Firespark

by Julie Bertagna

  The bridgers know about Tuck’s looting. It’s a shameful throwback to that pirate past. They’ve rescued him from the city’s prison barge more than once. The bridgers know he’s broken the bond with his da’s trade, yet he’s still the son of a bridger—and not just any old bridger; one of the best bridge masters Pomperoy’s ever known.

  After a while, Tuck can’t take much more of the bridger women’s fussing. He’s too used to Ma’s nagging. He even misses it. Misses her, he suddenly knows, with a horrible lurch inside. Tuck throws off the fuggy warmth of the quilt. He needs to get out, needs space, but there’s nowhere to go except the deck and that’ll mean work on the masts. He flumps back under the quilt and escapes into his head, imagines himself leaping and racing through Pomperoy until he reaches the calm black glass of the lagoon and falls asleep at last.

  When Tuck wakes, he realizes he’s slept away the day and maybe even most of the night. All around him, bridgers are bunked down. The smell of leftover fish soup and the sound of snoring fill the air. It’s so cold his breath makes white puffs like the bridger granny’s pipe.

  Tuck tugs his windwrap tight around him and tiptoes between the bunks, pushing through cold strands of sea tangle drying on a line of rope. He’s creaking open the door that leads up on deck when a gleam catches his eye. It’s a little silver box in one of the overflowing baskets of sea spoil. He hasn’t a clue what it is, but a looter’s force of habit makes him grab it.

  Outside, the wind is brittle with shavings of ice. The bridgers on deck are yelling about something and they don’t see him; they’re focused on the ocean. Tuck slips under the shadows of the masts and wonders where he can hide. He climbs onto the upper deck and stows himself in one of the lifeboats, burrowing down between piles of nets and ropes.

  The little silver box he’s looted gleams like pearly fish-skin or a slab of moonshine on sea. Tuck turns it over in his hand, trying to prize it open, fiddling with buttons, but the bitter cold makes his fingers clumsy and numb. A tiny window blinks open at the top of the box and Tuck blinks back in surprise. He puts his eye to the window to see what’s inside, and yelps.

  Inside the box is the world outside.

  Tuck takes his eye from the window and looks out at the night. With his own weak eyes the moon is a blurred silver fishhook above a herring-skin sea. A sea that wraps the boats of Pomperoy in clinging mist. At the eastern edge of the sky, day nibbles at the horizon. Tuck puts his eye back to the little window—and there’s the fishhook moon, sharp as the curved blade of a cutlass, and there’s the nibbling dawn, he can see every streak and ribbon of it, clear as day. All inside the box!

  Tuck studies the world with his new, sharp eyebox and spots a strange, ghostly rock trailing clouds of mist. A strange, sharp scent carries on the sea wind.

  Iceberg!

  The shout echoes across the boats and brings the other bridgers running up on deck. Tuck sits where he is and keeps the little eyebox pointed at the iceberg, trapping it safe inside. His trembling fingers touch a small button. There’s a buzz and a long nose shoots out of the box. Tuck jumps and stares at it, puts his eye back to the window, and yelps again—now the iceberg is so close he could reach out and touch it.

  He tries to trick the little silver box. He points it up at the masts, at the moon, pressing the button that shoots the nose in and out, but each time the box catches whatever he points at, zooming it large, shrinking it small. Tuck is about to smash the box on the side of the lifeboat, to crack it open like a shell to see what’s really inside, when it catches a darkness beyond the icebergs. He focuses the box on the jagged crust of darkness that, he now sees, lies all along the northern horizon. A glint of daylight touches it and now the very tips of the darkness look like a shoal of silver fish heads nosing out of the sea, baited by the bright hook of the moon. Tuck presses the button that shoots out the box’s funnel-nose and the shoal of glinting fish heads zooms up large.

  Every nerve in his body is ajangle as the little silver box shows that the silver-tipped shadow is not a shoal of fish heads, neither is it a leftover crust of night.

  It’s Land.

  He just knows it is by the trembling that runs up his legs.

  He can hardly believe his eyebox.

  For the first time in his life, Tuck is looking at Land.

