Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  For the Kiribati Islanders whose plight inspired

  Exodus, Zenith and Aurora and for everyone who has

  accompanied the characters of these stories,

  and me, on our epic journey.

  ‘To be part of a nation that might be under the sea gives me a feeling that I am from nowhere.’

  i-Kiribati native

  CONTENTS

  SEEK

  The Wind of War

  The Home of the Wind

  Wolf Mountain

  Scarwell’s Cave

  The Fox Father

  On the Hinterland

  The Embers of the Truth

  Signals in the Sky

  The Netherworld Queen

  A Scar from Old Times

  Phantoms and Legends

  Where the Sun Fell to Earth

  The Door into the Mountain

  The World’s Ocean

  SUNDER

  Dragons’ Teeth

  The Wrong War

  The Surge Rises

  History Whispers, History Jumps

  The Scavenged Girl

  The Girl and the Pontifix

  The Bridge Bride

  Today of All Days

  Scuts and Sky Fleets

  Lost Fathers, Lost Girls

  The Light of Ilira

  The Magic Globe

  The Eagle, the Slave and the Storybox

  Old Zenith

  The End Begins

  Candle, Alone

  Intruder at the Palace

  The Lethal Necklace and the Lost Spell

  Snakes and Ruins

  The Lethal Need

  Inside Earth and Out

  Land Girl in Ilira

  Oreon

  The Voice in the Watch

  Sea Wolf

  Weave Weapons and Dreams

  By Turn of the Tide

  Crescent and Claw

  SURGE

  Creep to the Sky

  Disturbing the Ether

  Wizzlog to the World

  Creeping into History

  The Ghost Trap

  Rogue Surge

  The Ghost of Caledon

  A Son Dead and Found

  Dreamers of the Day

  The Most Secret Surgent of All

  Warriors of a Woken World

  Candle Commands

  The Heart of a Wolf

  The Paradise Deal

  The Touch of an Old Friend

  Wolfscar

  The Magnificent Gift

  Homecoming Tide

  All the World’s Tomorrows

  On a Wing of Maybe

  SEEK

  The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,

  Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

  Walt Whitman

  WINTER’S END

  The year 2116

  THE WIND OF WAR

  The world’s wind blasts the old steeple tower as if it will tear it apart stone by stone - and hurl Pandora to her death.

  Rain lashes the girl’s fierce, wind-burned face. Her green eyes steal sparks from the lightning storm. Pandora scrapes away dripping tangles of hair, scrubs her eyes with a sodden lace sleeve and squints into the howling darkness.

  Where is Fox?

  He must be up here, somewhere.

  Pandora was rummaging through her hoard of old weapons in the museum when the crash of his axe echoed through the dank, storm-raked halls. Who! demanded a startled owl as it swooped from a headless statue to fly through one of the tall, shattered windows out into the storm.

  ‘Fox?’ Pandora called, as startled as the owl by the violent axe.

  Who else could it be? There was no other human presence, only their two selves, in all the netherworld.

  Yet she grabbed a shield and a sword along with her moonmoth lantern and raced through the clutter of the museum into the adjoining tower, following the noise of the axe. Up a thousand twisting stairs she ran through scared flutterings and slitherings and scuttlings of netherworld creatures, pausing only to skewer a fat rat with her sword – she’d roast it later for supper. Gasping for breath, she stopped as she reached an open door at the top of the stairs.

  The crashing axe had stopped.

  Pandora crept through the doorway. Her moonmoth lantern cast a fluttery glow upon tumbledown bookstacks, hillocks of mildewed pages and storm-shuttered windows that rattled in the hammer of the wind. As she stepped through the litter of lost centuries she spied a strange, dark gap. Tiptoeing towards it, sword at the ready, she saw that part of a bookcase was tugged out from the wall.

  ‘Fox?’ she whispered, and poked her sword, tentatively, into the gap.

  The thin blade shivered in a gust of wind. Pandora squeezed into the gap and lifted her lantern.

  The mothlight revealed a smashed door.

