Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Cath’s right,’ says the woman with the baby on her hip, her face flushed and fearful. ‘Some of us want our babes to grow up safe and sound. Some of us liked being bridged up and anchored to the rig. Some of us don’t want to ravage and rampage across the ocean like a scavenging flock of Great Skuas.’

  ‘When fear flocks round your head, don’t let it nest in your hair,’ the bridger-granny grunts. Her eye lands on Tuck’s face. ‘What’s Jack Culpy doing skulking down here with the women?’

  ‘It’s Tuck, mother, Jack’s son. Jack’s been dead a while.’

  The bridger-granny looks befuddled for a moment. ‘Whoever he is, he should be up on deck, not cosied up down here like an old woman. Water, Joss, water!’

  Joss heaves the bucket yet again and clatters it down, looking as if she’d like to stuff the mop head in the bridger-granny’s mouth.

  ‘You stay where you are, Tuck,’ says Cath, with a friendly wink. ‘You can help out once you’re rested and had a bit of looking after. Haven’t had much of that, have you, for a while?’

  The dig is at Ma. Tuck is surprised by a pang of anger on his Ma’s behalf, though he’s thought and said much worse to her face, himself.

  These are his own people, they’ve made that clear, and they won’t cast him out, especially not if they’re headed into a pirate war. There’s nowhere to cast him to, anyway, except ocean. Bridgers are like one big family, though since Da died he hasn’t so much as looked their way. They never forgot him though. Who else left sacks of fish and seaweed outside the shack door after Da died? Who tried to get their boat back from the Salter thugs? The bridgers offered him and Ma bunks on bridger boats but Ma’s fierce pride, then her drinking, stuck them in the barge shack. Still, when Ma was ill with grief over little Beth, it was the bridger-women who’d come and sit with her, every day, for weeks on end, while Tuck wandered the city all night and crashed out in his bunk all day.

  His Da always said there’s something in a bridger’s nature that makes them want to mend every broken wire they spot. The bridgers saved Pomperoy, forging bonds between gypseas as they bridged up the boats.

  It was the bridgers, claimed Da, that made Pomperoy a great city. They rescued it from itself. They’d linked up a thousand bridges, even as rival pirate gangs threatened to smash every last boat into flotsam. On the day the great Middle Bridges were raised, there came a lull. Gypseas stopped fighting each other and came to see the great sight. The bridgers had engineered a miracle, said Da, and every gypsea seemed to take a deep breath that day as they looked at the wonder of the five radiating bridges that now secured them to the rig. Pomperoy saw the great city it could become and the fighting stopped.

  The bridgers know about Tuck’s looting. It’s a shameful throwback to that pirate past. They’ve rescued him from the city’s prison barge more than once. The bridgers know he’s broken the bond with his Da’s trade, yet he’s still the son of a bridger – and not just any old bridger; one of the best bridge-masters Pomperoy’s ever known.

  After a while, Tuck can’t take much more of the bridger-women’s fussing. He’s too used to Ma’s narking. He even misses it. Misses her, he suddenly knows, with a horrible lurch inside. Tuck throws off the fuggy warmth of the quilt. He needs to get out, needs space, but there’s nowhere to go except the deck and that’ll mean work on the masts. He flumps back under the quilt and escapes into his head, imagines himself leaping and racing through Pomperoy until he reaches the calm black glass of the lagoon and falls asleep at last.

  When Tuck wakens, he realizes he’s slept away the day and maybe even most of the night. All around him, bridgers are bunked down. The smell of leftover fish soup and the sound of snoring fill the air. It’s so cold his breath makes white puffs like the bridger-granny’s pipe.

  Tuck tugs his windwrap tight around him and tiptoes between the bunks, pushing through cold strands of sea tangle drying on a line of rope. He’s creaking open the door that leads up on deck when a gleam catches his eye. It’s a little silver box in one of the overflowing baskets of sea spoil. He hasn’t a clue what it is, but a looter’s force of habit makes him grab it.

  Outside, the wind is brittle with shavings of ice. The bridgers on deck are yelling about something and they don’t see him; they’re focused on the ocean. Tuck slips under the shadows of the masts and wonders where he can hide. He climbs on to the upper deck and stows himself in one of the lifeboats, burrowing down between piles of nets and ropes.

