Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  OREON

  In Ale Alley Mara keeps to the shadows between the swinging lanterns above each drinking den. Not here, Lily, please don’t be here, she prays, peering into noisy cave bars, avoiding eye contact with the drunks.

  Someone speaks to her in a language she doesn’t understand.

  Mara flicks a nervous glance at the woman leaning against the entrance to a bar as if the rock wall depended on her for support; clearly, it’s the opposite.

  ‘Whassup, stranger?’ Now the woman speaks in Mara’s tongue.

  ‘I’ve lost my daughter,’ says Mara desperately.

  ‘She pretty?’ the woman slurs, closing one eye and tilting her head back to focus.

  Mara nods.

  ‘Bad place, this, for a pretty girl.’ The woman slithers a bit down the wall then props herself up. ‘Should keep a tighter grip, Mum.’

  Thanks for that, thinks Mara. A torrent of guilt sweeps through her because it’s true. Nothing in Candlewood has prepared Lily for this place. I’m supposed to protect her, Mara chides herself, but hiding the truth about the past has led her daughter here, like a lamb among wolves.

  ‘Watch out for the wolves,’ the woman warns with a black-toothed grin.

  Mara jumps and stares as the woman seems to read her thoughts. ‘Wolves?’

  ‘Lotsa wolves here to eat up a looker like you.’ The woman cackles then grabs Mara’s arm. ‘An’ there’s a real—’

  Mara pulls away from the drunk woman and barges through the revellers until she is out of the lantern-lit alley and into a darker rockway full of the secret scuttlings and furtive mutterings of nocturnal trades and business deals. She rushes on until she finds her way to the old fishing harbour.

  Night pours down from the mountains. The sky and the sea are full of stars and the moon sails above the fjord like a galleon ship.

  Mara slumps down on a rock.

  Now what? Where would Lily go? Think!

  In the big harbour at the other side of the bay the sailing ships are lit up by hosts of lanterns. Mara is now consumed by the fear that made her chase Lily through the mountains. What if she got on a ship? What if she is already crossing the ocean to try to find Fox? But surely she wouldn’t cut loose from her own family like that?

  I did, Mara reminds herself, with a plunging heart.

  She found herself cut loose from her family in one desperate moment of rage – and never saw them again.

  Mara puts her head in her hands and wills Lily to be safe in Ilira.

  ‘What kind of man is your Pontifix? I’ve travelled far to meet him.’

  The voice cuts through Mara’s fear. Pontifix? The word is strange, yet she has heard it before, somewhere.

  Mara turns around, recognizing the soft rise and fall of the voice. The young seafarer from the Mirkwood sits at a long, lamplit table outside a harbour shack with a group of fisherfolk, all busily mending their nets. The click-clack of their knitting needles is suddenly a nervous sound. The fisherfolk look wary.

  ‘He’s setting himself up as some kind of Emperor of the Arctic, I’ve heard.’

  Mara sees it’s the older seafarer from the Mirkwood, Greyfus, with the heavy beard and furs. She slips from her rock and creeps closer, hiding behind a stack of kayaks to listen.

  A sturdy fisherwoman brings a large jug to the table and fills tall tankards with frothy ale.

  ‘He’ll be challenged on that,’ the young seafarer responds. He raises his tankard, takes a long drink of ale and wipes the froth from his mouth. ‘He’s not the only power in the Arctic. Though he likes to wipe out his rivals. I heard he had Rodenglaw drowned.’

  Around the table, busy fingers grow still. A fisherman grunts but no one else speaks.

  ‘It’s the talk of the seas,’ Greyfus confirms.

  ‘Bad news grows wings,’ agrees the young seafarer. ‘Messenger hawks spread news of his death all over the North.’

  ‘It was the thugs that guard the Pontifix’s palace who killed Rodenglaw.’ A fisherman breaks from his net-mending to give the young seafarer a challenging stare. ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘But who told them to?’ The young seafarer sets down his tankard with a clunk. ‘Tuck Culpy always had a ruthless streak.’

  Mara can’t believe her ears.

  Tuck? Tuck is alive? Gypsea Tuck?

