CIRCLES OF STONE (THE MOTHER PEOPLE SERIES) (56 page)

For hours, Zena
sat there, all her energies focused on pushing the life force back into the
child.  And when she finally collapsed, not knowing she had moved, the
child was sleeping peacefully.  If there was pain in her body, none could
see it; if there were poisons, they no longer showed in angry lines on her leg
or in the heat of her body.

Gently, the big
man laid Zena on a warm fur, though he was careful not to remove her hands from
the child's.  He had seen how she had given up her strength, passed it on
to the girl he loved so dearly, and he did not want to break the bond between
them. 

He looked down at
the sleeping pair.  He had been right.   There was magic in this
woman.  He had suspected it when he had seen her riding the bison, and now
he knew it was true.  He had told the others what he had seen, and they
had agreed.  A woman who could ride the fearful bison would surely have
the power to heal the child they had hurt. 

Her magic must be
very strong, he realized, to have fixed the little one so quickly.  If she
had that much power, she might also be able to help when the time came for his
mate to give birth.  Perhaps now, this mate would not die as so many
others had, when their infants had refused to be born.  

The thin male must
have magic, too, since he had made the bison come alive on the walls of the
cave.  His scratching on the rocks had not been so useless after
all.  With one hand alone, he had made the animals run and leap where all
could see.  If he had the power to do that, he would surely be able to
tell the bison, maybe even the reindeer, to give up their lives more easily,
without harming those who needed their meat.

Relieved, the big man
lay down beside Zena.  For the first time in many seasons, his mind was at
peace.  Now, all would be well with those who remained in his tribe. 
The two strangers had come to help them, just as he had thought.  In
return for their help, he would give them meat. Since both of them had power
over the bison, the animals he hunted would surely cooperate, and the hunt
would be less dangerous.  Besides, now that he had seen the strangers more
closely, he was certain they would not be able to get meat for themselves. 
They might have magic, but they still looked too weak and thin to hunt. 

Yawning hugely, he
closed his eyes.  Already, the night was almost gone. 

For a few hours
the cave was quiet save for an occasional grunt, or the crackling of flames as
someone stirred the fire.  Then a ray of sunlight penetrated its
east-facing entrance and shone directly into Zena's eyes.  She sat
abruptly, astonished to find herself in this place.  She remembered how
she had come here, but she had not realized a whole night had passed. 

The child! 
She was no longer holding her hands, giving her strength.  She had fallen
asleep instead.  Zena bent over the girl, terrified that she would be
worse.  But breath still moved in and out of her lips, and her color was
good.  Seeming to sense Zena's worried gaze, she opened her eyes.  A
smile creased her lips, then she closed her eyes and slept again.

Shivers of awe ran
up Zena's spine.  The brilliant eyes were free of pain, free of fever
too.  And when she examined the wound, she saw that the red streaks on the
child's thigh and back were nearly gone. 

She stared down at
her hands, almost frightened at what they had done.  They had healed the
child.  The Mother had given her the power to heal.

"Thank you,
Great Mother," she breathed into the silent room.  For a long time,
she sat quietly, trying to absorb the magnitude of this precious gift. 

The child stirred
in her sleep, bringing her thoughts to the present.  Zena bent over her, then
she rose quietly.  The girl was much better, but now she must eat, not
heavy food like meat, but gruel, perhaps some fruit.  She would get the
food from her own cave before the others woke. 

The slanted light
dazzled her eyes as she stepped outside.  She turned away from the glare
and stood for a moment, feeling the sun heat her shoulders, pour energy into
her body.  The night's work had drained her.  Lazily, she squinted
along the length of the brilliant shaft of light.  It shone directly into
a crevice on the cliff across from her, seemed to widen it strangely.

Zena stared. 
The dream.  This was her dream.  The sun had reached into a slit and
widened it.  She had forgotten.  That was what she had seen, just
before she had walked with Conar through the labyrinthine passages beneath the
earth, had come to the narrow cleft that led to the open space where something
waited.

