Pathfinder

by Julie Bertagna

  Mara sighs wearily. The stone-telling prophecy is like a pebble in her shoe that she cannot shake out.

  But her plan is completely practical and it’s got nothing to do with visions or superstition or birds or fishes with rings or any of the other signs and statues that the Tree-nesters claim is the stone-telling. If she can just find a map and more information about the high lands of the Arctic among the paper mountains in the university, and get hold of the clothes she needs to make her look like a New World citizen—then all she has to do is find a way to access the ships that dock in the great towers. And that’s the bit of the plan she hasn’t worked out yet.

  If only she could find the cyberfox and get him to help her…

  Mara climbs into her nest and takes out her cyberwizz, recharged on snatches of netherworld sunbeams. Later, she tells herself. And she feels a shiver of the old excitement at the thought of plunging back into the familiar cyberworld of the Weave. Maybe, just maybe, she will find the fox. But right now she must begin to prepare the Treenesters. She must start to tell them something of her audacious plan and get them ready.

  “Treenesters!” she announces to the surrounding nests. “Listen! I have a story I want to tell you. It’s the story of a people called the Athapaskans that live in a forgotten highland forest at the top of the world. People that sound a lot like you.”

  THE LAND OF THE PEOPLE

  Next morning Mara is awake even before Ibrox the fire-keeper—ready and eager for a full day’s hunt in the book rooms of the university. She calls up to Gorbals, hoping to persuade him to come with her, then begins to gather fallen twigs to stoke the sunup fire. Pollock’s small hunting axe is lying on the ground. Mara picks it up, shivering beside the paltry fire. Only the gloomiest dawn light filters through the sky city, and the netherworld is a dank and bitter place. As she raises her arms to axe a low branch of a birch tree, someone grabs her wrist, painfully. She spins around and it’s Gorbals.

  “What are you doing?” he demands, amazed.

  “We need some more wood,” Mara tells him. “The fire’s too low and I’m cold. Why, what’s wrong?”

  Gorbals wrenches the axe from her fingers. He stares as if she’d suggested fire-roasting baby Clayslaps.

  “We do not kill trees,” he says sternly, then looks at Mara searchingly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you can’t be the Face in the Stone. Tree killing is a terrible crime.” Now he looks worried, wary. “You haven’t killed a tree before, have you?”

  “There weren’t any trees on my island,” responds Mara. “So I didn’t have the chance. Anyway, I wasn’t killing it, I was only chopping a branch or two.”

  “That is killing,” Gorbals insists. “What if I chopped one of your limbs off? Tree killing is part of the story of the world’s drowning. When Candleriggs was young she lived in the age of tree crime. The Earth needs its trees.” He frowns. “There were no trees on your island? Not even one?”

  “I never saw a tree till I came here,” Mara confesses.

  Gorbals shakes his head, stunned.

  “Maybe that’s why your island drowned. A place without trees is a dead place. We treat our trees with respect. We knock on them politely before we go to nest—yes, I’ve seen you smile—we leave them food offerings too and they eat them. We—”

  “The birds eat them, stupid,” Mara retorts, but gently. Then she remembers something Tain told her. “Wing did have trees once. Lots. The roots of them made peat in the Earth, and we used the peat for our fires. Long ago, Wing was all forest.”

  “And what happened to the trees?” Gorbals asks. “If they were killed and their dead roots were left in the Earth then your island was a necrotten place.”

  Anger takes Mara by surprise. How dare he say such horrible things about her island? It all happened hundreds of years ago. It was nothing to do with her. The ancient forest was burned down to free the land for farming.

  She begins to gather up the small pile of twigs at her feet and throws them furiously on the fire. The words stick like thorns inside her.

  “Mara, I’m sorry,” says Gorbals. “I said cruel words.”

  Mara bites her lip and nods tearfully. “But you think we lost our island because of what the people long before us did?”

  Gorbals sighs. “We lost our city because of that too. Candleriggs says human beings burned up the power of the Earth, not just the trees but so much of the goodness of the planet that the world grew hot and the great ice mountains melted and flooded the lands. She lived through it all.”

