The Horse Barbarians

16

Someone was grinding snow into Jason’s face, forcing it into his nostrils and mouth, effectively dragging him back to consciousness. He coughed and spluttered, pushing himself away from the offending hands. When he had wiped the snow from his eyes, he looked around, blinking, trying to place himself.

He was kneeling between two of Temuchin’s men. Their swords were drawn and ready, and one of them held a guttering torch. It illuminated a small patch of drifted snow and the black lip of a chasm. Red-lit snowflakes rushed by him and vanished into this pit of darkness.

“Do you know this man?” a voice asked, and Jason recognized it as Temuchin’s. Two men appeared out of the night and stood before him.

“I do, great Lord Temuchin,” the second man said. “It is the other-world man from the great flying thing, the one who was captured and escaped.”

Jason looked closer at the muffled face and, as the, torch flared up, he recognized the sharp nose and sadistic smile of Oraiel, the jongleur.

“I never saw this person before. He is a liar,” Jason said, ignoring the hoarseness of his voice and the pain in his throat when he spoke.

“I remember him when he was captured, great lord, and later he attacked and beat me. You saw him yourself there.”

“Yes, I did.” Temuchin stepped forward and looked down at Jason’s upturned face, his own cold and impassive. “Of course. He is the one. That is why he looked familiar.”

“What are these lies…” Jason said, struggling to his feet.

Temuchin seized him by the forearms in an implacable grip, pushing him backward until his heels were on the crumbling edge of the abyss.

“Tell the truth now, whoever you are. You stand at the edge of Hell’s Doorway and in one moment you shall be hurled down it. You cannot escape. But I might let you go if you tell me the truth.”

As he talked, Temuchin bent Jason’s body back, farther and farther over the blackness, until only the grip on his wrists prevented him from falling. Jason could not see the warlord’s face: it was a black outline against the torches. Yet he knew there was no hope of mercy there. This was the end. The best he could do now was to protect the Pyrrans.

“Release me and I shall tell you the truth. I am from another world. I came here alone to help you. I found the jongleur Jason, and he was dying, so I took his name. He had been gone from his people many years and they no longer remembered him. And I have helped you. Release me and I will help you more.”

A weak voice, filled with static, buzzed in his head. “Jason, is that you? Kerk here. Where are you?” The dentiphone was still operating — he had a chance.

“Why are you here?” Temuchin asked. “Are you helping the lowlanders to bring their cities to our lands?”

“Release me. Do not drop me now into Hell’s Doorway and I will tell you.”

Temuchin hesitated a long moment before he spoke again.

“You are a liar. Everything you say is a lie. I do not know what to believe.” His head turned and for an instant the torchlight lit the humorless smile on his lips.

“I release you,” he said, and opened his hands.

Jason clawed at empty air, tried to twist so he could clutch at the cliff’s edge, but he could do nothing. He fell into the blackness.

A rush of air.

A blow on his shoulder, his back. Then he was scraping along the side of the cliff, struggling to keep his face and hands away from the abrasive dirt and stone. The cliffside tore at the leather of his garments as he plummeted down the outward-slanting surface.

Then it ended and he fell free in the blackness once again. Falling for an unmeasurable moment of time, seconds or minutes, forever — until a crushing impact enfolded him.

He did not die, and that surprised him very much. He wiped something from his face and realized that it was snow. A snowbank, a drift, here at the bottom of Hell’s Doorway. A snowbank in hell and he had fallen into it.

“Where there’s life, there’s still hope, Jason,” he told himself unconvincingly. What hope was there at the bottom of this inaccessible pit? Kerk and the Pyrrans would get him out, that was a morale-building hope. Yet, even as he thought this, his tongue contacted a jagged end of metal in his mouth. With restored fear he groped out the crushed remains of the dentiphone. Some time during the fall, he had unknowingly ground it between his teeth and destroyed it.

“You’re on your own again, Jason,” he said aloud, and did not enjoy in the slightest the tiny sound of his voice in the immense blackness. What were his assets? He floundered about in the drift until he could reach back for his medikit. It was gone. Well, his wallet was still on his belt, though his knife was gone from his boot. His fingers searched through the assorted junk in the wallet until they touched an unfamiliar tube. What? The photon-store flashlight, of course. Dnopped in here and forgotten since the night they had picked up the climbing equipment.

But was it broken? The way his luck was running it probably was. He switched it on and groaned aloud when nothing happened. Then he turned the intensity ring and the brilliant beam slashed through the darkness. Light! Even though his situation was not materially changed, Jason felt a lift in his morale. He broadened the beam and flashed it around his prison. The air was still and the snowflakes fell silently through the light and vanished. Snow covered the flat valley floor below and piled in drifts against the walls. Black rock rose up on both sides, pushed out above his head where a ledge of rock projected. The sky was invisible, cut off by the jutting rock. He must have slid down that rocky angle and been shot off like a projectile into this snowbank. Pure chance had saved him.

There was a moaning cry and something black plunged down from above and through the beam of light, striking the valley bottom no more than ten meters from Jason.

The vertical rocks there were coated with only a thin layer of snow and the man had struck full across them. His eyes were open and staring, a tricide of blood ran from the gaping mouth. It was his betrayer, the jongleun Oraiel.

