Exodus

by Julie Bertagna

  Much as she wants to, Mara cannot explain away such uncanny coincidences. But a few cracks and scars don’t mean she’s the one who is going to save the Treenesters.

  “How did you manage on your island if you didn’t know how to read the signs of the world?” Gorbals suddenly asks.

  Mara doesn’t answer because not reading the signs was the reason she is here, now, having lost everything.

  Mara spends the day getting her bearings. She explores the Treenesters’s island and sees why they have chosen it as their home. As well as being the largest and most tree-covered, it lies farthest from the central towers of New Mungo and the ever-present threat of the sea police. The occasional wail of a siren and the reels of tide made by the supply ships are a constant reminder of the workings of the New World that overshadows this dank, gloomy one.

  Mara rafts over to the cathedral island, and then to the wrecked bus on the Bridge to Nowhere to look for Wing. At last she finds him up on the curving ruin of the building that tops the Treenesters’ island. She spies his grubby face peeking out through a large red-and-yellow plastic sign that’s lopsidedly propped on the building’s crumbling balcony; a bright yellow M, like a twin golden archway. Was this once the sign of some special, sacred place?

  Wing sits among the flocks of urchins that perch upon the rooftops to throw rocks at the birds. The curve of the ruin forms a kind of amphitheater that resounds with the chirrupping, whistling racket of the birds and the urchins. The urchins are vicious with birds, forever attacking and tormenting them, mimicking their voices, tearing them apart when they stone them down, eating them raw, dead or alive. Mara is sure they punish the birds in envy of their winged freedom. Only Wing’s own little sparrow, guarded fiercely by him, escapes such cruelty.

  Mara climbs through the rubble of bones and bottles and weeds that lie inside the ruined building. In the middle of a room with no walls or roof sits a smashed television set, its innards overgrown with chickenweed and dandelions. A kitten cries like a lost child in a wasteland, but as Mara clambers through to get up to Wing she sees it’s not really a wasteland at all. The place is teeming with wildlife—birds, bluebottles, beetles, cats, goats, a wild dog, chickens, wasps, worms, slugs, spiders, and ants. Nature has reclaimed the ruins of the human world.

  Tentatively, Mara climbs the remains of a staircase, stumbles and plunges into a mass of stinging nettles. She looks around for a dock leaf to rub on her stings and as she reaches out for one she almost thrusts her hand through a huge spider’s web. The crumbling building is full of gaps and holes, its doors and windows are wide open to the elements, yet the web survived last night’s ferocious storm.

  How can so much life survive in such a ruined place? Mara wonders, then she spies Wing.

  “I searched and searched for you,” she tells him when at last he scrambles down, “but you’ve been here all the time.”

  He stares at her mouth, hopping about on his spindly legs, trying to drink in the meaning of her words with his eyes while his bird-friend flaps around his shoulders.

  “I want you to bring me your friends.” Mara gestures up at all the urchins on the rooftop then points to herself. “I’ve had an idea. But,” she adds, pointing to the wound on her face and shaking her head sternly, “I don’t want any more of this.”

  Wing stares at her in concentration. He reaches up and puts a finger to her lips. Mara repeats her request and pantomime of gestures. The child blinks once and runs off.

  In a moment he’s back, trailing a flock of urchins. So he understood after all. Mara leads the way down to the ground and they gather around, tense and curious. She flinches as a hundred eyes fix upon her. She knows it’s a risk meeting these children alone here; they are truly wild, they might do anything to her.

  “Do any of you have names?” she asks nervously. “Do any of you understand me?”

  The eyes burn upon her.

  “I—I can give you names, if you like,” says Mara. “All the names of the lost islands in the ocean beyond the wall. Would you like names?”

  They don’t understand a word, of course, but it seems only right to ask.

  Mara points to herself. “Mara.”

  She points to Wing. “And you’re Wing, remember? Wing. Now say it,” she tells him. “It’s no use having a name if you can’t say it. Wing.”

  Mara puts her finger to his mouth. The child watches hers intently and attempts to mirror the shape of the word on her lips.