  “Our ancestors stole our future.”

  “Yes, and the sky people have only built themselves a safe island up above the ocean. It’s not up to them to find an island for us.” Gorbals shrugs and glances up at the city he is trapped beneath. Mara’s dark eyes follow his gaze and she frowns, no longer sure what she thinks about anything.

  “Come to the university with me,” pleads Mara. “Please, Gorbals, I need your help—you know words, and it’s words I’m looking for. Words that will tell me what I need to know if we are to escape from here and find a safe home in the world.”

  Gorbals looks over to the university steeple with the same fearful, yet eager expression Mara saw in his face when he took the book from her.

  “I found the book I gave you,” Mara tells him, “in a great round room piled high with books. Thousands of books, full of poems. Imagine, Gorbals, a room filled with mountains of poetry.”

  “I’ll come,” he nods. “Your story last night about the people at the top of the world decided me. I will come with you and give you whatever help I can.”

  Gorbals walks with Mara through the vast hall of dreams, gazing up at its colossal windows. The glimmer cast by the night lights of New Mungo is just enough to let them read the names in the colored glass. Mara begins a rollcall of the world’s great dreamers.

  “Galileo. Newton. Einstein. Fleming. Virgil. Plato. Shakespeare. Milton. Dante. Byron. Burns. Tolstoy. Rousseau. Marx.”

  Gorbals stares into the depths of the far halls. “Who were they?”

  “Creators,” says Mara. “And all men, it seems.” She points up at the portraits of all the great names, and she tells her theory of dreams, of the missing women in the mosaic of creation.

  “But women grow the living dreams, the human ones,” Gorbals argues. “A human being is the greatest creation of all. Each of us is a new living dream.”

  “Except we’ve become a living nightmare,” says Mara. “The human dream’s gone all wrong. I can’t believe there were no great dreamswomen in the whole history of the world. I bet there were loads. So why are none of them remembered here?”

  They walk slowly through the vast halls. “There must have been many unknown men whose names and dreams are lost too,” says Gorbals after a while.

  With a stab of pain, Mara thinks of her father; then of Tain and Alex, and all the unknown, ordinary men who farmed the land.

  “True,” she says softly. “But still, there are no women at all.”

  “Courage, perseverance, fortitude,” Gorbals reads from a stained-glass window that tells a picture story of an ancient battle.

  Mara leads them down the last of the vast halls, through the dwarf door set in the turret, and they begin the climb up the dizzying spiral of a thousand stairs, until they reach the book rooms that fill the huge tower beneath the great wizard hat steeple.

  “Mara!” Gorbals clutches her hand fearfully as they walk through the tumbledown stacks and mountainous heaps of books. “So much—so many—I can’t believe it.”

  Mara stops in the doorway of the seventh room.

  “This is the room full of poetry,” she whispers.

  Wonderstruck and trembling, Gorbals stares around him.

  “I’ll leave you here for a while and I’ll begin searching,” says Mara.

  “Don’t leave me alone!” gasps Gorbals.

  “They’re only books, Gorbals. They can’t hurt you.”

  “That’s not what Cand
leriggs says.” But already Gorbals is on the floor, rustling through the treasure of pages.

  Mara walks through to the next room. Where to begin? How will she find information on the Arctic among all this. History, she reads, noticing the sign above the door. Of course! The book rooms must be divided into different subjects. Mara walks back through the rooms, reading the sign above each door. Philosophy? What could that be? Art, literature, anthropology, history—and so many books for each. Archaeology, geography…

  Mara stops. Geography. Isn’t that the one? Geography is to do with atlases and the Earth. She dives into the room and begins hunting. There are books about every land on Earth—every land there once was. China and the Far East, the Americas, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Scandinavia, Europe, Australia…

  “Found anything?” Gorbals stands in the doorway, looking more like a plastic scarecrow than ever. Books stick out everywhere, from all the ragged pockets in his plastic tatters. “I don’t care what Candleriggs says,” he cries. “I must have these, I must! But now I’ll help you,” he says, seeing the weary look on Mara’s face.

