warm, clean up, we talk.’ And he ducked back into his house, sealing shut the skin cover behind him.
It was always this way now. Nobody wanted a sick man near their children.
So Novu led Chona through a cleft in the cliff wall, and into a kind of passageway. It was dark, and Novu wished he had a torch, but the walking was easy, the floor beaten flat by footprints, and the walls were smooth. People had evidently used this passage before.
After a dozen paces the walls opened out to reveal a larger space, a flat floor scarred by old hearths.
‘This will do.’ Chona slumped to the floor and leaned against a wall. ‘Make a fire. Then food . . . Oh, my bones.’ He closed his eyes and seemed to sleep immediately.
Novu opened up their packs and spread out their skins. Then he looked around the cave. He picked one of the old hearths to build his fire. He found a little wood piled up at the back of the cave, which he collected, and hard round blocks that might be bear turds; he decided to try burning them later. Before it was dark, he would go back out and collect more wood, and bring it in here to dry out.
He dug out the day’s ember, and soon the wood was burning brightly. He got out some dried fish for Chona, and fetched him a bowl of rainwater.
The trader’s appetite had been poor for days, but he forced himself to chew. ‘Here we are at the heart of the Continent. The beating heart, where rivers like veins flow with trade. And I missed the traders’ gathering! I missed it. First time in years. Ten years. More.’
‘You’ve spent ten years as a trader?’
‘More than that. My father traded. He showed me the way it works. I walked with him. The way you’re walking with me, I suppose. Loga thought you were my son! What a laugh.’
‘You don’t have a son of your own.’
‘No family. No wife. Or a hundred wives.’ He cackled, and made a pumping gesture with his crotch. ‘The trading, that’s everything to me. I saw how my father slowed down when he had his family, it ties you down like a tethered goat. Not for me.’
‘Where did you come from? I mean originally.’
‘Nowhere you’d know. Nowhere at all.’ He spat a bit of fish in the vague direction of the fire, and missed. ‘Shut up, boy, you’re annoying me.’
Novu brought him another bowl of water. But when he returned the trader had slumped back to sleep, and was snoring loudly.
Left alone, Novu, restless, bored, wandered around the cave. Odd pillar-like formations stood on the floor, and when Novu looked up he could see more pillars dangling from the roof, glistening, damp.
And at the back of the cave more clefts led off, presumably to more hollows deeper inside the rock.
Novu made a torch of a bit of pine branch wrapped tightly with dried reeds. He lit this in the fire, and returned to the back of the cave. He counted four, five, six clefts running off from this chamber, gaps wide enough for him to squeeze through. He picked one and pushed his way in. It was just a little wider than his shoulders, the walls rising above his head.
Maybe the whole cliff was riddled with caves, with clefts and passages everywhere. His imagination ran away. You could get lost. You could wander here for ever! Maybe there were whole tribes of people wandering in the dark, feeding on spiders or rats . . . Oddly he didn’t feel frightened by this idea. It would be like a huge, natural Jericho.
The passageway closed in, without revealing anything of interest.
He backed out to the cave, where Chona was still snoring, and tried the next passage along. This was clogged by dried brush that he had to push through. But after a few dozen paces the passage began to open out, the roof rising up, and he found himself in another chamber, longer than Chona’s, with tall, smooth, sloping walls. He thought he saw more of those dangling formations on the ceiling. He raised his torch to see better.
A horse bucked at him.
He stumbled back against the wall, nearly dropping the torch, his breath scratchy, his heart hammering. A horse! How could a horse be here? But he heard nothing, smelled nothing. He dared to raise the torch again.
The horse was painted on the wall. It was almost life size. And