Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Someone has to,’ snaps Tron.

  ‘I’ll go with you.’ Ibrox sneezes and hunches down beside his dying fire. ‘Just let me warm up first.’

  ‘Such a crowdy sky,’ says Gorbals. He spends much of the endless night mapping the patterns of the stars on the cave walls with charcoal embers from the fire. ‘Forests of stars. We never saw all this in the netherworld. The lights of the New World were too bright.’

  ‘Where’s Pollock and Possil?’ Ibrox ignores Gorbals’ star rapture and peers into the dark nooks of the cave.

  ‘Gone worming,’ says Tron. He frowns at Fir, who has wrapped her arms around him and wrestled him back in their sea-grass snug. ‘She didn’t want me to do that either.’

  ‘Worming?’ asks Gorbals.

  ‘Cave-worming,’ says Fir. She prods Tron in the chest. ‘And they’ve been gone an age. We might never see them again.’

  ‘Possil and Pollock could track their way out of anywhere.’ Young Clyde glares at her. ‘They’ll be back.’

  Tuck rummages in the pockets of his windwrap. He brings out the book he stole from a shelf in Pendicle’s boat in what feels like another life, and hands it to Ibrox.

  ‘It’s not much, but it’s got three hundred and thirty-seven pages so if we tear it and feed it slow, it might keep the fire awake till morning. I’ve been saving it till the last. Take it.’

  Ibrox stares at the book and jumps backward, as if Tuck’s tried to hand him a firebomb.

  Gorbals, on the other hand, leaps forward. ‘A book! Look, Mara.’

  But Mara has fallen fast asleep, curled up beside Rowan, and looks so wan and exhausted that Gorbals can’t bring himself to waken her, not even for a book.

  ‘We can’t burn this.’ He takes hold of Tuck’s book. ‘It’s not like our netherworld where the sea was full of book pulp,’ he reminds the others, ‘and their pages blew about us in the wind. We burned books like litter then, but we can’t do that now. I lost my only book when the ship went down. All we have left is A Tale of Two Cities. No, Tuck, this book of yours is more precious than fire.’

  Gorbals turns the book over in his hands. The cover is stained and tatty but the title is big and bold and clear.

  ‘NATURAL ENGINEERING by C. D. STONE,’ he reads, settling down beside the weak ember fire and beginning to flick through pages blurred with water stains.

  ‘Urth.’

  Tuck curses under his breath. He’s been working hard to win back the trust he broke with his cutlass. The pretended sacrifice of something that he doesn’t even want was meant to seal that trust, but the only one he’s impressed is Gorbals, who trusts him with his life anyway, just because he saved it once.

  Gorbals is flicking through the book. ‘Is this where you learned all your weaving and knotting, Tuck?’

  Tuck nods, though he has hardly glanced at the thing.

  ‘Listen,’ Gorbals is muttering. ‘It says here that animals are the best builders in the world. Look, termite tunnels and towers, how a beaver builds a bridge, ants, spiders . . . the technology of birds, of a worm . . . ha! Wait till Pollock sees this.’

  Tuck stares at the book in astonishment. ‘It tells you all this?’

  Gorbals reads him out a passage about the drill-like action of a worm in earth.

  ‘And these – these dead insects tell you this?’ Tuck stabs a finger at the black words on the page.

  Gorbals laughs. ‘Yes, that’s it. These dead insects are words. When you read them they tell you all sorts of things.’

  ‘How do you know what they say?’

  ‘My mother taught me,’ says Gorbals. ‘I’m the only Treenester who reads. The others, well, they were brought up to be scared of books. You saw Ibrox just there.’

  Tuck nods.

  ‘But Mara has a book.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ agrees Gorbals. ‘But she’s not one of us.’

  ‘She’s not?’

  Puzzled, Tuck glances at Mara, deep in sleep. What is she then? He remembers a snatch of conversation he overheard between Mara and Rowan as he dozed by the fire. They were talking about a place called Wing. An image of a Great Skua’s wing pops into Tuck’s mind and his skin prickles. He always wondered where the flocks of Great Skua go. Could it be a place called Wing? Does Mara come from the place that the Great Skua fly to? Is that what draws him to her like the moon draws the tide?

  Yet she treats him warily, like a stranger, and always sits with her Treenester friends and the other one, Rowan, who must be one of her people because he also knows Wing.

