Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Wormholes,’ shouts Possil. ‘Noise runs through them like worms.’

  That’s what Merien said on the ship, Mara remembers. That the mountains were like a worm-eaten apple. She tugs Mol’s arm, her throat tight. ‘I found her on the shore. She’s dead.’

  ‘Broomielaw? No.’ Mol breaks into a wail.

  ‘No, no, I mean Merien.’

  Mol quietens and looks blank.

  ‘Ruby’s friend. She was left behind by the scutpak. She was a good person, Mol, and she knew things, she would have – would’ve kept us right somehow—’ Mara breaks off, drowned out by the banging and clanging, unable to put into words her sense that Merien is a real loss. They need someone like her. Mol is only relieved that it’s not Broomielaw Mara found dead.

  A hand grabs hers and squeezes it.

  ‘But you’re OK,’ says Rowan.

  Mara nods.

  ‘Still got that telescope?’

  Mara nods again and pulls the telescope from the deep pocket of her sealskin coat.

  Rowan crouches at the cave mouth and scans the mountains.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘It’s not gunfire, it’s the mountain doors banging shut and—’ Rowan bursts out laughing.

  ‘What?’ Mara crouches beside him and he gives her the telescope. She scans the mountain and sees people rushing up the rockways into the caves and banging the car doors shut.

  ‘Look right above the big clock,’ Rowan tells her.

  Above the clock with no hands, the last rays of the low, fiery sun have lit up the words of a large, bashed metal sign that’s set into the mountain rock. Mara focuses the telescope on the sign.

  TIREDNESS CAN KILL

  TAKE A BREAK

  She lowers the telescope and laughs too. ‘Tiredness can kill ?’

  Rowan half-yawns, half-groans. ‘Well, I feel half dead with it.’

  Mara turns to the Treenesters. ‘It’s only their sundown,’ she smiles.

  The sun is falling fast and already the sign above the clock is dimming. The last of the car doors bang shut so that by the time the sun has dropped behind the western peaks and the words on the sign have faded, the people of Ilira have shut themselves tight inside the mountain.

  Ghosted in fog, the pirate fleet falls silent, as if stunned by the sudden disappearance of their prey. A horn blasts and a final firebomb fizzles in the wrecked and smoking bay.

  ‘The Steer Master’s horn says stop.’

  Everyone turns to stare at Tuck.

  ‘The what?’ says Rowan.

  ‘The Steer Master. He gives the orders.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asks Mol.

  ‘I was a gypsea. I just Landed today.’

  ‘You’re one of them? Those murderers?’ Mara jerks her head towards the pirate fleet.

  Tuck glares at her. Who’s she calling a murderer? She was on the Arkiel that drowned his Ma.

  ‘I thought you were one of the mountain people,’ says Gorbals.

  Tuck shakes his head. ‘Was a gypsea. I’m a Lander now, like all of you.’

  Mara stares at the large curved blade in the wire-woven scabbard that hangs from the belt of Tuck’s faded blue wrap. The firelight catches at crystals of sea-salt in his sun-bleached hair. The roll of the ocean is in his words, the whinny of sea winds on his breath.

  Tuck shakes his hair out of his gypsea eyes. ‘The fleet’ll rest awhile now the light’s gone then start up again at dawn with the Steer Master’s horn.’

  ‘What do they want?’ asks Rowan.

  ‘Loot, booty and boats. Pomperoy’s short of boats.’

  ‘All they’ll have is a pile of cinders,’ says Mara, ‘if they carry on like that.’

  ‘Well, there’s two ways to loot,’ says Tuck. ‘Sneak or storm. They were in a stormy mood.’

  Pollock and Possil exchange glances. This is the kind of talk they understand.

  ‘They only fire from the boats,’ says Pollock. ‘All day, they’ve fought from the sea and looted the boats but they’ve not landed. Why?’

  ‘A gypsea won’t set a foot on Land.’ Tuck stamps on the rock floor and his face cracks into a bleak smile. ‘You have to turn Lander for that, like me. They won’t. They’re raging because—’

  ‘Sounds like they’re scared,’ Possil interrupts.

  Tuck blinks. ‘A gypsea’s not scared. We’ve too much pirate in us.’ But he’s scared, so how much pirate is there in him? ‘But Land’s not safe. Land sinks and drowns. A gypsea’s safest at sea.’

