We clattered up a stairway and past open doors on the first balcony. A spicy smell of cooking came from one of them, and another must have been a toilet, and smelled terrible. There were holes in the floor, here and there, though not big enough to fall through.
A woman’s voice called softly from a lighted window, “A rescue, Steven?”
Our older man called back, “A rescue!” in a kind of loud whisper, and the woman clapped her hands.
Then we went through a door and a stuffy carpeted entryway, and into a room filled with light and people, all sitting round a table, and at the head of the table was Annie, smiling like sunup, with the girl Gwen sitting beside her.
They gave us such a welcome, it was as if we’d come back from the dead. They’d been eating, and they gave us bread and cheese and fruit—apples and cherries, things that don’t grow on Lucaya—and a sort of spicy chocolatey drink. Gwen made room for me next to her, with Lou on my other side next to Annie. He seemed to be getting movement back in his arms and legs now, gradually. The man who’d been carrying him propped him in his chair, and Lou leaned his head against Annie trustingly. She put her arm round him. It was almost as if he’d come home.
There were seven or eight men and women round the table, a mixture of ages, all of them sort of scruffy-looking, with shaggy hair and clothes that looked homemade and didn’t quite fit. They were all important people in the Underground, we found out, and the only reason they were here above ground, in hiding, was because they’d been looking for Lou and me.
“When the worlds touch,” Annie said, “we know if you are here, but not where we shall find you. Gwen is our seer, she tells us where you are. And if the authorities have you, someone from the Underground will always be able to reach you, to carry you away. We are everywhere in their spoiled world, everywhere in their government, but they can’t tell who we are, even with their wonderful technologies.”
I glanced at Gwen, and she gave me her quick squinty-eyed grin. She didn’t look like a seer, more like Marty Black, who sat behind me at school and was always in trouble for giggling.
Annie had me tell them everything that had happened to us since we arrived, and they listened very intently. They exchanged looks once in a while, specially at the bit where Sir told me the Underground wanted Lou’s talent and might kill for it. I paused, then.
“Is that true?” I said.
“Yes,” Annie said. “We would kill, or we would die. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
I suppose I did, after seeing what happened to the Wilderness.
When I’d finished, Annie said, “We have very little time left now. They will be looking for you everywhere.” She took a deep breath, and turned her head to me. “Trey—I told you your brother was prophesied, in Pangaia. That we were waiting for him. Now we should tell you why. This is the prophecy all of us in the Underground learned when we were children, from our parents and our parents’ parents and who knows how many generations before that.”
She looked round the room, and she said in a loud, firm voice, “For love of life, Gaia sends Lou.”
“Silent as stone,” said the old man on her left.
A redheaded young woman beside him said, “The tree speaks to him. He walks through stars.”
“Out of the labyrinth. The weaver spins him,” said a dark, narrow-faced man next to her, and I saw that it was Math.
“Into rebirth,” said his neighbor, a heavyset, grey-haired woman.
“Towering green,” said the next man, younger and fair-haired, with pockmarked skin. “At Loonassa.”
The man beside him had a hesitation in his speech. He said, “T-to save P-Pangaia.”
“For love of life,” said Gwen quietly, beside me. She saw the baffled look on my face, and reached to the center of the table for a thin, leather-covered book. She opened it. “Look, then, Trey,” she said.
I looked at the neat handwriting on the page.
“For love of life
Gaia sends Lugh
Silent as stone.
The tree speaks to him
He walks through stars.
Out of the labyrinth
The weaver spins him
Into rebirth
Towering green
At Lughnasa
To save Pangaia
For love of life.”
I looked up from the page and found myself facing Lou. He sat there unconcerned, smiling a little, and I suddenly felt he had known these peculiar words all his short life.
I looked back at the page. I said stupidly, “The spellings are different.”
“The sound of the words is the same,” Gwen said. “Lou is Lugh.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Lou knows,” Annie said. “Don’t you, Lou?” Her white hair was in a rough knot at the back of her head, her elegant chin held high; she looked like a raggle-taggle queen.
Still smiling his half-smile, Lou reached to the plate of fruit on the table and held up half an apple to me.
Annie laughed. “All right. Lou knows half of it.”
I was getting cross. “But I have to know too!”
“Of course you do,” she said at once, and reached over to pat my arm. “Trey—those words are very old. They are carved into a wall deep down at the start of the labyrinth, the maze of old tunnels under the deepest part of the city, which has been there for centuries. Deeper even than we live. Underneath the Underground. Gaia, the central force of our world, she put those words there.” Her dark eyes were looking straight into mine, and I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck.
She said, “We who are the children of Gaia know that those words are there for a crisis, and that the crisis is now. They tell Lou to go into the labyrinth, to accomplish there whatever the tree has told him to do, and thus to achieve the rebirth of Pangaia. He must do this, and he knows it. It is why he chose to come here.”
It was true that Lou was the one who’d brought us here this time, by urging me to go to Long Pond Cay at the moment the worlds touched, between tides.
“But I’m going with him,” I said. “Wherever he goes.”
They all nodded, and there was a murmur of agreement round the table.
