I spent the winter with Three Moons, crushing herbs, sorting plants and roots, and gathering firewood under the weak winter sun, far away and dreaming. She taught me the names of plants and herbs, and some of the properties woven into them. Many days I could only huddle by the cooking fire and listening, bleary-eyed, to her tales, or to the whisper of rain on the bark roof, endless streams of words that almost made sense, a constant burbling of voices between this world and the next. It made me think of Ash, and his trick with the bamboo pipe, and even underneath all this winter, I could see his face.
A dozen or so People of the Flint were camped with Three Moons, in four wigwams placed to allow entrance from the four cardinal points of the compass. They had come to teach the local peoples the Great Law, share the songs and chants to keep the ancient pacts and practices, and to mark and to watch over lost places, like the one that had nearly taken my life. Although my body was weak, I spent most of my days learning the songs and chants, lists of names, cures, signs, memorizing maps until I could draw them in the dirt from memory, could carry them for years unseen to pass on to new generations of The People. It was hard, but the effort helped focus my thoughts, and my will. At night I dreamed I floated across the world, and I saw below me the Earth, trees and rivers, and they formed shapes, emergent forms, the Horned Rose, the Triple Spore, the Dead Man on His Bones, the Burning Eye, the Black Rays of the Black Sun, some smaller than others. Even in the sea, the Dead Lotus floated just off the coast, where so many dreams had drowned.
Each year Three Moons came from the Land of the Flint to the Hoosac, The Place of Stones. It is the great wall between the East and the West, with only one doorway, yawning open less than an hour's walk from our camp. Where the doorway came from, how it was to be used, and by whom, was not something that was ever mentioned. Some of the men traveled that way, but only after making special preparations for the journey.
Willow came with the spring. There was an upwelling of movement and voices at the far end of the encampment, and she was there, my sister, walking in the new sunlight, too bright to be my imagination, smiling right into the heart of me, and running her hands over the stubble of my new hair. I hugged her and hugged her because she was my sister, and smelled of home, and we laughed until our eyes could hold our tears no longer.
The rest of the spring Willow and I helped Three Moons in her garden, walking in the forest collecting mushrooms, and watching to world pull itself up again from the rust-colored humps of winter bracken onto the green, furry, vibrant wave of springtime. I kept my hair, white and stiff, clipped short, so I would not have to look at it and wonder whose hair this was, and from whose head it was sprouting.
My strength grew with the spring as well, and Willow and I made plans to return home, to be back in time for the Summer Thanksgiving, the longest day of the year, when fire ringed the world around with the promise of life and warmth as far as the eye could see. It was clear, from the maps in my head that the first part of our journey would take us through the Hoosac, and darkness. We knew the doorway, because we had helped clear the brambles that grew on the way to the tunnel - the winter camp was small, and there was always work to do. The tunnel entrance was reached by walking down a lumpy, graveled way cut through the deep forest, with mossy walls on both sides. Rusted iron rails from the great wagons that had roared along it were still visible in places. Hardy, thorny brush grew there, so the clearing was work, and we all returned home with deep scratches, grimed with sweat from working under the sun.
The doorway itself was a square arch of black stone over a rounded tunnel, the area immediately in front blackened by old campfires and strewn with bits of broken bone and piles of garbage. The old way was dotted with piles of prayer rocks - stones piled as a simple act of faith, either to exhort the powers of the earth toward some personal intervention, or merely as a show of recognition and respect. These towers were normal rocks, chosen and balanced carefully in stacks while holding the mind in a state, perhaps, of grace. Or simply supplication. They eventually fell, releasing the prayers. Reassembling fallen towers was an oddly satisfying task that easily filled hours if one developed the proper concentration. The small piles were thickest around the mouth of the tunnel, where the old way entered the Earth.
Sun shone in through the opening, as tall as three people in a human tower, falling dully on more garbage (swept aside to form a pathway), many fallen bricks and thick muddy rivulets of water oozing out into the sunlight, feeding the growth of brambles, honeysuckle, blackberries, and the tireless sumac. Over the tunnel, in raised stone letters fuzzed with lichen and ringed with honeysuckle blossoms and flowering vines, read:
HOOSAC
1874
We had to go into the entrance a short ways to clear plants growing there, and the cool dampness was a relief from the burning sun. The walls of the tunnel were rough, and the floor was clogged with fallen bricks, mud, dust and broken rock. As a doorway, it was more than just an opening, but a portal to a clammy stillness completely unlike the restless forest around us.
