The Sea of the Dead
Page 22
Bren knelt in front of the pedestal and began to write in the dirt with his finger. He had no understanding of the words, he had only memorized the images, running left to right around the border of the mandala. When he had finished, he stood up and waited.
The rumbling began again in the belly of the volcano, and this time Bren suspected the damage would be far more catastrophic. He hoped that Lady Barrett and Nindemann and Ani and the brothers were far enough away, but even if they were, they had hundreds of miles to go with precious few resources.
There was an explosion. Rocks began tumbling down from above, crashing all around Bren. One hit the pedestal, splitting the book in two and rending the binding, and to Bren’s astonishment, the words fell from the loosed pages until he was standing in a litter of broken spells and scattered letters.
The floor began to give, and when it did, Bren fell deeper into the mountain, expecting to land in a lake of boiling magma. Instead he kept falling, and falling, until the rumble and roar of the volcano faded from earshot, and all he could hear was the whistling of cold air past his ears and the echo of his own beating heart.
CHAPTER
31
THE IMPOSSIBLE BLACK TULIP
The tap, tap, tap sounded like it was inside his own head. And it was annoying. His head hurt enough as it was.
It was pitch-black, wherever he was. He couldn’t remember, actually, and when he fumbled for a light all he managed to do was ram his knuckles against rock.
“Ow!” Bren screamed.
As he nursed his hand, he heard, Did you hear that?
Aye. Behind there.
Bren tried to stand up and hit his head on more rock, letting out an even louder howl of pain.
Over here!
There were a pair of taps now, tap, tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, which grew louder and louder, until Bren heard rock tumble from a wall and a small beam of light showed him that he was in a tunnel. Again. At least, though, it wasn’t made of weapons.
The hole grew bigger, and the light brighter, until soon Bren was staring into the smutty faces of two miners. “Dear God!” said one. “There’s a boy down here!”
Before Rand McNally had transformed Map into the mapmaking capital of the Western world, this part of the Cornish Peninsula had been known mainly for its tin mines, and mine shafts and tunnels still honeycombed the ground below the town. Most of the tin was gone, but a few enterprising men and women still occasionally went treasure hunting, usually with a map they had bought from Rand McNally.
Bren crawled through the hole, past the stunned miners, up and out of the tunnel and into what felt like an early spring evening with a bright full moon. All the mine entrances were north of town, and so Bren walked through the neighborhoods of the tradesmen, relishing the yeasty smell from the Belgians and their beer vats, and the strong scent of soap from the Italian garment makers, until he came to a familiar storefront in a narrow lane of Map’s Merchant Quarter. Bren wasn’t sure what time it was; it didn’t matter. There was a light burning inside, and Archibald Black sat at his counter, hunched over his chess board.
Bren quietly opened the door and shut it just as silently. “You’re going to have to get a lot better if you want to beat Aadesh,” he said.
Black looked up at Bren, then back at the board, and he began to weep. They embraced, and when both had regained a measure of their composure, Black told him how it was indeed spring 1602, and Sean had gotten them back to Britannia months ago. Sean had stayed with Black for a few days but finally decided it was time to go see his own family back in Eire.
“Oh, Bren, you must know we didn’t want to leave you. If there’s anything we could have done differently . . .”
“I know,” said Bren. “You didn’t leave, you were taken. So was I. You did the right thing. Lady Barrett told me everything.”
“So she did find you!” said Black. “Did she bring you all the way back here?”
“No,” said Bren. “And I don’t know if she’s okay. If I were to guess . . .” He stopped and said, “It will take a while to tell you everything. What about my father?”
“He sits up all night, getting drunk on cabbage wine,” said Black. “Go see him.”
When Bren reached the shabby clapboard house with the leaky thatched roof, now looking shabbier and leakier than ever, he was afraid to go inside. He wasn’t sure why it was so hard, but he had to remind himself how much his father needed to know Bren was alive.
Bren never told his father he went to see Black first. They sat up until dawn with each other, talking until David Owen had to leave for work, and then Bren climbed to his sleeping loft, determined to sleep for days.
He arrived on the landing to an astonishing sight—on his narrow windowsill sat the neglected clay pot where he had planted his tulip bulb so many years ago, and blooming there was a perfect black tulip. Bren went to the window, looking at the tulip from every angle in the light, convinced it must really be a deep purple. But it wasn’t. It was solid black.