  A secret door! Pandora had thought she knew every secret of this old tower.

  She looked at the rusty key stuck fast in the lock, at Fox’s axe still wedged in the wood. He knew there was a secret door here? And never told me? Furious now, she scrambled through the gash in the door, ripping her gown on jagged splinters.

  Pandora climbed up into storm-blasted darkness. The wind roared through a stark geometry of archways that rose all around and above her, in a vast cone of stone and air. Amazed, she saw that she stood inside the great spire that topped the old tower like a spiky hat.

  Now Pandora clings to an archway and battles the wind that wants to send her crashing down to the drowned city in the netherworld waters, down on to the seaweedy roofs that rise at low tide like the helms of sunken ships. Even she, with webbed hands and feet and the soft gills on her neck, might not survive such a fall.

  Raindrops as big as frogs splat upon her head. Pandora curses her dress, one of the museum’s ancient hoard, its drenched skirts a dragging weight as she tries to move across the slimy stone.

  ‘Fox!’

  The wind snatches his name from her lips and the sword from her hand. The sword clangs as it tumbles from the tower – yet another treasure lost to the flooded world.

  Something has been happening the last few days. Something big. Pandora has seen it in Fox’s eyes, breathed danger in the scent of his sweat. And now he’s smashed his way up into the spire in the teeth of the storm.

  Pandora raises her face to the battering ram and peers up through the soaring archways of the spire to the city of New Mungo, looming high above. Its skyscrapers dwarf the old netherworld tower like a crowd of giants. Police patrols? She scans the enormous towers and their network of connecting sky tunnels. Is that why Fox is up here? Surely they wouldn’t swoop on a night like this!

  Skybikers can swarm down without warning like wasps from a poked nest. Pandora and Fox have a hundred hiding places from the searchlights and guns that sweep the netherworld, hunting fugitives from the boat camp beyond the city wall – though none have made it through in years.

  Sky patrols have been rare this winter. The ferocious storms have kept them at bay. And the sky empire is sunk too deep in new dreams and nightmares, says Fox, to feel the tremors of revolution gathering in the world beyond its walls.

  A sensation of hot goosebumps prickles Pandora’s skin as a spindly finger of lightning reaches down towards the spire. All around her, the devilish stone faces of the gargoyles in the nooks of the old tower seem electrified into demonic life. The lightning jabs at a figure perched on the strange little stairway that twists up inside the spire, past the bell that never rings right to the innermost tip of the huge cone.

  ‘Fox!’

  Pandora shouts with all her might to the one who has been everything since he found her as a tiny mud urchin, abandoned in the ruins. No longer that sad and scraggy waif, Pandora has stared at her reflection in the slime pools of the museum and seen a you
ng woman grown tall and lithe and beautiful. Now she is the warrior queen of the netherworld, dressed in the jewelled gowns and armour of lost ages, with a lustrous tangle of hair and green eyes that glow like moonmoths when she looks at Fox.

  Soon she and Fox will have so much more than this kingdom of drowned ruins. When war smashes through the city wall, they will leap into the future together and rebuild a world where the sky empire’s brutal grip on the flooded Earth is broken at last.

  The rain pelts harder and Pandora raises her shield as if to a hail of bullets, imagining herself battling alongside Fox in the coming war. She loves him so endlessly she’d die for him, she vows, as she lunges towards the precarious stairway.

  Thunder rips through the world, a sound so immense it might be one of the sky towers tumbling down. Pandora unhooks the little brass bugle she keeps on her belt, waits for the thunder to fade, then blows the hardest blast she can muster.

  At last, Fox looks down.

  ‘The boats,’ he shouts. ‘Pan, come and see!’

  Pandora pulls dripping locks of hair from amazed green eyes. The great wall that makes an ocean fortress of the sky city, and traps the netherworld in gloom, is the only horizon she has ever known. She has never seen the boat camp beyond, only imagined it clinging like a crop of barnacles to the other side of the wall.

