Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Now Candle addresses the mass of guards gathered on the rocks who have turned from the burning ship to hear the commanding young woman in the antique fur and jewels.

  ‘My people have lived on this land since the White Age of ice and snow,’ she declares. ‘I am the daughter of Sea Lord Rodenglaw and my mother was a Hakan from Eagle Heights. My cloak,’ she grabs a handful of the heavy fur, ‘was made from the last white bear ever seen in Ilira, killed by my mother’s mother when she was hardly more than a girl.’ Candle puffs out her stout body. ‘And who knows if I am already carrying the heir of the Pontifix?’

  All eyes fix on her round stomach. Candle’s eyes glint.

  ‘Guards of Ilira, we must not betray our ancestors or our children,’ Candle urges them. ‘Or ourselves. And that’s what we would do if we give the Vulture control of our land and ships. So, I will tell you of the plan Captain Strozzi has put to me. We will fight with the gypseas to defend the North from invaders from the sky cities who want to steal our land – but we will not live in the grip of the Vulture’s claw. All of Ilira can unite through me!’

  Captain Strozzi strides forward.

  ‘Pledge allegiance to the new Commander of the Fleet – the Light of Ilira!’

  The cheer that erupts from the mass of guards is a roar of relief. Captain Strozzi looks surprised by the strength of the vote and his round face crinkles in a satisfied smile.

  ‘What are you a scholar of?’ Candle asks Oreon, helping herself to the silver gun stuck in the belt of his windwrap.

  The young scholar is struggling to keep his dignified composure. He looks as if he wants to dive into the sea and swim for his life.

  ‘Oh, everything,’ Oreon mutters desolately. He looks at his watch with a sigh, as if to check whether he has run out of time. ‘I am a scholar of the world,’ he adds.

  Candle studies the handsome gypsea intently. Her sharp little eyes flicker over his long limbs and fine, clever face.

  ‘I want to make a deal with you, Oreon, scholar of the world,’ she says. ‘The deal of a lifetime.’

  Captain Strozzi hurries over, looking alarmed.

  ‘Now, Candle,’ he murmurs, in a fatherly tone, ‘that was a triumph. But let us men of the sea handle this business now.’

  ‘Commander Candle,’ she corrects him. ‘Make sure Ilira’s defences are strong, Captain Strozzi. That’s your business now.’

  She dismisses her captain without another glance and Strozzi turns to his guards with the bellow of a man who will not be ignored, even though his young mistress has done precisely that.

  ‘My glass palace is full of everything,’ Candle murmurs confidentially to Oreon. ‘Tuck collected relics and mysteries of the drowned world.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ says Oreon sadly. ‘That’s the real reason I agreed to do this for my brother. I hoped Tuck might show me those treasures. I wanted to learn, I wanted to see – I wanted to be his friend.’

  ‘You wanted to befriend your prisoner?’ Candle eyes him intently. ‘Is that possible, Oreon?’

  ‘But if he understood my passion . . .’ Oreon looks distraught.

  ‘You must know that the Pontifix was the Keeper of the Globe?’ says Candle, moving ever closer. ‘The magic wizz.’

  ‘The globe,’ breathes Oreon. He gazes at Candle as if she holds the keys to paradise.

  ‘My deal is this,’ says Candle. ‘I will hold you prisoner in my palace, safe from your brother’s wrath, and you can study all the relics and mysteries, everything that was Tuck’s and now belongs to me. It’s the perfect place for a scholar of the world, and for a gypsea. The glass walls of the palace do strange things to the light and the dark,’ she whispers to him, ‘and you feel you are under the sea in a sunken ship.’

  Oreon looks mesmerized, nervous, tempted.

  ‘Oh, and I’m not really carrying the Pontifix’s child,’ Candle adds, with a shy, sly smile

  Oreon studies her face as he would a map of a mysterious land. ‘But – but what do you get from this deal?’

  ‘You,’ Candle says, in an airless voice as if she has been running round and round the corridors of the palace. ‘Your knowledge of the world,’ she adds hastily, ‘would be very useful to me, now that I’m Commander of Ilira.’

  Oreon gazes out for a long, wistful moment at the moonlit ocean beyond the fjord. He looks through the drifting smoke from the burned ship to the glass museum of Tuck’s palace, crammed with precious mysteries of the drowned world. Finally, he looks down at Candle, who seems to be holding her breath.