  ‘So why’ve you turned Lander,’ asks Mara, ‘if it’s not safe?’

  Tuck shifts from foot to foot, as if he’s ankle-deep on a waterlogged boat.

  ‘Urth knows, I just, just—’ His eyes flit around the dark depths of the cave, out to the fog-blanked sea and back, as restless as a wave. ‘I just wanted to see.’

  Mara locks glances with him. She understands that kind of wanting. It’s what led her deep into the cyber-world of the Weave, then took her from her island to the sky city, to Fox, and brought her on a journey she could never have imagined, that has ended up right here at the top of the world.

  ‘He saved my life,’ Gorbals reminds them all. ‘He’s not like the others.’

  Now Tuck has their attention. ‘You,’ he stares hard at Mara, ‘were on the Arkiel.’

  Mara wonders why he looks at her like that.

  ‘It was our ship,’ says Mol.

  Tuck weighs that up. He pulls his cutlass out of its scabbard.

  ‘Your ship. So it wasn’t just her. It was all of you.’

  Everyone stares at the curved blade glinting in the light of the fire.

  ‘Our ship,’ nods Gorbals, looking bewildered at the cutlass blade. ‘It sunk. It was wrecked on the rocks – Tuck, what’s up? Put your sword aw—’

  Tuck jabs the cutlass towards the two sneaky-looking ones, Pollock and Possil.

  ‘The Grimby Gray sank,’ he yells. ‘My Ma sank with it and drowned. It was the Arkiel that sank them both – my Ma and my barge home. The Arkiel’s why Pomperoy turned pirate, it’s why I’m Landed up here . . .’ Tuck looks around at the shocked, unfamiliar faces, at the darkness of the cave, and feels more alone than he’s ever been. He falters. Urth knows what he’s doing here.

  What’ll he do now? Run them through with his blade and chop them to bits? They deserve it, don’t they? If it wasn’t for them Ma would still be alive, he’d still have his gypsea home.

  He’d still be stuck in a broken-down shack on a wrecked barge with his moaning Ma, wishing she was dead and that he was free.

  Hot, sweaty guilt rushes up his legs and all through him, churning his insides. Tuck can’t bear it. He clangs the cutlass against one of the rock spears sticking up from the cave floor and an urchin falls off his feet in fright. The impact runs up Tuck’s arm, jangling all his nerves. Sparks fly from the blade and he feels the power of a cutlass in his hand.

  And for the first time in his life Tuck feels a pirate beat in his blood.

  ALL STORMED UP

  ‘It’s not their fault, it’s mine.’

  Mara, the girl he saw on the Arkiel, faces him. Her mouth trembles but her eyes are not scared. Just in case his own fear is showing, Tuck swishes the long curve of the blade close to her face, so close he lops off a strand of her hair. Mol screams but Mara’s dark eyes only glitter at him. She doesn’t flinch.

  ‘I never knew there were boat cities out on the ocean. I never knew your barge was there. I tried to stop the ship as soon as I saw but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’

  Tuck remembers her desperation. He saw it, when he glimpsed her on the ship. He hears her voice break over the word sorry and knows she means it. But he’s not going to let her off that easy. She killed his Ma.

  ‘Sorry’s no good,’ he tells her, ‘not to my drowned Ma. And there’s only one gypsea city, that’s Pomperoy.’

  Though he doesn’t know for sure if that’s true.

  Her eyes drop and she
twists her hands together.

  ‘What can I do?’ she mutters.

  ‘Well . . .’ Tuck pretends to think, but he knows what he wants.

  When she looks back up at him, Tuck’s heart turns over and the fledgling pirate in him fades. The girl’s sorry and scared, white as moonlight. Something about her catches at his heart. The looter instinct in him is alive and strong though.

  ‘If you’re sorry, prove it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Give me something to make up for the death of my Ma.’

  Mara looks aghast. ‘What’ll make up for that?’

  Tuck knows nothing will. He’s bluffing. His breath turns greedy. ‘You have to lose something that’s precious to you. Like that globe thing – your whatsitwizz – your magic machine.’

  Mara’s eyes have the dark gleam of an ocean night. Now they turn stormy.

  ‘No.’

  Tuck flashes his cutlass in her face again. He’s not really angry any more, but there’s something about this Mara girl that dares him to impress her. The cutlass-flashing is just for show.

