Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (16 page)

“Yes, it works on kerosene. They’re all like that in the town nowadays. And there are gas lamps in the streets. I’ll show you some day for certain.”

They crossed the little river on stepping stones: Durka ahead, Pelagia following, with one hand holding up the hem of her habit. The cockerel hopped along behind.

They walked through scrubby brushes for nearly a mile. And then the cliffs began. The girl walked quickly and confidently. The nun could barely keep up with her.

Once again Pelagia got the feeling she had had in the Forest, as if the night was watching her, like a thief, not looking her in the eye, but staring at her back. She even glanced around, and of course she spotted some shadows moving behind her, but she didn’t allow herself to feel frightened. If she was afraid of the night shadows, how could she go into the cave? That was where it would be really frightening.

Perhaps I won’t go in after all
, Pelagia thought with a shudder.
I’ll just
take a look at it, and that’s all. Indeed, why even bother to look? What do I need with this cave anyway?

She couldn’t find an answer to that, because there was no rational answer. And yet she knew, even without understanding the reason, that she had to look at the place where Durka had found the prophet Manuila. It was irrational; Sergei Sergeevich would not have done it. But then he was a man—she was made differently.

“There’s Devil’s Rock,” the girl said, stopping and pointing one finger at a dark hump that rose up in a sheer wall. “Shan’t we turn back now?”

“Lead me to the cave,” Pelagia ordered, then gritted her teeth so that they wouldn’t start chattering.

The place really did feel eerie. It was probably terrifying here even during the day, with those cliff faces crowding together and the absolute silence ringing in your ears. At night it was far worse. But Durka didn’t seem to be afraid at all. For her, no doubt, memories of Manuila painted this ominous landscape in different colors that were not frightening at all.

“Do you often visit the hollow?” asked Pelagia.

“I haven’t ever gone inside again. But sometimes I run to Devil’s Rock.”

“Why don’t you go inside?”

The girl twitched one shoulder. “I just don’t.” She clearly didn’t want to explain.

Rousty the Rooster also seemed to be feeling just fine. He hopped up onto the big boulder and spread his wings in lively fashion.
So am I the only coward here?
Pelagia rebuked herself, and asked, “Well, where is it? Show me.”

The entrance to the cave proved to be inside a fissure overgrown with bushes. It pierced the cliff face in a narrow wedge shape.

“There,” said Durka, parting the branches. Through the predawn twilight Pelagia made out a narrow black opening, about a yard high—you had to bend over to enter.

“Will you go in?” Durka asked respectfully. The rooster darted between her legs. He looked at the hole inquisitively, hopped forward, and disappeared inside.

“Of course I will. And you?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Will you wait here?”

Durka shook her head. “I’ve got to run now. Fediushka the shepherd will be driving the flock out soon. Don’t you be scared, Aunty. Only don’t go too far in. Who knows what it’s like in there … When you go back to the village, stick to the path. Well, ’bye now.”

She turned and dashed away, her white calves glimmering in the darkness.

Pelagia crossed herself and held the lantern out in front of her. She went in.

DURKA WAS RUNNING on air, so lightly that it seemed to her she wasn’t running at all, but flying over the white haze of dawn that was spread out just above the ground. She even threw her hands out to the sides, like the stork bird.

To get back in time to drive the sheep out, she’d have to run faster and faster, or that Fediushka would give her a good lashing across her backside.

’Sallright, ’sallright,” Durka whispered as she dashed along between the rocky walls of the cliffs. It helped you run better if you kept saying that:
’sallright, ’sallright
.

She’d already figured it out in her head: she’d run as far as the bushes, then she’d be out of breath and she’d have to walk to the river. And there she could fly on again, all the way across the meadow. If only she could get there in time—look, it was almost completely light now.

But she never did get out of breath, because she didn’t run very far from Devil’s Rock, only about fifty strides. At a point where the path squeezed right up against the wall of rock, a large black shadow swayed away from the cliff and moved to meet the girl.

“Emmanu …” Durka started to call, but she didn’t finish.

Something sliced through the air with a predatory whistling sound. There was a brief crunch of bone.

Then there was silence.

In the cave

IT SHOULD BE said that in deciding to enter the black opening, Sister Pelagia had to overcome more than just the usual female wariness, of which the nun probably had almost none anyway (at least, in her case, curiosity always won a decisive victory over timidity, even in situations fraught with greater risk than the present one). No, there was a more serious reason for her trepidation.

The problem was that for some time now, following a certain adventure that had taken place in the none too distant past, the nun had had special reason to be wary of caves. And the mere awareness that there were invisible stone walls squeezing in on her on all sides out of the darkness, and a vault of stone pressing down over her head, was enough to set Pelagia’s soul trembling in raw, mindless terror.

Reaching one hand above her head and failing to find the ceiling, she straightened up and forced herself to calm down. Now what could possibly be so terrible in this cave? Some predatory beast? Unlikely. If a bear or a pack of wolves had made the cave their dwelling place, there would have been a sharp odor in the air.

Bats? It was too cramped for them in here—they couldn’t flap their wings properly.

By and large, she managed to reassure herself and calm her nerves. Lighting the lamp, she shone the light in all directions. She proved to have been wrong about the cave being cramped: inside the narrow entrance hole the cave expanded both sideways and upward, so that the walls were lost to sight, drowned in the darkness.

At the very edge of the circle of light she glimpsed a small, low shadow. It was Rousty the Rooster, exploring the new territory.

What did I come in here for anyway?
Pelagia asked herself.
What need was there for it?