The entrance to
the passages was here, in front of her.  Zena turned to call for Conar,
but he was already beside her.  She grabbed his hand and pointed. 
Together, they scrambled up the short cliff and slid through the narrow
opening.

CHAPTER
TWENTY FOUR

A trickle of water
penetrated a crack in a rocky hillside, dissolving an infinitesimal quantity of
lime.  Years passed, and the trickle became a stream, then a river. 
More lime dissolved, and the crack continued to expand.  Once too small to
be seen, it became finally a gaping hole, big enough to swallow all the water.

The river poured
into the waiting hole and disappeared.  Now it attacked limestone beneath
the surface to create deep caves and long, winding tunnels.  As the land
dried out, the river sank still lower, excavating new passages under the ones
it had carved long ago.  The tunnels above crashed into the ones below and
suddenly there were immense chambers whose height was twice what it had been
before.  If the cave was close to the surface, light sometimes penetrated
through chinks in the ceiling.  Then, startlingly, a thin stream of
sunlight, perhaps moonlight, shone brilliantly into an underground world that
had known only darkness for thousands of years.

In deeper caves,
moisture came through the chinks, and  stalactites formed.  Each time
a drop of water fell, a particle of calcite was left behind.  Drop by
drop, the calcite accumulated, until a shimmering curtain of needles hung
suspended from the ceiling.  Drips from each needle fell to the floor
below, leaving another bit of calcite.  Each particle slid over the one
before it, making it a little larger, like dribbles of sand that finally make a
castle.  The bulky structures rose slowly toward the graceful needles that
had given them birth, and sometimes, if many centuries had passed, they
met.  Pillars formed then, long, shining pillars whose fragile tops rested
gratefully on the sturdy layers below.  In the perpetual darkness, none
could see their beauty, but if light did fall upon them, they shone in a
brilliant display of white lashed with all the colors of the rainbow.

It was at
formations like these that Zena stared in wonder.  Thousands upon
thousands of slender needles hung from the ceiling above her head, glowing with
color in the light of her torch.  All around her were structures for which
she could find no names, few comparisons.  Never before had she seen
anything like them.  Some rose from the floor of the cave in thick,
tuber-like shapes; others were like sticks, except they curved as no stick
could curve without breaking.  A few looked almost like trees that had
been squashed, or planted upside down.  Even the sides of the cave were
covered with the formations.  They spilled over each other, looking as if
they would keep on spilling until they poured across her feet, but when she
touched them, they were hard and cold, covered with a glistening layer of
moisture.

She turned to look
for Conar.  He was staring in awe at the shining needles, at the bulbous
shapes that rose to meet them.  His flickering torch threw strange,
dancing shadows across the formations, and they seemed suddenly to move. 
As she watched, his flare sputtered and went out.  She looked critically
at her own.  It would not last much longer either.  They must have
been here longer than she had thought.  

She hurried over
to Conar, and they turned toward the narrow passage through which they had
entered.  Reluctant to leave, she took a last look at the magnificent
cavern.  It was too closed in to be the open space of which she had
dreamed, but it was still the most extraordinary cave she had ever seen. 

Deftly, she
wriggled into the tunnel.  Conar slid in behind her.  She had taken
only two steps when her torch went out. Immediately, the blackness was
absolute.  She could see nothing, not even her hand as it moved
automatically in front of her face, to ward off the unknown threats darkness
seemed always to bring.  She could not see Conar, or the walls of the
passages, or the floor beneath her feet. 

"Zena!" 
Conar's voice reverberated strangely in the tight space.  He reached
toward her, feeling for her hand, so they would be connected.  She grabbed
it, glad she was not alone.  Silently, they groped their way along. 
They could not see, but they could hear and feel and smell. Without their eyes,
all their other senses were magnified.  For the first time, Zena heard the
soft, steady dripping of water, smelled the dankness of constant humidity, the
faintly abrasive scent of wet rock.  Her fingers registered the strange
combination of stone so covered with moisture that it would have been slimy,
but for the tiny granules that came away with her hands.   She
thought she could feel the darkness, too, as if the vast blackness of the night
sky had come deep into the ground to embrace her.  It filled her eyes, her
ears and mouth, muffled her voice when she spoke, clung to her arms and legs as
she moved.

