“Wasted! Wasted!” Chugger was shouting. “Two whole crates, smashed! Who’s done this? And the shed plastered with muck, and the window broken!” He glared at the crowd of workers. “Any of you know about this?” he demanded. “Anyone know what mad person did this?”
No one said a word. Doon stared with horror at the mess on the wall. It looked gory, as if it were smashed animals instead of just tomatoes. He could feel the rage of the person who had done it.
“I don’t like this,” Chugger said darkly. “Nothing like this ever happened before you people arrived. I want it cleaned up right away. Walls washed, window fixed, mess cleared away. Get on it.”
“Listen,” said someone. Doon turned to see—it was Tick speaking. “We didn’t do this. Don’t get all tough with us.”
Chugger whipped around. “Who else would do it? Who else but one of you, always griping and grumbling?”
“But we only just got here now—how could we have done it?” someone called out.
“Besides, we wouldn’t!” cried someone else. “We would never waste food!”
More and more voices rose in protest. Doon added his, too, saying, “It wasn’t us, it couldn’t have been!” But Chugger just stood and scowled at them. Finally he yelled, “Quiet! Get to work!” Just after that Doon heard running footsteps behind him and turned to see Torren racing across the field. He was shouting in his shrill, high voice as he came.
“I saw!” he cried, waving his arms. “Last night I was out here, and I saw!” He ran into the midst of the workers and stood panting, his little eyes wild. “I heard a thump, thump, thump, so I snuck up to see, and I did see!”
“Well, then,” said Chugger, “what did you see?”
“I saw who threw the tomatoes! I saw who made that big mess and broke the window!” He stood with his neck poked forward and his skinny arms held tight to his sides. His whole body was trembling with excitement. His eyes scanned the group of workers. “It was him!” he shrieked, pointing straight at Doon. “It was him that did it! I saw him!”
Doon was so shocked he couldn’t make a sound. He stood with his mouth open, staring at Torren. Around him, a few people spoke up. “He did not!” said someone. “He couldn’t have! Anyway, he wouldn’t.” “No,” someone else said. “He would never do that.”
But Chugger seized his arm and pulled him roughly aside. “What do you have to say for yourself? Is this your doing?”
Doon shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. That boy is lying.”
“And why would he do that? Why would he take the trouble to come out here first thing in the morning to point to you and lie?”
“I don’t know,” said Doon.
Chugger released his arm with a push. “I’ll be keeping a special eye on you from now on,” he said.
“But why?” said Doon. “I didn’t do this.”
“How do I know that?” said Chugger. “It’s your word against his. And he’s one of us.”
CHAPTER 15
A Long, Hot Ride
Lina lay very still—or as still as she could with the jolting of the truck over the rutted road. Her eyes were at the level of the space between the two lowest slats of the crate, so she could see out just enough to guess where they were—along the road by the river first, and then turning to go around the outskirts of the village. Occasionally she heard someone call a greeting to Caspar, and she heard Caspar’s voice returning it. Maddy never said anything that Lina could hear.
After a while there were no more voices. The sun beat down on Lina’s back and she began to get terribly hot and uncomfortable. She thought it might be safe to sit up now. The sound of the wheels would muffle any sounds she made, and she was far enough toward the back of the truck so that Caspar and Maddy wouldn’t see her moving. So she unfolded herself. She peered out and saw emptiness—vast stretches of dry, brown-gold grass, no people, no houses. It was an enormous space; she had not realized any place could be so big.
Sometime in the afternoon, because of the heat and the rocking motion of the truck and because there was nothing else to do, Lina went to sleep. When she awoke, she could tell right away that it was nearly evening. The air was cooler, and the sun was so low in the sky that she could no longer see it overhead; its slanting rays came between the slats of her crate.
A cramp gripped her stomach. It was partly hunger—she hadn’t thought to bring any food with her. But it was mostly fear. They must be close to the city. And when they arrived, what would she do? And what would Caspar do when he found her?
