hunched over the lamp and attempted to look menacing and wild. He barked “Ek-Ek-Kor! Kek-Rek-Gok!”
He straightened and adjusted his cravat, and gave a small smile. “Or something like that. A technical term for something that hardly admits of technicalities.”
He unlocked another door and stepped down into deeper, cooler, subbasement tunnels. The corridor ended in a heavily barred door, which the Director unlocked. On the other side, the tunnel was made of rough red rock.
“The natural caves go very deep here,” he said.
The rock beneath their feet was worn smooth. The rock of the tunnel walls was traced with red veins, the work of the Folk. It was all abstractions—whorls, spirals, sharp-edge intricacies. Complex; obsessive; beautiful. The Director moved too quickly, still talking, and she had no time to inspect them.
“My father,” he said, “was the first hairless man ever to be taken down here.”
“Hairless?”
“Yes. Ah.” He stroked his short wiry beard. “I imagine the Folk think of us as hairless. Stands to reason, don’t you think? Even your very long and fine hair is nothing next to the long and wild manes of the Folk. Of course, we don’t live long enough to grow such manes, do we? We die. They come back. Forever and ever. Imagine: they must see us as tiny and fractious and ignorant and hairless and naked children.”
“I have no idea, Director. Possibly.”
“Possibly? Certainly. Stands to reason. A Hillman is not an adult until he’s lain once at least in the dirt and risen again. Lacking that talent, we may never win their full admiration.”
He stopped with his hand on a door.
“My father,” he said. “They respected him. He was a strange and distant man, and he and I were not close. But this is what it says in his journals. The Folk brought him here. There were three of them. Their names, insofar as it is meaningful to name them, were Kek-Kek, Kur-Kur, and Kona-Kona. They showed him what I am about to show you, and he felt what you are about to feel. He sat down by the water and he cut his arm open from his wrist to his elbow with Kek-Kek’s stone knife. Such strength of will! A risk-taker; how could he be sure it would work? How did he know? He did not. He only believed. The Folk respected his ability to bear pain, he wrote. They respected endurance. They respected will and belief. And he bound the wound with his shirt and he slept there in that cave for seven days. The wound did not grow infected. The blood thickened and did not spill. In seven days, he was all but healed. Afterwards there was the most terrible scar and he never recovered full use of his fingers; but he had proved what he set out to prove. Later he came back with iron. There was no place for the Folk here anymore. It was wasted on them, he used to say. He had a vision. He built this House.”
The Director opened the door.
“My mother had been injured,” he said. “A stray bullet. The Spirit could not give her back the use of her legs, but I believe it eased her suffering. Of course, she’s dead now.”
“Oh! I’m so—”
He smiled wanly. “I would be very interested, Liv, in your opinion as to whether he acted correctly.”
“Director, I—”
“As an outsider, I mean. I really don’t know. Please don’t answer at once.”
He blew out the lamp. The cave ahead of him glowed with a warm red light.
The Director stepped aside into the shadows to let Liv pass.
The cave was womb deep and womb dark. The ground was smooth damp earth, which sloped steadily downward to a still pool, as large perhaps as the Academy’s duck pond. Tall rocks surrounded it, like women taking laundry down to the river to wash; or, Liv thought, like supplicants coming to be baptized in some very old-fashioned religion.
The water glowed with a soft red light.
The cave’s walls were painted with designs of a strangely delicate character; they hung in the misty half light like the branches of the willow trees that hung over the Academy’s river.
Self-consciously, she sat cross-legged on the floor.
The light emerged from below the surface of the water—like, Liv thought, when one held one’s hand in front of a candle, and the light passed warmly through it.
“The light is very beautiful,” she said.
She felt a little flushed, and she fanned herself with her sleeve. The cave was oddly warm.
“Director Howell?” She turned around,