  Suddenly his lilting ocean voice is in her head. She can see Tuck’s eyes in the firelight one night years ago, deep in the mountain behind her, as he tells her about his Da, Jack Culpy, the best gypsea bridge-maker there ever was – and yes, he told her too, didn’t he, of his dream of being a pontifix. It was a special name, he said, for a bridger in ancient times. That’s what he’d be one day, he said, trying to impress her – Tuck the Pontifix, the greatest bridge-builder in the world.

  And she tried not to laugh at the scruffy gypsea pirate boy with his glittering eyes.

  Mara looks through Tuck’s magnificent bridges to his moonlit palace, amazed.

  ‘My brother thought he was dead,’ continues the young seafarer. ‘But his fame spread across the oceans and it turned out that your Pontifix was our Tuck.’ He laughs. ‘So, two old gypsea friends are set to battle each other over who rules the Arctic seas – though a much bigger battle is brewing.’

  ‘Who,’ says Greyfus, taking up the prompt, ‘is your brother?’

  ‘Pendicle Prender,’ says the young seafarer in his mild voice. ‘No doubt you’ve heard of him.’

  Knitting needles clatter on to the table. The fisherfolk exchange frightened glances and shift in their seats.

  ‘Prender the pirate?’

  ‘The Vulture of the North?’

  ‘Well, well! All that time on the ship and you never said a word.’ Greyfus sits back in his seat eyeing his young companion warily now.

  ‘I’m not my brother,’ the young seafarer assures them. ‘I am Oreon. A scholar gypsea.’ He looks out at the fjord. ‘I am on a historic mission,’ he offers enigmatically, ‘to save the North.’ He turns back to the fisherfolk. ‘You must have seen the fleets in the sky?’

  ‘We see ’em,’ says a wizened man Mara recognizes as the one who grabbed her on the shore. ‘You know what they are then, eh?’

  ‘My brother keeps lookouts in the Northern oceans,’ says Oreon. ‘Since the spring sun rose, sky fleets have been landing in the Far North, others around Narwhal Sword Bay and at Aurora, north-east of here.’

  ‘An invasion?’ says Greyfus. ‘From the sky?’

  Oreon nods.

  ‘What do the sky cities want with our land?’ demands a young fisherwoman, clutching a sleeping baby close to her. ‘They’ve all the world’s oceans!’

  ‘The tentacles of the sky empire are spreading far beyond the oceans,’ says Oreon. ‘Now they want all the lands of the world. Soon there will be invasions of the high lands all across the Earth.’ Oreon leans towards the fisherfolk. ‘The Vulture sent scouts inland on the trail of the first sky fleets,’ he says. ‘They have driven out the people of the Far North – Inuits who have lived there for time out of mind. They fled south, their villages razed. Some joined my brother’s fleets on the seas. There are fuels and metals deep in your land that the empire wants. Teams have begun tunnelling and building settlements. New cities.’

  ‘Sky cities?’

  The faces in the lamplight are aghast at the idea of towering cities on their land.

  ‘Underground cities.’ Oreon’s long fingers draw patterns upon the table. ‘Burrowed cities protected by great domes that will stay warm and light all winter. So the scouts say. There are rumours,’ he leans forward, eyes alight, ‘that the empire even plans to own the weather and the stars.’

  ‘The weather belongs to the Earth!’ the old fisherman scoff. ‘And the stars to the sky.’

  But the others watch Oreon’s restless fingers with stricken faces as they seem to glimpse the frightening future he draws upon then tabletop.

  ‘The Pontifix will never share his sea power, no matter what,�
�� the old fisherman grunts.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Oreon responds. ‘Your Pontifix is blind in more ways than one. His sights are fixed on his old rivalry with the Vulture but he’ll soon be forced to put that aside. The Vulture aims to take conquest of the Arctic seas and battle the sky empire. He is the one with the vision and the power to do that.’

  Oreon curls his fingers into a fist and thumps the table lightly, as if carefully bursting one of the bubble cities.

  ‘If we don’t have the right leader for this fight, the sky empire will take everything. Your city, these seas, this land. And you will all be its slaves – if you survive.’

  THE VOICE IN THE WATCH

  Oreon holds the startled gaze of his listeners. ‘The only way is for the Arctic peoples to combine under a strong leader and join the Surge against the sky empire,’ he tells them.

  ‘The Surge?’ a fisherman queries.

  ‘A rebel force around the globe that wants to keep the Earth’s high lands free. The Surgents are mostly flood refugees,’ Oreon explains, ‘and empire rebels.’

