Firespark

by Julie Bertagna

  PIRATE AGAIN

  Night fled in a panic when dawn revealed what was burrowed in the dark. A drumbeat sneaks behind the march of the ocean. Hidden in fog and helped by the tide, the terror creeps up the winding channel of the great fjord.

  The people of Ilira are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, shocking themselves awake with the icy spray of the waterfalls, grabbing new-laid eggs from the mountain ledges, roping down the rockways to the market where scutpakers sell shipwreck booty and branded slaves.

  A faded red skysail punctures the fog.

  Ilira is entranced by the playful red dash that billows above the fjord. Sails begin to bloom all across the sky. A motley patchwork of masts bursts from the fog like a tattered army of spears. The Steer Master’s horn bellows and the sneaky drumbeat rouses into a gypsea storm.

  If the wall of mountains behind Ilira cracked open to reveal a flaming dragon, the shock would be just as deep.

  The armada of boats erupts from the fog with a petrifying roar as Pomperoy turns pirate again.

  THE STAIRWAY AND THE BLUE WISP

  Mara doesn’t dare stop. She stumbles up a steep, narrow rockway until it turns into rough steps. The stone stairway might have been hacked out of the mountain by eons of grinding ice or human hands, she can’t tell, but it climbs so high she can’t see where it ends because the rockway disappears into a shelf of fog. Soaked by spray from waterfalls that hiss and thunder from crevices all across the mountain, Mara prays she doesn’t lose her footing on the drenched rock. If she does—she looks behind her to the base of the mountain where the waterfalls smash into fizzling rainbows—she’ll crash all the way back down.

  She had one second to escape the gun pointed at her head, a moment when the world around her erupted and the cold metal of the gun barrel trembled then lifted from her forehead. She took her chance and raced across the rocky beach, faster than wind, until she found herself at the bottom of the mountain in a maze of rockways that brought her to the mountain steps.

  A hundred more slithering steps take her underneath a massive waterfall that drenches her in icy spray. Here, the rock is so lethal with iced slime she hardly dares move. Then she sees the rope. She’s been so intent on keeping her footing that she hasn’t seen the thick rope stapled as a handrail into the mountainside. Mara grabs it, glancing behind her for the umpteenth time, but still there is no one on her tail.

  Up through yet another waterfall, the stepped rockway splits. She can either climb up into the fog clouds or take the descending way. Upward is cold and terrifyingly blank, so she takes the way down, though these steps are so steep and twisting her head spins and the world reels. Mara grips the mountain rope so tightly her freezing hands burn.

  The steps wind down around a knuckle of mountain and Mara finds herself on a wide ledge in the middle of a crowd. A shrieking woman yanks on ropes knotted like harnesses around the squat, fur-wrapped bundles of two small children. Mara stares at the doors set haphazardly across the cave-pitted face of the mountain. Car doors. There was such excitement on those rare occasions when one washed up on Wing. Mara remembers the scramble to claim such scarce scrap metal.

  The car doors are bashed and ill-fitting for the uneven cave mouths. The scraped, motley colors couldn’t look more out of place. Yet somehow they give the bleak mountain face the homely look of a village. As the shrieking mother drags her children inside, Mara glimpses a cavernous darkness made snug with candles, furs, and skins, and feels a jolt of wanting. She wipes a stream of water from her drenched face and tries to catch her breath. The crowd of weathered-looking people stare out to the ocean.

  Mara sees the stricken faces. She follows their eyes.

  A vast tide of boats fills the fjord.

  What she thought was the roar of the mountain waterfalls was only partly that; the rest is the battle roar of an invading fleet.

  All the way up the mountain, escape was Mara’s only thought. She grabbed the chance to save her backpack, and her life. Only now, as she watches the horror erupting in the bay below, does she remember what she’s left behind: her friends, abandoned on the shore.

  Slamming erupts all around her. The mountain vibrates with the metallic percussion of car doors. People armed with guns and spears are racing out of the caves and hurling themselves down the rockways, harnessed to ropes. Others drag their children inside.

  Which way? Which way? Should she escape farther up the mountain to who knows where, stay here, or join the people rushing down to the battle on the shore?