  Gorbals has thrust another page of the book in his face and Tuck casts aside his thoughts as he looks at a sketch of small creatures who seem to be building a driftwood bridge across a river.

  ‘My Da was a bridger,’ he tells Gorbals. ‘One of the best. He built a hundred bridges.’

  So Ma said, though Tuck only ever counted seventy-three that were branded with his Da’s trademark, the Culpy crescent, the shape of a fish-hook moon or a cutlass blade.

  Tuck takes the book from Gorbals’s hands and studies the page on bridge-building.

  ‘Read this to me, Gorbals,’ he urges, pointing at the insect-like words that lie in neat lines all across the page. ‘Tell me how to build a bridge.’

  HUNTING A STAR

  ‘A beaver,’ reads Gorbals, ‘is the ultimate bridge-builder or pontifex. Now, what’s that? Ah, see here,’ Gorbals taps the page, ‘it’s an old word for a bridge-builder. Listen to this, Tuck. In ancient times, people thought the making of a bridge was such a miraculous skill that it must be inspired by the gods. A pontifex was an almost sacred title. A great bridge-builder was treated like a god.’

  Tuck listens, mesmerized, as Gorbals puts down the book and tells him about the vast bridges of the New World. Miraculous, impossible things that stretch across seas.

  And as he listens, Tuck begins to think of his own Da in a new way. Not as an ordinary gypsea worker but as a hero with a sacred skill, inspired by the gods. And he wasn’t an ordinary bridger, Tuck remembers, he was said to be one of the best bridge-masters on Pomperoy. People said you could always tell a Jack Culpy bridge because it wasn’t just a way of getting from one place to the next, it was unusual, intricate, a tough and beautiful thing of sea-scavenged wire and rope.

  Now Tuck remembers his Da’s fascination with spiders’ webs. Weak-sighted like Tuck, with gypsea eyes used to scanning fields of ocean, Da would peer at the tiny patterns like the grain in a block of driftwood or the whorls on a shell. Spiders were rare on a floating city ravaged by ocean winds but if you looked hard, you’d find them scuttling and spinning in the deepest, darkest corners of the boats. Da would spend ages studying the intricate designs of their webs. Tuck used to think he was daft, but now he sees why.

  ‘What was that old word for a bridge-master?’ he asks, but Gorbals has jumped up to follow Ibrox. From the depths of the cave comes a rabble of echoes. Tuck hopes it’s Pollock and Possil with a catch of waterfall fish. He scans a few pages of the book but none of the dead black insects looks anything like the words that Gorbals read.

  He screws up his eyes and tries to remember the ancient word. Something to do with fixing. Pontifix. Wasn’t that it?

  ‘Hey! Look at the size of these!’ Possil bursts into the cavern swinging a hefty catch of fish over his shoulder. They land with a squelch on the cave floor.

  Possil flings the fish one by one on to the hot stones around the fire and kicks away Scarwell before she steals a whole, raw one for herself.

  ‘Fish don’t live in waterfalls,’ declares Possil, breathless. He seems to gleam with excitement. The fish begin to sizzle on the stones. ‘They jump down waterfalls from a place.’

  ‘What place? Where’s Pollock?’ asks Ibrox.

  ‘A place,’ says Possil, waving away Ibrox’s worry with a grin. ‘A watery place. Like a sea. But not salty. The water is clear, like rain. You can drink the waterfalls.’

  ‘We know that,’ says Gorbals. ‘But what are you sa
ying? There’s a sea up in the mountains?’

  Possil taps his head. ‘You put words together, Gorbals. Me and Pollock, we put together clues and track them. We found a tree root that’s grown through the cave roof. Waterfalls with water that’s not salt, and a giant waterfall, deep in the belly of the mountain, full of fish. The wink of a star at the top of a whirling chute of water far, far above us in the roof of the cave. Put all that together.’

  People frown, trying to make sense of Possil’s clues.

  Possil pulls something out of his pocket, with a grin that suggests he’s saved the best fish till last. But it’s only a small stone. He puts the stone down the neck of Mol’s sealskin coat.

  ‘Eeeh, it’s hot!’ Mol wriggles and bursts out laughing.

  Possil grins. ‘This stone is from a place deep in the mountain, almost eight thousand steps from here.’ He laughs. ‘A warm cave with a pool full of bubbling hot water. The cave glows like the moon and the sound of the water bubbling is like a song. If we go there until the sun comes back, we’ll have hot water and heat. There’s fish and fresh water from the falls and I’ve marked a trail with fire stones so that we can find our way. We can still come back here to the cave mouth to collect eggs and wood.’

