“But monsters…”
“Domestic animals.”
“Domestic?”
“
Thomas squeezed himself against the wall to let disgusting animals pass, jumped up if one darted between his legs, and dashed between the legs of bigger ones himself: falling down on his belly with a thunder, his armor ringing, his eyes closed tight.
Thomas plunged after the wonderer into a dark tunnel, walked along, bending down in places and sinking to his fours in others. The passage was a steep rise, sometimes they had to climb up all but vertically. The air gradually turned warmer, less damp. Thomas got hot and sweaty. At last, he gasped with malice, “I feel going up! But are you sure there’s a way out? We meet no ants anymore!”
“Are we bound to return to the same place precisely?”
Thomas wanted to say that definitely they weren’t, the main thing was to get out, no matter whether it would be woods or hot desert or even the nomad camp of terrible bloodthirsty Pechenegs, but the wonderer’s voice seemed sneering. Thomas paused — and the pile of gold nuggets he had left in hundred steps from the entrance into the ants’ burrow flashed in his mind! “Well,” he forced out, “let us get out where we happen to get. May it just be in sun!”
“Then we’ll have to linger,” Oleg said thoughtfully. “It’s night there above.”
“Sir wonderer!”
“Let’s keep going,” Oleg replied, as he heard dangerous notes in the voice of exhausted knight. “Stars may also make a sun to someone.”
Oleg reached out his hand to help Thomas to climb: he had heavy armor on, no light shirt, but the knight dodged with indignation, only asked in a hoarse voice, “Is the entrance close?”
“Close,” Oleg comforted hastily. “That’s said by charms.”
“Thus saith the Teacher,” Thomas muttered under his breath.
“What?” Oleg asked with surprise.
“I often heard that from my tutor,” Thomas explained. “While learning quadrivium, as every knight is obliged to… Has Christ ever been to these ants?.. The Holy Book says nothing of that but he spent forty days alone in the desert where Satan tempted him. Now I know
The shining wall facing was left far behind, they groped their way in complete darkness. Should Thomas touch the walls with head or shoulders, as he did constantly, earth and small pebbles fell down. Once there came a shower of dirty water and soaked him all over.
“Damn them for not strengthening their walls!” Thomas swore. “They are
“We are far beyond their anthill,” Oleg comforted.
“Why?”
“Thomas, you have the stamina of warhorse, but even so I’d have to drag you. And I value my back.”
“Is it a straighter way?”
“Half a mile.”
“And over?”
“Er… just a bit over.”
“Then two miles,” Thomas resolved. In the dark, he recoiled with such force that his armor clanged, the rock got shaking and a landslip thundered behind them. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “let’s go straight. As straight as a crow flies!”
The wonderer found his bearings in some way: he kept warning of pits and ledges with his voice. Sometimes he gripped Thomas in the dark, which made him scream in fright, dragged into a crack, as narrow as a mouse hole, that Thomas would have never found on his own but kept beating against walls for the rest of his lifetime, like a goat beats against manger.
“Is it close?” Thomas kept asking. The wonderer’s hands were holding him constantly then, and Thomas had no strength to push them away.
Once they saw a glimmer of light ahead, Thomas first thought it just seemed to him: he had spots of light floating before his eyes for a long time, but the wonderer dragged him on, urged, swore. Thomas climbed with his last strength, clutched at stones, pulled his heavy body up, rested his feet, groped blindly with his fingers spread wide apart.
He tumbled out on the surface, fell down on his back, his goggled eyes looking in the sky, so bright with stars and dented moon. The wonderer breathed hoarsely nearby. Thomas heard his choking voice. “I’d never believe… what pride brings to… Sir Thomas… you hero! Knights of Round Table not fit to hold a candle…”
“Sir wonderer!” Thomas whispered with protest, though he felt flattered.
There were shrubs on both sides and a crest blocking the sight ahead, but Thomas could see the bare top of a tall mountain. A silent shadow of a night bird, probably an owl, darted to that side. They heard a squeak in the dark, then silence again.
A grasshopper went chirring warily near Thomas. The knight looked there: the tiny green singer was seated on a grass blade in a foot from his face. The creature was fat, potbellied. He cast guarded looks at the giant monster but persisted in moving his jaggy leg on the edge of hard wing.
Thomas smiled, being moved by that. The grasshopper is definitely afraid: his big eyes goggled in fright, his feelers trembling with fear, but he chirrs his song, upholding his territory, his lands, his castle bravely against the intruding monster. Thomas moved away carefully. If he frights the bold warrior singer away, the latter will be deprived of his dominion. Other lands are all occupied and divided by others, so he, poor thing, will have to either hire or turn a knight errant. “What’s bad about being an errant knight?” Thomas said aloud and got surprised by own hoarse voice, as croaking as an old ill crow’s.
The wonderer stirred nearby, sat up heavily. His face was wet with sweat, stained with dirt. “You speak truth. The one who once made a trip around his house knows more than the one who stayed on his stove.”
“Sir wonderer… where are we? It’s mountains, no steppes…”
“Just one mountain,” Oleg corrected. He rubbed his face with force, trying to drive the tiredness away, but only spread the dirt over. “Surrounded by steppe that has no end… Things look black, Sir Thomas.”
“Again?!” Thomas moaned.
“Agathyrsians took us far to the northeast, you know. Now we have to cross flat steppes full of savage nations who kill strangers with no mercy. What is more, here we are in full view of Secret Seven. And the third thing… which threatens trouble only to you… we got so far to the east that no horse in the world will get you to Britain before the day of Saint Boromir!”
Thomas rose a bit, collapsed face first. He did not want the wonderer to see his bitter tears. His heart wrung with pain, he felt a jerk and grasped that crying, which is so easy to women, tears a man’s chest. “Then… I die,” he whispered. “Sir wonderer… I need no life without Krizhina. And she… she won’t just stay alone… but get in hands of evil men… they’ll make her unhappy!”
Oleg watched him with pity and anxiety, fingering his found charms. As he sat a bit higher, he could see the whole mountain: precipitous, its foot covered with dense forest all over. Only the top remained bare. The rocky wall had cracks but no seed of a tree took root there, even grass blades failed to clutch at the red granite, nestle in those cracks. “Fetch the firewood,” Oleg said suddenly. “I’ll go round to the mountain.”
Thomas jerked his head languidly: let all the world go to ruin if he had to part with his love, but the wonderer got up quickly, broke into the thickets like an elk, with only a rustle of bushes.
The morning came to be dull and chilly. Thomas got cold, his armor cooled. He shivered, his teeth started to chatter. His body was shaken all over by foul shudder, so he struggled up his feet, dragged together some dry twigs, which he found close in the narrow valley, managed to strike a fire. His fingers were disobedient: thrice he dropped the flint and spent a long time raking through twigs and dry grass in search of it.
The twigs got on fire fast, smokeless. It licked their grey curves with orange, gnawed at cracks and hollows with red teeth, started to crack them like well-warmed nuts. For a long while, Thomas sat by the fire, watching the dance of red flames with no thought at all, then came back to his senses as he warmed, went out of the cleft, spotted a distant stream, which could be guessed by the rich green grass.