  Hours pass as they search the book stacks and shelves and the piles of blown and toppled volumes on the floor. At last Mara slumps back against a heap of books.

  “It’s useless!” she cries and bursts into tears. “I’m useless. But I have to find an answer, or else Mom and Dad and Corey and Gail all died for nothing!”

  Gorbals rushes over to her. “Mara, Mara, don’t cry, we’ll—ow!”

  He stubs his big toe on a fallen bookcase and hops about in pain, then crashes backward into the tottering bookstack next to him. Books flutter and tumble from the shelves and dust and cobwebs fill the air with a thick haze as ancient pages disintegrate all around them.

  Mara covers her head, coughing and spluttering, as books thump and flutter upon her.

  “Oh, Gorbals!” she sobs, but she can’t help laughing too. “You big clumsy—ow!”

  A final volume falls with a thwack on her head.

  Gorbals rakes away the pile of books that have landed in her lap, sneezing and blinking in the dust clouds.

  “Greenland,” he reads wistfully, catching sight of the silvery title of one. He opens it wonderingly. “What a beautiful name. Maybe it’s a land of trees. I wonder where it is.”

  “I don’t know,” sighs Mara, “but it’s sure to be drowned like the other lands. It’s the Arctic we’re looking for.”

  Mara rubs tears and dust from her eyes, and forces herself to begin searching once again.

  “Mara,” says Gorbals, after a while.

  “Mm,” she says distractedly as she scans title after title. Then she registers the excitement in his voice and turns around. “What?”

  Gorbals is still engrossed in the silvery-titled book.

  “Greenland is in the Arctic. It’s a land of mountains that’s been trapped under ice for millions of years. But the people who live there don’t call it Greenland because strangely it’s not green at all—it is white with snow and ice. They call it Kal-aall-it Nun-aat,” he sounds out the strange words carefully. “Kalaallit Nunaat. The land of the people.”

  When he looks up at Mara her eyes are almost as wide as his own. “But it will be flooded too,” she says.

  “No, listen. Greenland is a vast, empty land of mountains locked in ice,” reads Gorbals. “The interior has been sunk beneath the weight of colossal ice sheets. If ever that weight of ice was to melt it would engulf and drown the lands of the Earth with a billion liters of water for each person on the planet. Yet once freed from her immense burden of ice, Greenland would bob up like a cork, her highlands revealed for the first time since they were locked in the deep freeze of the Ice Age.”

  Mara listens in amazed silence.

  “Where—where exactly is this land?” she asks at last, wishing that she knew more of the world, ashamed once again at her own ignorance. Gorbals takes the book to her and shows her the map. And Mara cries out in dismay because Greenland is the massive island that divides the North Atlantic from the Arctic Ocean, north of Wing. It’s far north, much farther than the distance New Mungo was to the south; but maybe just within reach. Oh, we should have gone north! We might have done if everyone hadn’t listened to me.

  But we didn’t know, Mara reminds herself. We thought it was in meltdown, that the land would be sunk too. We never knew it would bob up like a cork once the ice was gone. How could we?

  Mara flicks through the book, her eyes gulping in information.

  “Oh, Gorbals!” Elated, she clasps the book to her chest. Then she jumps up to hug him, gleefully. “This is it! This is what we need!”

  Gorbals looks amazed and delighted. “Then there is a place in the world for the Treenesters? In Greenland? The land of the people.”

  Mara nods, her eyes shining. “I think so.”

  “But how will we get there? So far across the ocean!”

  Now Mara shakes her head and her dark hair falls across her face. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Last night you said you wanted the clothes of a sky person, then you ran off after Broomielaw and you never said why.”

  “Well, the only way I can get near the ships is if I look like a sky person. A scruffy refugee like me doesn’t stand a chance. The problem is, even if I can get into the city I don’t know what to do then—we need to overpower the city guards and police to steal a ship—more than one ship because we must help the people in the boat camp too. But there aren’t enough of us—they’ll shoot us all. Oh, Gorbals, I just can’t see a way to do it! But now we’ve found this …” she clasps the book on Greenland, “I can’t give up. I must keep trying to think of a way.”