  Mara’s heart jumps. She creeps out from the stack of kayaks where she’s been hiding, listening hard.

  The large fisherwoman slams her tankard on the table, outraged. ‘An’ they all want to come here?’

  ‘Not all. There are other high lands in the world. But you have a whole new continent here, sparsely populated. Don’t you know how vast this island is?’ Oreon demands. ‘I have helped my brother map the south and west coasts – there are endless empty swathes of land, as far as you can see, all risen from the White Age of ice. As for the deepest North and the interior beyond the mountains, who knows what expanses of empty lands are there too?’

  Around the table, the fisherfolk exchange uneasy glances.

  The young scholar looks out impatiently at the dark sea fjord. He shakes an arm from his windwrap and taps a disc strapped to his wrist. The glassy face of the disc flashes symbols that Mara is too far away to see.

  ‘A watch!’ exclaims the wizened fisherman. The lines of his face intensify as he peers at the disc and his eyes sink deeper among the creases. ‘Haven’t seen one of those since I was a boy.’ He sweeps a glance across the sparkling arena of the sky. ‘The stars say midnight,’ he challenges. ‘What time do you say?’

  Oreon looks at the watch-face.

  ‘Twenty-three minutes and thirty-two seconds past,’ he replies with a laugh. ‘The stars are on time.’

  ‘Is that a radio watch?’ Greyfus exclaims, staring at it. ‘But we could have listened on the ship!’

  ‘There was nothing to hear,’ Oreon shrugs. ‘The soundwaves were crackling like an aurora storm. In Hallow the winter was so wild we barely heard a whisper on the soundwaves. But last night I heard him again’

  ‘Who?’ says Greyfus. The keen, sharp eyes that have been watching Oreon since he revealed who he is now light up.

  ‘We might be too late but . . .’

  Oreon fiddles with the watch and pulls out a small stem from the disc. The figures around the table look startled as a voice speaks out.

  It seems to Mara that she doesn’t hear the voice, she absorbs it as a bolt of shock, a live current, a kind of incandescence that sends her reeling out of the moment and down a tunnel of time to land back in her own past.

  It’s him.

  Mara moves towards the voice as a tide rolls to shore, a moth to a flame.

  But how can it be? How?

  The voice wraps around her like a tingling spell. A man now, not a boy. The years have weighted his voice but it has the same hungry, husky tone and she feels the same elemental tug inside, as if by a fine hot wire, as she did when she first reached towards him in the ether wastes of the ruined Weave.

  If she saw him, would she even know him now? Once the globe was gone and the connection between them cut dead, Mara learned that it was best not to remember. She pushed his face and memories of that fierce, fleeting time with Fox to the very hinterland of her heart. She had to. She couldn’t step into the future while forever looking back. Yet she couldn’t ever truly forget because he was always there, in Lily, who would look at her through a tumble of hair and the walls around her heart would crumble as Mara glimpsed him in their daughter’s eyes.

  Beyond will, beyond thought, somewhere far deeper than memory, some essence of Fox lodged in her, kept faith all this time, like the secret rings in the trunk of a tree.

  And she knows, beyond doubt, that the voice in the watch is him.

  ‘Land girl!’

  Mara jumps. The spell shatters.

  Faces stare, curious faces, all turned towards the stranger who has stepped out of the dark and into the edges of their lantern light.

  ‘You can smell the land and trees on ’er,’ says the wizened one who grabbed her on the shore.

  The voice that is Fox breaks into crackles. Oreon taps his watch and the voice is silenced. His dark gaze is fixed on Mara.

  ‘Let me hear him,’ Mara bursts out. ‘Please!’

  ‘He’ll be gone now,’ says Oreon, studying her with surprised interest. ‘His story had finished.’

  ‘He tells stories?’ Mara stares in confusion at the shining watch-face. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He is the Midnight Storyteller,’ says Oreon. ‘But the spring auroras breakup the radio waves.’

  He nods to the fierce eruptions of colour in the sky above the mountains.

  Mara doesn’t look; she doesn’t care about the sky.

  Radio?

  She remembers the word. Granny Mary had one. A small silver box covered in buttons and dials. She’d switch it on from time to time. You just never know, she’d say, but it was always full of empty noise. Radio communications had died out in the Great Floods, yet Granny kept hoping for a voice.