  The little silver box he’s looted gleams like pearly fish-skin or a slab of moonshine on sea. Tuck turns it over in his hand, trying to prise it open, fiddling with buttons, but the bitter cold makes his fingers clumsy and numb. A tiny window blinks open at the top of the box and Tuck blinks back in surprise. He puts his eye to the window to see what’s inside, and yelps.

  Inside the box is the world outside.

  Tuck takes his eye from the window and looks out at the night. With his own, weak eyes the moon is a blurred silver fish-hook above a herring-skin sea. A sea that wraps the boats of Pomperoy in clinging mist. At the eastern edge of the sky, day nibbles at the horizon. Tuck puts his eye back to the little window – and there’s the fish-hook moon, sharp as the curved blade of a cutlass, and there’s the nibbling dawn, he can see every streak and ribbon of it, clear as day. All inside the box!

  Tuck studies the world with his new, sharp eyebox and spots a strange, ghostly rock trailing clouds of mist. A strange, sharp scent carries on the sea wind.

  Iceberg!

  The shout echoes across the boats and brings the other bridgers running up on deck. Tuck sits where he is and keeps the little eyebox pointed at the iceberg, trapping it safe inside. His trembling fingers touch a small button. There’s a buzz and a long nose shoots out of the box. Tuck jumps and stares at it, puts his eye back to the window and yelps again – now the iceberg is so close he could reach out and touch it.

  He tries to trick the little silver box. He points it up at the masts, at the moon, pressing the button that shoots the nose in and out, but each time the box catches whatever he points at, zooming it large, shrinking it small. Tuck is about to smash the box on the side of the lifeboat, to crack it open like a shell to see what’s really inside, when it catches a darkness beyond the icebergs. He focuses the box on the jagged crust of darkness that, he now sees, lies all along the northern horizon. A glint of daylight touches it and now the very tips of the darkness look like a shoal of silver fish heads nosing out of the sea, baited by the bright hook of the moon. Tuck presses the button that shoots out the box’s funnel-nose and the shoal of glinting fish heads zooms up large.

  Every nerve in his body is a-jangle as the little silver box shows that the silver-tipped shadow is not a shoal of fish heads, neither is it a leftover crust of night.

  It’s Land.

  He just knows it is by the tremble that runs up his legs.

  He can hardly believe his eyebox.

  For the first time in his life, Tuck is looking at Land.

  THE STONES SPEAK

  The great wave of land rumbles with thunder.

  Yet all across the northern horizon the ragged peaks rip into clear blue sky. Sunlight lashes off mountainsides that look like crushed metal.

  Mara is so fogged with exhaustion she feels unreal. Her body is a dense and dragging weight, as if it’s no longer part of herself. Every now and then panic spikes her fogginess and spooks her with the thought that Merien could be wrong – that what seems to be a vast mountain range really is a wall of water. She scans the glinting peaks but the telescope assures her that it’s mountain rock all right; but even the telescope can’t fathom the source of the strange, invisible thunder.

  All day, as the ship moves closer to the coast, the thunder roar grows. At last the telescope reveals what it is. The mountains are punctured with waterfalls. Chutes and cascades of water pelt down, thumping off ledges and rocks, crashing down with so much force that the air froths and fi
zzles with rainbows and the sea along the coastline churns with whirlpools.

  ‘Like a worm-eaten apple,’ says Merien, wonderingly. ‘Worms made of ice.’

  Mara looks close, sees what she means.

  Over aeons of time, the ice must have bored tunnels through the rock like worms into an apple. Now melted, the immense ice cap that was once cupped by the mountains pours through the punctured peaks.

  Greenland is not green at all. It’s a land of silver mountains and thunder-water. There is still ice at the top of the world, but only a little, Mara can only suppose, of what there was once. Ice frosts the mountain peaks. The sea is sludgy with icy floes and the North Wind carries tiny, sharp splinters. The coastal whirlpools fling out a skin-stinging froth of salt and ice and legions of dwarf icebergs emerge from endless chasms that cut deep into the land.

