Marlo shrugged. “Everything is a risk. Life is a risk. We have to be what we are. Our souls are not like the soul of a fox. Our hearts are not like the heart of a sparrow.”
She could see he was getting more passionate, his eyes bright, his cheeks flushed. She leaned in toward him, concentrating on his every word.
“We are full of…full of…feelings. And yet…”
“And yet?” Letta prompted him.
“Feeling isn’t even a List word.”
“But…but…” Letta struggled to put her thoughts into words. “If we give ourselves up to our feelings, aren’t we destined to make the same mistakes all over again? There are so few of us left, Marlo. If we are to survive, we have to compromise. Change. Not be like we were before. Not waste our time on abstract things—things that only lead us off the path.”
“Things like music?” Marlo cut across her.
She nodded, though her heart felt heavy.
“Yes,” she said. “Even music.”
Marlo sighed. “I envy you, Letta. I envy your ability to believe in Noa without question. I just know I can’t do it.”
He sank back on his pillow again and closed his eyes, leaving Letta alone with only the sound of the rain for company. His words stayed in the atmosphere, bright like the fireflies she remembered from her childhood. Words darting all over the room.
Freedom. Music. Feelings.
Were they things they could live without? Images of Daniel taunted her. His mother’s face as they took him away.
It wasn’t sadness that assailed her now but anger, her old nemesis: her temper. She got up and started to pace the room. Didn’t Daniel have a right to live here too? She had always been taught that it was John Noa who had built Ark, that it was to Noa they owed their very survival. And yet hadn’t they a right to live on the planet? She shook her head. There was no sense to her thoughts. She should go downstairs and get back to her work. Marlo and his rebellious thoughts had no place here in the wordsmith’s shop. She turned and looked at him sleeping quietly, a thin line of sweat on his upper lip. He looked so peaceful, she thought. So innocent.
In the shop, Letta settled down to her work. She looked in the drop box and found a little notebook with fifty words carefully written down with a slight explanation to each one. Her eyes scanned them thoughtfully, delight flooding her heart as she went through them. This is what it was all about. New words. Words they didn’t know. Words that could be saved.
Smith: A person who works metal
Anvil: A block of iron on which metals are shaped
She had heard rumors that old Manus Burkked the blacksmith was unwell. He was an old man, maybe eighty or even older. He had lived through the age of technology, fought in the last war, and now he was going to die in a world very far removed from all that.
A lot of old people left them their words before they died. She closed the little book carefully and took it to her desk. She pulled a card toward her, dipped her nib in the familiar red ink, and started to write. Soon, she was lost in the world of the blacksmith. She barely noticed the noise from outside, the creaking of a cart as it passed the door, the barking of a dog, the pitter-patter of the rain.
As she wrote, her left calf began to cramp, sending spasms of pain through her leg. She stood up to try to ease it and walked across the floor and opened the door. Outside, she could see the cat collector’s cart and two of his men walking alongside it. She smiled. When she was a little girl, she had believed they were literally cat collectors. One evening, when she saw them passing the shop, she had taken Benjamin’s old cat, Fidget, and hidden him in a cupboard under the stairs.
She looked at the men again. They weren’t really collecting cats, of course. They were collecting any kind of rubbish they found on the streets, including dead animals. That was how they’d got their name. She was about to go back to her desk when one of the men turned to her. For a second, she couldn’t place him, but then she realized who he was.
“Finn,” she whispered.
He nodded. He had shaved his face and was wearing a hat with a broad brim pulled down over his eyes. His partner beside him had a similar hat and an old pair of dungarees. As Letta watched, he picked up a dead pigeon and threw it in the cart.
“Back door?” Finn asked quietly.
Letta nodded. “Lane alongside,” she said just as she saw the healer crossing the street to the cart.
The healer frowned in Letta’s direction, then addressed Finn. “Dead dog near water station,” he said gruffly.
Finn nodded but said nothing. The healer seemed satisfied and crossed back to his own shop.
Letta went inside, pulling the heavy door behind her. Once out of public view, she flung the bolts across and stood leaning against the wall, waiting. She knew the back door was unlocked, and sure enough, she soon heard their steps in the hall.
Finn seemed even bigger indoors than he had in the wheat field. Behind him, his companion was small and lean, with a sharp face that reminded her of a stoat.
Finn smiled. “We don’t even know your name,” he said, speaking the old tongue fluently but with a slight accent.
“Letta,” she said.
“Letta,” he repeated. “And where is Marlo?”
She nodded toward the stairs.
“The room at the end,” she managed to say. “But he won’t be able to walk far.”
“We’ll put him in the cart,” Finn said and nodded at the other man. Together, they thundered up the stairs while Letta waited in the shop, tension making her bones ache. She strained to hear something from upstairs and in a few minutes was rewarded with the sound of their feet on the steps.
They came through the door supporting Marlo between them. His face looked white and thin beside the ruddy complexion of his friends, and Letta’s heart ached for him.