  ‘Deal,’ ventures the gypsea scholar.

  THE TOUCH OF AN OLD FRIEND

  ‘Wait!’ Lily bursts through the guards on the harbour and runs towards Candle as she leads Oreon away. ‘Candle! Broom and Clay are in danger. They’re trapped somewhere under the palace.’

  Candle’s startled expression suggests she did not expect to see Lily alive again and is not entirely happy to find that she is.

  Lily bounds up the palace steps. ‘Tuck said they’d drown by the morning tide.’

  Candle glances at the eastern sky, at the sea, and gasps.

  ‘Find them, quick!’ she orders some guards. ‘Bring my husband’s body inside,’ she tells others. She sees the body lying near to Tuck’s on the harbour rocks. ‘Is that a drowned wolf?’

  ‘It’s my friend, Wing,’ says Lily. ‘He saved me from the ship. He’s burned. Please, Candle. .?’

  Candle sighs. ‘Bring him too. Broom has a medicine box.’ Her face crumples in sudden fear. She races into the palace. ‘Broom! Clay!’

  Mara grabs Lily’s hand. ‘What do you mean, Broom and Clay? It – it can’t be.’

  Lily nods. ‘It is.’

  Mara sits down hard on the palace steps. ‘They didn’t drown when the Arkiel sank? They’ve been here all this time?’

  She looks out to sea. There is a sudden definition in the darkness, a soft grey line drawn across the ocean night.

  ‘Dawn,’ Mara cries, hurrying into the palace. ‘The turn of the tide. They can’t drown, not now.’

  She races blindly, desperately, along winding corridors.

  ‘Broomielaw!’ Mara shouts. Her voice echoes forlornly through the glass maze. The only reply is the hot hiss of a geyser in an alcove. The sea booms softly outside.

  There comes an answering cry from somewhere deep in the palace. Mara runs towards the voice until, rounding a final bend, she rushes into the embrace of the friend she thought drowned years ago.

  They gather in Tuck’s room of relics, among the strange objects nestled in the glass walls and upon rocks. As the lost ones reunite with tears and joy, Oreon picks up relic after relic with the look of a starving man imprisoned at the greatest banquet on Earth.

  Mara and Broom tend to Wing and he sinks into a spirit-numbed sleep on a bed of furs, his burns soothed by seaweed balm.

  A torrent of conversation rushes around the room, drowning out the gush of the geyser, voices spilling over each other as stories are shared and mysteries explained.

  ‘He’s alive and he will come, he said he would,’ Lily is insisting to her incredulous, wide-eyed mother.

  ‘What was the point,’ Broom demands, ‘of us surviving everything if you youngsters are now going to lead us into war and—’

  ‘Make surviving worthwhile?’ Clay interrupts. ‘Mum, tins war will come and find us anyway.

  ‘Not if we go into the mountains with Mara,’ Broom retorts. ‘No one will find us there.’

  ‘Clay is right,’ Oreon cuts in. ‘The sky empire has already invaded at Fort Aurora, due North of here – and elsewhere. The invasion will spread. They’re sure to break into the interior of the island. Nowhere will be safe. Our only hope is to fight with the Surgents.’

  Oreon is dragged from his solitary banquet with Tuck’s relics to show the radio watch on his wrist that connects him to the Surgents. The global leader of the Surgency is also, he is sure, the Midnight Storyteller who captivates the world.

 
‘Midnight is a different time zone all around the world so I have worked out his rough whereabouts,’ says Oreon, looking around Tuck’s possessions. ‘I could show you if I had a map of the oceans . . .’

  ‘He’s in New Mungo,’ Mara says softly, and she grips Lily’s hand.’ It’s Fox’s revolution. He did it’

  ‘Not yet, he hasn’t,’ says Oreon. ‘But it’s begun.’

  With careful fingers, he picks up something that lies on the wide stone table at the centre of the room.

  ‘A book,’ he says, and his lips quiver hungrily. ‘Natural Engineering by C. D. Stone.’

  An astonished cry breaks from Mara and she rushes over to look.

