The Six

The Six

by Catherine Maven

Copyright © 2008

            It is a jolly scene, for a dungeon.  The Six stand side by side in front of the elongated hearth, each with his or her own cooking pot, laughing and stealing ingredients from one another's store to add to their own pots.  Even in the dim light of the fire, you would not consider them a pretty sight.  With matted and bedraggled hair, brown sackcloth garments worn to threadbare, and feet and legs encrusted with dirt, the sparkle in their eyes is paradoxical.

They are prisoners in this underground room, if one may use so nice a term.  More like a cave, some thirty feet in circumference, but without egress to the outside world, if you discount the narrow shafts for the air vent and chimney flue.  There is no furniture, either, save the sleeping pallets that line one wall. 

The room is lit from some invisible source, and is in light and darkness in roughly-equal measures. There is a food-bin which is always full no matter how much is taken out, though the food is poor fare.  The hearth is a long, low, rough stone fixture that looks as if it had been ill-fashioned a long time before, which it had, and as if it has deteriorated considerably since then, which it has.    

You might expect this group to be despairing, angry, or even mad after this many centuries of close confinement, and yet they seem jovial, easy together the way only old friends can be.  That is why, when later one of the men climbs his rock-pile and begins to scrape the ceiling with his cooking pot, the rest tease him.    

"Looking for Heaven?" one laughs.    

"Shhhh!  You’ll be waking the dragon next ," says another, rolling his eyes theatrically.    

"Don't care," Digger replies convivially.  "Gives me something to do, doesn’t it?  Something to look forward to."    

They glance at one another then, and the tiniest air of sadness creeps into their smiles as they look at him with good humor.  Some of them shrug as if to say, oh well, go on then, you've got to do what you've got to do.  Others look away.  Two of them turn to begin their game of dark/light, which they play with small, flat stones which Digger has excavated over the centuries.    

"I win!" Dark declares to Light.  "That's ten thousand, nine hundred and forty-three you owe me!"    

"How do you suppose you'll collect, then?" Light smiles back.         

"Oh," he says, reaching around her waist, "you could give us a kiss."

She smacks him solidly, but without malice, across the face.  He doesn't even flinch as he sets the stones up for another game.      

"Play again?" he invites.    

"Might as well," she responds coquettishly, "I'm into it for enough, might as well be more."

“Spar?” Fighter asks Fencer.

"Might as well," parries the other man. "I'm into it for enough, might as well be more." The two men face off with the long roots they have fashioned into swords, and begin to fence. Their battle is more comedy than passion, though, so everyone laughs,  and then turn to watch Shaker goes about her own nightly routine.  First she shakes the chimney flue.    

"You've got as much chance of getting out that way as Fencer has of winning!" exclaims Digger, pausing from his own hopeless quest­.

Shaker joins in the general laughter.  You can only remain angry and frustrated for so long.  After a century or two of struggle against the inevitable, you find it harder and harder to take seriously.  And when you're dealing with Merlin's magic, you don't start off with much hope anyway.    

Somewhere along the way, they have lost their proper names.  They have also become increasingly fused, as time has gone by, into a single unit, The Six.  Imprisoned underground by Merlin for plotting to upset his plans with the young boy Arthur. Trapped within time so that while the world has aged and groaned under the increasing weight of its inhabitants, The Six have remained as they were in Arthur’s time.  And pretty much reconciled to spending eternity together, if such is meant to be.

Which was why they are all so shocked a minute later when Shaker, moving on to rattle the grate over the air vent as she does every night, suddenly pulls it off.  The long bolts that have always seemed securely buried in the earth hang loosely from the metal grid she holds in her hands.  She is dumbfounded, as are they all.  Could the magic have worn off?  Are they finally free?  No one moves.    

Finally, Shaker puts the grate carefully on the ground, as if afraid she is dreaming, and peers up into the vent.  It is a tangle of tree roots, stretching up as far as she can see in the dim light.  But there does seem to be a dot of light at the top.  She leans farther in, and then coughs and pulls her head out as loose dirt falls onto her. But she is smiling. Triumphant.     

“I'm going up," she announces into the silence.  No one makes a move to stop her.  They are all sure that the magician has placed more than one set of charms to keep them captive.  He could be back at any time.  No one has ever needed to say this aloud, for each knows they all think it.  Against the force of this belief, Shaker and Digger have struggled.  As against their own fears.  What might lie at the top?    

