Shibumi

listened with hushed attention to verse they could never understand? Was it not Papa Cagot who had gone into Spain with this outlander, Hel, to rescue thirteen who were in prison without trial?

Le Cagot's voice came over the wire. 'I think I'll stay here for a while.' He was no longer panting and rasping, but there was a calm of resignation alien to his boisterous personality. 'This place suits me.'

Not sure exactly what he was going to do, Nicholai began to speak in his soft voice, 'Neanderthals. Yes, they're probably Neanderthals.'

'What are you talking about?' Le Cagot wanted to know.

'The Basque.'

'That in itself is good. But what is this about Neanderthals?'

'I've been giving some study to the origin of the Basque race. You know the facts as well as I. Their language is the only pre-Aryan tongue to survive. And there is certain evidence that they are a race apart from the rest of Europe. Type O blood is found in only forty percent of Europeans, while it appears in nearly sixty percent of the Basque. And among the Eskualdun, Type B blood is almost unknown. All this suggests that we have a totally separate race, a race descended from some different primate ancestor.'

'Let me warn you right now, Niko. This talk is taking a path I do not like!'

'...then too there is the matter of skull shape. The round skull of the Basque is more closely related to Neanderthal man than the higher Cro-Magnon, from which the superior peoples of the world descend.'

'Niko? By the Two Damp Balls of John the Baptist, you will end by making me angry!'

'I'm not saying that it's a matter of intelligence that separates the Basque from the human. After all, they have learned a great deal at the feet of their Spanish masters—'

'Argh!'

'—no, it's more a physical thing. While they have a kind of flashy strength and courage—good for a quick screw or a bandit raid—the Basque are shown up when it comes to sticking power, to endurance—'

'Give me some slack!'

'Not that I blame them. A man is what he is. A trick of nature, a wrinkle in time has preserved this inferior race in their mountainous corner of the world where they have managed to survive because, let's face it, who else would want this barren wasteland of the Eskual-Herri?'

'I'm coming up, Niko! Enjoy the sunlight! It's your last day!'

'Bullshit, Benat. Even I would have trouble with that double dihedron. And I have two good arms and don't suffer the blemish of being a Neanderthal.'

Le Cagot did not answer. His heavy breathing alone came over the wire, and sometimes a tight nasal snort as his broken arm took a shock.

Twenty centimeters now, thirty then, the boy at the winch took up the slack, his attention riveted to the cable markings as they passed through the tripod blocks, swallowing in sympathetic pain with the inhuman gasping that filled his earphones. The second lad held the taut take-up cable in his hand, a useless gesture of assistance.

Hel took off his headphones and sat on the rim of the gouffre. There was nothing more he could do, and he did not want to hear Benat go, if he went. He lowered his eyes and brought himself into middle-density meditation, narcotizing his emotions. He did not emerge until he heard a shout from the lad at the winch. Mark 40 meters was in the blocks. They could take him on the line!

Hel stood at the narrow crevice of the gouffre mouth. He could hear Le Cagot down there, his limp body scraping against the shaft walls. Notch by notch, the lads brought him out with infinite slowness so as not to hurt him. The sunlight penetrated only a meter or two into the dark hole, so it was only a few seconds between the appearance of Le Cagot's harness straps and the time he was dangling free, unconscious and ashen-faced, from the pulley above.

When he regained consciousness, Le Cagot found himself lying on a board bed in the shepherd's artzain xola, his arm in an improvised sling. While the lads made a brushwood fire, Hel sat on the edge of the bed looking down into his comrade's weatherbeaten face with its sunken eyes and its sun- wrinkled skin still gray with shock under the full rust-and-gray beard.

'Could you use some wine?' Hel asked.

'Is the pope a virgin?' Le Cagot's voice was weak and raspy. 'You squeeze it for me, Niko. There are two things a one-armed man cannot do. And one of them is to drink from a xahako.'

Because drinking from a goatskin xahako is a matter of automatic coordination between hand and mouth, Nicholai was clumsy and squirted some wine into Benat's beard.

Le Cagot coughed and gagged on the inexpertly offered wine. 'You are the worst nurse in the world, Niko. I swear it by the Swallowed Balls of Jonah!'

Hel smiled. 'What's the other thing a one-handed man can't do?' he asked quietly.

'I can't tell you, Niko. It is bawdy, and you are too young.'

In fact, Nicholai Hel was older than Le Cagot, although he looked fifteen years younger.

'It's night, Benat. We'll bring you down into the valley in the morning. I'll find a veterinarian to set that arm. Doctors work only on Homo sapiens.'

Then Le Cagot remembered. 'I hope I didn't hurt you too much when I got to the surface. But you had it coming. As the saying is: Nola neurtcen baitucu; Hala neurtuco care cu.'

'I'll survive the beating you gave me.'

'Good.' Le Cagot grinned. 'You really are simpleminded, my friend. Do you think I couldn't see through your childish ploy? You thought to enrage me to give me strength to make it up. But it didn't work, did it?'

'No, it didn't work. The Basque mind is too subtle for me.'

'It is too subtle for everybody but Saint Peter—who, by the way, was a Basque himself, although not many people know it. So, tell me! What does our cave look like?'

'I haven't been down.'

'Haven't been down? Alla Jainkoa! But I didn't get to the bottom! We haven't properly claimed it for ourselves. What if some ass of a Spaniard should stumble into the hole and claim it?'

'All right. I'll go down at dawn.'

'Good. Now give me some more wine. And hold it steady this time! Not like some boy trying to piss his name into a snowbank!'

The next morning Hel went down on the line. It was clear all the way. He passed through the waterfall and down to the place where the shaft opened into the great cave. As he hung, spinning on the cable while the lads above held him in clamps as they replaced drums, he knew they had made a real find. The cavern was so vast that his helmet light could not penetrate to the walls.

Soon he was on the tip of the rubble heap, where he tied off his harness to a boulder so he could find it again. After carefully negotiating the rubble heap, where stones were held in delicate balance and counterbalance, he found himself on the cave floor, some two hundred meters below the tip of the cone. He struck on a magnesium flare and held it away behind him so he would not be blinded by its light. The cave was vast—larger than the interior of a cathedral—and myriad arms and branches led off in every direction. But the flow of the underground river was toward France, so that would be the route of major exploration when they returned. Filled though he was with the natural curiosity of a veteran caver, Hel could not allow himself to investigate further without Le Cagot. That would be unfair. He picked his way up the rubble cone and found the tied-off cable.

Forty minutes later he emerged into the misty morning sunlight of the gouffre. After a rest, he helped the lads dismount the aluminum-tube triangle and the anchoring cables for the winch. They rolled several heavy boulders over the opening, partly to hide it from anyone who might wander that way, but also to block the entrance to protect next spring's sheep from falling in.

They scattered stone and pebbles to efface the marks of the winch frame and cable tie-offs, but they knew that most of the work of concealment would be done by the onset of winter.

Back in the artzain xola, Hel made his report to Le Cagot, who was enthusiastic despite his swollen arm throbbing with pain.

'Good, Niko. We shall come back next summer. Listen. I've been pondering something while you were down in the hole. We must give our cave a name, no? And I want to be fair about naming it. After all, you were the first man in, although we must not forget that my courage and skill opened the last of the chokes. So, taking all this into consideration, I have come up with the perfect name for the cave.'