Lou took my hand.
Math said, “We have a saying here: my brother saves me so that I may save him.”
“I’d come too, if they’d let me,” Gwen said. She would have done too, I think; she was a tough little thing.
Annie said, “Bryn will be here soon—he is the doorkeeper of the labyrinth. He has gone to make sure we can pass back to the Underground in safety. Up here, everyone will be looking for you now.”
“But not in these streets,” said the old man beside her. He had a lined brown face and white hair; he looked a bit like Grand, without the beard. He grinned at me. “This is the underbelly of Pangaia, where the poor live,” he said. “The people whom our wonderful civilization does not reach. The forgotten millions, who cling to life by their fingertips—and believe in the Underground.”
The older of the two men who had brought us stuck his head into the room, and I realized they must have been keeping watch at the door. “Bryn is here,” he said.
And big golden-bearded Bryn came in, scarcely recognizable in a ragged black jacket, with a greasy woolen cap pulled half over his face. He winked at Lou and me as if he had last seen us only five minutes before, and he didn’t even say hello.
“Time,” he said to Annie. “To the station, and through the service tunnel. The patrol comes back in twenty minutes. Time to go.”
They were all on their feet so fast, they nearly knocked over the table. The redheaded girl stayed behind, but the others took us out through the courtyard and into the dark street, to a fenced stairway that led down under the ground. There were far more people down there than on the surface.
It was a subway, they said, an underground railway. I’ve never seen one in our own world, so I don’t know if it looked the same. We went down long moving staircas
es into a big open space where men and women were hurrying to and fro. The people from the Underground stayed close round Lou and me so that nobody would notice us. But this crowd was made of busy, ordinary people who paid us no attention. They were rushing in and out of a wide set of about ten gates, and the underground trains were beyond that; you could hear a distant rumbling. We never saw the trains, though. Before we reached the gates, Bryn paused by the wall, outside a tall metal door with no handle, marked NO ENTRANCE. He tapped gently. The door swung slowly open and then back again, and before it was shut, five of us had slipped inside. Bryn, Annie, Gwen, Lou and me.
I never knew what happened to the others.
And I don’t remember much of the whirl through underground pipes and tunnels, on those strange little trolleys of theirs that took us to the entrance to the labyrinth. In the dimlit dark, they knew where they were going, and we were simply carried along with them. It took a long time.
We came, at last, to a place where the tunnels were not round and man-made, or carved out by machines, but rough, rocky cave-tunnels, made over centuries by the stirring of the planet itself. There was no light of any kind here except the flickering glow from old-fashioned lanterns that we were all carrying. We came to a flat rock wall where Bryn, Annie and Gwen all stood still for a moment, and bent their heads. Then they held their lanterns close to the rock and showed us the lines that they had spoken to us earlier, the lines about Lou. My Lou, their Lugh.
You could only just make out the words. They looked as if they had been carved into the rock centuries ago.
For love of life
Gaia sends Lugh . . .
It was a spooky place. There was no sound except our own voices and footsteps; if we stood still and silent, you could hear only a slow drip of water somewhere deep in the cave, and once or twice a faint quick rustling sound. I didn’t like the rustling; it made me think of rats. Shadows moved like dark ghosts all round us, as the lantern flames flickered.
Bryn said, his voice making a soft creepy echo, “This is the entrance to the labyrinth. There are two doors. The first I can open, the second can be opened only by Lou.”
He gave his lantern to Gwen and stood facing the rock wall next to the carved words. Then he raised his hands high and put them on the wall, his fingers moving to and fro over it, looking for the feel of something. I couldn’t see any sign of what it was, but in a few moments he must have found it, because a great creaking sound began, and he stood away from the wall.
A whole section of the rock moved inward a little, away from us, and then slid sideways, making a hideous screeching, scraping sound as it moved across. Inside, I could see only darkness. My throat felt very dry suddenly, and I could hardly swallow.
Lou came forward eagerly as if he were playing a game at school.
“Be careful!” I said, and my voice came out in a squeak.
He paid no attention. I don’t think he even heard me. Holding his lantern as high as he could, he stepped through the black opening, and his light went with him and showed another cave, running into darkness on either side. It too was like a tunnel, and we were facing its side wall. We followed Lou in, and the light from all the lanterns together showed faint lines running up and across and down the wall, like the outline of another door.
Something was written in the rock of this door. Three words. Their letters were as old and worn as the others had been, and I had to trace them with my fingers before I could make them out. Then gradually I saw them, one by one.
Rigel
Bellatrix
Betelgeuse
Annie said, “We have never known what these names mean.”
“Only that they are the children of Gaia,” Bryn said.
Lou grabbed my hand and tugged at it urgently, asking; he was too small to reach the words with his fingers, and he couldn’t see them. With my eyes on his face, I read them out to him.
“Rigel. Bellatrix. Betelgeuse.”
Lou stared at me for an instant, and then he gave his gurgling laugh-sound. I grinned back at him. For a moment I even forgot how scared I was. We both knew those three names. Grand had recited them to us often, rolling them off his tongue slowly as if he could taste them.
