With difficulty, she found the notch again. Fortunately, the soles of her leather shoes were mostly intact, so Maia only winced, hissing with discomfort as she set one foot in the crevice and reached high above, tightly grasping two clusters of shells. Even through canvas, the things jabbed painfully. Tightening her lips together, she pushed off, using muscles in first one leg and then the other, drawing herself upward with both arms till she stood perched on one foot, pressed against the wall. Now sharp stabs assaulted the entire length of her body, not just the extremities.
Okay, what next?
With her free foot, she began casting for another step. It seemed chancy to ask a cluster of shells to bear her entire weight. Yet it must be tried.
To her astonishment, Maia encountered a better alternative. Another slim, encrusted notch in the wall—and at just the right height!
I don’t believe it, she thought, pushing her left foot inside and gingerly shifting her weight. It can’t be a coincidence. This must mean …
Checking her conclusion, she freed one hand and felt about until, sure enough, it met another notch. One that had to be exactly where it was. The notches are woman-made … or man-made, since this place used to be a sanctuary. I wonder how old this “ladder” is.
No, I don’t. Shut up, Maia. Just concentrate and get on with it!
The notches made climbing easier. Still it was an agonizing ascent, even when her face lifted above the scouring layer of plankton-feeders and she had only to contend with smooth, rectangular cuts in the side of an almost-sheer wall. Maia’s muscles were throbbing by the time her groping hand encountered a ring of metal, bolted to the rock. The rusty tethering collar proved useful as her final handhold before Maia was able at last to flounder one leg, then another, over a rounded lip and onto a stony shelf.
Maia lay on her back, panting, listening to a roar of her own heavy breathing. It took some moments to appreciate that all of the sound wasn’t internal. I can hear. My ears are recovering, she realized, too tired to feel jubilant. She rested motionless, as echoes of each ragged inhalation resonated off the walls, along with a watery susurration of incoming swells.
Her pulse hadn’t yet settled from a heavy pounding when she forced herself up, onto one elbow. Got to get back to Brod, Maia thought, wearily. The re-descent would be hard, and she had not figured out how to drag her friend up here, if it proved impossible to rouse him. As always, the future seemed daunting, yet Maia felt cheered that she had found a refuge. It drove off the sense of hopelessness that had been sapping her strength.
She sat up, letting out a groan.
More than her own echo came back to her, muffled by reverberations.
“M-Maia-aia-aia?”
It was followed by a fit of coughing. “M-my god-od-od … what’s happened? Where is she? Maia-aia-aia!”
Resounding repetitions caused her to wince. “Brod!” she cried. “It’s all right! I’m just above—” Her calls and his overlapped, drowning all sense in a flood of echoes. Brod’s overjoyed response would have been more gratifying if he didn’t stammer on so, offering thankful benedictions to both Stratos Mother and his patriarchal thunder deity.
“I’m above you,” she repeated, once the rumbling resonances died down. “Can you tell how high the water is?”
There were splashing sounds. “It’s already got me cornered on a spit of sand, Maia. I’ll try backing up … Ouch!” Brod’s exclamation announced his discovery of the wall of shells.
“Can you stand?” she asked. If so, it might save her having to climb down after him.
“I’m … a bit woozy. Can’t hear so good, either. Lemme try.” There were sounds of grunting effort. “Yeah, I’m up. Sort of. Can I assume … everything’s black ’cause we’re underground? Or am I blind?”
“If you’re blind, so’m I. Now if you can walk, please face the wall and try working your way to the right. Watch your step and follow my voice till you’re right below me. I’ll try to rig something to help you up here. First priority is to get above the high-water line.”
Maia kept talking to offer Brod a bearing, and meanwhile leaned over to tie one end of her rope around the metal grommet. It must have been put there long ago to moor boats in this tiny cave, though why, Maia could not imagine. It seemed a horrid place to use as an anchorage. Far worse than Inanna’s tunnel hideaway on Grimké Island.