The truck slowed and came to a stop. Lina felt Caspar and Maddy jump down.
“This looks like a good enough place,” said Caspar’s voice. “Near the water, anyhow.”
“Looks all right to me.” That was Maddy’s voice.
“I’ll take the animals down to the stream,” said Caspar. Lina heard clanking and slapping sounds as he unbuckled the harness, and then the slow thud of hooves as the oxen were led away.
What was Maddy doing? Lina heard a few footsteps, some rustling among the grasses. Then there was silence. She had to move. Her legs were cramped and she had a pain in her back. Cautiously, she stood up. She stepped onto the first slat of the crate and then the second, and when she got high enough to look over the top edge, the first thing she saw was Maddy, sitting on the ground a few feet from the end of the truck, leaning against a tree and staring right at her.
“Well, well,” said Maddy. “Look who’s here.”
Lina just stared. She couldn’t move.
Maddy heaved herself up from the ground and came over to the truck. She regarded Lina with a look that was half puzzled and half amused. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I want to see the city,” said Lina.
“Don’t you know it’s a five-day journey? How did you expect to ride in a crate all that time? And not be discovered?”
“Five days? I thought it was one day.”
Maddy just shook her head. “What are we supposed to do with you?”
“I don’t know,” said Lina. She felt a trembling start up in her stomach. She should never have come.
There was a long pause before Maddy spoke again. Then she said, “Listen. It would suit me fine if you came along to the city, if you’re sure you want to.”
“I do want to,” Lina said, though she wasn’t really sure.
“Good,” said Maddy, “because it looks like you have no choice.” She smiled. It wasn’t an unfriendly smile, but there was a quirk in it that seemed to say, What a situation. “Stay there, then,” she said. “I’ll be back.” She stamped away.
Lina watched Maddy heading toward a strip of green grasses and low trees that must border the stream; at the edge of this strip she could see Caspar and the oxen. In all directions, the landscape was the same she’d seen that morning—gently rolling, empty of buildings, covered with brown-gold grass. Here and there stood low, dark green, mushroom-shaped trees. Three of them stood near the truck, their leaves dusty, their trunks thick and gnarled. The sun had gone down behind the hills in the west, and the sky there was scarlet. Though the air was still warm, Lina shivered. She sat back down in the crate, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. Somewhere a bird sang its going-to-bed song.
Then suddenly there were loud footsteps and Caspar’s voice coming toward her, and in a moment Caspar’s fist thudding against the crate. “Come out!” he said.
Lina climbed out and stood on the truck looking down at him.
“Jump down!” he said.
She jumped down.
Caspar glared at her. “So,” he said. “A stowaway. What were you trying to do? Cause trouble? That’s your idea of fun?”
“No,” Lina said. “I want to see the city.”
“What for?” A look of suspicion passed over Caspar’s face. “What do you know about the city?”
“Nothing,” said Lina. She wasn’t going to tell Caspar about her vision of the city, or what the city mi
ght be for the people of Ember. “I just want to see it.”
“Well, too bad,” said Caspar. “Why should I take you there? Why would I want an extra person to feed? A kid to look after? Your ride stops right here. You can go back where you came from.”
“One second,” said Maddy. “Listen to me before you decide. She could be useful to us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Caspar whacked his two big hands together as if to dismiss the subject.
“Yes, she could,” said Maddy. “When you’re looking for something in a ruined place—you know how it is. Small spaces, sometimes. Tippy rubble where you need to step carefully. A small, light person could go where we couldn’t.”
Caspar took a step back and studied Lina, still glowering. Lina tried to look as small and light as she could.
“As for food,” said Maddy, “she can share mine.”
“Ridiculous,” said Caspar again. But he kept his eyes on Lina. She could see he was thinking.
“Come on, Caspar,” Maddy said. “Let’s take her. We don’t have much choice, after all. The only other thing we can do is leave her out here by herself.” She turned to Lina. “If we let you come,” she said, “you’ll have to work for us. You’ll have to do what we say.”