  The snake burned into her arm throbs, reminding her that this race of people had her bound and branded as a slave. Escape is the only sensible thing to do. But her friends are down there on the shore.

  A firebomb catapults from a ship and explodes in one of the boats on the bay, scattering blazing debris onto the shore. Gripping the rope rail, Mara begins to run down the mountain steps, as fast as the slippery rock allows. She reaches a lower ledge crowded with stone igloos. Mara uses the wall of an igloo to brace herself against the icechipped hurl of the wind. She looks down the mountain, trying to figure out what’s happening, trying to see which way to go.

  Ma-ra-ra-ra …

  She scans the mountain. Are her ears playing tricks? Is it the shriek of the wind in the rockways or is someone really calling her name? It’s hard to tell amid the uproar in the bay. A stone cracks against the mighty slab of granite that forms the ledge and bounces close to her foot. Mara picks it up. She peers at the ground below.

  A mass of people are rushing onto the firebombed shore. Smoke and flames now fill the fjord. Mountain people have taken cover behind rocks to return fire at their attackers, but the invading fleet is out of reach of short-range guns and spears. Firebombs are devastating the anchored boats in the bay while the counterfire of the mountain people lands in the sea.

  Ma-ra-ra-ra …

  Her name, again, she’s sure. Another stone cracks against the rocky ledge. Mara scans the mountain slopes and the shore below her. Where are they? Where? Far below, a cluster of people are out on the open shore. Mara thinks she sees Rowan’s dark blond head, Mol’s stream of hair whipped up in the wind, the ragged scarecrow that is Gorbals. The wind clears a gap in the smoke and now she’s sure it’s them—there’s Pollock, wiry and dark-headed, his arm raised to throw another stone. Mara waves frantically, then screams as she sees what they can’t because they’re looking up at her: a firebomb flying across the bay toward them.

  Mara shuts her eyes as the firebomb explodes. When she opens them, her friends have been thrown to the ground but a large rock seems to have sheltered them from the worst of the blast. One of them—in the confusion she’s not sure who—staggers up and begins racing to the sea, flames streaming from his arm. A spark from the firebomb has caught the raggedy plastic clothing that hangs in tatters from the sealskin coat. The figure trips over a rock and crashes into the sea.

  Gorbals.

  He flails about in the water. The others try to reach him but a hail of gunfire from the shore halts them in their tracks. Gorbals is struggling against the waves but the others can’t make it through a line of gunfire, and there’s nothing Mara can do. She is about to look away, unable to watch, when her eye is caught by a blue wisp, racing toward Gorbals. The wind whips the tail of the blue wisp high into the air. Mara screws up her eyes. What in the world is that?

  The telescope.

  Does she still have it? Mara rips open her sodden backpack, rummages, and it’s there. She grabs a thick handful of her hair and scrubs the lens clean, then leans as far as she can over the rocky ledge and focuses the telescope with shaking hands.

  The blue wisp is a boy or a man in a garment that’s wound around his head and body and flutters into a long, wind-frittered tail. He runs into the sea, unwinding his garment, and flings its long tail into the waves. Gorbals disappears under a wave, but when he resurfaces the blue tail is thrown once again. He grabs it and the wisp, now soaked to a deep blue, hauls him out of the sea.
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  They disappear in the smoke of the firebombs. When the wind shifts the smoke there’s no sign of them, only the shell of an overturned boat.

  Mara looks all across the shore to the spot where she last saw the others. They’re gone too.

  She scans the whole of the eastern shore, the rocks and the foot of the mountain. Where are they? Shoving the telescope in the pocket of her sealskin coat, she hurries down the mountain steps, toward the battle that rages in the bay.

  EARTHED

  Tuck lifts up the edge of the upturned gondola and peeps out.

  The gondola is the only thing protecting him and the half-drowned ragbag he’s just rescued. Not that a wooden gondola will be any good if it takes a direct hit from a firebomb. Behind those car doors in the mountain, that’s the place to be.

