South of Winter, Two Singulars

       The lanky middle brother had vanished before dawn, and Snufkin never learned if he had abandoned his pursuit of Joxter. The whole day was spent gaining the southern mountains. The walking was easy. Snufkin found the rhythm of the road again, and his leg scarcely troubled him. Only a slight, weary stiffness in the right shin by evening, nothing of consequence. Come the next morning, the Gunman led him not to a friendly, sloping mountain foot but directly toward a sheer cliff-face, though gentler saddles were visible along the ridge. “No passage there,” he’d answer with a cryptic smirk, and stopped only at a thicket of acacia clawing at the foot of the stone. There the mumriks spent a solid hour bundling dry branches into faggots, each as long as a man’s arm. Snufkin guessed. “Through caves, then?” “Spot on.” Reaching the underworld’s door required fighting through the acacia’s thorny embrace, then climbing higher over boulders of limestone rough as sandpaper, before dropping into a narrow slot between two great stones, a hole no wider than a pack and a half, invisible from any angle. The Gunman lowered their gear on a rope, then held it fast while Snufkin slithered down, jumping down last himself. It was not deep—two mumriks’ height at most. A low tunnel yawned in the end of more or less level spot no bigger than the veranda of the Moominhouse. “Tomorrow we’ll come out the far side, right on the Round Hills,” the Gunman explained. “The eastern or southwestern passes would’ve meant a week’s detour.” Then here’s your chance to repay the favour… And if you spot something interesting … Mountain or marsh passes that cut days off a journey… just send word with a swift or a gull… Snufkin shook his head, trying to dislodge the pirate captain’s voice and the hopeless understanding of his truth. But the thought clung, tenacious as a burr. The Gunman struck a match. A bundle of twigs caught with a crackle, burning with a pale, smoky flame. For mumrik eyes, however, it was light enough. It painted the cavern walls in a wavering fresco of ancient stone and deeper shadow, and the cold, still air began to taste of dust and secret depths. “Not fond of caves?” he asked, and Snufkin hurried to compose his face into something neutral, shrugging, not trusting his voice. His history with caves was a complicated one. A shallow stone overhang for the night was one thing, but descending into the earth’s gut… He disliked the narrow, oppressing spaces, the stale, unmoving air, the prospect of being sealed under a rock mass. On the other hand, risk lent a flavour to the most ordinary things. And only in caves could one find absolute silence and blackness, or mysterious sounds and shapes, or entire grottoes of crystals that shimmered like captured light, wonders unknown to the surface world. But here there was only ordinary limestone shot through with seams of slate and basalt, unremarkable, faintly damp, dusted with calcite and streaked with the dark runnels of ancient water. No pick-axe marks, no soot from many torches. “No one lives here? Or passes through?” Snufkin asked, just to be sure. “Bats live here. Blind fish,” the Gunman replied, his voice the same low whisper the stone seemed to demand. “As for passing through… other mumriks, perhaps. But I’ve seen no sign of them.” He clearly knew the way, choosing without hesitation between two or three branching tunnels, leading them into corners where an unobvious gap would lay behind a fall of rock, warning of a low ceiling or a slick patch underfoot. Snufkin could follow, his mind free to wander its own darker passages. So the clan of Dire Straits did not know of this route. The information could hold value for them. No one would be harmed if the clan’s agents used it. Yes, scouting for pirates was a sour thought, but neither did he wish to be an ungrateful wretch like Joxter. Unless… what if he reported directly to Moominmamma, and not to the other captains? She would weigh the harm and the good. But that would be merely shifting the burden onto her. That too felt wrong. The torchlight danced over walls that had seen no light for a thousand years, and his conscience wrestled in the silence, a small, troubled thing in that immense and indifferent dark. Time in a cave was hard to reckon, the only indicator a grumble in the gut. But above, the day must have been rolling into evening when the Gunman stopped at a narrow place in the tunnel and turned, his face lit by that rare, ear-to-ear grin of his. “You’ll see now,” he whispered, and lit a second torch. The circle of light swelled, pushing the walls back. One turning, then another. The flame shivered in a sudden draught—ahead lay open space. And indeed, the passage ran into a cavern so vast its walls were lost to the gloom. Well it was not the walls that commanded the eye first, anyway. The doubled light scattered sparks across the wet surfaces of impossible forms. Pillars, icicles, columns, shapes for which there were no names. Some were a milky beige, of gypsum, others translucent. “Crystal?” Snufkin marvelled. Surely not diamonds… “Ice.” For a long while they stood at the cavern’s edge, silent before the magic of water, stone, and flame. The Gunman glanced at his brother now and then, and Snufkin understood him well. Had he led Moomintroll to such a place, he too would have watched in secret, all flustered, to see what wonder it would stir. Then the Gunman touched his elbow. He doused both torches in a puddle a few steps away and whispered into the absolute dark: “Stand still. Listen.” Without the crackle of fire, the rustle of cloth, only the natural music remained: the clear ringing of drops falling from every icicle and stalactite, striking pools or stone from different heights, at different intervals. If one held one’s breath and became all hearing, these notes seemed to arrange themselves into a melody, gentle, capricious, like nothing else. In the perfect dark, visions more fantastical than any torch could reveal arose behind the eyes. It was… no, words failed. Music would too. On a harmonica, one could only ever conjure a ghost of it, a reminder of the wonder. His head grew light from the shallow breath, yet all the time in the world would not be enough for this music to grow stale. So after a time, Snufkin simply drew a deep breath and said, very quietly, “Thank you.” A few seconds later, a match scratched. It flared, illuminating a dry branch and the Gunman’s hand, and once more the pearled shimmer of refracted light began to dance across the stone, a poorer but kinder thing than the perfect dark. He passed the second torch to Snufkin this time and again told him to watch, adding, somewhat abashed, that there was no need to follow. Then, pausing a moment, he darted into the grotto and began to walk soundlessly among the gypsum statues. Not a simple walk, but a measured dance—altering his pace, his direction, the length of his stride so that every falling drop missed him, leaving the cavern’s magic melody undisturbed. He stopped at last on a dry clay elevation and glanced back. Not as a challenge, but Snufkin took it as one all the same. Only he stood longer, listening to the voices of individual drops along the path to that island. And he had, in any case, memorised his brother’s trajectory. And so he danced the whole way, striving not to slip, not to forget the bulk of his pack, not to lose the wild, syncopated rhythm… And only at the very end, standing beside the Gunman, did he stretch out a hand without looking, and a single drop fell squarely upon his sleeve. “I’d leave a silence in that beat,” he announced, tilting his chin up, the mischief proving contagious. The Gunman shook his head, but he was smiling. “Well? Feeling better? You seemed right gloomy back at the entrance…” Snufkin remembered at once all the grim deliberations about reports to pirates, but he merely nodded. Now he knew the answer. In his head swarmed the notes of the cave’s own melody, and his breath came easy. He would never betray such beauty to those who would likely see not a wonder, but an obstruction, and level it all to a flat, useful floor. And a debt could be repaid some other way.