‘Hey, hey, come here.’ Fox grabs a can full of rainwater and plunges the burned hand into it. The child wails at the top of her voice, a sound that mimics the sea-police sirens. Fox points to the fire and copies the siren noise. ‘Don’t touch.’
‘You’re a Pandora all right.’ Candleriggs dips a corner of her mossy cloak in the rainwater and begins to clean the urchin’s mucky face. ‘Too curious for your own good.’
Candleriggs scrubs the urchin’s clay-caked face and body. A green-eyed, wild-ringleted cherub emerges from layers of netherworld muck. In the firelight, when Candleriggs shows how to warm hands and feet by the fire without getting burned, Fox stares at the urchin’s leathery, thick-downed skin and the faintest of webbing between her fingers and toes.
Once she’s eaten some scrambled egg and spat it out in disgust, Pandora prowls the tower room, curious and wary. Fox eats her leftover egg and watches her grab an uncooked one and munch it, shell and all. When Fox laughs she snatches his green headgem from the bookshelf behind him, hissing like a snake. Fox smacks her fingers but Pandora won’t let go of the gem. He has to force her fingers open. She bites his hand.
‘No!’
Pandora just looks at him with beautiful green eyes and laughs. She points to the headgem that’s the same colour as her eyes, with another hiss.
‘What’s the hissing for?’
‘I don’t know. She’s copying something, as children do. The waste air that’s pumped out of New Mungo, maybe? There’s a waste pipe near the Face in the Stone. No, listen – she’s speaking,’ says Candleriggs.
Fox can only hear a serpent hiss.
‘Whississss,’ Pandora hisses, still pointing at the green gem.
‘What’s this?’ Candleriggs’s face creases into a thousand wrinkles as she smiles at the child.
‘Thisss,’ says Fox, imitating the hiss, ‘iss mine. Iss not a toy.’
‘Ah, but I’ve got a toy,’ declares Candleriggs.
She digs into a pocket in her mossy cloak and brings out a little wooden snake, hardly bigger than her hand. The snake is made of a train of short stubs of wood, linked on a string, so that it wriggles whenever it’s moved. The greenish tinge the wood has been stained with has almost all rubbed off.
‘Whississss.’
‘It’s a toy snake. See? Sssss.’ Candleriggs runs the wooden snake up Pandora’s arm. The little girl squeals with delight and grabs it. ‘It was my son’s,’ says Candleriggs, laughing. ‘I made it for him when he was a baby. You can play with it now,’ she tells the child.
Candleriggs has a son? One of the Treenesters who have gone with Mara?
Candleriggs reads the surprise on Fox’s face.
‘He died when he was a baby.’
Fox takes this in. ‘You had a baby with my grandfather? Is that what you mean? And he still threw you out of the city? With his own baby? What kind of a man could do that?’
Anger flashes through him. The thought of Mara with his baby, an ocean away, haunts Fox night and day.
‘Caledon never knew,’ says Candleriggs. ‘It was my revenge. But revenge didn’t do me any good when my baby died,’ she pauses, her eyes bitter and dry, ‘of an infected mosquito bite.’ Candleriggs gives Fox a look that makes him shiver. ‘Maybe he’d have looked something like you, if he’d lived.’
Everything might have been so different. What if Candleriggs hadn’t rebelled against the New World, where people are safe in their sky-city havens and everyone else, like Mara, is abandoned in the drowned world? If Candleriggs had stayed with Caledon and her baby had lived, his grandfather would never have married his grandma. He, Fox, wouldn’t have been born at all.
Fox has a glimmering of all the great and small flukes of fate, all the twists and turns in the lives of his ancestors, that must have happened to cause him to be born, to be alive, here, at this point in the world.