The evening before we were to set off, Three Moons sat with Willow and I under a great white pine, the inflowing night air suffused with the rich moist breezes of spring, the earth slowly cooling around us. Tacky pine sap was rising, making little rivulets along the bark of the tree, clinging to everything it touched, and leaving sticky black marks on our hands wherever it had touched. Three Moons began by speaking to me, as if Willow understood things much better, which perhaps she did.
"The Hoosac is not like Ro, Alderana. You need not fear it in the same way - you may pass safely. The doorway was built in the Time of Dreams, and thoughtlessly, as too many things were. Many, many men died in the making, and that can not be ignored, but the stories you have heard of ghosts and the hunger of the dead are not useful and contain little wisdom." She paused for a second, and I snuck a glance at Willow. I had never heard anything about the Hoosac. Had she? What were these stories? I imagined the legion dead waiting silently with their pale eyes in the darkness. After a time, Three Moons continued.
"The path leads deep into the Hoosac, deeper into the earth than you have ever been, either of you. The Hoosac is not a dead thing. It lives, like all of the Earth. The doorway is an open wound, black and dead and rotting for many years, which now has begun to heal. That means it must be traversed with care."
In the end, we would walk alone beneath the mountain in darkness, from West portal to East portal, for light could not be brought into the roots of the earth. The belly of a mountain is a world without light, and must remain so. That is its nature.
We started our journey early, because five miles in darkness over rough terrain meant a long day. The left our offerings, smooth river rocks Willow and I had dived deep to find, the careful piling of which occupied a good part of the morning, and we started our journey. There was plenty of light at first, and it was an easy walk. Sunlight from the tunnel entrance carried farther than I thought, and our eyes adjusted rapidly. The floor was slightly raised in the middle, the iron rails caked in rust but running visibly into the darkness. The center was also slightly elevated - the left hand side was filled with loose, shifting rocks, and the right side with sticky mud, so deep it sometimes lay over the tracks, forcing us to walk through it, and leaving our leggings and moccasins filthy with grime.
The walls of the tunnel were rough and scabbed, as if some monstrous rodent had chewed its way into the mountain, like a worm into an apple. We moved farther from the entrance and the going became more difficult. Fallen bricks and debris were everywhere, sometimes piled so high that we had to scramble up over the heaped bits of broken rock, shattered bricks, broken bones, and rotting and burned branches - another sign of that people had lived here, inside the mountain. After maneuvering past a few piles, I could no longer see the tunnel entrance when I looked back.
Between the piles of rubble were many smaller obstacles. Pools of sucking mud shifted under our feet or jerked us suddenly backward as we tried to walk through, one leg sunk deep and immobile. Bricks rolled under our feet. Even holding hands tightly we stumbled and staggered, and soon were painted with bruises and scrapes. Gradually, we learned to grope blindly with the hazel branches we had brought to help us find our way, but not before banging our knees and elbows and shins painfully several times.
My mind wandered. I couldn't help it, staring into nothing, my thoughts curled outward, finding their own paths. In addition to the dull rattle of the tumbled bricks underfoot and the slurping of the mud, there were other sounds. The heavy plop of parts of the ceiling falling to the mud, or a dull clang of something hitting an exposed rail. I wondered about all the things abandoned here, laying in the darkness for so many years. I also thought of some of the things that Three Moons had told me in the heart of the winter, how the Earth holds its past inside, new life piling upon the old, burying memory deep. Human memory is passed along intricate chains of the living, racing along like the summer water-striders skimming the surface of a lake, but in the earth memory is buried deep, layer upon layer, and only bits rise to the surface, already ancient and bent into clumps of stone, the rest immersed and unseen.
After what must have been several hours, we perched on a rocky pile, out of the mud, to rest. Carefully, we unwrapped the dried meat and fruit we had packed for the journey, and passed it back and forth in silence. Looking back from where we sat, the West portal was visible as a tiny point of light in the distance. The tunnel was as straight as a fallen pine.
In the stillness of our rest, a thousand small noises bloomed, the tin drip of water, the flutter of tiny papery wings, a distant moaning of shifting air. The atmosphere itself was heavy and dank, thick and stale, impregnated with the reek of mold and bat guano, as if air was out of place here, and slowly becoming more like the soil it was buried under, heavy and slow, turning to stone, and us along with it, if we stayed here too long.