  But Tuck can’t make his legs move toward the mountain even though he knows that he’ll be safe there. Pomperoy will loot and steal every boat it can, and burn and sink every one it can’t. What a true gypsea will never do is set foot on Land.

  But the Landers don’t know that.

  Up close and underfoot, Land has turned out to be such an overwhelming thing that Tuck only dares look at it in glimpses from under cover of the boat. When he and the gondola crashed onto the shore, he tried to get up and staggered so much he fell over, his head swimming as if he’d been glugging seagrape beer all night.

  Only the gangly man-boy rushing into the sea, his arm afire, brought Tuck back to his senses. He didn’t mean to rescue anyone, it’s not his kind of thing at all, but someone screaming and drowning right in front of him made him think of Ma in her last moments on The Grimby Gray. Almost without thinking, Tuck found himself in the ocean, yanking the drowning ragbag back onto shore and under the shelter of the upturned gondola.

  All around him Land rises up in mountainous waves that seem to surge and swell, threatening to break like gigantic sea rollers upon his head. Tuck knows the Land is not moving and neither is he, for the first time ever in his life. What if his gypsea heart is so wired to the beat of the ocean he’s not meant to be still? What if the sea-swell in his head never settles and calms? What if he’s stuck forever here on Earth but never finds his Land legs?

  Ocean is a moving, live thing, but Earth’s so still and solid it doesn’t seem right. Maybe it’s dead. What if that’s why the Land sunk down into the sea—because it died? Tuck picks up a pebble and feels the deathly cold of the stone, with no beat of life in it at all.

  “Th-thank you.”

  The scraggy one sprawled on the ground beside him grabs Tuck’s hand and, though his grasp is almost as cold as the stone, Tuck is grateful for the touch of another moving, live thing. He finds a strand of wet seaweed and wraps it around the boy’s burned hand.

  “My name’s Gorbals.” The ragbag winces.

  “I’m Tuck,” says Tuck.

  A firebomb explodes nearby and a hard rain of stones falls upon the gondola.

  “Is that a place?”

  “Is what a place?”

  “Tuck.”

  Tuck narrows his eyes.

  “Oh, never mind.” Warily, Gorbals lifts the boat and points to the mountain with his good hand. “See, there’s a cave. I think that’s where my people are. If we make the boat our shell and run—”

  Tuck sees the crack of darkness at the foot of the mountain.

  His heart hammers.

  “Safer in there than out here,” says Gorbals. He rises to a half-crouch, balancing the boat over his head as if he’s a human snail. His burned arm makes him wince again.

  “Give a hand,” he urges.

  Tuck stands up on shaking legs. He should have ignored that impulse on the Waverley, when he felt the first roots of Earthiness stirring inside. Now look what’s happened to him.

  Instead of pirate, he’s turned Lander.

  The world reels and spins but he grips the gondola hard over his head and runs with the raggedy stranger across the rubbish-strewn shore like a fast, four-legged snail, toward the terrifying crack of darkness that will take him to a place he’s never imagined in his wildest gypsea dreams.

  The inside of Earth.

  THE FACE IN THE STONES

  Mara reaches ground at last and is hit by a pelt of hot stones as a firebomb explodes on the shore. All she can do is crouch and put her arms over her head, while the stones rain on her back. She stands up, shaken and bruised. Every large rock has been commandeered by the mountain people to launch their counterattack, so there is no shelter. She runs away from the battle toward the far end of the bay. The rockways down the mountain were so winding she’s lost her bearings. The overturned boat, her one landmark on the shore, has vanished, so she can only guess at the spot where she last saw the others.

  The sun is low, without the energy to rise any higher. It’s hard to tell what time it is. So much has happened it seems like an endless day. The smoke from the firebombs has cast its own gloom but Mara is sure daylight is beginning to fade. She must find the others before night falls. There’s a lull in the firebombs and Mara pauses, shivering in the icy wind. Winter comes early in the Far North. Her own island, Wing, only had a few hours of daylight in deep winter. Here, at the top of the world, the sun disappears below the horizon until spring. All too soon, they will plunge into a season of endless night.

  Mara looks up at all the cave doors, at the sheer steps and rockways of the precarious metropolis the people have made of the mountain. They’ve found a way to survive. But will we?

