Stargazer

by Patrick Carman

  “Our turn,” said Matilda.

  Seeing the rope bridge from a distance had been one thing, but standing right next to it was a much scarier feeling. The wind was coming in slight gusts, swinging the long bridge gently back and forth. To be truthful, it wasn’t so much a bridge as it was a weird collection of ropes. There was one low along the middle and two higher on each side. Between it all, there wound a web of additional rope holding everything together. It appeared that I’d be walking along a tight rope with extra ropes at each hand to steady my way. It did not look the least bit inviting.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” came a voice from behind. Jonezy was walking toward us, meeting us as he’d said he would. “I’ve done it hundreds of times and only slipped on three occasions.”

  Seeing that his comment had only made me more afraid, he added, “But, of course, I’ve never fallen. I’d be dead if that had happened.”

  “It would be best if you didn’t talk anymore,” said Matilda. She stood up and went to the bridge, looking out. “All you have to do is never let go with both hands at the same time and always watch your footing. Oh, and don’t look down. Ever. Follow those simple rules and you’ll be fine.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Has any part of this bridge ever been broken?” I asked.

  “Never,” said Jonezy. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Matilda gestured to Jonezy as if to say, All right, if you’re so sure it’s safe, then you can go first.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, pushing her gently aside and starting out over the water.

  Seeing him on the bridge gave me some comfort, because he made it look easy.

  “You next, Alexa,” Matilda said. “I’ll follow close behind.”

  Jonezy was already well out onto the bridge, his weight bowing the ropes as he swayed gently in the wind. He stopped and looked back when he was thirty steps out.

  “What a lovely day!” he shouted. “A little breeze always makes things interesting!”

  Matilda rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t get off the second pillar as often as he used to. He makes it sound more exciting than it really is.”

  She wasn’t fooling me, though. I could see that there would be plenty of excitement on the rope bridge as I put my first foot out and held on for dear life. I made the mistake of looking down the moment I had both feet free of the second stone pillar and gasped at the feeling it left in my throat.

  “Uuuuuuuhhh,” was all I could manage. It felt as if the world had come out from under my feet—which I guess it had. The water was so far below—and, even worse, the sea monster was thrashing in the distance, tearing chunks of stone from the fourth pillar.

  “It’s okay, Alexa. Just look straight ahead and do what I told you. You’re going to be fine.”

  But I couldn’t turn away. My eyes were glued to Abaddon, way down below, and they wouldn’t come free.

  You’ll never make it across. You’re going to fall! And guess who’s going to catch you?

  The terrible voice rang in my ears. How I wished it would go away or that, at least, someone else could hear what I was hearing.

  “I’m not going to fall!” I yelled.

  “That’s the spirit!” shouted Jonezy. It was just what I needed, because I looked up at the sound of his voice. It seemed that as long as I wasn’t looking at Abaddon, his voice didn’t ring in my ears. It occurred to me that this might be a point worth remembering as I tried to figure out how to overcome him. Would he hear me if I spoke? Or was it only the other way around? I made a mental note to test this idea when I wasn’t in such a precarious situation.

  Matilda came on the rope bridge behind me and Ranger whined loudly from somewhere on the other side.

  “Will he be all right?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry so much about the dog. Just put one foot in front of the other and keep a tight hold. Ranger will be waiting with a stick in his mouth when you get there.”

  After that, I went along just fine for about fifty steps. The rope bridge kept bending lower and lower, swaying like it would tip right over when a gust of wind chopped through. But I’d gotten the hang of it and felt some confidence as the rope bridge began to turn upward. The third pillar was higher than the one we’d been on by a healthy margin and climbing up the backside of the rope bridge proved harder than I’d expected.

  “Hurry up, you two!” cried Jonezy. He’d made it to the third pillar faster than I could believe and was taunting us to join him.

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Matilda. She had stayed right behind me step for step. “Just take it slow and easy.”

  Something about Jonezy’s yelling from above, Matilda’s instruction from behind, and the strongest gust of wind yet conspired against my feet. First my back foot slipped, then my front, and then all at once I was hanging by my hands on a swinging bridge a thousand feet in the air.

  “Matildaaaaaaa!!” I shouted. My feet were whirling around in little circles trying to find a hold.

  “Hang on!” Matilda cried. She reached out and caught one of my feet and pulled it back in, setting it on the thick rope center of the bridge. Then she hopped over my foot and swung out on one hand. She took my other foot and gently placed it back where it belonged. She remained hanging by one arm, and I couldn’t believe how strong she was.

  Matilda swung around in front of me and settled her feet on the rope.

  “Let’s finish climbing across before I get us both into more trouble,” I said. “I want to see what the world looks like from up there.”

  The rest of the way was hard going, but Matilda stayed in front of me, climbing backward as she went, watching every step I took to be sure I wouldn’t fall. When we finally arrived, Jonezy took my hand and pulled me off the rope bridge. I flopped on the ground, exhausted and out of breath. Ranger dropped a clod of dirt on my stomach and licked my face.

  “She’ll need some practice on that,” said Jonezy. “We might want to send her back the easier way.”

