“The first of the New World sky cities was just built. New Mungo was the prototype—Cal insisted the very first was to be built upon his home city. People were now living as far inland as they could, or up on the highest parts of the old city, crammed together in the tower blocks and hills, on rooftops, anywhere they could find refuge from the rising sea. We had watched in amazement as the huge towers and all the sky tunnels were built at impossible speed, high above our heads. They were so strange, terrifying… and wonderful. Everyone felt full of hope then—we were all going to be saved. By now, Cal was no longer my Cal. He had become a very powerful young man—the one who owned the idea of the New World. His idea had spread as quickly as the oceans had risen. All over the planet, governments tried to reclaim the confidence of the people by building their own sky cities as quickly as possible. Then…”
Candleriggs’s voice falters but she pulls herself together and continues. “Then everything changed—Cal too. I was already in New Mungo with him. Our families and friends were due to move up any day when the one thing that everyone said could never happen, did. A massive sea surge hit Europe. The whole continent was wiped out.”
There is a long pause. Candleriggs stares into the fire.
“I always knew in my heart that the New World cities couldn’t house all the Earth’s refugees, but instead of trying to rescue everyone we could and cramming in every last person we could manage, instead of speeding up the building program to make more cities as quickly as possible and providing some form of shelter and protection for the ones we couldn’t house—boats and food and water supplies at the very least for the mass of poor souls who had made rafts and floating shelters out of whatever they could salvage from the floods—instead of that, the New World barred its doors. The great wall that I thought was built to protect the city from the sea became a fortress to keep refugees out.
“Now the New World was to be only for what it judged to be the best of human beings: the most brilliant minds, the most technically skilled. An intelligence test was set for entry and only those whose scores were high were allowed in. Everyone else was regarded as an alien, an outcast—even family and friends. Cal said we couldn’t make different rules for ourselves, but I was sure he had his parents and young sister hidden away somewhere in the city. He would never have abandoned them,” Candleriggs declares bitterly.
“Now, instead of reaching a hand outward to help the survivors of the floods, all the imagination and energy of the citizens of the New World turned inward. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I challenged Cal and we argued furiously about it. I could see he knew I was right, but he was too caught up in his New World dream to surrender it. He pleaded with me to forget those we couldn’t help—there were far too many to even attempt to help, he said, and if we tried to take them in, the New World wouldn’t be able to cope. The new cities would be overwhelmed, the system would collapse, and we would all perish. It was best to put the rest of the world out of our minds, be thankful for what we had salvaged for ourselves, and live for the future—a future that was to be lived high in the sky in a world peopled by the most brilliant of human beings.”
The old woman wrings her hands in misery.
“But I couldn’t share that dream. So I became a rebel. There were others like me—not many but some, who couldn’t forget the rest of the world either. We formed a revolutionary group and tried to speak out for the rest of the world, for the abandoned ones. But most people refused to listen. They were too grateful to be saved from the drowning and too scared to join us in case they were thrown out, back into the nightmare of the world outside. I thought they were evil then, but now… now I think there were many people who were good at heart, who cared about the refugees, but it was fear for their own future that made them selfish and cruel. Maybe if we had had more time to argue our cause, if we had been less hotheaded and rash and had spoken calmly to people about their fears, maybe we could have convinced them that reaching out to help others needn’t devastate their own future… maybe then more people would have joined us and we would have spoken as the voice of the people. Then Caledon and the other city fathers would have had to act. But so few spoke out, it was easy to destroy us.”
Candleriggs pauses for a long moment, trembling with great emotion.
“What happened?” Mara whispers.
“They rounded us up. Cal came to me in my prison cell and begged me to break with the rebels. He still loved me, he said. We could still live happily ever after in his empire in the sky. All I had to do was forget the outside world. And I almost did,” Candleriggs whispers, “because I loved him so much. I wanted to be with him. And I was so frightened. But then I saw that what I loved was what he once was, not what he had become. He tried to say that it was all out of his hands, that he didn’t have the kind of power I thought he had, that others were in control of the New World, not him. He had convinced himself that there was nothing he could do. But the truth was that his dream of the New World consumed him—he couldn’t see beyond it, didn’t want to.”
Candleriggs holds her head in her hands, as if the memory of what happened is too awful to contain.
“I told him I hated him. He looked as if I had stabbed him in the heart. But my hate was all mixed up with love. I felt there was a savage war raging inside me. I was thrown out of New Mungo with the rest of the rebels. Cal saved us from being shot, at least. Instead we were flung outside to drown, but we survived and made our world here among the trees and ruins of the lost world.”
She stares blankly into the darkness.
“At first I thought I would die of a broken heart. I wanted to die. There was nothing to live for. My family and friends were all gone and there was no one and nothing on Earth that meant anything to me anymore. But when we settled ourselves among the trees and found a way to survive, we looked around at what was left of the world and began to see the signs set in the stone of the old city. They were everywhere. They gave us a story to live by and believe in. We took the names of the old city so that it wouldn’t be forgotten, and the stone-telling became our faith and hope. It was all we had.”