  It’s not the homeland she hoped for, this harsh, barren place.

  The war in the bay is ferocious again. We’ll be lucky, thinks Mara, to survive to the end of the day.

  Something trips her up and sends her sprawling onto the pebble shore. Mara curses and rubs her raw knee, then sees it’s not a rock or driftwood but a child crouched on the ground.

  “Wing!”

  He’s alive, if not safe. Wing smiles but squirms away from her frantic hug, more interested in the great heap of shiny pebbles he is piling up. A rabble of urchins comes running out of a fold in the mountain. Mara sees Hoy and opens her arms to hug him too, but like Wing he only throws a quick smile at her and rushes to add his armful of pebbles onto the growing pile.

  There’s a tug on her arm. It’s Scarwell, the urchin girl who once ripped Mara’s face in a fight. They gauge each other warily, then Scarwell breaks into a grin as she points to the lifesize apeman model, lying on the shore.

  Mara has to laugh. Somehow, Scarwell has stolen back her beloved apeman from the wreckers.

  Another explosion, followed by screams, reminds Mara that they are an easy target here in the open. Used to the siren squads of sea police in the drowned city, the urchins seem unperturbed by the noise of the battle in the bay.

  Mara grabs little Hoy and points toward the mountain. “We need to hide. Come with me, come on.”

  “Oy,” grunts Hoy, wriggling free. He puts his handful of colored pebbles on the heap.

  “Hoy, it’s dangerous—” Mara blinks as the sun flashes on the pile of pebbles. Bloodred, sea green, and sunset amber, the stones are gemlike, polished by ice and sea and time.

  Yet another explosion, far too close, rains a painful hail of stones on their heads.

  “Quick! Follow me.”

  She grabs Hoy again and stops. The whole world seems to stop as Mara sees a face in the stones.

  Wing is picking gems from the heap they’ve made, gently placing them upon the almost-buried face.

  Mara grabs hold of Wing. “What are you doing?”

  He looks up at her and smiles.

  Mara sinks to her knees and forces herself to claw the gems and pebbles off the ashen face. Then reels back in shock when she sees who it is, sees the garish splash of blood on the stones.

  Merien.

  Mara lets out a wail. She can’t speak. The urchins could not have done this, they couldn’t. These children are wild but surely they couldn’t kill …

  But she killed a man,
didn’t she?

  Wing crouches down beside her. He points a finger at the face and imitates the sound of a gunshot, then points back at the battle.

  Of course. It wasn’t the urchins. Abandoned here on the open shore, still bound by the wreckers’ ropes, Merien was trapped in the blast of the battle.

  Mara feels shamed. Merien was the urchins’ friend. How could she think they would harm her? But it’s hard to keep trust in anyone or anything anymore. The world has become so strange, everything so precarious, shifting, and unreal that it’s hard to gauge what anyone will do, including herself.

  When the gun was at her head, her only thought was to save herself and her cyberwizz. In that instant and in the fear rush that followed, she never gave a thought to her friends.

  Wing and Hoy begin to replace the stones that Mara has clawed off Merien’s face, pebble by pebble, gem by gem, chanting under their breath. Mara kneels down beside them and listens, wondering what it is these wordless children are saying. The rest of the urchins join in, all chanting together.

  They’re counting.

  Death, smoke, and fire fill the bay. The wind howls around them, full of ice. Still, the urchins keep counting, one, two, three, four, five, over and over, just as Merien taught them to on the ship. Except now they are burying her gently beneath the Earth’s beautiful stones.

  INSIDE EARTH

  The mountain has swallowed them whole.

  Tuck looks back at the cave mouth, at the gray sky and familiar roll of the ocean, and his legs twitch, eager to run him back to the world outside. Suddenly, he’d rather take his chances in the battle than face this terrifying darkness that is Earth.

  The cave walls lean too close; they bump against his shoulders and his head so that he has to walk bent and stooped as his old Grumpa. He seems to feel the pressing weight of the mountain overhead. The only thing Tuck ever has over his head is his windwrap, the roof of a boat, or the sky.