  “You will,” says Gorbals warmly. “Because you are the Face in the Stone.”

  “I’m not, Gorbals, really I’m not. I’m just a girl called Mara and somehow I’ve ended up in such a strange place.”

  “Mara, then. Ma-ra, Ma-ra… it’s the sound of a wave rolling into shore.”

  Mara smiles. “I like that.”

  Gorbals smiles back. “We should get going now,” he says, but neither of them moves. Silence falls, as dark and deep as the book stacks, ghosting through the vast halls and up through the staircases and book rooms of the steeple tower.

  Gorbals reaches inside one of the ragged pockets in his plastic tatters and takes out a book. Mara nestles down beside him as he begins to read a poem he has found called By the North Sea, about a land lonelier than ruin and a sea stranger than death.

  “Is that what the sea is like?” he asks fearfully, once the poem is finished. “Stranger than death?”

  Mara is puzzling over something else. “Gorbals, what if the sky people have taken Greenland for themselves?”

  Gorbals frowns then shakes his head. “Candleriggs once told me they don’t want to live in the world anymore, only the sky—and even beyond.”

  “Beyond? What’s beyond the sky?”

  “The stars. Candleriggs said that’s where their eyes are fixed—on a journey out into the stars. They want to make New Worlds out there too,” says Gorbals.

  Amazed, Mara tries to imagine a New World city on some distant planet in space.

  “How does Candleriggs know all this?”

  “She lived through many things she won’t talk about,” shrugs Gorbals. “Terrible things in the time when the world drowned.”

  His stomach rumbles loudly. Mara reaches over for her backpack and takes out the plastic-wrapped package of food they have brought, along with flasks of rainwater and hupplesup. They munch ravenously on thick rolls of herby potato pancake. Full stomachs and hupplesup set them yawning after their early rise and expedition across the water, followed by their long hunt in the book rooms.

  Mara nestles sleepily into a hillock of books.

  “The littlest of naps.” Gorbals yawns loudly. “We must get back well before the Bash starts and the ships come in. We’re much nearer the sky people here.” He snuggles down too, just for a w
hile.

  All too soon, Mara wakes with a jolt. A fox has wakened her—a dream fox this time, whose eyes and flashing tail torment her amid the ruins and junkheaps of the Weave. Each time she thinks she’s close the fox slips out of reach and disappears. Then, just as she finds it and reaches out a hand to touch that tawny fur, the fox turns on her, snarling and vicious.

  “Bats?” Gorbals murmurs, feeling her jump, his voice full of dust and sleep. “Ratbashers?”

  Mara shivers. “No, just me. It’s all right.”

  Now she’s wide awake, feeling desolate. Gloom has descended upon the netherworld and she wonders what time of day it is. She looks out through the smashed window but the clouds are too thick to let the sun through so it’s difficult to judge. It can’t be too late, surely. They were up so very early.

  “Garlic and sapphires in a puddle,” Gorbals babbles in his sleep.

  Mara feels around the pockets of her backpack and takes out her cyberwizz globe. It tingles in response to her touch. Her heart is beating fast as she grips the wand then slips the halo over her eyes for the first time since she left the island. She powers up the cyberwizz and verges into the world of the Weave. When she drops down a shimmering strand right into the heart of it she is suddenly panic-stricken. It all feels strange and alien. The noisy electronic buzz and flicker of the once-familiar tower-stacks and junk mountains fill her with fear. She tries to zip and zoom as she used to but the speed unnerves her. What’s wrong with her? She feels as if she has been gone a hundred years, as if she is a stranger. And then suddenly she knows what’s wrong.

  Before, fear was a game. Now it’s far too real. Mara tries to make herself venture into the ruined back alleys where a fox would stalk and roam, but she can’t. To her left, something shifts in a pile of electronic litter that has tumbled off a junk mountain. A long electronic feeler reaches out toward her. Mara stifles a scream and tries to leap, but she’s forgotten how—forgotten the cryptic symbols that used to give her such effortless speed and power. The feeler hovers above her head, sparking venomous decay.