Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Grunting with pain, he retrieves his bitten hand when she opens her mouth to let out a wail.

  He must leave yet there’s so much he wants to know about this wretched, feisty girl with the temper of a wildcat and the soft eyes of a doe.

  ‘Your father –’ he begins, then remembers the other scavenge, one he hid from Kronk – a mysterious object he snatched from the girl’s pocket after he netted her on the rocks. Clay pulls the carved wooden box from the pocket of his hide jacket. Opening the box, he stares at the strange silver crescent inside. When he takes it out, it begins to glow in his hand like a thin young moon.

  The girl’s heartbroken sobbing instantly stops.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asks, mystified.

  ‘Give it back!’ Lily gasps tears scattering from her face. ‘I need it.’

  ‘Why?’ Clay holds up the crescent and its gentle glow falls upon the piles of crates and sacking that fill the dank cave. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘You’ve never seen one before?’ Lily asks, suddenly curious. ‘Don’t you have these in your world?’

  Clay shrugs. ‘I see most things. I’m a good scavenger, the best. I’ve found all kinds of sea treasure from the drowned world,’ he boasts, wanting her to know he is not just an ordinary slave. ‘But I’ve never seen this.’

  He looks up to find Lily’s eyes fixed on his own so intently that something flips in his stomach, as if he has swallowed a tiny, excitable fish.

  ‘Did you never,’ she asks urgently, ‘find a globe?’

  Clay shakes his head. ‘The Pontifix has a globe. But I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘Ponty-fix?’ Lily stumbles over the strange word.

  ‘The man who rules Ilira. He’s Bridge-Master, Overlord of the Sea Lords, Ocean Commander, Keeper of the Globe. Tuck Culpy’s just about everything round here.’

  ‘Tuck!’ Lily’s tear-streamed mouth falls open. ‘Our Tuck?’

  Clay stares. ‘There’s only one Tuck Culpy.’

  ‘But he’s supposed to be dead,’ says Lily wonderingly. ‘My people made his name a curse.’

  ‘My people have made him a god.’

  Clay is unnerved. The Pontifix’s magic globe is a subject he usually avoids – especially in front of his mother. It’s guaranteed to get her weepy about the past.

  ‘If it is him, if – if somehow he didn’t die in the landslide,’ Lily is muttering to herself, ‘then – then the globe must be . . . I must see this Tuck!’ she declares.

  Clay bursts out laughing. ‘I don’t think so. The Pontifix is too busy to meet scavenged slaves today. He’s getting married. To my almost-sister,’ he adds, with a sigh.

  He moves towards the cave door, avoiding the girl’s scared, bewildered eyes.

  ‘I’m no slave. Don’t leave me here,’ she cries. ‘Please let me go.’

  Clay lights a small oil lamp so she won’t be left in darkness. He takes his own leather water pouch and a sliver of smoke-blackened seal meat from his pocket and chucks them in her lap. On an impulse he also tosses her the carved wooden box, now empty, telling himself she hardly deserves his kindness after that vicious bite to his still-throbbing hand.

  ‘Help me!’ she shouts as he leaves. ‘I must see Tuck Culpy. I need the halo and the globe to find my father!’

  Clay’s heart is heavy as he bolts the cave door against her desperate cries. He stuffs the crescent deep in his pocket and runs to hitch a ride on the back of the little cable train that click-clacks up the mountainside. His mind is buzzing. What does it all mean?

  Nothing, he tells himself. She’s just a scared girl trying to talk herself free.

  Gripping on to the back rail of the train, Clay sticks his free hand in his parka pocket and fingers the crescent. A halo, she called it. A thought strikes him. The Pontifix is mad for strange treasures like these. If this halo is something to do with the globe then he, Clay, holds a powerful gift in his hand.

  It’s only after he has jumped off the cable train and is clambering up to the mountain cave where his mother is in the thick of wedding preparations that something jars in his mind. He stops, balanced precariously on a thin ledge of rock.

  Clayslaps. Was that what the girl called him as he was running away from the cave? She couldn’t have. Only his mother ever calls him that.

  He looks down the steep mountainside to the harbour where Lily Longhope is locked in the cave, then stares across the ruffled waters of the fjord where the Pontifix’s glass palace is raincloud dull in the dreary light.