“What’s this? Temuchin eliminating eyewitnesses? That’s not like him.” The mouth still gaped open but Oraiel had finished forever with speaking.

Jason floundered out of his drift and started across the floor of the narrow valley. The ground was smooth in the center, smooth and very flat. He did not consider why until there was an ominous creaking beneath his feet. Even as he tried to throw himself backward the ice broke, splintering and cracking in every direction, and he fell into the dark waters beneath.

The sudden shock of the frigid water almost drove the air from his lungs, but he clamped his mouth shut, sinking his teeth hard into his lower lip. At the same time his fingers tightened convulsively on the flashlight. Without this he would not be able to find the opening in the ice again.

Almost at the same instant his feet touched the rocky bottom, the water was not deep, and he kicked upward. The light shone on a mirror above as he rose and his hand went out to press, palm to palm, against his imaged hand. It was ice, solid and unbroken above him. Only when he felt his fingers being dragged across its surface did he realize that he was being pulled swiftly along by a current. The hole in the ice must already be far behind him.

If Jason dinAlt had been prone to despair, this was the moment when he would have died. Trapped beneath the ice at the bottom of this inaccessible valley, this was indeed the time to give up. He never considered it. He held the burning lungful of air; he tried to swim to the side where he could get some footing, perhaps press up through the ice; he waved the light upward looking for a break

The current was too swift. It threw him numbingly against the rocks, then hurtled him back into the swift-flowing current. He pointed down stream and kicked to stay in the center, looking down at the smooth rocks that flew by an arm’s length beneath his face.

The water was cold; it numbed his skin and carried him along with it. But it was the fire in his lungs that could not be ignored. Logically he knew that he had enough oxygen in his body cells and his bloodstream to live for many minutes. The breathing reflex in his chest was not interested in logic. Dying! it screamed. Air, breathe, until he could deny it no longer. Numbly he drifted upward to the mirrored surface and broke through into blackness and sucked in a shuddering, lifegiving breath.

It took a long time for the reality of what had occurred to penetrate his numbed senses. He dragged himself to a dark, stony shone and lay half in and half out of the water like some form of beached marine life. Moving seemed completely out of the question, but as the shuddering cold bit deep he realized it was either that or die here. And where was here? With pained slowness he pulled himself clear of the water and moved the light up the rocky wall, across the rock above and back down the rock to the water again. No snow? The meaning of this forced through his chilled and sluggish synapses.

“A cave.”

It was obvious enough by hindsight. The narrow valley, Hell’s Doorway, must have been cut by water, slowly eroded out through the centuries by the small stream. It had no visible outlet because it plunged underground, and it had taken him with it. That meant he wasn’t finished yet. The water had to have an outlet, and if it did he would find it. For a moment he considered the fact that it might sink lower and lower into the rock strata and vanish, but he swiftly rejected this defeatist idea.

“Carry on!” he shouted aloud as he stumbled to his feet, and the echoes called back “On… on… on….”

“Good idea, on, onwards. Just what I shall do.”

He shivered and squelched forward through the fine sand at the edge of the water, and the next thing he saw were the footprints emerging from the stream and going on ahead of him.

Was someone else here?! The footprints were sharp and clear, obviously recently made. There must be an entrance to these caverns that was well known. All he had to do was follow the footprints and he would be out. And as long as he kept walking he would not freeze in his sodden clothing. The cave air was cool, but not so cold as the plateau outside.

When the trail left the sand beside the stream and ventured into an adjoining cavern, it became more difficult to follow, but not impossible. Small stalagmites growing from the limestone floor had been kicked down, and there were occasional marks gouged into the soft stone of the walls. The tunnels branched and one went back to the water where it ended abruptly at a rocky bank. The shone was gone and the water filled the cave here, coming close to the smooth ceiling. Jason retraced his steps and picked up the trail again at the next branch.

It was a long walk.

Jason rested once and fell asleep without realizing it. He awoke, shivering uncontrollably, and forced himself to go on. As far as he knew, the watch concealed in his belt buckle was still operating, but he never looked at it. Somehow the measuring of time could not be considered in these endless, timeless caverns.

Walking down one of them, no different from all the others, he found the man he had been following. He was sleeping on the cave floor ahead, a barbarian, in furs very much like Jason’s.

“Hello,” he called in the in-between tongue, then fell silent as he came closer. The sleep was for eternity and the man had been dead a very long time. Years, centuries perhaps, in these dry, cold, and bacteriafree caverns. There was no way to tell. His flesh and skin were brown and mummified, leather lips shriveled back from yellow teeth. One outstretched hand lay, pointing ahead, a knife just beyond the splayed fingers. When Jason picked it up, he saw that it was tarnished only by the thinnest patina of rust.

What Jason did next was not easy, but it was essential for survival. With careful motions he removed the fur outer garments from the corpse. It crackled and rustled when he was forced to move the stiff limbs, but made no other protest. When he had the furs, he moved farther down the cavern, stripped himself bare and donned the dry clothes. There was no repugnance; this was survival.

He stretched his own clothes out to dry, bunched the fur under his head, turned the light to a dim yellow glow, he could not bear the thought of total darkness, and fell instantly into a troubled sleep.