  Over the years she and Fox have listened to the crackling voices on the soundwaves: flood refugees telling desperate stones of then survival on the oceans. They are her people, thinks Pandora, because her lost family must have been boat refugees. Fox chose his netherworld exile; he fled his home in the sky city above to launch the revolution that will soon shake the world. But how did she come to be here? Pandora has no memory of family or a life beyond the wall.

  For now, the boat people cling in wretched anchorage around the Earth’s sky cities, barricaded under gun shields, crafting weapons from sea junk for the battle ahead. At least, Pandora hopes so. Their communications with the boat camps died in the mighty winter storms. Searching the hissing desolation of the soundwaves, listening for a pulsebeat of the outside world, Pandora has imagined the boat people all swept away.

  Step by trembling step, she now begins to climb up the precarious, twisting stairway towards Fox – who takes a sudden leap across empty space and vanishes through an archway.

  Pandora searches the darkness. A tiny parapet encircles the top of the spire. Is that where he went? The wind pounds her, fear drums inside, but she climbs on.

  ‘Here.’

  His voice is suddenly close. Sheet lightning turns the sky as bright as the moon and Pandora glimpses his ghostly figure in an archway, just above. One last heart-stopping twist of the stairway . . . a few more terrifying steps . . .

  ‘Take my hand,’ shouts Fox. Rain streams from his outstretched arm. Sweat steams from his skin.

  If she misjudges the jump, Pandora will follow her lost sword down into the netherworld sea. But she grabs Fox’s hand, leaps through the archway – and lands on the narrow parapet at the top of the spire, safe in his grasp.

  Lightning flickers across their drowned kingdom, illuminating the cathedral that seems to float as an ark in the netherworld sea and the broken bridge that lunges from the water like a lagoon monster, draped in seaweed and barnacled with ancient rust-heaps. All around the old steeple tower and the water-glugged museum, scattered among the massive trunks of the sky towers, lie the last scraps of a city lost to the sea: tiny mud-banked land-scraps, crammed with trees and ruins, teeming with animal life. Enclosing it all is the vast city wall.

  ‘Look,’ urges Fox.

  Beyond the wall, as far as she can see, is an immense heaving darkness.

  The world’s ocean!

  And out on that violent ocean are the jostling shadows of the boats. Lightning turns their metal gun shields into the scales of slumbering sea dragons.

  ‘So many!’

  A smile breaks on Fox’s drenched face. ‘Not just here. Outside every sky city in the world . . .’

  A silver pathway stretches out across the ocean and ends abruptly in the darkness.

  ‘The eastern sea bridge,’ murmurs Pandora. Fox has schooled her well in the workings of the sky empire.

  The bridge project to link the sky cities of Eurosea was abandoned after the slave breakout of 2100 that brought Fox to the netherworld. That was when the gates in the city wall were sealed. No ship or refugee has breached the walls since. Now, food supplies from the vast ocean farms and floating greenhouses and all trade between cities comes by the airships that land on the roofs of the sky towers.

  ‘I heard whispers on the soundwaves,’ says Fox, his voice a warm huskiness in her ear. ‘Voices so faint they might have come from the stars. It was our boat people. I had to see them, just once, with my own eyes.’

  Pandora looks up at the billowing darkness that has smothered all the stars. Never have they known a winter so wild. Barricaded in the tower, she couldn’t see how the boat people out on the wild ocean could survive.

  Somehow, they have.

  Fox grips her hand as they gaze out at the seething black ocean.‘Whatever happens now, whatever we have to do, Pan, remember this moment. This is what we’re fighting for, all those people out there.’ He pauses for a heartbeat. ‘And for the others, wherever they are.’

  His last words are almost lost in the howl of the storm. But Pandora hears the break in his voice and knows he’s thinking not only of the refugees around the sky cities of the world, but of those who fled in the 2100 exodus of ships that went North. The memory of that day is burned into Pandora, as it is also in Fox.

