Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 32)

The next few days were the most paradoxical that Mishael had ever known. In circumstance they were the lowest, the most hopeless, the most distressing and uncomfortable, unspeakable in their horrors of degradation and misery. And yet, in his heart he was the freest, the merriest, the most unshakably hope-filled, and in such an overwhelming and imperturbable fashion as he could simply not account for. Shashi, too, was overjoyed at Mishael’s arrival, and thought of the terrible prospects of their future only occasionally, and was almost always able to put those thoughts out of his mind at once, and so genuinely to enjoy his conversations with his childhood friend. The two of them would laugh and chatter all day long in their gloomy little cells, like schoolboys anticipating the near advent of summer, with its longed-for break from the classroom, and its tantalizing world of unforeseen adventures and pleasures.

The old, apathetic prison guard was at first incredulous, then skeptical, then baffled, and finally, for the first time in his twenty-plus years of service, amazed. He would never have admitted it, but he actually found himself looking forward to that part of the day in which it was incumbent upon him to bring the two of them their scant daily rations of tasteless moss-gruel and fetid water. He would find reasons to linger about their cells, just to listen to the two of them converse cheerfully about childhood memories, the ups and downs of their recent adventures, the people they had met along the way, the winsome and beautiful Ariel who had been made to stay behind in Lebben-Or – and in short, every topic under heaven. Eventually, he became courageous enough to contribute a few stale phrases to the conversation, at first gruff and cynical, but then longing, desperate, pleading, almost jealous.

And in fact he was jealous. He refused to admit it, even to himself, for several days. But one morning, about five days after he had first admitted his prisoners, as he was rushing through his other duties, yes, literally rushing for the first time in many long years, he suddenly paused, scowled, and cried out to himself in a loud, angry voice, “You’re jealous, you old fool! Jealous of prisoners who are only waiting to be tortured and killed! What has happened to you, you foolish old man!”

And then, he broke down and wept openly, and the tears that had not moistened his cold, heartless eyes for more than a score of years were soon coursing freely down his wrinkled old cheeks, washing away the dirt and grime of the stifling dungeon.

When he arrived at the joint cells of Mishael and Shashi that day, he was as silent as he had been at the beginning. He did, however, give them both a little more than the usual supply of food, the extra bit of which no doubt came from his own daily fare, and he lingered even longer than usual. Finally, without a word, he tore himself away from the little cell and went back to his other duties. He was up very late that night, for his extended stay had put him quite behind in his work.

The next morning, the prison guard showed up as usual at the cells of the two friends. He seemed unusually distracted, agitated, full of nervous energy, and he stood before the cell doors for a few moments, fidgeting with his massive hands and feet, and obviously trying to get the courage to say something that he considered very important. Finally, in his characteristic gruff voice, but with an almost imperceptible edge of solemn and mysterious anticipation of some monumental event, he addressed the prisoners:

“We’ve received report that Javan will be here by tomorrow. When he returns, he will come here at once. You will be tortured, interviewed, kept alive as long as possible only so that you might be made to know more pain. Finally, when they have wrung everything they can wring from you, they’ll kill you and cast aside your broken bodies. It’s not an end I would wish on anybody.”

Here, the prison guard sighed, and said pensively, in a faraway tone, “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and no one has escaped. But how could anyone escape, unless his door were inadvertently left unlocked, and unless I inadvertently dropped my key ring on my way out, which will open all the doors between here and the surface of the city. Even then, it will probably be impossible to escape, though. But what does a fellow have to lose?”

Then, deliberately, he opened both cell gates, thrust through the daily fares as usual, and shut them again almost all the way, only stopping before he heard the characteristic click of the pin springing back to deadbolt the door.

Without another word, the old guard turned around and walked out of the tunnel, in the direction from which the two friends had been brought in to their cells, and toward the place where Gilead and Carl were still presumably locked up and awaiting the return of the Grand Proprietor.

For a few minutes, there was a surprised silence. Finally, Mishael called out to Shashi in a hushed tone, saying,

“Did he really do what I think he did? Is he really letting us go? But why?”

“Maybe it’s just a trap,” Shashi replied. “Maybe he’s trying to catch us in the act of escaping, to give himself an excuse to torture us.”

“But why would he need an excuse?” Mishael replied. “What we have already done is more offensive to Vrak than what we would be doing in trying to escape. No,” he concluded pensively, “as inexplicable as it is, I think this was a genuine gesture of goodwill. Will impossible things never cease to surprise us?”

“Hey!”, Shashi cried out all of a sudden, in a voice louder than the foregoing conversation had been conducted in, louder than he intended, in fact, so that he at once put his hand up to his mouth in an act expressive of censure and self-restraint.

