Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor

“How does it work?”

“I believe I can find the way out of here,” Mr Broom said.

“And yet you didn’t on any of our prior expeditions. And why not? Sheer modesty, I wouldn’t wonder.”

Mr Broom had gone red in the face. “Perhaps you have a plan of your own.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“Do you or don’t you?”

Tomas drew himself up. “If anyone is to lead the expedition,” he said, “I believe that should be me.”

“Oh?” said Mr Broom. “And why is that, can you tell me?”

“Because I am the eldest, and so I have the wisdom of time on my side.”

“The wisdom of time?” said Mr Broom. Apparently he found the phrase humorous.

“That’s what I said,” Tomas answered sternly.

“Does one always accompany the other?”

“In my case I believe it does. Beyond that, and this is inarguable, I have journeyed upriver far more often than you have, and so am more familiar with the terrain.”

“That’s one way to put it. Another way might be to say that you are more familiar with failing to surpass the terrain.”

Tomas levelled a finger at Broom. “I saw the sun set thousands of times before you drew your first breath.”

“And so?”

“I was entering women when you were still soiling your short pants.”

“And so?”

“I slit a man’s throat before you could milk a cow.”

“I still can’t milk a cow. But I think your plan is pure foolishness.”

“It’s no more foolish than yours.”

“Yes, but my plan is mine, and so I prefer it.”

“And just as naturally, I do mine.”

Arriving thus at stalemate, the pair lured Lucy into the fray, asking which plan he himself thought best. Believing each one to be equally poor, Lucy admitted to having no preference at all, a statement which effectively offended both men, who together began to chastise him, for here they were busily concocting schemes while he sat by, marking time, contributing nothing whatsoever.

All this to say there was strife among them, and confidence was ebbing with each passing minute. In the end, Lucy did come up with a plan of his own, and as it happened, this was the idea they could all three of them agree on.

Lucy hadn’t eaten in nearly three days by this point. Tomas and Mr Broom found this alarming in that it had potential to upset their escape, and so they brought him yet another fish and sat before him; and whereas earlier they were disinterested in whether or not he chose to eat, now they were all the more keen, so that Lucy felt a pressure to please them. His hunger was startlingly vivid; it stabbed and pinwheeled in his stomach and seemed at times to possess the attributes of colour. And yet he felt he simply could not perform the action of severing the metallic scales with his teeth, and he told his comrades he wouldn’t do it.

“It will give you pluck, and so you must,” said Tomas.

“If we’re leaving in the morning, as Mr Broom says, then I can do without.”

Mr Broom shook his head. “We’ll be days in the darkness, and it will take our every bit of strength to see this through, if it’s even possible to see it through. I’m sorry, Lucy, but we really must insist that you eat.”

Lucy glared at the fish, knowing that he would consume the thing but hating it, and unsure just how to start. Tomas touched the tip of his finger to the fish’s belly. “Here,” he said. “Just shred it away.” At last Lucy drew the fish to his face and bit into its flesh; at the same moment he did this, the fish fairly exploded, shooting out a clammy glut of roe, for it was a female, and had been on its way to the spawning ground when captured in the stone corral. Lucy was incredulous, and he sat very still, roe clinging to his cheek and chin. When Mr Broom and Tomas ceased laughing, they took the fish away and fetched him another, a male. Lucy did not dawdle with this, but consumed it with a certain violence or anger. Soon the fish was but a head, tail, and skeleton; and as Lucy felt his body accepting the much-needed nourishment, then did his mood lighten. He lay back on the sand, watching the distant purple circle which was the shading sky framed by the mouth of the Very Large Hole. His stomach squirmed loudly, relentlessly; he was listening to this with dispassionate amusement when a consequential thought, like a bird flown through an open window, came into his mind and perched there. He sat up alertly, looking across at Tomas and Mr Broom, both of whom had also eaten and were ruminating upon their own concerns.

“The fish head upriver when they spawn, do they not?” said Lucy.

“They do,” said Tomas.

“How far upriver do they travel?”

“I don’t rightly know. Do you, Mr Broom?”

“A good long while, anyway,” Mr Broom answered. “Why do you want to know?”

“Well,” said Lucy, “if we were to follow one, mightn’t she lead us to freedom?”

When he said this, Mr Broom, too, sat up. Tomas wore a sceptical expression; and yet there was a stiffness or seriousness to him as well. He asked, “And how might one do such a thing, even if we weren’t making the journey in total darkness?”

Lucy was staring at the woman’s boot, situated once again in the centre of their circle. He believed he knew the answer to Tomas’s question but he didn’t answer right away, forcing himself to act with calm. He took the boot up and poured out the water. Removing the lace, he lay this in a straight line before him, watching it awhile before unlacing his own boots, and tying each of these to the first, tripling its length. Mr Broom drew his fingers to his mouth in a gesture of surprise and recognition; now he also began unlacing his boots. Tomas didn’t understand what was happening, and had to be enlightened; once this was done, he still didn’t want to give up his laces. But Lucy and Mr Broom entreated him, and though Tomas thought it far-fetched, neither did he want to spoil their fun, and so he handed over his laces as well, and these were tied to the rest, so that there was now a single lace of goodly length laid out between them. They studied this for a long while, and with something like veneration, representative as it was of their last chance for escape. Later, and the men slept, dreaming their dreams of vainglory, the tongues of their boots lolling in the sand as if exhausted.

The idea, of course, was to tie the string of laces to the tail of a fish on its way to the spawning ground and, as one walking a dog on a lead, follow the fish to the river’s wellspring. It was, Lucy thought, not just a good idea, but the only idea — the only logical method other than blind luck or brute force which might see them home again. He was prouder, perhaps, than he’d ever been in his life, and it was difficult not to discuss and rediscuss the idea’s inception and canny brilliance with the others, neither of whom was, Lucy felt, appropriately enthusiastic or complimentary about it. Mr Broom seemed to think it almost a shared notion, or one which was so obvious that he would have come to it himself in the blue-skied by and by.

They selected the fish from the corrals, a moderately sized female who had been caught only the morning prior, and so, they hoped, had not had time to become idle. Tomas held her still while Lucy attached the bootlace to her tail. While this was happening she was full of fight, but once transferred to the river she merely floated in place, and the three men stood and stared, waiting. Lucy gave a tug on the bootlace but nothing happened. He gave a second tug, less gentle this time — still nothing. He hadn’t considered the possibility of failure, somehow; and in the face of it, he felt a gross despair gathering about his heart. But now, and with no small amount of relief, he saw the bootlace was growing taut, and that the fish was pulling towards the mouth of the cave. She had been temporarily demoralized by her capture and imprisonment, or else was flummoxed by the fact of her tail being fettered and had needed a moment to gather her wits, but the spawning instinct had returned, and she would see the impulse through to its natural conclusion.