  “Easier way?” I said, sitting up. “You mean there’s an easier way of getting over here?”

  “Sorry to confuse you, Alexa.” Jonezy pulled me up on my feet and Matilda brushed the dirt off my back. “The easier way can’t be used to come over, only to go back.”

  “Oh,” I said. My short reply was more of an ooooooooh than an oh, but it wasn’t because of what Jonezy had said. I had gotten my first real look at the place where I’d arrived, staring out over a landscape that was entirely unexpected.

  “Welcome to the third pillar,” said Jonezy in his very gentlemanly way. I found the scene before me breathtaking, and Jonezy knew it.

  “Would you like to take a look around?”

  I took a first, timid step forward toward the middle of the third pillar.

  “Would I ever.”

  CHAPTER 7

  SKIMMING OVER THE VILLAGE

  There was much about the third pillar that I hadn’t expected, but I will begin with the two things that surprised me the most. The first was the shape of its landscape. It was not flat or rolling hills or any of that. Instead it was curved down in the middle—deep and wide—like the inside of an enormous spoon. The whole surface of the third pillar was below the rim, and all of it was alive with a mossy green texture I couldn’t help but want to kneel down and touch.

  “It’s soft,” I said, pushing my finger into the bright surface. “Squishy.”

  “That’s because it’s full of water,” said Matilda. “Pick a spot—any spot—and dig a few inches below the surface. Nothing but water down there.”

  I had the same boots on that I’d worn throughout the voyage on the Warwick Beacon. They were laced up, to keep me warm and dry, but I wished now that I could get them off quickly and sink my toes into the spongy surface of the third pillar. Looking off to my right, I saw that it wasn’t all mossy green. There were clumps and shelves of stone scattered everywhere as well.

  Before I get carried away wit
h all that I saw of the third pillar on that first day—there is much more to report!—I must first tell the second most surprising thing I saw because I saw it at the rim, before I traveled any farther. The third pillar was almost the very highest of the five, quite a bit higher than the first and second pillars. From here I could see the top of the fourth—the one Abaddon was trying to destroy—and I knew then why no one lived there.

  “That looks hard to live on,” I said, pointing in the general direction of pillar number four. It was shaped like the opposite side of the spoon, curved at the top, and it was covered in the same bright green moss as the pillar I stood on.

  “That it is,” said Jonezy. “Its shape makes it dangerous to set foot on, though Sir Alistair Wakefield did it all the time.”

  Hearing that name sent my imagination reeling. Somewhere down the path of yesterday, lives the man who never ages, Sir Alistair Wakefield. I remembered Roland’s words as if they were haunted.

  “Why did he go there?” I asked. I was also interested in how he’d gotten there, since there was no bridge across, but I managed to control my curiosity.

  “Who can say?” said Matilda. She was tying her long hair back with a string. “He disappeared onto that pillar for long stretches of time. Sometimes we didn’t see him for months on end.”

  This struck me as odd even for the mysterious Sir Alistair Wakefield. What had he been doing over there?

  “That one looks …” I didn’t know exactly how to say it as I looked up at the fifth pillar, the only one I couldn’t see the top of. “A little mean, I guess.”

  Jonezy and Matilda gazed up at it as well. It was a lot higher than all the rest—shooting straight into the sky—and it was the only pillar with thick black streaks along its sides. What I could see of the top looked like a wall of jagged stone. It had a strange familiarity about it, a little like the walls around Bridewell Common in a day long past.

  “Mean,” pondered Jonezy. “That’s not a bad way of putting it. It’s certainly true that no one has ever tried to go there.”

  “What’s its purpose?” I asked.

  “Your guess is as good as ours,” answered Matilda. “We’ve simply let it alone all these years. I’ll tell you this, though: The walls up there weren’t always that high. I remember a time when they weren’t even half that tall. It’s as if they’re alive, growing out of the pillar.”

  “There’s not much more to say about those places,” said Jonezy. I could see that he was anxious to get moving. “They’re not for anything. They just sit there, year after year, with no purpose. Best to turn your gaze in a different direction.”

  And so I did.

  We began our descent into the green spoon of the third pillar, moss squishing gently beneath my boots as we went. This, too, was memorable in a peculiar way. It was like the feeling under my feet on the way to the glowing pool on Mount Norwood with Yipes. Why were there so many things that seemed like copies of places I’d been before? I wondered if it could be that the same hand was at work in both places. The evidence was mounting.

  Thinking of all these things made me long to be with Yipes even more. He was my closest friend, my constant companion through so many challenging times. It felt all wrong being away from him in the midst of so much confusion.

  There were narrow channels of clear water running everywhere between the mossy green. They reminded me of the veins crisscrossing the backs of my hands. The tracks were so thin that Ranger had no problem putting his left legs on one side and his right on the other, lapping up water as he loped down the hill.

  “Where does all the fresh water come from?” I asked, certain that it wasn’t saltwater I was seeing.

  “Only Sir Alistair would have known,” answered Jonezy. “It’s a mystery I’ve tried to figure out for years with no success, and he was maddeningly quiet on the subject.”

