Page 150 of Dawnlands

Again, she was wearing the ragged apron and a necklace of shells. Her nakedness did not disturb him: he had befriended her mother and her grandmother, who never wore more, unless they were coming under the critical gaze of an English border town. But the sight of her bare strong toes on the mulch of the forest floor turned his heart with tenderness for her.

“Can you follow me really quietly?” she asked him.

“I will.”

“And swear you will never tell them, any of them, that you met me and that I was here?”

“I’d never betray you.”

“Follow then,” she said. “Give me that musket and that bag, and your jacket. And try to be quiet in those boots.”

She started at a steady trot, and within moments Ned was blown and struggling to keep up. She paid no attention to his increasingly hoarse panting but kept the same steady pace through the forest, ducking under branches and stepping over fallen boughs, dropping down and down through a gully. Ned could hear the drip of water falling beside them.

After a little while, she held up her hand and stopped; Ned stumbled to a halt behind her, his chest heaving. He had a pain in his laboring lungs, and a cramp in his leg.

She glanced back at him. “Nearly home,” she said, like a son to an aging father. “You’ve done well.”

Ned took a sobbing breath and looked around him. They were in a little clearing. Hot sunlight filtered through the thick canopy, where a troop of monkeys moved and a parrot flew in a flash of green. They were beside a small cave formed from the white limestone rock, half-covered by the trailing roots of the bearded fig.

“We’re here,” she said, and his heart sank at the thought of her living in this cleft in the rock like a beast without shelter.

“Rowan…” he started, as she ducked behind the roots of the fig and beckoned him to follow her.

Before he could protest, she had dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through a little hole. Ned followed her into the darkness.

Their route was downhill; he could feel the tumble of little stones shifting under his hands and knees as he went, following her, ever deeper into the cave system, farther and farther downhill. It was dark at the entrance, but it became pitch-black; he was following her by sound, the rasp of his musket dragged behind her on the stones, the regular thrust of her hands and knees. The space became tighter around his shoulders until he thought that he might not get through. He felt the shoulders of the shirt rip on some rock and had a sudden panic of being stuck underground in the darkness—and then suddenly there was clean cool air, and a light ahead of him, and the sound of water falling, and she said: “Here we are.”

The cave opened up and he blinked at the milky light. There was an opening in the vaulted roof far above him, and the bright sunlight was filtered through the falling water that poured down through the hole in the ceiling of the cave. Under the waterfall, there was a huge lake of luminously blue water; reflections danced on the ceiling, where long fingers of rock, sparkling with white crystals, extended downwards. Some of the rocks were folded like curtains of white silk, some of them pointed like cones of refined sugar. Ned looked around him in wonder: it was an extraordinary place, like a fairy-tale palace. The quality of the light was enchanting, and the cool air on his sweating face made him want to plunge into the turquoise water. Rowan smiled at his surprise.

“This is where I live,” she told him.

“You live here alone?”

“Others live here with me too.”

“What others?”

She took a breath of the cool damp air, as she trusted him with her secrets. “Runaway slaves: a woman and her son.”

Ned slumped down to the floor. “Rowan—if you’re caught?”

“We won’t be caught. These caves go back for miles. They may run through the whole island—we’ve found many entrances and many too narrow to enter. Everything that your people build is balanced on a hollow land.”

“Anyone could come in the way that we came in.”

“Yes, and that’s why I brought you that way. The other, more secret ways, the narrow ways, hidden ways cannot be found. We can get in and out at a hundred places. This is a world your sister Alinor would understand. It is a world beneath the world, inside the world.”

“She has died,” he told her. “Alinor died last summer.”

She nodded as if he were telling her something that she knew. “Ah well,” she said. “Did you bury her with her tools?”

He smiled, remembering the gardening basket on the coffin. “Yes, I thought of your ways.”

“That was good.”

He gestured to the beach where the blue water lapped over the white sand. “Any good dog could track you through that?”

She smiled. “They don’t have good dogs, and that’s quicksand. It would swallow up a dog and all the men that followed it.”