The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (26 page)

He spent hours working with the diamonds. He discovered a small lever within the metal collar; when he pressed it, a spark flashed up, startling him, and showing him that the diamond could be used like a match, to start a fire. He figured out how to unwind wires from within the diamonds’ metal rings and connect them up to other things besides light bulbs. He found an old electric fan in a storage room at the Pioneer that he repaired, and when he hooked it to a diamond, the fan turned nicely, making a weak stream of cool air. He connected an ancient toaster to a diamond and burned up a few pieces of bread. He figured out how a diamond could run a water pump, if he’d only had the materials for making an electric pump in the first place, and how several diamonds could be hitched together to provide power enough for something larger, like a refrigerator, if ever a roamer should come through with an old refrigerator that could be made to work.

But mostly the diamonds simply showed what was possible: that the light from the sun could be caught and stored for the use of human beings. Understanding how this was done, finding the means of doing it, learning to make light bulbs, learning to make diamonds—these projects would take many, many years. Doon understood that they wouldn’t happen in his lifetime. But he could begin. He could learn, he could make things, and he could teach others. He knew it was the work he would choose.

Lina made a discovery that involved something old and familiar and something very new. It happened because of a roamer who came through the town late in spring. It was Mrs. Murdo this time who was the first to see him. She was down by the Pioneer, taking some pickled plums to Maddy, and there he was coming up the road from the south, leading three horses. Two were thin, with saggy backs and drab coats, but one—dark brown, with a black mane—held its head high and had a lively step.

Mrs. Murdo was struck with an idea. It was such a good idea that she ran ahead of the roamer on her way back into the village, and she was breathing hard when she got to Mary Waters’s house. “Mary,” she said. “I think we could do something wonderful for Lina.”

Mary agreed, and so it was done: one of the diamonds was traded for the brown horse, and the horse became Lina’s. She named him Fleet and spent nearly every one of her few spare moments that summer learning to ride him. By fall, she could stay on even when he went at a gallop.

Time passed—more winters, not as dark or as hard as the first one, more wet springs, more hot summers. New houses rose; new fields were planted. Roamers came through with things the town needed, and sometimes these were bought with a diamond. In this way, little by little, diamonds ended up in other villages. The roamers told people in those villages where the diamonds had come from and what they were for, and in time light bulbs from the abandoned places, which had always been useless before, became items in the roamers’ stocks. Sometimes people who’d bought the diamonds sent a message back to Sparks, asking to buy more diamonds or wanting to know more about what the diamonds could do. Doon wrote up a booklet of information in response to these requests, and the students in the school helped him make copies of it. In this way, the diamonds and the knowledge of them spread slowly up and down the countryside.

More and more, the villages in the area communicated with each other. The roamers, whose oxen walked slowly and who stopped often, were the main connection, so messages didn’t go back and forth very quickly. This was what made Lina think once again about being a messenger. She began riding out across the empty lands to small settlements and towns, following the roamers’ routes but going far faster than they did, carrying letters and small packages from one place to another. Sometimes Doon went with her, sitting behind her and holding on around her waist, out to the ruins of ancient towns, where he gathered up old electric shavers and hairdryers and plugs and wires that might help him with his work. Sometimes Torren went with her; he called it “going on roamer practice.”

Lina taught Torren the song she’d heard from the old roamer about Ember. She had recalled the words by now, and she knew Maggs had had it wrong. Maggs had sung it this way: “What’s hidden will come to light again, A diamond jewel more precious than gold.” But those lines should have been, “What’s hidden will come to light again. It’s
far more precious
than diamonds and gold.” The precious treasure was the people of Ember, just as Lina had understood when she first heard the song. The diamond was precious, too—but without people to find it, understand it, and use it, it wouldn’t have had much value at all.

Most often, however, Lina went on her trips alone. Mrs. Murdo worried a little that she would have accidents, or meet up with bandits, or get lost. She’s just a child, Mrs. Murdo fretted. And yet, she reminded herself, look at all the remarkable things she and Doon have done! It wasn’t because they had extraordinary powers, really, but because of how well they used the ordinary powers everyone had: the power of courage, the power of kindness, the powers of curiosity and knowledge. Lina would be all right, Mrs. Murdo concluded. After all, she was growing up and would soon be deciding on her own what she wanted to do. She asked Lina to please not go out into the wilderness during the very hottest or coldest parts of the year, and Lina agreed.

Lina divided her time between helping Mrs. Murdo and Doctor Hester at home and going out on messenger trips. She loved embarking on these trips, readying the saddlebags Mrs. Murdo had helped her make, packing food and supplies, planning her route; and she loved arriving at her destinations and delivering the letters people had been waiting for. But most of all, she loved the trip itself. She loved slinging herself up onto Fleet’s broad strong back in the early morning and setting out, first at a walk as they went through the village, and then, when they got out onto the empty roads, faster and faster ’til they sped forward at a gallop, and the rushing air flicked through Fleet’s mane and made Lina’s hair stream out behind her. Maybe there was no happily-ever-after, as in that book of Edward’s, but there was happiness sometimes, and she had it now, doing what she knew she was born for—to carry messages and to go fast.

One day, on her way back from one of her messenger rides—it was nearly five years after the discovery of the diamonds—a bundle of letters slipped from one of her bags and fell to the ground. It was her fault; she hadn’t packed very neatly. She saw it go, and she brought Fleet to a halt so she could get down and retrieve it. But one of the letters had somehow blown beneath his feet before he stopped, and it was torn to shreds. She picked up all the pieces she could find. It probably wasn’t an urgent letter; it was for Edward Pocket, from a man in another town who was also interested in finding books. But it would be embarrassing to have to admit that she’d ruined it.