“All right,” Lina said, though she wasn’t sure it was all right at all. Maybe it would be better to give up seeing the city and try to get back to Sparks from here. But how would she do that? She’d never be able to find her way. And the Empty Lands frightened her; she didn’t want to be alone in such a vast, wild place. “But how will I get back again? Will you take me?”
“You should have thought of that when you climbed onto the truck,” said Caspar. “That’s your problem, not ours.” He turned to Maddy. “Right, partner?”
“Certainly,” Maddy said. “Now let’s get settled for the night. The first thing we need is some kindling. Lina and I will go and gather it.”
Lina followed her out toward the trees. Once they were in among them, Maddy bent down and spoke to her in a low voice. “Don’t worry. You were foolish to do this, but I won’t let harm come to you. And I’ll see you get home again, somehow.” She straightened up again. “Now,” she said. “Gather up some dry twigs and sticks and a few tufts of dry grass.”
They carried the sticks and grass back to where the truck was parked. There Maddy scraped out a shallow hole in the ground with the heel of her shoe. In the hole she set the smallest splinters of wood, arranging them in a sort of square. Over these she placed some sticks, and on top of those she added larger branches. She tucked in some handfuls of dried grass at the bottom of this stick building.
Until this point, Lina did not understand what she was doing. But when she pulled from her pocket a little cloth-wrapped package, unwrapped it, and took out a short blue-tipped stick, she knew. She took in a quick breath and stepped backward.
Maddy held up one of the matches and said, “Have you ever seen one of these?”
“Yes,” said Lina.
“You’re lucky, then,” said Maddy. “They’re rare.”
She struck the match across a rock and the blue tip burst into flame. She held it to the grass, and the grass sizzled and flared up.
“Come and stand close,” she said to Lina. “We need to shield this from the breeze until it gets going.”
But Lina stayed where she was, staring. The little flame at the heart of the stack of sticks flickered. It reached for the splintered end of a stick, caught it, set it aflame. The sizzling grew to a hissing, and then to a crackling. Flames jumped, and jumped higher, and there again was the orange hand stretching upward with its pointed fingers, waving, leaning toward her.
Lina stumbled backward. She didn’t want to be afraid—Caspar and Maddy weren’t. Caspar had come back now and was crouching right beside the fire, feeding it with sticks and grass. But for Lina it was as if the flames were shrieking a message at her: Run, run, run! She stood twenty feet away, staring at the fire with a pounding heart. The wind blew a ribbon of smoke at her, and when she breathed, it stung the back of her throat.
Maddy noticed, after a while, that she was out there. “Come closer, Lina,” she called. “It won’t hurt you.”
But Lina could not get her feet to walk toward that hissing, snapping blaze. It might not hurt Maddy and Caspar; but if she were to stand near it, she was sure it would reach for her with that orange hand, flick its fingers against the ends of her hair or the hem of her shirt, and she too would flare up. “I’m all right here,” she said. “I don’t want to be near it.”
Caspar laughed. Maddy lumbered to her feet and came beside Lina. She put an arm around her. “You’re shaking,” she said. “Well, never mind. You don’t have to be by the fire if you don’t want to.”
From a box on the truck, she took what they called “travelers’ cakes”—lumps a little smaller than a fist, made of Lina knew not what—and she and Caspar stuck them on the end of long sticks and roasted them over the flames. “You have to get fond of these if you’re a roamer,” Caspar said. “They keep well, that’s their best quality. You need them for those long stretches where there’s no other food to be found.”
They were dry and tasteless, but Lina was hungry, so she didn’t mind much. She ate hers standing up, and she licked her fingers when she was through.
She wondered where they were going to sleep. There was no room on the truck, so she supposed they’d have to lie on the ground. It was quite dark now. A breeze had come up. From somewhere far away, she heard an animal noise: yip-yip-yip, then a long wail, then an eerie chorus of wails. “What’s that?” she asked Maddy.
“Wolves,” Maddy said. “Out hunting. They’re not very close, don’t worry.”