  “Wuh,” he grunts at last, trying out the sound. He bashes his head with his hand and tries again. “Wuh-eeng. Wuing!”

  Mara claps her hands. “Good! That’s it, that’s who you are: Wing.” She turns to another child, a noisy girl of around eight. “You’re obviously meant to be Yell. That’s where my father was born.”

  She comes face-to-face with the girl who attacked her in the cathedral. Mara and the girl stare each other down for a moment.

  “Scarwell,” Mara laughs. “That’s the name for you.”

  Mara works her way around the urchins, dishing out names at random. She repeats each name until the child can say it. Jura, Skye, Iona, Barra, Benbecula, Tiree, Orkney, Harris, Foula, Hoy, Unst, Copinsay, Stroma, Lewis, Fetlar, Muckle Roe, and so many more; all the drowned islands. She moves on to lost villages and hamlets when she runs out of islands, until each child has a name. Then all of a sudden she sits down in the midst of them as a great wave of emotion hits her. It’s as if until this moment, when she gave away the legacy of their names, she never truly believed that the islands were lost to the world.

  Something clear and harsh rings out in the netherworld. Wing jumps up and the urchins scatter, yelling excitedly as they run off down the hillside to the water. Mara listens to the sound and remembers the same lone, harsh beat that struck through the heart of the storm last night and the night before when she first met Wing at the sea bridge. More urchins rush out from the ruins and from other secret places all over the drowned city. They hurtle off the Bridge to Nowhere and flock upon water that the falling sun has turned red. Mara peers through a bolt of sun to watch in astonishment as the urchins seem to speed across the surface of the sea.

  A hundred children zip across the water’s sheet of fire.

  Mara runs down to the water’s edge. A silver network has emerged from beneath the waves. At first she can’t fathom what it is, this glistening trail that maps the water—and then she knows. It’s the rooftops of the drowned city, the ones she saw glowing like ghosts in the dark the other night. The very tips of them have been revealed by the low tide and it’s these tracks that the sure-footed urchins race upon, zipping and zooming in all directions across the secret silver maze on the red sea, rushing chaotically through a forest of chimney stacks.

  But the chaos has a pattern only the urchins know. They flock into clusters around all the churches, then climb up the church steeples into the bell chambers. As the red sun moves behind the towering steeple of the giant wizard hat and sets fire to its network of stone and air, the urchins begin to bash the bells of the drowned churches with sticks and stones. Mara feels the beat echo in her bones and turns dizzy as the netherworld reels in a chaotic red haze.

  They must hear it in New Mungo, thinks Mara. As if in answer to that thought, the howl of sirens rises across the netherworld. Far across the water Mara sees the lights of a supply ship. The sirens grow closer, louder.

  Gorbals and Broomielaw race out of the grove of trees, grab her, and drag her up the hillside.

  “Get up into the greatnest! It’s not safe! If the sky people see you they will take you away!” cries Broomielaw, climbing up into her nest where Molendinar is hushing baby Clayslaps.

  And now Mara sees how they keep themselves safe. To outside eyes, there isn’t a sign of any living soul. The sundown fire has been stamped out and scattered with branches, the moths set free from their twig lanterns. If Mara didn’t know better she’d think those glimpses of plastic were bits of litter blown into the trees. The Treenest
ers have made themselves invisible to the prying eyes of New Mungo and its police.

  But Wing and his friends are out in the open. And at the outburst of the sirens, the Bash stops.

  Once the sirens recede, the Treenesters climb down from their nests. Swiftly, they hunt for moonmoths to relight their lanterns, they clear and restoke the sundown fire, then sit in their circle around it. Mara wants to look for Wing but they insist she will not be safe and make her sit down among them. Now Gorbals begins to build his own gentle beat with words. Mara slips into the comforting rhythm of his poem and feels her heart settle and her body relax. When his poem has ended, the other Treenesters stand up, and one by one each shouts out a name that remembers the lost places of the drowned city.

  The red ball of sun slips suddenly below the city wall. The light dies and for a moment the whole world seems to fall away. But the Treenesters’s sundown fills the air with a stubborn shout of life.

