Zenith by Julie Bertagna
ONLY ALIVE
It feels like an age until the Earth roar ends. Once the last broken echoes die in the abyss, Ibrox begins calling out the names of the Treenesters, Mara and Rowan and the urchins.
‘Are we all here? Is it only Tuck that’s missing?’
Mol erupts.
‘Only Tuck?’
‘I didn’t mean – Mol, I just meant that we’re all here.’
‘We’re not all here. He isn’t.’ Mol pushes past Ibrox and runs back around the bend.
Mara follows her, ignoring the others’ warning shouts.
Round the bend, she stops dead. The ice tunnel and the frozen waterfall are gone. Starlight pours down upon a fallen slice of mountain, a great clutter of rock.
Mol is on her knees at the place the tunnel mouth should be. Tuck, she sobs, again and again. Echoes of his name spill into the abyss.
With axes and bare hands, they all try to shift the huge rockfall. They pull away what rubble they can until there’s another rumble and the land begins to slide once more.
Ibrox calls an urgent halt. ‘We’re going to bring it all down on our heads.’
They stand in stricken silence and wait for the Earth to settle. Then Ibrox kneels down beside the rockfall and calls Tuck’s name one last time.
There’s no answer, only a trickle of rock.
‘He rescued me from the sea.’ Gorbals’s voice shakes. ‘I should rescue him from the Earth.’
Mol turns to the mountain and batters her fist on it with a wail.
Mara feels numb. She knew Tuck was scared but was sure his curiosity, like hers, would overcome his fear. She can’t believe that the very thing he dreaded has come true. She should have spoken to him before she went into the tunnel, but she was keeping her distance. What happened between them last night replays in her head. She begins to tremble as she feels the ghost of Tuck’s cold kiss on her lips.
The baby kicks and turns inside her, oblivious to the world outside.
‘Look,’ says Rowan.
His eyes glitter with starlight or tears. Mara turns to see. Far away, a thin red fire burns in the black night.
‘What is it?’ Mara whispers. She imagines a phantom fleet of fiery pirates, all coming for Tuck.
‘The sun,’ says Rowan. He sounds choked. ‘Tuck just missed the sun.’
The sun never rises above the mountains but its ember fire kindles in a twilight sky. The wind is flint-sharp after the vaporous fug of the moon cave. Starlight shocks eyes used to the darkness of the mountain caves. More shocking still is what the stars reveal.
The path they edge along is a wrinkle on the rim of a vast abyss. Far below, what remains of a glacier glimmers with a cold blue light. Mara can’t begin to imagine the aeons of ice that gouged out such a deep, wide gorge.
When they stop to rest, she wonders how much longer she can go on. The pain in her back is grinding but every time she wants to cry or complain, she remembers poor Tuck. She can hardly bear to think of him crushed under so much rock. She must fix her mind on something else. Is there anything to give her hope? Mara scans the sky for the Star of the North. At first, she can’t find it. Then she sees her sky markers: Queen Cass’s zigzag crown and the Long-Handled Ladle. And there it is. The jewel that is dropping off Queen Cass’s crown into the Ladle. The North Star, the sailor’s steering star, the wanderer’s lodestar.
Her anchor in the world. And for the first time she sees that the star is not pointing North. Now it’s right overhead.
We’re here at last.
NOT HERE
This is not here, say the words that are gouged into the rock above his head.
Tuck wondered what they meant when Mara read them out. Now he knows.
The Earth has roared and smashed its fist. Now Tuck is trapped in that clenched fist. He thinks of the box of seeds that Mol found here in this very nook of cave. Maybe he, like the seeds, can survive until they dig him out. Surely they will.
Tuck makes his windwrap into a tent and huddles inside, trying to ease a trapped foot from the rubble.
This is not here, he decides, and neither am I.
He reaches into a pocket of his windwrap and feels the cold curve of the one thing that might have the power to keep him safe. He hugs it close, hoping any trickle of power that remains will save him from this savage Earth.
FROM THIS ABYSS
The moon is like a breath-misted mirror among the clouds that cling to the western peaks.
Mara slips a freezing hand into her backpack and finds the little wooden box. She pulls it out and opens the lid that Tuck tried to mend with his Grumpa’s triangle of mirrored glass. Stars glitter in the cracked mirror until her breath clouds it. Mara closes the lid, wishing she could capture a boxful of starfire to keep herself warm.
She puts the box back in her bag then, as always, checks that her cyberwizz is safe. She feels the crescent of the halo but the globe must have rolled out of its inner pocket into the main part of the bag. The tiny wand is slotted inside the globe.
Mara’s heart beats faster though she knows the globe must be there. She checked it twice last night before she went to sleep and she hasn’t opened her bag since.
‘What’s up?’
Her frantic rummaging makes Rowan raise his head from his pillow of freezing rock.
‘I can’t find my globe.’
Mara begins to take out her only possessions, lays each one on the ground. The cyberwizz halo, Tain’s carved box, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the small black lump of meteorite she found in the netherworld museum. The clutch of herbs from her mother’s garden are only crumbs now, their scent almost gone. The red shoes Candleriggs gave her are in Ilia, and her book on Greenland is at the bottom of the sea. She can account for each and every one of the precious things she brought from her island or found along the way, but the cyberwizz globe is not there.
