Pathfinder

by Julie Bertagna

  She has grown used to the urchin’s comings and goings, sometimes not seeing him for days as he roams the netherworld with his own kind. Try as she might she can’t tame him into a replacement little brother. Wing is wild. He does as he wants. No matter how tender she tries to be or how hard she tries to teach him words and language, he makes it clear he’s having none of it. But he answers to the name Mara gave him and seems fond of her; at least, he’s fond of the treats she sneaks him.

  This morning, unexpectedly, he has brought her a present—an armful of cockles and mussels and whelks. Mara takes them hungrily; she loves shellfish and they’ll be good fire-roasted.

  “No!” Broomielaw smashes the hoard of shellfish from Mara’s hands. “Don’t touch it. It’s necrotten stuff.”

  Mara looks at the scattered shellfish longingly.

  “I won’t let you eat it,” Broomielaw insists, and when Mara sees the fear on the girl’s face she obeys.

  “Wing eats it and he’s all right.”

  “He’s a dirty ratbasher,” says Broomielaw. “It might kill you.”

  There’s no arguing with Broomielaw on the subject of the urchins. Mara watches Wing tear into the potato then feed morsels of it to his sparrow. When he’s finished every bite and licked his mucky fingers, she calls him over.

  “You can have these.” She points to the pile of bright litter. Wing chirrups in delight and makes a grab at a gold bottle top. Mara holds him back and wags a finger at him. “Not yet. But you can have them all if you come with me over there.”

  She points across to the great wizard hat that rises majestically out of the foggy waters.

  “No, Mara!”

  “Oh, Broomielaw, please stop telling me ‘no’ all the time,” Mara sighs in frustration. “I’m not Clayslaps.”

  “But Candleriggs has always told us it’s a dangerous place, full of bad, necrotten things.”

  “Maybe. But it’s also full of books. That’s where they spill out of, you said, and I need books. I’ve found something in this one …” Mara holds up the tatty pages, “that’s given me an incredible idea. Something that might help us. But I need more information than there is in these few pages. And anyway …” she hides a mischievous smile, “doesn’t Thenew, the Face in the Stone, have a book on her lap? Maybe this is part of the stone-telling.”

  Mara doesn’t believe that, but it’ll do no harm if Broomielaw thinks so. The girl falls silent and looks from Mara to the great black steeple with huge eyes.

  “Be careful,” she whispers fearfully.

  Up close, the building makes her dizzy.

  There’s something ferocious about it, as if it’s been built in a rage of obsession by a hand and mind that could not keep still. Mara gazes in awe at the vast patterns of stone, the latticed windows, the towers and turrets tipped by spinning gold weathervanes that seem to be an army of tiny spears thrust at the caged sky.

  Low clouds rush past, blanking out all sight of New Mungo. The clouds’ speed gives a sudden illusion of movement and Mara feels as if the great black steeple has broken loose of the Earth; that it—not the speeding clouds—is surging forward, with her on board. But now the clouds clear, the sky city reappears, its windspires whirling and whooping in the high wind; and she is still caged within the netherworld.

  Mara steers the raft through an archway that leads into the large central tower topped by the huge steeple. She sails into a dark forest of stone. Here in the undercroft the sea glugs and gulps, thick with the pulp of books. Echoes of water music run through a honeycomb of caverns and pillars, vaulted chambers, and archways. Mara has to lie flat to steer through without hitting her head on the roof caverns. Wing helps paddle. He stops and makes a lunge into the murky water, then brandishes a cold blue lamp that Mara sees with a shudder is a dead fish, luminous with necrotty. But once they are deep in the dim caverns Mara grows thankful for its deathly light.

  What was this place? she wonders, peering down through sludgy water to the stone floor that so many people must have walked upon once. But what did they do here?

  When they reach a wall, Wing clangs his metal paddle against the stone until there’s a crunch. He starts bashing and Mara sees that what he is trying to smash through is the tip of a wooden door.

  “We’ll never get in,” says Mara. “It’s too solid.”

