Zenith

by Julie Bertagna

  There’s a shout from up ahead, then a volley of excited cries.

  ‘Just a few steps further, Mara,’ Mol pleads.

  What have they found? Mara forces one foot in front of the other until she makes it into the mountain pass, a gully between two high peaks.

  At the far end of the gully she sees what looks like a church steeple. Mara’s heart jumps. Bewildered, she rubs the sweat out of her eyes and looks again. No, it’s a spiralling narwhal horn, pointing straight up into the blue ocean of sky.

  ‘That rock – it’s like a dead giant’s finger,’ murmurs Fir. ‘Are there giants in this land?’ She grabs Mara’s arm in fear.

  It’s not a church steeple or a narwhal horn or the finger of a dead giant, but a spire of rock as tall as the steeple of Fox’s netherworld tower.

  ‘Water!’ Voices ricochet off the gully rocks. ‘Water, like a great sea . . .’

  ‘Hear that, Mara?’ Mol urges, pulling her on. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  Mara hears through a surge of pain. The stomach cramps have been growing stronger and stronger. Now the pain is suddenly red-hot and ripping, as if the baby has grown talons and is clawing her insides.

  ‘Stop it,’ she mutters through clenched teeth. Amazingly, the baby obeys and the pain subsides.

  The others are at the far end of the gully, running towards the rock spire just beyond. She can see little Wing’s bright blue snow suit, bouncing through the gully like a ball.

  The baby starts up another agony of talon-clawing her until–

  ‘Ow, w-water!’

  ‘Nearly there, slow-slug.’ Mol laughs, then she sees Mara’s face and stops dead.

  ‘Something’s happening, Mol, something’s wrong . . .’

  ‘Oh, Mara.’ Mol looks at the hot gush on the ground at Mara’s feet and sees what’s wrong. ‘That water. It’s all right. It’s what happens.’ But Mara hears the crack of fear in Mol’s voice, sees the paling of her face as she yells at the top of her voice to the others. ‘Come back! Quick, everyone, help!’

  ‘What happens?’ Mara gasps, but she is remembering the island women’s birth talk.

  ‘This happens when the baby’s ready to come.’

  Mara nods. Of course it does. She just didn’t expect it to happen to her, right now.

  ‘We should have talked about it.’ Mol’s face furrows with anxiety as she takes Mara over to a sheltered shelf in the rock face. ‘I thought we had more time.’

  ‘We have – it’s too soon – I’m sure it’s not time yet – oh.’

  In a lull between peaks of pain, Mara tries to count months on her fingers then stops as the pain surges back. She has no idea, anyhow, what month this is.

  ‘The baby doesn’t think it’s too soon,’ says Mol briskly. ‘All this climbing might have brought on the birth.’

  Mara grips on to a rock as shards of pain break inside her.

  ‘Stop gawping, you lot,’ Mol shouts. ‘Do something.’

  ‘What?’ says Gorbals. They all look blank with panic.

  ‘Oh, just go away,’ Mol sighs. ‘Useless bunch of dubyas. I’ll deal with it.’

  Gratefully, the others disappear – all except Ibrox, who makes up a fire in silence, and Fir, who twitters nervously as she breaks icicles from rocks and puts them in a pot to boil. And Rowan, who crouches by Mara’s side.

  ‘Go away,’ Mara whimpers. ‘I want my mum.’

  ‘So do I,’ sighs Rowan. He ignores her and stays.

  ‘Hold her hand,’ instructs Mol.

  And in the undulations of pain and fear that follow, Rowan’s hand is the one and only thing that roots Mara to herself.

  A HOLE IN THE DARK

  Great Skua, he’s through!

  Bashed and smashed and scraped and bruised, yet he’s wormed out of the Earth just like he used to wriggle out of a Salter’s grip. He was lucky too. His little nook was near the edge of the landslide and after an age of tunnelling he made his escape.

  Now he’s stuck in the blind dark. Tuck tries not to panic and feels in the pockets of his windwrap for the little silver firebox he looted from Ibrox. His trembling fingers fumble uselessly on the switch, again and again, until finally the miracle of a tiny flame burns a bright hole in the dark.