  Every drop of water on the ship has been guzzled. Throats are parched and sore and all they have, now that the rain clouds have cleared, is the salty ice they catch on their tongues from the biting wind.

  But we have found land.

  Mara gazes at the endless shining peaks. Greenland seems to stretch ever onward, as far as she can see.

  Pollock spots something with his hunter’s eyes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He points warily. Mara looks up. High on a mountainside, a strange figure seems to want to catch the rays of the rising sun. It’s too enormous and still to be human, yet there’s something heart-rending in the way its open arms reach out to an empty world.

  Only once Mara fixes the telescope on it does she see what it is.

  ‘It’s a stone man. Big as a giant.’

  She lowers the telescope and passes it to Pollock, but he shakes his head. He’ll use his own good eyes. Pollock frowns up at the stone welcome, suspicious of anything that hasn’t been examined by his own hand.

  The telescope is passed around the ship.

  ‘It’s probably an ancient thing,’ says Rowan, once he has studied the stone creature for a long moment. Mara knows he’s thinking of the circle of standing stones on their island, remnants of another world lost in distant time.

  ‘He points that way,’ says Gorbals, staring uneasily at the stone giant.

  ‘North-East,’ nods Rowan.

  Mara says nothing. Following signs in the ether and messages set in stone has brought them all here, for good or ill, to the ends of the Earth.

  ‘There’s another one!’

  Possil points to the next mountain. True enough, perched precariously high on a stab of rock, outlined against the sky, is another stone man.

  Even without the telescope, Mara can see this one is different. There is no open-armed welcome. This one – she grabs the telescope in ice-pained hands, peers through – this one has an arm raised, pointing along the coast of the land.

  Mara lowers the telescope and looks at the people she trusts. Rowan, Broomielaw, Molendinar, Gorbals – and she searches beyond them until she finds Merien.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It seems to be pointing the way,’ Merien murmurs.

  Mara thinks of all the times she has made the wrong choice. All she can do is try to read whatever signs she finds in the world but it’s often hard to know what things mean.

  ‘Go the other way,’ says Pollock.

  ‘The other—’

  ‘Why?’ asks Merien.

  ‘Why does it want us to go that way?’ Pollock squints up at the stone creature. ‘What does it mean? It could be a trap.’

  Gorbals looks scornful but Mara can’t help smiling. ‘Pollock, you think the whole world’s a hunter’s trap.’

  Pollock raises an eyebrow. ‘Uhuh.’

  ‘It means we’re not alone. People are here,’ says Molendinar.

  ‘Or have been,’ adds Rowan.

  Mara nods. ‘If there are people and they wanted us to go away, wouldn’t they use something more threatening?’

  ‘Not if they’re trappers,’ says Pollock. ‘A trap’s a trick.’

  He looks at Mara and the others as if they are fools.

  ‘Oh, Pollock.’ Broomielaw raises her eyes skywards. ‘Why would someone want to trap us? They don’t even know we’re here.’

  ‘We’re a ship. Maybe we’re the catch they’re waiting for.’

  ‘We’re a great big ship, so what could anyone do to us?’

  Pollock stares hard at the stone man, trying to divine his purpose, but he can’t.

  ‘It – it’s a message left in the stones,’ Gorbals cries. ‘Of course it is! Look at it. This must be part of our stone-telling legend. A part we didn’t know.’

  Mara could kick him. The Treenesters’ owl-eyes settle on her with an expectant, trusting stare that makes her want to run and hide.

  ‘It’s another sign,’ Gorbals rushes on, ‘like the stories our ancestors left in the city stones about Mara saving us and—’

  ‘There was no sign,’ Mara cuts in. ‘It was just a statue.’

  She doesn’t need to look at Ruby; she can feel her sneer. But others, who were listening in to Gorbals’s storytelling the previous night, look curious.

  ‘We’ll vote on it,’ says Mara briskly, eager to divert attention from herself.

  ‘There’s another one! Two!’ someone yells.

  Another stone man is pointing resolutely East. On the next mountain a stone friend gives an open-armed welcome.

  That seems to settle things. The overwhelming vote is with the stones.

  Pollock watches the land, a deep scowl on his face.

