Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  The beautiful vision of the bridges glistens in his mind’s keep-pocket, beside his memory of the gem that is the Earth. Tuck limps out of the cave mouth and climbs down on to the rocky shore. He lets the salt wind gust through him, overcome with a sharp joy just to be on the outside of Earth once again.

  A huge sky billows above the ocean, stacked high with night clouds. The sun has died behind the mountains of Ilira but it’ll be back – Tuck is almost certain it will – at the other side of night.

  He tugs his windwrap around the warm clothes he took from the caves. The salty gusts blow the dust of the Earth from its folds. He remembered who the windwrap once belonged to when he was tunnelling through the earthfall in the mountain, with an instinct that he never knew he had. It’s the windwrap of one of the best bridge-builders Pomperoy has ever known.

  In the faded blue windwrap that was his father’s, with pockets full of treasure, Tuck limps into the wind and heads for Ilira.

  The place of fearful awe.

  THE LAND OF DAY

  Iceberg ships and castles sail the interior sea under a vivid sundown sky.

  So vast is the water that the mountains on the furthest shores can’t be seen. If it wasn’t for the air, sharp as glass without a tang of salt, Mara would believe that the rolling waves belong to the ocean, not a lake cupped in the middle of a land.

  ‘Trees,’ whispers Mol. ‘I can smell them on the wind. I’m sure I do. Can’t we go to the trees?’

  Ibrox has already sparked a meagre fire in a shelter of rocks and Mara hardly has the energy to move. Mol has taken Wing’s telescope to scan the shores of the lake.

  ‘There!’ She thrusts the telescope at the others. ‘Look over there!’

  The trees of a young forest hunch together in a valley that leads down to the interior sea. Thick, dark, arrow-shaped trees bend in the wind over a scattering of bare silvery ones. The mountains on either side lean over them like austere parents.

  ‘Where there are trees, there are birds and animals,’ says Possil.

  ‘Food,’ says Pollock, in case anyone misunderstands.

  ‘It’ll be more sheltered there,’ says Fir. She pulls Tron’s arm around her. ‘I want to be warm again. I miss the hot spring.’

  ‘The fire,’ shouts Ibrox. ‘I need something to burn. First things first.’

  ‘This is the first thing,’ snaps Mol. She’s grey with tiredness and her eyes keep blurring with tears, Mara sees, and knows it’s because they’ve made it here but Tuck has not. But still, Mol won’t let up on the trees.

  ‘Who are we if we’re not Treenesters any more? Who are we now?’ she demands.

  ‘This must be the land I dreamed of on the ship, only I never imagined a place so . . . so . . .’ Gorbals stares out at the darkening lake. For once, he doesn’t have words for what he sees. ‘This is the land of Mara.’

  ‘So we’re Marans now,’ says young Clyde. ‘Not Treenesters.’

  Mara has to laugh.

  ‘We sound like aliens. I think I’ll stay a Longhoper.’

  ‘It looks like another planet,’ says Rowan. ‘Or the moon.’

  Ice has sculpted the mountains into infinite strangeness: chaotic cathedrals of stone. A frenzy of spires and turrets, worm-eaten lattices of rock, snow-packed crevasses and vicious, staccato peaks. The great spire of rock that looms high above them points to the Star of the North, just as the narwhal horns did in the ocean. The lake, full of fallen starfire, is like the crumpled silver litter the urchins hoarded in the caves. A silver moon peeks over a crag of mountain and blows the North Wind across the waves.

  ‘Can you walk, Mara? Could you make it down there?’

  Mara nods. She’s more exhausted and sore than she ever thought possible but she’s as anxious as everyone else to find shelter from the bitter wind. And though there were none on her island and she was only a Treenester for a short time in the netherworld, the green patch of trees make her feel she is home, at last.

  More than anything, she wants a home for her baby.

  The baby snuggles against her skin and a beam of happiness surges through her, as pure as a shot of sun; but the flash of joy is spiked by grief so sharp that Mara has to push the pain deep inside, where she has put the grief for those other losses that are too painful to bear.