“Here I am,” Brod announced just below her. “Frost! These bitchie barckles are sharp. I can’t find your rope, Maia.”
“I’ll swing it back and forth. Feel it now?”
“Nope.”
“It must be too short. Wait a minute.” With a sigh, she pulled in the cord. Judging from Brod’s ragged-sounding voice, he wouldn’t be a good bet to make the same climb she had, unassisted. There was no choice, then. Fumbling at the catches with her bruised fingers, she unbuttoned her trousers and slid them off, over her deck shoes. Tying one leg to the rope with two half-hitches, she also knotted a loop at the far end of the other leg, then dropped everything over the side again. There was a gratifying muffled sound of fabric striking someone’s head.
“Ow. Thanks,” Brod responded.
“You’re welcome. Can you slip one arm through the loop, up to your shoulder?”
He grunted. “Barely. Now what?”
“Make sure it’s snug. Here goes.” Carefully, step by step, Maia instructed Brod where to find the first foothold. She heard him hiss in pain, and recalled that his cord sandals had been in worse shape than her shoes, unfit for tackling knife-edge barnacles. He didn’t complain, though. Maia braced herself and hauled on the rope—not so much to lift the youth as steady him. To lend stability and confidence as he moved shakily from foothold to handhold, one at a time.
It seemed to last far longer than her own laborious ascent. Maia’s abused muscles quivered worse than ever by the time his huffing gasps came near. Somehow, drawing on reserves, she kept tension in the rope until Brod finally surged over the ledge in one gasping heave, landing halfway on top of her. In exhaustion they lay that way for some time, heartbeats pounding chest to chest, each breathing the other’s ragged exhalations, each tasting a salty patch of the other’s skin.
We must stop meeting like this, thought a distant, wry part of her. Still, it’s more than most women get out of a man, this time of year. To Maia’s surprise, his weight felt pleasant, in a strange, unanticipated way.
“Uh … sorry,” Brod said as he rolled off. “And thanks for saving my life.”
“It’s no more’n you did for us on the ketch, this morning,” she replied, covering embarrassment. “Though I guess by now that was yesterday.”
“Yesterday.” He paused to ponder, then abruptly shouted. “Hey, look at that!”
Maia sat up, puzzled. Since she couldn’t see Brod well enough to make out where he pointed, she began scanning on her own, and eventually found something amid the awful gloom. Opposite their ledge, about forty degrees higher toward the zenith, she made out a delicate glitter of—she counted—five beautiful stars.
I believe it’s part of the Hearth.…
Abruptly reminded, Maia grasped along her left arm and sighed in relief when she found her forgotten sextant, still encased within the scratched but intact leather cover. It’s probably ruined. But it’s mine. The only thing that’s mine.
“So, Madam Navigator,” Brod asked. “Can you tell from those stars just where we are?”
Maia shook her head seriously. “Too little data. Besides, we know where we are. If there were more to see, I might be able to tell the time—”
She cut short, tensing as Brod laughed aloud. Then, noting only affection in his gentle teasing, Maia relaxed. She laughed, too, letting go as the fact sank in that they would live awhile longer, to struggle on. The reavers hadn’t won, not yet. And Renna was nearby.
Brod lay back alongside her, sharing warmth as they watched their sole, tiny window on the universe. Stratos turned slowly beneath them, and there passed a parade of bri
ef, stellar performances. Together, they feasted on a show neither had expected ever to see again.
By day, the cave seemed less mysterious … and far more so.
Less, because dawn’s filtered light revealed outlines that had seemed at once both limitless and stifling in pitch darkness. A mountain of rubble blocked what had been a generous cave entrance. Sunlight and ocean tides streamed through narrow, jagged gaps in the avalanche, beyond which the two escapees made out a new, foamy reef, created by the recent barrage.
There would be no escape the way they’d arrived; that much was clear.
Increased mystery came associated with both hope and frustration. Soon after awakening to the new day, Maia got up and followed the ledge to its far end, where it joined a set of stairs chiseled deep into the cave wall. At the top there was another landing, cut even deeper, which terminated in a massive door, over three meters wide.
