The tree is a giant spruce, hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. It is entwined with creepers that have somehow merged into the bark to give the tree a lumpy, ridged skin that reminds Willem of the skin of the dinosaur.
Héloïse slides to a halt at the base of the tree, waiting for the others to catch up.
She looks behind them at something Willem dares not turn to see.
“Hurry,” she says, and in the quiet of her voice is a warning more chilling than if she had screamed.
She pulls back the branches of a thick bush that grows at the base of the tree, revealing a vertical shaft that descends into blackness.
Willem reaches the tree just after François, who moves quicker through the forest than he does.
“Down,” Héloïse says.
François hesitates.
“Just go,” Willem says.
François sits on the edge of the hole, turns and grasps the rocky lip of the shaft, then lets himself down. He dangles by his fingertips for a moment.
Willem looks behind to see Jack arrive, no longer leading Frost, but carrying him on his shoulder.
There is a thump that echoes up the shaft.
“François?” Willem calls.
“It is not deep,” François shouts back. “The fall is not great.”
“The lieutenant is first,” Willem says. “Help to catch him.”
He doesn’t wait for a reply but helps Jack lower the small frame of Lieutenant Frost into the hole.
The dreadful rattle of the demonsaurus sounds through the trees behind them.
“Jack, go!” Willem says, but for answer Jack shoves him backward into the hole, catching one of Willem’s arms as he falls and lowering him down with one strong arm. Hands grab at his legs, and then he is safely on the ground. Jack arrives headfirst just after him, and Willem, looking up, sees black skeletal hands scrabbling down into the hole behind him. Jack lands on top of them, collapsing the group into a pile of bodies on the ground.
Willem looks around for Héloïse, and sees her extricate herself from underneath François. He hadn’t even seen her climb into the hole.
At the surface, the demonsaurus are silhouetted against the light of the sky and the forest above. They scrape at the edge of the cave, and long spines on their head rattle furiously. The sound echoes down the shaft and off the hard rock walls in the cave.
The cave is narrow and dark, except for the rod of light that falls from the entrance. There is a muddy, earthy smell here, along with something else. A faint but bitter smell of animal dung.
Abruptly the creatures above are pulled back.
“Muskets!” Frost shouts, and they all scramble away from the area beneath the shaft.
The explosions are deafening in such a small space and lead balls ricochet off the rocky floor and the walls.
Jack grunts and staggers, but when they turn to him he shakes his head and points to a small tear in his uniform at the shoulder. The ball that hit him has ricocheted at least once, and although it will leave a nasty bruise, it has not broken his skin.
Already Héloïse is leading the way deeper into the cave. The roof slopes down, lower and lower until they must crawl to get through.
Behind them Willem hears one then another of the soldiers drop into the cave.
Héloïse is humming, softly and tunelessly, and at first Willem cannot work out why, but as the thin light from the entrance fades he realizes. It is pitch-black underground. Only by following the sound can he follow her.
There are passageways here, forks and branches. He cannot see them but he can feel them. A honeycomb of tunnels through solid rock.
The sounds behind them cease, then he hears the soldiers retreating. But he knows they will be back. With lamps.
For now though, they are safe, and as soon as he is sure the soldiers are gone, he calls out names, to make sure no one has missed a turn in the blackness.
Everyone answers.
Here, deep in the bowels of the earth, there are sounds. Animal sounds. Roars and growls that echo in the distance.
They follow Héloïse. There is no way to gauge time, but it seems like hours. Sometimes they stand and walk, other times they crawl below low rock ceilings. How she knows where she is going, Willem cannot imagine, but eventually a faint glow appears in front of them.
The glow intensifies and they emerge onto a high rocky ledge in a vast underground cavern.
The light comes from oil lamps hung from hooks on the walls at regular intervals, and now they see the source of the animal sounds.
Dinosaurs.
Héloïse puts her finger to her lips, then repeats the gesture. Her meaning is clear. Utter silence. Although the ceiling is high here, they crawl, so they can’t be seen from below.
Willem places his hands and knees carefully, feeling the ground in front of him before trusting it to take his weight, wary of any pebble or loose rock that might move and create sound.
The smell of dung is strong. Below them, a cart piled high with animal waste is hauled off by four men in gray peasant smocks. There are no horses to pull the carts, nor mules. Not even demonsaurus will enter this place.
The dinosaurs are chained to huge metal anchor points in the floor and walls of the cave. They are not as large as the giant crocodile that attacked the village, but still at least twice the height of a man. Immense heads on massive bodies are counterbalanced by long, heavy tails. The front legs are small, and seem to serve no purpose, but the back legs are enormous, with vicious claws like those of a firebird. They have the same protruding bony brow as the crocodile, but a shorter jaw. They are meat-eaters. There is no doubt. Only meat-eaters have teeth like these. The beasts strain against their chains, shifting their huge feet, scratching and stamping at the rock floor of the cavern. Some kind of leather mask covers their eyes and nostrils. Willem suspects they can neither see nor smell. Heavy leather straps run around the creatures’ massive jaws, preventing them from opening more than a few centimeters. Willem has seen the remnants of one of these masks before, on the beast that attacked the village.
