With a sigh, Boris took the bag, felt the cup through the thick fabric. Thomas watched him with great respect. The elder listened, then his head jerked up, he cast a sharp look in Oleg’s eyes. Oleg nodded. The old sorcerer, keeping an intent eye on him, put his hand into the bag, found the cup by feeling, and stiffened.
Boryan and Borunia glanced at their elder brother with anxiety: his face was too strange. They also looked askew at fascinated Thomas who had even rose a bit to look into the bag.
“I feel strange power,” Boris spoke very slowly. His face was otherworldly, as though his eyes were reaching far behind the stone walls. “This cup contains great power… but I cannot understand it.”
“How great?” Oleg asked tensely.
Boris still had a vacant look, his voice sounded remote. “It is hard for a mortal man to judge. And we, though Great Sorcerers, are just mortals… Taurus would have put it better. He has the blood of gods… And Agathyrs the Immortal would have told even more of it…”
Oleg heaved a sigh. Thomas shot a quick glance in his dark face and understood that Agathyrs would have said nothing too. And if Agathyrs told it, he, Oleg the wonderer, would have told the same before.
Suddenly Boris’s eyes opened wide. His hand in the bag began to twitch, as though trying to clasp the cup around. His eyes, full of infinite astonishment, were fixed at Oleg. The wonderer gave a reluctant nod of agreement with something important that the old sorcerer got to know due to the Holy Grail. With the next nod, Oleg pointed at Thomas’s mighty figure, then shook his head.
With obvious reluctance, Boris took his hand out, handed the bag back to Oleg who, in turn, gave it to Thomas.
“The Secret Seven, our mortal enemies, made a real hunt for this cup,” Oleg told Boris insistently. “It is a miracle we still have it. But they have never come themselves — only their servants! Why? What value they see in it?”
Boris chewed his flabby colorless lips. “Why won’t you look in the future yourself, the Wise?” he asked suddenly.
Oleg glanced askew at Thomas who was adjusting the cup carefully in the depth of the bag, replied hastily, “All the land we crossed is enclosed with invisible fence. When I got two score steps away from the cup, the screen remained. And a longer distance away… Either no time for it or too dangerous. When I parted with the cup last time, I could allow no look in the future — we were too busy saving our skins!”
Borunia, after being silent for a long while, spoke in an angry, shrewish voice. “These caves are impenetrable to the power of Secret Seven!”
In the face of Boryan, they could see anxious doubt clearly.
“I don’t think they know anything of the nation of Agathyrs,” Oleg comforted them, “the brother of Scyth. When you come out in due time, it shall be a disaster to them!”
Thomas shifted his gaze between the sorcerers and his friend. At last, he dared to break the silence with his strong manly voice that clanged with steel, as though a huge hammer beating on a cooling blade. “Is that prophecy about you?.. A mighty nation come from the North… Gog and Magog… Is that you?”
They gave no reply, rigid and immersed in something unknown to Thomas.
Ostap emerged near the cave entrance several times, shot anxious glances. Nazar and Taras came and brought pieces of strange meat, very fragrant. Thomas looked at it with hungry eyes but refused firmly: one of the young sorcerers had explained him before that was the meat of frog animal. Thomas hardly kept from vomiting. After that, all the three days long, he refused to eat the meat of frogs, despite those cave frogs were as large as camels and attacked people.
A jug of mountain mead was put before Thomas. They had dinner. Then Boris looked silently at his siblings, they nodded sulkily in turn. The eldest sorcerer told the guests sadly, “Our young will take you above.”
Chapter 32
They climbed up sheer walls, squeezed themselves into narrow cracks, crawled by endless winding burrows, scraping their sides and backs. Every time they fell, they were caught by small but strong hands of young sorcerers. The third of them, Nazar, carried the knight’s clanging armor in his bag and had the hilts of huge swords, the bow and arrows jutting out strangely over his shoulders.
Looking at the sorcerers, Thomas suspected they could easily get above straight through the rocks if not the need to pull their guests along. Once he even spotted, out of the corner of his eye, that Ostap’s shoulder came in touch with the protruding sharp stone edge but the young sorcerer proceeded with no hint of stagger: as though it were no solid stone but a cloud of smoke. Then Taras whispered something to him angrily, pointing at Thomas and Oleg with his eyes. Tired Ostap gave his excuses. Thomas pretended to see and hear nothing.
Long before the surface, they felt fresh smells. The tinkles of water, which often crossed their way, were growing colder until they turned icy cold. Smirking Oleg explained stunned Thomas that the deeper into the earth is the warmer, so Agathyrsians knew neither winter nor cold autumn for several thousand years — it was always warm summer in their middle caves. If one gets deeper, he’d have to walk across scorching deserts, on hot stones. Deeper in, the walls are burning hot and the air as boiling as within a stove. It smells of burning, with even more torrid heat coming from below.
Thomas glanced back. “We need to memorize the way. Hell, you say?”
“Why would
“And you?” Thomas cried with insult. “How can I sit on the cloud while you sit in a pot of boiling tar? May all feathers on my wings burn, but I will come to rescue my sworn brother!” He kept glancing back to memorize the way to Hell. His face was solemn and tragic. He was already planning that journey in his mind, checking his equipment.
They felt currents of air and, finally, saw the light ahead. The sorcerers tied thick black cloths over their faces but kept moving with confidence, with no touch to walls. Thomas started screwing up, as he saw the breach ahead. They made the last steps on their bellies, scratching their knees and elbows.
Thomas gasped, as he saw the trees and old stubs flooded with bright light. It was night, the scatter of stones from where they came out was shielded by thick branches, which whispered anxiously, but the dark sky seemed as bright as day!
Ostap was the only one to come out on the surface, while Taras and Nazar stayed in. Ostap tossed the bag down on the ground, it gave a protesting tinkle. He hurried to take off the sword baldrics, the bow, and the quiver. His voice sounded muffled through the thick black cloth. “Even this light is too bright for us!.. Eyes are watering. We leave. We adjure you again: tell no one about us!”
Oleg embraced him. Thomas shook his hand and assured, “Good sires, I’d never betray people who saved my life!”
Standing in the crevice, Ostap raised his hand in farewell and vanished. Oleg and Thomas stayed in the shining night forest. Puffing with strain, Thomas climbed hastily into his iron armor, clasped the steel plates on legs and arms. At last, he put on his gauntlets, clenched and unclenched his fingers happily. His steel fists looked menacing.
“No wink of sleep,” Oleg warned. He checked his bow and went fingering his arrows critically. “It’s night. A moonless one! May the sun not blind us when it comes out!” He examined the trees thoroughly, squatted to touch the last year’s leaves on the ground, the empty shells of acorns.
Suddenly Thomas clapped a hand to his forehead. “Sir wonderer!.. We’ve spend much time there. I’m afraid I’ll have to ride more than one horse to death to get on the bank of Don by Saint Boromir’s Day!”
Oleg pecked at the earth silently, trying his sword grip, then landed a test blow on a young tree. Being cut down slantwise, it stuck into the dark ground near them, fell across the glade, its branches rustling anxiously. “I’d like to know where we are,” he said thoughtfully. “To see the stars at least…”
“What do you mean?” Thomas was surprised.