  WRECKERS

  A sickle moon hangs like a lopsided smile. Its thin, sharp light casts a cold armour over the stone giants that have been the ship’s guides all day. Even when night closed in, even now, as a patch of fog swallows up the ship and the rest of the world vanishes, the refugees refuse to lose heart. The stone giants are rock-solid messages of hope.

  Only Pollock, headstrong and thrawn as ever, refuses to trust the signs set in stone.

  The snow geese and the narwhals led the way, Mara tries to reassure him, and now the stones.

  ‘Animals can’t lie,’ says Pollock, ‘but men can.’

  ‘Even stone men?’ Mara teases. She makes a funny face at baby Clayslaps who is trying to wriggle out of Pollock’s arms.

  ‘Who made the stone men?’ is Pollock’s gruff reply. He frowns. ‘Why is the thunder suddenly far away?’

  Clayslaps gives a gull-like shriek and kicks his legs. The child points excitedly at something.

  ‘Lights!’ cries Broomielaw.

  Mara gasps. They have burst through the thick fog as fast as they entered it. Rising out of the sea right in front is a heap of twinkling lights.

  ‘Slow down!’ she yells at Rowan in the control cabin. ‘We’re going to crash.’

  There’s a great pull and the ship heaves and shudders as Rowan cuts speed. Broomielaw grabs baby Clayslaps from his father’s arms.

  The lights of what must be a village blaze out of the dark. The thin moon makes it hard to see whether there is a harbour.

  ‘There!’ Ibrox the firekeeper has tracked the patterns of light and points to a line of blazing torches that reaches out into the sea and ends in a wide curve.

  Mara races into the control cabin. ‘Keep slow but steer to the harbour lights,’ she tells Rowan.

  His forehead is damp with sweat and his hands grip the steering wheel. His eyes are fixed on a screen full of tumbling numbers. ‘Still way too fast,’ he grunts.

  ‘No, steer away!’ Pollock bursts in. He stares at the ship’s controls, looking frantic. ‘This is wrong. There’s no harbour. The stone men, the lights—’

  ‘Pollock, don’t be a dolt—’

  ‘We’re in a trap. I’m a hunter, I set traps, I know—’ Pollock yells.

  The ship gives a huge jolt that sends them all crashing against the cabin wall. There’s a metallic screech and groan, a horrible sound, and screaming from the deck.

  Mara struggles to her feet a
nd peers out the cabin window. The harbour lights are all gone.

  What happened? Where are they?

  She rushes into the uproar on deck and stares out at black sea. A moment ago there was a clear line of lights. Now there is only dark.

  A horrendous banging erupts, deep in the ship’s bowels.

  ‘Rocks!’ Rowan yells. ‘We’ve hit rocks!’

  The world lurches. Mara is flung off her feet and is sent rolling across the deck. She crashes into the ship’s rail, tries to grab it, but it’s gone. There’s a long, dark moment of freezing wind, tumbling stars. The stars are falling, she thinks, bewildered, feeling them rush past her head as she plunges into blackness.

  The moment stretches. She can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t find her way out. Where are the stars, the ship, where’s the sea? She’s suffocating, alone, in freezing black space.

  Sea.

  It’s more instinct than thought, an instant knowing that electrifies her. This frozen blackness is sea. Mara thrashes around in terror. Which way, which way? The darkness is too deep; she can’t see where the surface is. Her head and lungs ache with the weight of the sea. The impulse to breathe is overpowering. She can’t resist, must, can’t. Thoughts tumble, fragments of consciousness scatter like smashed stars.

  Someone help me, I’m lost . . . Fox . . .

  Light, light . . . there . . .

  A light hangs in the darkness. Mara reaches for it, claws and kicks away the blackness that has begun to drag like a stone weight. The thin curve of light bobs out of reach, there are too many smashed stars inside her head, she’s too weighed down.

  Can’t see, must breathe . . .

  Air hits her lungs. She breaks through the surface, raking in painful, barbed breaths. A wave fills her mouth with sea and she’s choking. Salt water stings her eyes. A sharp shadow that must be the ship’s hull juts into the froth of the stars. But there’s something wrong. It’s listing sideways, at a precarious angle. The ship is groaning like a dying iceberg.