  But she’s wrong. The soft, rotten wood is disintegrating. Mara wrenches out a great splinter with her bare hands, kicks and struggles alongside Wing until they have broken right through. The raft will never fit so she ties it to a stone pillar with a rope made from lengths of knotted plastic, slips off, and swims through the splintered gash in the door. She is barely inside when she encounters hard stone and finds herself sprawled upon the broad step of a huge, sweeping staircase. Mara struggles to her feet and, with Wing close on her heels, makes her way up the sweeping staircase, along a grand hallway until she comes to a giant doorway.

  “Wing!” She grabs his hand, suddenly afraid of what might lie behind such a colossal door. Mara takes a deep breath and, the rusted hinges groaning, she pushes through.

  The hall is vast and utterly wrecked.

  Were they giants, the people who built this? Mara wonders.

  It’s only one of many vast halls. The next one is full of golden names set in stone pillars with a symbol beside each one. A musical symbol for Beethoven, Wagner, and Mozart. Musicians, thinks Mara. There’s a paintbrush for Michelangelo, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and many others; pens and paper scrolls beside the names of writers and poets; crowns for kings and queens; and many more golden names with ancient dates, their greatness lost in time, all cast in everlasting stone.

  High on the walls there are portraits of the faces belonging to the golden names. Mara walks past, studying each one.

  There are more stone carvings on the walls—a loaf of bread with a golden plaque to remember the bakers, hats for the bonnetmakers, wool for weavers, cloth for tailors, plants for gardeners, bricks for builders. All the unnamed, ordinary craftsmen and women.

  Now Mara walks into a hall full of glass boxes. Inside each one is a vast assortment of objects, every kind of human invention. And suddenly she understands. These halls hold the golden names of long-gone people who dreamed up the visions that took humankind from wooden clubs to space telescopes, from bone daggers to metal guns, from bread making to the building of cathedrals, from baked-clay vases to violins and oil painting, from brittle twig combs to the delicate mechanisms of compasses and thermometers, then to computers and cyberspace. And finally to cities in the sky.

  Mara is walking through a history of dreams.

  Suddenly she sees that the nature technology of the Treenesters must spill from the same well of ingenuity as that which made the New World. It’s the same human impulse that drives the urchins to create junk vessels, that made the islanders of Wing find fuel in the peaty land and knit clothes from the sheep they farmed and build homes from island rocks and stones; the same spark that fueled Mara’s adventures through a universe of cyber-dreams on the wings of sunpower.

  The shatter of glass wakes her from her daze.

  “Wing!”

  He appears with a bleeding hand, carrying a dagger and a doll. Then he spies something else he wants, smashes its glass case with his dagger, reaches in, and pulls out a fishing net. He pops the wooden doll in the net and looks around for more objects to loot.

  “Don’t!” Mara rebukes him. But what does it matter? There’s nobody left to see any of these forgotten dreams. All of human history lies on the seabed, all except this, and one day soon the waters might rise further and this will be lost too. Wing may as well take what he wants.

  A small object in a case of its own catches her eye. Mara reads its metal plaque then smashes the glass with Wing’s paddle, reaches inside, and lifts out something that is older than Earth—a tiny meteorite made of the raw material of the universe.

  Wing runs up to see what she has looted but grunts in disinterest when he sees the sma
ll black rock. He is much more excited by a life-size model of an apeman. At the end of the great halls Mara finds herself in a corridor of many doors.

  Which way? Somewhere in this maze of halls and doors there are books, she is sure, but where?

  Each door opens into another room and yet more doors. When she comes face-to-face with a dwarf-sized door set in a curving section of wall, Mara remembers the motto she always followed in the Weave.

  When in doubt, always take the most curious route.

  It’s curious all right. When she squeezes inside she trips on the first step of a tight-winding staircase. Mara follows the steep spiral up and up and up. It feels never-ending.

  After a thousand dizzying stairs she spills out through the last door, gasping for breath, her legs like water. And finds herself in a storm-blasted room full of towering book stacks. Book avalanches have made paper mountains of the floor. There are so many books she can’t believe her eyes.

