Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

The light reveals that underneath the mud and slime his skin is tough for such a young child, his whole body covered with sleek hair—thick, seaworthy skin like a water rat or a seal. Mara shudders and takes a step back as, full of curiosity now, the child reaches up to touch her face. She is both drawn and repulsed by this strange little creature.

  Don’t be silly. He’s just a child.

  An abandoned little one in a drowned world. And somehow the urchin and his friends are surviving—somehow they’ve found enough food and this shelter and even learned to make fire.

  “I’m Mara,” she tells him. “My name is Mara.”

  Now the urchin touches his own face and looks at Mara intently.

  “You’ve no name? Never mind, I’ll give you a name.” Mara wonders what she can call this strange little urchin. The name that springs to her mind is not a child’s name but somehow it suits him with his quick, birdlike movements, chirping voice, and spindly legs.

  “Wing,” she announces. “That’s what I’ll call you.”

  Wing chirrups and runs off into the noisy mass of wild, vagabond children. A sudden loud “who!” makes Mara freeze. She looks up at the vast, vaulted ceiling toward the source of the cry and sees what the white phantom is.

  An owl. That’s all. There are lots of them, perched high in nooks and ledges in the ancient stone—quite different in color and marking to the barn owls on Wing. And quite different in voice too, with their loud and eerie hooting. Mara remembers the hissing shrieks of the owls that lived in her barn as they flew on silent wings past her window at night in search of prey.

  She sighs with relief and tries to shake off her ghost-terrors. Now she leaves the noisy cathedral to walk across the grassy hill outside, finds a moss-furred slab of stone, and sits down to rest and think. All around her the black sea glimmers and flickers with the ghost-light of the drowned city below and the dark reflections of New Mungo looming high above. Beyond the colossal geometry of the new city glows a forget-me-not sky. But Mara falls into an exhausted sleep with her mind upon what might still exist down here, in the drowned ruins.

  When day breaks she is still out on the cathedral hilltop, fast asleep upon the thickly mossed stone. The scents and sounds of this strange netherworld under the sky city flow into her exhausted body and gently, unconsciously, she absorbs them. Her eyes are opened at last by a sharp shot of sun that breaks over the top of the city wall. For a while, as the sun climbs above the wall and before it is netted by the thick weave of the sky tunnels, the drowned city is filled with light.

  Mara blinks, awake in a moment, and sees the massive trunks of New Mungo emerge from the steamy waters—then she sits up in amazement as the rest of the world within the wall unwraps itself from the early morning mist.

  It’s huge—even larger than she guessed in the dark. And Mara’s heart leaps as she realizes that it’s not all sea. Five, six, seven, eight islands are emerging! They lie scattered across the great walled circle of netherworld sea, around the vast trunk of New Mungo, as unguarded and forgotten as old secrets.

  Some of the islands are tiny, just a few leaps across, but one or two are about the size of Wing’s small village. Some are topped with ruins and—Mara gasps in delight—tall clumps of greenery surround the ruins. Trees! She has seen pictures of them in books but she has never seen a real tree before.

  And now a mass of tall, dark shapes, like spiky wizard hats, materialize from the mist and float upon the sparkling waters.

  Mara rubs her eyes. Then sees the wizard hats for what they really are—the steeples of drowned churches. She laughs and leans back to stretch upon the mossy slab. The bright green moss is soft against her face, the sun warm upon it. There is bee song in the air, or the lazy hum of a small wind. Nice, thinks Mara, stroking the soft moss. Beneath the moss there are grooves in the stone. She fingers them and recognizes the pattern of letters—and her heart jumps in horror. No! Not a gravestone! But it is. Now she can see the ranks of ancient slabs and tombstones, camouflaged with green moss, all down the grassy hillside.

  I’ve been asleep in a graveyard!

  But gnawing hunger and a desperate thirst override her fear. What’s so scary about a peaceful graveyard anyway? The living world is far more terrifying. Mara recalls the silly things she used to worry about in her old, ordinary life; all the thrills of the Weave she used to enjoy scaring herself with. She stretches out her exhausted limbs and looks around, wondering where she might find water and food.