He’s hungry, miserable, his life is a wreck, and the idea that he could change things seems like a mad fantasy. The temptation to go back home is huge, to plead for forgiveness from his family and claim his disappearance was just a teenage prank that got out of hand. Night after night, too cold to sleep on his lumpy mattress of books, he’s on the verge of giving in. But he always comes back to Mara. Mara and a ship of refugees at the top of the world. Wasn’t it a mad fantasy to think she could do that? Wasn’t it a mad fantasy of his grandfather’s to imagine up a whole New World of skyscraping cities studded across the globe of a flooding world? Yet he made it real and became the Grand Father of All the New World. His grandfather and Mara both chased their dreams and made them real.
‘Your parents,’ Candleriggs interrupts his thoughts. ‘They must be missing you, worried sick.’
It’s not the first time she’s said it. She keeps urging him to post them a note in the Noos, at least.
‘I hardly knew them,’ says Fox, aware as he says it that he’s put his parents behind him, in the past. ‘They were never there. Their work came first.’
The idea he’s been crafting all this time feels like mad fantasy too. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll work. The Noos is more ruthlessly guarded than ever before, but Fox knows that trying to police cyberspace is like trying to police the universe. You can’t. And now he has created a new wonder for the stunning cyber-universe of the Noos.
A galaxy of peekaboo moons.
He found the idea in old Weavesites: pesky adverts that pop-up in your face. Yet the occasional one would catch his eye and he’d be curious to see what it was about. So Fox has created another kind of pop-up: a peekaboo at a buried past and an unknown world of the present that exists just beyond the city walls. It’s a pesky pop-up of brutal truth the people of the New World need.
Someone, surely, will take a look to see what his peekaboo moons are about. The bored and the too-curious, the brilliant and the lonely. Some daredevil Noosrunner like he once was, who still has a glimmer of wonder and might stop for an instant amid the frenzy of invention and cyber-trading that engrosses the New World.
That’s who Fox is seeking. People of a mind like him. In the unguarded moment they stop to take a look, their godgem is open to him. That’s his chance to sneak a secret connection with the godgems of all the curious minds. All he can do is hope there are such people left in the cosseted cities of the New World.
If there are, he’ll pop them a shock of truth.
I chased the clouds of my Thrawn Glory
Looking for my Kingdom Come
Slip the chains of Fate
Don’t tell me it’s too late
‘My Thrawn Glory’ by James Grant
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s heaven for?
Robert Browning
THE TECHNOLOGY OF A WORM
The globe is a dead and useless thing. It has no power to get him out of here.
Tuck wriggles inside the tent he’s made of his windwrap as something trickles down his neck. A fragment of the rockfall that traps him, or an insect, he can’t tell.
An insect.
Tuck has been trapped long enough to latch on to the slightest slither of thought. He gave up counting heartbeats once he reached twelve thousand and after that there was nothing else to count. He doesn’t know much about insects. There were few in Pomperoy. Lots of woodworm though.
Worms. They live in the Earth as well as in wood. Maybe it’s a worm that’s gone down his neck.
He waits, feels nothing except the pain in his trapped foot, but a thought slides out of a corner of his mind.
Worms and insects. Dead insects. Dead, black insect words.
The book.
Tuck rummages in the pockets of his windwrap, willing the book not to be lost. In one of his pockets he finds a trickle of small, smooth stones. They run through his fingers and Tuck remembers with a shock what they are: the seven pearls that Pendicle gave him on the day Ma died. He’d forgotten all about them. Tuck’s heart beats faster. It feels like a sign. But a sign of what?
Great Skua,
this is not the day he’s going to die.
What about Pendicle? Is he loose on the ocean or safe back at the rig? Or is he lost at sea just as Tuck is lost at Land? And the bridgers? What about the rusted barges and ferries and the leaky old Waverley? Did they all survive the harsh oceans of the Far North?
What folly to rush headlong after the Arkiel like that. Pomperoy acted on pirate impulse with no thought to what might happen or how to get back if it all went wrong. Just as he rushed headlong to Land.
Don’t build a bridge into thin air, Tuck.
An old bridger saying that Da used to quote. Before, it was just words but now Tuck understands.
He’s found the book in a pocket and grips on to it, visualizing the tatty cover in his hands, its words like thick black oil. He fixed those words in his head.