  THE STONES SPEAK

  The great wave of land rumbles with thunder.

  Yet all across the northern horizon the ragged peaks rip into clear blue sky. Sunlight lashes off mountainsides that look like crushed metal.

  Mara is so fogged with exhaustion she feels unreal. Her body is a dense and dragging weight, as if it’s no longer part of herself. Every now and then panic spikes her fogginess and spooks her with the thought that Merien could be wrong—that what seems to be a vast mountain range really is a wall of water. She scans the glinting peaks but the telescope assures her that it’s mountain rock all right; but even the telescope can’t fathom the source of the strange, invisible thunder.

  All day, as the ship moves closer to the coast, the thunder roar grows. At last the telescope reveals what it is. The mountains are punctured with waterfalls. Chutes and cascades of water pelt down, thumping off ledges and rocks, crashing down with so much force that the air froths and fizzles with rainbows and the sea along the coastline churns with whirlpools.

  “Like a worm-eaten apple,” says Merien, wonderingly. “Worms made of ice.”

  Mara looks close, sees what she means.

  Over aeons of time, the ice must have bored tunnels through the rock like worms into an apple. Now melted, the immense ice cap that was once cupped by the mountains pours through the punctured peaks.

  Greenland is not green at all. It’s a land of silver mountains and thunder-water. There is still ice at the top of the world, but only a little, Mara supposes, of what there was once. Ice frosts the mountain peaks. The sea is sludgy with icy floes and the North Wind carries tiny, sharp ice splinters. The coastal whirlpools fling out a skin-stinging froth of salt and ice and legions of dwarf icebergs emerge from endless chasms that cut deep into the land.

  Every drop of water on the ship has been guzzled. Throats are parched and sore and all they have, now that the rain clouds have cleared, is the salty ice they catch on their tongues from the biting wind.

  But we have found land.

  Mara gazes at the endless shining peaks. Greenland seems to stretch ever onward, as far as she can see.

  Pollock spots something with his hunter’s eyes.

  “What’s that?”

  He points warily. Mara looks up. High on a mountainside, a strange figure seems to want to catch the rays of the rising sun. It’s too enormous and still to be human, yet there’s something heart-rending in the way its open arms reach out to an empty world.

  Only once Mara fixes the telescope on it does she see what it is.

  “It’s a stone man. Big as a giant.”

  She lowers the telescope and passes it to Pollock, but he shakes his head. He’ll use his own good eyes. Pollock frowns up at the stone welcome, suspicious of anything that hasn’t been examined by his own hand.

  The telescope is passed around the ship.

  “It’s probably an ancient thing,” says Rowan, once he has studied the stone creature for a long moment. Mara knows he’s thinking of the circle of standing stones on their island, remnants of another world lost in distant time.

  “He points that way,” says Gorbals, staring uneasily at the stone giant.

  “Northeast.” Rowan nods.

  Mara says nothing. Following signs in the ether and messages set in stone has brought them all here, for good or ill, to the ends of the Earth.

  “There’s another one!”

  Possil points to the next mountain. True enough, perched precariously high on a stab of rock, outlined against the sky, is another stone man.

  Even without the telescope, Mara can see this one is different. There is no open-armed welcome. This one—she grabs the telescope
in ice-pained hands and peers through—this one has an arm raised, pointing along the coast of the land.

  Mara lowers the telescope and looks at the people she trusts. Rowan, Broomielaw, Molendinar, Gorbals—and she searches beyond them until she finds Merien.

  “What do you think?”

  “It seems to be pointing the way,” Merien murmurs.

  Mara thinks of all the times she has made the wrong choice. All she can do is try to read whatever signs she finds in the world but it’s often hard to know what things mean.

  “Go the other way,” says Pollock.

  “The other—”

  “Why?” asks Merien.

  “Why does it want us to go that way?” Pollock squints up at the stone creature. “What does it mean? It could be a trap.”

  Gorbals looks scornful but Mara can’t help smiling. “Pollock, you think the whole world’s a hunter’s trap.”

  Pollock raises an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”

  “It means we’re not alone. People are here,” says Molendinar.

