Over most of the valley, the tall trees grew toward the tops of the slopes, along the cavern walls; farther down there was scrub and then meadow, with a few coppices here and there. Occasionally he found a tangle of brush and vines, compacted into a single whorled mass with tunnels all through it, some of them large enough to admit a man. He ventured into one of these, and had crawled a dozen ells into a pleasant leafy gloom, when, as he pulled himself around a bend, he heard a "Whuff!" and found himself staring into a furry, big-eyed face almost as big as his own. He was too astonished to think of drawing his sword, even if there had been room in the tunnel; the beast turned and vanished, and Thorinn, with some difficulty and many scratches, backed out again.
Droppings were plentiful, from pellets the size of millet-grains to chalky lumps the size of his fist. In the soft turf of the meadows and along the river bank he found the prints of sharp hooves or claws, angled backward. One early morning he surprised a thing like a large hare, and knocked it over with a stone. It got up and leaped off into the bushes, but not before he had seen that its hind legs had blunt spiky claws, and that it leaped by thrusting its toes into the ground.
Birds' eggs there were in plenty, in the treetops and in the reeds along the river. The water birds mocked him with scornful honks, a few ells away in the stream, but when they went ashore with their webbed feet they were almost helpless; he lay in wait for them in the rushes, caught them, and wrung their necks. Three times more he climbed a tree just before dawn or nightfall, and three times he saw the same brown bird.
To pass the time, Thorinn let the box tell him more of its stories about how the world was made. There were little bits of matter, too small to see, and these bits themselves were made up of smaller bits, and so on. Then there were things that were not solid at all and could not be seen either, and with these things it was possible to keep time from passing in certain places, so that, for instance, the weight of the earth above a cavern in the Underworld could not crush it, and also the heat of the lower parts of the earth could be drawn off and kept until it was needed. For all these things the box had outlandish words of its own, and it always told the same stories concerning them, but it could not give any proof that they were true, and Thorinn could not see what use it was to know them.
As for the world itself, the box maintained that it was a great ball, the Midworld being its surface, with a sort of tent all around it to keep the air in. When Thorinn asked what was beyond that, the box replied that it was a vast space like a cavern with no walls, which nevertheless did not go on forever but had an end somewhere; and when Thorinn inquired what was beyond that, the box replied that the question was senseless.
The box further maintained that the world was pushing itself about in this enormous cavern by means of tubes which pierced the tent and from which invisible particles were expelled. Snorri's Pipe, it appeared, was one of these tubes, but just when Thorinn thought he had understood this, and asked why the tubes had only now begun to make the world go faster, the box replied that on the contrary, they were slowing it down.
He tried to teach the box a game of insults, which Withinga and Untha had often played in the evenings (though with them the game had never lasted long before one player lost his temper); but he could not seem to explain to the box what an insult was, and having to play both sides took the fun out of it. Weary of walking on his toes and crawling in the underbrush, he cut a piece of deadwood with a projecting stub, flattened it with his sword and tied it to one shoe so that the stub was angled backward under the ball of his foot. Now he could leap as the hares and other animals did, though he could never catch them.
After the first few days he grew tired of sleeping in the wet forest, and moved into one of the tower rooms, a small chamber directly under the peak of the roof, where, he reasoned, he would have the most warning if the owners came back; it had a window through which he could escape quickly into the trees if necessary. He slept poorly here, and had bad dreams.
He awoke one morning with the fantastic notion that there were cellars under the city, with hidden trap doors, and that the tower people with all their children and livestock were hiding below. The feeling was so strong that he went and looked at the floors of the central shaft, and the byres and workshops, but they were solid packed earth, as he had known before. Yet, if the people and their animals were still in the cavern, they must be hidden underground. He felt them there, by day and night, dumb eyeless presences.
He explored the valley, first downstream, then up. Twice he found small steadings tucked away between the forest and the meadows, but they were as deserted as the city. At the far end of the valley, the river turned into a labyrinth of more and more sluggish waterways. Wading with poles in the marsh, Thorinn found that the water flowed under the cliff through a slot too narrow for a man. For sport and to vary his diet, he took a bow and some arrows he had found in the city, and practiced shooting at a mark until he had lost all but two of the arrows in the brush. He had a tendency to shoot high, and supposed that was because the arrow, not being as heavy as it ought to be, fell too slowly in flight.
He fetched more arrows and continued to practice outdoors; he also hung a mark at the top of one of the inner wells in the city and shot at it from below. When he could hit this target more often than not, he threw it into the air and practiced shooting at it as it soared. He kept on, day after day, until he seldom lost an arrow, and could hit the target in flight nine times out of ten. Then one morning he got up before dawn and climbed a tree. Balancing himself on a limb just below the tip, he unbuckled his belt, passed it around the stem and refastened it. Now, leaning back against the belt, he could look upward without losing his balance or risking a sore neck.
In the treetops all around him, birds were making their morning noises. He waited. The golden bar appeared at the end of the cavern, and he found time to wonder where the light came from that turned the dark sky-moss bright—did the sky of one cavern join that of another, all around the Underworld? He took an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, drew the bowstring back. The light swept overhead, and in the instant of its passage he clearly saw the brown bird. He released the arrow; it vanished silently into the glare, but he knew it had been truly aimed. He put another arrow to the bow and squinted upward. There! A dark shape gliding down, turning, crippled. He let fly, missed, nocked another arrow, released it, and this time saw it strike. The bird was pinwheeling slowly into the trees. Thorinn marked the spot where it vanished and scrambled down.
A rhythmic thrashing in the underbrush led him to his quarry. Transfixed by two arrows, in the body and in the wing, it lay tangled in spiky bushes, still trying to fly. One wing was crippled; the other flapped, flapped, flapped.
Thorinn bent nearer. It was a large bird, bigger than a hawk, but having a short, straight bill. Its feathers were dark brown above, buff below. Its bright eye stared fixedly past him; the beating of its wing neither quickened nor faltered. Thorinn drew his sword and struck. The blade rebounded; the bird's neck was bent but not cut through, and there was no blood. The rhythmic flapping continued. Thorinn struck again, with no better result. Finally, conquering his revulsion, he pulled the thing out into a clear spot, where, holding it against a fallen log, he chopped with his sword until he had cut the neck half through and opened a gash in the body beneath the crippled wing. Cut feathers drifted away in the wind of his blows, but still the bird did not bleed. At last the flapping stopped. Inside the body Thorinn saw unfamiliar dry shapes, unlike the entrails of any bird or beast. He carried the carcass back to the clearing outside the city and there, on a flat stone, gutted and dismembered it. In all its outer parts, feathers, skin, eyes, talons, it was like a bird. Inside were bulging strands, some dun color, some yellowish, that were flexible and soft to the touch but so resistant that his Yen-metal sword could barely cut them; here were networks and skeins of red threads and blue; here clusters of white balls. "Box, what sort of bird is this?"