  Tuck whimpers with relief. He limps around the cave, hurting his crushed foot, but it doesn’t matter, he’s free! Well, nearly. He scrambles across rubble, kicking up dust, searching for an exit tunnel, and begging The Man, though he’s an ocean away by now, to help him find a way out. And he does! Tuck’s tiny flame shivers on the upside-down grin of a skull. Tuck grabs it and lights the small chunk of driftwood inside.

  Now he can see the way through the dust and rubble into the tunnel. All he has to do is follow the trail of bone crosses back to the hot spring. Beyond that, the way is marked with amber fire stones.

  Tuck can hardly believe it. Soon he’ll be outside under the sky with the ocean wind in his face, not trapped here deep inside the Earth.

  He’ll be out in the world again, free at last!

  THRAWN GLORY

  Fox wakens in a slice of sun as it breaks over the city wall. He feels the fuzz on his chin and the fur on his tongue and wonders if he’s been asleep for a day or a week. Slowly, he remembers the burning fever, the terrible sickness and the pain gouging his stomach but it all feels distant as if it happened in a bad dream. What was it? A bad egg or some disease from the filthy netherworld sea?

  Or the urchin child. She is real. She isn’t a fevered dream. She eats rats and birds. Has she given him some disease?

  Where is she? Where’s Candleriggs? Fox looks around him. Where is he?

  This is not the usual tower room. He’s lying in a sick-crusted bed of paper below a wrecked bookstack labelled History.

  Gingerly, Fox sits up. He peels off a layer of loose pages that are stuck to his back. He is so fuzzy-headed it takes him some time to find his way through the mess and maze of wrecked bookstacks to the tower room he’s made his home with Candleriggs. So weak is his voice that when he tries to shout only a crackle comes out.

  ‘Candleriggs?’

  She’s not here, only the urchin child, hiding inside a small cave she’s built out of books.

  Fox kneels down by the child. Pandora. The name crawls out of his memory, as if he’s been gone a hundred years.

  ‘Where’s Candleriggs?’

  Blood and a crust of sickness are spattered all down the creases of the knotted tunic Candleriggs made for the child out of the litter of plastic bags. Pandora must have been ill too, but what’s the blood? She looks pale and her gem-green eyes are shadowed and scared. Fox sees the dead mouse on the ground that she’s been eating. He swallows a surge of nausea.

  ‘Candleriggs!’

  He’s panicking now. Something’s wrong. Candleriggs wouldn’t leave Pandora alone eating dead mice.

  Pandora points at a mound of books she has made under the tower window at the other side of the room. Fox stares at the gnarled foot that pokes out.

  He digs away books, hurling them all over the room until Candleriggs’s face is clear.

  The only other time Fox has seen death was the shot urchin in the water. That was brutal; this is not. The deep lines on Candleriggs’s face have softened as if she is deeply at rest, but death is not something that can be mistaken for sleep. There’s no life, no breath, just stillness in a golden lozenge of sun.

  She’s not there.

  Candleriggs is gone.

  She left him a note, scribbled in the margins of a book with a bit of charred wood from the dead fire.

  Go back to your people. This is all wrong. Maybe it was enough that Mara found you and I lived long enough to know you, and you could know the truth of the abandoned world. There’s nothing you can do from here, I see that now. You’ve lost too much and there is so much more to lose. Take the child and go back home. Change your world from the inside. Tell Caledon

  And there it stops. What she wanted to tell his grandfather
has been lost to death or the impossibility of finding the right words.

  There’s a charred circle around some words in the book.

  We shall be as a city on a hill, Fox reads. The eyes of all people are upon us.

  They are the long-ago words of an Englishman, John Winthrop. He wrote them, the book says, on board a ship called the Arbella in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He was one of the Founding Fathers of a new world in another age.

  Fox stares at the words. Walks over to the window. He looks up at the gleaming towers that dwarf the old world tower he stands in and hears the misery that carries on the wind from the boat camp all around the city walls.

