Shibumi (48 page)

The tank was stopped.

He hauled it back against the current, hand over hand, the rope molten iron in his raw palms, the cords of his crotch knotting and throbbing. When his hand touched the web strap of the tank, he pulled it up and hooked it behind his neck. With that weight dangling at his chest, the move back to the ledge was dicy. Twice he pushed off the smooth wall, and twice he tottered and fell back, catching himself again with the flat of his sole, his crotch feeling like it would tear with the stretch. On the third try he made it over and stood panting against the wall, only his heels on the ledge, his toes over the roaring stream.

He moved the last short distance to the scree wall that blocked the way to the Climbing Cave, and he slumped down in the book corner, exhausted, the tank against his chest, his palms pulsing with pain.

He couldn’t stay there long. His hands would stiffen up and become useless.

He rerigged the tank to his back and checked the fittings and faceplate of the mask. If they were damaged, that was it. The mask had somehow survived banging against the tank. Now he began the slow climb up the corner between the side of the shaft, and the boulder wall under which the river had disappeared. As before, there were many foot– and handholds, but it was all friable rottenrock, chunks of which came off in his hands, and grains of stone worked their way into his skinless palms. His heart thumped convulsively in his chest, squirting throbs of blood into his temples. When at last he made the fiat ledge between two counterbalanced boulders that was the keyhole to the Climbing Cave, he lay out flat on his stomach and rested, his cheek against the rock and saliva dripping from the corner of his mouth.

He cursed himself for resting there too long. His palms were growing sticky with scab fluid, and they hinged awkwardly, like lobster claws. He got to his feet and stood there, opening and closing his hands, breaking through the crusts of pain, until they articulated smoothly again.

For an immeasurable time, he stumbled forward through the Climbing Cave, feeling his way around the house-sized boulders that dwarfed him, squeezing between counterbalanced slabs of recent infall from the scarred roof far above the throw of his helmet light, edging his way along precariously perched rocks that would long ago have surrendered to gravity, had they been subjected to the weather erosion of the outside. The river was no guide, lost far below the jumble of infall, ravelled into thousands of threads as it found its way along the schist floor of the cavern. Three times, in his fatigue and stress, he lost his way, and the terror of it was that he was wasting precious energy stumbling around blindly. Each time, he forced himself to stop and calm himself, until his proximity sense suggested the path toward open space.

At last, there was sound to guide him. As he approached the end of the Climbing Cave, the threads of water far below wove themselves together, and slowly he became aware of the roar and tympani of the great waterfall that led down to the Crystal Cave. Ahead, the roof of the cave sloped down and was joined by a blocking wall of jagged, fresh infall. Making it up that wall, through the insane network of cracks and chimneys, then down the other side through the roaring waterfall without the safety of a belay from Le Cagot would be the most dangerous and difficult part of the cave. He would have to rest before that.

It was then that Hel had slipped off the straps of his air tank and sat down heavily on a rock, his chin hanging to his chest as he gasped for air and sweat ran from his hair into his eyes.

He had taken a long drink from his
xahako,
then had lain back on the slab of rock, not bothering to take off his helmet.

His body whimpered for rest. But he mustn’t sleep. Sleep is death. Just rest for a moment. Not sleep. Just close your eyes for a moment. Just close… eyes…

“Ahgh!” He started awake, driven from his shallow, tormented sleep by the image of Le Cagot’s helmet light rushing down toward him from the roof of the cave! He sat up, shivering and sweating. The thin sleep had not rested him; fatigue wastes in his body were thickening up; his hands were a pair of stiff paddles; his shoulders were knotted; the nausea of repeated adrenaline shock was clogging his throat.

He sat there, slumped over, not caring if he went on or not. Then, for the first time, the staggering implications of what Diamond had said over the phones burst upon his consciousness. His château no longer existed? What had they done? Had Hana escaped?