She stopped at the library to explain this to Edward. He wasn’t there, but Doon was, bent over some thick volume with damp-warped pages. A thought struck Lina. She smiled to herself. “Doon, look,” she said. She sat down beside him and spread out the bits of the torn letter. “I think most of it’s here,” she said. “Maybe you could help me put it back together.”

“Sure,” he said. He started moving the bits around. “Let’s see. This looks like it must say . . . and so then this would go here . . . and this . . .” He paused and looked up at her. “Haven’t we done this before?”

Lina laughed. So did Doon. A look went between them, like a quick current of electricity.

Sparks grew and prospered in those years. New houses arose behind the Pioneer Hotel, built in clusters around small courtyards so families could live easily connected to each other. There came a day when one of these houses belonged to Lina and Doon. Poppy lived with them, and next door lived Mrs. Murdo, who created a neat and well-scrubbed place by herself until, a year or two later, she accepted an offer from Doon’s father, who left his small cottage to be with her, and she did her best to tolerate the untidy but interesting heaps of small items he couldn’t resist collecting.

Much, much later, on the site of the ruined city that Lina had seen from Caspar’s wagon, a new city slowly began to rise, a city of bright buildings with glittering rooftops—not buildings so high they turned the streets into shadowy canyons, but buildings hardly taller than the trees that grew around them. It was a beautiful city, a sparkling, dazzling city, where trolleys powered by the sun carried people up and down the hills, gardens flourished in schoolyards and between shops, and ships with colored sails arrived at the harbor from distant ports. Lina never saw this city, of course—not with her actual eyes, though she had seen something very like it with the eyes of her imagination. But her great-great-granddaughter lived there, and she kept, tucked away in a carved wooden box, the fragile old drawings that Lina had done. She took them out every now and then to look at and marveled at how they caught the spirit of the city that Lina had never seen.

But all that was many years in the future. Now, in the warm summer after the expedition to Ember, Lina is out in a field of wildflowers with Fleet, Doon is trying to hook up an old hairdryer to a diamond, Mrs. Murdo is sweeping the courtyard of the doctor’s house, and Doctor Hester is in the garden scattering corn for the chickens. Torren is sitting nearby on a tree stump with his airplane. He makes it swoop and zoom. He is trying to imagine himself in it, traveling off to distant lands, being the Greatest Roamer Who Ever Lived.

Of course, he can’t get off the ground, and he never will. But imagine that he could. Imagine that he could fly upward, like a bird. He would see the green landscape of spring spread out below, with the river curving through it, the fields dotted with yellow mustard flowers and orange poppies, and the people out doing their work. Up higher, he would see beyond Sparks, the roads leading to other villages and settlements, and on the roads the roamers who connect one place to another.

Then imagine he could fly even higher, like an airplane. Now he could see the vastness of the earth below. The mountains would look like crumpled cloth bleached white at the peaks, the lakes would glint like coins, roads would be threads, and the grassy hillsides and fields would be a green carpet as far as his eyes could see. Here and there, clusters of dots would appear where people had settled, but there would be wide distances between them. The world would seem beautiful and peaceful from up here; he wouldn’t see the storms and quarrels and terrors that can make life hard.

And at last, imagine that he could fly higher still, as high as a rocket heading into space. From here, he would see the round edge of the planet. In the gulf between himself and the earth’s surface, he might notice an object moving along on an unsteady orbit. Sometimes it remains so high above the earth that a person below could mistake it for a slow-moving meteor or comet; sometimes it swoops very close to the earth. It is what many people in the area had noticed lately—most of them thought it was a traveling star. But it isn’t a star at all. It’s a small unmanned spacecraft that set out toward Earth more than two hundred years ago, after an astronomer named Hoyt McCoy, who lived in a town called Yonwood, made the first contact between the human race and beings on another world.

At the time, his discovery was kept secret except for a privileged few. Other scientists were told and so was the president of the country, who paused for a moment in his rush to war to contemplate what this discovery might mean. Eventually, some years later, the news leaked out. Newspapers ran headlines about little green men, and people got very excited. But after a while, when no little green men showed up, the usual concerns of life took over again, and the small craft making its way through space was nearly forgotten. Fifty years passed. Then came the great Disaster—and after that, there was no one who remembered it at all.

But the spacecraft continued its journey, and those who had sent it continued to monitor its progress over the many decades of its flight. Finally, a few months before Lina and Doon made their trip back to Ember, it arrived. It has been collecting data to send back to its home planet. It will report that the magnificent and powerful civilization it had expected to find seems to have disappeared and that a much smaller and humbler one has taken its place. It will observe that a great part of this world lies in darkness during the night, but not all. In some places, sparks of light shine—not fires but electric lights, bright gleaming spots like diamonds in the darkness. The people here seem not to have lost
everything
that came before, the little craft will report. Some of them have survived; some of their learning has, too. It seems clear that they are making a new start.

J
EANNE
D
U
P
RAU
is the bestselling author of
The City of Ember, The People of Sparks,
and
The Prophet of Yonwood.
She lives in Menlo Park, California, where she keeps a big garden and a small dog.

To learn more about Jeannie, visit her Web site at
www.jeanneduprau.com
.

The BOOKS of EMBER

THE CITY OF EMBER
THE PEOPLE OF SPARKS
THE PROPHET OF YONWOOD
THE DIAMOND OF DARKHOLD

Imagine living underground . . .

never feeling sunlight or snow . . .

and then discovering that another world exists!

Read the books that started the adventure.

THE BOOKS OF EMBER