  She remembers swimming towards the fleet of white ships, too small to keep up with the other urchins. Seaweed clung to her, clamping her legs. She couldn’t break free. The netherworld would not let her go. By the time she crawled on to a mudbank, choking on seawater, the ships were surging out through the gates in the wall. And she was left behind, a lone little urchin, grubbing around in the mud and ruins. But then Fox, with the soft face of a man-boy and eyes full of fire and broken dreams, found her and brought her to live in the crumbling tower with the wise old woman, Candleriggs, who mothered Pandora and guided Fox in his revolution, until she died.

  Pandora drags her gaze from the mass of boats to Fox’s handsome, rain-streamed face. Her heart leaps as she understands why he has smashed his way up into the spire and why he speaks, now, of the ones who fled North.

  Fox is as charged as the electric wind.

  ‘Is this it? Is it all beginning, Fox? Now, at last?’

  Excitement jolts through her, as if a bolt of lightning has hit the tip of the spire.

  ‘As soon as the storms settle and the soundwaves clear. Once the radios are back up and running . . .’ Fox pulls her close in a rare, fierce embrace that Pandora yearns for more than anything in the world. ‘Then the global Surge begins.’

  THE HOME OF THE WIND

  A scream tears across the great lake at the top of the world.

  The North Wind hurls the sound upon the ancient faces of the mountains, scattering echoes into the forest of Candlewood. The scream is neither animal nor human. Yet as they settle for the night in their earthy burrows under the forest floor, the people of Candlewood greet it like the voice of a long-awaited friend.

  Pine needles crackle like excitement under Lily’s deerskin boots. Beyond the tree lamps the forest is a dense darkness, the cold as fierce as fire, and the wind is everywhere.

  ‘Lily!’

  Lily pushes on through the scaly trunks of the pine trees and pretends not to hear

  The icebergs are dying. Far out on the lake, the scream of rupturing ice climaxes with a crack that seems to split the night apart. Winter’s harsh reign is ending. At last.

  ‘Lily Longhope, come back right now – or else!’

  Lily hesitates. She’s in trouble if she doesn’t turn back. A quick glance over her shoulder shows the slim, dark-haired figure of Mara, her mother, haloed by the light of a tr
ee lamp.

  ‘I just want to see,’ Lily yells back.

  It’s all right for her, Lily sighs, kicking a tree. She’s had all the adventures anyone could ever want. Her mother has no idea what it’s like to be cooped up in the family burrow for the fifteenth winter of her life, aching to be out in the world again and pent up with a restlessness that makes her feel ready to explode like a pine cone in a flame. She is desperate for some excitement. The icebergs crashing into the lake will do.

  ‘Take a tree lamp, at least. Lily, the wolves!’

  Lily smiles to herself. She knows all about the wolves. There’s a boy in wolf’s clothing she’s hoping to find. Nevertheless, she runs back and grabs a flickering tree lamp from a branch.

  ‘Just to keep you happy.’ She gives her mother a cheeky grin.

  ‘I’ll only be happy once you’re back safe and sound in the burrow,’ says Mara, fastening a wind-shield around the lamp, ‘so don’t be long. Stay on the shore and don’t dare go looking for Wing in the dark’

  Oh, shutupshutup, Lily thinks as she plants a kiss on her mother’s cheek to pretend that she’ll do as she says.

  Soon the trees crowd so densely that Lily must push her way through the scratchy pine trunks and branches like big, icy feathers. It’s easy to lose yourself in this patch of the forest, but the trees will help her. Lily casts the lamp around to seek out the glinting eyes of the forest: amber firestones set in the trunks to mark pathways through the trees. She swings the lamp up and follows the firestone trail.

  Time is against her. Any moment now the icebergs might disappear with an almighty crash into the lake. It often happens like this: a sudden meltdown, a tumultuous mass death, soon after the best day of the year when the forest dwellers rush from their winter burrows to greet the new sun as it clambers on to the shoulders of the eastern mountains after months of polar darkness.

  Lily pushes forward, then stops. She cannot find the next firestone. But there’s another kind of fire that can guide her through the night. She throws her head back and gazes up beyond the wavering tips of the pines.