Still she moved from left to right, hoping for something to change. Shuffling sideways, her feet encountered a gentle slope . . . alas, rising no more than another meter or so. Yet it made a crucial difference. At the limit of Maia's tiptoe reach, her fingertips passed beyond the scummy crust of shells and stroked smooth stone.
High-water mark. The ceiling's above high tide! This offered possibilities. Assume I waken him in time. Could Brod and I tread water and float up with the current, keeping our heads dry?
Not without something strong and stable to hang on to, she realized with chagrin. More likely, the waves' flushing action would first bash them against the abrading walls, then suck their fragments outside to join other rubble left by the reavers' bombardment.
The only real hope was for a cleft or ledge, above. If there's'some way to get up there in time.
She returned to check on Brod, and found him sleeping peacefully. Maia bent a second time to drag the boy up the little hillock she had found. Then she began exploring the cave wall in earnest, working her way further to the right, patting the layer of barnacle creatures in search of some route, some path above the killing zone. At one point she gasped, yanking her hand back from a worse-than-normal jab. Popping a finger in her mouth, Maia tasted blood and felt a ragged gash along one side. May you live to enjoy another scar, she thought, and resumed searching for a knob, a crack, anything offering a hint of a route upward.
A minute or two later, Maia almost tripped when something caught her ankle. She bent to disentangle it and her hands felt wood — a shattered board — snarled with scraps of canvas and sodden rope — fragments of the little skiff they had wrecked without ever giving it a name.
Shivering, she continued her monotonous task, whose chief reward consisted of unwelcome familiarity with the outline of one obnoxious, well-defended marine life-form. A while later, the sandy bank began to descend again, taking her even farther from her goal, and nearer the icy water.
Well, there's still the area leftward of where I put Brod. She held out little hope the topography would be any different.
On the verge of giving up and turning around, Maia's hand encountered … a hole. Trembling, she explored its outlines. It felt like a notch of sorts, about a meter up from the sandy bank. It might serve as a place to set one's foot, to start a climb, but with a definite drawback: the proposed procedure meant using the sharp, slippery barnacle shells as handholds.
Maia turned around, counted paces, and knelt to grope amid the wreckage she had found earlier. From remnants of the shredded sail, she tore canvas strips to wrap around her palms. For good measure, she looped over her shoulder the longest stretch of rope she could find. It wasn't much. Hurry, she thought. The tide will be in soon.
With difficulty, she found the notch again. Fortunately, the soles of her leather shoes were mostly intact, so Maia only winced, hissing with discomfort as she set one foot in the crevice and reached high above, tightly grasping two clusters of shells. Even through canvas, the things jabbed painfully. Tightening her lips together, she pushed off, using muscles in first one leg and then the other, drawing herself upward with both arms till she stood perched on one foot, pressed against the wall. Now sharp stabs assaulted the entire length of her body, not just the extremities.
Okay, what next?
With her free foot, she began casting for another step. It seemed chancy to ask a cluster of shells to bear her entire weight. Yet it must be tried.
To her astonishment, Maia encountered a better alternative. Another slim, encrusted notch in the wall — and at just the right height!
I don't believe it, she thought, pushing her left foot inside and gingerly shifting her weight. It can't be a coincidence. This must mean . . .
Checking her conclusion, she freed one hand and felt about until, sure enough, it met another notch. One that had to be exactly where it was. The notches are woman-made … or man-made, since this place used to be a sanctuary. I wonder how old this "ladder" is.
No, I don't. Shut up, Maia. Just concentrate and get on with it!
The notches made climbing easier. Still it was an agonizing ascent, even when her face lifted above the scouring layer of plankton-feeders and she had only to contend with smooth, rectangular cuts in the side of an almost-sheer wall. Maia's muscles were throbbing by the time her groping hand encountered a ring of metal, bolted to the rock. The rusty tethering collar proved useful as her final handhold before Maia was able at last to flounder one leg, then another, over a rounded lip and onto a stony shelf.
Maia lay on her back, panting, listening to a roar of her own heavy breathing. It took some moments to appreciate that all of the sound wasn't internal. I can hear. My ears are recovering, she realized, too tired to feel jubilant. She rested motionless, as echoes of each ragged inhalation resonated off the walls, along with a watery susurration of incoming swells.
Her pulse hadn't yet settled from a heavy pounding when she forced herself up, onto one elbow. Got to get back to Brod, Maia thought, wearily. The re-descent would be hard, and she had not figured out how to drag her friend up here, if it proved impossible to rouse him. As always, the future seemed daunting, yet Maia felt cheered that she had found a refuge. It drove off the sense of hopelessness that had been sapping her strength."
She sat up, letting out a groan.
More than her own echo came back to her, muffled by reverberations.
"M-Maia-aia-aia?"
It was followed by a fit of coughing. "M-my god-od-od . . . what's happened? Where is she? Maia-aia-aia!"
Resounding repetitions caused her to wince. "Brod!" she cried. "It's all right! I'm just above—" Her calls and his overlapped, drowning all sense in a flood of echoes. Brod's overjoyed response would have been more gratifying if he didn't stammer on so, offering thankful benedictions to both Stratos Mother and his patriarchal thunder deity.
"I'm above you," she repeated, once the rumbling resonances died down. "Can you tell how high the water is?"
There were splashing sounds. "It's already got me cornered on a spit of sand, Maia. I'll try backing up … Ouch!" Brod's exclamation announced his discovery of the wall of shells.
"Can you stand?" she asked. If so, it might save her having to climb down after him.
"I'm … a bit woozy. Can't hear so good, either. Lemme try." There were sounds of grunting effort. "Yeah, I'm up. Sort of. Can I assume . . . everything's black 'cause we're underground? Or am I blind?"
"If you're blind, so'm I. Now if you can walk, please face the wall and try working your way to the right. Watch your step and follow my voice till you're right below me. I'll try to rig something to help you up here. First priority is to get above the high-water line."
Maia kept talking to offer Brod a bearing, and meanwhile leaned over to tie one end of her rope around the metal grommet. It must have been put there long ago to moor boats in this tiny cave, though why, Maia could not imagine. It seemed a horrid place to use as an anchorage. Far worse than Inanna's tunnel hideaway on Grimke Island.
"Here I am," Brod announced just below her. "Frost! These bitchie barckles are sharp. I can't find your rope, Maia."
"I'll swing it back and forth. Feel it now?"
"Nope."
"It must be too short. Wait a minute." With a sigh, she pulled in the cord. Judging from Brod's ragged-sounding voice, he wouldn't be a good bet to make the same climb she had, unassisted. There was no choice, then. Fumbling at the catches with her bruised fingers, she unbuttoned her trousers and slid them off, over her deck shoes. Tying one leg to the rope with two half-hitches, she also knotted a loop at the far end of the other leg, then dropped everything over the side again. There was a gratifying muffled sound of fabric striking someone's head.