Tears are streaming down Mara’s face. Many of the Treenesters are quietly sobbing. Broomielaw reaches out to hug Candleriggs but the old woman shrugs her off, as if there’s nothing in the world that can take away the pain of what she has lived through.
“Cal, my wonderful dreamer—what happened to you?” murmurs Candleriggs. Her head droops and her eyes are suddenly leaden and lost.
“Time to nest now,” Molendinar tells her gently.
The old woman murmurs Cal’s name again as Ibrox and Molendinar help her to her feet. Then she turns and there’s something in her face now that lets Mara see the fiery young girl this old woman must once have been.
“I broke his heart though! When I refused to stay in his selfish New World his stone heart broke in pieces!” Candleriggs declares. “I know it did because when he said good-bye a splinter flew from his heart and pierced my own. And it’s still there. I still feel it.”
As she goes away to nest, her hand clutches at the place where the stony splinter is stuck in her still-sore heart.
LONGHOPE
Deep in the still center of the night, when even the bats and owls fall quiet, Mara shakes Broomielaw awake in her nest.
“What is it?” Broomielaw panics.
“Come with me to the cathedral,” Mara pleads urgently.
“Now? In the dark? Be calm now, Mara, it’s nest time.”
“It’s important, Broomielaw. I have to.”
Broomielaw sighs but she rises and climbs down from her nest. “Wait,” she says. “I must get Molendinar to nest with Clayslaps till I come back.”
While she does so, Mara takes a moth lantern from under its bat-proof covering in the nook of a tree trunk. Then they take a raft and set off across the water to the cathedral island.
“What are we doing?” asks Broomielaw.
“There’s something I need to do
if I’m to get Gorbals and Wing back,” Mara replies.
“Oh, Mara,” wails Broomielaw, and she bursts out crying again. “We’ll never get Gorbals back, or Wing. No one ever returns once they are taken. They’re lost forever. Forever!”
Mara hushes her. Then, to calm Broomielaw, she begins to tell her how the crack in Thenew’s stone face matches her own scar and is also uncannily repeated in the crack in her grandmother’s mirror, which reflects as a scar upon her face. All three scars occur on the same side, the left cheek.
“It’s strange, Broomielaw. It’s a small thing but it’s so odd,” she finishes. “I really don’t know what to think. I can’t believe I’m the Face in the Stone because I’m just me—Mara. Yet I’m determined to find a way to save us all. It’s got nothing to do with the signs in the stone, though, it’s just what I feel I must do. It’s the only way I can live with myself. And part of what I must do is try to find Gorbals and Wing, because I owe it to them. There are other things I’ll explain later, to all of you.”
Broomielaw jumps off the raft to bring them into shore.
“The scars are to do with the stone-telling,” she says simply. “I’m sure of it. And you think there’s something in the cathedral that will help you?”
“Yes,” says Mara.
They enter the dark, empty cathedral. The mothlight shows the dark shadow of blood spilled in many places among the ash on the stone floor.
“What should we look for?” asks Broomielaw nervously.
“A girl,” says Mara. “One of the sky people. She’s been left behind. The other sea police can’t have seen her—she’s behind one of the tombs.”
Broomielaw looks terrified.
“She’s dead,” Mara reassures her. “It’s her clothes I need.”
They step carefully around the small, crumpled bodies that lie among the vast stone pillars. Broomielaw lets out a hard, dry sob, and Mara watches her bend over a tiny urchin and close the child’s eyes.
“You’re right, Mara. They’re only children, and what’s been done to them is a horror beyond words.” Broomielaw turns away, stricken. Then she stoops to pick up something from the ground. She holds up the mothlight to let Mara see. “Look! Isn’t this Wing’s?”
Mara cries out in surprise. It’s the bone-handled dagger that Wing looted from the museum halls of the university. Gratefully, she takes the weapon. The ancient bone handle feels sound and sure in her grip. Its stone blade is cold and crude. Yet it could still, after thousands of years, rupture human flesh. It could still kill.
“This way,” says Mara, moving carefully through the bodies to the back of the cathedral.
“It’s a sign,” says Broomielaw, “a good sign, finding that.”
“I hope so,” whispers Mara. But there’s no sign of Wing. Yet somehow, with his dagger in her hand, she feels stronger, more certain of what she is about to do.
“She’s here,” says Mara quietly, reaching the body of the girl who has fallen so awkwardly behind a tomb.
“She’s been shot?” puzzles Broomielaw. The mothlight reveals a small, dark bullet hole in the girl’s forehead. A pool of blood makes an angry red halo around her head.
“They shot one of their own by mistake,” Mara nods, but she can’t take any pleasure from that fact.
“You want her clothes?” says Broomielaw.
Mara nods again and together, gently and silently, they undress the body from its waterproof orange uniform, taking the soft, sleek clothing beneath that and the light, tough shoes. When they’ve finished, Mara covers the young woman in a moss quilt she has brought with her.