  ‘Who is this storyteller?’ Mara demands of Oreon. ‘Tell me what you know about him.’

  The gypsea scholar raises an eyebrow at the incomer’s imperious tone.

  ‘No one knows for sure,’ he responds nonetheless. ‘Some say he is a Siberian hermit in a mountain cave. Or a ghost in the airwaves telling the tales of what has been and what is to come. Others say he is a secret rebel in New Jing. Whoever he is, his midnight broadcasts have set the world alight.’

  The sturdy fisherwoman jumps to her feet, pointing to a flotilla of gondolas that sweep like dark arrows up the moonlit fjord.

  ‘The palace guards!’

  ‘At last,’exclaims Oreon.

  He drops a handful of pearls on the table with thanks and the grateful fisherfolk make a grab. Oreon shakes hands with Greyfus, gathers his windwrap around him and hurries towards the end of the harbour.

  The fisherfolk watch nervously.

  ‘There are claw emblems on their helmets,’ one whispers. ‘The palace guards should wear the moon crescents of the Pontifix!’

  The claws adorning the helmets of the guard fleet are burnished gold in the moonlight. But Mara can only think of one thing.

  Oreon cannot leave. She can’t let him disappear with his watch, the watch with the voice, the only chance she will ever have to find –

  What am I doing? Mara stops dead, heart pounding. But it’s not for me, she tells herself. It’s for Lily.

  A scream rips through the rockways.

  A creature scampers from the dark alleys out on to the harbour rocks.

  Mara sees pointed ears, a long snout, amber eyes and sleek fur glistening in the moonlight.

  The wolf pauses, lifts its nose in the air as if sniffing out an escape path, then darts from rock to rock as a rabble staggers out of Ale Alley on the hunt.

  ‘Wolf!’ the human pack yells. ‘Kill the wolf!’

  SEA WOLF

  A crack of gunshot. A bullet clangs off a rock. Mara ducks behind the stack of kayaks.

  Run! she wills the wolf as it bounds past. A sudden sense of kinship with this unwelcome intruder from the mountains makes her root for it. But now the wolf is stranded on the outermost rocks of the harb
our.

  The hunting crowd jeers. Weapons glint as the rabble move in for the kill – then halt as people spot the fleet of guards in the fjord.

  Oreon turns. He looks at the wolf. Two bounds, Mara sees, and the wolf will be on his neck. But Oreon smiles. A surprised, amused smile. He raises his hand. A weapon like a silver dagger gleams in his fist.

  A thin bolt of light shoots from the weapon.

  The wolf gives a loud yelp then crashes into the harbour water among the crush of fishing boats and the incoming gondola fleet.

  The lightning-bolt weapon silences the hunting pack. They draw back from the lethal stranger and creep away fearfully to the rockway bars, muttering amongst themselves. When Mara looks around the fisherfolk are gone too, their shacks shuttered up, the table dark, the lamp snuffed out.

  Oreon leaps into a gondola. Only once the fleet have surged back up the fjord towards the palace, and the harbour is quite empty, does Mara emerge from her hiding place in the kayaks. She walks towards the spot where the wolf hit the water. She knows what she saw.

  The light-bolt did not hit the wolf. Oreon deliberately misfired and hit the rock behind. The wolf leaped. And there’s something else Mara is quite sure of . . .

  She peers down at the dark water in between the harbour rocks and shifting fishing craft. Nothing. But she waits, holding her breath until . . . at last the surface of the water breaks. Mara lets out her breath in a great gasp as the head of the wolf appears, spluttering.

  ‘You!’ she cries

  The wolf clambers from the water, panting, seawater dripping from its coat. When it reaches Mara it lifts its snout to the moon as if about to howl again. But from under the wolf head, another pair of eyes sparkle.

  ‘Me,’ says the wolf.

  Wing grins and lifts the dead wolf head from his own. He throws off the wolfskin and grabs Mara in a sodden hug. She holds him tight, then holds him at arms’ length.

  ‘Where is she, Wing? Is Lily safe?’

  Wing points towards the sea.

  Mara puts her head in her hands, distraught. ‘She’s gone to sea? How could you let her go? Why did you let her come here at all? You know this city – we were all lucky to get out alive before. I’ll never find her now.’ A great sob bursts from Mara. ‘I can’t bear it.’