There was something else, too. A slow, crushing presence, like a huge jungle snake coiling and uncoiling slowly slowly, sleek and torpid. We were deep within the Hoosac, wrapped in millions of tons of living stone, moving so slowly as to seem still, a mountain riddled with secret veins and black pools of water, tiny troglobytes moving through the fissures and sheared stone, filtering down past the roots of the forest, impossibly far above. I could almost hear the grumbling of the Hoosac, the tiny shifts of its mighty coils, too deep and slow for any ear to register, the inner workings of a great beast, greater than any I had seen or heard of, but somehow less frightening. We were too tiny to be noticed here, like the beetles, worms and centipedes that crawled with us here underground,unremarkably underfoot.
While we sat chewing with our eyes wide, aimed at nothing in particular, I started to hear some of Pop's stories, his voice spiraling slowly through my head. Pop had told me many times about a race of reptiles that had roamed the earth long ago, countless eons before the birth of god, as mighty as mountains, with teeth like falling stars and claws as heavy as thunder. Just their bones, bones turned to stone in the earth and shrugged to the surface in far deserts, are terrifying, even long dead and faded to gray. Like the cast-off shoes of a giant, they reminded us that we were not the first, certainly not the greatest, and probably not the last, playing at kings in the footprints of titans. Maybe we would be found, Willow and I, ages hence, frozen forever in the far corner of a dry steppe. Perhaps the process had already begun, the essence of theHoosac seeping into our own gray bones, half-stone already. I wondered if we might find those dragons too, lost here, Earth dragons petrifying with us in the long dead archives of the Earth, none of us aware that we no longer belonged to the world of light left behind.
My anxious ears sought out any sounds that might indicate something else in this endless night, the scrape of claws, the hiss of heavy breath through razor teeth, the slow thump of titanic limbs. There was nothing, but that was no comfort. Willow rose and I pulled her back down, saying "No. Wait." The blackness gaped in front of me, like a great toothless maw,sideless and edgeless. I chided myself "What's wrong? Afraid of the dark?", and I had to admit that, yes, yes I was. Terrified. My heart was racing and I began to pant like a cornered cat. I think I would have run blindly back the way we had come if I had not remembered, somewhere, that the light and the sky were hours away. My mind was suddenly raging with terror. And it didn't stop. I clutched at the rocks underneath me, dizzy and sick. Willow did not try to touch me, she began to sing, so faintly it barely registered over the sluicing of blood through my ears, some toneless, quiet song, without any words I could understand. I gritted my teeth, and strained to hear, I am not sure why, but it helped focus my mind there underground, with a whole mountain sitting on our heads.
The fear didn't subside. It was all I could do to sit and breathe and listen to the trickle of notes from Willow, as tenuous as a thread of smoke. I don't know how long we sat there, but I finally became angry. I had spent the winter waiting to die, and I would not sit here now like a rabbit in a wolf's jaws and wait for the end. It could kill me, whatever was out there, it could wipe my soul from the earth, but not like this. I would hold my straining heart between my teeth, and walk forward. I would finish this journey. I stood up, limbs trembling, breath hissing through my teeth, and stumbled down the pile of rubble into the muck, expecting at any second to be smashed into the ground by some shapeless titan in the dark. But I was going. Willow rose and joined me, still crooning to herself. And we continued our journey, one step at a time.
I was so rigid I could barely move, but I forced myself to follow Willow, stumbling and prodding awkwardly with my walking stick. It became easier after a few minutes. We settled into an uneven rhythm of shuffling and testing, climbing the detritus slowly clotting the tunnel. It still seemed certain that we would both die at any moment, but I was determined to move forward until the then, even if every step was bringing me closer to inescapable death. Slowly, over the next hour, my panic sank sullenly into a slow throb of dread, like a toothache. The truth is, my teeth did ache, I was gritting them so hard, and I rubbed my jaw with my free hand to try to relax it. "Leave a pretty corpse." It was part of some joke Pop made sometimes, and I snorted. A pretty corpse with pretty teeth.
The feel of the air changed, more damp, but less stale. The sound of dripping water grew louder. Soon we came to a pile of rocks that rose up over our heads toward the ceiling, wet to the touch. Tiny puffs of air passed us. After prodding and searching, we were able to circle the huge pile of debris in the center of the tunnel, with rivulets of water running down its sides. There must have been an air shaft here, long since clogged with fallen stones, and periodically washed free by falling groundwater. We searched for any sign of light from above, but there was nothing. The way up was long ago filled with roots and soil, although it did let some air through.