  As we continued down the hill, something else I hadn’t been entirely sure about became clearer. There was a village way down below, in the very middle, and it had seemed as if it were shrouded in a covering of earth-toned fog. But the closer we got, the more I realized it wasn’t a fog at all, but a weaving of lines running back and forth across the open sky.

  “What are all those lines for?” I asked. I could see now that there were ropes like the one’s we’d crossed on strung back and forth all through the center of the pillar, like a vast web made by a gargantuan spider. More shocking still, it appeared that here and there people were riding beneath the ropes. They were holding on to something between their hands that was looped over the long ropes, their entire bodies hanging down like clumps of fruit, and they were moving unbelievably fast.

  “They’re skimming,” said Matilda. “It’s part of our tradition to skim the vines. You’d be surprised how serious people are about it.”

  “There must be hundreds, maybe thousands of vines. It’s impossible.”

  We went farther down and soon we were below the highest of the vines, traveling along a series of stone shelves that wound lower and lower. It was layered for hundreds of feet, this web of ropes or vines that seemed to go on forever. I watched as several more people darted by, flying through the air in the distance.

  “But why do they do it? It looks dangerous. And it doesn’t seem to have any purpose.”

  “Tonight you’ll see it has a very real purpose,” said Matilda. She smiled as if she had a secret she was excited to share with me. “The night skim is something that has to be seen to be believed.”

  The night skim? She had definitely piqued my curiosity.

  As we came lower on the hill, I looked more carefully at the scene before me and began to get the idea. The vines ran in every direction above the village. We were coming very near a shelf where someone was about to jump.

  “Practicing a little early, aren’t you?” asked Jonezy.

  The boy on the ledge turned and saw us.

  “Jonezy!” he said excitedly. “I haven’t seen you for weeks. Where have you been? I hope you’ll be flying tonight.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” said Jonezy.

  The boy was clearly in awe of Jonezy for some reason.

  “Marco is looking really good,” Matilda said. “He’s been practicing more than ever. Do you think he’ll break your record?”

  Jonezy sniffed at the air and waved off the idea. I wanted to ask who Marco was, but the boy jumped from the ledge with a howl and zoomed away toward the other side on the rope. He raced over the village, gaining speed until it looked more like he was flying than riding on a rope.

  “Very focused, that one,” said Jonezy. “He didn’t even introduce himself to you. He’s something of an admirer. Probably wanted to show me what he could do.”

  “An admirer?” I asked. But Jonezy was busy watching the boy make for a landing on the other side.

  “He’s not going very fast,” said Jonezy. “And there’s no tracer to worry about. We’ll see how he does tonight.”

  It appeared to me as if he was racing over the village faster than I’d ever gone on a horse, which was pretty fast.

  “That looks like it might be a good thing to try,” I said, mesmerized by the idea of swooshing across open air over the village. In the back of my mind I was constantly trying to devise a plan to defeat Abaddon. Flying over him or down to his level at a great speed might prove useful, and this strange method seemed to hold some promise. Marco had landed way over on the other side and had begun walking across the shelf to another vine. It was the lowest shelf of them all, and this time when he grabbed the rope, I realized it would lead him right down to the ground. He dove into the air, skimming down the vine with alarming speed.

  At the very bottom, beneath the random weave of hanging ropes, was a village of houses and paths. There must have been thirty houses or more, all magically clustered around an open field of green at the center. Hundreds of vines disappeared into the ground from every imaginable direction.

  “There’s no time like the present,” said J
onezy as we stood on the slab shelf of stone where the boy had jumped into the air. I’d gotten lost in the view of everything before me and had to shake my head back to reality.

  “What?” I asked.

  “To give it a try,” said Jonezy. “There’s no time like the present!”

  Matilda called to Ranger. “Go on, boy! Go on! I’ll see you at the bottom.”

  This was clearly a command Ranger had heard many times before, as if it were a race that had just commenced in order to see who could reach the bottom first—Matilda or the dog. Ranger was already gone, racing down the side of the hill toward the village.

  “He wins every time,” said Matilda. “I think I could beat him to the bottom, but it would crush his spirit.”

  I had only known her for two days, but I decided then and there that I absolutely loved Matilda. She was everything I’d always hoped for in an older sister I’d never had. Confident, funny, beautiful, small, gentle—she was perfect.

  “Will you show me how to do it?” I asked her. Jonezy was a little put off that I hadn’t requested his help.

  “I feel it’s only fair to tell you I was the very first skimming champion on the stone pillars,” he told me. He took off his pack and removed a short strand of rope. It had palm-sized knots on either end. “I crushed the competition!” he continued, leaning down and sliding a flat stone near his foot that looked like a dinner plate. Under the stone, there was a shallow hole filled with something yellow and waxy. He held the two big knots—one in each hand—and the length of rope dangled in between until it reached the yellowy wax. Jonezy took great care in rolling the rope with the ball of his foot, covering it with whatever was in the hole.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked Matilda. We were both eyeing Jonezy as if he were a patient on an examining table. I don’t think he liked it very much, but Matilda thought it was hilarious.

  “The old champion of the ropes is making his slider extra slick,” said Matilda. “I hope he doesn’t regret it.”