Trembling and sweating, soaking wet at the earth’s heart, the top of the passage pressing down already on his spine, Cyprian breathed away the panic that communicated from the butcher’s body with a quick electric buzz. Slow, Cyprian said. His voice surprised him with its gentle firmness. Slow and easy. Fidelis was using all his strength to move his hands, just his hands. Ich weiss nicht, Cyprian heard the butcher say. And then he heard himself tell the butcher in that same calm and compelling voice that he could do it, that Fidelis must back out of the hole with him, that he must let Cyprian go back in alone.
“I have done this before,” said Cyprian. His voice told a calm, kind, reasonable lie. As though it were an everyday thing to fetch a boy from a crack deep in a mound of earth. He didn’t know how he caused his voice to sound so persuasive, except that he knew Fidelis would listen to nothing less than an utterly convincing argument. He must be given no way to argue back. “You’re too big — you could kill him if you try to drag him out. I’m trained for this. I can get the boy out. For your boy’s sake, come out with me now. Come out.”
And like one tranced and obedient, Fidelis did as he was told at that moment. Their antagonism had abruptly turned to a magnetic loyalty. The two men inched backward, crawled slowly back out the passageway into the blaze of lanterns. When Cyprian’s boots appeared, men rushed forward to help and he screamed them back again.
At his terrible yell, they did fall back and crouched in a circle around the entrance that looked impossibly small for two grown men to have gone into it, disappeared as though the hill had swallowed and then in some act of peristalsis conducted them to its center. Cyprian edged out and then gently, bit by bit, the butcher emerged. Kneeling in the white light, both men entirely blackened by the wet dirt, gasped their lungs full. Cyprian called for rope.
“I must go back,” the butcher said, lunging toward the hill. It was unbearable to have left the boy. Cyprian tackled Fidelis and held him around the waist, wrestled him backward, called out, “Delphine, Delphine, tell him.” The light blazed around them in a slick radiance. The air was cold and wet with the first drops of a blowing rain.
“Cyprian can do it,” Delphine said evenly, seeing the shape of things. She held the butcher’s eyes in her gaze. “Let him go.”
Those who watched said, later, how Cyprian seemed to dive into the earth, plow himself in as though he’d suddenly grown into a boneless earth swallower, a great human night crawler. He disappeared. And Fidelis, stunned and shaking his great head, his eyes wide and white in his mud-crusted face, stayed behind. He slumped in the dirt, waved the other men off with a violence they understood at once. They fell back, away from him, took the lanterns aside and left him in darkness as he wished. Only Delphine had no fear of him and did not leave his side. He seemed of the earth itself, waiting there, his breath ragged. Although she was too lost in her own suspense of terror to dwell on Fidelis, she did wonder whether he was praying. She never had known him to pray before, and although she released what she felt were foolish, beseeching, desperate words from her mind, she knew even as she thought these words that her prayers were not prayers. She should have listened to Step-and-a-Half. Now her pleas were no more effective with the powers that made the earth than the protesting bellows of cows prodded into killing chutes. Still, she begged despairingly for the rain to hold off, for the earth to mesh, for the flimsy tunnel to hold. Perhaps she muttered something out loud, for the butcher reached over and grasped her hand as though to quiet her, or perhaps himself, or maybe he didn’t know what he was doing at all with Delphine’s hand, or that he even had hold of it as the two of them knelt like petitioners at the entrance.
IT REALLY WAS a matter of finding his balance, only not in air, but inside the earth. When Cyprian went back in, he eased himself into the ever narrower tunnel with a swift intention he hoped would carry him past the point, halfway through, where panic came up, shutting down his brain, racing his heart. It was natural, this fear, like the stillness he encountered nearing the top of a flagpole where he’d actually stood. He saw a yellow screen of lights, breathed in an even whistle to control what he knew, from the war and from his more dangerous tricks. His first limit. He had a benchmark where he encountered the first level of his fear, and he knew he could get beyond that initial sick drop of his guts by thinking only of one breath, the next, then the next. By balancing along his own interior wire. And so he breathed himself through the tightest center of the passageway, and he crawled deeper. At last, he came to the place where Fidelis had reached up into the tiny hatch of space.
The boy was there all right. At first he thought with a wave of terrified disappointment that the boy was dead. But then he felt along Markus’s body and with his fingertips touched the boy’s lips and was certain he felt a small burst of warmth. And further, at a right angle to the boy, he discovered a small space into which he could pass the earth he removed in small handfuls, for that was all he took away. One handful, another judicious handful, a scraping of dirt here, some brushed away and some plucked, as though he were an archaeologist uncovering an ancient and fragile treasure. Even so, twice, the earth seemed to shudder around them. He didn’t know that it was thunder from an approaching storm, a storm that would drench the watchers and cause ten of them to wrestle Fidelis to the ground when he dropped Delphine’s hand and tried to reenter the earth.
Cyprian concentrated only on each bit of dirt he pulled away, only that, until he was able to expose the boy sufficiently to unwedge him just by inches, to bend him slightly at the waist. As he’d worked incrementally, Cyprian had understood that he’d have to fold the boy out of the place where he was caught. So he continued, in complete blackness, to draw the earth methodically first from one limb, then the next, then to turn the boy, then to fold him at the waist. He wrapped Markus’s arms across his chest and then with the tenderest of little pulls, slowly, through the tiny aperture, he delivered Markus onto the passageway floor.
There was a flop of dirt as the boy came free; one of the boards gave way just where Markus had lain, and Cyprian put his hands around the boy’s face to shield it, but the tunnel did not give way entirely and the earth held around them once again.
It was good that the boy was unconscious, for Cyprian could feel that a bone was broken in one arm, and who knows what else, and he was afraid the boy might thrash around in pain if he came out of shock. So he roped the boy’s limbs, tied him up like a package, and he left a loop he could pull. He took that piece of rope in his teeth and edged backward, feet first, down the tunnel and out into the rain. And when the lights blazed over him, and the men roared at the sight of him, Markus came quietly and momentarily awake. Emerging from the narrow opening, blinking away the dark, the first face he saw was Delphine’s, in a circle of radiance, as she unlashed the ropes and drew him into her arms.