  ‘Caledon David Stone. Your grandfather, Lily!’ Mara takes the book from Oreon and with Lily hanging over her shoulder she flicks through pictures of spiderwebs and termite towers and nests, all the astounding architecture of the natural world that first inspired Caledon and then, much later, Tuck. ‘It’s a book for Broom,’ she sees, with a smile for her visionary friend. Then her smile wobbles as all the happenings and revelations of this strangest of days overwhelm her.

  ‘The globe,’ she remembers, scanning the room. ‘We need to look for my globe.’

  ‘I forgot!’ Lily begins unfastening the band of netting she has knotted around her waist like a thick belt. From the folds of fishnet she unwraps Granny Mary’s carved box and hands the heirloom back to her mother.

  ‘I saw Granny Mary in the Weave,’ she tells her dazed-looking mother. ‘Really, I did. Fox found her and kept her for you’

  Now Lily unwraps from the netting the prize that almost cost her her life. She disentangles the crescent of the halo and wipes a strand of seaweed from the globe before handing it to her mother.

  ‘Oh, Lily,’ Mara whispers. ‘You found it. But if I’d lost you . . .’

  ‘Don’t know if it still works,’ Lily confesses. ‘It’s been in the sea.’

  A tingle runs up Mara’s arm; a shock of delight at the touch of an old friend. The globe powers up, coloured clouds swirling across the smooth surface, a warm glow at its core. Then it begins to fade.

  ‘It’s dying,’ Lily whispers. ‘It keeps fading.’

  ‘It survived a drowning before, twice,’ says Mara, opening the globe. She takes out the small wand inside. ‘And a mountain falling on it.’ With her nail, she flips up the small screenpad and removes the tiny solar rods. ‘It needs some sun.’

  ‘Last night was the final broadcast before the Surge began,’ says Oreon slowly, transfixed by the sight of the most famed of all of Tuck’s relics, the globe in Mara’s hands. ‘No one knows if the Fox will survive. But what he’s done for the world is – it’s vast. You should be very proud if the Fox is your father,’ he tells Lily. ‘Whatever happens now.’

  A ghost seems to walk across Mara’s skin as she recalls the haunting words from the voice in Oreon’s watch.

  Someone, I say to you, will think of us in some future time.

  They were the words of a poet, said Fox, a young woman called Sappho who lived on an island almost three thousand years ago. Her words had survived all down the ages. If we do the right thing now, Fox urged his listeners, our words and actions will stand like a rock in the ocean of time for our children and all the generations after.

  Then his voice was lost as the soundwave died in the sizzle of the spring auroras.

  ‘If he doesn’t come I’ll get on a ship and find him,’ Lily declares.

  ‘You can’t just launch out into the ocean,’ says Mara.

  ‘Like you once did?’ Lily retorts.

  ‘I had to find a home!’

  ‘I have to find my father!’

  ‘You already have a father,’ says Mara quietly. ‘Rowan has loved you since the day you were born and you know it. He’ll be out of his mind with worry. And the little ones . . .’

  Mara’s voice breaks. Lily looks at the ground and nods.

  ‘You’re not going to sea either, Clay.’ Broom breaks the tense silence. ‘A Treenester lives on the land.’

  ‘There’s a future to fight for, Mum. I’ll do what I have to.’ Clay hesitates. ‘And I’m not really a Treenester. This is my home. I love the ocean and I want to see the world.’

  Lily lifts her gaze from the ground and meets Clay’s eyes.

  ‘I want to see a sky city,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Well, isn’t there always a future to fight for?’ Broom sighs in exasperation. ‘Of course you’re a Treenester,’ she chides Clay. ‘You were born in a tree nest! What about your father? You have one in Candlewood you’ve never met. Some people risk then lives to find their fathers but you’d rather run off to sea.’

  ‘Well, if our mothers didn’t keep losing our fathers . . .’ Clay retorts.

  Lily smothers a giggle as Clay grins mischievously. Mara and Broom surrender to weary laughter as the tension breaks. The sound of the morning tide on the rocks beyond the glass walls is like a sigh of relief.

  ‘Clay won’t be running off to sea,’ says Candle, who has been watching everything with her acute eyes. ‘I need him here.’

  Now she asserts her authority, inserting herself between Lily and Clay who seem to be imperceptibly drawing towards each other, moment by moment.

  ‘I won’t be your slave, Candle,’ growls Clay.