  Mara sways.

  Urth, he’s scared her. She’s looks like she’s going to–

  Tuck drops the cutlass and catches her as she falls.

  She can’t believe it. She almost passed out. And now she’s thrown up. All over herself and the pirate boy.

  He’ll probably kill her now. Except his pirate blade is on the ground and he’s leaning over her, shaking vomit off the tail of his blue wrap.

  Mara takes a deep breath to quell her queasiness. The cave spins, but she has to make sure her backpack and her cyberwizz are safe. She turns her head, sees the bag through someone’s feet and lunges for it. She can’t reach and the effort makes her sick again, right over Tuck’s old cracked boots.

  Tuck makes a disgusted noise and grabs the backpack. Mara kicks him as hard as she can, but he hands the bag calmly to her.

  Amazed, Mara grabs it and wraps her arms around it.

  ‘Wasn’t really going to chop you.’ Tuck gives her an apologetic smile. ‘I was just all stormed up about my Ma – aah!’

  The blue windwrap becomes a noose around his neck. The cutlass glints above his head. Tuck chokes and struggles.

  ‘Pollock, no!’ Mol yells. ‘He said he wasn’t going to hurt her. He’s just upset. We killed his mother, Pollock! We sank his home. Let him be!’

  Mol throws herself at Pollock and sinks her teeth into his fingers until he yells and unloosens his grip on the noose he’s made of Tuck’s windwrap. Tuck breaks free, choking for breath.

  ‘Foghead!’ Mol rages, glaring at Pollock until, reluctantly, he lowers the cutlass. Rowan, with a rock in his fist, lowers his arm too but keeps up a threatening glare.

  Mol crouches beside Tuck, now on his knees. ‘Water, someone. He’s choking, water!’

  Tuck unhooks a small wooden flask from his belt. ‘Here’s water,’ he gasps, but hands the bottle to Mara, first.

  Mara takes in the look on Mol’s face as she sips Tuck’s water.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, you were sick,’ mutters Mol, her cheeks flushed.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ says Mara.

  ‘Maybe it was the fish,’ says Gorbals.

  ‘Huh!’ Pollock jabs the point of the curved blade at Gorbals’s behind. ‘The fish was fine. No one else is sick, are they?’

  ‘Give me that.’ Ibrox takes the cutlass off Pollock. ‘Now, I will melt this blade in the fire,’ he declares, ‘if there’s any more trouble from any of you. Our lives are precarious enough. We need to save our energy for keeping alive, not killing each other. Yes?’

  He lays the cutlass beside the fire and glares around him.

  ‘Yes?’

  Everyone nods.

  Mara sits up and leans her head against the cave wall. She hands the water bottle back to Tuck.

  ‘I’d probably have killed me if I was you,’ she admits.

  Once again, the horrible memory flashes up of her own kill back in the sky city.

  Tuck gives her a wobbly grin. ‘Lucky I’m me, then.’

  Mara returns a thin, wary grin before pulling up the furred hood of her sealskin coat. She lies down on the rock floor, hugging her backpack tight to her chest.

  ‘I’m truly sorry about your Ma,’ she whispers. ‘I lost mine too, so I know. I lost all my family.’

  Tuck leans across the cave floor and grabs his cutlass. He cleans the blade in the ash and embers of the fire and scrapes off the sick on his boot with the tip of it.

  ‘Me too,’ he murmurs.

  He doesn’t need to raise his head to know that, Pollock, Possil and Rowan, and the firekeeper, Ibrox, are watching his every move. Gorbals is pretending he is not. Mol, the one with the hair as long as herself, never stops watching him. Tuck puts the cutlass back in exactly the spot Ibrox placed it, on the stones by the fire. He finds a place to sleep that’s not too far from the heat and winds himself tight in his windwrap.

  If he decides to stay with them, he’ll have to win their trust.

  And if he doesn’t, well, they don’t have the all-seeing eyes of The Man in the Middle. They can’t see his thoughts and watch his every move, all night, every night, to see what he will do.

  A SHATTER OF DAYS

  Half asleep, Mara thinks the silver crescent cutting through the mist is the moon. She sits up, heart thumping, when she sees it’s Tuck’s curved cutlass. They’ve been here long enough to see the thin crescent moon grow fat, yet there’s something about Tuck that she still doesn’t trust. But he’s only cutting down the few strands that remain of the tough sea grass that overhangs the side of the cave, to stoke up the fire Ibrox struggles, night and day, to keep alive.