  Fox is not here to see the miracle they’ve made. She is the lucky one. Mara looks down at her little miracle, tucked tight and safe against her, and the love that sweeps through her is as intense and frightening as the pain of her baby’s birth.

  ‘I never saw Broomielaw or Clayslaps in my dream like I said I did.’ Gorbals looks as if it’s a secret he can no longer bear to keep to himself. ‘I lied. They were never meant to be here, were they, or they would have been in my dream.’

  Mara glances at his face as he helps her over a spur of rock. She remembers the moment of hesitation when he first told of the dream and squeezes his hand. It doesn’t make her own pain any easier but she’s not the only one who has lost the person they love.

  It’s hard to look at Mol and see her pain because then she has to think of Tuck, who wouldn’t be dead and neither would his mother, if Mara hadn’t crashed into their lives. But even that can’t ease her devastation, her disbelieving fury, at his theft of the globe.

  Life has fastened itself into the most unlikely nooks and crannies all over the Earth. Mara looks at a shrub that seems to be growing out of a cleft in sheer rock. She thinks of the lichen they found in the bleak glacier gorge and remembers the netherworld ruins, alive with insects and creatures and herbs and weeds. She thinks of Fox in his tower there and wills him her love on the wings of the wind.

  In this small nook of forest, Mara vows, they will root themselves to the Earth and make a life at the top of the world.

  In the shelter of the trees, they fall asleep around a crackling fire, hardly able to believe they are here. When light trickles through the trees a bird flies out of the branches above them, singing a song of impossible joy.

  The baby rouses with sharp, hungry cries.

  ‘What will you call her?’ Fir asks, stroking the baby’s cheek as she feeds from Mara. ‘She’s as soft as a new leaf.’

  ‘Or a flower.’ Mara winces at the force of her baby’s hunger but she can’t stop breaking into a smile every time she looks down at the perfection of the tiny face. ‘I’m calling her Lily. For Candleriggs.’

  ‘Lily Longhope,’ smiles Gorbals. ‘It’s a good name.’

  ‘You’re not Longhope, you’re Mara Bell,’ says Rowan.

  ‘Longhope’s my placename,’ Mara explains.

  ‘The name of your farm on Wing.’ Rowan still looks puzzled.

  ‘It’s a Treenester thing,’ says Mara, but she takes his point. ‘She can be Lily Bell Longhope then.’

  ‘Better,’ says Rowan. ‘But what about . . . ?’

  Mara’s face tells him not to mention Fox.

  ‘She has his looks so she can have my name,’ Mara says in a voice that’s brisk to stop her brimming into tears.

  Rowan hesitates, as if he’s searching for just the right words. He touches the baby’s hand and her fingers open like a star. Then she closes her hand tight around his thumb. ‘She can have all of my love and care. Always.’ His voice trembles.

  And that does it. Mara’s tears brim and fall on the baby’s fox-tawny head and on to the earthy roots of the trees.

  Mara rocks her baby asleep to a rhythm her body seems always to have known. She can’t stop gazing at the tiny face. As long as she has Lily she will never be alone in the world. The future seems ever more precarious now that this precious mite depends on her for survival, and yet Mara feels a fluttering joy as she thinks of all the things they will do together in the years ahead. And there is so much she must tell Lily, one day.

  In the shelter of a tree Rowan is busy with a pile of fallen branches. Mara walks across the carpet of needles cast by the trees and looks over his shoulder. He is weaving a large basket. After a while, he set
s it down and tests it on the ground. He throws a quick smile at Mara and now she sees what it is: a rocking nest for Lily.

  ‘Bit wobbly,’ he decides and begins to weave some more.

  As she watches his hands working the wood, Mara thinks of old Tain and his driftwood carvings that were famed all over Wing. She pictures her father mending his fishing boat with scraps of driftwood alongside the other island men on the shore. And she remembers her mother rocking her to sleep just as she rocks Lily, with the slow sway of a summer sea.

  What she and Rowan are becoming, Mara is not sure. His familiar presence anchors her where Fox was like an electric storm. He ripped through her life and is scorched into her soul as surely as the snake is branded on her arm. And he is burned into her future through Lily.

