Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  A narwhal horn always points to the North Star.

  That was another thing the folk legends said. Mara looks, and catches her breath. Amazingly, the narwhals are tracking a route through the icebergs, their spiralling tusks pointing straight to the Star of the North. And the narwhals know what Mara doesn’t: where the hulking mass of icebergs lurk under the waves.

  Between the radar, the narwhals and Rowan’s pinball skills, maybe, just maybe, they can make it through.

  Mara rushes below deck. The hoard of objects the urchins looted from the netherworld museum is stashed behind a pile of crates in a corner of the hold, watched over by urchins and Scarwell’s model apeman.

  ‘Telescope,’ says Mara, but the urchins have no intention of letting anyone get their hands on their loot. She mimes the act of putting a telescope to her eyes, pleading, but it’s no use. The urchins are fierce guards. Snarling, they bare teeth, more feral than child-like.

  ‘The telescope!’ she commands. ‘Wing? Where’s Wing?’

  A small, wiry, filthy creature jumps down from a crate, gives her a wide smile and holds out his hand.

  ‘I don’t have any presents, Wing. Listen, I need the telescope.’ She does the telescope mime again. ‘Please?’

  There is a wordless, stubborn calculation in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, you!’

  Mara yanks off her backpack and rummages until she finds her own precious loot, a pencil. She scribbles on a crate then rubs out the mark with the rubber. Wing watches, fascinated.

  ‘Deal?’ says Mara.

  Wing grabs the pencil. He pulls out a telescope from the plastic bag that is tied around his waist and replaces it with his new toy.

  At last.

  Mara trips over a crumple of plastic bags in her rush to get back on deck. There’s a howl of pain.

  A head emerges from the plastic bags. It’s Gorbals, huddled in a ball of seasick misery.

  Mara kneels down beside him. ‘What are you doing down here on your own? It’s not safe. Come up on deck. The sea is a lot calmer now.’

  ‘Grooo,’ he grunts.

  ‘Come on,’ she urges. ‘I’ll show you something amazing.’

  He follows her unsteadily and trips over a jumbled heap. Mara helps him up, then sees that the jumble is clothing. She picks up one of the garments. It’s an embroidered coat, tough and weatherproof, with a fur hood and lining. She sniffs the garment and knows the material, though she can’t tell what the fur is. The people of her island made winter boots and jackets from this.

  ‘Sealskin! Where did these come from?’

  ‘The ratkins stole it all from the museum.’ Gorbals glares at the urchins. ‘They bite if you try to take any of their stuff.’ He shows her teeth marks on his arm.

  Mara turns to the urchins. ‘Wing!’

  The child peeks out from behind a crate. Mara rummages in her backpack and takes out the crumpled sheets of blank paper she stole from Fox’s grandfather. She folds them into paper birds as she used to do for her little brother, Corey, with the pages of an old book.

  Mara fires the paper planes at the urchins who yelp and scrabble to catch one.

  ‘Now I’m taking these clothes.’

  Wing only grins as he sends a paper bird flying through the air.

  Mara pulls an embroidered sealskin coat over her thin New World clothes. There are skin mitts in the pocket too.

  Gorbals is pulling a sealskin jacket over his bedraggled tatters. The arms are much too short and his tattered plastic clothes hang out of the sleeves. He only just manages to pull the hood over his head. But he doesn’t care. A skimpy sealskin is warmer than any amount of ragged plastic clothing. ‘The ratkins have rat skins anyway. They don’t need clothes.’

  ‘Lucky them,’ says Mara. She grabs the heap of skins and takes them up on deck.

  ‘Treenester clothes are too thin for the wide world,’ says Broomielaw, close to tears as she and Clayslaps snuggle inside a warm heavyweight of animal skin.

  ‘Favouring your friends?’ snipes Ruby, recoiling as a passing urchin bumps into her. She stares in disgust at the child’s thick-downed, weather-toughened skin.

  ‘Yup,’ Mara snaps back.

  She hands coats to the Treenesters but not to Ruby, and heads for the the control cabin where Rowan is so numb with cold that Mara has to pull the coat over his head.

  ‘We have guides in the sea,’ Mara tells him. He looks at her with weary blankness. ‘Narwhals.’ She gives him a hug and the sealskin coat crackles. ‘Remember what I said about reading signs in the world? If we follow the narwhals, they’ll help us through.’