She walked forward a little and saw that in the far corner, the walls and the ceiling converged again, but the cave did not end there—it simply seemed to turn upward.

The holy sister put the lamp on the floor and sat on a projecting ledge of rock. She wondered why destiny was always driving her into caves of one kind or another. What kind of parable was this—these niches under the ground? What did the Lord want them for? What was the significance of their invention? There was a meaning to it, and a special meaning, too, that was clear to everybody who had ever, even once in his life, wandered into an isolated cave that was at all deep.

And after all, there was so much commentary on them in Holy Writ. The ancient Israelites had lived in caves and buried their dead in them. The prophet Elijah heard a voice from a cave that asked him: “Why are you here, Elijah?” And could it really be a coincidence that Christ’s resurrection had taken place in a cave?

A natural passage into the bowels of the earth—surely that was an opening from one world to another? From light into darkness, from the visible to the invisible? A cave was like the crater of a volcano, which led from the surface into the essential core of the earth—a planet that, according to science, consisted ninety-nine percent of blazing fire. We were all flying through the darkness on a ball of fire with nothing but a thin crust of solid ground over it. Death was above our heads, but also below our feet.

Perhaps as a result of her philosophical ponderings, or perhaps for some other reason, Pelagia thought she saw the darkness around her start to quiver and flow. She began feeling drowsy, and she heard a low, vague ringing sound that couldn’t possibly have been caused by anything in this place.

And then something else happened.

From out of the darkness on the side where the entrance was, she heard a crack, followed by a rumble. At first indistinct, then louder and louder.

Pelagia dashed toward the sound. She crawled into the narrow passage on all fours, her heart pounding furiously. And her hands encountered a solid barrier of rocky scree.

A landslide!

She tried to clear the stones, but it was hopeless. Pressed down from above, they were locked solid. Pelagia broke her nails as she tried desperately to shift the heap at least a little, but she got nowhere. On the contrary, she heard the sound of new rocks falling on the outside. The heap shifted slightly toward the nun as it was subjected to an even greater load.

CALMLY, NOW, let’s not have any female hysterics
, Pelagia told herself, wiping the fine beads of cold sweat off her forehead with her sleeve.
Tomorrow, that is, later today, Durka will see that I haven’t come back, she’ll come running here and realize what’s happened. If she can’t clear the
stones away herself, she’ll bring the peasants. For something like that she’ll recover the gift of speech
.

A few hours to wait. A day at most. It was bad, of course, but not fatal. The nun made her way back to the spacious open area and forced herself to sit down. She wound down the wick in the lamp in order to use the kerosene more economically.

She sat there until suddenly her heart was seared by a horrible thought:
You were trying to guess what was drawing you to this cave, weren’t you? Perhaps you were drawn here because this is the very place appointed for you to meet your destiny? What if the instinct that drew you here was not the instinct of life, but the instinct of death?

This sudden surmise frightened Pelagia very badly and made her jump to her feet. What a cruel trick of fate it would be if she were to die here! Truly a case of Curious Varvara getting her nose pulled off! And worst of all, it was so stupid, there was no need for it, no sense to it!

I have to do something
the nun told herself.
Otherwise I shall go insane in here. What do they want with me, these cursed caves? What are they tormenting me for, what have I done to displease them?

She picked up the lamp and set off upward over the gravel and the small stones. Perhaps she could find another entrance.

The cave narrowed so much that she had to scramble along on her elbows and knees. She crawled a couple of paces, then dragged the lamp from behind her and set it higher up ahead. Then she crawled again. The poor nun tried not to think about the fact that there could quite easily be snakes here. They would just be waking up after their winter hibernation. April, the vipers’ venom was at its strongest. Lord, Lord …

After a while the passage widened and led out into a new hall, much larger than the lower one. Pelagia explored the empty space. She walked to the left and the right and found at least nine passages—if they weren’t simply cracks. Which path should she choose?

It turned out that the rooster had also managed to make his way in there. And he hadn’t lost any of his high spirits—he was running back and forth, his claws clattering gaily.

Then the holy sister remembered that Durka had said a rooster would always find its way out of a maze. She squatted down in front of the bird and started coaxing him: “Rousty Rousty Rooster, you show me the way out of here and I’ll get a whole sack of millet for you. Eh, Rousty?”

He looked at her with his face turned sideways, listening to her tender voice. But he didn’t actually go anywhere.

Then Pelagia lost patience. She picked him up and started carrying him to each of the passages by turns, putting him down and watching to see if he would go in.

The rooster skipped into the first crack, but immediately jumped back out again. He didn’t even stick his beak into the second. But then he darted nimbly into the third and disappeared from view.

Pelagia picked up the lamp and squeezed in after him. This burrow was even narrower than the one that led from the first level to the second. Pelagia almost got stuck in one place, like a bottleneck. Somehow she managed to force her way through, but afterward she couldn’t reach the lamp, and it was left behind and below.

She scrambled on in pitch-black darkness, feeling for anything to hold on to. She was soaked through and shivering—there was cold water running over the rocks. But that still didn’t mean that there was a way out higher up; everyone knows that water can seep through any crack, and sometimes it even filters through solid rock.

The nun tried to drive out of her mind the terrible thought that now the passage would narrow down to such a tiny crack that it would be impossible to go any farther. Then that would be the end, and a terrible one, because it was quite impossible for her to reverse direction. She would be stuck here in this stone shroud, and nobody would ever find her … Why, oh why had she decided to follow the rooster? She ought to have stayed down below and waited for help!