  He doesn’t really know what the words mean or why Candleriggs wanted him to have them. Maybe, though, they weren’t for him. Maybe they’re for his grandfather in his city high above. And Candleriggs is right. Though he hardly knows his own parents Fox knows they’ll be broken-hearted, as his grandfather will.

  Maybe he wants them to be.

  Just what is he doing here? Getting back at his parents for not being around? Kidding himself that one person in a tower can change a whole world?

  We shall be as a city on a hill.

  Fox finds the bucket of rainwater. He splashes his face and gulps handfuls of the cold water until his head clears.

  He remembers his fever-dream of going back to the sky city, demanding an airship to find Mara at the top of the world. In the throes of deep fever Fox was certain his grandfather, so thankful to have him back safe and sound, would do that for him.

  Fox looks over at the dead body of the woman his grandfather once loved yet abandoned in the drowned world. All because she stood against him and challenged the cruelty of his world. Fox knows his fever-dream was fantasy. When the world he created is threatened his grandfather is ruthless, even to those he loves. The evidence is here, right before his eyes.

  The only way Caledon would have him back is if Fox denies the truth of the world outside.

  How can he? Mara is living the truth he’d have to deny.

  We shall be as a city on a hill.

  The long-ago words keep haunting his thoughts, recalling his idea of a cybercity, a place with no state in realworld. A place that only exists in the ether because its citizens will it to be.

  And what would it be, this secret city, entered through the portal of a peekaboo moon? A place that would open its doors to the truth of the past and the present – to Candleriggs’s and Mara’s existence, and the life of his baby to come, and to all the lost people of the drowned world.

  But though Fox popped a legion of moons into the Noos, no one has answered his call.

  It’s no use. He can’t create a city on his own. And if he did? He reads Candleriggs’s message once again. What more there is to lose? Candleriggs kept trying to make him think about the consequences of his plans. Once you’ve shocked them with the truth about the outside world, she’d ask, what then? Now, with her dead beside him, Fox feels bound to ask himself the questions he always avoided before.

  What would revolution really mean? His heart quickens as scenarios tumble through his mind. For the first time Fox sees that it might not be such a grand and glorious task.

  He looks at his torn, grubby fingernails and the netherworld grime ingrained in his skin. It might be vicious, dirty work. Wrecking the old order means destruction.

  Fox looks at the towers above him. How much wreckage and destruction justifies the creation of a better world? Could he be sure it would be better? What if the new order were just as corrupt and hooked to power as the old? What if they became so?

  There is one question he cannot avoid any more.

  What if people died?

  Could he live with that?

  Mara has to live with guilt of the deaths of people she loved dearly. But they were a mistake. Wouldn’t any deaths caused by his revolution be the same? A horrible but necessary consequence of his attempt to rescue the future?

  But would Mara ever have left Wing and sailed to New Mungo if she knew it would mean those deaths? Never. And yet he is contemplating something with consequences that are just as unknown, involving countless lives.

  What if he begins something he cannot control?

  What if he does nothing when he could be the catalyst for a new world?

  The eyes of all people are upon us.

  How many deaths, Fox asks himself, would justify the creation of that world? Many or none? Well, Candleriggs, he thinks, I’ve faced the hard questions but haven’t found answers. The final question, Fox knows, is the darkest of all.

  What if that’s the only way?

  In the depths of his fever he thought he heard Mara calling him.

  Where are you? he tried to shout.

  Above you, came the answer.

  Trapped in the fever, he couldn’t find her but now he understands what she really said.

  Not above you.

  I love you.

  Fox wants to rush and see if, by some miracle, she’s on the bridge right now. She is the one person left in the world who might help him with all the questions that are churning him up inside. But there’s something he must do first. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this. In the New World, old age and death are dealt with invisibly and tidily behind the Youthnasium’s doors.

