Young boys jumped up in haste, making room by the fire for him. Oleg saw ghostly pallid faces with blue lips turned to him from every side. Everyone had strangely big eyes, the color of ripe acorns, that seemed goggled in surprise. They watched him with astonishment. When Oleg sat down by the fire, the boy who looked the eldest told him with caution, “We have eternal twilight here, stranger.”
Oleg nodded, his watchfulness and anxiety still with him. He felt something strange about those people but could not fathom what it was. His charms seemed to have run wild: they stuck in fingers all at once. “Twilight… Why?”
“You don’t know? That’s strange… We are in the lower world.”
Oleg took in their serious faces at a glance, looked around. The lower world was what Slavic sorcerers called the place for the souls of dead people. Ordinary people, not heroes.
“When did you die?” Oleg asked.
People around the fire stiffened, goggled their eyes at him. He felt something wrong again. “Die?” the eldest one asked back.
“Die,” Oleg said again. “How else could you get here?”
People exchanged glances. Finally, a young-looking man with deathly pale face told him, also with great caution, “Our forefathers came here. But they came alive… as we are.”
Oleg felt his charms, glanced the strained faces over quickly. The people also felt nervous, that gave him some comfort. Thoughts darted about his head fervently, Oleg ran over the options, threw some of them away. “We seem to have the same name for different things,” he said at last.
Annoyed, he reminded himself that in the times when Agathyrs led his tribe away from the banks of Dnieper, after he had lost to Scyth the contest in drawing the bow of their grandfather, there was still a soul circle. No need of the underground world, so it did not exist. The need arose when humans received the obligation to remain human even after death. To achieve it, people started to bury their dead straightened. And if the body was burnt, the pot to collect ashes was either made in the shape of human figure or had a human face painted on it.
“Does everyone know this world is underground?” he asked.
They watched him closely. Shivering in his soul, Oleg noticed all of them had sharp, penetrating eyes. Their sights touched his mind like invisible delicate fingers, but Oleg was used to keeping his thoughts and feelings hidden behind a solid fence.
“You are smart,” the eldest one said. His voice was flat, with no hint of feelings. “Very quick at it… No, the tribe knows not. Many generations changed since the day when Agathyrs led the last of his people into a deep cave to save them from enemies who were coming upon… Only we, initiated sorcerers, know the truth: we and our herds roam about great caves!”
Oleg did not falter. He felt tenacious eyes on him. His brain worked quickly, thoughts replaced each other like flames.
“Do you know the way out?” he asked.
“Now we do,” the eldest one replied. “But that time the entrance collapsed behind Agathyrs and his people. The earthquake all but ruined the tribe… Many died, the rest had hard time. They explored the cave, using their torches, found a way deep into, through a whole succession of colossal caves, some big enough to house
Oleg closed his eyes, listening to the dull monotonous voice, and imagined all that terror when people ran out of their torches on the third day, started to burn clothes and broken fragments of carts. Then the wood was also over, leaving them in creepy dark… It was pitch-dark when a big animal attacked women, killed two and injured five. Men managed to kill it despite the dark, though several of them were injured by swords and spears in that terrible night battle. The tribe made lamps of the fat of dead animal. Then they would kill other cave animals, eat their meat, make bow strings of their sinews and lamps of their fat…
Many people died, unable to stand the life without sun, but those who survived gave rise to a new tribe. Agathyrs and his sons would always come ahead of the main party to explore every crack, every way down. In the four hundredth year of cave life, after many generations had changed, one of the walls burst with a crash and opened a cave so large that others, which saw the life and death of those generations, seemed small forest glades as against it. In that cave, connected with some others, big and small, strange grass grew, amazing animals lived, and some blind fish never seen before splashed in lakes and rivers.
By that time, only Agathyrs and two of his sons, one of whom was a sorcerer, remained of the eldest generation. Others had long lives, several times as long as a common man’s, but they had less sunny blood of gods in their veins, so they got old and died… few of them, as the rest perished before, in fierce fighting with cave monsters. Agathyrs dreamed of the return above. He even prepared arms to revenge the offenders, but, not long ago, he was also reached by doom: he perished in a campaign, fighting the monster who attacked his party suddenly. Agathyrs was the last living man of those who had seen the sun. His sons were born underground, the two of them who still live are decrepit old men…
“But how did we get here?” Oleg inquired tensely. “If you saw no sun…”
“No sun, but surface,” the elder one replied. “Every six hundred years, as entrusted by Agathyrs, two or three men of the most initiated sorcerers make a long, exhausting way above. They climb for two or three months. Once it took half a year. Then we wait for a rainy night, when the night sky is covered with clouds… Last time it were me, Taras and Nazar who made the ascent. My name is Ostap. Straight out of the crevice, we found you. We did not know people above can still gorge on the overcome grass! In our tribe, even a child would not eat a blade more than he needs, so we had no antidote with us, which is, definitely, unforgivable for sorcerers. We should be ready for any case, shouldn’t we?”
Oleg felt searching looks at him. “The overcome grass is extinct above. They tell tales of it, but no one knows what she looks like. I found it by chance…”
“But you knew it was overcome grass?”
“I knew but people had forgot. I’m a sorcerer, so I know more than others.”
They ate meat in silence. Ostap told Oleg there were big serpents in caves and beasts much bigger and scarier than serpents: they would hunt serpents as wolves hunt hares, kill and eat them. Also they hunted huge slow animals that looked like turtles, but each one was the size of a hill, its bone plates as thick as a log. When those animals fought, their roar rent the air, made big stones fall from walls and the invisible sky, killing and injuring people and cattle. Once Agathyrsians suffered very much of those monsters, dying without number, until their warriors, under the guidance of sorcerers and Agathyrs himself, made traps for the beasts. Since that, people were safe, then started to press on the monsters, bit by bit, winning new caves from them.
They heard steps. Thomas came out of the thick air suddenly. As he saw Oleg, his face lit up, he gave a polite bow to everyone around the fire. Ostap pointed at the place near Oleg, gave the knight a twig with stringed slices of roast meat.
“He doesn’t know our tongue,” Oleg explained. “He’s from another tribe.” They looked with disbelief. Someone tried to speak to the knight, Thomas made guilty smiles and helpless gestures.
“He doesn’t understand,” Oleg said again. “Out there, many things have changed. You came underground when the world was young and all the tribes and nations spoke the same tongue. Or almost the same… at least they could understand each other. One pronounced ‘a’ where another said ‘o’, the third spoke with a twang, but it was understandable. However, changes are fast there above. The nations you left… no trace of them anymore! Even their names are forgotten. Brave Agathyrs forged his swords in vain. He would have found no one to revenge, no one to burn in a slow fire, no one to skin…”
Oleg started to retell the conversation to Thomas. The knight stopped him with a gesture: talk now and