He smiled and turned to the wall across from his bed, where as a child he had drawn his large map of the world’s most fantastical places: the Orient; the East Netherlands; China. Improbably, he had been to all these places. But the map was different now, as if someone had been revising it while Bren was gone. There was the Vanishing Island in the southern Indian Sea. And there was the island where Bung Ananda had tried to build his own Paradise. The Pearl Cliffs, Qin’s tomb; Khotan and the Dragon’s Gate and the Leopard’s Nest. The Arctic Islands no one had thought existed.
Only one thing was the same. There was Fortune, the place his mother had told him about as a child. An enchanted island that hovered between sea and sky, appearing unpredictably.
“I’d like to think it’s real,” his mother had said, and so Bren had mapped the imaginary island in detail, hoping, as a child would, that mapping Fortune would somehow make it real.
Except he had kept that map, that childish wish, hidden inside his small writing desk. And yet here it was, tacked to his wall.
Something startled him. Mr. Grey hopped through the window, knocking the black tulip sideways, causing Bren to jump toward the window to try and rescue his priceless botanical, nearly pushing it entirely off the sill instead.
“Where on earth did you come from?” said Bren. “Have you been coming here this whole time? Who’s been feeding you?”
Mr. Grey just sat there staring at him, then ignored him completely and began grooming himself. Then, as if it had been his idea, he walked toward Bren, pausing within arm’s reach to stretch and invite Bren to pet him.
As he bent down to stroke Mr. Grey, Bren noticed grains of sand on the floor. Probably just dirt—it would be just like his father never to have cleaned up here—but then he noticed sand all over the floor under the map of Fortune as well.
His mother had told him something else about their enchanted island: that she imagined it as “a place of peace, where only the people you love can find you.”
He stood up and reached into his pocket, feeling around until his fingers found the cool, smooth surface of the black jade stone. He had taken it out of his pocket long ago, convinced it was worthless, and had no memory of replacing it. And yet he knew it would be there. He took it out and held it on his palm. “Let’s pretend this is a piece of Fortune,” his mother had said when she gave it to him.
No, it couldn’t be. But then Bren looked at the blooming black tulip and reminded himself that nothing is impossible. He placed the stone back in his pocket, scooped up Mr. Grey, and closed his eyes. He cautiously stepped forward, imagining all the time that instead of a wall, he would feel a warm wind against his face and hear the thunder of ocean waves. It was only when Mr. Grey squirmed out of his arms that he opened his eyes, and kneeling on a vast beach under a pure blue sky, he grabbed a handful of brilliant white sand and let it slip gently through his fingers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Shortly before this book went to print, I lost a dea
r friend, Dale Mackenzie Brown. Dale gave me my first writing assignment for publication, and he continued to encourage and advise me through the years. I am deeply saddened that he won’t read this. The book is dedicated to my agent, Jen Rofé, but I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the Andrea Brown Literary Agency for allowing Jen to take a shot on me way back when I submitted a peculiar book about a puffin. And to Jordan Brown and Walden Pond Press, who gave me a chance, I will forever be grateful.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO BY ANNABELLA BRANDON
BARRY WOLVERTON is the author of The Vanishing Island and The Dragon’s Gate, the first two books in the Chronicles of the Black Tulip, as well as Neversink. He has more than fifteen years’ experience creating books, documentary television scripts, and website content for international networks and publishers, including National Geographic, Scholastic.com, the Library of Congress, and the Discovery Networks. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. You can visit him online at www.barrywolverton.com.
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BOOKS BY BARRY WOLVERTON
Neversink
The Chronicles of the Black Tulip
Volume I: The Vanishing Island
Volume II: The Dragon’s Gate
CREDITS
COVER ART BY PRISCILLA WONG
COVER DESIGN BY KATIE KLIMOWICZ
COPYRIGHT
Walden Pond Press is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Walden Pond Press and the skipping stone logo are trademarks and registered trademarks of Walden Media, LLC.
THE SEA OF THE DEAD. Text copyright © 2017 by Barry Wolverton. Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Dave Stevenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942890
ISBN 978-0-06-222196-4
EPub Edition © November 2017 ISBN 9780062221988
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FIRST EDITION
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