  “Or have been,” adds Rowan.

  Mara nods. “If there are people and they wanted us to go away, wouldn’t they use something more threatening?”

  “Not if they’re trappers,” says Pollock. “A trap’s a trick.”

  He looks at Mara and the others as if they are fools.

  “Oh, Pollock.” Broomielaw raises her eyes skyward. “Why would someone want to trap us? They don’t even know we’re here.”

  “We’re a ship. Maybe we’re the catch they’re waiting for.”

  “We’re a great big ship, so what could anyone do to us?”

  Pollock stares hard at the stone man, trying to divine his purpose, but he can’t.

  “It—it’s a message left in the stones,” Gorbals cries. “Of course it is! Look at it. This must be part of our stone-telling legend. A part we didn’t know.”

  Mara could kick him. The Treenesters’ owl eyes settle on her with an expectant, trusting stare that makes her want to run and hide.

  “It’s another sign,” Gorbals rushes on, “like the stories our ancestors left in the city stones about Mara saving us and—”

  “There was no sign,” Mara cuts in. “It was just a statue.”

  She doesn’t need to look at Ruby; she can feel her sneer. But others, who were listening in to Gorbals’s storytelling the previous night, look curious.

  “We’ll vote on it,” says Mara briskly, eager to divert attention from herself.

  ‘“There’s another one! Two!” someone yells.

  Another stone man is pointing resolutely east. On the next mountain a stone friend gives an open-armed welcome.

  That seems to settle things. The overwhelming vote is with the stones.

  Pollock watches the land, a deep scowl on his face.

  WRECKERS

  A sickle moon hangs like a lopsided smile. Its thin, sharp light casts a cold armor over the stone giants that have been the ship’s guides all day. Even when night closed in, even now, as a patch of fog swallows up the ship and the rest of the world vanishes, the refugees refuse to lose heart. The stone giants are rock-solid messages of hope.

  Only Pollock, headstrong as ever, refuses to trust the signs set in stone.

  The snow geese and the narwhals led the way, Mara tries to reassure him, and now the stones.

  “Animals can’t lie,” says Pollock, “but men can.”

  “Even stone men?” Mara teases. She makes a funny face at baby Clayslaps, who is trying to wriggle out of Pollock’s arms.

  “Who made the stone men?” is Pollock’s gruff reply. He frowns. “Why is the thunder suddenly far away?”

  Clayslaps gives a gull-like shriek and kicks his legs. The child points excitedly at something.

  “Lights!” cries Broomielaw.

  Mara gasps. They have burst through the thick fog as fast as they entered it. Rising out of the sea right in front is a heap of twinkling lights.

  “Slow down!” she yells at Rowan in the control cabin. “We’re going to crash.”

  There’s a great pull and the ship heaves and shudders as Rowan cuts speed. Broomielaw grabs baby Clayslaps from his father’s arms.

  The lights of what must be a village blaze out of the dark. The thin moon makes it hard to see whether there is a harbor.

  “There!” Ibrox the firekeeper has tracked the patterns of light and points to a line of blazing torches that reaches out into the sea and ends in a wide curve.

  Mara races into the control cabin. “Keep slow but steer to the harbor lights,” she tells Rowan.

  His forehead is damp with sweat and his hands grip the steering wheel. His eyes are fixed on a screen full of tumbling numbers. “Still way too fast,” he grunts.

  “No, steer away!” Pollock bursts in. He stares at the ship’s controls, looking frantic. “This is wrong. There’s no harbor. The stone men, the lights—”

  “Pollock, don’t be a dolt—”

  “We’re in a trap. I’m a hunter, I set traps, I know—” Pollock yells.

  The ship gives a huge jolt that sends them all crashing against the cabin wall. There’s a metallic screech and groan, a horrible sound, and screaming from the deck.

  Mara struggles to her feet and peers out the cabin window. The harbor lights are all gone.

  What happened? Where are they?

  She rushes into the uproar on deck and stares out at black sea. A moment ago there was a clear line of lights. Now there is only dark.

  A horrendous banging erupts, deep in the ship’s bowels.