  The fog is like a live creature. It creeps round the bends of their doorless cave to the inner caverns they have made their home and curls icy fingers around them as they sleep. Each morning they wake up fog-blind and coughing.

  The siege in the bay ended when winter arrived in a shock of cold so deep even the sun seemed to lose the courage to face the day. The pirate fleet panicked as night swallowed day and the sea began to creak. Ice threatened to trap the invaders in the fjord where they would become the prey of the mountain people. They made a clumsy retreat through the hardening waves, grabbing a loot of boats and booty, along with a harvest of bridge-building metal from the wrecked ships at the neck of the fjord.

  And left a bay full of ruin behind.

  Mara has seen bodies broken and burned, tangled in seaweed on the rocks where the tide has cast them.

  The one good thing the battle brought is a fjord full of driftwood from all the bombed boats. But even Ibrox’s fire-keeping skills can’t quell the cold. In the gloomy light of the dimming days Possil and Pollock and Partick sneak out of the cave to gather whatever eggs and seaweed and driftwood there are to be found among the rocks near the cave mouth. Tuck shows how to dry, weave and knot seaweed into nets and sleeping mats and throws. The urchins are both pests and helpers, but Mol is his most ardent pupil, hanging on the salt-scraped ocean-roll of his voice and the sea-glitter of his eyes in the firelight.

  They keep their presence hidden from the people of Ilira. A reminder of their brutality is branded on so many arms. But as winter deepens and hunger grips, Mara has to fight the urge each day to grab more than her fair share of food and fire. She begins to see how survival in such a harsh place might have made the mountain people as brutal as their land.

  At the end of each day, when the setting sun illuminates the TIREDNESS CAN KILL sign, the mountain shudders with the noise of the curfew bell and all the cave doors bang shut in a grand slam. Then, the refugees claim the bay and take to the shore with driftwood spears and seaweed nets and fish by starlight or fog-clouded moon. Each day the curfew comes earlier and earlier. The days shorten as the sun’s power fades and it cannot seem to find the energy to climb into the sky.

  One day, the sun doesn’t rise at all.

  The mountain is still and silent. The people of I
lira are land-locked inside now that day has become one long winter’s night. The North Wind whines across the ocean and up the fjord. It whirls through the mountain rockways, kicks on the shut doors and rampages into the open caves where it hurls around the spears and pillars of rock, spitting ice and shrieking like a demented banshee.

  Mara aches to the marrow of her being. Her turns at the fireside fill her ice-bitten limbs with scorching pain. Hunger is a raking agony. She has been sick again and brought up the sliver of fish and sip of seaweed broth she had only just gulped down.

  Tuck carries the cut sea grass over to the fire and feeds a bundle to the flames. But it only fizzles, too full of frost to be much use.

  Ibrox sighs. ‘We’ll be lucky if it lasts till morning. Stupid to let the fuel get so low.’

  He’s angry with himself for falling ill with a bad cold. No one else has Ibrox’s nose for driftwood. He goes to the cave mouth and sneezes as he looks out at the stars banked thick and high above the ocean. ‘If I could steal some of that fire.’

  One of the young Treenesters yawns. He ruffles his hair out of his eyes and groans. ‘I’ll go,’ mutters Tron, ‘and find some.’

  ‘No,’ yelps Fir, from underneath the heap of sea grass and seaweed that is their bed. She tries to pull him back down beside her. ‘You’re not going alone. It’s too dark.’

  ‘The stars are like moonmoths tonight.’ Tron shakes her off. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, Tron,’ growls Ibrox. ‘Fir’s right. No one goes out alone. That’s how we lost Partick.’ He falters and the others fall into a stricken silence. Partick went out alone to gather driftwood from the rocks at the other end of the bay one night when a sudden fog descended. They have searched and searched but there’s been no sign of him since. ‘Oh, you can curse me as an old fire-fool,’ cries Ibrox, ‘but we can’t afford to lose any more of you strong young ones. And you can’t bear to lose one another. You can’t tell black ice from rock in the dark.’

  Tron gives Fir a nudge. ‘You come with me then.’

  ‘Me? In the cold? In the black dark?’