Lina shivered. The darkness here was so enormous, and so full of terrible things. In Ember, except when there was a blackout, people were almost always safe in their beds when darkness came. Lina wasn’t used to being outside at night. She thought about Mrs. Murdo, who would be getting into bed in the doctor’s attic room right now. Mrs. Murdo would be worried about her. Poppy would be saying, “Where Wyna?” No one would imagine that she was out in this great emptiness, with nothing between her and the sky.
Maddy took some rolled-up blankets from the truck and spread them on the ground. She put two of them close to the fire. The third she offered to Lina. “Put this wherever you want to sleep,” she said.
Lina walked over to take the blanket, and as she did, Caspar tossed a big branch onto the fire. Sparks sprayed up. Some flew sideways, caught by the wind. Lina jumped away, but a few sparks landed on her sock. She stamped her foot frantically, but this only made the sparks burn brighter. The threads of her sock glowed. On her ankle she felt a pain like a fierce bite. “No!” she cried. “Get it off me!” She shook her leg and clawed at her sock with her hand. Panic rose up in her, and she would have taken off running if Maddy had not blocked her path and grabbed her in strong arms. Once she’d stopped her, she bent down and put a hand over the burning place in Lina’s sock, and when she took her hand away the glow was out.
But the pain was still there. Maddy took off Lina’s shoe and sock and poured cold water on the burn, but it didn’t help much. All night, Lina huddled on the ground under the thin blanket, gritting her teeth against the pain on her leg and wishing she had never come on this awful journey.
CHAPTER 16
The Starving Roamer
The next morning, after a breakfast of plums and coarse bread, they set out again. Maddy made Lina a place to sit at the back of the truck, between two of the crates. She took the blankets they’d slept on and spread them on the rough floor of the truck. Lina could sit on the blankets, lean against the nearest crate, and dangle her legs over the truck’s back edge. The burn still hurt this morning; it was a reddish, angry-looking blister. After a while, as the sun came up and sweet grassy smells arose from the earth, Lina began to enjoy herself again. She watched the countryside fall away behind the truck, stretches of brown-gold grass as big as
the sky, trees like hairy spikes, rocky slopes.
And this is how it was for four more days. At night they would find a place by a stream to sleep, if they could find a stream. They passed other ox-pulled cars and trucks on their way, both going their direction and coming back. They would stop and talk with these roamers and sometimes trade with them for food. Caspar always asked if they’d been to the city. Very few of them had. The ones that had been there just shook their heads when Caspar asked if they’d found anything interesting. “It’s a waste of time to go there,” they said. “Don’t bother.” Most of the roamers they met had been scavenging in what they called the suburbs, which Lina understood to mean towns that lay around the city.
Caspar and Maddy hardly spoke to her at all during the day. Around noon they would stop the truck and get something to eat from the chest of provisions they had brought. At first there was dried fruit, but they soon used that up. After that it was travelers’ cakes, morning, noon, and night.
Caspar always went to sleep right after he’d filled his belly. He lay back on the ground and snored. Then Maddy would beckon to Lina with a tilt of her head, and they would walk away from Caspar and find a place to sit, often beneath a tree, one of those trees that spread their branches out like the top of a big mushroom. They would sit in the soft grass and look up at the sky through the tree’s branches. Sometimes a breeze swept across the land and brought them the scent of dusty earth and dry weeds.
After lunch on their second day of traveling, Lina asked Maddy where she came from.
“A horrible place,” was all she said.
“Horrible in what way?”
“Small, cold, and poor. Houses made of old boards. Bad soil for growing things, never enough food. A place that was withering.”
“What does that mean, withering?” Lina asked.
“It means shrinking and dying. Things were getting worse there. There was too much sickness, too much hunger, too much unhappiness. People were always quarreling, and a lot of them were leaving. It was ending, the place where I came from. I wanted to be somewhere that was beginning.”
The People of Sparks: The Second Book of Ember (Books of Ember) Page 12
