Aurora (21 page)

She is lost.

The mountain is vast, the tunnels endless. What if she can’t find her way out? She might die here and never see any of her loved ones again.

Mara shouts Lily’s name over and over until her throat aches. The only answer is the mountain’s echo of her own voice. But she keeps moving, reigning in her fears. She will not let old terrors beat her. She will not give up.

A soft wind blows through the mountain and her torch shivers. The air is suddenly thicker, scented, tangy. It tastes of salt, of . . .

Ocean
.

A tremor runs through Mara. The thought that she would never again see the ocean sometimes falls on her like a blow – even though it’s the ocean that wrenched her apart from the people she loved. Maybe now it will save her. Just this once.

Mara breathes in the salty air and follows, step by step.

One moment she is blindly feeling her way around a twist in the tunnel . . . then the dark drains away and she is dazzled by light at the mouth of a cave. She draws in a sobbing breath of sea air. The last time she stood here Lily was a tiny mite of life inside her. Mara shades her eyes against the sun and looks out at the world on the other side of the mountain.

And wonders where on Earth she has landed up.

LAND GIRL IN ILIRA

Brilliant pathways cross the sunlit water, linking the mountains and islands of a great fjord.

Mara sits down on a rock, rubs her eyes, and looks again.

Bridges?

This is not the place she fled years ago – not the bleak mountain city of Ilira where she was once captured as a slave.

Yet beneath the magnificent bridges she recognizes the same snaking channel of sea. Across the mountains are the rockways and waterfalls and ranks of scavenged car doors, a riot of rusty colour, that front the cave homes of the mountain dwellers. There, stuck in a high cleft of rock, is the crashed plane.

But there are tracks in the rockways where dark machines creep up and down. Mara rummages in her memory for the forgotten word: she remembers seeing them in Granny’s old books when she was young.

Trains
.

Elegant long boats puff up and down the fjord, engulfing the bridges in steam. Beyond the bridges, a mysterious sphere on a small islet far out in the fjord glows like a firestone in the embers of the setting sun.

Mara can barely believe her eyes. Ilira is a city transformed.

Maybe Lily is safe here
, she tells herself.
Maybe it’s all different now
.

A ship sails up the sea fjord. The falling sun has turned its billowing sails into nuggets of gold. Mara gasps as bridge after bridge breaks in the middle. Each bridge separates into two arms that open and rise up towards the sky, one after the other, to let the tall ship pass through. The arms fall back into place. The ship heads towards the grandest bridge with its bustling market and just as Mara is wondering what will happen to all the shops and traders if that were to break open, the ship eases into a harbour and joins a cluster of tall masts, just beyond.

The wind carries the sound of the seafarers’ excitement. Mara cannot stop herself. She hurries down the heel of the mountain and across the rocks towards the incoming ship.

Mara plunges into the crowd of traders and seafarers that pour off the ship. The jumble of scents and smells, strange words and accents stirs up a buried longing for the ocean world. Yet the back of her neck prickles with alarm as a word rumbles ominously through the harbour hubbub.

War
.

A tall, young seafarer disembarks from the ship, so striking in appearance that he draws Mara’s eye. The layers of his windwrap are the colour of storm clouds. His black hair is a regiment of long braids. His strong face is as smooth and brown as an acorn. There is something imperious in his stride. He seems very sure of his place in the world, thinks Mara, wondering who he might be.

He waves to a commanding figure at the bow of his ship,
Mirkwood
, as he strides alongside an older seafarer who is so wrapped in Arctic furs that his grey-flecked beard seems part of the animals he wears.

The word
war
is on their lips too. Mara follows as they walk along the harbour towards Ilira, drawn to the exotic young seafarer and his frenzied talk of the outside world.

‘
Surgents on the move. War is coming, Greyfus, all across the Earth . . . sea against sky . . . pirate fleets . . . global attack . . .
’

Mara struggles to keep pace with the seafarers in the bustle of the harbour. When they reach the shore the crowd thins out and it becomes easier to hear what they say.

‘Ever see one of those cities?’ the grey-bearded man in furs is saying. ‘I only travel the Arctic seas and I’ve never seen one here.’

‘There are none this far north,’ his young companion replies. ‘I used to think they were only legends. But there are settlers on Hallow, on the west coast of this land, who know about the sky cities. I wintered with them during the storms and made good friends there.’ His voice has a lilting rise and fall that Mara knows of old, the ocean voice of a gypsea. A soft smile relaxes the young seafarer’s intense face. ‘One day I’ll go back,’ he says, ‘when this war has all blown over. Yes, there is a girl,’ he laughs, answering the mischievous question on the older man’s face. ‘Her people were refugees. They fled a sky city when she was a child.’

‘Fled a sky city?’ The smile on the older man’s face turns to amazement. ‘Well, they’ll have stories to fill a winter!’

The young seafarer lowers his voice and again Mara strains to hear. ‘Their stories of the city of New Mungo turned this scholar into a warrior,’ he tells his companion, who looks at him closely, now.