At least she thought it was a door. It seemed the place for one. A door was desperately called for at this point.
Only it looked more like a piece of sculpture. Several score hexagonal plates lay upon a broad, smooth, vertical surface made of some obdurate, blood-colored, impervious alloy.
Impervious because others had apparently tried to break through, in the past. Wherever a crack or chink hinted at separable parts, Maia noticed burnished edges where someone must have tried prying away, probably with wedges or crowbars, and succeeded only in rubbing off a layer of tarnish. Soot-stained areas told where fire had been used, presumably in efforts to weaken the metal, and striated patches showed signs of acid-etching—all to no avail.
“Here are your pants,” Brod said, coming up from behind, startling Maia from her intense inspection. “I thought you might want them,” he added nonchalantly.
“Oh, thanks,” she replied, taking the trousers and moving aside to slip them on. They were ripped in too many places to count, and hardly seemed worth the effort. Still, she felt abashed without them, last night’s fatigued intimacy notwithstanding.
While struggling into the pants, gingerly avoiding her worst cuts and contusions, Maia noticed that her arms were pale once more, as well as what hair she could pull into view. Without a mirror, she couldn’t be sure, but recent multiple dunkings appeared to have washed out the effects of Leie’s makeshift dye job.
Meanwhile Brod perused the array of six-sided plates, some clustered and touching, some standing apart, many of them embellished with symbols of animals, objects, or geometric forms. The youth seemed oblivious to his physical condition, though under his torn shirt Maia saw too many scratches and abrasions to count. He moved with a limp, favoring the heels. Looking back the way he had come, she saw specks of blood on the floor, left by wounds on his feet. Maia deliberately avoided cataloging her own injuries, though no doubt she looked much the same.
It had been quite a night, spent listening to tides surge ever closer, wondering if the assumed “high-water mark” meant anything when three moons lay in the same part of the sky. Surges of air pressure had made them yawn repeatedly to relieve their abused ears. The shelf grew slippery from spray. For what felt like hours, the two summerlings held onto each other as waves had lapped near, hunting them with fingers of spume.…
“I can’t even figure what the thing’s made of,” Brod said, peering closely at the mysterious barrier. “You have any idea what it’s for?”
“Yeah, I think. I’m afraid so.”
He looked at her as she returned. Maia spread her arms before the metal wall. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before,” she told her companion. “It’s a puzzle.”
“A puzzle?”
“Mm. One apparently so hard that lots of folks tried cheating, and failed.”
“A puzzle,” he repeated, mulling the concept.
“One with a big prize for solving it, I imagine.”
“Oh yeah?” Brod’s eyes lit. “What prize do you think?”
Maia stepped back a couple of paces, tilting her head to look at the elaborate portal from another angle. “I couldn’t say what the others were after,” she said in a low voice. “But our goal’s simple. We must solve this … or die.”
There had been another riddle wall once, a long time ago. That one hadn’t been made of strange metal, but ordinary stone and wood and iron, yet it had been hard enough to stymie a pair of bright four-year-olds filled with curiosity and determination. What were the Lamai mothers hiding behind the carven cellar wall, inset with chiseled stars and twining snakes? Unlike the puzzle now before her, that one had been no massive work of unparalleled craftsmanship, but the principle was dearly the same. A combination lock. One in which the number of possible arrangements of objects far exceeded any chance of random guessing. One whose correct answer must remain unforgettable, intuitively obvious to the initiated, and forever obscure to outsiders.
Shared context. That was the key. Simple memory proved unreliable over generations. But one thing you could count on. If you established a clan—your distant great-great-granddaughters would think a lot like you, with similar upbringing and near-identical brains. What had been forgotten, they would recover by re-creating your thought processes.