“Hey,” he said again, this time softly, “It’s just like your mirror showed! You said there was an open door, right? Well, this is the open door! After this will come the toppling of the walls and the freeing of the slaves. We have no time to lose, let’s go find Gilead and Carl, maybe we can find Tobiah too, and after that…well, I haven’t gotten that far yet. But we’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

“Would it be wiser to wait until nighttime, though?”, Mishael asked, really just because he was grasping for some reason to deliberate further, as the whole prospect of running off alone through the gloomy tunnels all around held very little appeal to him at the moment.

“But what’s nighttime?” Shashi answered immediately (and very sensibly); “just because we wake up at a certain time doesn’t mean that’s morning. It’s always night in here, and we have no way of knowing whether it’s now midnight on the surface or broad daylight. Only our guard would know that, and if he’s letting us escape, he’s probably giving us the opportunity at the time at which our chances of success would be the likeliest.”

What Shashi was saying was true of course, and Mishael had to admit that he was just a little taken aback and nervous. So they came to a point of agreement, deciding at once to step out through the open door, work their way back, the best they could remember anyway, to where Gilead and Carl had been left, and keep their eyes open for the key ring along the way.

And so they stepped through the open doors in their cells, and for the first time in several months, they actually saw each other face-to-face, and could not contain themselves, but embracing each other heartily they wept once more, only this time with tears of joy and hope for the future.

The two reunited companions walked briskly down the dreary tunnel, which was inadequately lighted with a few smoldering torches spaced much too far apart on the moldy walls. They were looking first of all for the key ring that the guard had hinted he might “inadvertently” drop, and second, for the gate through which they had to pass before entering the block in which their friends were being held.

They had only walked a few yards when their attention was arrested by a strange zipping noise, sounding as if a stiff rope had suddenly been tightened against itself. The noise ended in a sort of muffled thump, and was immediately followed by the sound of rustling clothes, which gradually faded away to silence. At the same time, their eyes caught an out-of-place glare on the floor up ahead of them, just before an open doorway, as if some metallic object were reflecting the light of a torch (and there was in fact a torch hanging on the wall directly above that part of the floor).

As they walked closer, they saw that the glare was indeed caused by a ring of keys that had been dropped on the floor. And when they stooped over to pick up this ring, they saw a pair of boots, familiar boots, which they had seen every day since they had been in the Dragon’s Dungeon. The boots were dangling some two or three feet off the floor; and as they looked on, one of them jerked with an awkward, unnatural spasm, then grew still again.

Snatching up the keys, Mishael ran the rest of the way to the end of the tunnel, with Shashi right behind him.

They soon found the key to unlock the gate at the end of the tunnel, and began making their way back in the direction from which they had come. Mishael was thoroughly disoriented and Shashi was not much better off either; “but if we could just find our two companions,” Mishael whispered, “then maybe Carl can show us the way out. After all, he’s lived here all his life.”

When he finished whispering, he was immediately answered, not by Shashi, but by another whisper coming directly from his left, and very near, which only said,

“Mishael? It can’t be you, can it?”

“Gilead!” Mishael whispered excitedly. Then, turning to Shashi, “We found them after all, somehow!”

Turning again toward the cell from which Gilead had whispered to him, Mishael said softly, “We have the key; we’re on our way out. Only, is Carl still with you?”.

“Yep, I shor am,” came the sound of a voice that was placidly pleasant, even if a little doltish. Carl didn’t sound surprised at all. In fact, the thought struck Mishael that, in a way, he must be like Elkanah himself, taking the good circumstances and the bad without a complaint, neither amazed by the good nor distressed by the bad, but going along through life with a contented air of satisfaction which suggested that, as he considered himself in every respect a little less worthy than other men, so he considered every circumstance he encountered a little better than he deserved, just because it was not quite as bad is it could have been.

“Carl, our dear comrade!” Mishael addressed the pleasant voice; “We’re going to have to rely on you now. Do you know the way out of here?”

“Yep, I shor do,” the voice replied again, although this time with just a trace of surprised pleasure, no doubt because of the fact that, for probably the first time in his life, he was truly needed, indispensable even.

“But first,” Mishael continued, “We need to find Tobiah. Do you know where he’s being kept?”

“Yes, we need to tell you about that,” Gilead replied, cutting off Carl, who seemed to require a little more time than most to formulate any response, however basic; “A few days ago, not long after we had been locked up, there was a bit of a stir in here. Two or three soldiers came knocking at the gate – the big one, you know, that we passed through together when the guard opened it up – and anyway, the guard, who seems to be the only person allowed in here under normal circumstances, let them in, and we overheard them telling him of an escape. Apparently, two men dressed up as soldiers of Vrak, but who were actually only spies, infiltrators they called them, had made their way down here unquestioned and unopposed.”