“You know them!” Gwen said. She clapped her palm against her fist, like a little girl. “Tell me!”
“They’re stars,” I said. “The brightest stars in Orion.”
They all looked at me blankly.
“Orion. The constellation. The one that has three stars in a row, for his belt. The belt of Orion. You know!”
But of course they didn’t know. You could see Orion from our world, not theirs. The air of their world was so dirty, they could hardly see any stars at all.
I looked up at the names on the wall again—and then I saw something else. Beside each name, there was a round hole in the rock. Two of these holes were empty, but in the third there was a little chunky, rocky star. I knew just where I’d seen a star like that before.
“Bryn!” I said. “Look—next to the names!”
“Oh yes,” Bryn said sombrely. “They are Gaia’s great mystery. The gaps have to be filled. Without them, Lou can never open the door.”
“Pick him up, please please, pick him up so he can see!”
My voice was near a squeak again, I was so excited.
Bryn gave Gwen his lantern again, put his big hands round Lou’s waist, and hoisted him up. With one hand Lou held his lantern close, with the other he ran his small fingers over the little rocky star, the star that was absolutely identical with the fossil star shell in his precious collection hidden on Long Pond Cay.
He beamed down at me, and made a happy little honking sound.
Gwen said suddenly in a frightening, choked voice, “Bryn! Put him down, quick! Trey, put down your lantern! Lou, you too!”
Startled, Bryn dropped Lou to the ground, and the two of us hastily put down our lanterns.
Gwen was showing the whites of her eyes the way Lou does in a seizure. Her body went rigid. Annie gave a dreadful desperate sound like a groan, and took her hand.
“The worlds are touching!” Gwen said in a strange, hoarse voice.
The lights of the lanterns began to swim in front of me, as if I were looking at them underwater. I felt Lou’s hand take mine and hold on tight. I heard Bryn’s voice calling, as if from a long way away.
“The stars! Find the stars!”
And the voice dwindled into the high song of the wind in the casuarina pines, and Lou and I were back in the sunshine, under the blue sky, on the long white beach of Long Pond Cay.
TEN
He both knew exactly where we wanted to go, of course. We turned and ran along the beach, on the firm white sand near the water, where your feet don’t sink in. I can’t tell you how good it was to be in the clear air and the cool sea breeze of the islands, after the dark tunnels of the Otherworld. After a minute or two, I pulled off my sneakers and splashed along in the shallows, just for the fresh cold feel of the seawater on my feet.
It was a long way to the other end of the bay, and our running slowed to a walk by the time we reached the low sandstone cliff, fringed with casuarinas, where the sea had carved out our little cave. Lou dived inside, and pulled back the chunk of rock that hid our special shells in their hole. He reached in, and held out his hand to me.
There it was: the little rock star, that had been a star shell once, before hundreds of thousands of years turned it into a fossil. It was exactly like the one set into the wall deep in the labyrinth. I whacked him on the back. “That’s two of them, Lou!”
He put it carefully in the pocket of his shorts, and pulled back the rock to cover the others, but he shook his head in a worried way. He held up three fingers, and shrugged. He was right; neither of us had a clue where we might find a third stone star.
And then we saw something that knocked the stone stars right out of our minds. A few yards up the beach, where the scrubby undergrowth began, a tall flat notice board had
been erected, on sturdy wooden posts. It was brand-new; the wood was still fresh and yellow. We ran round it, to see what was written on the other side.
In huge letters, the notice read, DANGER HEAVY MACHINERY AT WORK, and in smaller letters underneath, SAPPHIRE ISLAND RESORT.
We had been gone for no more than an hour of our own time; the notice was new. But when we went home and described it to Grammie and Grand, we found it was the end of a sequence of things that none of us had known about. Grand and his friends and all of us who cared for Long Pond Cay, we had lost our battle against Mr. Pierre Gasperi. During the weeks while the minister had put a temporary stop to development, he and his partners and their lawyers had managed to persuade Government that they would really bring good changes to the islands with their Sapphire Island Resort. They promised to employ local people, they printed elaborate studies about how many tourists they would attract to Lucaya, and they rushed in experts from all over the world to explain how and why, in the long run, they would do no damage at all to the environment.
So Government, hoping to improve life on Lucaya, gave them permission to develop.
“And by the time people notice that the fish breeding grounds are gone, and the birds got nowhere to nest and feed,” Grand said bitterly, “the damage will be good and done.”
Things began happening much faster than they usually do in the islands. Before the developers began turning Long Pond Cay into Sapphire Island, they had to have somewhere on Lucaya to store their materials. They bought a big piece of scrubland at our end of the island, about half a mile from Grand’s little marina, and they cut down all the trees and stripped the land until it was a big bare sandy parking area. It looked terrible.
Miles away in town, freighters came to the deepwater harbor and unloaded trucks and bulldozers and cranes and all kinds of heavy machinery, and after them loads and loads of concrete block and steel and cement and timber. Every day the big trucks thundered along our road from town, carrying it all to the parking ground. A big steel fence was put up there, all around the piles of supplies, with a gate and a security guard post.