Shaker struggles to pull her body into the narrow vent. Luckily, their sparce diet has kept her thin. Tree roots have almost totally claimed the space, but they also provide footrests for climbing.  She has to push against the grasping tendrils, and fear crawls up her back. The gnarled and knotted textures feel almost human, like woody fingers grasping at her.  She looks back uneasily, but the tendrils remain inanimate.  She refuses to look up, concentrating on each root as she ascends.  She climbs and climbs.  She is just beginning to tire when she glances up, and sees the opening scarcely feet above her head.  Cautiously, she climbs the last few roots and pokes out her head. 

And sighs in dismay.  On a floor of tree roots and dirt stands a small village. Is it the one they lived in so long ago?  She looks curiously under her feet as she climbs out.  It feels like standing on marshy ground.

She looks up, and realizes there is no sky, only more dirt. A village under the ground.  It appears to be dawn or dusk, but she can spot no obvious source of light. All of the buildings belong to the time they left, and are apparently deserted.    

Then, as she moves forward, a creature—human?—comes out of one of the buildings.  It is as gnarled and stubby as the tree roots surrounding this place, and is so startled by her appearance that she easily dodges it.  She is sure that at one time this creature had been intended as a backup to the cave charms, but it is obviously too old and too surprised to prevent her from moving forward.    

One of the buildings she recognizes. Home? Someplace important, that's for sure.  She enters the open door, closes and latches it behind her to at least delay the creature from following her, and goes straight through to the back of the cottage as if she knows what's there.  Which she doesn't.  Because all she comes upon is a stone wall.  She is trapped.  If the creature follows her in here, she won't be able to get out. And she has no idea what powers the creature possesses, should it get over its surprise.

"No!" Shaker cries into the stillness.  "I won't be stopped now!"  She pounds on the wall in front of her, and then jumps back as loose stone and mortar come tumbling toward her. Age has attacked this structure as well, then.  She peers into the tiny opening in the wall. She can see light.  She feels triumph, joy, and a fierce sweet anger burn in her breast, and begins to tear at the wall in a frenzy, giving no thought to her fingers as they are cut and bleed.  The age-old hope, the need to breathe fresh air and taste the blue sky surges through her like fire, and she cares not for what she might find, nor for what may be behind her.

     As soon as the opening is big enough, she pushes herself through into brilliant sunlight.  She scrambles to her feet and runs a few yards, intending to escape farther, but falls down in astonishment.

     Dazed, she looks around.  Sunlight stings her eyes, but she refuses to close them.  Instead, she narrows them to slits while she adjusts to the brightness.  In front of her is a pathway made from extraordinarily seamless black rock. Before she can collect her thoughts, though, a large brightly-armored beast with a shining coat rushes by her on the path, making a huge bellowing noise.  She leaps backward onto a smaller pathway.

She is gradually able to see more clearly as her eyes adjust to the now-forgotten brilliance of real, honest sunlight.  The buildings are totally unlike any she remembers.  They are enormous, like castles, built of red stones more evenly cut than any she's ever seen—and her father a mason, too.  Each building is surrounded by a green pasture which looks as though it has been closely cropped by goats, only there are no goats to be seen, and, when she sniffs, no goats to be smelled. 

The buildings stretch along the hard pathway as far in either direction as she can see, except on a corner where there is a different sort of building entirely, made of bright colors with a sign revolving in front of it, though there is no wind to speak of.  Merlin's magic must be strong indeed, if all this is illusion.  She hears a voice, and glances around.

"Mummy, look at that lady.  Why is she dressed so funny?"

Though unable to understand a word of this foreign language, Shaker finds herself looking into the fair blue eyes of a small boy, and wants to cry.  How long has it been since she's seen a child?  She longs to hug it, to pet the shiny hair, to ask for food and shelter, but her voice remains locked within her breast.  It is all too much.  Crouching on the ground, she looks up at the mother.

The well-dressed, and astonishingly clean woman—obviously of the nobility—is saying something nervously to the child, edging past, keeping her body between Shaker and her son.

The boy tugs out of his mother's hand, and runs back toward Shaker. "Where did you come from?" he asks.

Although the accent is passing strange, Shaker suddenly realizes she has understood his words.  She turns to point to the hole in the stone wall through which she has only just crawled.

She hardly hears the mother's remonstrations or the child's whining as they hurry off. 

The wall is gone.  She should be only a few steps from it, and it is gone.  Even standing, all she can see is a large, strange-looking structure set far off the road, surely much farther than she ran before she fell.  There is no hole, no wall. 

She sinks to the ground, to cry.  And to wait for the rest of The Six.

*** End of Chapter 1? ***