Concern for her, and the need to avenge Le Cagot, did for his body what food and rest might have done. He clawed his remaining glucose cubes from the pouch and chewed them, washing them down with the last of his water-wine. It would take the sugar several minutes to work its way into his bloodstream. Meanwhile, he set his jaw and began the task of limbering up his bands, breaking up the fresh scabbing, accepting the gritty sting of movement.

When he could handle it, he slung the air tank on and began the hard climb up the jumble of infall that blocked off the mouth of the Crystal Cave. He recalled Le Cagot telling him to try a bit to the left, because he was sitting in the line of fall and was too comfortable to move.

Twice, he had to struggle out of the tank harness while clinging to scant points of purchase because the crack he had to wriggle through was too tight for a man and tank at once without risking damage to the mask slung from his chest. Each time, he took care to tie the tank securely, because a fall might knock off its fitting, exploding the cylinder and leaving him with no air to make the final cave swim and making all this work and torture futile.

When he achieved the thin ledge directly above the roaring waterfall, he directed his lamp down tire long drop, up which mist rose and billowed in the windless air. He paused only long enough to catch his breath and slow his heartbeat. There could be no long rests from now on, no chances for his body and hands to stiffen up, or for his imagination to cripple his determination.

The deafening roar of the falls and the roiling 40° mist insulated his mind from any thoughts of wider scope than the immediate task. He edged along the slimy, worn ledge that had once been the lip of the waterfall until be found the outcrop of rock from which Le Cagot had belayed him during his first descent along the glistening sheet of falling water. There would be no protecting belay this time. As he inched down, he came upon the first of the pitons he had driven in before, snapped a carabiner into the first and tied off a doubled line, threading and snapping in another at each piton, to shorten his fall, should he come off the face. Again, as before, it was not long before the combined friction of the line passing through these snap links made pulling it through difficult and dangerous, as the effort tended to lift him from the scant boot jams and fingerholds the face provided.

The water and the rope tortured his palms, and he clutched at his holds ever harder and harder, as though to punish the pain with excess. When he reached the point at which he would have to break through the sheet of water and pass behind the falls, he discovered that he could no longer drag down slack. The weight of water on the line, the number of carabiners through which it was strung, and his growing weakness combined to make this impossible. He would have to abandon the rope and climb free from here on. As before, he reached through the silver-and-black surface of the falls, which split in a heavy, throbbing bracelet around his wrist. He felt for and located the sharp little crack, invisible behind the face of the falls, into which he had wedged his fingers before. Ducking through the falls would be harder this time. The tank presented additional surface to the falls; his fingers were raw and numb; and his reserves of strength were gone. One smooth move. Just swing through it. There is a good ledge behind the cascade, and a book corner piled with rubble that made an easy climb down. He took three deep breaths and swung under the face of the falls.

Recent rains had made the falls twice as thick as before and more than twice as heavy. Its weight battered his helmet and shoulders and tried to tear the tank from his back. His numbed fingers were pried from the sharp crack; and he fell.

The first thing he became aware of was the relative quiet. The second thing was the water. He was behind the falls, at the base of the seres pile, sitting hip-deep in water. He may have been unconscious for a time, but he had no sense of it. The events were strung together in his mind: the battering of the water on his back and tank; the pain as his skinless fingers were wrenched from their hold; clatter, noise, pain, shock as he fell to the rubble pile and tumbled down it—then this relative silence, and waist-deep water where, before, there had been wet rock. The silence was no problem; he was not stunned. He had noticed last time how the falls seemed to muffle the roar once he was behind it. But the water? Did that mean recent rains had seeped down, making a lake of the floor of the Crystal Cavern?

Was he injured? He moved his legs; they were all right. So were his arms. His right shoulder was hurt. He could lift it, but there was gritty pain at the top of its arc. A bone bruise, maybe. Painful, but not debilitating. He had decided that he had come through the fall miraculously unhurt, when he became aware of a peculiar sensation. The set of his teeth wasn’t right. They were touching cusp to cusp. The smallest attempt to open his mouth shocked him with such agony that he felt himself slipping toward unconsciousness. His jaw was broken.

