blinded. It was as if daylight
shone in that place – and, indeed, when I looked up I saw, far
above, a small round opening that looked to be the sky!

I turned to Quiff, whose eyes had narrowed.
He was studying the edges of the space we were in.

“Bessst we go,” he said.

As my eyes grew used to the unaccustomed
brightness, I saw that the yellow walls of sulphur cave we were in
rose impossibly high to the opening far above us. I saw a pink
patch of sky and a scudding cloud.

It had been real daylight shining down into
this place.

“Where are we, Quiff?”

“Wassss . . . volcano,” he answered.

I stared in wonder at that faraway patch of
sky, the first I had seen in more than a week.

I wanted to climb up those sulphur walls and
get to it.

Quiff tugged at my arm as I stood staring
upward.

“Go,” he said.

Reluctantly, I followed.

When we reached the far wall of the cavern,
and an opening there, Quiff stood stock still, and urged me to do
the same.

“Waitttt,” he whispered, and then he
disappeared into the dark opening.

He was gone so long that I bent my ear to
listen for him. I heard nothing. I took a tentative step into the
dark opening.

“Quiff?” I called out, in a whisper.

No sound.

Then: a far-off patter, like someone
running.

I was nearly bowled over by Quiff, who raced
out of the darkness past me, his feet carrying him as fast as they
could.

“Runnnnn!” he shouted at me,

I now saw why: a sea of bullet heads and huge
dark eyes swarming toward me from the cave.

I turned and ran – but as I followed Quiff
over the sulphur plain of the cavern, dodging yellow boulders and
slippery stretches of sulphur sand, I now saw that the opposite
cave opening, from which we had originally emerged, was now filled
with swarming underground Baldy bodies.

Quiff came to a halt, and I beside him.

“Now what?” I shouted, above the growing din
of hissing creatures fanning out behind and before us to encircle
us.

Quiff’s face was blank with fear.

“Quiff!” I shouted. “Tell me what to do!”

“Hhhhhope!” he shouted, his head back,
looking up.

I thought he had lost his mind, and all I
could do was watch helplessly as the ring of Baldies closed around
us.

“What will they do with us?” I asked.

“Eeeeeeat!” Quiff answered, still staring
upward.

The hissing creatures drew in.

And then – I looked up, too, because above us
it grew brighter.

“Yesssss!” Quiff exulted.

A sudden blinding flash filled the cavern,
washing it in brilliant light.

“Ssssssun!” Quiff shouted, grabbing me.
“Runnnn again!”

I blinked against the blinding light of the
sun, which had filled the ancient volcano opening above us, and saw
that our attackers had dropped to the ground, covering their eyes
and moaning in pain. Following Quiff, we tore through them even as
the brilliance behind us began to fade. We reached the far cave
opening where our horses waited, and ran into it as the light
seemed to blink out behind us.

The sun, the glorious sun, had moved on – but
only after saving us.

Or almost, I should say. For once again Quiff
pulled me into a small opening in the side of the main tunnel, and
we watched as the defeated, hissing horde of Baldies, rubbing their
eyes and snarling their disappointment in our escape, trooped past
us.

We waited in our cutout for more than an
hour, until Quiff was sure they were gone.

During that time, I never enjoyed the odor of
rotting fish more.

A
day later found us
in more hospitable surroundings, within sight of the surface but
unable to reach it.

It was a strange feeling, smelling fresh air
but not being able to stand on the surface of the planet. We were
in such a safe spot that Quiff felt confident enough to build a
fire and cook our latest catch, a silvery-white fish, long as an
eel, the likes of which I’d never seen. I had become used to this
underground world and its mysteries, it’s rivers which appeared and
then disappeared, winding out of a cut in a rock wall and into a
cut in an opposite wall, or, once, running
overhead
and
unseen. I had expressed my fear to Quiff at that time that the
entire ceiling above us might come down in a shower of tons of
water at any time, but he had merely laughed.

“Never happened in a milllllion years!” he
said.

This latest wonder, a smooth-walled cavern so
near the surface that we could see the caves leading out a mere
hundred feet above us, but were unable to get to them. The walls
were smooth as glass. A waterfall fed by a near-surface aquifer
plunged from the mouth of a yawning cave just below the ceiling and
spread in a crystalline pool of blue-white at our feet. Quiff
proclaimed this some of the best fishing in all of the “downside”
areas.

But we had been here nearly three days,
lounging and sleeping and fishing and eating, and I was once again
growing restless. My strength growing, I had taken to running
sprints around the perimeter of the cavern, and swimming in the
waterfall’s pool. I was bored and energized. Quiff, on the other
hand, seemed completely at ease.

“It won’t be longggg,” he assured me, as he
had since we had reached this place.

But he would not tell me what we were waiting
for.

“Can’t you give me a hint?”

For the first time since I had met him, his
eyes twinkled with amusement.

“It won’t be
longgggg.”

I
ate my tenth meal
of eelfish, and settled down to my tenth restful nap.

When I awoke, my life changed.

The cavern was nearly filled with people. I
heard laughter, and smelled something more than fish cooking. It
smelled like poultry! And there was singing coming from one side of
the cavern, with answering singing ringing from the other.

Was I in a dream?

Or had I awakened into one?

“He’s awake!” someone shouted, a basso voice,
and there was instant silence.

I looked for Quiff, but he was nowhere to be
seen.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes, then threw my
blanket aside and stood up.

“What –?” I began.

The hundreds of faces surrounding me looked
down as one, and the hundreds of bodies bowed, as one.

One portly gentleman, who owned the basso
voice, stood up close by me and locked eyes with me. Those eyes
were both merry and serious.

“It is our pleasure to serve you,” he said,
his voice deep and resonant as a well.