  INSIDE THE WIZARD HAT

  Earth turns. Days pass. And Mara is stuck in the netherworld.

  Rain quells the steamy heat. Water pours day and night as if there’s some giant celestial tap in the sky. The ting of a million drops upon New Mungo fills the air with a heavenly sound that’s undermined by the ghostly moans and whispers of the city’s windspires.

  Birds fly south. Mara watches them through the sky tunnels, remembering the winged arrows that flocked in ever-changing patterns across the island skies this time every year. Each glimpse of the birds’ freedom intensifies her frustration. Somehow she must break out of this deathly netherworld and find a safe home in the world, one that is beyond the reach of the ocean. But where is there to go, and how could she get there?

  Time binds into a pattern. Nest building, food gathering, and meal making fill the gloomy daytime. While Mara tries to find an answer to the urgent question of the future, she busies herself with the here and now. She learns which roots and mushrooms are safe to eat and which never to touch, which pungent leaves and herbs must be rubbed on the skin to repel the disease-bearing mosquitoes and malaria flies. She builds her own treenest, helps Broomielaw search for the soft, scented moss she uses as diapers for little Clayslaps and the sweet nuts she grinds into butter that he loves to suck from his fingers. Molendinar shows her tree sap medicines and herbal cures, and she gathers and dries driftwood with Ibrox the firekeeper. Evenings, she helps hunt for moonmoths to put in the twig lanterns that hang in the nests and fill the trees with a dim, fluttery glow.

  Nights are deep and dark. The Treenesters fill them with music and song and poems and many, many stories. Mara sits by the fire listening as she tries to patch together a pair of new shoes to replace her leaky terrainers from the piles upon piles of old, sodden ones that the tide dredges up from the drowned city and deposits on the Hill of Doves. Or she snuggles in her treenest and watches the ghosts of the old city glimmer in the sea as the tales unfold. Clyde tells of his incredible birth in a tree during a vicious spring storm. Broomielaw describes the sudden disappearance of her father and brother one long-ago night—grief at the loss led to her mother’s death soon after. Gorbals tells of the crop of necrotten mushrooms that poisoned the soil in the vegetable patch, killing many Treenesters and leaving him orphaned. The lives of the Treenesters have been harsh and tragic. They show Mara a strength and compassion that help her grow strong enough to bear her own terrible loss.

  Near the end of each day there’s a space of time when the sun breaks through the gap between the high city wall and the umbrella of the sky tunnels. Suntime, the Treenesters call it. Mara joins them as they gather on the mossy slope of the Hill of Doves to catch the low amber rays. Their faces lose a little of their pallor in the evening sunshine and their owl eyes crinkle against the brightness as they loll about the hillside, happy on hupplesup, relishing every second of suntime in this strange netherworld.

  Their only freedom, thinks Mara, is the light that breaks through another world.

  She spends any spare time collecting book litter, drying out and flattening the pages under stones, then reading them in her nest by the flickering light of the moonmoths. All the time she is thinking, thinking, furiously turning ideas over in her head, trying to devise a rescue plan that might salvage a future in this drowned world.

  The most surprising thing is that she wants a future. Her grief over her lost family is so terrible that she has quickly learned to make her thoughts circle around that reality. It’s a wound so achingly raw she cannot bear to touch it. And she endures continual, horrible waves of guilt over her part in bringing everyone here to New Mungo—but somehow, incredibly, she no longer wants to die.

  The fate of Rowan and the others in the boat camp deeply scares her, but she knows that even if she managed to make it out through the wall again, the chance of getting herself back and the others safely through to the netherworld is near impossible. And the netherworld is not an answer to their future. The Treenesters are anxious to escape the rising waters of their island, but they do nothing. They wait for her to act, claiming she is the one who will save them; a presumption that annoys and overwhelms Mara, yet also increases her growing sense of purpose. Desperately, she hopes that her friends in the boat camp can cling to life until she can think of some way to help them. She hopes with all her heart that they’re not already dead.

  Somehow, for everyone’s sake, she must come up with a plan—and fast.