  She rushes out to the bow of the ship and scans the dark sea with the telescope. At last she picks out the glint of a horn.

  ‘Look.’ She hands the telescope to Gorbals.

  ‘Risings of fire and risings of sea,’ he chants and lowers the telescope in a shaky fist. ‘A war in the sky, now ghosts and swords in the sea.’

  ‘You have been reading my book.’

  Gorbals nods and hands the telescope back to Mara.

  ‘What are narwhals?’ he whispers.

  ‘Huge sea creatures, much bigger than a man, with long tusks like swords.’

  The glimmering tusks of the narwhals surge northward as Mara tells Gorbals the folk legends of these ancient lords of the sea. If the sword-like horns disappear or veer off in another direction, they’ll alert Rowan. But as long as they can keep the narwhals in sight, keep on their track, they might just stay safe.

  There’s so much in the world that’s impossible to trust, that misleads and betrays: people, maps, books, weather, sea and land. But some things hold true. There are the September geese, flocking through hidden corridors in the sky. And the narwhals, navigating the icebergs, horns thrust at the North Star.

  THE DARK WAVE

  A tentacle of light lifts the lid of the night and a path through the icebergs becomes clearer. Now Mara can locate each one at a distance, instead of them looming with lethal suddenness out of the night. The twilight has softened them into milky castles that drop lumps of ice like clots of cream into the ice-soup sea.

  Sometimes a trick of the light will set an iceberg ablaze with sunset amber or turn it a shimmering greeny blue, as if they are ice cathedrals lit by coloured lamps. Most are no more than the size of small skiffs now, on the surface at least. Mara yawns and stretches. Her body aches from the strain of the long night’s watch.

  Gorbals has gathered a crowd around him on deck. The northern chill has numbed the muscles of the waves, slowing up the ship. Gorbals is coping with the sea at last. He is telling the Treenesters’ legend of the stone-telling and how Mara’s arrival in the netherworld fulfilled it because she is the face that’s cast in the stone of the sunken city below New Mungo.

  ‘We’re still living our story,’ he finishes. ‘We don’t know how it’ll end. But the story set in the stones came true. Mara saved us and we’re not Treenesters trapped in the netherworld any more. You,’ he speaks to the refugees from the boat camp, ‘are not shut out of the world, dying outside the city wall. And you’re not ratkins any more.’ He winks at the urchins. ‘We are all people now. People of the free world on the way to our home. I dreamed about it last night.’

  Everyone leans closer, eager to catch a glint of Gorbals’s dream.

  ‘The sun was low and orange over the sea. The wind had a voice full of secrets. We had lived in this land more than ten thousand days. My hair was silver and thin, but there was still more of it than now.’ He rubs his shaven head and everyone laughs. Baby Clayslaps joins in with throaty gurgles. Gorbals turns to the baby. ‘And little Clayslaps here . . .’ He hesitates for a moment, ‘Yes, I think I remember, he was a strong and handsome man.’ He tickles the baby and Clayslaps gurgles again. ‘It was a good place to live and it had a good name. We called our land Mara.’

  The crowd is hushed. Gorbals smiles across at Mara, hiding in the shadows at the back of the crowd. ‘The land of Mara was our home.’


  Tears spring to Mara’s eyes. Their faith in her is such a weighty and precious thing.

  ‘Fairy tales and nonsense.’ Ruby’s brisk voice breaks the moment.

  The elderly woman, Merien, speaks up. ‘There’s often hidden treasure tucked away in the corners of a fairy tale,’ she says. ‘I enjoyed your story,’ she tells Gorbals. ‘I hope it comes true.’

  She is a woman in the mould of her own Granny Mary, Mara senses. Maybe that kindred spirit is what draws her to Merien.

  ‘I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss,’ Gorbals announces to the back of Ruby’s head.

  Mara smiles. The words are from A Tale of Two Cities.

  The iceberg blitz begins to thin at last and now the ship splices through ice floes with a crunch and hiss. When Mara returns to the control cabin, Rowan is grey, exhausted, beyond the help of Irn-Bru.

  She makes a snug from some blankets, on the floor, and makes him lie down to rest.

  ‘Yell if you need me,’ he mutters, asleep in seconds, but Mara is glad just to have him there. Rowan grounds her. His familiar presence reminds her of a time when life was happy and simple and ordinary. She can hardly remember how that felt.