Hours seemed to
pass as they felt their way along the walls, crawled and scrambled through the
maze of tunnels, trying vainly to remember how many turns they had taken when
they had come.  In the total darkness, nothing could be distinguished, not
even memories of where they had walked before.  Zena felt as if the
blackness were closing in on her, pressing against her body and confusing her
mind with its relentless pressure.  Finally, she could not fight it any
longer.  She sank down heavily against the walls of the tunnel they were
negotiating.

"We are lost,"
she said bluntly.  "And we cannot wait for light to come, for light
never comes to this place."

Conar nodded, then
realized she could not see him. "Yes.  We are lost," he
agreed.  "But surely, if we keep going, we will find the way
out.  These tunnels cannot go forever."

"We must
think as we go,"  Zena responded, trying to give herself courage by
making a plan.  "We must think what each place feels like, if it
seems deeper beneath the earth, or if it is dryer, and perhaps nearer the
surface.  When we first came into the tunnels, it was not so wet. 
Then we went down, I think.  Now we must try always to go up."

The proposal
restored her dwindling confidence, gave her the will to get up again. 
Just as she rose, something slithered across her feet.  She screamed. 
The sound came back to her ears, went away again, and then returned, over and
over, becoming fainter with each repetition.

"There must
be snakes here," she said apologetically. "They  frighten me
when I cannot see, but at least it did not bite."

"I saw the
thing that crawls in the big room," Conar reassured her.  "It
was like a snake, but it was small and harmless, I think."

Zena groped her
way forward, trying hard to control her shaking legs.  They shook not just
because of the creature that had crawled across them, but from exhaustion and
hunger.  She had hardly slept or eaten last night, and once she had
discovered the entrance to the caves, she had been too excited to think of
food.  They had stopped only long enough for her to take gruel to the
child, for Conar to prepare their torches.  Now she was paying for her
foolishness.

"We are going
down, I think," Conar said.  "It gets wetter.  I hear water
below too."

Zena headed in the
opposite direction.  To restore her spirits, she began to make sounds, so
she could listen to them bounce back like her scream.  At first, the
sounds were slow to return.  They seemed to spread out hollowly before
meeting another wall that sent them back.  Then, as they rounded a long
passage that curved to the left, the sounds returned faster, in a series of
quick repetitions, as if the walls were close.

"The
sounds!" she said excitedly.  "We can tell from the sounds if we
are in a big space or a small one."

"Perhaps it
is true, but I do not know what good that will do," Conar objected.

"No. 
You are right."  The excitement left Zena and with it went the last
of her strength.  She sank to the ground, too dispirited to go on. 
Conar dropped down beside her.  His skin felt clammy against her shoulder,
as if there were no heat left in him.  She shivered convulsively. 
Maybe they would never get out of the tunnels.  They could go in circles,
and they would never know it.  Or perhaps the passages just kept going,
winding endlessly beneath the earth.  Maybe she would never again see the
sky, the leaves on the trees, or even Conar's face.

The depressing
thoughts wandered around and around in Zena's mind, as twisted and confusing as
the passages themselves.

"No!" 
Zena propped herself up.  Beside her, she felt Conar jump at the suddenness
of her word.

"We must not
give up," she told him, and the sternness in her tone was for herself as
much as him.  "That is not right.  The Mother Herself showed me
these tunnels, and She does not expect me to lose myself in them.  I must
find my way out, so I can look again for the open space where She waits."

She pushed herself
up and went on, making noises as she went.  Perhaps Conar was right, and
they would not help, but she could not think of anything else.

"Hoo,"
she called out, imitating the noise owls made when they hunted at night. 
The blackness made her think of owls, with their huge, wide eyes that could see
in the dark.