  If only Rowan could see this!

  Beyond this room there are others. Mara walks through room after room—square tower rooms and round turret rooms—all interlinked by doors, all crammed to bursting with a vast clutter of books. At each door she is met by a silence that’s immense. Sometimes she thinks she hears a yawn or a cough, a footfall or the whisper of a page turning. But there’s no sign of any human presence—it’s just the noise of the birds who nest here among the books. Their feathers and droppings are everywhere.

  Mara finally flings herself down upon a paper mountain. The wind batters books around the room, flinging loose pages up against stone walls. Her head is reeling. She never guessed there were so many books in the world. The e-texts of every book ever written were stored in just one of the Weave’s tall towerstacks. It was filled with tiny, moving scrolls that she could download to read on her cyberwizz. Except Mara never bothered. They looked so flat and boring. She hardly gave the Weavesite a second glance before zooming off elsewhere.

  All this—all these books full of ideas and stories—were shrunk to virtually nothing in cyberspace.

  And how much more once existed in the rest of the drowned world? So many lost visions and dreams, Mara imagines she’d need a thousand lives to explore them—and even then she’d never discover them all.

  Mara picks up a book at random and sits in a window seat. How will she ever find the information she needs in these mountains of books? She leans back in the seat, suddenly struck by what she holds in her hand. It’s heavy and the pages are edged in gold, hinting at treasure inside. It smells of dust and wood and leather. She fingers the beautiful patterns on its bound cover. Mara opens the book and the words are settled and calm on the creamy paper. Yet out of their stillness emerges a story. Mara starts to fall into it.

  Everything before us and nothing before us …

  The words build into pictures—but there’s no time to read now. She must begin her search. Reluctantly, Mara puts the book down and unfastens a plastic bag she has tied around her waist. Inside, in a second layer of plastic, a double protection to stop the fragile paper getting wet, are the precious fragments of the book that has fired her idea.

  The Athapaskans, she reads, are a mobile people who inhabit the huge, mountainous boreal forests of the Arctic Circle, one of the emptiest, most forgotten places on Earth. They have not devastated the natural world around them as so-called civilized societies have, but have coexisted in fine balance with the land and its animals for thousands of

  And that’s almost all there is. The rest of the paper fragment is torn and water-smudged. Mara can only make out the odd sentence about potlatch gifts and a great flood which occurred way back in distant time. But those few lines about the Athapaskans have fired her imagination because they sound as if they are natural relations to the Treenesters. Could there still be mountainous forests at the far north of the world? Tain had searched his old atlas for habitable, mountainous lands but they had all been too far away, he said, unreachable in Wing’s old fishing boats. But Tain had always looked south—why didn’t he or anyone else think to look north to the Arctic lands?

  Now, guiltily, Mara remembers that in the meeting at the church, Jamie, the young fisherman who skippered her family’s boat, had tried to raise the idea but he had been shouted down by the older fishermen who said the Arctic was a meltdown of ice; you couldn’t make a life in a place like that. Then Mara had told them of the New World and all thoughts of going north had been forgotten.

  Mara puts her head in her hands. What if Jamie had been right all along? What if the only land within reach was at the very top of the world?

  Well, she must find out. And surely an answer lies here, somewhere, among these paper mountains.

  NECROTTEN DREAMS AND

  JEWEL HEARTS

  “City Songs by James MacFarlan,” whispers Gorbals, eyeing the fine gold lettering on the book cover with awe. “A gift for me? Thank you, Mara.” But he doesn’t take the book.

  “Why are you all scared of books?” Mara flings herself and the book on the grass under the trees, tired and downcast after a long and fruitless search.

  “They’re full of poisonous necrotty,” Broomielaw reminds her, looking worriedly from the book to baby Clayslaps, who is crawling on a patch of grass nearby. “Candleriggs says so.”

  “This isn’t—it hasn’t been near the water. I found it in a room high up in the great black steeple.”