“From what we could piece together, these supposed soldiers seem to have wandered about these tunnels for some time; and finally, whether by chance or inside information nobody knows, but somehow they found Tobiah’s cell, which must not have been too far from our own, just on the other side of the big gate. At any rate, they popped the hinge pins right out of his door, which the soldiers were baffled by, as they had never seen such a thing done before and had not previously thought it possible. Well, then they must have covered Tobiah with a hood, and in broad daylight they marched him right out of the dungeon, handcuffs and all, with such an air of grave authority that these three soldiers, all of whom had seen the three men leave together, did not dare to question them. Tobiah and his mysterious rescuers have not been seen ever since.”

“Elkanah and Azariah!” Mishael whispered. “They must have donned the armor of a couple of the soldiers slain by our dear fallen comrade and walked right into the city with the rest of the returning army! If we had just stayed away from the city, then, Tobiah would have been rescued anyway, and we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

“But then where would I be?”, Shashi asked. “And besides, your mirror showed a whole tribe of freed slaves. I think there may be some further purpose in your little trip to the dungeon.”

“But regardless,” Gilead interrupted, “it is our first concern to find a way out of here. Carl, take us out of here by the most out-of-the-way route you know. The whole city will certainly be watching for us before long, as soon as they become aware of our absence. And that will probably be soon indeed, for the prison guard is due here at any time.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about him,” Mishael said, and for some reason he was a little sad to say it. “But still, you’re right. We must leave at once.”

By this time, Shashi had the door unlocked, and with Carl at their head, the four companions set off at a subdued trot down the dismal, sunless passages of the Dragon’s Dungeon.

Already, the Dragon’s twisted entrails were rumbling and stirring. It felt as if the very depths of the earth were heaving in agony, preparing to vomit out their inhabitants once and for all. A couple of the deep, seismic spasms were strong enough to cast one or two of the travelers to their knees.

For what seemed half a day, but was actually only about ten minutes, the four fleeing comrades fled through the hellish tunnels at an ever-increasing rate of speed, until they were all but sprinting down its dark corridors. “’S only a little bit further,” Carl gasped out finally, utterly out of breath. “Th’ gate t’ th’ city’s armpit’s right up thar.”

Just then, the gate toward which Carl was pointing gave off an ear-jolting screech, as it turned on its rusty hinges; and a few seconds later, the sound of footsteps mingled with coarse, sadistic laughter and cruel, perverted chatter echoed toward them down the last few feet of the tunnel. The sounds were getting closer at an alarming rate.

“Carl, we just passed a little doorway a few feet back; where does that lead?”, Gilead whispered urgently.

“Uh, th’-that, uh…oh, that little gate back thur? Wull, that goes to the pit whur the Exatoits live” (the awkward name of the last tribe, the “Eschatoi,” was apparently quite beyond our friend’s limited linguistic ability). “Only nobody uses it no more, cuz thar’s a faster way now –”

“Quickly!” Gilead whispered, cutting him off again; “Down that tunnel! Only be quiet about it!”

The four friends darted into the dark little tunnel just before the soldiers arrived. They kept on walking and chatting, entirely unaware of the presence of the escapees just a few feet away. Finally, when the sound of the footsteps had faded away, Gilead spoke up again:

“Carl, if we keep following this tunnel, will we find a way out of the city? Somewhere that turns off before the pit? It will be too dangerous to try to get over the city wall right now. Soldiers could come by at any moment, as we’ve just seen.”

“No, th’ tunn’l goes direc’ to th’ pit,” Carl answered. “’Cept, thur’s a little hole what goes up to a gate in th’ city wall, whur they bring out th’ garbage. They allus go out that little gate, an’ pop down into th’ tunnel, and from thur it’s nought but a few feet to git t’ th’ edge o’ th’ pit an’ dump th’ garbage down.”

“But between the city gate and the hole in the tunnel it’s open? I mean, there would be no wall holding us back, if we came up through that little hole? We’d be out of the city?”

“Why shor,” their newfound friend responded; “it’s only a few feet. Why ‘ould they make a wall fur but a few feet?”

“Without pausing to respond, Gilead whispered, “Let’s go!”

Together, the four of them set out down the dark little tunnel. Apparently, this tunnel was now so little-used that it was no longer justifiable to keep torches burning in its passageways, so the surroundings soon became pitch black. But with their hands on the walls the companions felt their way ever further to the edge of the city, where they hoped under cover of night to escape with their lives, and make their desperate flight back to Lebben-Or.

In the meantime, the rumbles beneath the surface of the ground were becoming ever more pronounced, and it was starting to be difficult even to walk.

“We have to hurry!” Gilead whispered again; “We don’t have much time!”.

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