Admetus leaned toward her. “That makes more sense than anything I’ve heard since we left Chiron’s cave. I say we follow the feather.”
“And I!” Lynceus whispered.
“And I!” his brother said.
“And I!” Alcestis added.
Only Jason and Acastus were silent, glaring at each other.
Suddenly Jason broke off eye contact and moved forward, keeping low behind more acacia bushes, until he’d caught up with the feather.
The others trailed behind him, all but Acastus. When they’d almost lost sight of him, he suddenly made a dash to catch up.
“What a band of idiots!” he hissed.
“Why did you follow, then?” his sister asked.
“Because I can’t fight a hundred centaurs on my own.”
Up the mountain they clambered, over rocks and through jagged bushes, the feather bobbing ahead of them.
And then Jason saw something. At first he thought it was merely a shadow cast on the mountainside or a dark wet spot on the granite face. But when they got a bit closer, he realized it was a narrow cleft in the rock.
“Lynceus, look!” he cried.
Lynceus had already spotted it. “It might just be a niche, going nowhere.” But he began to run ahead of Jason.
“Praise the gods!” Alcestis exclaimed triumphantly. “Praise all the gods of Olympus—and especially Hera!”
Jason did not tell her that it was Hera who had wanted her brother and father killed.
They scrambled up to the dark cleft, and Lynceus found a stick, which he pushed into the cleft as far as it would go. It seemed to penetrate straight into the mountain.
Jason looked around for the feather, but it had vanished, seemingly into thin air.
“What do you think, Jason?” Admetus whispered. “Is the opening large enough for us?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe not for Idas.” Lynceus elbowed his big brother.
“More importantly—will it get us to the centaurs?” Now Acastus started to take charge.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Jason answered.
“I wish we had a torch.” Lynceus looked around, but they were above the tree line and none of them wanted to go back to look for branches. “Even I can’t see in the dark.”
“We’ll just have to make our way as best we can,” Acastus muttered.
“So, do you believe now, brother?” Alcestis crowed.
“I’ll believe when I see farther into that cleft.”
Jason turned sideways and slipped between the rocks, into a fairly wide tunnel. “It’s all right,” he called back. “We can all fit but—”
Before he finished speaking, Acastus had pressed in behind him, going from morning light to dark in an instant.
“Grab my belt,” Jason said. “We’ll need to hold on to one another so we don’t get separated in the dark.”
Acastus grunted, not quite an agreement, then grabbed Jason’s belt.
Behind him crowded Admetus, then Alcestis, Idas, and Lynceus, each holding on to the person in front, going down into the awful dark.
CHAPTER 18
THE CAVERN
WHILE THE TUNNEL WAS wide enough for all of the boys, it was clearly too narrow for any centaur, and too low as well. They had to walk crouching, which was hardest for Idas.
“Most likely,” Jason whispered, “the centaurs don’t even know about this tunnel.” He had stopped for a moment, turning to look back. There wasn’t a bit of light.
“Can you still see the entrance?” he called quietly.
“Yes, just barely,” came the reply from Lynceus, who was last in line.
Jason moved forward step by cautious step, probing the blackness with his eyes until they ached from the strain. As he moved, he put his hands out and touched cave wall on either side. That, at least, gave him a sense of where he was. The walls were damp and cold, and soon he had to fight shivering.
“I think the tunnel is sloping downward, so take care,” he whispered back to Acastus, who shared this with the others.
They crept along for what felt like hours. The dark, the cold, the damp were oppressive. They had no sense of the true passage of time.
“It feels like being buried alive,” Admetus whispered.
Maybe, Jason thought, this was a stupid idea. Maybe it’s Hera’s joke—to bury us all in a rocky grave.
Suddenly he thought he saw something up ahead. The faintest glint of yellow, a pinpoint of light in the darkness. Jason blinked once, twice. The light was real.
He stopped, turned, whispered to Acastus, “Light. Ahead.” Jason could feel the others behind him tense; he heard their sharp intakes of breath. Even more wary now, he proceeded forward. But he’d slipped his sword from its sheath with his right hand, the fingers of his left still brushing along the rough walls. If the centaurs were down there, surely he would hear them.
He slowed even further, knowing they had to be silent as shadows. As he paused, he suddenly made out a distinctive murmur of voices, no louder than a distant trickle of water.
“What’s going on?” came Idas’ voice. “Why have we stopped?”
“Shhhhh!” Jason cautioned.
They crowded together as much as possible, all listening.
Then Jason started ahead again, Acastus’ hand gripping his belt.
The patch of yellow grew larger, the voices became louder. There was enough light now that when Jason looked over his shoulder, he could see the outline of Acastus’ face.
“Let go,” Jason whispered. “Let my belt go.” He pointed to his own eyes, then made a walking movement with his fingers, meaning that he was going for a look.
Acastus nodded and released his hold on the belt.
Then Jason began to creep forward until he could see the end of the tunnel and, ahead, the arching roof of an immense cavern opening out high above him.
The tunnel path suddenly began sloping upward. Dropping to his hands and knees, Jason crawled slowly up the slanting rock. When he reached the edge, he lay flat and peeked over. Below were more centaurs than he’d ever seen in his whole life.
One hundred? Two hundred? he thought. Maybe even more than that!
A sea of bearded faces and glossy horses’ flanks filled the cavern. Off to the right yawned the mouth of another tunnel, presumably the one that led outside to where the sentries stood.
Pine torches jammed into notches in the wall cast a flickering yellow light over the whole scene, making shadow centaurs caper along the walls. Resin-scented smoke rose up into Jason’s nostrils so that he had to rub his nose vigorously to keep from sneezing.
Acastus slid up beside him and uttered a muted gasp. “There’s an army of them!”
It was safe to talk as long as they kept it to a whisper. They would never be heard over the bass hubbub of centaur voices.
“Look over there, on the far side of the cavern,” said Jason. He pointed to two jars sitting upon a flat rock with one burly centaur standing guard over them.
Admetus pressed up next to them while the others crouched behind, straining for a view of the cavern.
“Keep down!” Acastus ordered them.
Jason examined the cave before him, assessing it as a hunter checks the lay of the land when tracking his prey. The centaurs had long ago cleared the cave floor of any boulders or large rocks to make room for their gatherings. They had rolled these up against the walls. There seemed to be enough cover there if he chose his moment well and moved stealthily. But Jason knew he would need every bit of skill Chiron had taught him.
Having found somewhere he might hide, he next checked the cleared floor. It was littered with the broken bones of deer, boar, goats, some of them not yet picked clean. Just visible through the milling centaurs was a shallow pit. There were bones in the pit, too, but they were not strewn about. Rather they were carefully reconstructed, forming a complete skeleton of a giant centaur that lay on its side.