“We must bury her,” says Broomielaw. “We must bury all of them. But we can’t do it ourselves. We’ll come back with the others and do it at first light.”
Mara turns away from the girl’s body, overcome by the sweet, thick smell of death all around her. She feels sick to her soul, wants out of this awful place, needs fresh air, now. Mara grabs the policewoman’s bundle of clothes and runs for the door—but in her hurry to escape, she trips over the leg of a dead urchin. Horrified, she steadies herself against the thick trunk of a pillar. The cold stone calms and soothes her body. She leans her hot cheek against it for a second. And finds herself face-to-face with the word REMEMBER, cut thick and deep into the stone.
Behind her, Broomielaw’s moth lantern flutters just enough light to illuminate the rest of the inscription on the pillar.
Read the story of the past
Ponder its lessons—
And think not to leave
Without lifting up your heart.
Though Mara does not believe in signs set in stone, she can’t help but shiver at the uncanny aptness of ancient words that seem to know what she has already decided to do.
Mara is packing her world into her small backpack.
The book on Greenland and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Wing’s bone-handled dagger, the tiny black meteorite, and the young policewoman’s wallet, inside which she found several small, shimmering, wafer-thin disks, all go into her bag.
In the bathtub up in the ruins at the top of the Hill of Doves, she has scrubbed herself clean of netherworld grime, brushed her teeth with applemint leaves, smoothed the tangles from her hair with a brittle twig brush until it gleams like dark water. Now, back down among the trees, she checks her reflection in the cracked mirror of Tain’s little carved box before putting that back in her bag. She can’t help staring at the crack in the glass that runs parallel to the fading scar across her face.
Last of all, she checks out her cyberwizz.
The Treenesters whisper nervously and huddle together when they see it. Pollock has told the others all about the magic machine that he spied in Mara’s bag. Mara takes out the globe, the silver halo, and her tiny cyberwand. She holds the globe snug in her palm and feels it come alive at her touch. The Treenesters gasp as colors swirl and shadow across the globe’s surface, and Mara feels a rush of emotion for that old, safe existence when the most difficult thing she had to face was a close shave with a Weave demon.
She has recharged the cyberwizz with whatever rays of netherworld sun she could catch, but she’d better double check. A sudden, wicked idea strikes her. She bends her head over the globe to hide her grin and scribbles a quick cyberspell upon its electronic pad. Then she slips the silver halo over Pollock’s eyes.
“Hunt that,” she tells him.
He looks at Mara in puzzled wonder for a moment, then his eyes focus on some vision that only he can see and his expression changes to horror. He screams, loud and long, rips off the halo, and hurls it at Mara.
“Monsters!” he yells and runs off into the bushes.
“Monsters?” Gingerly, Broomielaw puts on the silver halo and immediately yelps with terror and turns to run for safety. Mara catches her and pulls off the halo.
“M-monsters,” the girl repeats dazedly.
“Not real ones,” says Mara apologetically. “It’s a kind of picture story.”
Pollock’s eyes stare out in horror from the bushes. The other Treenesters have all backed off.
“A m-monster nearly ate me,” they can hear him sob.
“It’s gone now, Pollock,” Mara tells him bluntly. “Broomielaw scared it away.”
She picks up the young policewoman’s clothes and shoes and goes behind a tree to change. Broomielaw has meticulously scrubbed the blood from the orange uniform where the girl’s head wound stained it. Mara pulls off her own clothes and her leaky, sodden terrainers. The uniform fits well but the girl’s shoes are too tight. Still, they’ll have to do. Her old terrainers would give her away instantly. But her nylon backpack, well-scrubbed, should pass. Its material is not dissimilar to the policewoman’s uniform.
“Candleriggs wants to know what you are doing, Mara,” says Molendinar, from the other side of the tree.
“What I have to do,” Mara replies.
“No, Mara, no,” Broomielaw cries. “This is not the stone-telling.”
&nbs
p; “How do you know?” says Mara as she emerges, all neat and clean, dressed in the luminous orange uniform of New Mungo’s sea police. The Treenesters stare.
“You look so strange,” Broomielaw shakes her head ominously, her huge eyes brimming with dread. “Not our Mara. Like one of them.”
“Good,” says Mara. “That’s exactly how I need to look because I’m going up to the New World.” The Treenesters erupt in horror. Mara holds up her hand to quiet them.
“I’ve made up my mind. Listen! I’m going to try to get Gorbals and Wing back. And we need ships. Remember I told you about the Athapaskans—well, just before he was taken Gorbals found a book in the university that convinced me there is land in the north, in a place called Greenland—a huge land that was covered in ice until the meltdown that flooded the oceans. It has lots of high land, and it must be free from ice now. It’s the kind of place we could build a new life, but to get there we need a ship—more than one, because we must rescue the people from the boat camp outside the walls. So I need to go up to the sky city to find a way to get access to those ships. We can’t do it from down here.”
“It’s too dangerous!” Broomielaw protests.
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