“So,” Marlo said with a smile. “This is good-bye.”
She nodded.
“Thank you, more than I can say.”
She nodded again. She didn’t seem to have words for any of this.
“We have to go,” Finn’s companion said, his voice deep and gruff.
“Don’t forget Daniel,” Letta said to Marlo.
“I won’t, but don’t get your hopes up,” he said, his hand warm on her arm. “I don’t want you to be disappointed.”
Finn caught Letta’s eye and smiled. “Thank you again,” he said. “You’re a brave girl.”
The banging on the front door caught them all off guard. No one moved. Letta felt as though they were all in a picture, caught forever, exactly as they were.
“Gavvers! Open!” The voice outside was firm, full of authority.
Letta felt weak. What was she to do? They would break the door down. She had to say something, but what?
“Gavvers! Open!”
Finn nodded to her, willing her on with his gaze. This time, she found her voice.
“Minute!” she called. “Find key!”
Her eyes sought Finn again. He took his arm away from Marlo and signaled to the other man to take the boy through to the back door.
As they moved away to obey him, he pulled a knife from his pocket and, with the elegance of a deer, vaulted the counter and hid beneath it.
Letta stared at the place where his head had been, but there was now no sign of him. The banging started on the door again. She took a deep breath, turned, and pulled back the great bolts.
Please don’t let them notice there is no key, she thought as she did so.
Slowly, the door opened.
Two gavvers. She recognized one of them as Carver.
“Come,” he said.
“Where?” Letta answered, trying to imbue her voice with confidence.
“John Noa,” the gavver replied.
John Noa? Why would John Noa want her? Could he know about M
arlo? The gavver was trying to look past her into the shop. She had to stop him coming in somehow.
“Why?” she asked. “Why John Noa want me?”
“Not for you to ask,” Carver snarled. “Come.”
Letta moved forward, but the second gavver put up his hand, stopping her.
“Coat!” he said.
Letta looked at him blankly. What had he said? Why couldn’t she understand him?
“Coat!” he said again.
He wanted her to get her coat.
“Yes,” she stammered. “Coat.”
She turned, her mind gripped with panic. Where was her coat? By the back door. What if they followed her? She went to close the front door, but Carver got his hand to it, preventing her. Were they going to come in? She walked across the floor, her knees weak. She looked over her shoulder. The gavvers hadn’t moved.
“Hurry!” Carver said, his eyes boring into her. She continued on. Don’t look at the counter, she warned herself. Don’t look. Through the door into the hall. She could see her coat on the peg beside Benjamin’s old winter scarf. She reached up her hand to take it down and almost screamed. The Desecrator and Marlo were standing under the garments, completely hidden from view. Marlo’s blue-gray eyes stared out at her.
“Go,” Marlo whispered.
Letta took her coat and moved quickly back to the shop.
Carver was standing inside the door looking out at the rain. She glanced at the counter. Nothing. Not a sign that a man was there holding a knife.
“Ready,” she said.
Carver moved onto the street. Without a backward glance, Letta pulled the door behind her and followed him.
• • •
The room was large and airy. Shelves lined the walls on three sides, shelves that stretched way above his head, bending under the weight of the hundreds of books stored there. The fourth wall was covered in old newspaper, yellowed and faded but still readable. The room had become a shrine of sorts, he supposed. The books he had saved before the last days. He ran his finger along the spines: Shakespeare, Dickens, Keats, the ancients, all there alongside books from the last century. Nothing wasted, nothing lost. His private collection. He would find it difficult to let them go when the time came, but he would let them go. He couldn’t risk them being found at a later date.
There were few incidents where people managed to decode words after Nicene, very few. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t take that chance. They would be destroyed along with everything the wordsmith had managed to salvage.
For a second, images of the wordsmith filled his head, but he pushed them away. He turned his back on the books and walked across to the wall of newsprint.
Here was a potted history of the past hundred years.
The warnings.
The signs.
Global warming.
Water levels rising.
It was incomprehensible even now that man had just ignored it all. Young people talked about the Melting as if it were a single event, but it hadn’t been like that. The earth had been heating up for years. His finger touched one of the news sheets. Scientists were warning of an alarming acceleration in the melting of the polar ice caps. They predicted a dramatic rise in sea levels. That was back in the twenty-first century! He shook his head.
He chose another article from around the same time. The writer was warning about the disappearing ice caps.
“Until recently, the Arctic ice cap covered two percent of the earth’s surface. Enormous amounts of solar energy are bounced back into space from those luminous white ice fields. Replacing that mass of ice with dark open ocean will induce a catastrophic tipping point in the balance of planetary energy.”
Torrents of words had followed. Words from politicians assuring people there was no such thing as global warming. Words from industrialists who justified their emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. Words to hide behind. Words to deceive. Useless, dangerous, destructive words…
He drew back his hand and punched the wall, hurting his knuckles and leaving a trail of blood on the yellowing paper.