  When sun breaks across the ocean, Mara begins to relax. Now she can see clear ahead. But what she sees makes her heart stop. Beyond the glittering patchwork of ice floes is a dark and terrible thing.

  Mara runs out on to the deck. The deep shadow of a wave stretches all across the horizon. It is massive, as dark as the icebergs were luminous. And deadlier by far. It’s possible to outwit a sea of icebergs, but even the biggest ship is at the mercy of a tidal wave. Mara knows all about the giant wave that hit Wing and swept away whole villages, in the Century of Storm when Granny Mary was young.

  Anything is possible, she tries to tell herself. She thought there was no way through New Mungo’s vast city wall, yet there was. There seemed to be no way into the sky city, yet there was. Escaping the New World seemed impossible, yet they did. Leaving Fox behind seemed the most impossible thing of all, yet she did that too. But this deadly shadow of a wave stretching across the northern horizon has risen like a wall against the future and she can’t see a way through.

  During those mad games of pinball, Mara learned it was best to ride right into the most ferocious waves. You held steady and steered straight ahead, up and over the wave. It was the only way. But a wave as vast as this?

  In a corner of the deck, Merien has shared out scraps of breakfast among a group of urchins. Mara can hear her softly chanting one, two, three to the urchins, teaching them to count out the food. Mara cries out something wordless, and Merien looks over. Terror is buzzing inside her head and Mara can’t hear Merien’s reply. In a moment, the older woman is at her side and Mara sees her own stricken look reflected in Merien’s face. Mara stutters, can’t find her voice. She points to the wave and shoves the telescope into Merien’s hands.

  Merien takes the telescope and peers through it for a long moment. She lowers it, her eyes still on the horizon, and puts the telescope back into Mara’s shaking hands.

  ‘Look again now, look hard. That’s no wave, my dear.’ There’s a glint in Merien’s shrewd eyes; a puckish smile on her mouth. ‘It’s land.’

  A FISH-HOOK MOON

  The eastern sky is mother of pearl, the inside of a mussel shell.

  Sun is prising open the night. It steals across the ocean and nips the jostling topsails of Pomperoy. The city has travelled leagues of sea under darkness, the thunder of the masts and skysails and the shouts of the gypsea sailors making an invisible, ghostly rabble in the dense ocean night.

  Tuck has clung to the gondola all night long, chilled to numbness, willing the rope that attaches him to the Waverley not to snap. There was nothing else to do. By a sliver of moonlight, they tried again and again to haul him on board, but the wind was too hard, the sea too rough. Tuck would have smashed like a piece of driftwood off the side of the ship. When cloud swallowed up the moon, the gypseas couldn’t see him any more; the glow of their lanterns couldn’t reach him, so all he could do was hang on as the gondola whacked and crashed through the froth of the Waverley’s wake.

  Now, someone is shouting down at him though it’s hard to hear through the blast and roar of the ocean. Tuck wipes spray from his eyes and sees a wind-leathered gypsea face peering down at him from the side of the ship. He yells back as loud as he can, and the old man cries out in surprise.

  ‘Great Skua, it’s Jack Culpy’s lad! Hang on down there, we’ll have you on board in a finflick.’

  The old greybeard with long wisps of silver hair streaming out of his windwrap looks like a hundred other gypseas. But something in his salt-rasped voice strikes a memory. It’s Charlie, an old bridge-master mate of his Da. Tuck last saw him the night of Da’s sea burial.

  A knobbly knot of rope strikes him on the forehead. Tuck grabs it, close to sobbing with relief as he’s hauled up through bales of wind and spray on to the Waverley.

  Charlie grabs Tuck in wiry arms and sets him on his feet, but Tuck reels and crashes on to the floor.

  ‘Easy, lad, easy. Take time to find your boat legs again.’

  Charlie steers him across the deck, under the masts and past the fat funnels that once upon a time pumped steam, and takes him below deck.