  Suddenly a shadow falls. Mara turns her head and sees that New Mungo has eclipsed the rising sun. The graveyard takes on an unnerving aspect as gloom robs color from the netherworld.

  Now Mara hears something rush toward her, and she can do nothing as it lands upon her with the force of a charging bull.

  GORBALS

  It’s no bull. What has crash-landed upon Mara is a long, lean boy with a moon-pale face, strawlike hair, and wildly tattered clothing. He rolls in the grass beside her, clutching his foot in agony where he stubbed it on the slab of gravestone.

  The tatty boy rubs his foot vigorously then puts it in his mouth to ease the pain. As he does so he catches sight of Mara and sits staring at her with the toes of one foot stuck in his mouth. Mara has to laugh.

  The boy stares at Mara with wary astonishment. Swiftly, he looks her over, every part of her—hair, clothes, shoes, and finally her face. His eyes are huge, owlish, and their stare unnerves Mara. All she can do is stare back. They look at each other in silence for long moments. At last the boy takes his foot out of his mouth.

  “Have you fallen from the sky?” He glances upward.

  Mara shakes her head. “The sky?”

  “The sky city,” the boy says edgily. “Are you one of the sky people?”

  “Oh, no,” says Mara.

  His tatty clothing is made from plastic bags of all colors, knotted and tied around him. Much of the plastic is torn, many of the knots worked loose, which gives him the appearance of a shredded plastic scarecrow.

  He sighs with relief and relaxes.

  “Who are you then?” he asks in a warm, curious voice.

  “Mara,” says Mara.

  “Where’s that?” asks the youth.

  “Where’s what?” says Mara.

  “Where’s Mara?”

  Mara stares at him, wondering if he is mad. He looks odd enough. She gets to her feet.

  “I’m here,” says Mara. And now I’m going, she thinks.

  “Wait,” calls the youth and he follows her. “Don’t be strange. I only wanted to know where you come from.”

  “I’m not strange. I tell you my name, standing right here in front of you, and you ask where I am. That’s strange where I come from.”

  “Strange? I only asked you, where is Mara? Where is your name-place? Where is the place you are named after? Don’t people ask that where you come from?” the youth persists. He steps forward, his plastic tatters rustling. “My name is Gorbals. My name-place is over there.” Eagerly, he points across the waters of the drowned city. “You can still see the tips of its towers at low tide. In the old city Gorbals was a place of tall towers—towers that were homes to many, many people. One of them is a foundation tower for the sky city.” His face hardens then he shrugs. “Still, I’m proud to have its name.”

  “I see,” says Mara. “Well, I’m not named after a place. I was called after my grandmother, Mary, and my mother, Rosemary. I think Mara means bitterness,” she adds, remembering she has never liked that.

  Gorbals wrinkles his nose. “That’s ugly,” he says.

  “Well, it’s my name,” says Mara, edging away again. She’s not at all sure about this strange boy. Yet she hesitates. At least he can talk, unlike Wing.

  “Where is your nest?” he asks wonderingly. His owl eyes grow even wider, as a thought seems to strike him.

  He’s mad, Mara decides, and turns to go. But as she turns and faces the huge, gloomy lake of the netherworld she remembers she is lost and all alone in this strange
place. She hasn’t a clue what she is going to do now or how she is going to live. Wing could be anywhere among the mass of urchins who have spilled out of the cathedral to romp among the gravestones. Suddenly Mara is in tears, a great flood of them.

  The tattered boy rustles up to her and takes her arm, awkwardly but gently.

  “Don’t go,” he says. “Come and meet my people.”

  “I’m late again,” groans Gorbals.

  They climb off the rickety log raft he has steered across the dim waters, through a cluster of spiky steeples, and up to the bank of another island, the largest one that lies farthest from the city gates and the comings and goings of New Mungo. It is topped by a thick grove of tall trees.

  “Late for what?” asks Mara, staring in awe at the huge trees that surround the curved ruin of a building that crests the hump of land.

  “Sunup. I was supposed to be leading it.”

