The riders plodded in single file inside the tube of featureless stone. Their flickering torches gave a knot of animation to the closeness of the wall and their isolation as they moved between pools of darkness. The Oracle’s odd unpredictable sounds cast back into the darkness they had left behind and forward into the darkness they were heading into.
The men barely spoke. The abnormality of the place and the unknowing were becoming depressing. Then the first torch spluttered out.
“Jesus,” said the Kid. And Follett commanded that they stop.
“We must feed the horses whilst we still have light,” he said, and the simple statement made things much worse. Its normality undermined by a future dread. Only Follett and Tarrant got off their horses and found the nosebags. Attaching them to the animals’ heads provided a distraction. The sound of the horses’ eating was both disgusting and comforting, and it gave the men an opportunity to mutter, their machinations smothered by chewing noises.
When the horses finished, Follett and Tarrant crawled back into their saddles and gave the word to continue.
“How far have we come, Captain?” asked Alvarez.
“Impossible to know. It feels like three or four hours, but the tally of it is difficult.”
This was the last understanding of and conversation about time. Both were silenced with the extinction of the last torch. The inevitable arrival of the endless blackness changed everything.
They stopped as if frozen…hopeless and blind. A horizontal vertigo reached into the lost memories of their traveled past and the unknown distance of their future, and the containment of standing still made it worse. The continual movement had given them hope. Without it, the dismal fear of eternal entrapment engulfed them all; the horror of the living grave overwhelmed every man in a black flood of realization. The horses sensed their riders’ unease and became agitated.
Tarrant whispered into his mount’s ear and urged it forward. Eventually, the animal accepted the command and moved on. The others followed.
Occasionally, the horses grazed the men against the rough walls; the animals were losing their coordination and their spatial awareness. The steady line faltered, men and horses nudging and stepping sideways. The only thing that had improved was the temperature. The limb-numbing cold of the cave had given way to a uniform chill that sat outside their bodies like a claustrophobic shroud.
From the back of the line, Pearlbinder said, “This tunnel is getting steeper, like it’s climbing to Heaven, but it feels like a descent into Hell.”
His voice seemed unattached and his words abstract. A single sob was heard among the men, who could see absolutely nothing. A single anonymous and automatic exclamation of despair.
When wicked men of wicked caliber lose part of their lives, they never come back entirely. Some part accepted death as a better option than the life they found themselves trapped in. One of these scarred and charcoaled souls had entered that state of mind, but he would never admit it.
The only other noise growing between the sounds of the horses’ hooves was the growling of the men’s stomachs, which gave a modest indication of how long they had been locked in this corridor. The next hours or days were appalling. The plodding rhythm in the rising tube caused a nauseous drowsiness that swallowed the last remnants of their willpower. So the riders would plummet into thick, meaningless dreams and then startle awake into a reality that was far worse. They had no control left. Alvarez began to moan involuntarily, and the Kid’s teeth were chattering. Starvation and the grave became their reality, and eyes that had shed tears were now parched, constipated, and locked open.
The men were barely conscious, staring blindly, when the Oracle began to whistle a soft, bright sound that filled the thick darkness like a memory of a spring day. The contrast was cruel and terrible in their despair. Then Tarrant’s lead horse walked headfirst into the closed end of the tunnel. The Oracle whistled again and the wall before them fell asunder. The men and horses shrieked, reared, and fell.
A vast magnitude of whiteness hit them as the space in the wall opened into a brilliant morning of sun-dazzling snow. Their eyes, wide open in the tunnel’s night, were now stunned and hurt by the intensity of the light. They rolled and stumbled in the snow’s purity, hands covering their faces, screams turning into tears and laughter, drinking and eating the whiteness. The Kid rubbing it into his eyes.
The Oracle sat in its crate and observed everything quietly. Gradually the men calmed down and confronted their pitiful state and their desperate need for food and shelter.
“Where are we?” asked Alvarez.
They turned to examine the hole they had just passed through onto this plateau of virgin snow. The men spread out, finding themselves on the edge of what felt like a summit; each man walked to a different place, their bodies becoming markers describing a roughly circular space.
“There is a track down this way,” called the Kid, “and there are rabbits down there.”
No more needed to be said as the men tore open their packs to grab anything they could use to hunt. Pearlbinder moved up behind Follett.
“You know what this place is, don’t you?”
The old man didn’t turn round but answered quietly, “Das Kagel.”
Pearlbinder looked around him. “How do you know? We could be anywhere. There is no land in sight, just clouds.”
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Tarrant called to them. “We are above the clouds, like birds.”
“Not an albi-tross, I hopes?” said the Kid, with a foolish grin and a handful of wire traps.
Pearlbinder looked deeper into the clouds and forgot his question to Follett. For a moment, all the men took store of where they were in this world, because it was easier to believe that they had entered another. A vast dome of radiant blue sky crowned with the ragged mountaintop was the only solid feature in the middle of this impossible landscape. The black, negative space of the hole they had just exited was the darkest thing around. The blinding snow covered a softly undulating circle that led to a rim: the edge of the summit. The descending track was clearly defined, spiraling down into the top surface of the clouds, which extended to the horizon in all directions. Its myriad colors were iridescent and warped and whispered through with blues, silvers, and whites. Undertones of gray slid in temperatures of opacity, which were seeking the space to become transparent. A vast sleeping ocean whose undulations were too slow to see and too fast to ever be remembered. It was easier to believe that one could walk or sail across this seascape rather than travel down through it. Even in their desperate hunger, or perhaps because of it, the men were mesmerized by its beauty, lost in its endless potential. Even in the cinder hearts of the most callous, there is a cusp for rapture. Even in the souls of those who would joke or spill life and death, there is a pause just long enough to be surprised by the taste of air. So it was with these pilgrims on the brink of their night. Soon they would descend into blindness, cold, and terror, but they had been given this day, this vision, and the sweet taste of rabbit flesh before they devoured the inevitable.