She rummages again in the empty backpack, every corner. Searches the pockets of her clothes. But it’s not there.
The globe is gone.
Mara slumps down against the rock wall of the mountain. Everything feels distant and unreal.
A voice with the roll of the ocean and the whinny of sea winds echoes in her head.
Mara closes her eyes.
I am not here.
‘I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss.’
Gorbals reads the words in a low, trembling voice by the light of the meagre fire Ibrox has kindled almost out of thin, cold air.
Mara hauls herself to her feet and staggers towards him. She rips A Tale of Two Cities out of his hands.
‘No,’ breathes Gorbals, thinking she’s about to feed it to the fire. ‘It’s our only book.’
Mara flicks through the pages so harshly that she rips some, until she finds the page she wants.
‘Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation,’ she reads in a voice so bitter and harsh it doesn’t sound as if it’s her own. She flicks the pages again. ‘I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth.’
She glares at the others but no one looks at her. They don’t know what to say. Mol’s head is on her knees and her arms are wrapped round her head.
Gorbals gets to his feet. There are tears in his eyes.
‘I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss!’
He chants the line over and over again, his voice growing stronger each time, until the glacier gorge is filled with the echoes of the words.
SNAKE IN THE STONE
Midnight is an empty place now that Mara never comes. Fox’s only company are the hosts of owls that nest in the tower by day and flit like ghosts in the dead of night all across the netherworld.
Who you, they hoot in ghoulish voices, who you, who?
Once upon a time, after a day’s work in the Noos, night was when Fox went prowling into hidden corners of cyberspace. That was how he first found Mara in the Weave
Asleep, he dreams that he left on the ship with Mara. Awake, he wonders if part of him really did – if the wrench of her leaving split his cyberfox self from his realworld self, the one who is called David Stone. Maybe David is living at the top of the world with Mara. Maybe that’s why he feels so lost and dead here.
Who you? hoot the owls and he wonders. Is he now a phantom Fox? He looks down at the drowned city that glimmers with eerie phosphorescence under the water. Has he, like it, become a netherworld ghost?
A wind full of stars gnaws his face as he stands at the tower window. A wind that feels as if it has travelled the oceans of the Far North. My heart is with you, he reads in an old, gold-edged book by someone called Ovid. Only my husk is here.
His husk has entered a state of winter, a cold and barren zone.
Candleriggs is weak. She misses her people badly and Fox knows he can’t fill the gap so he doesn’t even try. There’s a scraping sound to her breathing and a waxy look to her face. Her large owl-eyes are dull and yellow and she sleeps a lot.
‘I’ll go and look for some dinner,’ he tells her. If he doesn’t, there’s only the dandelion and rainwater soup that he hates, boiled up and thickened with the gluey bindings of books.
Candleriggs tells him that Molendinar’s winter crop of root vegetables should be ready over on the Hill of Doves.
Fox makes the long trek down the stairs and through the many halls of the museum until he reaches the stone arches of the watery undercroft at the foot of the tower where the raft is tied to a pillar. Fox rows out across the stagnant sea of the netherworld towards the Hill of Doves.
He has tracked Mara’s trails in the netherworld. He has rowed over to the ancient cathedral and felt the peace of centuries preserved in its stone – and found the recent remains of bodies entombed there. He has explored the Treenesters’ old home, the tiny island of the Hill of Doves, where Mara lived for a while.
A sudden wail of sirens catches him on the open water. Heart pounding, he drags on the oars to steer the raft in the opposite direction, away from the sirens towards the nearest shelter, the one place he has avoided all this time: a building with archways full of statues, topped with turrets and towers. It’s here in one of the archways, so Candleriggs says, that Mara’s face is carved in stone.
As the sirens reach a head-splitting pitch and the netherworld fills with the flashing lights of a fleet of sea police, Fox rams the raft into a nook in the turreted building and loops the rope around a jutting piece of stone. Knotting the rope, he sees that the stone is a hand, reaching out into thin air. His heart thuds harder. He draws back. The statue is up to its waist in water so he is on a level with the face. Time has weathered away the features but even so, Fox is sure it’s not Mara.
Light flashes in his eyes and Fox drops flat on to the raft. Lasers and gunfire ricochet across the netherworld. Fox clenches every muscle. Is this how he is to die? Not in some glorious fight for a better world but here, for no good reason, on this rickety raft?
But the fleet of police on waterbikes is passing, with a huge white cargo ship in its wake. There’s no way of knowing when the ships arrive. Their timings are kept random, Fox is sure, to thwart attacks by the boat-camp refugees. He clings to the raft as it crashes against the building, willing the stone hand that anchors him not to break. When the netherworld dims back into calm, he raises his head, sits up cautiously – and grabs the stone hand in fright.
A small body has washed up against the raft. Fox stares into the pale, unblinking eyes of a young child. He is so shocked he doesn’t know what to do and in the moment he hesitates a wave hurls the child out of reach. He should untie the raft and – and what? Fox saw the black hole burned deep into the child’s forehead: the wound of a laser gun. The child was dead.