Chapter 7
#82
Breath
Air in and out of lungs
The climb was not an easy one. They had just passed the Round House, the gavvers’ base, when the path started to rise steeply. John Noa’s building was right at the summit of the mountain, a half circle cut into the rock. Its back was made of stone, but the curved front piece was almost all synthetic glass. At night, when it was lit, it looked like a picture she’d seen in a book of an old-fashioned spaceship. Letta looked up at it to where it broke out of the mountain, towering above her. Her feet worked to find footing on the stony path, the pebbles and shale shifting as she walked. The higher they climbed, the stronger the wind became until Letta was struggling to push against it. The gavvers walked behind her, giving her a none-too-gentle push each time she slowed. Her mind was racing. What could Noa want? If he knew about Marlo, he would have had the gavvers arrest her. It couldn’t be that.
The rain had stopped, and Letta could hear the men breathing heavily behind her and the sound of a bird somewhere far above them, screeching as it flew as if warning of some great misfortune. Letta realized they had arrived at the bottom of a long flight of stone steps. Carver shoved her, his hand rough on the small of her back. She stumbled, then righted herself and started up the steps. She looked up. They were approaching the house from the western side. She could smell the sharp tang of salt air. The ground leveled out. In front of her was a door set into the gable. To her left, a low hedge. And below her, far below her, the sea. She averted her eyes. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. A gavver leaned in past her and knocked on the door. They waited. Behind her, the gavvers mumbled something she didn’t catch.
The door opened abruptly. A woman stood there. She was tall and thin, vampire pale with a sharp angled face. Her hair was a gray bleached color, and Letta suspected that released from its tight bun, it would reach her waist. Amelia Deer. Everyone knew her. She worked for Noa, and people said she was the second-most powerful person in Ark. She was also known as the woman with the breathing problem, and now that Letta was up close to her, she could hear why. Amelia’s breathing was like the sound of a punctured bellows. Her lungs had been damaged in a chemical explosion before the Melting—or so Letta had heard the women at the water station say. Up close, Letta could see that each breath was an effort for her, a slow sucking noise that made Letta shiver. Letta went through the door, and Amelia closed it, leaving the gavvers outside. A long corridor stretched out in front of her.
“Come,” the woman said, and Letta followed her. Halfway down the corridor, Amelia stopped and opened a door. The room they entered was large and comfortable. A seat hung from a chain in the middle of the ceiling, and all around were soft chairs and tall, elegant candles that when lit would supplement the modest electric light. The far wall was entirely made of glass or what looked like glass. Up close, Letta could see that there was a door embedded in the glass. Amelia opened it and gestured to Letta to step outside.
Letta moved forward tentatively. She was standing on an enormous platform, a half circle bordered by a low wall of glass. As she stepped onto it, it felt as though it was swaying in the wind. She clenched her fists and looked up. A man stood against the wall looking out beyond the house. John Noa. Letta registered that it must be him, but she couldn’t concentrate on that. The wind was howling around her ears, and she felt dizzy.
The man turned. “Come,” he said in a high, sharp voice she could hear just above the sound of the wind.
She wanted to turn and flee to the safety of the house, but she had to do as he said. She felt as though she were on a tightrope, sure the gusts of wind would pick her up and throw her over the edge. The floor was transparent, and through it, she could see the teeth of the cliff. She wanted to lie on the ground, to close her eyes. She took two
more steps forward. As she neared John Noa, she almost stopped breathing. The platform stretched out over the edge of the cliff and looked down on an angry sea. She could hear the waves below, feel the salt spit on her face. She felt the dizziness return.
“Are you all right?”
She could hear Noa as though he were miles away, his voice echoing through a tunnel. Her legs grew weak and then his arms were around her.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and she could feel his breath on her cheek.
“I don’t like heights,” she managed to say. The truth was she was terrified of heights. She always had been.
Noa took her arm. “You poor child.”
He led her back to the safety of the room. She almost collapsed as he closed the door, shutting out the wind and the terrible vista outside. He lowered her onto a chair.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “I thought you would enjoy the view. I even asked them to be sure you brought your coat.”
He filled a glass of water from a jug that stood on the table. “Here,” he murmured. “Drink.”
She swallowed the cold liquid gratefully and felt better.
“Th-thank you,” she stuttered.
John Noa looked down at her. A tall, gangly man, he had deep-set dark eyes and curly hair, brown streaked with gray.
He smiled at her. “Better?”
She nodded. Was he talking List now? As though he could read her mind, he spoke.
“So,” he said sitting on the chair opposite her. “You are a wordsmith. No need for us to speak List then, is there?”
“No,” she said.
“I don’t often get the opportunity to speak in the old tongue. I find it quite enjoyable.” He picked up the jug and poured himself a glass of water. “You must be wondering why I sent for you?”
“Yes,” she said.
He frowned. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Letta’s thoughts raced. Bad news? Was he going to shorten the List again? Or something worse? Why was he telling her and not Benjamin?
The List Page 7