  Possil looks at all the ice-pinched faces around him. ‘Well?’

  ‘Fire stones, you said?’ Ibrox picks up the hot stone Mol dropped on the ground. ‘Like this?’

  ‘No, they’re cold but they look like chips of fire. See?’ Possil digs in the pocket of his skin coat and shows Ibrox a handful of fiery amber stones.

  Ibrox takes one and studies it in the light of his fire.

  ‘So deep into the Earth,’ Tuck murmurs, ‘how dark will that be?’

  ‘But where’s Pollock?’ asks Mol. ‘You haven’t lost him?’

  ‘He’s hunting a star.’

  ‘Hunting a star?’

  ‘The one that winked at us from way high up through a swirling water chute in the roof of the cave,’ says Possil. ‘It’s the clue to the place where the waterfalls come from.’

  ‘What place?’ Gorbals tuts.

  ‘They fall from the sky, do they, all those waterfalls?’ Pollock laughs.

  Mara gets up from her sea-grass bed. Wakened by the excitement, she has been listening hard.

  ‘There could be a sea over the other side of the mountains.’ She scrapes back the dark fall of hair that sleep has tangled all over her face. ‘Let me think. My book said the mountains enclose a sea of snow and ice. It fills the interior of the land. Over many thousands of years, the weight of it all made the land sink in the middle, like a basin. Greenland is the biggest island in the world. Now the ice is melted there could be an interior sea.’

  ‘A sea?’ Rowan puts down the hot fish he has grabbed from the fire.

  Mara rakes her hair again, her face lit up.

  ‘Well, it could be a sea now. Couldn’t it? I mean, a lake almost as big as a sea. All the melted ice, cupped by the mountains.’

  ‘A freshwater lake like the one in the hills above Wing,’ croaks Rowan, scrambling to his feet. His shorn hair stands on end and there’s glint of life in him that Mara has rarely seen since they left their own island.

  ‘Maybe that’s why this place thunders with waterfalls.’ Mara grabs Rowan’s hand. ‘They leak down through the mountains from the interior sea, like all the burns and springs ran down from the lake in the hills.’

  ‘Lake Longhope.’ Rowan smiles at her. ‘That was its name.’

  Mara bites her lip. It was the name of her farm.

  A spark of hope flits around the cave.

  ‘And you said you saw a tree root?’ whispers Mol. She nudges Possil. ‘Huh?’

  Possil nods as he tears a fish apart and stuffs it in his mouth.

  ‘Tree roots in the cave roof? If there are roots, there must be trees.’ Mol looks as if she has stopped breathing. ‘We could be Treenesters again.’

  ‘It was an old root,’ Possil confesses through a mouth of fish, ‘turned to stone.’

  ‘But it was a tree root?’ Mol persists.

  Possil scowls. ‘I know a tree root when I see it. I lived in a tree too, remember?’

  ‘And there’s heat?’ Fir asks. She snuggles up to Tron, teeth chattering.

  Possil smiles. ‘The air is like a summer’s day. I had a bath,’ he gloats, ‘in the hot pool.’

  ‘If there’s a tree root,’ Mol insists, ‘then there must be trees somewhere.’

  ‘A hot bath?’ Fir gapes at Possil, her mouth an outraged, envious, fish-filled O.

  ‘But why not stay right here?’ Tuck’s skin is crawling at the thought of moving deeper into the Earth.

  ‘I want heat.’

  ‘I want to see those tree roots.’

  ‘I want to see if there’s a way through these tunnels into the interior . . .’

  ‘We’ll freeze if we stay here. We’re hardly into winter. It might get colder yet.’

  ‘We could go to the people in the mountain. Surely they’ll help us,’ tries Tuck. He’ll do anything, anything, but he cannot go deeper into the cave. He just can’t. His head aches constantly and he is sure it’s the weight of the mountain pressing upon the air. He lies in bed trembling at the thought that at any moment the whole mountain might collapse upon him. Great Skua, who knows that it won’t?

  Tuck stamps on a tiny ember that’s fallen out of the fire. And that would be him, smashed into dust, snuffed right out of the world.