  How could a scavenged girl from beyond the mountains know that was his proper name? And how could she have anything to do with a man as powerful as the Pontifix?

  THE BRIDGE BRIDE

  ‘And once the babies arrive,’ says Broom, wiping the tears from the blotchy face of her young mistress, ‘that will make everything better. Having Clayslaps made all my hardships easier to bear – and you too, Candle, once I had you to look after. The Pontifix is a great man and you should be proud he chose you out of all the young women in Ilira.’

  ‘But why? I’m not pretty. I’m nothing, not to him.’ Tears spout once again from the girl’s small dark eyes, splashing down the sides of her snub nose. ‘You know why he’s marrying me, Broom – because my father has ships and trade links. And he has enticed the Pontifix with all your ideas about sun- and waterpower. What would the Pontifix do if he found out my father steals your dreams and pretends they’re all his own?’

  ‘Even the dreams of a slave belong to her master,’ Broom says drily, though she has told Candle often enough how her inventions began among the ruins of a netherworld, far across the ocean, long before she was an Iliran slave. ‘The Pontifix won’t care – as long as he gets what he wants. And don’t you tell him, Candle. The young bride of such a powerful man must tread carefully.’

  ‘I’m not a bride,’ says the girl sullenly. She wipes her eyes and nose on the fur-trimmed sleeve of her wedding dress. ‘I am a bridge between two men. My father and the Pontifix are marrying their businesses. It’s their wedding, not mine.’

  ‘You’ll find your own power one day,’ Broom tells her, patting the arrangement of shining coils she has styled out of Candle’s heavy, straight hair. ‘Just you wait.’

  The girl’s downcast face brightens at a scampering sound beyond the roughly hewn window in the mountain cave.

  ‘There are worse things than this, believe me,’ Broom tells the girl. ‘You are not losing all the people you love. I’ll still be with you, and Clay won’t be far. You must make the best you can from the life you’re landed with, Candle. It’s the same for all of us. And no,’ Broom casts a withering glance at her son who has just clambered in through the window, ‘that doesn’t mean you can go to sea. Slaves do not go to sea.’

  Clay and Candle exchange grins as Broom takes a snow-goose feather and dips it into a scallop shell full of powdered pearls then dusts the girl’s tear-stained face.

  ‘But we’re not slaves, Mother,’ mocks Clay. ‘We are Treenesters – people of the wide world who ended up here by mistake.’ He snatches the feather brush from his mother’s hand and tickles her nose. ‘Treenesters do go to sea – you did.’

  Broom sneezes and grabs back the feather. ‘And look how that ended up! Stop wasting the pearl-dust, Clay. It costs the Earth. Go and do something useful, you pest.’

  ‘I just did.’ Clay’s teasing stops. ‘I scavenged a girl.’

  ‘A girl?’ Candle’s dark eyes narrow to slits. ‘Where?’

  ‘Out on the rocks. And a wolfman, almost, but he’s dead.’

  ‘Was there a wreck?’ asks Candle excitedly. Ship and boat wrecks mean all kind of goodies. Not that she gets many, but she likes to hear about all the strange sea junk from Clay.

  Footsteps echo through the winding mountain corridors and they fall silent, recognizing the heavy clop of metal-soled boots.

  ‘Rodenglaw!’ Broom hisses at her son.

  Rodenglaw must not find a scavenger slave in his daughter’
s bedroom on the morning of her wedding. It doesn’t take much for him to erupt. Clay may be like a brother to Candle, but to Rodenglaw he’s just another slave.

  Clay kisses Candle hard on the cheek, leaving the mark of his mouth on the pearl dust. ‘Remember you are Candle. Not Tartoq. No one owns you – or me. Ever.’

  Candle touches her tingling cheek. How will she bear it when she can’t see Clay every day? He can’t come clambering into a guarded palace the way he does the mountain home of an absent Sea Lord. The Pontifix rarely leaves his palace these days, not since his eyes grew so weak. There are no windows in the palace anyway.

  How desolate Candle was when Clay was sent away to the harbour hovels to work for the scavenger Scuts. He was still a boy then, barely as tall as Broom. Now Clay is taller than most men in Ilira. Where Candle has the wind-planed cheeks, cave-dark eyes and sturdy body of her mountain people, Clay has his mother’s gentle face and large eyes, but the strong body of his hunter father who went down with all the others in the shipwreck that Broom and her tiny son survived, years ago.