‘Well, don’t wait too long to return to your girl,’ the older man tells his young friend. ‘Wars don’t blow over as fast as storms. From what you have said, this one,’ he shakes his head, ‘could take a lifetime to burn out.’

The young seafarer nods. ‘All around the planet the fuses are lit.’

The seafarers stride ahead as Mara slows to a halt.
Sky city refugees? On the west coast? Is it possible?

A whole fleet of refugee ships escaped New Mungo, along with hers, but they lost each other out on the ocean. Mara has always held on to the hope that the others survived. She couldn’t bear the thought that, as she did with her own islanders, she led all those desperate people out on to the ocean only to lose their lives there. But if refugees from New Mungo have settled on the western coast of this vast island then it’s possible that other ships made it across the ocean and made new lives elsewhere too.

Mara’s heart lifts. She can’t help smiling. There
are
still miracles in the world.

‘That pretty smile for me?’

A man who looks as if he has weathered a thousand hard sea voyages has stopped bang in front of Mara. He studies her with eyes so flinty they might have been chipped off the mountain. He leans in close. Mara draws back at the reek of beer and oysters on his breath, but he grabs her arm.

‘Passed you by on the harbour and smelled you, girl. Smell of land, you do.’ He pulls her towards him and pushes his face into her hair. ‘Trees!’ he exclaims. ‘I never smelled trees on anyone since I was a boy.’ Mara shakes him off, but the man shouts after her. ‘Hey, land girl! Where you from?’

People are turning to look. Mara puts her head down and hurries along the shore towards the mountain city. Her heart is thudding. An old scar seems to ache: the slave-brand once scorched into her arm right here on the shores of Ilira. Mara scolds herself. It hasn’t hurt in years. The ache is from the man’s grip, that’s all.

But Mara’s hate of Ilira, a place she once journeyed through a mountain to escape, has returned. Her eyes search the bay and the bridges and the mountain rockways.

Where are you, Lily? Please, please be safe
.

Ilira might look like a stunning new city but Mara can’t shake off the dread that it’s every bit as dangerous as it ever was.

War all across the Earth
, the young seafarer said in his lilting voice.
Sea against sky
.

Mara thinks of the sky ships she and Lily saw flying north over the lake. But who are the Surgents? What did the young seafarer’s cryptic words mean? What great changes have occurred while she has hidden away in Candlewood? Mara walks through the bustling sea traders on the shore, as if through the phantoms of another world.

An old feeling fires up inside her. Fox promised a revolution. A war against the sky cities.

Is it possible? Could this be his war?

Mara kills the thought. This is no time for wondering. War is on its way, that’s all she knows. So she must find Lily, and fast. Dusk is deepening over Ilira. Mara glances up at the salmon-streaked sky. She’d better make a start before it’s dark.

The islands and waterfalls on the far side of the fjord clang with industrial noise. Cargo wagons trundle across the bridges, pulled by teams of yelping dogs. Ilira is all business and brashness, a riot of voices and smells. After the intense peace of Candlewood, Mara’s senses jangle and reel.

Only the tiny island with the palace near the neck of the fjord is solitary and still.

As the marketeers crammed upon the largest bridge shut up their shops for the night, people spill into the city’s wide bay. Mara wills herself to find Lily’s fox-flame hair among them but the only head she recognizes is the dark-braided one of the young seafarer with the rolling gypsea voice who knows so much of the world she has been exiled from for so long.

OREON

In Ale Alley Mara keeps to the shadows between the swinging lanterns above each drinking den.
Not here, Lily, please don’t be here
, she prays, peering into noisy cave bars, avoiding eye contact with the drunks.

Someone speaks to her in a language she doesn’t understand.

Mara flicks a nervous glance at the woman leaning against the entrance to a bar as if the rock wall depended on her for support; clearly, it’s the opposite.

‘Whassup, stranger?’ Now the woman speaks in Mara’s tongue.

‘I’ve lost my daughter,’ says Mara desperately.

‘She pretty?’ the woman slurs, closing one eye and tilting her head back to focus.

Mara nods.

‘Bad place, this, for a pretty girl.’ The woman slithers a bit down the wall then props herself up. ‘Should keep a tighter grip, Mum.’

Thanks for that
, thinks Mara. A torrent of guilt sweeps through her because it’s true. Nothing in Candlewood has prepared Lily for this place.
I’m supposed to protect her
, Mara chides herself, but hiding the truth about the past has led her daughter here, like a lamb among wolves.

‘Watch out for the wolves,’ the woman warns with a black-toothed grin.

Mara jumps and stares as the woman seems to read her thoughts. ‘Wolves?’

‘Lotsa wolves here to eat up a looker like you.’ The woman cackles then grabs Mara’s arm. ‘An’ there’s a
real—
’

Mara pulls away from the drunk woman and barges through the revellers until she is out of the lantern-lit alley and into a darker rockway full of the secret scuttlings and furtive mutterings of nocturnal trades and business deals. She rushes on until she finds her way to the old fishing harbour.