Aurora (16 page)

‘An eagle?’ The Pontifix weighs the halo in his hand like a marketeer on the bridges with a handful of pearls.

‘A golden eagle from the mountains. They steal things.’ Candle dares a question. ‘Do you know what it is?’

But the Pontifix has forgotten her. He strides to the stone table in the centre of the room and opens up a jewelled casket. A gasp escapes Candle as he takes out something that looks like a small moon. The moon-like object begins to glow in his hand.

The globe! It must be.

People say he sees visions in his magic globe. Tuck Culpy arrived one day out of nowhere, it’s said with the magic globe in his hands. He was the Pontifix, he claimed, and his globe held visions of the future. He would build magnificent bridges and fleets of ships and make the pirate-ravaged bay strong again.

In the time it took Candle to grow from a squalling baby to a young woman, Tuck Culpy had stirred up the people of Ilira to transform then bleak frightened city into a hub of trade and industry, famed all over the North.

Open-mouthed, Candle watches as colours swirl around the globe like a tiny aurora storm.

The Pontifix holds the globe in one hand, the halo in his other. He presses the globe with his thumb and a finger. It opens up, as if an invisible knife has sliced it down the middle into two smooth round halves.

‘Take her away,’ he orders, and a guard appears.

Candle dares not argue. Prickling with hurt at his curt dismissal, she is also relieved that her ordeal with her strange new husband is over, at least for today. She follows the guard through the palace where the scavenged mysteries shelved in the walls remind her of the insects trapped forever in her amber necklace.

All imprisoned in glass
, she thinks.
Just like me
.

THE EAGLE, THE SLAVE AND THE STORYBOX

Darkness drizzles through the palace walls. From her bed, Candle watches miserably as a hundred shades of evening drown the last lights of day.

A slave arrives with food. Feigning sleep, Candle watches through half-closed eyes as the woman rolls down the sealskin wall blinds, shutting out the dark and the cold. Heat builds in the room now from the gurgling steam geyser in the alcove.

The aroma of smoked seafood turns her stomach though she
should
be hungry, she’s barely eaten all day.

‘Go away,’ she mutters, and pulls the bear-fur quilt over her head.

‘Suit yourself,’ says the slave.

‘Broom!’ Candle flings off the quilt and rushes over to bury herself in the familiar hug of her beloved slave. ‘Where have you been? He’s horrible. I hate him. I can’t stay here forever!’

There’s a strange, excited light in Broom’s eyes. Years seem to have dropped from the slave’s soft face.

Broom pulls her close and whispers in her ear. ‘Candle, what if you could escape from this place?’

‘Escape? On a ship? With Clay?

‘Shh!’

Broom nods towards the doorway where there must be a palace guard. She begins tidying Candle, tucking away unruly strands of hair and fixing her face, her voice as dry as the pearl dust she dabs on to the girl’s blotchy face, but Candle hears Broom’s quickened breath and wonders at her glowing cheeks.

‘The Pontifix has
much
more important things on his mind than some silly girl he just married,’ Broom says loudly, for the benefit of the guard outside. ‘Eat up your supper!’ Then in a murmur: ‘We’ll speak later.’

Candle imagines a lifetime of unhappiness in this palace. Can Broom help her escape? But how? Her imagination spins and Candle pulls the plate of smoked seafood towards her, suddenly hungry, and begins stuffing delicacies into her mouth.

‘I saw the globe,’ she whispers, through a mouthful of seafood. ‘But he sent me away.’

‘Well, he wants to see you again now you’re fed,’ says Broom, as Candle clears her plate.

The seafood churns in Candle’s stomach as if the creatures have slithered back to life. Broom pulls her to her feet.

‘Be brave,’ she tells the girl, and gently pushes her to the curtained doorway, but Broom’s words and her strange excitement have given Candle heart.

She follows the waiting guard back through the palace. In his room her new husband lounges on a bed of furs. Candle empties herself of all feeling, as she has learned to do many times. Nothing and no one can be worse than her father’s brutal temper, she tells herself.

The Pontifix looks up as she creeps into the room. His hearing, Candle notes, is sharp as a bird’s.

‘Your gift was a shock,’ he says bluntly.

Candle wonders what to say. ‘Sorry,’ she murmurs.

He gets up from the bed and makes his way to the wide stone table in the centre of the room, motioning her to follow.

‘But the best of gifts!’ He breaks into a smile and Candle loses some of her nervousness as the face of her peculiar new husband is suddenly young, bright and handsome.

‘Do I,’ she dares, ‘call you Pontifix? Or can I call you Tuck?’

There is a pause, then he smiles again.

‘Tuck’s my name.’

If you calf something by its real name, Broom always says, you draw the fear from it.

‘Tuck,’she says firmly.

Amusement flickers in his eyes and once again Candle feels unnerved at not knowing how much he can see. He is far from blind, she has decided, but without his silver eyebox he would be lost.

Now Tuck takes another silver box, squat and bashed, from a rock shelf and sets it on the table. This one is bigger than his eyebox, with a face full of buttons and a stem sticking from its top.