He is still grasping the statue’s cold hand as he watches the small body float away into the gloom.
Beyond the old stone tower, at the foot of one of New Mungo’s vast trunks, the white cargo ship is unloading its goods under the protection of the sea police who killed the child. A new, hot, dark anger burns inside Fox. This is what his world does. Kills children like vermin when they get in the way. Mara’s plight made him understand the kind of world he wants to fight for. Now he has seen for himself the callous inhumanity he is fighting against.
Already, the short day wanes. A fat full moon is rising above the city wall. Soon night lights will glow in the sky-city tunnels high above him – the very tunnels he used to skate through in his old life.
Above you.
Those strange, last words Mara spoke to him on the bridge. He still can’t fathom what she meant. Was she trying to tell him to go back up there? Or telling him to remember why he’s down here? Fox stares up at the sky city, feeling desperate. It’s not Mara who may as well be dead; she’s growing a whole new life. He may as well not be here.
Above him is his destiny. Could that be what she meant? He has lost his way these last few months, grieving for the life he left and for the one he could have had if he’d gone with Mara on the ship. Well, he’s done enough grieving. He can’t bear to live this ghost life any longer, yearning for Mara and the baby he will never know.
The moon slides out from behind a tower. Its light falls on the faces of the statues in the archways. The oars sloop through the murky water as Fox moves around the building, studying each stone face. At last he stops. Draws in a breath.
There.
It’s her. Mara. The statue is cracked and furred with moss but the likeness of the stone face is astonishing and true.
Fox wants to reach out and touch her face but he can’t see a way to secure the raft. All of a sudden he knows what it is he must do now he is here. He must say a goodbye of sorts. He won’t give up on her, he couldn’t; he will leave a cyberfox to wait for her on the bridge in the Weave. But he must stop dwelling on the path he did not take. He needs to move on, grow his own new life.
What he must do, he sees, is turn all his pain into energy. He needs energy to do what Mara must have been urging him to do – not to dwell on her and the baby but push on hard to change the world right above his head.
Dreams can slip through your fingers like water. Crafting dreams into something solid and real, Fox now knows, is one of the hardest tasks in the world.
He studies Mara’s statue; the dream that some long-ago craftsman, who never knew her, carved into stone. And he looks up at his grandfather’s dream in the sky – a wonder of the world that is rotten at the core.
Something slithers and hisses at the mud-caked base of the statue. Fox draws back. He raises his oar, ready to strike. Some slimy netherworld creature is coiled in a heap at Mara’s stone feet.
In the dim light, Fox thinks it’s a snake. The creature begins to uncoil, hissing louder. Fox stares at it through the gloom. It’s huge. Better just row off, fast as he can.
The snake unfurls arms and legs from within the heap of itself.
Fox peers at what he thinks is a round, entirely human head with two large, bright eyes. The thing hisses, stands up, and chucks a handful of clay that hits him splat! on the head.
‘Hey. Stop that!’
A child’s giggle bursts out. The giggle is so full of sheer naughtiness it makes Fox smile, despite his dripping hairful of muck. He takes a clump of dirt out of his hair and flings it back. The child giggles again.
A child so caked in mud and dirt she looks as if she’s made of clay.
THE CLAY CHILD
‘I found
Candleriggs raises her head from her book. Her eyes moisten when she sees the urchin beside Fox.
‘Were you left behind, little one?’
The child hisses back.
‘She doesn’t talk, just does that hissy snake noise.’
Fox flops down on a lumpy heap of books in the corner of the tower room that he has made his bed. The journey across the netherworld and back has made him dizzy and weak. His neck and arms ache from rowing.
‘I didn’t know what to do with her. She crawled out of the water and sat at Mara’s – I mean, the statue’s – feet. I think she’s all on her own.’
He finds he can’t speak about the other child, the dead one.
‘You found her at the Face in the Stone?’ Candleriggs looks startled then rummages on the floor among a scatter of books. ‘Now, where is it? I was reading a Greek legend . . . it’s such an old story it surely can’t do me much harm.’ Candleriggs mutters, fumbling in a book.
Fox has to smile. She’s surrounded by hillocks of books, sleeps upon them, the floor is carpeted with pages and they burn them to keep warm, yet Candleriggs can’t shake off her belief that books are dangerous things.
‘Ah, here it is.’ Candleriggs smoothes the page, so intent on the words of the story that she momentarily forgets her fears. ‘The legend of Pandora, a child made of water and earth. Made of clay, really . . . and you found this clay child at that statue. That’s important. Must be.’
Fox yawns. The old woman is fixated with signs in stones, with coincidence and what’s meant to be – as if the future is all laid out, already set. Fox is clinging to the hope that the future is still up for grabs. He has to believe that, or why else would he be cooped up here in a cold stone tower in a netherworld with an ancient, owl-eyed Treenester and a child made of clay?
The urchin is staring at the fire, hissing. Before either of them can stop her she reaches out and picks up a glowing ember. And drops it, screaming, her hand singed.