  His hands shake so much it’s hard to begin, but Fox makes up a fire exactly as Candleriggs taught, with her flint stones and dry pages from the books. Pandora’s green eyes watch through her tangled blonde locks. She hisses with unease, whississ, clasping her toy snake tight while he works on the fire until it’s fierce and strong and thick smoke fills the small tower room. He tidies every book and scrap of paper from the stone floor and adds them to the fire. Eyes streaming, he takes Pandora by the hand and shuts the heavy oak door on Candleriggs and her blazing funeral pyre.

  And it sometimes happens that the stone breaks into flower in your hand.

  George Mackay Brown

  THIS DAY FOREVER

  She is born in a sunbeam, in a flame of agony, just before the sun sinks.

  From the moment Mara first sets eyes on her daughter’s face, on the soft mouth that opens and closes like a little fish, on the waxy eyelids that flicker like moth wings in the weak candle of spring and on the fox-tawny down of hair, she knows the baby is not the hostile presence she had begun to fear, especially in the tearing hot pain of her birth.

  She is the most perfect and beautiful thing Mara has ever seen on this Earth.

  A HUNDRED BRIDGES

  Stunned by sun, Tuck catapults back into the cave.

  He thought the darkness was thinning, but after a season spent in deep night the last thing he expected when he turned the fifty-sixth tunnel bend was a dart of such eye-stinging sun.

  Tuck rubs his shocked eyes. A galaxy of sunspots flashes in his head. Shading his face with one hand, the other gripping on to one of the rock spears sticking up from the cave floor, he peers round the very last bend.

  Reels of copper light lie like metal rods across the waves in the fjord. The salt wind is in his face and Tuck’s spirit soars as he stares at the sunlit sea.

  His jaw drops. His heart beats hard. Tuck scrubs the wind-tears from his eyes and looks again, but the light has shifted and the vision, or whatever it was, has already passed.

  Yet for a moment there, he saw the most astonishing thing.

  The rods of sun, with the waves running through them, seemed to forge into a network. Tuck rubs his eyes again. He knows it was only a trick of his salt-stung, sun-stunned eyes but for an instant he’d swear, by the eyes of The Man he would, that what he just saw was the glint and weave of bridges.

  Bridges, all across the water!

  A hundred bridges! Linking the islets of the fjord.

  That would beat his Da’s seventy-three. Tuck imagines the trademark Culpy crescent branded on every one.

  What was that gypsea saying Ma would always nag at him?

  Take your father’s windwrap
and step out into the wind.

  Now he sees that Ma was only telling him to loot the best of what his Da had given him and make it his own. If she’d nagged a bit less maybe he’d have listened to what she was trying to say. Well, now he understands.

  Breathing heavy and hard, Tuck counts each of the looted and gifted treasures in the various pockets of his windwrap. The vision of the bridges is so strong in him, it’s shaken him to his roots. Counting always calms him down.

  He’d counted twelve thousand heartbeats trapped in the earthfall. There in the dark, Tuck suddenly knew why he has always counted out the world. It gives him a grip of things his weak eyes don’t always reach – and a grip of the world when it feels beyond him.

  Maybe now it’s within his grasp. Maybe the Arkiel’s sinking of The Grimby Gray opened up a gateway to the world he would never have had if he was still there with Ma.

  Tuck fingers the pages of the book on natural engineering, the cold metal of the camera and the firebox, and the seven tiny moons that are Pendicle’s pearls. There’s the tiniest tingle in his fingertips when he touches the egg-smooth surface of Mara’s globe, with all the secrets of the past nesting inside. And he has his cutlass in its wire-woven scabbard, hanging from his belt.

  He misses the smooth glass of Grumpa’s three-cornered mirror. It fitted snug and sharp into the crease of his palm. That’s gone with Mara, along with a broken piece of his heart. He’s got her globe so they’re quits, he supposes, though Urth knows he didn’t mean to loot it, he was always going to give it back. But he can’t now there are mountains between them and a landslide of fallen rocks.

  The pirate in him was snuffed out somewhere deep inside Earth. There wasn’t too much to snuff out. He’s not enough of a pirate to beat the things that make him quake. Things like ice tunnels and unsalty air and the inside of Earth.

  He can’t be a gypsea now either because he’s Landed.

  So who am I? What am I now?