  “Rocks!” Rowan yells. “We’ve hit rocks!”

  The world lurches. Mara is flung off her feet and is sent rolling across the deck. She crashes into the ship’s rail, tries to grab it, but it’s gone. There’s a long, dark moment of freezing wind, tumbling stars. The stars are falling, she thinks, bewildered, feeling them rush past her head as she plunges into blackness.

  The moment stretches. She can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t find her way out. Where are the stars, the ship, where’s the sea? She’s suffocating, alone, in freezing black space.

  Sea.

  It’s more instinct than thought, an instant knowing that electrifies her. This frozen blackness is sea. Mara thrashes around in terror. Which way, which way? The darkness is too deep; she can’t see where the surface is. Her head and lungs ache with the weight of the sea. The impulse to breathe is overpowering. She can’t resist, must, can’t. Thoughts tumble, fragments of consciousness scatter like smashed stars.

  Someone help me, I’m lost … Fox …

  Light, light … there …

  A light hangs in the darkness. Mara reaches for it, claws and kicks away the blackness that has begun to drag like a stone weight. The thin curve of light bobs out of reach, there are too many smashed stars inside her head, she’s too weighed down.

  Can’t see, must breathe …

  Air hits her lungs. She breaks through the surface, raking in painful, barbed breaths. A wave fills her mouth with sea and she’s choking. Saltwater stings her eyes. A sharp shadow that must be the ship’s hull juts into the froth of the stars. But there’s something wrong. It’s listing sideways, at a precarious angle. The ship is groaning like a dying iceberg.

  Mara’s stunned mind clicks into gear. The lights went out. The ship hit the rocks. It has capsized, it’s sinking. And she is close to freezing in this icy sea.

  Keep moving. Swim to the rocks, find a rock.

  Lights flash in front of her. Someone shouts. Mara looks up and sees a lantern on a long stick looming out of the dark.

  A loop of rope dangles from the lantern stick. Mara lunges for it but her freezing fingers cannot grip. She forces her hand to make a claw, lunges again, feels the hot burn of rope in her hands, and is pulled into shore. Rocks rake her skin but pain is numbed by shock and cold. Mara lies where she’s been dragged onto a slab of rock.

  Unable to get up, she turns her head. The sickle moon hangs above the silhouette of an
open-armed stone giant like a glinting fishhook, or a sly smile.

  PEEKABOO MOON

  Fox rips up books and feeds them to the fire. The cold stone of the university tower has seeped into his bones and he can’t sleep. Every time he shuts his eyes he sees Mara trapped in the arms of the wind, separated from him by a wall of sea.

  She didn’t make it to the bridge again tonight. Is she safe? Fox puts on his godgem once more and zips into the Weave, but the electronic boulevards zing with loneliness. The Bridge to Nowhere is empty, the ether undisturbed.

  Realworld zings with emptiness too. Unseen presences of bats, cats, and rats haunt the tower. The ghoulish screams of owls echo across the netherworld sea. The only signs of life are the white cargo ships that slip through the gate in the great wall. In their wake comes a blast of sea-police sirens and a tide of rank sewage from the boat camp outside the wall.

  Fox’s only company is the fire and the luminous moon-moths in the twig lantern. Candleriggs is fast asleep. The old woman sleeps a lot; she’s missing her Treenester people badly. Awake, she dedicates all her dwindling energy to teaching Fox survival skills, as if she’s thinking the same as he is: that she is increasingly frail and winter is on its way.

  There’s a lot to learn. Weather is a shock after the sky city’s mellow air. In summer, says Candleriggs, the netherworld bakes under the metal grill of New Mungo but winter is cold and stormy and they need to prepare. Now Fox knows how to make fire, where to find food and fresh water. It takes so much time and effort to survive, he’s often too exhausted to make any progress in the Noos. No wonder his battle with the New World has stalled.

  Yet tonight, when he can’t sleep and could be working, he wanders the tower room, wondering what’s happened to Mara and restlessly flicking through books before feeding them to the hungry fire.

  A page flutters onto his lap. In the instant before he tosses it into the flames, some words catch his eye.

  I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.