  ‘Hide!’ Candle tells him.

  Clay jumps back out of the cave window as the door of the room bursts open and Sea Lord Rodenglaw stomps in.

  ‘Father,’ Candle murmurs, struggling not to flinch at his fierce eyes.

  Fear annoys him. If she is going to act scared she may as well have cause, he will say, adding that the mark of his hand can only add interest to such a plain face. But any boldness earns Candle an even harder blow. Candle has learned to grow an invisible shell and close herself up like a clam when her father around.

  ‘Wedding gift,’ he tells her gruffly, pulling a bright red bundle from the fur-lined windwrap he has taken to wearing over his sea armour, in the style of the Pontifix. ‘Belonged to your mother.’

  Candle can’t remember her father ever giving her a gift. There are never any on her birthday, a day of mourning for Rodenglaw.

  On that day, fifteen Winter Darknesses ago, a fleet of gypsea pirates surged up the fjord and firebombed the city, ravaging Ilira’s harbour of boats and ships. Rodenglaw’s wife, heavily pregnant, was caught up in the sudden attack and so badly wounded in the firestorm that the baby had to be cut from her burned and blasted body.

  The mother died, but the baby lived. Rodenglaw’s small son perished too.

  Broom was found that same day, washed up in the bay clinging to the lifebelt of her sunken ship with her own tiny child, and was taken by Rodenglaw as a slave to nurse his motherless baby. The unwanted scrap of life was named Tartoq, the Iliran word for the darkness the wailing baby seemed to embody for Rodenglaw now he had lost his fleet of boats, along with his beloved son and wife.

  Broom and Clay became a mother and brother to Tartoq. But her new mother refused to call her by the bleak name given by her father. Instead Broom called her Candle, in memory of the old Treenester woman who had been like a mother to her because, she said, Candle’s birth should be seen as a tiny bright miracle that happened on a dark day.

  Her own story is almost as strange to Candle as Broom’s tale of her shipwreck and slavery, after escaping the netherworld at the foot of a city of great towers.

  Now Candle breaks into a delighted smile and clasps the red leather shoes her father has gifted her. It’s the only heirloom of her mother the girl has ever owned.

  ‘Look, Broom! They’re beautiful.’

  Broom’s large, shocked eyes stare at the red shoes as if Candle holds a ghost in her hands.

  Rodenglaw grips his daughter’s shoulders and she stiffens as he turns her around so that he can appraise the black coils of hair, the weighty cloak made from the aged white fur of the last polar bear ever seen in Ilira, and the pearl-seeded silks underneath.

  ‘What this dress cost me!’ he says, his lips pressed thin in his weathered face. ‘Siberian silk! This dress, the wedding dowry I gave to the Pontifix – I could have built a whole new ship for less!’

  Rodenglaw takes a box from under his arm and hands it to his daughter. Candle is astonished. Another gift?

  ‘From the Pontifix.’

  Candle takes the dented metal box. Ancient writing is still visible on its rusted surface but Candle cannot read. She studies the faint image of the exotic delicacies that must be inside. Her mouth watering, she opens the box – and blinks as she pulls out a handful of what seem to be tiny, blazing suns.

  It’s a necklace made of a hundred amber gems.

  Rodenglaw grunts in appreciation. The gems trickle through Candle’s fingers and she sees that each amber droplet has a tiny dead insect trapped inside. Broom’s quick hands are already draping the jewels around her neck and shoulders in a glittering cloak. Candle moves towards the window and each gem becomes a tiny sun-catcher. The girl spins around, delighted, in a dazzle of amber.

  ‘I am not Tartoq any more,’ she laughs, and her small, dark eyes sparkle. ‘I am all light!’

  Rodenglaw raises his arm so casually he might be going to caress the girl’s face, but he brings his hand down on her with a blow that sends Candle sprawling against the rock wall. The amber necklace splashes up over her face and the red shoes fly from her hand.

  ‘You will always be Tartoq,’ Rodenglaw mutters darkly. ‘The girl who was the death of her mother. You have no reason to be pleased with yourself.’

  He stumbles over the red shoes and his face darkens. He kicks them away but a brief, strange flush of shame remains, as if the boots are a flash of reproach. If her mother were alive, Candle thinks for the thousandth time, rubbing her throbbing elbow, she would never let Rodenglaw be so brutal.