That insight had opened the way, after Maia failed in her first attempts in the Lamatia Hold wine cellar, and Leie’s efforts with a small hydraulic jack threatened to break the mechanism, rather than persuade it. Even Leie had agreed that curiosity wasn’t worth the kind of punishment that would bring on. So Maia had reconsidered the problem, this time trying to think like a Lamai. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
She had grown up surrounded by Lamai mothers, aunts, half sisters, knowing the patterns they exhibited at each phase of life. The cautious enthusiasm of late three-year-olds, for instance, which quickly took cover behind a cynical mask by the time each towheaded girl turned four. A romantic outburst in adolescence, followed by withdrawal and withering contempt for anything or anyone non-Lamai—a disdain that intensified, the more worthy any outsider seemed. And finally, in late middle-age, a mellowing, a relaxation of the armor, just enough for the ruling age-group to make alliances and deal successfully with the outer world. The first young Lamai var, the founder, must have been lucky, or very clever, to reach that age of tact all by herself. From then on, matters grew easier as each generation fine-tuned the art of being that continuous single entity, Lamatia.
Pondering the problem, Maia had realized she knew nothing of how individual Lamais felt, deep within. Mentally squinting, she pictured a Lamai sister looking in the mirror and using words like integrity … honor … dignity. They did not see themselves as mean, capricious, or spiteful. Rather, they viewed others as inherently unreliable, dangerous.
Fear. That was the key! Maia had not been able to speak after that flash of intuition, on realizing what drove her mother clan.
It was more than fear. A type of dread that no amount of wealth or security could wipe out, because it was so woven into the personality matrix of the type. The genetic luck of the draw, reinforced by an upbringing in which self perpetually reinforced self, compounding and augmenting over and over again.
It was no crippling terror, or else the offshoots of that one var could never have turned themselves into a nation. Rather, Lamatia rationalized it, used it as a motivator, as a driving force. Lamais weren’t happy people. But they were successful. They even raised more than their share of successful summer progeny.
There are worse, Maia recalled thinking on the day she had had that insight, while turning a crank to lower the dumbwaiter into that crypt below the kitchens. Who am I to judge what works?
Her mind afroth with possibilities, Maia had approached the wall with new concepts in mind. Lamais aren’t logical, though they pretend to be. I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle rationally, as a series of orderly symbols, but I’ll bet it’s a sequence based on emotion!
That day (it felt like ages ago), she had lifted her lantern to scan familiar patterns of stone figures. Stars and snakes, dragons and upturned bowls
. The symbol for Man. The symbol for Woman. The emblem of Death.
Picture yourself standing here with an errand to perform, Maia thought. You’re a confident, busy, older Lamai. High-class daughter of a noble clan. Proud, dignified, impatient.
Now add one more ingredient, underneath it all. A hidden layer of jibbering terror.…
One long year later, and a quarter of the way around the globe, Maia tried the same exercise, attempting to put herself in the shoes of another type of person. The kind who might have left a complex jigsaw of hexagonal plates upon a metal wall. An enigma standing between two desperate survivors and their only hope of escaping a death trap.
“This place is old,” she told Brod in a soft voice.
“Old?” He laughed. “It was a different world! You’ve seen the ruins. This whole archipelago was filled with sanctuaries, bigger than any known today. It must’ve been the focus, the very center of the Great Defense. It might even have been the one place in all of Stratos history where men had any real say in goings on … till those King fanatics got big heads and ruined it all.”
Maia nodded. “A whole region, run by men.”
“Partly. Until the banishment. I know, it’s hard to imagine. I guess that’s how the Church and Council were able to suppress even the memory.”
Brod was making sense. Even with the evidence all around her, Maia had trouble with the concept. Oh, there was no denying that males could be quite intelligent, but planning further than a single human lifespan was supposedly beyond even their brightest leaders. Yet, here in front of her lay a counterexample.
“In that case, this puzzle was designed to be solved by men, perhaps with the specific purpose of keeping women out.”
Brod rubbed his jaw. “Maybe so. Anyway, standing around staring won’t get us much. Let’s see what happens if I push one of these hexagon slabs.”