  The boy begins to bound up the hillside, through a small orchard of stunted apple trees to the grove at the top of the island. Mara follows, but stops as she enters the tall, thick trunks and wide canopy of branches, wonder-struck by the magnificence of such ancient trees.

  “They’re so beautiful,” she whispers, breathing in the fresh green scents and reaching out to touch the cold, living pillar of a trunk.

  Gorbals has disappeared within the grove and Mara is left to follow the noise of his plastic crackles. “I’m sorry!” she hears him call. When she catches up with him he is in the middle of a group of about twenty people who have begun to rise from the circle they were sitting in around a smoky, fragrant ember fire in a small clearing under the trees. Like Gorbals, their clothing is made from odds and ends of plastic litter; all except for one very old woman, still sitting by the fire—her clothing seems to be woven from moss and leaves and grass.

  “No, wait!” Gorbals calls after them as the people begin to disperse into the trees. “I was working on my sun poem all night. I journeyed so far with the words that I lost track of the night and then I fell asleep on the grass and slept too late. Wait and hear it, please! And there’s something else—look what I found!”

  “Too much to do, Gorbals. Save it for sundown,” laughs a sweet-faced young woman with a sleepy baby strapped to her in a papoose made out of a plastic bag. As Mara emerges from the cluster of trees, the young woman stops dead in amazement then cries out in fear.

  “But it’s no use for sundown, it’s a sunup poem,” wails Gorbals.

  “I’ll tell you what’s no use, boy,” says the old woman in the earthen clothing. She is as gnarled as a tree with a face as pale as the moon. “This latecoming is no good. We must have a poet we can depend on. You are always late, late, late.”

  Now the old woman sees Mara and stares at her, wide-eyed and wary. “Who is this?”

  “I won’t be late again,” protests Gorbals. “I promise. It’s just that sometimes I get so lost in the places the words take me to I forget where I am and—”

  “Who is this person?” demands the old woman. Her wide, unblinking stare unnerves Mara. With a great crackle of plastic, the rest of the group gather around.

  “Yes, I found a person!” exclaims Gorbals. “That was the other thing that made me late.”

  The crowd of crackling strangers encircles Mara. Like Gorbals, they all have huge, owlish eyes and moony faces. Standing so intent and still in the gloomy light of the netherworld they could almost be wraiths.

  “This is Mara Bitterness,” says Gorbals, “who is not a place. And she is not one of the sky people either. I don’t know what she is.”

  “Mara Bell,” Mara corrects him.

  “Bell?” says the old woman wonderingly.

  The young woman with the baby in the papoose comes close and studies the material of Mara’s anorak. In the dim light her neatly plaited, earth-colored hair and eyes, even her skin, have a greenish tinge, like a tint of grass and leaves.

  Shyly, she reaches out and fingers the sleeve. “It’s as quiet and as soft as a feather and it gleams like a moon-beam.” She glances at Mara with a fierce curiosity in her huge pale eyes. “What is it made of?” the girl murmurs.

  “Nylon, I think,” says Mara. Her jacket, like all her clothes, is a much-mended, recycled castoff, made before the world changed.

  “Nylon?” frowns the girl.

  Mara tries to remember what Tain has told her about the materials of the drowned world. “It’s something people used to make long ago, like your plastic clothes.”

  The girl touches her knotted plastic outfit, which is neatly tailored to her body, unlike Gorbals’s chaotic tatters.

  “We find our clothes in the trees and the ruins and the water,” says the girl. “They’re good for the wetness but bad in the heat. Where did you find this?”

  Mara smiles. “In a wardrobe at home. It belonged to my grandmother. It’s very old.”

  “I’ve tried to explain all this to you, Broomielaw,” croaks the shriveled, ancient woman, in the earthen clothing. “I’ve told you about plastic and nylon and all those chemical evils but you don’t listen, do you, because an old woman doesn’t know anything about the world, eh? You should stick to the natural gifts of the Earth.”

  The aged eyes gleam and the girl, Broomielaw, blushes deeply.

  “But—but surely everything must come from the world,” the girl persists. She cannot take her eyes off Mara and her clothing. “You can’t make something out of thin air.”