NATURAL ENGINEERING by C. D. STONE
There were worms and insects in the words and pictures of the book.
Tuck is trying to build a bridge out of thin air – to every dead insect word and every picture from the dark days and nights when Gorbals read to him by skull light. He knows there are three hundred and thirty-seven pages and forty-two pictures, but remembering what’s in them is hard. Tuck tries to turn each page in his mind, pages upon pages on the dam-building of beavers, the web-weaving of spiders, tower-building of termites, nest-knitting of birds, the industry of ants – and the tunnelling of worms.
The tunnelling of worms.
THE ROWAN TREE
The sun takes another golden footstep into the sky, climbing higher each day as they make their way through the vast glacier gorge. The wheel of the year is turning, winter slowly rolling towards spring. But the journey through the gorge is so gruelling that Mara wonders why she brought everyone to such a place.
Why didn’t she stay in the caves? Why didn’t she stay with Fox? Why didn’t she stay on the island and drown? Drowning in her own comfortable bed on Wing often seems preferable to this: a moment-by-moment struggle, fighting brutal winds along the perilous wrinkles of rock that the glacier has scraped into the mountain face. The baby grows heavier by the day, sapping her energy, making a back-aching agony of every blistered step.
Sometimes she wishes she was Tuck, crushed to death in an instant in the caves.
They have climbed right down into the pit of the glacier gorge. It’s a place so deep and gloomy the light of the low sun never reaches its ancient ice. Now they have to climb up the other side of the gorge and hope against hope that they find a break in the rock face there, that there are cave tunnels or a mountain pass that will lead them through the mountain to the interior. Mara can’t let herself wonder what it will be like there, whether it will be a place they can survive or not.
All she can do is survive here and now, one breath, one step, at a time.
A shrieking wind roams the glacier gorge. It’s so harsh that Mara wonders if this is the very source of the North Wind. It fades to bitter whispers as they climb. They take a break in the shelter of a cave where they eat slivers of seal meat, washed down with thin, bitter soup made with lichen scraped from the rocks and boiled up with seal fat in chunks of ice.
Mara’s exhausted mind is spooked by the whispering winds in the gorge. She dozes and dreams that the North Wind has hurled the lost secrets of the drowned world into the glacier gorge and imprisoned them in its icy home.
‘Another tree!’
Fir is on her feet, pointing at the roof of the small cave, at a tree root entombed there in the stone.
‘Long dead,’ says Tron.
‘But it’s a tree.’ Fir turns to Mol. ‘A stone-telling.’
Mara closes her eyes. She’s had enough of stonetellings and signs.
And yet, when she falls back into her doze, her dreams are now crowded with trees. Candleriggs’ great nest in the oak tree on the Treenesters’ Hill of Doves. The Athapaskans in their boreal forests, around the curve of the Earth, near the top of the world. In the dream she’s back on Wing, digging up slabs of peat for the fire. The peat is packed with ancient tree roots that made the soil so rich. The dream turns into nightmare as she’s whisked off the island by a screaming wind. Pain grips her as she’s ripped from the ground, from her roots.
She wakes up. She can still feel the hot pain in her back and all down her legs.
Rowan is crouched over her, his blue eyes full of worry. ‘OK? You cried out in your sleep.’
‘Bad dream.’
She doesn’t tell him about the pain. It’s almost gone now, anyway. She’s thinking about her dream and how, like the green wind, trees are the key to the future. She’s not sure how but she feels it in her bones.
Rowan stirs up the fire embers and warms her a ladleful of the lichen soup.
‘What were you dreaming about?’ he asks.
‘Trees.’ She sips the bitter soup.
‘Trees?’
‘Yup. We need trees.’
‘You’ve got one right here.’
Mara looks up at the petrified tree root in the stone roof of the cave.
‘We need live ones.’
‘That’s me.’
She looks at him, puzzled, then laughs. Rowan, of course.
‘I forgot you were a tree. A rowan tree.’
