She wasn’t even surprised. However astonishing similar things might be, identical things were not. One could be astonished at the close resemblance of brothers but not at that of identical twins. So she couldn’t be astonished at this moor, for it was not merely like. It was the one she had known, and that was all there was to it. The two, though they seemed separate in time and space, were the same place.
So musing, believing herself half dreaming, she came to the edge of the cliff at last, feeling a familiar panic, a fleeting urge to jump. Why? Why the panic? Why … because there was something following her. Something seeking her. Now? Or then?
She puzzled over this as she turned left along the rim-rock. This was the way she had always turned. The cliff was as she remembered, and the soughing of the sea. She wandered slowly along the precipice, around this stone and that twiggy growth, searching, believing she had missed it, as she had always believed—
Only to come upon it suddenly: the outcropping of stone, the branch extending into space, the bare, pale, polished place upon the wood where her hands, someone’s hands, had rubbed the bark away to make a smoothness. Without thinking, without decision, she leapt out, hands extended to grasp, the springiness of the wood coming as a shock to the muscles of her arms as she bounced pendant beneath it like a toy jerking upon a string. No hole, she told herself in sudden panic. No hole in the cliff. Nowhere to go from here.
The fear was only momentary. The entry was there, a darker crevice among the striations of the cliff face. And a protruding stone where she needed to put her foot. And a ropy rootlet hanging down …
She didn’t really remember this part. In her dream, she felt the details of the cave rather than smelled or heard or saw them. This cave felt sandier; it had no bracken bed. It felt smaller, too, but then, it would have seemed larger to the child she had been when she had dreamed it first. The trickle of water was there at the back, making a modest puddle on its hollowed stone, seeping away down a mossy crack. She remembered caches of food. There were none in this cave. She remembered warm animal skins, and they, too, were missing. She could bring food. She could bring blankets and armfuls of cut bracken to cushion her rest. From this time forward, she would go to bed with the others, but when they slept, she would sneak away to spend the dark hours here, in this refuge above the sea.
Now she lay down on the sandy floor, her body taking the curved form so often imposed upon it, knees up, thumb in mouth, hip seeking a familiar hollow. The stones beside the entry were piled as she had left them in dream. She reached with one hand to stack them, the larger ones on the bottom, the smaller above.
Moving the stones disclosed a niche. In the niche was a painted jar with a lid. Snark’s eyes drifted across it, hardly seeing it. Though she hadn’t remembered the jar before, hadn’t recalled its presence or patterns, she did so now. The jar had always been there, its egglike shape of white clay covered with dark swerving lines, wings, and faces. She even knew the names of those portrayed. Father Endless and Mother Darkness. Mother had put the jar there. Someone … someone named Mother had put the jar there. And inside were the bones of …
Whose bones? Why there?
She fell asleep before she could answer the question.
Just before dawn she had a momentary panic when she prepared to leave the cave and realized she didn’t know how. She remembered coming here, yes, time after time, escaping here, yes, finding refuge here, cuddling down warmly, nose to the gap in the piled rocks, smelling the sea wind, hearing the birds when they woke before dawn to plunge out in their screaming spirals above the sea. She could remember eating here, jaws moving in slow mastication while the birds screamed and dived. She could remember sucking up the slow seep of water as it accumulated on the hollowed stone. She even remembered squatting on the minuscule ledge, skinny butt jutting over the gulf as she peed down the face of the cliff, her own tiny stream joining the vast ocean below, but she had no memory at all of ever leaving this place.
So, how did she get out? The branch that had dropped her down had sprung back to its position above, out of reach. The cliff overhung the ledge. Above was invisible, unreachable. She sat, fighting panic, thinking it out. She needed something to draw the branch down. Once she had hold of the branch, she could pull herself up. So, she would use her belt, with a stone tied to the end to give it weight.
She tried this, but her belt was too thick, too inflexible. She took off her shirt and tore strips from it, braiding them together for strength, succeeding at last in drawing the branch down, close, where she could reach it. As she bounced and juddered, working her way up to the rim of the stone, she resolved next time to bring a strong line with a weight affixed so she would have the proper tool to get out. She must have had such a tool before.