Willem taps Jack on the shoulder and points at the creatures. Jack nods. These are the saurs that attacked the soldiers at Mont-Saint-Jean.
Willem counts. There are a dozen dinosaurs just in this one section of the cavern, but the rock walls bend away around a corner and echoing from that direction come more grunts and occasional growls. There could be any number of the creatures here belowground.
They follow Héloïse, crawling along the ragged rocky ledge and under a low overhang that leads away from the cavern.
A series of interconnected caves takes them upward and here the air is slightly fresher, drifting in through natural vents in the rock, and the barest blush of natural light filters down somehow through a series of crystals in the ceiling.
They crawl beneath old, dead tree roots into another small cave.
There is just enough light to see, and what they see is both shocking and yet somehow not really a surprise. Some rough bedding is pushed against a wall. A wooden pail sits against the opposite wall. Old, dried food scraps litter a corner.
The surprise is the pictures. The walls are decorated with hundreds of them, crude images of flowers, trees, the sun, a boat on a river. One of them shows a woman cradling a baby. A wretched and yet touching vision. A desolate young girl’s only reminder of her mother.
Willem looks around in a kind of horrified awe. This is where Héloïse spent six years of her life, fending for herself, feeding herself. Hiding from French soldiers. Sharing a vast dungeon with terrifying giant saurs.
“Are we safe here?” Willem asks.
Héloïse nods. “For now. They know we are here and will search the caves, but it will take them a long time to find this place,” she says. “I go, but will return soon.”
She scuttles out of the cave, leaving them in the almost dark, and the almost silence, broken only by the distant growls of the dinosaurs.
They wait without conversation, overwhelmed by the events and the sights of the day.
The light through the ceiling crystals shifts slightly as time passes, although how long Héloïse is away, Willem cannot tell.
When she returns she has two gray peasant smocks. She gives them to the British soldiers and indicates that they should cover their uniforms.
She also brings a small sack of food. That she can so easily raid the soldiers’ supplies gives some clue to how she survived down here on her own for so long.
Willem glances again around the walls, looking at the world through the eyes of the girl, spending her childhood in this rock-walled cage. Suddenly he can bear the guilt no longer. He puts down the morsel of bread he is eating.
“Héloïse, I must tell you something,” he says.
She looks at him curiously, but says nothing.
“That day in the forest. When the firebird took your mother,” Willem says.
“It was you,” she says without expression.
“You already knew?” he asks.
“Since you killed the dinosaur in the village,” she says. “I knew then.”
“I am so sorry about your mother,” he says. “If I had done something sooner…”
“You could not have saved her,” Héloïse says. “And I am alive because of you. But this memory holds great pain for me. Please do not speak of it again.”
“I will not,” he says.
“I also must tell you something,” she says. “About your mother.”
“Please,” he says.
“She did not escape as she said she would,” Héloïse says.
“François told me,” Willem says.
“She was taken away in a cage. As was Cosette,” Héloïse says. “They were lucky.”
“Lucky? What do you mean?” Willem asks.
Héloïse looks at François, who looks away.
“He knows,” she says.
“I saw nothing,” François says. “I don’t know.”
“He knows,” Héloïse says again.
François just stares at her, and when he will not talk, Héloïse does.
The cave seems to grow cold as she speaks and when she is finished, Willem is sobbing. François sits facing a wall, refusing to look at them. Shaking his head as if to shake out her words.
There is silence for a long time. The distant sunlight, filtered by the crystals, drifts farther and begins to fade.
“Where did they take Cosette and my mother?” Willem finally asks. He realizes even as he says it that, without thinking, he asked about Cosette first.
“I do not know,” Héloïse says.
“I must find out,” Willem says. “I cannot go to England while they are being held captive by the French.”
“You must go to England,” Frost says. “If you do not, then Napoléon has already won.”
“I cannot leave them here in the hands of the French,” Willem says.
“What will you do?” François asks. “Break them out of a French prison?”
“I will do whatever it takes,” Willem says. “But I will not leave here without them.”
The conversation has been in French, but Frost has been quietly translating for Jack, who now speaks. It is in English and although Willem understands the words, he cannot understand the meaning.
“What did he say?” Willem asks.
“A strong man can move a boulder. A wise man can change the world,” Frost says.
“I understood the words, but not the meaning,” Willem says.
“He means that you, by yourself, can do nothing to help your mother or the girl. You are just one man. But you can teach the world how to defeat Napoléon’s monsters, and that is your best chance to rescue those you love.”
“Jack said that?” Willem asks.
“That was his meaning,” Frost says.
“I cannot go to England,” Willem says. “Yet I cannot stay here. I cannot win.”
“What do you mean?” Frost asks.
“They have my mother and Cosette,” Willem says. “If they know I am here, and alive, they will use them against me. If they think me to be dead, or in England, they will … have no further use for them.”
Frost relays this in English to Jack, who nods his understanding and mutters something.
“What did he say?” Willem asks.
“Jack thinks it would be easier if you just disappeared,” Frost says.
One of the dinosaurs along the corridor roars, and the reverberation is so strong through the narrow passageway that dust falls from the walls.
“Jack is much smarter than he thinks he is,” Willem says.
“I keep telling him that,” Frost says.