  ‘I want you to be my ocean master. I will have Oreon as my adviser on world affairs and you, Clay, will rule and organize Ilira’s fleets and trade. Strozzi will carry out your orders and captain the fleets at sea. And you will be my dreamswoman, Broom,’ Candle adds. ‘All your ideas of the power that lies in the sun and the weather and the waterfalls – we can make those dreams real now!’

  Broom looks torn; Clay unimpressed.

  ‘An ocean master who never goes to sea?’ he scoffs.

  ‘I must go home, Candle,’ Broom decides.

  ‘This is your home.’ All Candle’s imperiousness vanishes and she rushes across the room to fling her arms around Broom. ‘You’re my slave,’ she murmurs to the woman who has been her mother. ‘You’ll do as I say or I’ll have you locked up under the palace again.’

  Broom kisses her then sets her apart. ‘Now that is no way for a commander to behave. And don’t you be so cheeky.’

  ‘No more slaves, Candle,’ says Mara. She pulls up the sleeve of her jumper to reveal a faded symbol on her arm. ‘Your people branded me one once, before I escaped into the mountains. Ilira made Broom and Clay slaves and all their talents were lost. So much is lost when people are not free.’

  ‘But I’ll lose Broom if she goes with you,’ Candle cries. ‘Just when I need her most. And Clay too if – if he . . .’

  She stutters to a stop and glares at Lily, her tears dried to flinty sparks.

  ‘Imagine if the way into the interior was opened up,’ says Mara. ‘There’s so much we could do! No one ever need lose anyone again. What about trains, communication links . . . radios., all kinds of things are possible . . .’

  Her vision is only fragments. She must piece it together before she can see what the world might be. But now she has the globe back Mara has regained all the lost treasures of the Weave. The old virtual world is a cybermuseum littered with crucial knowledge of the drowned world and lost ages. That knowledge can surely help them learn from the mistakes of the past.

  ‘This great island was once called the Land of the People,’ Mara remembers. ‘Tuck opened up Ilira to the world but we could build on that and open up this whole land for all its people. If war is on its way,’ she adds, ‘won’t a free people fight for their land much harder than slaves?’

  ‘You’ve been enslaved all your life,’ Broom says softly to Candle. ‘Everyone should be free.’

  ‘Does that include me, Mother?’ says Clay with a sly grin.

  Broom replies with a rueful smile, trapped by her own words.

  Oreon picks up a beautiful relic, full of mended cracks, with a long neck and a curving body of iridescent blue.

  ‘Some kind of w
eapon?’ Oreon muses, puzzling over the wires on the axe-like neck.

  ‘I won’t hide away in the mountains or in a palace,’ Clay tells Candle. ‘Captain Strozzi should master our fleets through a war. He is already a master of the ocean – but I could learn from him.’

  The burly sea captain has been sitting in grumpy dejection on a rock, having been insulted twice now by the young mistress he himself just lifted on to a pedestal of power. He gets to his feet, struggling with hurt pride.

  ‘No one is ever a master of the ocean but I am always at the service of Ilira,’ he says gruffly, appraising Clay from head to foot, with the expression of a cook asked to create a feast from unworthy scraps, but his eyes twinkle as he seems to spy some essential ingredient in Clay’s determined face. ‘Well’ he shrugs, ‘let’s see what the ocean makes of you.’

  Lily touches the mysterious blue relic in Oreon’s arms. Its curving body is the vivid blue of a twilight sky above Lake Longhope. At her curious touch the taut wires strung from its neck vibrate. A wild thrum fills the air.

  ‘It doesn’t kill,’ Lily exclaims, grabbing it from the scholar and thrumming it again. ‘It makes music’

  ‘Ah, I saw a weapon but you found music,’ says Oreon, looking shamed. ‘War has invaded me and it hasn’t yet begun. What will it make of us all once it breaks on our world?’

  WOLFSCAR

  The wolfskin wraps around Lily, steeped in Wing’s scent.

  ‘My wolf will keep you safe till the Fox comes,’ says Wing.

  Lily looks up from the harbour rock she is sitting on, watching the skies. The agony she sees in Wing’s burned face is not only from his wound.

  ‘You’re going back? But you’re hurt, you can’t go. You need to rest.’ Lily reads the unspoken words in his eyes. ‘You’re going back to her.’