She sees how he has shed the last of his boyhood. His shaved hair has grown back a much darker blond than it used to be. Always tall and lean, his face and limbs are sharpened by months of hunger and trauma, as her own must be. The ice wind has blazed colour on his cheeks, as the sea wind once did, and his carefree blue eyes are now sharp as flint. Though he’s changed, he looks more like Rowan from the island again than the wasted wreck he was on the Arkiel.
Mara sees what the change is. He looks like one of the island men.
‘Protector against bad things.’ Rowan makes a rueful face. ‘Huh. Lots of people on Wing used to have a rowan tree outside their house, did you know that?’
Mara didn’t. There were no trees at all on the island in their lifetimes.
‘They cut them all down before we were born. My mum called me Rowan after the tree outside her bedroom window when she was small. She cried the day they chopped it down. She said its red berries cheered up the winter and when I was born I was as red as a rowan berry.’
Mara laughs again. Then groans as a sudden deep pain grinds into her back and grips her inside.
Blue eyes meet hers. He is trying hard to look like a protector from bad things but she knows he is just as scared as she is. Mara puts her head down on her backpack as the pain recedes and tries to ignore the baby’s kicks and punches, tries not to think about the pain coming back or the journey through the mountain pass that lies ahead.
KINGDOM COME
The fever strikes as sudden as a winter storm, though Fox has been off-colour and achy all day. He’s in the thick of the bookstacks, reading about the creation of nations by flickering mothlight, when the headache strikes and his body is gripped by invisible chains of fire and ice. His skin is shot with hot needles, his stomach spasms with pain and he can’t seem to find his way back through the maze of adjoining book rooms to Candleriggs and the part of the tower they’ve made their home.
Was it something he ate? What did he eat?
Dizzy, Fox grips the edge of a bookshelf. He tries to hold on to the dream kingdom he’s been building inside his head. A dream of a cybercity, a place that doesn’t exist in realworld, created only of ether and ideals. A gathering of energy in cyberspace, strong enough to cause vibrations of change in the real world. Fox loses his grasp of the dream as the real world seems to tremble, now, as his body tries to burn the sickness out.
He lies between the bookstacks, too ill to move, on a bed of wrecked books. Under the shelves by his head is a pebble-like object covered in dust so thick it looks like fur. Fox reaches out and grabs it. Wipes off the dust with his thumb. It’s sleek and black and flicks open easily. There’s a small screen and a keypad inside. What is it? Some old world computer or communicator? Fox presses all the
keypad buttons but it’s out of power, just like him.
He stares at the glossy screen and all he sees is his own gaze reflected back. Fox can’t believe the haunted eyes that peer from a mess of matted hair belong to him.
He feels so ill and disorientated he’s frightened. He calls out for help but no one comes. His can’t remember where his godgem is. If he had it, he’d send an SOS to his grandfather in the Noos because something awful is happening, he’s dying, he’s sure.
When he’s home in New Mungo and all better he’ll demand an airship to go North and find Mara and bring her back. After all, his grandfather is the Grand Father of All the New World, he can do anything. Surely he’ll do that for the grandson he loves.
A beautiful child with green eyes, the colour of his godgem, flits into his vision and his head fills with a hiss of white noise. He can’t quite remember who she is. The lantern of glowing moonmoths is by his head and as he falls deeper into fever Fox thinks it’s his legion of peekaboo moons. They’ve homed back to him here, among the tower bookstacks.
They’re answering his call.
A NARWHAL HORN IN THE SKY
Day breaks like a spell, the air as sharp and clear as glass. All around them, as they climb, is the crack of icicles breaking off the frozen waterfalls.
‘Just as well we got out of that gorge when we did,’ mutters Ibrox. ‘Wouldn’t want to be down there when these waterfalls burst into full pelt.’
They scramble through a chaos of rock. For the first time, the sun almost manages to heave itself over the mountain peaks but gives in at the last gasp. Mara does no better. She can’t go any further. Not until the pain that is slicing through her subsides. She leans against a rock, willing the pain to pass.
Zenith Page 22
