“Jamie!” screamed Alex. “We have to jump!”
“Alex—I, I can’t!”
Alex was about to repeat the urgent command when, upon hearing the rats suddenly advancing, he grabbed Jamie by his sleeve and pulled him over the edge. They plunged beneath the surface of the troubled water, only to resurface moments later well downstream, coughing and spluttering in the daylight. Alex, still holding onto Jamie, looked back and saw dozens of rats, poised above the water where only seconds earlier the two of them had stood. Jamie recalled hearing that cats had nine lives; he now wondered how many Alex and he had, and how many had already been used up.
They bobbed and rolled swiftly down the river, each hanging onto the other and without speaking, other than to give alerts, such as, “Jamie! A wock!” or “Alex! Push off!” or “Look out!” or “Going under!”
The water was surprisingly warm, and currents billowing up from below seemed to hold them aloft without their having to swim or even try to float. They traveled in this fashion for nearly an hour, searching the banks far ahead for a place to land; but everywhere they looked the banks were either too steep or entirely nonexistent—and they were moving too swiftly to take advantage of any shallow ones that might come along. The river flowed on for miles in a ravine carved thirty feet into the earth, so Alex and Jamie had no idea what any of the landscape outside the riverbed looked like along the way.
Finally, the river began to slow markedly, branching on both sides into a number of smaller streams and creeks, and thick stands of trees along the banks above them leaned over the water, turning twilight to dusk. The riverbed rose. Soon the banks were nearly level with the water, and Alex and Jamie found themselves floating gently through a dense forest, able to touch bottom and head for land at will along navigable shorelines. Since they were making progress toward someplace, however, and the ride was pleasant, they decided to wait for a while before beaching themselves. Occasionally a blackbird would give out a raspy chirp and flit rapidly from view. Otherwise, Alex and Jamie saw no other signs of life except the trees—the highest branches of which began to swirl wildly in a suddenly-freshening wind; the tree limbs squeaked and groaned as if conspiring with one another.
Soon, however, the trees thinned and the wind turned feathery, barely stirring the topmost branches.
A short while later the riverbed deepened once again and the trees soon disappeared, or at least disappeared from view. Everything all about them was again still.
“Wook, Jamie!” Alex whispered, pointing straight up. “What ah they, Jamie?” Jamie looked up and saw perhaps a half dozen spots, as if hovering in a pack, high in the sky, nearly to the clouds.
“I don’t know, Alex, but I’m thinking we should stay as still as possible—and try not to be seen.”
As they floated without stirring in a lazy current, they heard in the stillness only the sound of the water gently lapping the shores. The spots circled high overhead for a short while and then slowly dispersed out of sight.
It was just then, however, that the most startling of sounds shattered the stillness.
~six~
Aneht, with Elli in hand on one side and Beatríz in hand on the other, stepped out of a sharp right turn in the middle of the Sanctuary forest and stopped. Only a few feet in front of them stood what appeared to be a mud hut the shape and size of a large igloo, with a single arched doorway opened wide to the dense darkness within. The hut was a perfectly rounded, hemi-spherical dome, it’s earthen surface hard and smooth.
“Yes, yes, well here we are! Inside you’ll have mud pies of all sorts to suit any fancy!” Aneht giggled with girlish delight. “Yes, yes!”
Elli, who along with Beatríz was trying hard not to believe that Aneht was shortly going to be serving them anything other than actual pies—as in, for instance, something like a Mississippi “mud pie”—said, looking at her friend, “Beatríz, we are facing a large mud dome, maybe fifteen feet high and twenty five feet wide, right in the middle of the woods, or, at least entirely surrounded by a group of trees; the trees go off from each side into the woods. And there’s an open doorway, maybe six feet tall; and it’s too dark inside to see anything, at least from the outside.”
“Yes, yes, precisely as she described it, Beatríz. Now, please follow my lantern and me into my home that some call Adytum, but I call Mud Mansion.” Aneht reached straight out her arm carrying the lantern and led the girls (still in two of her other three hands) through the arch and into what struck Elli as an unwelcoming darkness, as if stepping into the blackness of deep space.
As soon as the girls entered the room, stepping on a smooth circular floor also made of hardened mud, Aneht’s lantern revealed in its dim orange light a room with no windows and another dark doorway, somewhat smaller than the one they had just entered and located in the floor itself, leading to a flight of stairs going down. Almost missed by Elli, in the crown of the ceiling above was a hole just big enough for someone the size of Aneht to crawl—or jump—through. A faint shimmer of light inside the hole was scarcely noticeable.
The smell of something baking was wafting into the room from below, and although the aroma was not unpleasant, it carried the definite odor of hot dirt. The three of them descended a spiral staircase (constructed of tree root cuttings and bush branches woven together) until they stepped into another circular room almost identical to the one above, except that it had four doorways not quite opposite each other, as well as, again, a dimly lit hole in its ceiling located to the side of the ceiling’s center, and another spiral staircase penetrating the floor.
“Down we go, yes, yes! Down we go! Follow the light! Yes, yes! Something to eat and drink!”
In this fashion Elli and Beatríz trailed behind Aneht through several levels of virtually identical mud domes until Aneht arrived in a domed space that was identical to, but much larger than, the others through which they had descended. There she invited the girls to sit on a couple of large spongy balls made of the thinnest of reeds and vines. The room also had a shut door with a small window, suggesting by the light drifting through it that the doorway led to the outside.
“Yes, yes, here we are! Please sit and comfort yourselves in my home while I prepare you some dinner and drink! Yes, yes!” Elli watched Aneht open the door to the outside and walk out onto a wooden platform where there were various articles of furniture, including a large table on which were baking in the sun what appeared to be the very sorts of mud pies that Elli and Beatríz as little girls used to make quite frequently in the summer months—but, of course, never to eat! (Once a little boy next door asked for one with dirt-made worm squiggles on top, and then, when the girls had given it to him, he promptly tried to eat it, only to vomit moments later.)
As Elli explained to Beatríz what she was seeing, both girls had the incident of the little boy fresh in mind when they thought at all about eating.
Aneht poked her head in through the door and invited them out. “Time to eat! Yes, yes! Come out!”
Elli took Beatríz by the hand and led her through the doorway. The light from outside was so bright—by comparison with the darkness inside to which Elli’s eyes had grown accustomed—that she squinted her eyelids nearly shut, and so was unable to see anything at first except the smooth wooden patio beneath her bent head.
“Yes, yes, take my hand, Elli! Soon you’ll see!” Whereupon Aneht took the hand of each of the girls and led them a short way to a chair for each, similar to the ones on which they had been sitting inside the dome.
“Yes! Yes! Sit and see! Take whatever time you like—since there is, of course, no time to take! But what sort of time there is will give us time to talk and answer questions! Hee-hee!”
“Elli!” Beatríz said eagerly while settling into the chair that seemed softly to both gently cradle her and hold