  Scrambling outside the window makes Candle jump. Broom’s face turns ashen.

  ‘Lord of the Sea, she’s just a stupid girl,’ Broom murmurs hastily. ‘Please don’t bother with her. I’ll see that everything is as you want it.’

  She ushers Rodenglaw towards the door, just as Clay’s head appears at the cave window behind him.

  Rodenglaw stops by the door, pulling his furred windwrap around his burly body.

  ‘I need your sunpower plans to be ready,’ he tells Broom, ‘as soon as the wedding is done. The Pontifix likes the idea.’

  ‘Yes, Lord Rodenglaw,’ gasps Broom, and almost shoves him out of the door as Clay clambers back over the window ledge, a dagger in his fist.

  TODAY OF ALL DAYS

  ‘I’ll kill that brute!’

  Clay strides across the room to the metal door that Rodenglaw has clanged shut. Broom gets there first and stands with her back against the cave door.

  ‘Don’t, Clay!’ pleads Candle. ‘Not on my wedding day.’

  The echo of Rodenglaw’s clopping feet recedes in the mountain corridor.

  Clay throws down the dagger and helps Candle to her feet. The girl’s eyes are dry but the rock wall has scraped her cheek and a trickle of blood runs like a scarlet tear towards her mouth. He stares at the necklace, at the tiny insect trapped in each amber gem, and remembers Lily Longhope’s fire-flecked eyes.

  ‘I’ll get him another time,’ grunts Clay. ‘Like tomorrow.’

  ‘How could he do this today of all days?’ Broom’s gentle face is flushed and furious as she dabs at Candle’s cheek with seaweed balm. ‘But this is the last you’ll ever have to suffer him. The Pontifix is a good man. He must be. Look at what he’s done for this city.’

  The clang of a bell sounds deep in the bowels of the mountain, echoing through all the tunnels and caves.

  Broom rushes to the window and looks down the mountainside to the bay. ‘So many people! The whole of Ilira is coming out for you, Candle. And the sun too – see, it’s chasing the clouds from your wedding day.’

  Candle goes to the window and looks beyond the glistening bridges to the glass palace on an islet deep in the fjord. The morning sun blazes upon the palace that will be her home after today. What will it be like to live without the shelter of the mountain, in the blast of the sea and sun and the dark and the storms – with the Pontifix?

  Bro
om gives Candle a tender shake. ‘Your father won’t dare mistreat you once you are the first lady of Ilira. No one will.’

  Candle kicks off her embroidered sealskin boots.

  ‘I will wear my mother’s shoes,’ she says, exerting the only power she has now.

  Broom watches with a grim look as Candle tries to squash her feet in, and can’t.

  ‘I will wear them,’ Candle insists.

  ‘Clay, give me your knife,’ says Broom with a sigh, and kneels to the leather upper of each shoe, almost to the toe, then stuffs Candle’s feet in. They must still hurt but the look on Candle’s face says that she’ll wear them if it means breaking her toes.

  Broom wipes her eyes and stands up, her hand shaking as she gives the knife back to Clay.

  ‘These shoes were not your mother’s,’ she tells Candle. ‘Candleriggs, the old Treenester I named you for, gave them to Mara. I could never forget them.’ Broom stare down at the red shoes, distraught. ‘But how could Rodenglaw own them?’

  Clay and Candle exchange glances. They know all the stories about Mara and the Treenesters of the netherworld and how emotional those old memories always make Broom.

  ‘It’s just a scavenge, Mum,’ says Clay. ‘Washed up on the shore – like us. They only look the same.’

  ‘They were my mother’s,’ Candle insists, her face crumpling again.

  Broom pulls herself together. ‘Well, now they’re yours. Ready?’

  Candle shoots a last, nervous glance out of the window to the palace where she will meet her groom today, on her wedding day, for the first time. ‘What should I call him?’

  ‘Lord of the Sea Lords, Keeper of the Globe, Pontifix of the Bridges . . . take your pick.’ Clay’s voice is as dry as a bone.

  ‘Can’t I call him Tuck?’

  ‘Just do what he says,’ says Broom. ‘At least, let him think you do.’

  Clay’s face has darkened again. He fumbles in his parka pocket, chewing his lip. Then pulls out the glowing crescent.