  “Broomielaw told us you went there,” whispers Gorbals. “Don’t let Candleriggs find out.”

  “But I will,” Mara insists, “because I want to know why she fears that building and its books. Gorbals …” she sits up now, her face alight, “you must come with me tomorrow. It’s an amazing place full of so many books and things of the old world you won’t believe it. Please, Gorbals. I need someone to help me—it’s important. If you want a future you must come.” Mara picks up the book again and holds it out toward him, insistently. “This could have been written for you—read it!” she urges him.

  Tentatively, Gorbals takes the book. He holds it in his hands as if it’s a bomb. “My mother loved words,” he murmurs. “She taught me to read from pages she saved from the water—like you do. She wouldn’t listen to Candleriggs either.”

  Gorbals gingerly turns the pages, and Mara takes her place for sundown beside the others as the Bash begins. Ibrox the firekeeper has scattered the flames with soothing lavender and the scent calms her body and mind, even amid the racket of the Bash.

  Gorbals cries out in sudden amazement, his eyes drinking in the words of the book.

  “Mara, you are right! Treenesters, listen to this. “Again upon my senses beat the city’s wavelike din,” he reads. “This poet has written about the Bash and he hates it too.”

  Mara wrinkles her brow. “It was published over two hundred years ago. There wasn’t a Bash then.”

  “There must have been,” says Gorbals. “How else could he write that? Listen, his words are like treasure: he speaks of Brave hearts, like jewels. And what does this mean?

  But does no lingering tome survive

  To prove their presence more than dreams?

  “What’s a ‘tome’? Is it like a tomb? A necrotten place?”

  “A tome is a very large book,” says Candleriggs quietly. She is frowning fiercely at the book in Gorbals’s hands. Now she turns to Mara; but Mara has steeled herself for the old woman’s displeasure. “You were in the library of the university? What were you doing there?”

  “Universe city?” asks Gorbals, wonderingly.

  “University,” snaps Candleriggs. “The old place of learning.”

  “So that’s what it is,” Mara murmurs.

  “Then why have you always warned us never to go near it, Candleriggs?” cries Gorbals. “You’ve always told us that it’s a necrotten place, a place that brings sorrow and heartache. That its books are full of poison. Why?”

  “Because it’s true,” says the old woman. “You will not go back there, Mara.”

 
“I have to,” says Mara. “Because I think it might hold the answer to the future—yours and mine. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Old Candleriggs stares at her furiously, then her owl eyes mist with sadness.

  “But where’s the heartache in learning, Candleriggs? There’s no sorrow in that,” says Molendinar. “If there’s learning in those books they might help me with my cures and medicines. There’s so much I don’t know, so much we need to know.”

  Candleriggs shakes her head miserably.

  “Mara says that the books of the university might be part of the stone-telling because the statue of Thenew has a book on her knee,” ventures Broomielaw. “It’s true, she does.”

  The old woman stands trembling and points up to the sky city. “That is the sorrow and heartache that learning ends in. A place that lives only for itself in its own world of dreams and forgets the rest of the world. Now don’t ask me any more. It’s a story I can’t bear to tell.” Candleriggs composes herself. “But if Mara feels that it’s a necessary part of the stone-telling then I must put my faith in her, whether I like it or not.”

  Candleriggs sits down again weakly. Broomielaw and Molendinar try to comfort her but the old woman shrugs them off.

  Gorbals clears his throat. “This James MacFarlan has written about our world. His poems are far better than any of mine. So if—if Candleriggs will allow it I’ll use his words, not my own, for tonight’s sundown.”

  Candleriggs mutters as she stares into the sundown fire but she doesn’t object.

  Pollock sniggers. “No words of your own left, Gorbals? Got to steal someone else’s?”

  “I don’t steal,” Gorbals says coldly. “I have what I need and I don’t steal what doesn’t belong to me.”

  The two young men match each other sneer for sneer.

  “Stop this,” says Broomielaw breathlessly. “I hate it. Why is everyone unhappy tonight?”