thrust a few inches above him met no resistance. Yet he could not crawl through the way he had begun, or his back would break. He should have gone through on his back, not his belly.
The sweat of fear had begin to break out on him, fear at the thought of lying here trapped for eternity. That was an advantage. And underneath him was not rock but sand or shale. Methodically, Shef began to scrape what he could from underneath his belly, making a little hollow in which to turn. He drew in his breath to reduce his mid- section every inch it would go, rolled, tried to force himself over. Stone dug into his sides, his leather belt seemed to catch on some projection. He twisted with panic force, felt the belt tear and give, felt himself roll over.
After a few seconds he found a purchase with his feet, began to force his back up the rock face behind him. A few painful inches, another moment of seeming immobility. Then he managed to get one knee under the lip of the crawl-ledge, found a better foothold, thrust his head up into the clear.
There was a ledge behind him, breast-high. He turned once more, pushed himself up, got a knee over and crawled out of the pit. As he did so, perfectly clear in the still black air, he heard a long hiss. The scratch of scales on stone. He could see nothing, but somewhere close to him in the blackness, he knew, there was a serpent.
He shuddered involuntarily. The dream of Loki, and the serpent pursuing up the staircase was still with him, and the moment when he found himself in the orm-garth of the gods. Yes, Svandis had explained it. The marks in his flesh where the snake had seemed to strike, they were his own mind playing tricks on him like women believing themselves pregnant. The dream of the climbing feet and the orm-garth, they came from a memory of Brand and a mixture of guilt and fear at the death of Ragnar.
But Shef had seen the death of Ragnar, had seen the adders strike him and the face turn blue and swollen. That had been no dream, and this was no dream either. There was a real snake somewhere in the blackness. Snakes had senses humans did not. It could detect him, could strike before he could raise a hand to defend himself.
There was someone in the blackness close to him as well. Some one, not some beast. Shef's sensitive ears could catch a faint scuff of sole on stone. At the same instant Shef felt around his neck an embrace of cold scales. A snake as thick as his arm had been dropped round his neck.
It was the faint reek of sweat that saved him. If it had not been for that he might have shrieked, clutched unavailingly for the neck of the thing round him, been bitten again and again by the angry rat-snake, and perhaps run fruitlessly into the darkness, there to die, not of poison—for the rat-snake held no more in its fangs than was needed for its rodent prey—but of thirst and despair. But the sweat-stink was that of Thierry. Shef realized in the same instant that Thierry must have come round the rock-wall which he had been made to climb under, had no doubt seen or sensed his progress all the way, was here to administer the next stage of his test. Was waiting for the stranger to flee in panic.
Shef stood stock-still, felt a forked tongue flicker across his face as the snake got its bearings, felt the scales rasp slowly across neck and body and leg as it determined which way to go and slithered down to the ground and off about its business. After it had gone Shef stood for a while motionless. Not from fear. He was beginning to grow angry at the way he was always held at disadvantage, at the thought of Thierry laughing silently in the dark. He mastered the anger, considered what he had already learned.
These people were testing him. They did not mean to kill him, so much was clear. If they had meant to kill him, he would be dead already. They were testing him. And they wanted him to pass the test. If he did, they would want something from him once he had passed. That did not mean that they would not kill him if he failed.
The sensible thing was to walk slowly forward, and to be alert for the next test. They would try to surprise him. Do not react instantly, whatever they do. He stepped forward, feeling carefully for footing with each step, arms spread wide for balance and warning.
Someone gripped him round the body. Again, he could not repress the jump, the shudder of fear. But this was no hostile attack. The arms that closed round him from in front were warm and naked, an embrace not a grapple. Lips kissed him suddenly on the chest. Automatically he closed his own arms round the person who held him. A woman. He could feel her breasts push against him. A naked woman. He dropped his hands, felt her buttocks, felt her immediately respond and push close against him, moving her groin up and down against his.
A week before, sunk in the doubt of his own impotence, Shef might not have responded. Since then there had been Svandis. She had roused him, had proved to him that the fear and horror that had lain on him since the death of Queen Ragnhild were not of the body, only of the mind. She had shown it to him half a score of times since, his body was roused and full of repressed youth. Before he could so much as think of it, Shef's manhood had responded, was rising urgently. The woman felt it, seized it in her hands with a throaty chuckle of triumph, began to sink backwards. He could roll with her on to the stone, take his fill of her here in the dark, clasp her deep and spurt the seed into her here where the sun never came.
A test. Don't respond. The thought of the dark and the lost passages everywhere around bit cold into Shef's heart. The woman could not escape him now he had hands on her, but once he was done, what then? She would slide into the darkness like the snake, and he would be left, alone and a failure. While the testers, whoever they were, watched and mocked.
Shef straightened, gently pulled the woman's hand from him. She came back, pressing herself to him and moaning with passion. She was lying. Her moans were pretense. He unwound the arms from his body, pushed her to arm's length. As she twisted he turned her round, slapped her sharply low down, pushed her away.
He heard her bare feet on the stone for a pace or two. And then, almost dazzling to eyes long groping in the black, a candle-flame. She had lifted a hood from a candle, and for an instant he saw her, naked, squat and middle-aged, vanishing into a cleft in the rock.
Shef turned back in the direction he had been going, and this time, leapt instantly two yards backwards.
A corpse-face had looked into his from no more than a foot away, yellow, rotten, its teeth bared, the eyeballs sunk to mere shreds of leather.
It was hanging from the roof, with half a dozen more. He had been meant to see them at the same moment as the woman vanished, Shef realized. But the closest was on his blind eye, he had not seen it till he turned. Maybe he had been spared the first shock. And now the shock was over: it was a test. Don't respond. At least he now had light to see. Shef walked over and picked up the candle before doing anything else.
The corpses. He did not think these would be their own folk, used in a trial. They buried their dead in stone up here, so he had been told. Every village had its secret sarcophagi somewhere, as every English village had its churchyard and every Norse one its barrows and burning-grounds. No, they did not look like villagers. One there had the face of a Moor, another still on him the leather, but not the mail, of a Frankish lancer. Wayfarers, maybe tax- collectors, ambushed in the mountains and kept here for use. The bodies swung on their ropes like the smoked corpses in the house of Echegorgun the troll. But these were dry, dry as tinder, mummified in the dry cold of the high mountain caves. Shef took a piece of cloth between his fingers, felt it crumble. Yes, dry as tinder. He could not bury these folk. But whoever they were, they did not deserve to hang here for ever. He could give them a sort of burial.
Stepping on from one corpse to another, Shef held the candle at the rags of clothing, watched them catch and flare, begin to work on the dry withered flesh beneath. As he walked forward a red glow filled the cave, showed him its full extent to either side, more paintings on the walls.
In front of him another rock face, but no more than eight feet high. Propped against it as if in invitation, a pole-ladder, for all the world like the one he carried on his own breast.
Nothing surprising there, he thought as he walked towards it. A true ladder, with two supports and rungs between it, that is work for a carpenter, fitting rung to drilled hole. But anyone can make a pole ladder, whether in the North or the South, the mountains or the fens. Take a tree, a fir-tree for choice. Take its trunk and trim off the branches, leaving only those which grow at either side, alternately, first one for the right foot then one for the left. It takes balance to walk up it, but no skill in the making. Once upon a time all ladders must have been like that. Like the stone tools we have grown out of.
Shef walked to the foot of the ladder, began deliberately to climb it as the corpses flared and blazed behind him.
Chapter Sixteen