  Ibrox is sparking the morning fire, scattering fresh pine needles on last night’s embers when Mara climbs down from her nest just after dawn. She has lain awake for most of the night, thoughts racing through her mind. An amazing idea in the fragment of a book she rescued from the waters has set her imagination ablaze. Could this be the key to their future? But as yet, she can’t see how it would be possible.

  As the air fills with the mind-sharpening scent of roasted pine needles, Mara longs for the lost pages of the book. Maybe they would answer some of her questions. She needs more information, much more. She could search the Weave, of course, but looking for anything in there is like looking for a needle in a million haystacks. It takes forever and time is what Mara does not have. Could there be quicker answers lying in the realworld ruins?

  “It’s enough to make a tree angry!” Ibrox explodes as an urchin crashes through the trees and pulls out a length of half-flamed log, upsetting his expertly stacked fire.

  The small girl escapes with the precious fire and runs with it up to the ruin at the top of the island.

  Mara chuckles. The urchins scavenge anything, even fire.

  “Never mind, Ibrox. Can I help anyone?” she yawns, jangling a wind chime made of colored glass fragments to keep Clayslaps happy, while Broomielaw fastens his swinging nest securely with a tough knit of sticky moss.

  “You can help me collect the rainwater from the bathtubs at the top of the hill,” Partick shouts over his shoulder. “Grab a bucket. Possil and Pollock are out on an all-night hunt and this old man has to do it on his own.”

  “Then you can boil up the water and make tea,” grins Molendinar, handing her a bunch of tea herbs.

  “And milk the goats,” shouts Springburn, as she rounds up the herd.

  “The eggs need collecting before Gorbals gets up and stamps all over them with his clumsy big feet,” giggles cheeky young Clyde.

  “Then you need to scramble the eggs,” adds Trongate.

  “I want eggflap,” argues Gallowgate, hanging freshly washed plastic upon a prickly gorse bush to dry.

  “Boiled,” Gorbals grunts sleepily, shaking his moss quilt out of his nest.

  “What would you like, Candleriggs?” asks Trongate. “You decide for us. Scrambled, boiled, eggflap…”

  “Peace!” calls Old Candleriggs as she climbs down from her nest. “That’s what I want first thing in the morning. What a racket you all make!”

  “Mara will stay right there and rock the baby,” smiles Broomielaw. “She’s still half in dreamland.”

  The Treenesters no longer treat M
ara like an angel who has fallen to Earth.

  “He likes the rock-a-bye-baby song,” says Mara. “My mom sang it to me and my brother.”

  Mara sings it to the baby as she rocks his swinging nest. Up above them, the wind rocks New Mungo.

  “Please don’t sing that anymore!” Broomielaw exclaims. “It’s a horrible song.”

  Mara starts in surprise, the brutality of the words striking her for the first time. There couldn’t be a worse lullabye for a baby Treenester.

  “The ratkin is here,” says Broomielaw. For Mara’s sake she tries to hide her disgust and has stopped calling Wing a ratbasher, gentling it to ratkin, though Mara argues he’s much more like a little bird; but Broomielaw still won’t have him anywhere near her baby.

  Mara sneaks Wing a fire-baked potato. She’s also got a little pile of the bright litter he treasures—shiny bottle tops and bits of colored glass—to use as a bribe to entice him to raft over with her to the place the Treenesters have warned her never to go near. She could go alone but she’d far prefer to have some company in that daunting place. And since the Treenesters won’t go, there’s only Wing.

  She has grown used to the urchin’s comings and goings, sometimes not seeing him for days as he roams the netherworld with his own kind. Try as she might she can’t tame him into a replacement little brother. Wing is wild. He does as he wants. No matter how tender she tries to be or how hard she tries to teach him words and language, he makes it clear he’s having none of it. But he answers to the name Mara gave him and seems fond of her; at least, he’s fond of the treats she sneaks him.

  This morning, unexpectedly, he has brought her a present—an armful of cockles and mussels and whelks. Mara takes them hungrily; she loves shellfish and they’ll be good fire-roasted.

  “No!” Broomielaw smashes the hoard of shellfish from Mara’s hands. “Don’t touch it. It’s necrotten stuff.”