Aurora
Authors: Julie Bertagna
For the Kiribati Islanders whose plight inspired
Exodus, Zenith
and
Aurora
and for everyone who has
accompanied the characters of these stories,
and me, on our epic journey.
‘To be part of a nation that might be under the sea gives me a feeling that I am from nowhere.’
i-Kiribati native
CONTENTS
History Whispers, History Jumps
The Eagle, the Slave and the Storybox
The Lethal Necklace and the Lost Spell
The Most Secret Surgent of All
SEEK
The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.Walt Whitman
WINTER’S END
The year 2116
THE WIND OF WAR
The world’s wind blasts the old steeple tower as if it will tear it apart stone by stone - and hurl Pandora to her death.
Rain lashes the girl’s fierce, wind-burned face. Her green eyes steal sparks from the lightning storm. Pandora scrapes away dripping tangles of hair, scrubs her eyes with a sodden lace sleeve and squints into the howling darkness.
Where is Fox?
He must be up here, somewhere.
Pandora was rummaging through her hoard of old weapons in the museum when the crash of his axe echoed through the dank, storm-raked halls.
Who!
demanded a startled owl as it swooped from a headless statue to fly through one of the tall, shattered windows out into the storm.
‘Fox?’ Pandora called, as startled as the owl by the violent axe.
Who else could it be? There was no other human presence, only their two selves, in all the netherworld.
Yet she grabbed a shield and a sword along with her moonmoth lantern and raced through the clutter of the museum into the adjoining tower, following the noise of the axe. Up a thousand twisting stairs she ran through scared flutterings and slitherings and scuttlings of netherworld creatures, pausing only to skewer a fat rat with her sword – she’d roast it later for supper. Gasping for breath, she stopped as she reached an open door at the top of the stairs.
The crashing axe had stopped.
Pandora crept through the doorway. Her moonmoth lantern cast a fluttery glow upon tumbledown bookstacks, hillocks of mildewed pages and storm-shuttered windows that rattled in the hammer of the wind. As she stepped through the litter of lost centuries she spied a strange, dark gap. Tiptoeing towards it, sword at the ready, she saw that part of a bookcase was tugged out from the wall.
‘Fox?’ she whispered, and poked her sword, tentatively, into the gap.
The thin blade shivered in a gust of wind. Pandora squeezed into the gap and lifted her lantern.
The mothlight revealed a smashed door.
A secret door! Pandora had thought she knew every secret of this old tower.
She looked at the rusty key stuck fast in the lock, at Fox’s axe still wedged in the wood.
He knew there was a secret door here? And never told me?
Furious now, she scrambled through the gash in the door, ripping her gown on jagged splinters.
Pandora climbed up into storm-blasted darkness. The wind roared through a stark geometry of archways that rose all around and above her, in a vast cone of stone and air. Amazed, she saw that she stood
inside
the great spire that topped the old tower like a spiky hat.
Now Pandora clings to an archway and battles the wind that wants to send her crashing down to the drowned city in the netherworld waters, down on to the seaweedy roofs that rise at low tide like the helms of sunken ships. Even she, with webbed hands and feet and the soft gills on her neck, might not survive such a fall.
Raindrops as big as frogs splat upon her head. Pandora curses her dress, one of the museum’s ancient hoard, its drenched skirts a dragging weight as she tries to move across the slimy stone.
‘Fox!’
The wind snatches his name from her lips and the sword from her hand. The sword
clangs
as it tumbles from the tower – yet another treasure lost to the flooded world.
Something has been happening the last few days. Something big. Pandora has seen it in Fox’s eyes, breathed danger in the scent of his sweat. And now he’s smashed his way up into the spire in the teeth of the storm.
Pandora raises her face to the battering ram and peers up through the soaring archways of the spire to the city of New Mungo, looming high above. Its skyscrapers dwarf the old netherworld tower like a crowd of giants.
Police patrols?
She scans the enormous towers and their network of connecting sky tunnels.
Is that why Fox is up here? Surely they wouldn’t swoop on a night like this!
Skybikers can swarm down without warning like wasps from a poked nest. Pandora and Fox have a hundred hiding places from the searchlights and guns that sweep the netherworld, hunting fugitives from the boat camp beyond the city wall – though none have made it through in years.
Sky patrols have been rare this winter. The ferocious storms have kept them at bay. And the sky empire is sunk too deep in new dreams and nightmares, says Fox, to feel the tremors of revolution gathering in the world beyond its walls.
A sensation of hot goosebumps prickles Pandora’s skin as a spindly finger of lightning reaches down towards the spire. All around her, the devilish stone faces of the gargoyles in the nooks of the old tower seem electrified into demonic life. The lightning jabs at a figure perched on the strange little stairway that twists up inside the spire, past the bell that never rings right to the innermost tip of the huge cone.
‘
Fox!
’
Pandora shouts with all her might to the one who has been everything since he found her as a tiny mud urchin, abandoned in the ruins. No longer that sad and scraggy waif, Pandora has stared at her reflection in the slime pools of the museum and seen a young woman grown tall and lithe and beautiful. Now she is the warrior queen of the netherworld, dressed in the jewelled gowns and armour of lost ages, with a lustrous tangle of hair and green eyes that glow like moonmoths when she looks at Fox.
Soon she and Fox will have so much more than this kingdom of drowned ruins. When war smashes through the city wall, they will leap into the future together and rebuild a world where the sky empire’s brutal grip on the flooded Earth is broken at last.
The rain pelts harder and Pandora raises her shield as if to a hail of bullets, imagining herself battling alongside Fox in the coming war. She loves him so endlessly she’d
die
for him, she vows, as she lunges towards the precarious stairway.
Thunder rips through the world, a sound so immense it might be one of the sky towers tumbling down. Pandora unhooks the little brass bugle she keeps on her belt, waits for the thunder to fade, then blows the hardest blast she can muster.
At last, Fox looks down.
‘The boats,’ he shouts. ‘Pan, come and see!’
Pandora pulls dripping locks of hair from amazed green eyes. The great wall that makes an ocean fortress of the sky city, and traps the netherworld in gloom, is the only horizon she has ever known. She has never seen the boat camp beyond, only imagined it clinging like a crop of barnacles to the other side of the wall.