  ‘The mountain people wrecked our ship.’ Mol’s lips tremble. ‘They lost us Broomielaw and Clay and Merien and a lot of others too. They tried to sell us as slaves.’

  Mara pushes up the sleeve of her sealskin coat and shows Tuck her charred arm. ‘See? They branded us with this.’

  Tuck stares at the mark on Mara’s arm. He knows it. It’s the old sign of power and wealth; the oil-black emblem like a wriggly eel on a fish rod that is embroidered on the Prender family windwraps. Gently, he touches the brand on Mara’s arm. She flinches and pulls her sleeve back down.

  ‘The mountain people did that. They’re brutal and dangerous,’ she insists and tells him of the stone giant’s sinister sign that welcomed strangers to a place of fearful awe. ‘They had a gun to my head,’ she continues, ‘they’d have killed me if I hadn’t run – if your gypsea fleet hadn’t attacked.’ She stops, confused, realizing that the attack by Tuck’s people probably saved her life. ‘If that’s what the people of Ilira were like before the attack, they’d surely kill strangers outright now.’ The others are nodding in agreement. Mara stares into the darkness at the back of the cave. ‘But the interior. Maybe we can find a safe place there . . .’ She turns to Rowan. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I’d risk my life for a hot bath,’ says Rowan. ‘I really would.’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ says Fir. ‘Even if we starve to death at the back of the cave, I’d rather die warm.’

  Ibrox is already tidying up the tools of his little firebox and stuffing it securely inside his skin tunic. He breaks into sneezes.

  ‘So we’re agreed?’ asks Rowan. He glances at the faces around the fire. ‘No point hanging about then. Let’s go.’

  Mara can’t help grinning at the sudden resurrection of the old, feisty Rowan, brought back to life by the thought of a hot bath.

  GYPSEA HEARTWIND

  Stone by fiery stone, Possil’s torch flame picks out a glittering amber trail on the floor of the tunnels that worm deep into the mountain. Mara, Rowan, Tuck, the Treenesters and the urchins follow. Each time Possil rounds a curve and the torch disappears, Tuck swallows a panic that makes him want to yell. Touch has replaced sight. His skin is raw-nerved. The hot scrape of the cave wall, an icy blast of waterfall, the stub of his head or toe on rock: every sensation is magnified in the dark.

  Tuck touches his nose, feels the familiar bump, but can’t see his own hand.

  The only thing that calms him is counting, and the only things to count are his footsteps or the beats of
his heart. His heart is racing too fast so he counts steps. He’s counted nine hundred and three when the person behind grabs his arm.

  ‘Tuck, where’s your hand? Give me your hand.’

  He turns, can’t see anyone. Flails his trembling hand around till Mol finds it.

  ‘You’re shaking like a leaf and your breath’s fluttering like a moonmoth.’

  ‘It’s the dark. It’s closing in.’

  ‘It’s not,’ says Mol. ‘It’s just the cave walls are narrow here.’

  ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘I can see.’ Mol squeezes his hand. ‘My eyes are strong in the dark. I was born into a dark world.’

  Tuck puzzles over Mol’s words. Survival, and adjusting to the great rift in his life, has taken up so much of his thoughts and energy he hasn’t questioned what he thought he knew about these people from the Arkiel. He assumed they lived on the ship just as he lived on a barge shack in Pomperoy. He wonders what dark world Mol means, to unstrap his mind from the fact that the tunnel is now so narrow that he has to walk sideways.

  ‘I thought the Arkiel was your home.’ His forehead scrapes on a sudden lowering of the cave roof. His heart bangs. This is what he feared most, the mountain caving in. Now he has to walk sideways and stooped.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Mol. ‘My home was a scrap of land in a netherworld at the foot of a sky city. We lived on the Hill of Doves, among the trees.’

  Mol’s voice breaks on the last word. Tuck hears it. Driftwood comes from trees, he’s sure, though he doesn’t know what a tree is. Mol seems very keen on them though. He knows Mol and her people call themselves Treenesters but he’s never thought to ask why. It’s just who they are, as he is a gypsea. Or was. What he is now, he doesn’t know. A true Lander wouldn’t have such a terror of Earth.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ he asks Mol, to keep his mind off his terror.

  ‘The water kept rising. We had to leave before our Hill of Doves drowned just like Mara’s island in the sea.’

  ‘Mara’s from the sea?’

  ‘From the island of Wing in the Atlantic Ocean.’