  The old woman laughs a stubborn “Hah!” but her attention is fixed keenly on Mara. As Mara returns her gaze the old woman gives a sudden gasp.

  “Enough, Broomielaw,” says Gorbals. “Mara isn’t like us. Mara is strange.”

  “I’m not!” says Mara.

  “You are to us,” smiles Gorbals. “Very strange. We’ve never seen anything like you.” He touches her nose. “A brown face with orange spots on the nose.”

  “Spots?” Mara touches her nose and can’t feel anything. “You mean my freckles?”

  The moon-faced crowd burst out laughing. “Freckles, freckles,” they murmur.

  “What is freckles?” asks Gorbals. He is laughing too. “Freckles, freckles, freckles. It sounds like a fire word.”

  “Well, they’re caused by the sun.” Mara looks around the dim netherworld and suddenly the wide owl eyes and moon faces make sense. It must be the result of a lack of sunlight.

  “Freckles are little sun spots,” she explains.

  A murmur grows among the crowd and they crackle with excitement. The old woman stands up from her seat beside the ember fire.

  “You are from outside,” she says sharply. “From the sun world?”

  Mara nods. “From an island in the north.”

  “An island in the world beyond the great wall?” says the old woman, trembling now.

  “Yes,” says Mara. “An island called Wing, in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  There is a great gasp all around her.

  Gorbals explains. “We didn’t think there were any places left in the world beyond this.” He glances over at the city wall. “Long ago, our people would try to get out beyond the great wall to see. Most were taken by the sky people even before they got through, and the ones who did—none of them ever came back.”

  “I don’t think there are any places now except the sky cities,” says Mara. “My island drowned.”

  They all look at her with pity in their great owl eyes.

  “No one except the ratbashers has made it through in many, many years,” adds a woman with the longest hair Mara has ever seen. It hangs in a thick, dark plait to her feet.

  “The ratbashers?” frowns Mara. “You mean the urchins? The wild children?”

  The old woman steps forward. Slowly, she extends a gnarled hand and Mara takes it. The hand trembles in hers but its grasp is warm and strong.

  “Welcome, Mara Bell from the island of Wing in the Atlantic Ocean. Welcome to the Hill of Doves, the island home of the Treenesters. I’m Candleriggs the Oldest. We have b
een waiting a long time for you.”

  Mara takes a step back.

  “For me? Sorry, but you’ve got the wrong person. It was sheer chance that I got here at all. I only managed it by the skin of my teeth.”

  “How did you do that?” asks Gorbals, staring at her teeth.

  Old Candleriggs motions to Gorbals to be quiet and looks at Mara, her eyes gleaming, and when she speaks her voice is full of emotion.

  “The stone-telling promised you would come one day.” Turning to the others, she points to Mara’s face. “Look! What do you see? It’s the Face in the Stone, the one we’ve been waiting for. Treenesters, our time has come. The stone-telling has begun.”

  Every one of the Treenesters stares intently. Mara looks into Candleriggs’s ancient owl eyes and shivers even before the old woman speaks her next words.

  “The stone tells of you, Mara Bell. Now you are here the stone-telling shall be.”

  THE STONE-TELLING

  Mara turns to Gorbals to avoid the look of awe in the eyes of the crowd.

  “What’s the stone-telling?” she asks anxiously.

  But Gorbals just stares, with the same awestruck look as the others in his huge eyes.

  “This is a big mistake,” Mara tells them. “I’m not whoever you think I am. I lost my home, my family, all the people I love and I ended up here because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. There’s nothing left in the world beyond the wall.”

  “I’m sorry I tripped over you. I didn’t know who you were,” says Gorbals in a hushed voice.

  Mara shakes her head and backs away.

  Old Candleriggs puts a gentle hand on her arm. “We can’t make you stay,” the old woman says. “But if you come with me I’ll show you the stone-telling and then you’ll see who you are.”

  I know who I am, thinks Mara. I don’t want to be whoever you think I am.

  And yet she is curious about the stone-telling. What can there be in this strange, dim netherworld that is anything to do with her?

  So Mara follows the old woman, just to see.

  • • •