As we moved on, there were times when I felt that there must be galleries to one or the other side of us, but there was no way of knowing. I was increasingly sure we were near the middle of our journey. I was tired, but unwilling to stop, mechanically pushing onward. I started to hum along with Willow.
The pale figure sitting off to one side didn't surprise me so much as produce a dull shock of recognition, stirring the thick muck of fear in my belly, but nothing more. He was mending some sort of net, intent on his work. As we passed, he looked around languidly, but did not seem to see us. Our eyes never met - would never meet. I recognized every detail of his face, the stubble, the tattoo of horns on his temple, the crooked teeth peeking out from his heavy lips. I looked back after we passed, but he made no move to follow. It seemed as if he had settled here forever. I had only seen his face for a moment while alive, but it was as familiar as Willow's now. I knew I would see him again, he was a part of me now, a deep spine driven through my heart.
When I turned back to look ahead, the way was blocked by rows of tired, dirty men, their faces smeared with sweat and dust, illuminated by a tenuous light that touched nothing else. The grim resignation on their faces struck me like a blow, and I stopped dead. Willow continued on, and I hurried to grab her hand, not to be left alone here. This was not something I was prepared to face. There were hundreds of them, men in strange clothes, some holding picks or long, heavy hammers, a lantern here or there. The ranks were wider than the tunnel should be, as if they were part of the mountain, just blocking our path by chance. Their dull eyes were fixed on us, though, tracking us as we approached. Willow walked sedately ahead, pulling me behind like a recalcitrant child. I braced myself for... something, some sort ofectoplasmic shock, clammy hands from the grave.
But they drew aside as Wllow approached, bowing their heads slightly, leaving a path ahead. I didn't understand what happened, but I decided to just be glad that I didn't have to touch them, or pass through them, or whatever would have happened, because I was more determined than ever to walk out of the Eastern Doorway, no matter what I had to do to get there. So now, in addition to the dark and the wet and the bricks we now were making our slow way under the flat eyes of the silent watchers, ranks of them stretching forward. After a few yards they became indistinct, it was hard to see how many were there, lining our path. They never moved, only swivelling their heads and following us with their eyes, their calm, unflinching faces. We passed close enough to see every detail, a white scar under the left eye, ears that stuck out wide in thetomblike air, thick pores shiny with ancient sweat. I wondered how long ago they had disappeared, and whether what I saw was they way they were at the end, or the way they remembered themselves to be.
The deeper ranks had different people, tall teenagers, wizened couples, women holding babies. After a few minutes I saw something move behind them, a boy, weaving swiftly between their legs. "Apple?", I whispered, but Willow continued onward, and pulled me with her. After that I looked more closely, and I thought I saw familiar faces back in the deeper rows, just at the edge of the darkness, but none that I could see clearly, always slipping away at the edge of vision.
And then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone. We passed the last few standing figures, and walked alone again under theHoosac . I looked back to see them all, waiting, following us with their shining eyes, as still as the breathless summer air in the deep forest, and I knew that, in their need to be remembered, they had become creatures of memory, ultimately bent to the will of therememberer , and nothing more. I waved, then, a sudden, awkward gesture, seeing them not as terrible creatures, but as children, lost in a game of their own making. They didn't wave back, but I didn't expect them to.
We were close enough then to see the Eastern Portal each time we climbed above the floor now, and soon we could smell the fresh air of the outside world, thick with the scent of summer flowers. The sound of a steady rain carried down the tunnel with a light that must have been gray, but nearly blinded us as we made our slow approach, watching ghostly shadows flicker across the entry. The weight of theHoosac pressed against our backs, solid as the trunk of an old grandfather tree. We finally stopped several paces from the outside world, watching hummingbirds flit among overhanging honeysuckle and the thick, sweet orchids clustered around the portal, crystal drops of fresh rain glowing andquicksilvering back and forth along their tail feathers until they let go and fell - perfect, shining - and disappeared into the ground, immediately replaced by another, just as perfect. As perfect as the million million other raindrops falling all around them.
Willow and I were both grinning like fools, watching this brilliant, intricate little world go about its business. I suddenly remembered what else Pop had told us once about the terrible lizards, that some had not died like the rest, but had grown feathers and taken to the air, as light and free as their ancestors were heavy and slow. I looked again at the birds, busy in the glittering rain, and thought to myself, "The dragons are here, drinking from the flowers.
And they are beautiful."
And do. And they are.