The face mask. Had it taken the fall? He tugged it from its pouch and examined it in the light of his lamp, which was yellowing because the batteries were fading. The faceplate was cracked.

It was a hairline crack. It might hold, so long as there was no wrench or torque on the rubber fittings. And what was the chance of that, down in the ripping current at the bottom of the Wine Cellar? Not much.

When he stood, the water came only to midshin. He waded out through the largely dissipated waterfall into the Crystal Cavern, and the water got deeper as the mist of frigid water thinned behind him.

One of the two magnesium flares had broken in his fall; its greasy powder had coated the other flare, which had to be wiped off carefully before it could be lighted, lest the flame rush down the sides, burning his hand. He struck off the flare on its cap; it sputtered and blossomed into brilliant white light, illuminating the distant walls, encrusted with glittering crystals, and picking out the beauty of calcite drapery and slender stalactites. But these last did not point down to stumpy stalagmites, as they had done before. The floor of the cave was a shallow lake that covered the low speleotherns. His first fears were supported: recent rains had filled this nether end of the cave system; the whole long marl chute at the far end of the cave was underwater.

Hel’s impulse was to give in, to wade out to the edge of the cave and find a shelf to sit on where he could rest and lose himself in meditation. It seemed too hard now; the mathematics of probability too steep. At the outset, he had thought that this last, improbable task, the swim through the Wine Cellar toward light and air, would be the easiest from a psychological point of view. Denied alternatives, the weight and expanse of the entire cave system behind him, the final swim would have the strength of desperation. Indeed, he had thought his chances of making it through might be greater than they would have been if he had Le Cagot to belay him, for in that case he would have worked to only half the limit of his endurance, needing the rest to return, should the way be blocked, or too long. As it was, be had hoped his chances would be almost doubled, as there was no coming back through that force of water.

But now… the Crystal Cave had flooded, and his swim was doubled in length. The advantage of despair was gone.

Wouldn’t it be better to sit out death in dignity, rather than struggle against fate like a panicked animal? What chance did he have? The slightest movement of his jaw shocked him with agony; his shoulder was stiff and it ground painfully in its socket; his palms were flayed; even the goddamned faceplate of his mask was unlikely to withstand the currents of that underground pipe. This thing wasn’t even a gamble. It was like flipping coins against Fate, with Fate having both heads and tails. Hel won only if the coin landed on edge.

He waded heavily toward the side wall of the cavern, where flowstone oozed down like frozen taffy. He would sit there and wait it out.

His flare sputtered out, and the eternal spelaean darkness closed in on his mind with a crushing weight. Spots of light like minute crystal organisms under a microscope sketched across the darkness with each movement of his eyes. They faded, and the dark was total.

Nothing in the world would be easier than, to accept death with dignity, with
shibumi.

And Hana? And that insane Third World priest who had contributed to the death of Le Cagot and Hannah Stern? And Diamond?

All right. All right, damn it! He wedged the rubberized flashlight between two outcroppings of aragonite, and in its beam attached the mask to the air tank, grunting with pain as he tightened the connections with his flayed fingers. After carefully threading the straps over his bruised shoulder, he opened the inflow valve, then dipped up a little spit water to clear the faceplate of breath mist. The pressure of the mask against his broken jaw was painful, but he could manage it.

His legs were still unhurt; he would swim with legs only, holding the flashlight in his good hand. As soon as it was deep enough, he laid out on the water and swam—swimming was easier than wading.

In the pellucid water of the cave, unclouded by organisms, the flashlight picked up underwater features as though through air. It was not until he had entered the marl chute that he felt the influence of the current—more a suction downward than a push from behind.

The pressure of the water plugged his ears, making his breathing loud in the cavities of his head.

The suction increased as he neared the bottom of the marl chute, and the force of the water torqued his body toward the sunken sump of the Wine Cellar. From here on, he would not swim; the current would carry him, would drag him through; all his effort must be bent to slowing his speed and to controlling his direction. The pull of the current was an invisible force; there was no air in the water, no particles, no evidence of the tons of force that gripped him.