‘All this strangeness will pass,’ he tells Candle, and she hears the lilt of the ocean in his voice. ‘I found a new life here when I was young.’ He pauses. ‘No one will harm you now – not unless you deserve it.’

Candle absorbs the warning.

‘You are kind,’ she murmurs. And maybe he is, she hopes.

‘The wedding gift you brought me,’ he sits down beside her, ‘is a treasure I’ve searched for all across the Arctic ports. I picked a good wife.’ He smiles again and taps the box ‘So this is a gift for you.’

‘What is it?’ asks Candle, watching him pull on the box’s stem until it’s almost as long as his arm.

‘A storybox.’ Tuck begins to wind a small handle on the side of the box. ‘One of my Sea Lords found it in a new port on the north-west coast’

His fingers fiddle with the buttons on the box. He twitches the long stem. Candle jumps with fright as the buzz of angry insects bursts out. Tuck seems unworried and carries on tending to the buttons and stem, listening closely, waiting patiently until a voice, so crackly and buzzy it might be a giant honey bee, cuts through the noisy swarm.

‘This is the Midnight Storyteller,’ says the voice in the box.

Candle has gripped Tuck’s arm in fright. She draws back.

‘The storyteller,’ she gasps, ‘is trapped in the box?’

‘His voice sails in on the winds,’ says Tuck, ‘and then harbours in the storybox.’

‘I send this story out to you,’ continues the voice, ‘wherever you are in the world. In all the forgotten corners of the Earth and its oceans . . .’

‘Where is he?’ Candle whispers. ‘Who is he?’

Tuck’s brow furrows. He hates not knowing things, Candle sees, yet he has surrounded himself with a palace full of mysteries.

‘He tells tales to the world,’ says Tuck. ‘That’s all I know.’

‘Over the years I’ve read you all so many stories from the books of the drowned world. My next is the most extraordinary of all. It’s a tale of the sea-broken people,’ says the storyteller, and Candle hears a tremble in Ms voice. ‘A story called
Exodus
. And it begins with
The Old Woman Who Lived in a Tree
. . .’

‘I know that one!’ Candle exclaims.

She sinks into the deep pile of furs and feels all the tension of this strange day easing from her as she listens to the heartrending tale.

Now the voice is so clear and strong that the storyteller might be right there in the room. Husky and warm, his voice wraps around her and she sinks into the story of the old woman who was thrown out of a tower in the sky to live in a tree in a flooded world. There is a crackly pause at the end of the tale. The sound of a hissing sea seeps from the storybox.

‘Tomorrow night,’ says the storyteller, ‘in the next part of the tale, I’ll tell how the old woman in the tree meets a girl from a drowned island.’

‘Mara!’ says Candle. ‘That’s when she finds the Treenesters in the netherworld.’

Candle is suddenly wide awake, her small eyes almost as round as the buttons on the storybox.
The storyteller knows about Mara?

The storybox is silenced with a click.

‘
Mara?
’

Tuck’s voice is incredulous. The look on his face makes Candle want to run.

‘How
do you
,’ he demands, ‘know about
Mara
?’

‘I – I don’t remember.’ The back of Candle’s neck feels icy even though the room is snug.

Tuck pulls her upright on the bed. ‘I want you to remember.’

‘My old slave,’ says Candle, slowly, so that she can think fast. ‘She told me lots of stories. She – she once came across the oceans on a ship with a girl called Mara. But – but that slave died years ago,’ she adds hastily.

‘Not the Slave you brought with you?’ he asks, all suspicion now.

‘Oh no.’ Candle is adamant. ‘Broom was old, like the woman in the tree. She’s long dead.’

Candle has no idea what is wrong, what the truth might mean for Broom with such an unpredictable man. It’s safer to lie. Too late, she realizes she should have used another name, just in case, but a great man like the Pontifix will surely not seek out a lowly slave?

Tuck has cocked his head to the side, listening hard. She meets his cold blue stare with her arrow-sharp one.

‘But how do
you
know about Mara?’ she asks.

What can Broom’s Mara mean to Tuck?

He seems overwhelmed by some memory or emotion. A chink appears in the aura he wears like an invisible windwrap. Candle peers through the chink and glimpses a man much younger and less certain of the world than he pretends to be. He is as unnerved by the mention of Mara as if he were standing on one of his great bridges and spied a lethal crack at his feet.

‘And you said an
eagle
brought you the halo?’ Tuck persists. ‘Not this slave of yours? The one you say is dead?’

Candle recalls Broom’s strange insistence earlier that the halo Clay scavenged was Mara’s. Is that what Tuck thinks? Candle cannot work it all out but she feels the danger in the air. She must deflect Tuck somehow.

‘It’s all just as I told you!’ she says, pretending to be piqued at his doubt. ‘But never mind that.
This
is a much more curious mystery!’

She dares to pick up the storybox and peers into the regiment of tiny holes that perforate its silver front, half expecting to see a pair of eyes winking back at her. There is only darkness inside. She clicks the button and the storyteller has gone. All she hears is a storm of empty noise.

‘The Midnight Storyteller,’ urges Candle. ‘Who is he? How does
he
know Mara’s tale?’

OLD ZENITH