  It’s a long time since Tuck has seen such a homely place. Pendicle’s home-boat was spick and span, the wooden decks and walls all scrubbed and polished, cushions plumped and porthole curtains neatly tied; it was sheer luxury compared to his sparse shack on The Grimby Gray. But the bridgers live in the cosy clutter that Tuck’s family enjoyed when Da was alive. The bunks overflow with feather-filled quilts; hanging racks are crammed with pots and pans, drying fish and wet windwraps; huge baskets spill with sea spoil and bridging tools. It’s such a comfortable mess it gives Tuck a homesick feeling that he can’t understand because it’s not his old shack he’s homesick for, it’s this ramshackle place he’s never set eyes on till now, that reminds him of his real home-boat, the one the Salters took.

  Tuck is made to sit down and sup a steamy bowl of oyster broth. The bridger-women fuss over him and the minute he yawns he’s snuggled into a feather quilt that’s as cosy as a warm cloud. Tuck falls into a doze, half-listening to the bridger-women’s chatter.

  ‘Time we got the wind back in our sails,’ an old bridger-granny grunts, puffing clouds of pungent smoke from a seaweed pipe. ‘We’d grown stagnant as algae stuck to that rig.’

  ‘Mother, all those years of bridgework, lost—’

  ‘I just hope we’re not off on some wild gull chase across the ocean,’ says a woman who has just burst in from the upper deck, bringing an icy chill of sea blast with her.

  ‘We’ve got the bridges all packed up. We can bridge up again any old place we like.’ The bridger-granny puffs happily then pulls her pipe from her mouth and points to her feet with its stem. ‘Water, Joss!’

  Joss groans and grabs a mop and bucket and hurries over to the small puddle of water that’s seeped up through the floor at the bridger-granny’s feet.

  ‘This leaky old boat’s not sea-hardy enough for a wild gull chase,’ Joss grumbles as she slops the sodden mop into the bucket. ‘We’ll all drown.’

  Through half-shut eyes, Tuck watches the newly arrived bridger-woman loosen her windwrap from around her head and a mane of hair the colour of sea foam spills out. It’s Charlie’s wife, Cath. ‘I’d rather be a clump of sea algae, slick with oil,’ she declares, ‘than fall off the edge of the world in a storm or circle the world for evermore. What do we do when our oil tanks run out and we’re a hundred leagues from the rig? Has the Steer Master thought of that?’

  ‘It’s not the only rig in the ocean,’ puffs the bridger-granny. ‘We’ll find another.’ She points the stem of her pipe to the floor beside the stove. ‘Water!’

  Joss drags the mop and bucket over to the stove, spitting curses.

  ‘Plenty rigs, Gran, but most a
re pumped dry of oil,’ Cath retorts.

  ‘It’s not the Steer Master,’ says a young woman with a toddler on her hip, stirring a huge pot on the stove. ‘He’s aged back into dribbling babyhood. It’s The Pomp who’s steering us. He’s taken his chance to make sure the masts are set his way. He’ll tie himself in windknots over this, wait and see. Where will it all end up? It’s no good saying war and piracy’s in our blood. I’ve never killed a soul, and neither have any of you. Neither have most of our men.’

  Tuck sits up.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Cath, ‘but you go up on deck and look at them all. They’re like sharks on the trail of blood.’

  ‘Are we at war?’ Tuck asks, but the women are too busy clattering and chattering to bother with him.

  ‘You know what this is really all about?’ Cath prods a finger in the air. ‘It’s nothing to do with avenging the dead or salvaging our pride. We need more boats, that’s what. It’s as cut and dried as salt cod. The whole of Pomperoy’s all crammed up tight with nowhere left to spread. Driftwood’s as precious as stardust, and there’s been no passing boats in ages, except those toxic ghost ships. The Pomp is after that big white ship and I’ll bet he thinks there’ll be more boats wherever it’s headed. Can’t you imagine the glint in those cold fish eyes of his when he saw such a ship?’

  The other bridger-women nod and mutter.

  ‘That’s what this is all about,’ Cath declares. ‘The Discovery is old and druxy and The Pomp wants the Arkiel for the launch of his Steer Mastership.’

  ‘That’s on the horizon soon enough,’ says a small, stout bridger-woman who is slitting open a pile of oysters that’s almost as big as herself. ‘The old Steer Master’s sun’s setting fast by the looks of him.’

  ‘We should’ve slept on our anger,’ sighs Cath. ‘We should’ve stayed our masts a while, not set sail in a temper. The Man only knows where it’ll all end up.’

  ‘What kind of gypsea talk is that?’ The bridger-granny spits a mouthful of seaweed ash on to the stove and it hisses.