  Mara remembers how she and Rowan grew up as close as two saplings in this forest of young trees. They sprang from the same patch of Earth; their roots are entwined. And Rowan is still here, alive, in her world. Sunbeams flicker through the branches and land upon the cradle-nest in his hands. The wind ruffles his hair, the same deep, burnished blond as her father’s and so many of her island people. He glances up, sensing her gaze, and the look in his blue eyes stirs up a sensation that takes her by surprise, as if a hot spring has burst through the hard grief inside. Mara holds on to his gaze, and the feeling. And she wonders.

  Might she and Rowan salvage a future, together, out of the wreckage of their past?

  Anything is possible, she reminds herself. It was something she once believed.

  MOONSCAPE

  Mara is not here. It was only a trick of hope on the back of his fever-dream.

  The emptiness of the Bridge to Nowhere leaches all his hopes. His plans are a waste of time. He has lost Mara for nothing. A one-man revolution is just a joke and he’s not sure he could stomach what a revolution really means. Candleriggs was right. He should take Pandora and go home. He will risk the wrath of his grandfather and the rooks and try to change his world from the inside.

  He’ll leave behind a fox-phantom, a dream of himself, to guard the broken bridge. A fox that will bay each night at midnight, its cry echoing all down the boulevards of the Weave. But he can’t keep coming back here, night after night, to a bridge that leads nowhere at all. He will exit this ghost existence and find his real life again.

  But he’s not giving up on Mara. He can never do that. The fox is the guardian of his last flint-spark of hope and he’ll leave it here on the bridge. If she does come, the fox will alert his godgem, wherever he is, however far from now.

  The ether is full of nervy static, as if he has infected the Weave with his mood.

  A light flashes high over the bridge. Fox scans the network for flying cyberdogs or one of the other venomous creatures that mutate out of Weave-rot. But there’s nothing he can see. He’s about to exit the Weave when there’s another flash of light. He looks up.

  A moon falls into the boulevards.

  A silver glow illuminates the ruins, too strong for a solitary moon.

  Another moon shoots over the bridge.

  The peekaboo moons!

  Fox watches two more moons zip out of the empty ocean of cyberhaze that lies between the defunct Weave and the sizzling cyber-universe of the Noos. He watches them land in exactly the right place. How many have come? How many moons have answered his call?

  Time to act or time to go? Now, Fox doesn’t know.

  But he leaves the phantom fox on the broken bridge and zooms through the junk heaps and the towerstacks, heading for the place he first spotted Mara when they were both just kids who knew nothing of the world and played among the rot and ruin of the Weave.

  Fox zips across the ether on to his boulevard of broken dreams.

  Just to see.

  IMAQA

  maybe

  The Earth turns five thousand times and more.

  Sunups and sundowns rise and fall.

  In the long polar nights of the Far North many suns

  never rise or set at all.

  Days pile on days and lives are lived.

  THE EARTH SPEAKS

  In Candlewood, the tree lamps wink and shiver. Winds burrow through the forest, as fleet as Arctic hares. Above the Lake of Longhope, a cutlass moon sharpens its blade on the eastern mountains, its watery twin broken into pieces on the waves. The stars are so fierce their reflections fizzle on the lake.

  Deep in the mountains, winter still grips. But on the shores of the lake at the top of the world, the sun is winning the battle against the longest night, unfastening the fingers of winter, one by one.

  There’s a rip in the texture of the night. A shift and crack that is nothing to do with the rupturing sky lights of the magnetic Pole. A roar and bellow like a dying iceberg, but this is a voice that is deeper, older still.

  The voice of the Earth.

  CLAY

  In the moon-windy rockways of Ilira, no one hears the Earth speak.

  No one hears in the umiaks, the fleet of long walrus-skin boats moving fast as darts up the snaky channel of the fjord. The sea and the banshee wind are too loud.

  The tide is with the umiaks and the waves rush them home. The rowers are grateful. Their arms ache after a long shift salvaging bridge metal from the sunken wrecks around the jutting sharks of land where the fjord becomes open sea. As they turn the last bend, the rowers pass under the network of bridges that connect the inner islets of the fjord.

  Moonlight makes a glistening weave of the bridges. To Clay, in the umiak at the tail end of the fleet, it looks as if a spider’s web has been cast over the wide bay.

  A lamplit procession is moving along the unfinished Culpy Bridge. The Pontifix has promised it will be the greatest of all the bridges, an astonishing wonder of metal-weave suspended right across the fjord before it widens out into the bay. The coiling pillars at each end and the graceful weave and sweep of the bridge make Clay think of the sea melodies the wind-pipers play in the market caverns, frozen in mid-air.

  Clay pulls on his oar, his eyes following the moving procession of lamps.

  ‘Eyes on your oars!’ roars the scut at the head of the umiak. He snaps his whip and his cutlass winks at the moon, while the moon winks on the metal crescents that brand the Culpy Bridge. Clay lowers his head but chances a sly glance upward just before his boat passes under the bridge. The whip tail cracks on his head but Clay doesn’t care. What he just saw was worth twenty whips.

  The Pontifix was standing on the Culpy Bridge. Clay knew it was him by his wind-straggled hair, the colour of a winter sun, and his bright blue windwrap emblazoned with silver crescents and the crossed wings of a Great Skua on its back. He was examining the bridge’s wirework with his silver eyebox. As the umiak fleet passed underneath him, the Pontifix leaned over the bridge to watch. Clay could swear the silver eyebox looked right down at him.

  The Pontifix, Bridge-Master of Ilira and Keeper of the Globe, looked through his eyebox into Clay’s upturned face.

  That’s something to tell his mother. It might bring a smile to her weary face.

  Up in the mountains the Earth is roaring and shifting but Clay is racing home to harbour, the world’s wind is in his ears and he doesn’t hear a thing.

  PANDORA AND THE GODGEM

  Fox is fast asleep at last.

  Pandora kneels on the floor beside the bed of shredded books, heaped with ancient clothes from the museum. She pulls on one of the long, grubby dresses, the first that comes to hand, strokes the tawny hair that’s strewn with fine threads of grey like cobwebs on autumn leaves and steals a kiss from his dreams.

  He’s exhausted from a long night’s work in cyberspace, outrunning the rooks that are forever on their track. Since Caledon died, New Mungo has lost its dominance of the New World. New forces are rising, says Fox, things are shifting. Insurrection and dissaffection vibrate in the ether. Finally, he says, after all these years, our time has come.

  Pandora lifts the lid of the jewelled casket they found years ago among the
museum’s armour and swords. It’s where he keeps the godgem with its headgem that is the same green as her eyes. He’s always telling her it’s not a toy but she knows that well enough. The game they play is a deadly serious one.

  Pandora creeps out of the tower room and runs down the narrow winding stairs. When at last the stairs end, she bursts out through a small door and only stops to rub a stitch in her side. Now she’s running through the great halls of the museum, barefoot, long dress rustling, the night air of the netherworld seeping through the smashed window panes and coating her unwieldy tangle of hair with beads of dank mist.

  She finds the hall with the huge stuffed elephant and crawls underneath, resting against the thick trunk of its back leg. It’s her favourite place and he never finds her here.

  Her presence disturbs an owl perched on the elephant’s head. It flies off with an indignant who you! to join the ghostly hosts of owls hooting and hunting all across the netherworld. Pandora puts on the godgem. The green gem on her forehead looks like a third eye. She gives a happy sigh as she takes a cyberleap to join a night-hunt in another ruined world.

  Now she’s zipping through the ruined boulevards, no longer Pandora but a green cybersnake, hyperspeeding far faster than she can ever run through the museum’s halls. Behind her is the broken bridge where a forlorn fox bays night after night for a mate that never comes. Pandora doesn’t bother about him. She is too busy snaking through the flickering towerstacks to play her own furtive part in events that will shake the very foundations of the New World.

  And there they all are, waiting for her in a puddle of moonbeams, in the wrecked boulevard where dreams are forged.

  CANDLEWOOD SPIRE